Get up and keep going PART 1

I’ve had a couple of rather crappy experiences the last couple of weeks, that brought me out of balance momentarily. I’ve gotten out of my negative emotional reactions now and feel that it’s time to see what I can learn from it.

This time the straw that broke the camel’s back came in the form of a huge bill from Trafikförsäkringsföreningen, because I made a mistake. This was the latest in a series of financial backlashes that I’ve faced lately and this time it was more than I could bear.

I was going to call Trafikförsäkringsföreningen a government funded maffia organization in this post. I also called them much worse things when I talked to my wife. And I told my wife about many things that I would like to do to those that work for them. But after consideration, I’ve decided that none of these things are expressions of who I want to be.

You can struggle all you want, telling yourself that “I should be above these emotions”. But that only makes things worse. And when you are in a negative emotional state, it feels as if it’s going to go on forever. We know on some level that this is not the case. But at the moment when we’re caught up in our emotions, we don’t have access to this knowledge in any meaningful way. Instead we find ourselves in a quadruple whammy. Our emotions make us unconscious of what exactly is happening within us, since our attention is focused on resisting the emotions and the situation that caused them. All the while, more or less unconscious negative thoughts keep feeding into our negative emotions, while we cause more resistance by telling ourselves that “I shouldn’t feel this way”. And on top of that, it feels like this is the new normal. Like we are going to feel this way forever.

What I did this time, was that I basically said “f*** it!” I usually eat quite healthy and I seldom drink alcohol. But now I bought both beer and junk food. Then I drank the beers and ate the junk food together with my wife, while watching God Bless America and later when I was alone also Hesher, two movies with loads of anger and negativity in them. 

The next day I didn’t feel all that great when I woke up. But after some yoga and meditation things started to clear up.