I can start off with a sense of vaguely awakening dread, a fog bound fear for what this day will bring. Emotionally bracing myself to hold and contain this uncertainty over the next hours. All this exists on a gut level of experience. My practice during the day is to pull my mind away from inflaming this further by layering negative personal thoughts onto the bone of it. I can tell myself its far too early to call the nature of the day. I recollect those days when most of our daily sales happen in the space of an hour mid afternoon. I also need to have a task to focus on, cleaning, merchandising or making, something that brings my attention into the moment more. Something that demonstrates a welcoming creative optimism.
We open at 10am, but it's a rare day when our first sale happens the very moment the shop door is put ajar. It can often be a few hours later before the till springs open for the first time. At that point I breath an inner sigh of relief, ' at least we've taken something' and ' its not going to be a complete disaster'. I appear then to relax into the day, access some equanimity, and be more prepared to let it just unfold. I have still to be aware that my mental attachment can then shift from -' will we take anything today?' - to - 'how much will we take today?' Again having to resist the gravitational pull towards the ideal beneficial future. All this effort of containing and pulling away from unhelpful mental and emotional states, well, this can be tiring.
The underlying emotion, is a disaster filled one, of fear that 'it's all about to go wrong - again'. This sits in the background waiting to pounce the moment a bad day in the shop is confirmed. This familiar personal story I am better at resisting engaging with these days. Its not rational, I know, and I also know rational ways of dealing with it bounce off like heavy rain on an umbrella. Logic or rationality have their uses, but they can be quite harsh commanders, tending towards ignoring, repressing or burying completely when faced with some intransigent emotional response that will not comply.
Even though one poor days takings don't make a disaster in retail. I can teeter on the edge of responding as if they were. There are days which have for whatever reason proved particularly exhausting. As soon as I'm no longer in the shop, and able to relax at home, a wave of despondent feeling can fall upon me. Its as though that fear of 'it all going wrong- again' will find its moment for being consciously experienced no matter what. When my emotional guard is weaker or vanished for a while, it grasps the opportunity to come up for air. That, is what I've been working with lately.
What concerns me now as I re-read this is that this doesn't sound like there's much enjoyment or fun to be had. Whilst I don't think that is entirely the case. If I were being honest I do wonder if I allow myself enough space and time for enjoyment and fun to fully emerge into. Perhaps I do spend far too much time in 'battle mode' even to step out of it briefly. Trying to examine these anxious states, how they arise and vanish in closer detail, can, through giving them greater attention, fall into amplifying, reinforcing and justifying there existence. I do appear to lean existentially towards a view of life as being about averting one catastrophe after another. Recent weeks have been additionally physically challenging with a tricky back flare up to manage too. Given favourable circumstances I can lighten up with the best of them.
Yet I am always on the look out for fresh ideas or approaches, a phrase or practice to encourage the cultivation of a different landscape to inhabit. If the gratefulness/blessing practice helps, its because to be truly grateful you have to be contented, satisfied with whatever you have. Dissatisfaction fuels restlessness and fidgeting. To be constantly on the move, searching for contentment somewhere else, other than right here. And if this feels too painfully familiar that I avert my gaze, its because it describes the action of a good deal of my life. Of moving. Mostly away from sources of disaffection. However habitually externalised and focused, dissatisfaction has roots in a sense of oneself. Not content and satisfied with who you are, or have become, you cannot stay still for long. All your memories appear to show you running off towards a new horizon.
Though currently I'm bringing to mind a Taoist phrase - 'To restore the primal wholeness of the mind, one must know how to remain unmoved and innocent.' There is then something in this state of immovable innocence, that seems entirely fitting. It speaks truth through the mirror. Stay put. Take off your filter. Practice without expectation.
So much mental proliferation and fretting is founded on wishful thinking. A feeling that if we believe something strongly enough it will happen. And if we know exactly what will happen, we can manage the future and be in complete control of it. Its essentially a wrong view of how reality works, but a persistent one nonetheless, because it offers a future with hope in it. The possibility of certainty, is always tempting.
However, to cultivate a state of immovable innocence, of not knowing, seems to be more in line with how things actually are. We cannot know what is just around the corner. A delight, a disaster or an unexpected opportunity. What we believe we know about our past, well that is what we must let go of, be forgetful of. To no longer be always bringing something to mind is to create a space for the state of innocence. A sort of spiritually sourced dementia. A state of not knowing. The absence of any mitigating history, the self justifying stories you tell yourself, the habitual responses, the fixed ways of seeing. To be free of those accretions is to return to a type of innocence I guess.
The Korean teacher Seung Sahn's perennial spiritual injunction was 'only don't know' as any other response would be considered egotistical and hence delusionary. This has associatively brought back to mind Padmasambhava's famous teaching phrase - 'I do not know, I do not have, I do not understand.' Yeh, tell me about it Vajra Guru!
The most practical way I've found of smoothing turbulent emotional states is to be out in nature. Watching the sun rise in the morning, taking a walk in the countryside, or strolling by the sea. All of which I am truly blessed with easy access to here. So that is not really rocket science. Though this isn't 'the cure' for anxiety or insecurity, it applies a healing ointment to the scuffed knee of it.
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