My philosophy is to "kill the monster while it's little." The best time to handle a "negative" emotion is when you first begin to feel it. It's much more difficult to interrupt an emotional pattern once it's full-blown.
Life is filled with rhythms-day and night, hot and cold, summer and winter, spring and fall, cloudy and clear. Likewise in a relationship, men and women have their own rhythms and cycles.
I realized I had been keeping people around even when deep down I knew they were bad for me. I had overridden myself.
Was Deirdre right about me purposely wanting relationships that were impossible?
The issue is that if you hold onto the resentment against yourself, you're just going to recreate that destructive pattern in different forms because unconsciously it's still a belief system that limits you.
Because one does not want to be disturbed, to be made uncertain, he establishes a pattern of conduct, of thought, a pattern of relationships to man. He then becomes a slave to the pattern and takes the pattern to be the real thing.
I write, "Give me reason but don't give me choice, because I'll make the same mistake again." I think that's what most men want to be told.
It is so much easier to rest contented with what we have already acquired than to change ever so slightly those routine but profound habits of thought and feeling which govern our life, and by which we live so blissfully. This mental inertia is, perhaps, our greatest enemy. Insidiously it leads us to assume that we can renew our lives without renewing our habits.
Remember always that we are pattern-seeking primates who are especially adept at finding patterns with emotional meaning.
Each time you meet an old emotional pattern with presence, your awakening to truth can deepen. There’s less identification with the self in the story and more ability to rest in the awareness that is witnessing what’s happening. You become more able to abide in compassion, to remember and trust your true home. Rather than cycling repetitively through old conditioning, you are actually spiraling toward freedom.
What I really want is to sit next to someone under an L.L. bean blanket on the beach in the fall and drink coffee from the same mug. I don't want some rusty '73 Ford Pinto with a factory-defective gas tank that causes it to explode when it's rear-ended in the parking lot of the supermarket. So why do I keep looking for Pintos?
Emotion is set in our genome and that we all have with a certain programmed nature that is modified by our experience so individually we have variations on the pattern. But in essence, your emotion of joy and mine are going to be extremely similar.
The embodiment of kindness is often made difficult by our long ingrained patterns of fear & jealousy.
When we say we have patterns, there is a cyclical movement to everything. Our psychological and emotional processes also have become cyclical largely because of a very strong attachment and involvement with physical process, and physical process has to be cyclical; only then we exist. Without out cyclical movement there'll be no physical existence.
