Rereading Loving What Is

Four years ago, I ordered a copy of Loving What Is from Amazon. It sat with a couple of other self-helpy, get-sane-quick books on my desk for some time when I was struggling worst with my job, my life, my marriage, my parenting. When I think back on it, there was rarely a moment that I was happy that wasn't all about the oxytocin rush of holding my son. I could hold him and smell his little baby boy smell, and I could even just imagine holding him and sniffing his little head, and I would get this amazing flood of well-being. The rest of the time, I just wanted to wish hours and days off of my life so that I could get to a part of it that didn't hurt as much. I remember thinking that it's like solving a Rubik's Cube -- sometimes, you just are in an arrangement that can't be solved, and you have to keep moving the pieces randomly until you get to a solvable configuration. And so it was with life. At work, I thought I couldn't possibly win or get anything meaningful done; at home, I thought more of the same. And I kept trusting that eventually, life would become solveable, and took it as my task to just survive until I saw the pattern that I could fix.

Things are so much better than they were then. Looking back, I blame probable post-partum depression, I blame sleep deprivation, and I blame myself for not asking for the help that I needed. I'm sad, perhaps, that others didn't recognize in me what I had no idea to watch for or how to recognize, no matter how obvious it is with 20/20 hindsight. But I feel strong and capable and hopeful now -- I feel like I've got the pattern figured out, and now I'm just slowly and methodically working my way through the puzzle, fixing things as I get to them, trusting that I can work with each pattern as it comes up to a successful resolution.

And I'm glad for the books that I read, mindlessly, non-absorbant as I was at the time, because even if I couldn't use those tools then, they distracted me for a time, and became part of the toolkit that I have today.

I picked Loving What Is, a book describing The Work of Byron Katie, off my bookshelf the other day, and am looking forward to the refresher course in breaking free from encrusted ways of thinking and checking out the possibility that if the perception of a problem is causing you pain, maybe it's not the problem, but the way you're perceiving that's the source of that pain.

As a doctor of mine once said, "Pain is your emotional response to a physical stimulus." There is no requirement to feel pain in response to a skinned knee or a jilted prom date or a broken heart or a frustrating job. The eyes we use to see sometimes determine what we end up seeing, and the eyes are equal partners to the vision.