When frustration comes…laugh
January 9, 2010 by Ed Conley
Filed under The Practice of Being Happy
The Practice of Being Happy: #15. When frustrations come, little one or big ones, and you have created a space between you and circumstances as they manifest, you are free from the grip of frustration…and you naturally will laugh. One takes joy, not in the frustration, but in one’s experienced freedom from that frustration.
You can begin this practice by noticing the next frustration. Perhaps you got the vacuum cord tangled and pulled over a lamp. Noticing this with bare attention expands your field of awareness to include both the tangling cord, the crashing lamp, and your mind’s reaction. You are not being attacked by the lamp if you notice your mind recoiling from the disaster unfolding. Notice what you fear..your wife or husband’s “I told you so.” or your own sense of being a klutz. “I screw up everything.” Or maybe this is not the case. But just watch the exterior and the interior action as one event.
You are not the lamp hitting the floor, you are not the cause of the lamp breaking, and you are not the mind reacting to this event. YOU are watching it, you are noticing it…you are the silent awareness of the body/mind event. It’s like a pond watching the ripples play on its surface. You watch the event, the subjective and the objective play upon the surface of awareness…and that awareness is YOU.
This is best practiced with simple frustrations at home, and then with that foundation of space being created, you can begin to find space in your greater frustrations, like the boss yelling at you or some friend hurting you. No matter what the pain, what the disaster…when there is enough space between you, the event cannot affect you.
The ripples—no matter how big a wave they become—can never disturb the pond or your basic peace. The experience of the pond is…joy. And the experience of the waves is life….you can have both. But without the background of the pond, your life experience will always be ultimately dissatisfaction. Ripples that don’t know they are also the pond have nothing but the fear that they won’t last.
