"A Hit Dog is Gonna Bark!"

No one makes us angry. Oh I know, I have just stirred the pot and you are already preparing your rebuttal. Whether you agree with that statement or not, does not negate its truth. Anger, along with many other emotions comes from the inside out. You are now thinking, “Oh no he/she did this or that and it made me angry, and I will say to you, “He/she did do this or that and that action/words triggered an emotion, a pain within, that already existed. Have you ever heard the saying, “A hit dog is gonna bark.”? That old adage pretty much sums it up! Their actions or words triggered a fear=anger within you and you barked. You know how you will know this is true? Because when someone does something ‘wrong’ to you, if you are not on their same ‘emotional’ wavelength (pain-body) you will not re-act. When we re-act we are doing exactly what that word means; tendency to revert to a former state. We re-act in anger or fear (which are the same) when their arrow hits a place within us that is already wounded. It’s like bumping up against your dresser with the hip you just bruised roller-skating ~ not the same accident or perpetrator but you just got hit in the same wounded spot and yes, you will find yourself cussing out the furniture. Eckhart Tolle speaks of the ‘pain-body’ in his book ‘A New Earth’. The pain-body is ~ “Any negative emotion that is not fully faced and seen for what it is in the moment it arises does not completely dissolve. It leaves behind a remnant.” That remnant is what you are truly re-acting to when someone awakens those sleeping giants with misspoke words or indifferent actions. 98% of the time they did not mean to harm you but because of a past pain (pain-body) that was not dealt with you clobber them. I once wrote an email to a friend and at the end wrote the sentiment “Merry Christmas”. Well, this friend had converted to Judaism and though I meant no harm by that sentiment she took great offense and in return wrote to me a three page response, blasting everything from my hair color to my toes. Well, of course, this was not a ‘reasonable’ response to Merry Christmas but this was a person who was very damaged and angry and always fighting some battle against the devil. She had demons but they did not reside in a place called Hell. She was living in her ‘own’ hell. We often want to demonize our problems to some outside force so we do not have to take personal responsibility for our actions. My father-in-law had a favorite saying that he repeated to almost any situation we ‘kids’, as he would call us, would encounter and it was; “There are two important characteristics an individual must possess to succeed in life and they are #1 personal responsibility and #2 self-discipline. Basically, the only way out ~ is through. So the next time someone ‘offends’ you try not to re-act that old pain but acknowledge the hurt feelings you are presently experiencing and then try something new ~ Don’t Bark! Remember their actions are their karma but you re-actions are your Karma. You will know you have healed a ‘pain-body’ when someone does something that at one time would have sent you over the top but now has absolutely no effect on you. It takes a lot of work but it is possible. Our salvation can be found in our deepest darkest secrets but they have to be exposed and dealt with. Lastly, I will leave you with one of my favorite passages from the good book, “It is for each man to work out his own salvation.” No one is going to save us, and we wouldn’t really want them to would we? If they could, which they cannot, they would have robbed us of our heritage, the trip of a lifetime ~ The Journey ~ the finding of ourselves. Namaste’, God Bless & Shalom Baby! The Dalai Mama