Tag Archives: hissy fit

602. Flexibility within Reality

 

Or how I decided to live a day where things didn’t turn out as ‘I expected’ and prevented myself from going into an exasperation about it and instead turn it into an opportunity to develop patience and understanding.  

So, part of my plans in the day was to write a blog yesterday, and I didn’t get to it. In fact it was one of those days where I woke up early as usual and wrote down all the points that I had to get done, keep an eye on, direct and get to ‘settle’ during the day as part of certain duties, commitments and responsibilities I have taken on in my life.

So, it was one of those days where nothing went as I wanted it to go/not as ‘I expected’ and all the things that I planned to get ‘easily directed’ during the first half of the day ended up being things and bits I had to direct and sort throughout the entire day… lots of phone calls, messages, being in a rather huge state of anticipation because of not being able to communicate with a friend of mine that was going to complete certain process for me in a long-distance manner, then ending up knowing that he had been in a compromised situation that was not cool at all for him, which led me to then be in a state of pressure of ‘I’m requesting this person to do this/that for me and they just went through such a shocking situation’ and having limited ways to communicate while having some deadlines to cover with timeframes for these processes that I could not just ‘go and complete myself’ because I just could not do them from where I am currently located.

I also had to deal with other ‘fixings’ in relation to certain services and that also took some time because of course, people in customer service are usually quite busy, some people make mistakes and so an entire thing becomes a greater problem because of that. I realized I had to understand how overworked they are, how they have to at times make up for someone else’s mistakes and how I had to be forgiving with the other person that had made an initial mistake that created great confusion in my process of attempting to get something sorted out. So I decided to remind me that ‘everyone makes mistakes, I won’t make a big fuss about it and just be patient while things get sorted out.’ So that process I had to do a couple of times today with different people/situations.

In the past in similar situations I would have already by the half of day been irritated, annoyed, calling people incompetent or not ‘wise enough’ to do things ‘just right’ from the get go – but interestingly enough I had the following audio from Eqafe.com quite ‘fresh’ in my memory in fact Failure and Success – Reptilians – Part 571. As I wrote the words ‘I would have been ‘whining’ about in the past like calling people ‘incompetent’ this audio came up because I certainly was that type of person that thought of myself as being spotless in terms of not making mistakes, always being efficient and doing things properly, which is of course quite an unreal view of myself and one that I had to definitely step down from in order to get more real about my flaws, my actual denial of mistakes and weaknesses which include of course this ‘short fuse temper’ type of tantrums I’d dive into within such starting point of believing that ‘If I was doing the work that others are doing, if I had been in this or that position, I would have prevented such problem, I would have done this more efficiently, I would have been able to clarify the situation faster for the client’ etc. And that is a very arrogant way to approach life situations, people and the many ‘out of the ordinary’ type of situations we can encounter in our day to day.

It seems as though this whole day could have been the perfect set of ingredients to make my ‘good old recipe’ of a short fuse temper cocktail that would lead me to ‘bash every single moment of the day’ and go into a state of ‘I don’t want to do any of it any longer’ and just throw a tantrum – read giving up while remaining angry about things – while believing that throwing a tantrum is righteous as in ‘the right thing to do’, which I never in fact dared to see or recognize as an actual weakness, as a form of giving up on myself and others within this attitude of just getting flustered, angry, irritated, frustrated or belittling people for what I perceived were ‘low capabilities to sort things out’ in other words, calling every other person ‘incompetent.’  

Yep, that’s really the truth of myself right there, existing in this ‘I know better’ position where I many times have wished I could just ‘clone myself and do everything myself so that I would never have to deal with incompetence.’ Yeah, again, ‘wow!’ I know… but till this day, I can still see these ‘old thoughts’ coming up within me and what are they indicating about me? They are a way for me to spot and identify where I am not being humble, considerate, patient and flexible towards life happening – as simple as that – because we are all humans, we all make mistakes, nothing can be entirely ‘perfect’ and I have to rather make space for a lot of trial and error in life, or else I won’t be able to ‘live in this world’ like my mother would say to me and my sisters.

My mother’s words come up in this because she had to live in a house with 4 other people  – my father and us three sisters – that have (had) serious ‘perfectionism’ issues. The ‘trademark’ was that of being apprehensive, going into tantrums if things didn’t go our way, if we didn’t get things done ‘the exact way we wanted it,’ if something/someone else would go missing in action and would cause some delay or something just not ‘happening’ to us, or say some teacher wouldn’t grade us in a way that we believed we deserved, the norm was to get angry, to blow things out of proportion, to be short-fusing all along and believe that such response in some way would give us an authority over things… lol, it never did. It only caused us some neurosis that I now know how ‘bad’ it gets when not taking care of it,  yep, learned along the way not the ‘easy way’ but the hard way many times.

This ‘short fuse temper’ point is one of those ‘biggie’ points I’ve been working on for several years now – otherwise identified as ‘anger’ for example – and this whole day was a test in my relationship to things ‘not going the way I expected’ and changing my experience throughout these ‘inconveniences’ and delays, things not happening, people not showing up, people going through actually rough things that delays other processes for me, people having shit happening in their management systems, people not sending out a notice about it, people having to be dealing with greater amounts of work because employers don’t want to hire an extra person to redistribute the load and so being slower in completing tasks, etc.

I had to let go in every moment that all of these ‘obstacles’ went on during my day and just embrace it. I had to remind myself that I could not fix it myself, I depended on others doing things for me, I had to make peace with it and so I did. But it wasn’t an ‘easy’ thing, I mean, I could still see the irritation and impatience wanting to come up, so in those moments I would remind myself to place myself in their shoes, in how there’s not only ‘one’ person that is responsible for certain things, that at times there’s several people down the line that cause such points. Other times it’s systems failing, other times it’s just people having literal shitty situations happening in their life which causes a turn on things that I had assumed would be ‘done as expected’ and having to ‘re-calibrate’ in certain ways.

So, the outcome was that I spent more time today ‘managing’ all these things and having back and forths in communication, sending emails, waiting for certain things to play out that I didn’t get to do what I wanted to get to do after I would have had those things ‘sorted out’ which I had hoped to have ‘sorted out’ throughout the first half of the day, and it just couldn’t happen that way.

As a result, I had to embrace the day, realize I cannot  always be ‘on top of my day’ but today was rather practicing being flexible, testing out my patience to not go into impatience, stopping going into an irritation about having to ‘wait in the line’ or letting go of wanting to have a definitive answer about certain opportunities opening up and in essence, had to ‘make peace’ with things just not being as simple, straightforward and easy-going as I had expected.

So, the last point of the day was that I was recording a translation for Eqafe.com, I’ve been doing it for so many years now that many times at the beginning I would be recording and find out I wasn’t recording at all or the microphone wasn’t plugged in and so I would ‘finish it’ without having a proper recording of the whole thing. In the past I would become so irritated about it! You know like wanting to kick something against the wall type of irritation, lol. Today it happened again, I had a ‘dimensional shift’ where I didn’t plug in the microphone, I just placed it in front of me and started recording. I did check a few times that I was recording through it, but I never noticed that the cable wasn’t plugged… so I finished and as I played it back  I noticed the sound was off, I had not plugged in the mic… well, that was the ‘cherry on top of the day’ or could have been so.

I noticed that there was an urge within me to just ‘want to repeat the whole thing and ‘get done and over with it’ right away’ but I know how this ‘getting over with it’ type of experience goes, it becomes a rushing-through-things type of stance where all of my expression becomes an I-just-want-to-get-this-done type of experience where I know I am irritated and I am just wanting to ‘run through the mistake’ and sort it out as soon as possible, without first addressing the actual irritation.

So this time before I even went into an experience of irritation or frustration for this mistake I made – and I did say ‘oh silly me, wtf!’ but I realized I was about to get into that ‘same old’ train of thought – so I hacked it – I said to myself: Ok, I will take a break, take a shower, eat something, do some cleaning, eat some actual cherries and cake lol and then come back upstairs to be settled enough to re-record it. It helped, I re did it, point done, no rushing rather enjoying the topic of what I was translating which precisely had to do with how if we are in energy and then get thrown into an experience that we react to with more energy, of course energy meets energy and it’s all blown out of proportion – which is actually a cool explanation of how if we don’t go in fact changing our relationship to all of these ‘bits of moments’ of ‘obstacles’ or inconveniences, we mostly get to that ‘tipping point’ where there’s that last drop that spills the glass full of water, which is a saying here that explains how we go filling a bucket or a glass of water with drops, little drops on a constant basis, and how if we don’t go sorting out that accumulation of ‘little bits,’ then at some point a ‘last drop’ will cause the water to spill out… because we didn’t work through or manage through the various ‘bits’ throughout the whole day for example.

So, in this, I didn’t judge me for having this slight reaction to the day, I just decided to understand it, to see how I could have ‘taken me’ to react in ‘bigger ways’ in the past and how I can decide to do things differently now.

I learned to place myself in the shoes of others, I learned to actually place myself in a position of providing assistance to someone that went through a rather shocking situation and doing what I would see I’d definitely gladly take on as support from another if I had been in their position. I learned to be considerate and not only focus on ‘my wants, my needs, my timeframes’ and be flexible. I learned to even laugh at my own silliness for example with missing plugging in the mic as I shared my experience with someone and look back at the day and realize that ‘yeah, this was quite an ‘out of the normal’ day’, but in the end it was a cool set of ‘tests’ for me to see who am I in the face of unexpected things happening or just things ‘not going my way’ or ‘as assumed’ or ‘as predicted’ and in that it assists me in learning to live with these ‘curve balls’ that lead me to create a point of anticipation, where yes I can anticipate something being sorted out soon, but realizing I don’t have to be ‘eating my heart out’ while anticipating…. Maybe that’s not the expression, but you get the point of how anxiety can pile up when something is not entirely in our hands to sort out or direct, but depend on someone else to do it for us.

So, as I re-did that recording, this time ensuring all was set in its usual ways, I realized how after all I thought I didn’t have ‘much to share’ about today because I didn’t get anything ‘done’ as in being ‘productive’ as such, but, I realize that I got other kinds of points ‘done,’ such as all of this ‘who I am’ in the midst of setbacks, delays, things not working, people going through unexpected situations, weather being really out of whack and not really being the best one to ‘plan my day’ accordingly, having to make room for ‘extra things’ I had to sort out that I didn’t plan to have to ‘fix’ etc.  And as I see myself at the end of the day, I didn’t get that irritated, except for rather being a bit too rushed in wanting certain responses, but I also got worried about a situation and it turns out some unfortunate situations did happen, but I could not do anything to prevent it or sort it out, other than provide some ‘moral support’ as they say.

So, instead of piling up reactions throughout the day, I decided to go testing out ways in which I could embrace these ‘curve balls’, practice patience, practice understanding, practice ‘letting go’ of my desired outcomes, embracing the unexpected, the unpredictable, the unfortunate and rather act to find alternative ways and be ok with having to repeat several things to get certain desired outcomes… it went out ‘ok’ in that sense in fact, so, that’s how I can also learn to see my day, not only through what I get ‘done’ as I’d like to see my day in terms of ‘production’ – but also embrace the day where I get to see who am I managing, walking through certain unexpected points, walking through certain consequences, walking through the unexpected, walking through ‘waiting’ etc.  Not going at all to ‘blame’ anything or the world for how things went through today – lol – but working along with it, finding ways through it, sometimes just plainly accepting ‘ok, not going to happen as expected’ and being ok with it, learning to manage myself in it and learning to let-go of my control over things.

Ok, thanks for reading!

 

 contourt

 

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449. How to Face Consequence: Defrosting Nightmare

I’ll share a moment where I have been able to change my ‘usual reactions’ into a supportive outcome.

I own a fridge that still creates walls of ice in the freezer. For over a month, we had not eaten stuff that was in there and I kept procrastinating the process of getting to defrost because of how I knew that it would have to be entirely empty to fully defrost several centimeters of this thick crust of ice. What happens here is that this freezer is a perfect example of how we operate in our minds when we just allow the ‘layers of ice’ in this case to pile up, and we don’t do ‘clean ups’ regularly instead – say once a week for this freezer – but we let it all just ‘pack up’ until it becomes this really tough thing to handle when finally deciding to ‘do the tough job’ of getting all that ice out.

So throughout the week we cooked the stuff to be eaten and empty the freezer, then it was the time to actually get it to defrost mode. Took over one day for it to fully defrost. But halfway the process, there were moments where a huge chunk of ice could not be taken out, it was just stuck, there was accumulated water and the tray that holds it was stuck with this big chunk of ice. I understood that if I let that piece there, once the fridge comes ‘on’ again, it would only recreate the same problem, it would be frozen and would not be let loose. So, there were moments where I was having my hands frozen, having to be ‘sponging’ the water out (because of the tray being stuck) and trying to get the ice stuff out. I almost wanted to give up, thinking there is no way I’m going to get this stuff out. But, I knew that it’s just not common sensical to ‘leave it for later’ because this is a matter of ‘now or never’ – so, kept pushing, moving around the tray, doing some forceful movements until finally the big chunk of ice came loose and we were able to finally take the water tray out.

Here, ‘the usual old me’ would have gotten pissed, would have tried to blame ‘the fridge’ for being so old that it still forms ice, would have blamed ‘my partner’ for not telling me to do this earlier or for not eating stuff earlier or ‘reminding me’ of doing the defrost… but nope, I didn’t do any of these things, I entirely assumed my responsibility related to this, and so breathed through my own desperation at times of wanting to say ‘fuck it, I give up’  – I refrained myself from doing this, deliberately, and instead kept pushing, deliberately breathing, deliberately knowing that what I was facing was nothing else but ‘piled up consequence’ of all the weeks I left this to come to this outcome, now I had to ‘pull up my non existent pants’ and take care of this, or it would simply cause havoc/consequence and possibly damage the thing.

So, I’ve been working with the word ‘embracing’ in these moments, an acceptance where we come to realize what we’ve ‘compounded’ in any either ‘physical outcome’ – such as the fridge situation – or internally where we get to a point of feeling entirely stuck, piled up with tons of ‘frozen stuff’ that we think it’s absolutely hard to remove, hard to self-forgive, impossible to take out – but what it takes is diligence, is not giving up, is walking the process with its necessary time – bit by bit – to get the stuff out and not ‘lose it’ half way, because in this freezer example I knew I could only pile up more consequence if I didn’t do it, and frankly yes I am fed up with me causing this same consequence over the years (been having the same fridge for 10 years now!) So I asked myself, hmm why haven’t I actually created an effective routine of defrosting more regularly? Why have I allowed myself to just ‘let it go by’ expecting it to ‘do it on its own’ and instead have mostly always waited until it is too difficult, too thick to just ‘turn off’ the fridge for a couple of hours and instead, it becomes this 24 + hours of keeping an eye on this or else, everything in the fridge would get warm and flooded with water….

This very much became a perfect example of how we operate in our minds unfortunately, where I from now on will consider how much of a consequence is created if there’s no regular ‘self-check’ through writings, through introspection, through focusing on what I need to take care of within myself and so without, because we are experts in procrastination and leaving things ‘up to the last moment’ where the consequence is huge and becomes really tough to handle, yet at the same time, if we are already there at that ‘stage’ of consequence, really there’s no other way but ‘take the bull by the horns’ and stand up, woman-up/man-up to our creation and take it bit by bit, yet taking this process as a cautionary tale to learn from, not to do as I’ve done with this fridge where time and time again I seemingly ‘forget’ the past SAME scenarios I’ve caused because of my lack of diligence in taking care of something that just keeps ‘piling up’ as the snow in the fridge. Same goes for my mind, our minds, no need to get to these piles of emotions over time, reactions, or even worse! React and throw a tantrum while we are taking care of our consequence, because I’ve done that actually every time I have had to run this same ‘defrost operation’ in the past. And this is what I became aware of yesterday, how I usually would start picking on the ice to get it out but it’s not only a physical movement, it comes with some anger, frustration, a blame of sorts to the poor ice that forms by itself and by default as per ‘freezer function’ lol – and there I would usually be the angry monkey that gets angry at her own consequences…. Really? Do I need to rehash the same consequence every single time?No, I could now laugh at replaying for myself this same scenario, really lol – and it’s no different to how we KNOW what consequences we create with certain experience inside us, how we don’t deal with things or understand things any better with ‘emotions’ yet we still bring it up! It’s like law of stupidity really and this is nothing else but what I declare as the last time I allow this to happen within and without me.

So yesterday was the time that I deliberately said, fuck no, here I am not focusing on these seemingly ‘justifiable moments’ of desperation, anger and just wanting to give up and instead keep moving, keep breathing, not blaming anything but entirely embracing the situation as My Creation.

Lol it was even funny how I knew that ‘it would eventually come off’ this large chunk of ice, and I knew that the more I ‘fought it’ the worse it would be, and yes…. That’s how it went. I left it for a moment, to warm up my hands and then gave it a second try, some more brusque movements and it came off. I just had to ‘cool down’ in my intent (figuratively, because I was actually very cold in that moment lol) and then give it a second go.

Well, the whole process yes took some 24 hours but at last now the fridge is free from thick layers of ice and I was able to change a very long pattern of me usually ending up angry and frustrated after this ‘clean up the compound freezer mess’ project that emerges periodically, because I haven’t yet made a clear decision to schedule a regular defrost of it and so prevent consequence.

So, lesson learned and the words to live by: consistency and diligence in both taking care of the consequence as one goes through the ‘piles’ that we’ve accumulated, while at the same time realizing that I can prevent these consequences by regular ‘defrost’ that is shorter in time and of course much simpler to take care of.  Patience with myself when finally deciding to ‘deal with the consequence’ and taking care of the situation, to not go into ‘hissy fits’ when seeing my own creation at the door of my fridge lol. Perseverance: not giving up on the project and believing that it’s ok to leave things ‘half way done’ – nope, keep breathing, keep ‘pushing’ until it is done. Embracing and acceptance of what I have created, Understanding how I came to procrastinate a clean up and so voilá! Here I create my own master piece of ice to deal with.

The next point will be to effectively remember to defrost it, and not use the stuff inside as an excuse to not do so, because practically speaking, it would not make much of a difference to have 3 hours of no ‘freezing mode’ for the food inside, as opposed to having to eat everything and leaving the whole thing to defrost for 24 hours… This is where Prevention as a living word comes: doing  the defrost regularly, and prevent the fuckup.

I commit myself to do the same with my mind, as points emerge, to not even allow them to ‘pile up’ but In the Moment, change, decide to breathe, decide to Prevent consequence – and if it is ‘too late’ and I’ve created consequence, to stand up to my creation, to deal with it in a directive manner which means, not throwing fits, not ‘thinking what I should have and should have not done’ or attempting to throw blames at the thing or others…. But entirely embrace the situation as my creation and deal with it the best and most effective way.

This might be a seemingly ‘uninteresting’ point but, it actually reflects a lot as to how I can be very diligent in many things, but there are ‘simple things’ that I have left just ‘slip out of my awareness’ and cause this mess every month or two months – or more, it has happened! – so, for once and for all to integrate all of these points within myself, to learn also from a better way to deal with consequence, but even better: to learn how to prevent it, within and without of myself.

Regular defrosting sessions with myself mean: writing, speaking self forgiveness in the moment as I know and experience that I am diving into a reaction, and do regular writings from my day to day to see what have I changed, what can I learn from the day, where did I see I was challenged in my stability and so establishing ways to continue assisting myself to improve, to stand up to things in a more apt manner.

Emotions, just like the stuck piles of frozen eyes in my freezer, are nothing else but these seemingly unnoticeable consequences that we create day by day, moment by moment in our lives and if we don’t do regular ‘defrosts’, man, it piles up to the point of ‘exploding’ – or in my freezer case, become icebergs – around a point and then sometimes we believe it’s too hard or difficult to face our creation, our experience, our consequences… but, it really is nothing else but our creation, so we need to stand up to it and be HERE in every moment, which means deciding to apply that moment to moment change, it is a decision, a deliberate decision that won’t emerge naturally from within ourselves. This is what I see change means to me, and nothing/no one else can do this for me, I owe it to myself. It’s a decision to live words instead of rehashing the same old ‘throwing a tantrum me’

Thanks for reading.

 

yellow-leaf-on-the-snow

 

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434. Hissy-Fit: Trance-Ending it.

 

Yesterday I noticed an interesting pattern that I had probably not seen with as much detail as before, simply because there has been a tendency to allow the kind of ‘short fuse’ situations to become a normalcy, especially when walking in the city.

So the story goes this way: it rained a lot the past days and puddles were around many places. I was walking with my partner in the middle of crossing one big avenue when I saw that the lights were red and so, it was time to cross in a short period of time – this city is not designed for pedestrians to begin with – which prompted me to give a bit of a jump and cross. I did not communicate this to him, which caused him to give a sudden jump into one area where there was a large puddle of watery mud. This simple event led me into an immediate experience of being pissed off or irritated, seeing it as ‘stupid’ that such thing could have happened. I started saying out loud to him ‘Didn’t you see where you were stepping? I’ve told you before to watch your step in these fucked up sidewalks!’ because that’s a reality, there’s no smooth ‘walk’ in the city that you can just go walking looking straight ahead of you, because not many places are even/ properly built and/or with wires sticking out, holes, etc.  Even though we were not in a hurry, I noticed that I got flustered about it. Here it is to see that even before asking if he was alright or if he had twisted his ankle or something, to me it was like immediately pointing out what he should have done or how ‘foolish’ the situation was, in a way implying that ‘this should not be happening to us right now.’

As we kept walking, he would stopped twice to clean the shoes and his sock, so at some point I said to him we should instead just sit in a place so that he can properly, clean the shoe, check his foot etc. But my tonality was of course already coming with this harshness, to which he asked if I was pissed, and laughing a bit out of it. It’s great because he usually just don’t follow with my every now and then bursts of whatever fit I tend to create, he just points it out and that moment I realized what I was doing. I reminded me of what I had written just hours before and applied precisely the point that I had written on not being hard on others, to be considerate, to be humble, to be patient.

So I ‘stepped down of my fit’ and said ‘ geez, yes, I got pissed but there’s no reason for it! Why am I even pissed! I should instead first ask if you are ok, if your foot is ok.’ So, it took a simple moment to question this sudden hissy fit, to then immediately see ‘wait, what am I pissed off about? This doesn’t even make sense!’ So, again, I apologized and then as we kept walking I was able to see the whole point being mostly a pattern I’ve seen or witnessed in my father. Whenever my mother would do something ‘less than perfect’ especially while traveling, moving or being out and about, he would point it out to her with certain anger/annoyance, almost in a way wanting her to know that ‘she’d fucked up,’ in a way it is like scolding. Actually now I remember that my partner pointed out exactly the point that made me see this precise pattern, something around the lines of ‘What is it? You cannot tolerate that which messes up your status-quo, is it unacceptable?’ And so I was able to see that, yes, anything that ruins this ‘perfected idea’ of what our walk in that moment was going to be got ‘screwed up.’

So, I completely stepped down of the experience as I saw how abusive it was. Is this at all something acceptable? Absolutely not, I could even get embarrassed from admitting I can get flustered about things like this; though this emerged, lasted some ten minutes because through communicating and doing my own ‘introspection’ in the moment, I was able to see the reason for it, the ‘learned behavior’ and this ‘perfectionism’ that makes me cringe every time something unexpected happens.

Then after some minutes I explained this point to my partner, how I need to be flexible when things don’t go as expected and how there is no reason to get pissed at it and instead focus on practical matters – like checking he’s physically doing alright. One supportive thing is that he doesn’t hold a grudge for it or changes the way he addresses me for it, we have learned throughout the various months of living together to not hold on to a moment of reactions, but to rather speak through it, get to an understanding, and a future consideration to prevent further moments like this.

From my perspective this kind of behavior is more of a physical and automated response that contains almost no thoughts, just sudden ‘pissed-offness’ that I wasn’t able to pin point at first when only remaining in an experience. It was through communication and then doing some further ‘inner-research’ that I was able to understand it. Yet what is most important is the ability to let go of the experience in the moment, to relax the body, to ensure all is clear in relation to the situation and keep on with the day, not holding onto it at all, but understanding the reaction and ensuring one gets to establish principles, words and corrections for any other ‘occasion’ this or any other similar point could show up.

I also see the benefit of voicing the words, the considerations for any other time or moment where something ‘unexpected’ happens, this means sharing with whomever you are so that we hold ourselves to our word with others that are close to us as well, and create an all-around learning process from it, instead of allowing it to ‘ruin’ a moment for a petty situation.

 

Not breathing

 

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