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I have recovered from the disease of Alcoholism. I believe there is only one person really,.. everybody. And that peace of mind is everything. -So treat your neighbor as you would treat yourself, because your neighbor IS yourself. I think most of recovery is what I would call common sense, but that learning to be ordinary is a true gift very few people acquire. My ambition is to accept everything unflinchingly, with compassion, and therefore be intrinsically comfortable in my own skin, no matter what. I am comfortable being uncomfortable and am willing to go to any lengths to improve my life. I believe the Big Book was divinely inspired, and is extraordinarily powerful. Unfortunately AA's best kept secret a lot of the time. (In my opinion). I just try to do what works, no matter what it is.

Sunday, June 24, 2007

Avoiding Harmful Speech: Keep your mouth shut ! till you cool down

Generally I kind of shut up till I cool down. Works for me!

When you step outside your comfort zone, guess what happens? You get fearful, anxious, uncertain, irritable, fault finding, whatever! The duvet seems very appealing! I don't know about you, but I tend to look for reasons to revert to type rather than embrace a WHOLE NEW way of looking at things. Being outside your comfort zone (within reason) is actually a REALLY GOOD THING, but yeah it feels UNCOMFORTABLE!! Ah well, you can't make an omlette without breaking a few eggs as they say..

So anger can be a GOOD sign as it tends to show up when you are venturing outside you comfort zone, but at the same time, anger pretty much ALWAYS tells me I am full of crap, and that I need to KEEP MY MOUTH SHUT till I have cooled down and am able to avoid what the Buddhists call 'harmful speech'.

Basically all words become POISON when I am angry. they are designed to hurt and punish, not heal. So I keep my mouth SHUT generally.
When I've cooled down, THEN I do the ''problem solving' with the situation that 'inflamed' me in the first place. You never really sort things out very well when you are heated, and getting heated is a very natural occurrence when you challenge your old ideas.

It's just the ego, thrashing about. Hold still!! Do not believe 'monkey mind'. It plays tricks on us you see.. Its aim is to keep us enslaved by the Ego (small mind). Basically its full of CRAP most of the time..

1 comment:

doctor a said...

Thanks for the excellent post. One of the most important skills in making relationships work is learning to recognize when your anger is building and to take a time out before it explodes. And then, equally important, come back after you have cooled down to talk about whatever it was that triggered the angry feelings and thoughts.

Also, how do you manage to write and publish 4 posts in one day? I can't even get one written every other day.