Topic, Topic, Who’s Got the Topic?

I’ve faced a lot of challenges, coming up with regular posts, and searching for topics people might find interesting enough to get past the first couple of lines. Not the least of them is choosing subjects which fuel not only my own passion, but that of my readers.

For the most part, I try to stick with things which will evoke pleasant emotions, or at least those which elicit pleasant memories along with the unpleasant. Yet every so often, I go off on some kind of rant knowing full well there are people who will not only disagree with my perspective, but do so rather violently.

This isn’t entirely a bad thing, though. Despite our differences and sometimes the delivery, these points of contention are a perfect opportunity to learn something new. By opening up a controversial can of worms, a new perspective might be gained, if we can step back a few hundred paces and disengage our own emotional attachment to the subject at hand.

It isn’t always easy to do so, or, in some cases, even possible, but I’m learning the rewards are often worth the trouble. It’s not so much that we can learn something which will change our mind as chances are, we’re already pretty set in our opinions. The benefits are far greater. We have the opportunity, not only to see the down and dirty side of people we thought we knew, but to gain perspective about how they came to embrace their own views on the subject.

When Life Hands You Lessons…

Admittedly, some of the surprises aren’t as pleasant as we’d hoped, but then, which of the lessons we remember best came from a view through rose-colored glasses or a stroll through the park? Most of the time, it takes a good, solid whack in the mindset to start seeing things as they are instead of how you want them to be. Pain, be it physical, mental, or emotional is one of our greatest teachers.

Too often, a lesson is so painful, we drag the pain along with it long after the healing process should have assuaged it and made it nothing but an unpleasant memory. We humans have a tendency to hash and re-hash the painful moments in our lives as if the memory of the pain will prevent us from making similar mistakes in the future. If you’re completely honest with yourself, has it really worked out that way? We still burn ourselves in one way or another, and too often, beat ourselves up because we didn’t learn the lesson the first time.

Stepping Stones

Life is a series of lessons, or as I like to call them, stepping stones. We learn things in portions we’re able

to digest at the time, building up a tolerance so the next time the lesson appears, we’re able to take a larger dose. It doesn’t mean we’ve learned all we’re supposed to. It means we’ve learned exactly what we’re supposed to at that stage of the lesson.

Few if any of us went from learning our numbers to Calculus. We had to gain an understanding first of the numbering system. Slowly, we acquired an understanding and maybe even a reasonable amount of skill with addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Only then were we ready for formulas and the many problems we could solve using math.

Why should life be any different? Granted, for most of us, math didn’t come packaged in pain, though I know for a few there was pain in learning to grasp the rules and components. But math has finite answers. Life does not. Life is a series of variables in which we ourselves create a moving target of possibilities. In some ways, the pain is what stops us from executing an endless loop of trial, error, repeat until you either fall over or go crazy. The pain is the brick wall that tells us we’ve gone as far as we can go for the moment.

Stopping So We Will Be Better Prepared to Move Forward

The wall we hit isn’t meant to stop us in our tracks forever, but acts more as a placeholder while we become accustomed to leaving the old behind and embracing the new. We need that time to adjust to the new set of rules for the place we’ve moved to. Understanding the new set of rules gives us the tools we need to break some of them and remain upright when the next shit-storm hits and we’re forced to change our perspective again…or not.

Sometimes the point of a lesson is to teach us to hold firm to what we know and believe. The lessons aren’t always about change, but instead, they teach us to use the tools we have more effectively.

Think about things like patience, or compassion, or self-confidence. We learn them in stages with increasingly difficult challenges. Yet the one we face today, while infinitely harder than our first one is comparatively no more difficult for us now than the first one we faced. We’re better prepared to face a situation that tries our patience to the last thread than we were when our patience was first tried, probably in childhood.

So it is with compassion, and even more so when coping with dramatically different points of view. The lessons we learn today will make us less likely to take offense when someone seems to attack our core beliefs. We’re more able to take the necessary steps back and try to see things from their perspective as we know it, and even seek to understand their perspective better. The first few thousand times we feel like someone is attacking our beliefs, our instant response is to go on the offensive, attacking theirs in the same mindless fashion.

Experience has taught us doing so is a losing battle so we learn ways to listen to what they’re saying, and maybe even read the subtext too.

Learning to Recognize Reactions from the Pain Body

You read and hear a lot about the “pain body” these days, especially if your reading list includes selections from Tolle, Chopra, Lao Tzu, and the like. The pain body is fueled by all of the painful experiences we, and even our ancestors have had. It locks us into belief patterns, but also affects the way we react to perceived threats. When we recognize the pain body, not only in ourselves but in others, we’re able to take those necessary steps back and see how even an attack is merely a conditioned response on the part of the pain body to protect itself. It’s not personal.

One of the most valuable, but also one of the most difficult lessons I’ve learned is to look past a person’s aggressive response and see it’s all about them, and not about me at all. They’re lashing out at something which is painful to them and have, at least in that moment, connected it with me. But it never was nor will it ever be about me at all. So I have no reason to either take offense, feel hurt, or lash out from my own place of pain. Yet there are still far too many times when I do lash out or feel a pain of my own instead of remembering my own lessons, and switching from anger to compassion.

Inciting Without Malice or Forethought

When I’m looking for topics to write about, I turn off my internal editor, at least while I’m putting the words on the page. As such, it means I will trigger pain bodies in some of my readers, and that’s perfectly OK. Like it or not, I’m unconsciously creating the space they need to move further along their learning path. As I do it for them, someone else will do it for me.

It might be something huge like my parents’ suicides, or something small like a belligerent drunk in a bar who believes I’ve insulted them. Either way, it’s an opportunity for me to learn a new skill or hone an old one. Just as what I trigger in a reader of my words has that same opportunity.

Needless to say, I will continue to put my heart and soul into my writing, even if sometimes it appears I’ve put my foot into my mouth instead. The words I write are inspired by the collective mind. I know this because, quite often, I’m no more than a conduit taking the words which need to be said from the higher mind to a page accessible via the internet.

Contribute to the Discussion

I welcome any and all comments but must insist upon adherence to a lesson I learned many years ago: attack the post, not the poster. My goal isn’t to determine right or wrong, but merely to incite a lively discussion wherein we might learn about each other, ourselves, and scenarios with which we’ve had no experience. Above all, I seek to inspire and to incite passion in others as so many have incited mine.

Write on!

 

About the Author

Sheri Conaway is a writer, blogger, Virtual Assistant and advocate for cats. Sheri believes in the Laws of Attraction, but only if you are a participant rather than just an observer. She is available for ghostwriting to help your business grow and thrive. Her specialties are finding and expressing your authentic self. If you’d like to have her write for you, please visit her Hire Me page for more information. You can also find her on Facebook Sheri Levenstein-Conaway Author.

Be sure to watch this space for news of the upcoming release of “Forgotten Victims: Healing and Forgiving After Suicide”.