Day 331 Question 331:

What is your worst habit?

Do you ever have those days when it feels impossible to screw your head on straight and you see every single one of your flaws and faults?  You feel completely disconnected with the world.  I am having a day of self-pity and what I hate the most about it is that I feel guilty for it.  For some reason I do not feel worthy of having some of the doubtful feelings that I do….I feel like I am a nuisance…I feel like I am simply whining.  I feel like I should know better than to allow my feelings to get the best of me.  Why is it that I can make my feelings (in comparison to others) so invalid?

Some of us have a hard time
believing that we are actually
able to face our own pain.
We have convinced ourselves
that our pain is too deep,

too frightening, something to
avoid at all costs. Yet if we
finally allow ourselves to feel
the depth of that sadness
and gently let it break our
hearts, we may come to feel
a great freedom, a genuine
sense of release and peace,
because we have finally
stopped running away from
ourselves and from the pain
that lives within us.
– Wayne Muller

It hurts to never feel good enough.  It hurts to always feel like second best or second option.  It hurts to be treated like an object instead of a person.  It hurts to put yourself out there, show vulnerability and have someone completely dismiss it.  It hurts to reach out over and over and over to certain people and they never reach back.  It hurts to know that some people will only reach out when it is convenient for them.  It hurts to have so much you want to share but have no one to share it with.

I am in this place of great debate in my head.  This area (geographically) has nothing to offer me and I feel like my time here expired a long time ago but here I still am.  I have never felt like I fit in here…I have never been able to transition.  I am in a lease and that I cannot break and I fear moving somewhere new…somewhere that I don’t know….all by myself.  I don’t want to be far from my parents….my mom is my everything.  I have had the moments…..these take the breath out of my lungs moments…moments that have made tears shed from my eyes.  The moment I think about is the moment my mother is no longer here….and how alone I will feel.  I am unable to even imagine a life without her and there has just been this build-up of different emotions that comes from getting older and having to deal with all that life throws at you.  I try my hardest to be so strong as often as I can but there are some days that I feel knees shaking weak on the inside….today has felt like one of those days.  I have tried to remind myself that what I am feeling is ok and that it will eventually passed but today it has just felt like the weight of the world is on my shoulders and I don’t have any idea what might happen next.  I know this will pass and I know what I need to do but I also needed a moment to vent because I have the worst habit of holding it all inside and when I finally let it out it does more harm than good.  My worst habit is not asking for help when I need it….not reaching out and telling people I need comforting.  I only see this as myself being weak and I have no right to burden others with my problems….I do not want to be one of  those people that constantly whines and complains (because those people turn me off so much).  This poor habit has kept me imbalanced in life and I am trying my hardest to work on it….I guess today just got the best of me.

An Excerpt from Being Zen: Bringing Meditation to Life by Ezra Bayda

Ezra Bayda presents Buddhist practices for dealing with fear, pain, and suffering. Here is an excerpt on peace that revolves around handling anger.

“For the last several years, I have been doing a practice I find highly effective in working with anger. One day a week I devote the entire day to practicing what I call ‘nonmanifestation of negative emotions.’ From the moment I wake up until I go to sleep, I make a conscious effort not to express negative emotions, either externally or internally. This is not just another dictate designed to induce moral behavior. In fact, its effectiveness has nothing to do with that. The reason it’s so effective is that it allows me to see the root of anger itself. Because I’m attuned to not expressing the anger, the moment it begins to arise, awareness is likely to kick in. I can see that point at which I would normally choose to believe my thoughts, fueling the expression of the anger. But I can also choose not to attach to the thought, which denies it solidity. I’m practicing not identifying with the notion of ‘me’ — its wants, its judgments — but rather with a more spacious sense of the moment. This is where I can reside directly in the physical manifestations of the anger, in the ‘what’ of anger itself. Sometimes the anger then quickly dissolves, leaving little residue.”