30 Days of Forgiveness 2015 - Day 16 - Snark Attack

-
"I realized that you can actually get mad and stop being mad in matter of minutes, as long as you set your mind to it. It was up to me to decide how I wanted to feel inside..." --Pernilla Hjort on www.tinybuddha.com

Someone was snarky on the phone with me this morning and it hurt my feelings. I was just trying to do my job, but to them I guess it felt like pressure.

Immediately I got the hit that this wasn't about me, that something else was going on: a sick kid, a broken refrigerator, a bad night's sleep, or maybe just a bad day. But it still hurt and I was having trouble letting it go.

I reminded myself of an article I read years ago that stuck with me. The article said that 80% of the time when someone snaps at you or does something mean to you it has nothing to do with you. 80%! That's a LARGE percentage of the time.

I try and think about that whenever something like this happens so that I can let it go as soon as I can, but this one was sticking. Probably because I have been short on sleep myself the past few nights and busier than is comfortable for me the past few days. I am feeling some stress and just needed to be appreciated for making the call, but appreciation is not what I got.

What to do?

As I walked the dog around the block, I made the decision to forgive.

I located the bad feeling in my body (it was just below my rib cage on the left side) and gave myself a massage as I walked, consciously focusing on letting it go. When I got home, I said the Buddhist forgiveness prayer from yesterday's post and felt my heart lift a little.

It is not completely gone yet, so I am going to do some yoga, take a salt water bath and continue to work on it. Because I want to feel good inside and that is MY choice.

[BTW...the article I quote above is fabulous and I highly recommend checking it out. :)]

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Wisdom from Raul Julia

-
"...[L]ife itself is a meditation."  --Raul Julia I have always loved Raul Julia, since I first saw him as the sensitive married man having sexual tension with Susan Sarandon while solving a murder in "Compromising Positions" (the cast of which also included the always entertaining Judith Ivey - I love her voice and demeanor so much I think I could watch her in anything). He went on to play defense attorney Sandy Stern in "Presumed Innocent" and of course the beloved patriarch Gomez Addams in "The Addams Family."  His was one the first celebrity deaths - in 1994 - to really effect me. He always seemed to have an undefinably quiet strength and grace. I get it now - he saw his life as a meditation - and that makes all the difference.  I hope someday to be remembered for my quiet grace and thanks to Raul I have one more clue about how to do that. Thanks Raul. For everything.
Read more

Quote of the Week - May 21, 2012 - What happens for one...

-
“On this earth we are connected one to another....to another....to another....to another...to another....to another....to another...such that whatever happens to one of happens to all of us.” -- Anna Grossnickle Hines from her book, "Peaceful Pieces" This is a poem called "Dominoes" that my younger son's class read last week on Friday for " Poetry Aloud ." They read it together as a class, one child starting and each child in turn saying "to another," "to another," "to another..." As I listened, the poem came alive for me. The idea of the poem came alive for me. I saw once again that we are all connected, we are all One and that whatever happens for one of us happens to all of us. Did you notice the Freudian slip there? I wrote, "whatever happens for one of us happens to all of us,"  when what I meant to write was, "whatever happens to one of us happens to all of us." But both are equally tr
Read more

28 Days of Kindness: Day 25

-
Every generation is a life-and-death struggle between wisdom and ignorance,  and there is no guarantees wisdom is going to win.  We have to try to be as human as we can be,  and as kind as we can be, and detach from our need for results.  -- Peter Coyote  ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ Be as human as you can be. Practice kindness. 28 Days of Kindness .
Read more