Practice Makes Perfect (I Hope)
I’ve learned some new ‘exercises’ in my positive intentions class and am diligently attempting them daily. Some are easier than others and I find that there are two that consistently find me struggling to focus and complete them.
The first is called “Shower.” In this exercise, I am supposed to find a quiet moment and visualize myself in my ideal shower, covered with a grey, sooty mud. This muck represents all of the negative energy I’ve picked up during the day, from witnessing a stranger’s struggle to helping the girls settle a fight to hearing bad news from a friend. None of this ‘mud’ is mine and I simply need to wash it away and restore the golden glow to myself, acknowledging that my love and light sent out to anyone and everyone who is struggling is the best I can do.
I am fully in favor of this exercise, but when I find myself standing in my shower (a wooden affair in the middle of a gorgeous green pasture with a rain-shower head and a view of the hillside) under the spray, my mind immediately begins to catalog all of the things I’m washing away. Within seconds, I’m bogged down in the minutiae of the negative energy and it stubbornly refuses to rinse off of me.
At the suggestion of a friend, I tried a different approach. She calls it the “cheesecloth.” I simply run an enormous piece of cheesecloth up through my body, catching all of the negative particles and packaging them up in a tidy bundle which I then discard. I can even tie the bundle at the top with a gold ribbon of love. For some reason, this is much more effective for me, not to mention faster, and when I’m done, I feel literally lighter. The cheesecloth is full of little black, sticky bits and I am free.
The other exercise is called “Eject and Replace.” Essentially, it gives you the opportunity to observe your reactions throughout the day and when you have one you don’t particularly like (snapping off some sarcastic comment to the girls when I’m rushed and annoyed), you simply tug on your earlobe. This has the effect of ‘flushing’ the nasty thought out of your mind and leaves a space for you to replace it with love and light. My problem is that my mouth is faster than my mind and once those words are out, it’s too late to flush them. I have discovered that these negative thoughts come much more often when I am doing seventeen things at once and I resort to habitual responses. Ultimately, I suppose that this is the entire point of the positive intentions class – to slow down and be aware of what I am saying and doing and INTENDING instead of just reacting.
Guess it’s a good thing we meet again tomorrow.
Good luck with that–no sarcasm intended.
Seems like you hit the nail on the head with your last sentence. And it seems like you're well on the way with this new awareness and intention. As Carrie would say, "Slowly, slowly."