I've been learning a lot of new things at work lately. Some of it's been really challenging. It's been easy (and tempting) to get swept up in a lot of "What the #)@#*!! is that" and "I'll never learn this!" and "I just want to go home, watch the Flash and maybe eat some orange sherbet and vanilla ice cream with a spoonful of peanut butter on top of it."
(Hey, if you think that's gross, then you go eat something else and write about it in your blog, okay? Geez!)
Anyhow, I've been talking to friends of mine a lot lately about something I learned from Pema Chodron, in her audio lecture Getting Unstuck. It's the profound power of just staying.
By staying she means not running away frorm our feelings, or pain, or fears, but just calmly being present for them, and moving through them.
Here, she talks about it way better than I can.
So the other day I was in the middle of one of those I-want-to-just-run moments when I consciously chose to stay. Eventually, I worked through my unease, and got my work done, and felt really good about it. It didn't mean that that panicky-wtf-feeling was now somehow enjoyable. It wasn't. But when I turned to stare it in the face, I saw I was spinning myself up, and making it far worse than it was.
Good stuff.