Stuck 2
Did you ever get stuck in snow or mud or worse? Reminds me of a story . . .
When my oldest son graduated from college, he and his friends cooked an appreciation dinner for their parents. It was at a dorm home near the beach. After dinner, I took the other two sets of parents for a four wheel drive on the beach. It was great fun until I got us stuck in the sand near the water’s edge. Did I mention we had wine with dinner and that the tide was coming in?
We got out and tried to push to no avail and the tide kept creeping closer. We found pieces of wood to dig the sand from beneath the tires, but it wasn’t working. I was stuck and the waves were licking their chops. I could hear them laughing. In the midst of all the chaos, I managed to tell one of the other fathers, whom I had just met, that this wasn’t the stupidest thing I had ever done in my life. We had a good laugh and then I called AAA. They sent a tow truck.
The tow truck operator was smart enough not to bring the truck on the beach. He had 80 foot chains that he affixed to the rear of our vehicle and he began to extricate it from the sand pit. The second he freed the car from the hole, a huge wave came crashing onto the beach and completely filled the space where our Blazer was an eye blink before. How fortunate we were that day.
Maybe you’re stuck in another area of life – professionally, personally, emotionally, etc.
About 5 years ago, I remember The Grasshopper giving me this definition of STUCK:
“When your thoughts tell you the projectionist has gone home, but your heart remains in the theatre.”
It’s a sticky-wicket we have all encountered.
Thoughts by nature get stuck. They repeat themselves over and over, like a skipping CD, until our mind latches on to something else to take our attention elsewhere. And then when that mental attraction wanes, the old thought comes back again for more visiting time in our mental prison. Observing your thoughts, without judgement, is the way out of this dilemma. Just notice that the thought is occupying your mind. Just the practice of noticing will have that thought visit less frequently and you will free yourself from this solitary confinement.
But what about your heart? Is your heart stuck? Your emotions are more dimensional than your thoughts because they contain a feeling component. You have feeling sensations attached to emotions – a lump in your throat, a quickening of the heart, a knot in the stomach, a gurgling of the bowels. These sensations are actual feelings in your body. The truth is no one ever hurt your feelings; they triggered your emotions.
Eckhart Tolle describes an emotion as the body’s reaction to the mind. Jerry Stocking describes an emotion as when your illusion bumps into reality. Both are describing the same phenomenon.
A feeling is something you can quantify – a pressure on your knee, a tingling in your hands, etc. An emotion is really a thought that your body has a response to.
An emotion cannot remain alive if the triggering thought has been paroled. The thought acts as the emotion’s body guard. Once thought is freed from the mind, it no longer has to protect anything. The energy associated the emotion dissipates and you get unstuck.
Begin observing your thoughts and notice how quickly they and the attendant feelings start to dissolve.
All the best,
John
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