This Is It! This Is How We Get There!

Another late Monday post! I hope you all had an excellent weekend. Ours was beautiful. We didn’t manage to do much around the house or to go anywhere, but we all survived and I count that as a win these days.

Last Monday’s post was pretty down and dour given all of the challenges we’ve had this summer. We are still struggling in a lot of ways, but I think I’ve managed to reframe it in such a way that has made me giggle and has lightened the load. Here’s how that happened:

Matthew and I were trying to plot out our week and decide how we were going to get things taken care of in the small pockets of time we have, how we were going to pay the bills due this week, and how we were going to get some big ticket items paid for in the next few weeks (maintenance for our cars, the furnace, and pumping the sewage {ew, sorry}). We both started spinning out a bit, but then I thought what would Pema Chödrön say?

And I remembered a story from page 54 in Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears, in which she goes to her teacher to describe the rising anxiety she had been experiencing and he smiles at her and says, Ani Pema, that’s the Dakini Bliss. That’s a high level of spiritual bliss. This reframe made all of the difference to her at the time and she was able to experience those feelings without fear or uncertainty, so I tried my own version of it:

Matthew, stop and look around. We’ve unlocked the highest level of enlightenment. This is it! We’ve made it!

After he choked on his coffee, we had a long laugh about it. And that has made all of the difference for us.

It didn’t take any of the stressors away but it was a good reminder to not take it all so seriously. Life is hard for everyone even if the challenges are different from family to family. This is how we gain the wisdom we hope to have in our later years and allows us to feel compassion for those who are also struggling. This is it! This is how we get there!

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And I will not linger on this post much longer and will simply push publish now. I hope to be back on Wednesday. Take good care!

ps – the picture at the top is my latest pair of socks in the delightful Farmer’s Daughter Fibers Foxy Lady.