What if, instead of resisting it, you could love it?

While talking with my accountability coaching partner a couple of weeks ago, he asked me, rather persistently, "What do you resist?"

Because whatever you resist, persists.

Finally, quietly, I admitted.

"I resist confrontation."

A few days later, talking with my own coach about one of my clients, I remembered the conversation and told him about it.  Once again I admitted my emotional Achilles Heel.

He said, "What if, instead of resisting it, you could love it?"

I've been thinking about it ever since.  As I've said many times in this blog, I am no stranger to self-help, change, and all sorts of emotionally immature positions.  Over the years I have embodied all sorts of damaged people.  For example, I haven't always resisted confrontation.  Once upon a time, I walked the world, a big oozing open sore just waiting to complain.  I have experienced road rage at something as simple as a driver in another car maneuvering out of turn in traffic.  I used to have an opinion about everything and I was eager to share them and debate with you.  At some point, someone, whose opinion I cared about, told me, "You really like to argue."  Even as I voiced, "No I don't," I wasn't immune to the realization that my very protestation was, in fact, the potential beginning of yet another argument.

A part of me understands that, under the Law of Attraction, we attract whatever we hold a great deal of energy about.  Not only do we attract it, but we attract it according to the frequency by which we are tuned.  If we have a great deal of negative energy about money, for instance, and have a bunch of negative limiting beliefs like "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer," we're likely to find ourselves walking the treadmill of our beliefs.  I have a great deal of negative energy about confrontation.  I've walked the walk of an "assertive personality" to the point where I was really rather aggressive.  I've talked the talk of a "passive personality" to the point where I was criticized as a "doormat" and suffered greater friendship losses than back when I would actively pick a fight with them.

What if, instead of resisting confrontation, I could love it?

When I first admitted my resistance to my accountability partner, we were talking about one of my clients.  As per what I saw as our "agreement," I was coaching her and giving her assignments in line with the curriculum.  Each week, despite my request for emails documenting the work she had done, I would receive nothing.  My inquiries at our next meeting as to whether she had performed a task were usually met with, "I forgot."  When I talked about the experience with either my accountability partner or my coach, they suggested phrases they might have said which felt rude or abrasive to my ears.

When I was a kid, my parents used to fight.  I don't think a week could go by without what felt like a very large brouhaha to my ears.  In Woody Allen's "Radio Days" the main character talks about his own parents fighting, "Then there was my father and mother.  Two people would could find an argument in any subject."  The scene cuts to the actors playing the parents arguing over which is the greater ocean.  The Atlantic or the Pacific.  "I mean, how many people fight over oceans?"

I can remember being dragged into their arguments as a kid.  Being asked to choose which one of them was right and while I struggled in miserable indecision, they never quieted down to see if I gave an answer.  As an adult riding in the back seat of their car listening to them bicker, I said, "Stop fighting.  I'm sick of listening to you fight."  In unison they turned and looked at me.  "This isn't fighting.  You think this is fighting?  I can show you fighting.  Would you like to see fighting?"  

If I were to pick a visualization metaphor for how I feel during confrontation.  I would pick one of those gelatinous creatures you sometimes find high and dry at the beach.  I guess they are some sort of jellyfish caught in the wrong place at the wrong time when the tide shifted.  Exposed and vulnerable, they can't protect themselves if you should decide to poke them and puncture them with a stick.  Honestly, I know I'm not that vulnerable, but the harsh words in a confrontation feel very much like being taunted with a stick.  No matter what I do, whether I try to shield myself or not, the person brandishing the stick will shove it and wave it until they feel they are done.  Really I feel less like a jellyfish than Frankenstein's monster cornered by the villagers, helplessly grunting, but thinking, "Your beef is with Frankenstein, the doctor.  I'm just the creature.  I didn't ask for any of this.  I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Except some times I am the doctor, not the creature.  I once found myself in a heated debate with the love of my life about which was better, Apple computers or PCs.  It ended as all of our confrontations did, with him having pulled away and me, willing to rewrite all of my programming if I could only see him smile.  Once we began that little confrontational dance, we would find ourselves caught in its rhythm every three months or so.  Right up until the end.  Sometimes I wouldn't even have a firm grasp on just what it was that I had said or I had done to cause his discomfort.  For me, the only part significant or important; the only part that hurt, was his pulling away.

What if, instead of resisting confrontation, I could love it?

I think my difficulty with the question stems from the fact it isn't a goal I can achieve.  Rather it is a byproduct of other things.  Confrontation hurts because I take its attacks personally and see it as a source and cause of rejection.  Confrontation disturbs because I view my peace of mind as being something others can disrupt and damage.  Confrontation threatens because I see speaking up for myself as an act of defiance.

What if, instead of resisting confrontation, I could love it?

It would mean I have truly accepted myself for who I am and I would attract others who have done the same.

The Law of Attraction and What You Resist, Persists

It is early Tuesday morning.  I should be asleep.  I haven't written my "regular Tuesday blog" yet and the idea I want to talk about keeps writing me awake.  In other words, I toss and turn, telling myself, "you'll be tired tomorrow, if you get up now."  At the same time, I'm afraid I'll forget my chain of thought, so my mind keeps fashioning the sentences and words.  It keeps writing the blog I would like to wait until tomorrow to say.

As Carl Jung said, "What you resist, persists."

Which is exactly the thought that keeps praying on my mind this morning.  In this blog, I've talked a lot about the Law of Attraction, which was recently made a popular concept by a book and movie called "The Secret."  At the time, a lot of people watched the movie seeing only desire and avarice and they resisted its message.  Other people watched with desire, if not avarice, and saw only a way to achieve their goals.  Both missed grasping a very large point.  In science, a law is defined as "a statement of fact, deduced from observation, to the effect that a particular natural or scientific phenomenon always occurs if certain conditions are present."  When we talk about the Law of Attraction, we are not talking about that other kind of law, "the system of rules that a particular country or community recognizes as regulating the actions of its members," we are speaking of a scientific law.  A statement based on repeated experimental observations that describes some aspect of the universe.  Why is this an important distinction?  We may focus on attempting to attract the happiness and wealth we would like to see in our lifetimes, but the truth is, we are always attracting our life's outcomes to us whether we are attempting a desirable one or not.

Part of the beauty of the five step method of working with the Law of Attraction is that it encourages taking responsibility for the type of life you have attracted yourself into and gives you tools with which to try and improve your outcomes.

We humans tend to resist pain.  Not only pain, but very individualized pain based on our versions of hell.

It happens roughly like this:

We are born
Things happen to us
Eventually we begin to judge those things as pleasant or unpleasant
We begin to resist the unpleasant things

What we resist, persists.

In other words, our personal Law of Attraction outcome gets stuck on negative.  That's because resistance requires a whole lot of energy and attention.  We attract what we give energy and attention.  So by resisting what we don't want, we actually receive more of it rather than less.

Why do we experience pain?  Frequently it is a lesson or warning that we are in danger.  Touch fire and you will get burned.  That painful sensation prevents us from being seriously damaged by fire when we are in a position to avoid it.  The popular definition of karma is basically the same as "what goes around comes around" or "we reap what we sow," but another, if less well known interpretation is that the lessons we need to learn throughout our lives, will repeat until we have learned them.

Someone asked me recently, "That means I attracted the men who cheated on me intentionally.  Why did I want that?"  

I couldn't answer.  The things we resist on an emotional level aren't the same as brussels sprouts or liver.  We don't tend to itemize them in our conscious mind.  The best I could do is tell her to focus on how it had made her feel.  In other words, the "why" component to the first step of the five steps to the Law of Attraction.  The first step is to be "crystal clear about what you don't want and why."  It not only shines a light on what we DO want, it also illuminates those unpleasant things and feelings we are likely to resist.  Combine those feelings you resist with the limiting beliefs you are trying to clear in step three, "identify and clear limiting beliefs," and you will uncover a very likely scenario of your own personal treadmill of bad relationships, limited funds or whatever you would like to overcome.

Honestly, I've been studying stuff like this for years, but huge bits snapped into place for me the other day when I was talking with another one of the coach-elect students.  As usual, I can explain everything a little bit more clearly, if I simply explain my situation to you.

Many of my limiting beliefs have tended to surround the notion of not being capable, not knowing what I'm doing, being incompetent, that sort of thing.  They stem from being asked to be responsible for things that were a little too grownup for me to be asked to handle when I was a child, combined with being mocked about my performance or told I hadn't done a good job.  At the same time, I realized that my most recent former ex had been a catalyst for some growth on that issue.  Some of the things he said during the break up were direct hits on that level, but it was only talking to this other person that I connected the notion of "how did that make me feel?"  After all, so what if I'm incapable?  What will happen if I don't know what I'm doing?

The emotion was fear of rejection.  If I don't know what I'm doing, I will be rejected.  Which, of course, as that relationship ended, I was.  And I resisted it big time.  So much so, I pretty much pushed him away.  I had let myself be open and vulnerable to someone, which was not something I had done very much in my life, and it ended with my own personal version of hell.  In other words, the thing I had resisted my entire life:  rejection.  I have been a people pleaser.  I have settled for less than I wanted in relationships.  I have sculpted myself into other people just to avoid being rejected.

For many of you reading this, it isn't new territory.  You already knew it.  Really, so did I, but sometimes it takes putting the pieces together and voicing them aloud to really understand.  But some of you haven't figured this out yet.  Humans are motivated by pain.  We will do anything to avoid it.  Once emotional pain has been triggered, we become automatons who run a program we have learned over time about how to handle it.  Perhaps we pick up a bottle or inject something in our veins.  Maybe we bully other people.  Maybe we sacrifice bits of our own uniqueness to simply make the discomfort go away.  Maybe we stuff ourselves with food until we have no more empty spaces to shove it into.

Ask yourself, "what don't I want, and why don't I want it?"  You will discover the negative carrots your destructive behavior feeds upon.  In the meantime, you can use another Achieve Today coach, Gil Mciff's Three Step Clearing Method to avoid becoming a slave to your emotions.  The principle is that our emotions take us out of the present moment and we run programs based on what we are feeling.  If we are running a program, we have become a victim and cannot make choices.

Three Step Clearing Method by Gil Mciff

Feeding what you want is natural and easy, you are already doing this in many ways.

The emphasis of this practice is focused on starving what you don't want by simply observing your emotions and thereby dis-identifying from being them.

Your habitual state of consciousness is the number one determinant of your personal circumstances.  The quality of your consciousness in this moment is the primary determinant of your future.  And what determines the quality of your consciousness is your degree of presence.  

Check in 10x a day with the question: "How am I feeling emotionally in my body right now?"

You can use a reminder app or alarm on your phone, sticky notes placed in random places, paint one fingernail different from the rest, wear your watch on the opposite wrist or upside down, or put a bandaid on your finger.  Every time this catches your attention, ask yourself, "Emotionally, how do I feel in my body right now?"

(A further suggestion my fellow coaching student told me was to do it every time you needed to use the toilet or took a drink of water.)

If there is ANY kind of negativity or if it is simply a lower emotion than you would like to be feeling, the fact is you did not choose it.  It's based on conditioned interpretation and is simply an old program running and it is time to do the following 3 steps:

(If you are feeling what you would like to be feeling then start with step 2.)

1.  Say These Specific Words - There it is.  That's not me.  That's a program.  

2.  Observe it deeply.  What physical and emotional sensations do I feel?  Where do I feel them?  Or simply I feel it (here,) it feels like (this.)  Realize who is doing this inquiring?

3.  Thank you for checking in.  I love you, I love you, I love you.  Thank you for no longer feeding the program.  Thank you for dis-identifying from the program, thank you for catching yourself and for no longer losing energy here.  Thank you for whatever you want to say thank you for.  I love you, I love you, I love you!

There it is.  That's not me.  That's a program.
I feel it here (location,) it feels like this (characteristics.)
Thank you for checking in, I love you I love you I love you.

These steps are not for the purpose of getting rid of the negative feeling (i.e. resisting and therefore feeding what we don't want.  That benefit may sometimes come with it, but this practice is more about implementing a new habit/program.  So every time you observe the emotion, it's an opportunity to do this practice without judgement.  It doesn't matter what emotion is there, what matters is that you simply observe it without giving it any meaning.  When this becomes habit you will have successfully reprogrammed the unconscious perpetuation of the old reaction with the automatic newly programmed conscious response.

It takes less than 30 seconds to do this practice.  30 seconds at 10x a day = 5 minutes
How many days will it take before this healthy response has become a new program for you?

Feeling is Feeding

A short while back I lost a friend.  In the midst of a conversation, I said something that offended the friend and he decided to withdraw from my life.  I hadn't intended to offend him.  When I found out I had offended him, I had no idea what I could have possibly said that had offended him.  Interestingly enough, that same individual had previously, by only a week or two, asked if I was a doormat who was afraid to offend people.

Now, you can't change other people.  Nor should you want to.  Hey, I've been nearly as damaged as the best of ya.  Let me tell you in YOUR language.

Anybody you actually changed wouldn't be there because THEY chose to be.  So, if you made them love you, they did it because you made them.  That will never be worth the same to you as it would if they had gotten there under their own steam.  Deep deep down, you know it was never right anyway.  It's just the rejection.  Feels like you have something to prove.  You don't.  Why would you want to hang around with someone who had no sense of humor anyway?  Move on.

Once, my concern about the friend would have been about offending him.  He chose to get offended and just as it hadn't to him, the fact that I had no malice in my heart wouldn't matter to me.  It does now.  If I'm stupid and put my foot in it, I'm sorry.  I'm a human and I'll do that once and again.  Even if it is dreaded "emotions" involved.  We're human and as Eckhart Tolle would put it, occasionally we're asleep.  I will be.  You will be.  I'll excuse your farts if you excuse mine.  We're good, so long as nobody chooses to just stay there.  So the fact that my heart had no malice is everything to me.

Nowadays when something like this happens, I want to learn from it.   What does the Universe have for me to learn from this experience?  There just isn't enough data input from my side of the table.  To learn something I have to try and experience it from his.

Ok so he came to see me.  I was at work so he couldn't have had any baggage about me having been supposed to go see him.  Check.  I said something during that exchange that upset him.  I don't remember the conversation that well, but I do remember that I never called him a name or said anything overtly insulting.  OK, so I had to have said something insulting during the conversation, probably during the more personal bits.  Well, we talked about his sister and his girlfriend.  He knows I don't know his sister and he knows I am friends with and like his girlfriend.  So somewhere in there I said something so offensive he chose to take it to heart and not be my friend?

What can I learn from that?

If you remember my earlier claim, I've been just as damaged as the best of ya.  So I've been just as damaged as that.  I can remember when someone doing something as simple as looking at their watch translated as "Is it time to go now?"  Which translated as him/her being tired of my company and wanted to be gone.  Which I found offensive.  I never was as offended as my former friend, but I was offended.

By someone looking at their watch.

It sounds so ridiculous to me now.  But I'll tell you a secret.  Sometimes I'll see the trigger, and the thought is still there.  No emotion and I can laugh it off.  But it is there.  I'm hoping it will go away someday.  That nagging stench of unworthiness.  After all, I used to know how it felt to throw a complete hissy fit.  The vein surging thrill of really letting your anger fly.  Stiff and tall like a Greek or Roman Goddess.  I don't anymore.  I can describe the feeling.  I remember feeling it.  I just can't relate.  Now if I feel the slap of anger, it is incidental only.  If I feel any following negative emotions, they've line-jumped to sadness about my unworthiness.

I can't say that's how it happens with everybody, but that's how it happened with me.  Before, if unworthiness got triggered, I had no idea and I got angry.  Sometimes monumentally angry.  I never stayed angry long, though.  I was like a firecracker going off only to immediate dissipate.  Usually into tears.  After I found out about my subconscious feelings of unworthiness?  It really became something hard to get angry about.  It's like watching a magician who has showed me how he does the trick and I can't un-see it again for enjoyment's sake.  It's funny, I've planned to say it does still make me sad, but trying to type it right now, it sounds a bit ridiculous.

Perhaps I will be very happy I wrote this blog.

Anyway, I've done my own bit of time, looking to be offended.  I know about that.  I know a lot of new things now that I didn't know then.

As Eckhart Tolle would put it, "the pain body," which is exactly what that is, "wants to be fed."  Simply having someone smash your emotional thumb isn't satisfying enough.  It has to sucker punch you with every negative thought it can throw.  Recovery time from the initial incident is very small.  Recovery time from a full out hissy fit can be years.  Meanwhile, you think you are only acting naturally.  X happened so you're entitled to be Y.  Sorry, I've realized it's a choice.

I want to be happy and on a very simplistic level I've realized I can't have that if I'm choosing to be angry.  Think of it this way.  Your favorite song comes on the radio.  You get angry at another driver.  You don't hear the music again until 3 songs later.  Anger robs you of time and the things you love and enjoy.

Most importantly, I learned about the Law of Attraction.  I can wish and hope to attract all the love and happiness I want, but I am going to get what I am, not what I want.  I am going to get what I give.

Feeling is feeding.  Feed want you want and starve what you don't.

The Decisions You Make

A few months back I was talking with a friend about her damaged uncle.  My friend, while I'm sure she has struggled with different issues throughout her life, is one of those people who can just push through the discomfort quickly and emerge victoriously on the other side.  To an outside viewer, she appears to do it effortlessly.  I couldn't even begin to tell you what childhood mishaps attacked her self esteem because she never seems to have made them her home.  My struggles more closely parallel those of her uncle and I found myself trying to explain why a man in the final decades of his life could still be struggling with "but my parents mistreated me."  Repeated attempts made me believe three undeniable concepts are at work.

1.  No matter how old a person is, if he or she can still mentally touch an open wound from past mistreatment, there will be a corresponding degree of rigidity and incapability to change and move forward.  It is easy to assume the larger the pain, the greater the problems, but I don't think that necessarily plays out.  Or at least not in an obvious way.  For one thing, pain is individual.  Most of my childhood problems were more of the "Barbie gets caught on the outskirts of a bad neighborhood" variety.  There was a very funny moment in a very disturbing movie remake decades ago.  The movie was "The Collector" and the laughable moment was when the heroine, already being stalked by her eventual killer, heatedly explains her discomfort to the police.  "He gave me gifts!"  I can't tell you how many times I've remembered that scene and my nervous laughter when I've tried to explain my relationship with my parents and why I've struggled with self esteem.

Pain is individual.  We're not allowed to line up the damaged and judge whether or not they have a right to feel hurt.  I believe an individual's problem moving forward stems less from how badly he was hurt than what he does with that pain.  Do you remember one of your first childhood cuts or scrapes?  Remember poking the wound throughout the healing process to see if it still hurt?  A skinned knee will eventually scab over and that poke won't feel any different than it does to the adjacent skin.  Emotional wounds don't heal the same way and repeated checks, rather than confirming or denying forward progress, tend to create a habit of negatively reaffirming your life.  People who are stuck in this "Groundhog Day" of emotional pain seem to believe they can move to forgiveness when it no longer hurts and don't realize that the healing will begin (and it will hurt less) AFTER they forgive.

2.  Frequently, pain colors "the damaged's" entire life.  On a ten scale for difficulty, they wake up every day at about an eight.  Before the red lights, traffic jams, road rage or other daily challenges, they wake up thinking:  "What the hell might happen next.  I don't know if I can stand much more."  There's a good chance they have at least a few documentable obvious problems like debt or health issues.  Their baggage contains a whole lot of entitlement because "my life has just been so hard or unfair, I really need someone to acknowledge or validate my pain."  They don't need to poke the wound to see if it still hurts.  It always hurts.  It never goes away.  That is exactly how I felt during the years leading up to my divorce as well as a few afterwards.  "Can't anybody see I'm drowning here?  Somebody, anybody, please throw me a line."

I was talking with a friend recently about one of her retail customers.  The woman was one of those constant complainers.  Nothing was right.  Nothing was what she wanted.  All of which added up in the customer's view to discounts she was entitled to receive as well as a free coke.  I listened, all the while feeling very fortunate she had not been my customer.  Then I tried to explain to my friend why the woman might be that way only to discover my friend already knew.  A core limiting belief of people in that mode of thinking is "no one understands me."  In reality, a lot of people do understand and aren't without empathy at your situation.  They genuinely are sorry for all of the lemons life has handed you.  What they don't understand is why you felt the need to build a monument to that pain and move in there.  At the same time, you are not a lot of fun to be around and "if you can't find a way to "move on" emotionally, could you please just "move on" physically.  Seriously, there are other stores that sell this stuff, you know?"

This sort of person is stuck where they are because everything is filtered through "me."  Rather than noticing how hard the sales person may have tried before they gave up, they will be stuck in the fervent outrage of "how could they treat me that way?  Don't they know the customer is always right?  I'll show them.  I'm never coming here again!"  Never realizing the sales person is probably thinking, "You promise?"

The empathy that "damaged" is looking for is also the exit door he or she keeps missing.  It is a "get what you give" world.  If you aren't receiving any empathy, appreciation or consideration, there is a high likelihood you aren't giving them to anybody either.  Besides which, remember that notion "pain is individual?"  The worst childhood story I have ever heard involved the children of an undiagnosed schizophrenic woman who was also a single mom.  For the first eight to twelve years of their lives, mom locked them in a closet every day because "the voices" told her that was where they would be safest.  I don't know about you, but I know it wouldn't help my self esteem very much to be outrageously indignant about my poor treatment as a customer only to discover my persecutor's childhood was far worse than mine.  That isn't even because I know it is a "get what you give" world.  It is simply because I have this notion perhaps I don't deserve things I am unwilling to give to others.

3.  There comes a time where it is no longer a question of what heinous things may have happened to you.  If you aren't happy with your life, it isn't because of your parents, your government, your president, the Democrats or the Republicans or your boss.  You are the one ultimately responsible for your life and if you aren't happy, it is exactly like the internet meme says:  "If you want something you've never had, you have to do something you've never done."

Maybe it is as simple as counting your blessings instead of infringements against you.  Maybe the world is so offensive because you really are looking to be offended.  Maybe each time your thoughts repeat the word "me," as in the sentence "how could you do this to me," you could ask yourself what they might have been feeling right before they hurt your feelings.  Could you have unknowingly hurt their feelings?  If that is possible, is it possible they didn't know they hurt you?  Is it possible that was never their intention?

If you can't do any of that, consider this.  Writers, musicians and painters frequently learn their art by emulating the voice or techniques of established masters they admire.  Find someone you admire who has whatever it is you feel you lack.  Success.  Love.  Happiness.  They have it.  You want it.  So do what they do.  Read their blog or their biography.  Look up their Wikipedia.  Find out as much as you can about how they have lived their life and repeat it.  Fake it to make it.  Repeat it every day until you are living the life you want on your own.

aha Moment

How can I say this?  My mother used to discipline the family dog with a broom.  She used to throw cats into our swimming pool, with me playing "catcher" in case they got into trouble, for entertainment.  At a very young age I felt the awkward discomfort of being a partner to what I felt was a cruel act with which I was not in agreement.

The worst punishment I ever dealt an animal when I was a child was singing to the dog.  My hand shaped like a microphone doing my best Judy Garland.  As a young married woman, people told me the best way to get our Siberian Husky puppy to stop howling in the backyard was to slap her in the jaw.  Hating the idea, I tried it only to be reduced to tears.  I have had moments where my pets felt like the only friends I had.  I would never ever abuse them. No rubbing their nose in a mess that they made.  No screaming at them or striking them for breaking or soiling some possession of mine.  It is simply an inanimate object and my pet is my friend and a creature to which I have made promises.

Today, my cat Peabody, the absolute love of my life, climbed onto the desk while I was working on the computer.  Photographs I found in my deceased parents estate went sailing to the floor as his little kitty paws tried to find a comfy spot.  I was smiling as I gently lifted him off the desk and set him into my lap, but then I was treated to the most wonderful of aha moments.

Trying to finish up my work so I could give him my undivided attention, I suddenly could hear his purr over anything else in the room.  I could feel his purr rumbling my lap.  Peabody is not really a lap cat and usually can be expected to settle on one for only a minute or two.  Today, he seemed quite content to stay there indefinitely.

I ruffled the fur on his head until I could see his inner eyelids.  Contentment.  For both of us.

Noticing the scattering of my parents photos, I thought of my mother.  "She could never have experienced this," I thought.

She would have yelled at her cat.  No doubt throwing something or waving her hands to dislodge him.  He would have run in fear from her and trusted her less the next time.  My mother's cats had to be locked in the bedroom with her when she wanted them to stay.  Peabody leads me through the house like he is guiding the presidential motorcade and sleeps with me every night, door open.

I am not a stranger to anger issues.  If I did spring from the womb as enlightened as I am now, I spent many years lost from myself.  I did have one cat who, while I never ever struck him, did hear far too much of my voice raised.  I hated myself a little more each time I noticed how much more skittish he was becoming.  I don't believe in anger management.  I believe in not being angry.

No matter how normally placid you are or how volatile, in that moment when you feel the beast rising up your chest and calling voice and limbs to act, what if you stopped?  Just waited.  Pretend you are in a separate place where time has frozen.  In that moment, there is raw potential.

Think about it.  Why are you angry?  It has everything to do with you.  You feel like you have been slighted or ignored; treated to an injustice; been pushed past a threshold; or don't have a voice.  Someone has inadvertently rubbed salt in your interior wounds.  You have been triggered.

You can build an army of creatures who tiptoe around you, careful of your broken parts, but it will never make you feel any better.

Feel the solid heaviness in your chest.  Feel the anger sting with near physicality.  It hurts.

You really do have to do something different to make your life change.  Do something different to feel something new.

What if, instead of the world letting you down, you are the one letting you down?

In that moment, while your anger is building, think of yourself as a god.  Think of yourself as Poseidon or Neptune.  You can be the storm that leaves wreckage in its wake, leaving everyone, including yourself, a little worse off than you were before.  Or you can observe the anger just as if it was a hurricane or tsunami.  Powerful, finite, meaningless.

It's just an emotion.  It's just a hiccup of a ghost of the way someone once made you feel and you didn't like it.  Depending on the circumstances, you didn't like it and you didn't feel right again for hours or maybe weeks afterwards.  Worst of all, you actually served someone you love and care about a big steaming plate of something you would never want for yourself.   Like my mother's cat, you trusted someone less and you passed along the baton by nurturing people who trust you less.

That trust is what you want.  In that trust is love, respect, admiration, all the wonderful gifts you feel you are being denied.  You build that trust.  Each time you pass up the opportunity to "tear someone a new one," you lay another brick on the foundation.

Anyone who has to ask whether it is better to be feared or loved, has never felt love.  If you have lived a life where creatures are free to love and trust you, guess what happens?

They love and trust you. I've found my pets even seem to instinctively know when I need a few more furry passes against my leg or a rumbling purr in my ear.

It's a beautiful thing.

You might be thinking.  "But Angela, the title of this blog is 'No One Taught You About Money' and the only thing my anger has to do with money is how I feel when there's not enough of it."

Money responds to a quiet faith in its abundance.  Money wants you to spend it.  Not frivolously, but with kindness, intelligence, generosity and the faith you will always have more than enough.  Those are all quiet and gentle mindsets.  Consider them butterflies that will never land on a volatile surface.  Have you ever trained a dog to come "off leash?"  The miracle happens because the dog believes that you are the best and happiest experience to be had against the enticement of all other possibilities.  Things happen when you can set aside dwelling on yourself and your own pain and focus instead on being kind, gentle and nurturing of others.

Your life changes and along with the change, come opportunities and possibilities for all the things you ever wanted.