14
November 2012
Health Talk: excitement, hope, and attachment by Matthew Hertert, D.C. In spring we talked about emotional upset and some of its mental triggers, such as misinterpretations, projection and blame. We commonly misinterpret something that happens to us, usually early in life, and then carry that through our lives. When something happens that triggers that misunderstanding, we get hurt because our view of reality gets violated. Often times this is followed by projecting our negative emotions on that situation or person and then blaming. This allows us to maintain our cherished misinterpretation by distancing ourselves from it, and we feel justified in our upset by casting blame. The solution is to become aware of the misinterpretation, to become willing to release it, and then to do the inner work to “reprogram” with a more accurate and neutral interpretation. Let me offer a quick hypothetical example: every time my friend Pat is late to our lunch date, I get irritated, hurt and angry. One day this pattern of upset finally caused me so much distress that I decided to do something about it, so I use the process described above to “reverse engineer” my experience and I realize that as a teenager I heard my Mom say that if someone didn’t do what they said they would it meant they were disrespecting me – which really means they don’t like me or care about me. One way to get more peace and freedom
Health Talk in my mind, heart and life is to release this (mis)interpretation and replace it with something like, “When people are late, what it means is that they are late.” This idea is more accurate and frees me from mindreading, tension and stress in relationships. While it may be true that some people who are late don’t like me, it also sometimes means there was traffic, or that I wrote the date down wrong. In the end, if they don’t like me it’s none of my business anyway. The truth is that it can take time to work through this to the point where my new interpretation overruns the decades-old one my consciousness is conditioned to react to. This solution, which has more to do with why we get upset, will have broader impact in our lives because the misinterpretation probably has a lot of manifestations in many life areas. In the short term, there is another key dynamic we can work with which we mentioned above: a stronglyheld belief about how the world should work or how people should treat us gets violated. This relates to expectations and attachment, or how we get upset. Getting excited about something is awesome. Even for those of us who have been hurt or disappointed in the past and may resist excitement, it feels good, brings us joy, enthusiasm and motivation, and is a
beautiful inner compass that tells us we’re aligning with what we want. Hope takes one step further: we start to develop a sense that life will somehow be better–versus just having more of what we want–if this thing we are excited about works out. Subjectively life might feel better, but this isn’t true objectively. The “better-ness” is a matter of interpretation and is therefore a choice we are making inside. Anytime we discover a choice point we gain power. Once we have established this idea inside our mind and heart that there is a “better,” it must mean that we are not better now, meaning there is something wrong, some lack. This sets the stage for attachment, which is a state of feeling so needy for something or someone that we convince ourselves we can’t survive or be happy without the thing. Of course this conviction happens to different degrees inside our mind, but if you’ve ever felt hurt, disappointment, resentment or anger at a person, institution or a higher power, then you were suffering from your own attachment. The process of attachment stems from the grand illusion that happiness comes from outside of us rather than from inside. It is often easier for people who have a spiritual tradition to release attachment and live in excitement. This can be a result of trusting that no matter what happens, you are being taken care of and things will work out for the highest good, as some religions and sects suggest. In eastern traditions
peace often comes from the belief that separateness is an illusion, so desire for “the other” is also an illusion. But a pragmatic approach for both the spiritual and the aspiritual is to acknowledge that in any situation one could conceive - getting to go fishing, or spontaneous remission of cancer - we could find someone in attachment and fear and we could find someone excited, at peace, and unattached to the outcome. Again, this means that our internal choices about what we want and whether to stake our survival or happiness on it are choices. That means we can choose peace. This is just as much of a practice as any other process of shaping our consciousness. We have all been shaped by our families, teachers, religious and ethnic cultures, marketing and individual experiences: getting free of the burden of the influences that limit us is a process, one we must undertake in devotion to ourselves and our happiness. Doesn’t more peace, freedom and joy sound good? Be well. Dr. Matthew practices in Boalsburg, where he lives with his wife and 1.5 kids.
State College Peace Center www.scpeacecenter.org
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“The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975”
7 pm Thursday, November 29 WEBSTER’S BOOKSTORE CAFÉ 133 East Beaver Avenue, State College Swedish Television journalists documented a decade of the Black Power movement and highlighted its key figures and events, more than 35 years before the release of this 2011 film.