We are our own worst enemies

No one is to be called an enemy; all are your benefactors, and no one does you harm. You have no enemy except yourselves.

St. Francis of Assisi



I was searching for something quite different from St Francis when I came across this quote. I wanted a cute quote about animals to fit with a video clip. You will see why if you take a look at the clip from U Tube I have added at the end of this Off the Mat. Instead the above is what I found. It hit me smack in the center of my being. God willing it will penetrate deep.

I would like to believe that even the worst things that happen to us can end up being something we benefit from in the long run. They say God only sends us trials that we are strong enough to handle and that God is closest to us when we suffer. Don’t try telling me that when I am in the middle of a migraine, or immediately after I bang my head. But the truth is that we learn from the very worst things. We can experience the best of things in the midst of a disaster or a crisis. Kindness is best appreciated and recognized when we really need it.


I am not sure if this is quite what St. Francis was getting at. But he does make it quite clear in the most Zen like way that no matter what is going on in our lives that is not pleasing to us, we are our own worst enemies.
Truly acknowledging this is a joyful, liberating experience.


And when we perceive an experience to be unpleasant or someone has come into our lives that we feel is our enemy perhaps this is simply a sign post to something deep within ourselves that needs to be recognized. It may be naked fear. Or perhaps you are being reminded of something from the long ago past when someone hurt you as a child on the play ground. It could be of course that another person really is attacking you and trying to hurt you. But their motives usually have a lot more to do with them and who they are. It isn’t personal believe it or not. And how you react will be key to your own ability to cope with the attacks of your so called enemies. Ask yourself all the usual questions about that person. In the simplest of situations it is possible the person was having a difficult day. But more often than not the person who is upsetting you is someone you know really well. This person knows you and is pushing your buttons out of sheer malice or just plain habit.

My father was often asked for advice by a husband or a wife regarding their spouse. But this can apply to a sibling, a child or a parent. He always stressed that no one should be a door mat for the other. He never encouraged the typical interpretation of turning the other cheek when someone tries to hurt us. But, he did point out again and again that the ‘other’ is our lesson book. Our husband, wife and friends are our lesson books, as is our ex husband or former friends or co workers. You may choose to clean the dust off your feet if someone rejects you or behaves badly. But in today’s day and age we have to deal with our ex husbands who remain parents to our children. This is why family are so challenging. That one person who needles and torments you is still going to show up at the BBQ, wedding or party. A woman once asked my father for his advice about what gift to give her son for his birthday. She wondered if her son would like a game or a book. She was thinking of material things. And children have so many toys that it is often hard to surprise them. My father simply said, “Stop fighting with his father”. It was like a bolt of lightening for this woman. Stop fighting with her mortal enemy? This man was the person who had disappointed her and hurt her the most in the world. But the effect was instant. My father had spoken. He was the type of person whose advice one would take to heart. He was a man of few words i and also a man of many. He wrote dozens of books, thousands of letters and essays and many short stories. But he also said that all that was worth saying in this world could be written on a postcard. And when he impacted me and others the most it was usually with a short, sentence. No monologue. No long diatribe advice that is hard to digest. A short digestible sentence, spoken at the right time and place can be the most meaningful. Many people loved this about him. His short memorable sentences were directly from God and there was no doubting it.

That night after he suggested that the gift to her son should be not to fight with his father, there was a social event that she had to attend. Her ex was coming because the children wanted him there. She adopted her new attitude. And a miracle happened. He reacted and responded in kind. Because of course it does take two to argue. If her ex had continued fighting with her, it would have been far more challenging. But her attitude had changed and the whole dance had changed. It was palpable. She felt different. She wasn’t ready for fresh romance with him. She was simply not ‘feeling’ mean or nasty or hurt. At the end of the night her eldest son was blissful. He said what a great night it had been. And then he added “Nobody fought”. She was filled with shame. She has not had to ever fight with her ex again. They have had differences of opinion but the hatred and rage just evaporated that night. It was over and all it took was for her to turn off the angry reactive switch inside of her. She let go of past hurts and memories and moved on.

This is one example. Each of us has to relearn the lesson again and again. Sadly there is no perfect recipe for harmony. But sometimes when we reach out in our minds first and foremost, the other person’s spirit does respond.

If we can accept the fact that we have no other enemy except ourselves as St. Francis tells us, then that becomes a shield that can protect us from the thoughts and behaviors or other people who are not behaving as we would like.

And now for the video clip from U Tube. You can view

http://lightworkers.org/video/33411/christian-lion

by clicking on this link above or by copying and pasting the address below into your browser



The video is only a minute or so long
I suggest watching it without the music first (feels more immediate and authentic) It has nothing to do with Off the Mat. It just moved me in a rare way…………..and reminded me of beloved pets here and now and from the past. It is said that our pets are a bridge between the mysterious world of nature and the logical, mental and tamed world of human domesticity.

Happiness and Gratitude

"What we grieve for is not the loss of a grand vision, but rather the loss of common things, events and gestures. … Ordinariness is the most precious thing we struggle for, what the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto fought for. Not noble causes or abstract theories. But the right to go on living with a sense of purpose and a sense of self-worth — an ordinary life."

A survivor of the 1943 uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto named Irena Klepfisz


Even a small 'ordinary' crisis in our lives can leave us longing for those very days that we did ordinary things. We can look back to a day in our lives from long ago and say to ourselves how happy we were then if only we had realized it at the time. We can look at a photo of ourselves and appreciate how young, how pretty or handsome we looked. The sad fact is that at the time we didn’t ‘know’ this. Looking at a picture of ourselves from back in time can be like looking at a total stranger. We can look at the ten year old with detachment and even appreciation. What a pretty/handsome child! Or maybe we can recognize that we were troublesome and a trial for our parents. We can appreciate the very things that we despised at the time. The home cooked meal that we had to attend without fail. The fact that we weren’t permitted to go to a party or a friend’s house and had to stay home can now be recognized as a blessing. We can look back too on the ordinary and the mundane and feel a sense of wonder about them.
We have read with fascination Anne Frank’s Diary, written in the midst of a dramatic time, and yet her days in hiding were full of tedium, the ordinary and the mundane. This Diary written about what for Anne Frank was ‘the ordinary’ is quite extraordinary and still sells millions of copies.
There was an interesting radio program on the subject of happiness. The guest was a scientist, Sonja Lyubomirsky, author of The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want. Ms. Lyubomirsky has conducted extensive research on the subject of happiness. The happiest people, she said, are:
- more grateful
- more forgiving
- less likely to compare themselves with others
- less likely to dwell on little things
- more likely to live in the present moment
- more likely to set goals and seek to meet them
Fifty percent of what makes a person happy, she says, is genetic. This is based on research with twins who embark on very different paths in adulthood. Of the rest, about 10% is based on our natural and worldly gifts: looks, brains, inherited wealth, romantic partner. The rest we can influence by how we think and live day to day. So 40% of our happiness is our responsibility. We cannot blame another person or point the finger at anyone but ourselves.
Gratitude is up at the top of the list. This is an attitude we can cultivate and learn even late in life. We can look at life from the perspective the glass being half full or half empty. A simple exercise of expressing gratitude morning and night and making a list of the things we have to be grateful for is a useful one, and it is easy to do. The very things we are grateful for will usually be the ordinary things in life. The ability to put one foot in front of the other, or what we can learn from not being able to put that foot in front of the other can be on top of the list. In other words we can be grateful for everything, even our difficulties and limitations.
One of my teachers on communication techniques used to insist on touching base with each of her students with the question "What is good and new in your life?" The answer had to be positive and we had to tell our news from a positive perspective no matter how much we felt like complaining and whining. So the answer to the simple question of how we were feeling would often lead to us feeling “excellent”, simply because of the way we were obliged to tell our news. The same news with a positive spin on it really made us feel quite different once we had expressed it in this positive way, with the focus being 'good and new'. Even if we were digging with difficulty as we searched for the good and the new in our day or our week, we would end up feeling so much better about our news. There was always something to say that was good and new, even if it was a great cup of coffee or good piece of music on the radio. An illness or an accident can take us to a place of being grateful for being able to breathe, talk, walk and eat in the normal, ordinary way. My son broke his arm when he was 10. He sat in the doctor's office, crying pathetically and blurting out how lucky he was to have a Mommy and how lucky he was to have a doctor nearby. His reaction wasn't "Why me?" His reaction was one of gratitude that he had lots of good things to be thankful for. A person might be plagued with migraines. Yet when a migraine hits they can be flooded with gratitude because the migraine is accompanied with a grace filled dream or vision and that direct connection with the Divine in the midst of extreme pain. It is said that in the midst of suffering God is closest. There can be gratitude too for the medication, the doctor, the love and concern of a beloved husband or friend.
One thing to put at the top of a gratitude list is that touchstone place in the center of our lives that we can retreat to from time to time, hopefully daily. A still point place. It doesn't have to be the woods or the beach. It can be listening to classical music in the dark, or The Who, Live at Leeds, played at high volume. It can be pottery or running on the beach at night. Some people prefer Yoga, Meditation or Prayer time. But it is well established that we all need a place where we come into close contact with something deep, meaningful and something that embodies love. By making time for that, we can remember that there is something out there beyond words that is important, that plays an ongoing role in our lives, even if it cannot be put into words. It is the extraordinary,

A lesson from the past on appreciating the small things in life

"If one finds the strength to deal with small things, one finds it to deal with the large ones as well." June 17, 1942.

Etty Hillesum

There is an expression about the straw that breaks the camel’s back. We can think of this expression from the flip side of the coin. Instead of the back breaking, think of the back becoming stronger. We can strengthen our body and our spirit one straw at a time.

Muscles can be strengthened one increment at a time. One tiny increment at a time. If this is true of the muscles in the body then it is also true for us emotionally and spiritually.

In Yoga we get stronger with each moment of practice if we approach that practice with care and wisdom. It is a process. A process that takes place over time. Lots of time. A lifetime of commitment to a body that is getting older all the time. One of my favorite expressions is that you cannot take the body with you. So don’t go over the top about your body’s ability to do or not do the posture. Use Yoga to get to know your body and what it can or cannot do.

Our spiritual life is a not so very different.
As a yoga practitioner I have injured myself over and over again. It is an endless cycle of over doing, being over ambitious and rendering the body ineffective if not downright useless because I asked too much of it.
Is our spiritual life so very different? One hears it said how the just man falls many times a day. If you try to fast and meditate for hours on end and expect amazing results, you will likely fall flat on your face. God forbid you might even give up and say to yourself that it is impossible to achieve what ever imagined goal you had in mind.
For today’s day and age a moderation is a good rule of thumb.
Short 5 minute yoga breaks. 5 minute meditation breaks. Goodness, even one minute of focus on the breath is transformational. Eat in moderation. Don’t have that one chocolate or the extra serving. Postpone that snickers bar if you are not really hungry.
To build qualities like patience, acceptance, and endurance must also be done one piece at a time. Hold your tongue just a few seconds longer than the last time you said something regrettable. Let your mind spring back during that second to one of your better moments. Hold it and then decide whether to say what you had in mind. You may even have forgotten the irritation in that second you stopped to think about it.
This is a practice no different from lifting weights or building stamina on the treadmill. Take the practice internally. So that even when you are thinking about saying that unkind word to the person who is irritating the hell out of you, you may be given the grace and strength to turn it around and understand the event or situation from the other person’s point of view.
How can you do this?
If you build a special internal place, a quiet room within your mind you can always go there, if only for a second or too. The grace and strength you need are always there waiting for you. The more you visit your special place, the easier it is to find it when you really need it. So don’t wait until you are in trouble, start building that mental internal room one block at a time.
In Etty Hillesum’s An Interrupted Life, this passage fell before me when I opened the book and I wanted to share it with you. It is written from the ghetto in July 1942. She died in Auschwitz in November 1943. It is an astonishing revelation of how Etty herself built that internal space. Her bedrock of faith in God and the human spirit is so palpable that we cannot fail to take heart when we read this passage. One of her tools to achieve mental quiet had to be her writing. We are very fortunate to be able to share in the amazing strength she received. In this passage, things are getting worse and worse for the Jews and for Etty.

“I feel so strange. Am I really sitting here writing things down so calmly? Would anybody understand me if I told them that I feel so strangely happy, not bursting with it, but just plain happy, because I can sense a new gentleness and a new confidence growing stronger inside me from day to day? That all the confusing and threatening and dreadful things that assail me do not drive me out of my mind for even one moment? I dare hardly write on. I don’t know how to put it; it is as if I had gone almost too far in my dissociation from all that drives most people out of their minds. If I knew for certain that I should die next week, I would still be able to sit at my desk all week and study with perfect equanimity, for I know now that life and death make a meaningful whole. Death is a gently slipping away, even when gloom and abominations are its trappings.”

Chutzpah

There is a famous definition of chutzpah as "that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan." This was written by Leo Rosten in The Joys of Yiddish (1968), an unofficial lexicon of Yiddish words, phrases, and rhetorical devices, illustrated with proverbs, quotes, and jokes.
How often do we each and every one of us make excuses for the things we do; the words we say? How often do we use what happens to us to justify our mistakes and errors?
Excuses are made even in our community at large for the dreadful things that happen. And all too often we justify our thoughts, words and deeds because of what has happened to us, There is always that delicate balance between tolerating bad behavior both in ourselves and others and understanding it. Between justification and compassion. Drunkeness, adultery, drug abuse are given kinder, clinical terms like alcoholism, sex addiction and self medication. And we can all thank God for this compassion and understanding. The challenge is balancing our sense of judgment both of ourselves and of others. Are we excusing the behavior, understanding the behavior, tolerating the behavior or striving to correct the behavior in ourselves? In those around us? It is said that for evil to thrive, all it takes is for good people to do nothing.
I have a dear, and most beloved friend who is a corrections officer. During part of his training, the superintendent gave a wonderful talk. He stressed the need to correct oneself before you can even think about correcting others. He stressed the fact that imprisonment is the punishment and that officers are there to correct by example and not to punish. But first and foremost they must ‘self’ correct. A tall order. And he challenged the trainee officers to ignore their spiritual lives at their own peril.
I watch my friend and listen often to all that happens within the prison. And I realize how similar some of the things that happen there are to what goes on in the world outside. It is a microcosm, a bee hive of humanity.
One young prisoner has had a particularly rough upbringing and is very angry and defiant making things difficult for himself and those around him. He doesn’t want to do even the simplest tasks assigned to him. Defiance radiates out of his pores. Understanding him and having compassion can go a long way. We can realize that we might be equally defiant in such a situation. And yet he has to be corrected if he is to function even within the prison, let alone outside in the world. In fact if he was simply to be ‘understood’ and not corrected, he would remain ‘stuck’ and frozen by his own bad behavior.
Correcting such defiance without becoming angry oneself is a goal in and of itself? To what extent do we have to self correct before we can step in and point out another’s faults? It is constant process. A daily dance. It goes on constantly even in friendly conversation. The least comment can become a barb, a thorn on the brain. The mother, the wife, the husband, the friend, the boss, the teacher, the student. All are constantly correcting one another. We do this with a look. Sometimes the lack of a comment is enough. Not apologizing or not paying a complement can speak volumes.
Self correction is the one thing we do have control over. The Dalai Lama in his book on Ethics for the New Millennium stresses the need for determination not to commit the error or misdeed again, rather than dwelling on it and being consumed with guilt which can be harmful. Recognize the fault, make a determination never to indulge that fault again and move on.
Every so often we meet an individual we can turn to, to help us with our own self correction. This is one who is seeking, striving and constantly self correcting. This is someone we can trust. A mental, spiritual mechanic who won’t be angry but recognizes the fault, notices what is wrong and will correct without judgment or shaming. If you are lucky enough to have experienced even briefly such a spiritual director then be grateful. Such a one is rare.
Of course our spouse, friends and family will willingly correct us in multiple ways. But they may be too kind or gentle to help us make the leap, and excuse our imperfections.
How can we develop the discipline for ourselves without a perfect other to help us? And the answer of course is to turn directly to God if you have the Faith and the Will to do so. Meditation and prayer are amongst the ways we can do this. There are billions of words out there written in great big books to help. But without a willingness to self examine and self correct neither prayer nor meditation will be a helpful exercise. At best it will be a form of relaxation and at worst it may lead a person deeply astray on the astral plane if they have the psychic ability to go there.
I repeat the following quote from Fr Keating because it is so helpful. It encourages me with the daily discipline of mental quiet and giving stillness and silence the time, value and importance that are their due. It is so easy to abandon this discipline or put it off till tomorrow and somehow tomorrow never comes. And for many of us, silence and mental quiet is utterly terrifying.

Fr. Thomas Keating on Centering Prayer
“In the deep rest of contemplative prayer the human body receives permission, so to speak, to evacuate the emotional junk of a lifetime. In other words, we have a psychological tummy filled with emotional traumas. We are like persons sitting for ten, twenty, thirty or forty years, on a meal that we never digested. “What we need to do to heal our psychological indigestion is a thorough evacuation of the emotional trauma itself. That requires a willingness to feel the primitive emotions of grief, fear, panic, despair, or whatever emotions accompanied the traumatic events of early life. In the purification of the unconscious this healing takes place through the process of contemplative prayer. Contemplative prayer gradually brings about the liberation of whatever prevents the presence of God from becoming a part of our constant awareness.”

Happiness and the quality of your thoughts

The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts:
Therefore, guard accordingly, and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature.

Marcus Aurelius (121-180 AD)


The quality of our thoughts is a complex web that dictates our happiness and state of well being. Self analysis can be difficult and constant supervision of our thoughts even more so. So I have isolated one mental activity that we all do from the time we are very young. This is the act of comparing ourselves to one another.
Comparison of oneself to another is both an obstacle to be overcome and useful tool. It can spur us on to do better and excel. It can also lead to jealousy and envy and take us down a slippery and destructive slope. Even those of us who claim we have never been jealous are constantly bombarded with opportunities for comparison. This may cause us to feel overly pleased with ourselves or utterly miserable because we are not as good as some other person.
Jealousy and envy can easily rear their heads like sleeping snakes peeping out of the basket. We should be the one to receive a certain gift, or favor or moment of attention from the teacher, parent, beloved or friend. We would make so much better use of that inheritance or prize. Sometimes the lesson comes hard and fast and other times it takes many years. If you compare yourself to someone else and find you wish for what they have, however innocent the desire might appear take a closer look. It could be good looks, money, intelligence, charisma. Ask yourself if you can accept the entire package that goes with being that person. Then you would also have to accept their cravings and desires, their health problems or obnoxious family members. You may find that what you perceive to be so desirable is nothing but a fleeting moment of temporary joy in their lives, or a gift that compensates for unbearable burdens.
I remember a close family member of mine giving numerous things that should by rights have been mine to give or not to give. I was furious and deeply resented the incident. My mind was reeling with comparisons. I had less money than that person. My need was greater. I could write an endless list of the thoughts that consumed my mind. And when it all boiled down to it, the thoughts all centered around comparing myself to this other person, and comparing my situation to theirs. Years later that same person who had innocently received the gifts went on to get cancer and recover, divorce his alcoholic wife and recover with difficulty, have a dreadful car accident and have numerous surgeries and eventually lose his leg. He dealt with these situations with great humor and amazing acceptance. At the time he received the gifts I thought should be mine, he had seemed so care free, so unaware. Now I thank God that he received the few small gifts that I so meanly resented at the time. If I could go back in time I would give him more, give him all, to strengthen him for the journey ahead.
This has happened to me time and again. A moment of resentment, followed by insight into the person’s life. If we were all blades of grass, each of us would still be looking up at the oak tree we stand beside. So to compare ourselves to one another blade of grass is ridiculous in the broader scheme of things. We each have tasks to learn and are given what we need to perform them. None of us will still be here in 100 years. All we have is now.
The happiest people it is said are more grateful for what they actually have. And the happiest people are less likely to compare themselves with others. So every time I start comparing, I ask myself if I have all the facts to make a true comparison.
Happiness has other key ingredients too. Happy people are more forgiving, less likely to dwell on little things, more likely to live in the present moment and more likely to set goals and seek to meet them.