TRANSFORM REACTIVITY TO PEACE
“Are you saying I should practice stillness?”
Very often we think that if we practice stillness or presence or silence in meditation or another deliberate spiritual practice, we can somehow replicate that stillness or presence in everyday life.
We think we can bring it into our relationships, so that when we’re triggered we can remain still or we can remain silent or remain present. But this is an error—you cannot impose your spiritual practice on life.
When you’re triggered, it’s not stillness that’s being called for—it’s openness.
This openness requires a willingness for self-exposure—the willingness to expose yourself to yourself.
What you are being invited to expose are the raw feelings, the ugly feelings, the scary feelings—whatever feelings you have spent a lifetime contorting yourself around to keep them hidden from yourself.
I don’t mean you should express these feelings as an out- burst of emotion, but rather to meet these feelings in the quiet space of your innermost—to listen to your inner truth and tell the truth to yourself about what you feel.
It seems one of the scariest things—on a psychological level—is to meet ourselves all the way. So we create layers of armoring around our innermost feelings, we create layers of pretense.
We don’t meet ourselves all the way, we don’t meet each other all the way, and we don’t meet life all the way.
The willingness to meet your experience all the way—to be honest with yourself about your feelings—softens the layers of pretense and defense.
And in this softness you are less likely to be triggered, because you are open to a deeper truth.
It is this openness that transforms reactivity to peace.
- Amoda Maa
- From ‘Falling Open in a World Falling Apart.’
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