…we often think that somehow we’re going to improve, which is a subtle aggression against who we really are.
Pema Chodron
That line of subtle aggression against who we really are stood out for me and has been tumbling around in my head.
Aggression isn’t that like fighting? How is it that “improvement” turns into aggression? That is scary to me that the opposite is happening and we do not even know it!
What is that when your body turns against itself, and destroys its own cells?
Inside of me, I had this mistrust, this feeling of being wary of those type classes, and I had to go and see just what was going on.
This sentence to me makes more sense than anything else I have thought about in regards to improving ones self.
If we were to do the total opposite, instead of aggression we had acceptance our whole demeanor would change.
In the past four years that I have been on this life journey but with my eyes wide open, I no longer am fighting who I am and where I have been and what I have done. When my sense of self crashed, I was without self.
Maybe if we remove the self, there will be nothing to improve, just feeling our life’s experiences.
Can you really improve the feeling of love? How about the feeling of sorrow? What can we improve on those experiences? How about when you experience the feelings of overwhelming gratitude, can we add a morsel more?
I began calling myself by the things I was doing. Perhaps because the Me of old, no longer existed, I became “the cooker girl.”
You then just enjoy the experience of the moment.
The cooker girl was never the same, sometimes her meals were wonderful, sometimes not so much, sometimes she would forget she was cooking and became a ‘reader girl’.
Life became much less serious, and I became more at ease with life.
I can see where I could have become aggressive with the cooker girl when she forgot, but by then I was accepting she was a reader girl.
If I were to try and take ‘cooker girl’ classes, I would learn how to do that action better, but it would not make me better or worse if I failed to learn how to cook better.
I still haven’t found my self, but I see glimpses of where I have been.
Clothes are done, so I must have been a clothes washer girl, quilts are finished, so I must have been a quilter girl, the blog is added to, so I must have been typing.
But at the end of the day, a body lays down, closes its eyes and rests. Heart beating, blood flowing, all knowing what to do. I do nothing but comply to its tiredness.
In the morning, resting seems to be over, I get up. How can I improve on something I have no control over?
I was trying to think of what I would improve each day?
And thinking back I use to have aggressive thoughts of I should have done more, been this or that. Yet I did what I did, it is over.
You can’t go back even a minute and do a redo.
We have original minutes, and original experiences in real time.
And if you focus on you, you lose the moment, if you even talk between the experience and you experiencing it.
Try thinking and being in joy, or sorrow. Both seem to eclipse the sense of you. That is how most life is, except you may have a running mind saying stuff over the top.
Have you ever driven miles and not remembered driving, for you were so deeply thinking. That is how life can slip by unnoticed.
I have no aggression towards myself. I accept I do what I do as I do it, and have no regrets. For if I knew better, I would have done better, but I didn’t. I accept my not knowing.
When I find myself in the midst of being a ‘don’t know mom’ I embrace that as well. And in the end, I do know and not a moment too soon…or too late.
I love the states of don’t know, for that means I am about to learn.
I love that I am not finished, that I don’t have to go out and seek to improve me.
I am me, completely me, fully me, with all my past unknowingness, and even my future unknowingness.
I can’t undo the past and have no desire to do so.
I can’t know the future, and have no desire to do so.
I can only be that which is asked of me in this moment.
I may be asked to cook, to be a mom, to be a wife, yet beneath it all, it is just this body some call mom doing tasks.
I love that line, “All it takes to become an Artist is to start doing Art.” Ellen Langer
You don’t even have to begin doing you, you already are!
No improvement needed.
