7:34 AM
Ovidia
from Comfort Queen
I believe we can get to a place where we can let go of anger, fear and other negative emotions, where we are more like the Tibetan monk Matthieu Ricard writes about in Happiness then say, OJ. Simpson. The monk spent twenty-five years in Chinese labor camps where he was brought to the brink of death many times. Now free, he visited the Dalai Lama who was deeply moved by his serenity. He asked if the monk had ever been afraid during his long imprisonment and the monk answered, “I was often afraid of hating my torturer, for in doing so I would have destroyed myself.”
Gulp.
When I think about where I am far too often and where that monk is, I feel pretty friggin humble. What I do is whine too much. “Why is this happening to me?” flits through my mind far too often. I think it’s only me who has gas before her first improv class, a mouse who apparently climbed inside her fridge motor and did not live to tell the tale (oh the puns are coming now) and who wonders five times an hour what she’s doing with her life. This trait of mine is getting some love and relief by using this phrase from Radiant Mind by Peter Fenner: “I suffer, yes, but this doesn’t mean that anything is fundamentally wrong.”
When we think we are the only ones or that we are being picked on or why me, oh my gosh, we make it so much worse.
I’ll fart my way through improv tonight and maybe make a joke out of it.
