How to Bloom

I pushed myself and walked five miles tonight! My longest walk ever! And there was a perfectly good reason for pushing myself.

I found myself in a situation where I wasn't getting something I wanted when I wanted it (attention), and I felt the desire to push to get it. The story I attached to the situation was that I was never going to get the attention I wanted, that all was lost, and that simply is not true. But the story made me want to push and possibly attempt to manipulate things so I could have what I wanted.

I've been thinking about this particular situation for a couple of days now and my instinct was telling me that I didn't need to push, that I needed throttle back and let the situation unfold, whether I was happy about it or not. As I allowed my imagination to envision the story of my throttling back and relaxing into my own feelings (fear of loss) and into the situation, my trust returned that the situation would work itself out and was not at all the catastrophe I had manufactured in my head.

But here's the deal: I still had that urge to do something, that desire to push, and I did not know what to do with that. I was annoyed with myself for being so stupid as to worry about the situation and I thought to myself, "Well, this will be a good night to push yourself to walk five miles." Now, at first I was seeing this as a way to "punish" myself for being so danged needy and getting upset, but as I walked, I began to realize it was a great substitution for my desire to push another human being and it truly relieved some of my stress with the situation!

Let me go ahead and expound a bit more. I told myself I needed to face my fear, which is always a fear of loss, and probably, abandonment, in this case.

I've been working on reading Pema Chodron's Living Beautifully With Uncertainty and Change. She is one of the ones who writes about how we attach stories to things, and get the idea that we HAVE to have things a certain way, when true acceptance is not predicated on whether or not we are happy with whatever it is we are accepting.

I'm smart enough to also figure out that the harder we cling to some things, the more damage we do. My pushing would have been a form of clinging. I didn't want to do that.

And that's another of the advantages to getting out and moving your body. You can expend the energy you might be tempted to spend on pushing other people in an attempt to get what you want when you want it and it really does help to relieve the tension. I "wore myself out" and came to terms with the idea of just riding things out and observing what will happen.