I have been feeling flat since Monday. I’ve felt flat since yesterday. Today I told Sara how I felt and she told me to “snap out of it” as only she can. I am lucky to have her as my wife.
We all experience ebbs and flows in life. Some mornings you wake up feeling great and some mornings you just want to stay in bed. The idea is to start seeing the constant flowing nature of life. When you truly embody this flow you begin to see that even though you are the flow –you are not. You can see the feelings and the thoughts. There is a dimension of awareness where you can become pretty comical about it. Learning to laugh at yourself can be better than taking yourself so seriously. Instead of saying I am feeling flat you can start saying that there are some flat feelings happening within me. I train myself to look at the feelings as “interesting”. This kind of awareness helps me in not identifying so much with the day to day emotions and thoughts because I know they are short lived. I will feel differently in 5 minutes, one hour, tomorrow morning and on and on. It is the permanent nature of living in an impermanent world.
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Hi, Johnny - you - uninspired?! was thinking about this kind of blah feeling after coming out of a long period of sickness for our family. It left me with the illusion that I needed to regain control of our lives by shrinking my world - by clearing the decks, so to speak, so that the challenges of being sick, of having sick kids, of feeling like I and they weren't fulfilling our obligations would be minimized. Then I began thinking about a chapter in Pema Chodron's book The Wisdom of No Escape, in which she talks about needing to embrace the difficulty of sadness and the power and vision of the Great Eastern Sun in order "to make a proper cup of tea." This led me to think about the idea of the Chinese yin yang (and, of course, how that connects to a balanced yoga practice...) - in which there is the circle, a symbol of unity, and the pairing of opposites (light and dark, activity and passivity), the tension between which promotes growth and progress. In short, I came to realize, the way to clarity is not to eliminate challenge, but to recognize it as an equal and essential part of the process. For there to be balance, there must be challenge and calm, doing and resting, or in Chodron's words, samsara and nirvana.
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