The Best Use of Will Power (written 10/12/07)

Hello fellow travelers. This week's NEWS is about Dental Mishaps, Wanting to Curl Up Into A Ball, The Best Use of Will Power, and Getting Things Moving Again.

First off, let me give you some background on where I have unwittingly traveled to recently.

Several weeks ago, I had a dental mishap that involved my top teeth and my bottom front tooth colliding and scraping (while eating a bagel) that resulted in roughening up the edge of my bottom tooth. It was a traumatic moment for me in which I keenly registered the impact of this misalignment. I called the dentist fairly soon thereafter. He filed that spot down a bit and warned me to be careful. He then proceeded to tell me the story of another careless person who had bitten down on a fork and broke their tooth. I found his lack of compassion for the accident victim/perpetrator unsettling.

Then, the other day, the same thing happened again with the same tooth (I believe). This stirred up a low-level hysteria characterized by feeling out of control and vulnerable . Suddenly, I felt unable to trust myself in regards to normal, low-risk activities like eating. Round two of spastic biting occurred on a Friday. My dentist doesn't work on Fridays. I decided to wait until Monday. Fast-forward over a weekend of chewing carefully. My concern grew bigger and bigger, not so much over the particular tooth, but over what I feared might be a developing trend. Monday arrived along with a strong case of Not Wanting To Call.

There were other things I wanted to do Monday, also. I wanted to write but felt stuck. I wanted to order some promotional things for VIOLET BING but felt stymied in my attempts. After some time of feeling lost and tormented, thinking things that made me feel bad , I lay down on the loveseat and threw up the surrender flag. I wanted to take action, but the troubled state within was too great. But I didn't lie there thinking those thoughts; I surrendered those thoughts and focused in my chest, and let a kind of restful, soothing weight rest there. I gave over to that. I had no hope, at that point, that doing this would help me in the least, but I didn't know what else to do. About five or ten minutes went by and suddenly, I found myself jumping up with new energy. I went to the bathroom and fixed my hair; I went to the phone and now felt okay about calling the dentist; I went to the computer and started working on the things on my list. As it turned out, when I got through to the dentist, there was only one appointment available that week and that was only because someone had recently canceled. If I had called in the morning as I'd planned - that appointment wouldn't have existed.

All of a sudden, things were moving again and I really couldn't say why. Where did that bad feeling go? It had been so heavy, so oppressive, so stifling.

The same thing happened the other night, around dinner time. I was feeling miserable. And I felt awful being around Bill and the kids as I knew I was like a contagion - bound to do more harm than good, yet I couldn't seem to shake it. I wrote in my journal but found no relief. After considering retreating to my room during dinner and sparing us all further tension, I decided to lie down for a few minutes and see how that went. I did my best to focus in my chest/heart area again, and when Bill called me to dinner, I could tell "it" had lifted.

What happened? Ten minutes before, I had been consumed by negative feeling ; I was in distress just being seen. Now, I felt free again, to talk and be and that THING was gone. In deciding to leave those painful thoughts , rather than trying to use THEM to get me out of the place they'd put me in, something else was allowed to happen, something that sets things right and allows us to leave the jail we've temporarily constructed for ourselves.

Stuck is always - stuck thinking the wrong thought.
The best use of my Will Power is to use my will to Let Go of my current troubling thoughts. It's an act of Trust. When I've made myself Wrong or Powerless, I'm in a War. And the casualty of the war is always ME. To get things moving again means, to allow myself to move off of what hurts. This takes practice.

Much Love to You All.
All is Well,
Jen