Would You Like Fries With That?

Okay, so I was all happy-happy high on life when I wrote that last post. I've said that I won't be afraid to be honest when I write now. But I've got a confession to make. I was afraid to publish that feel-good post. Afraid that by declaring my happiness, the universe would surely strike me down with immediate and epic misery.

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So, on Friday, I had a crappy day at work. I had to do a software upgrade which requires all employees be out of the system for a period of time. I will spare you all the boring details but absolutely nothing about it went as planned and what was supposed to be a 20 minute process took me 6 1/2 hours. During which time, everyone was "shooting the messenger" (me) and basically not following my instructions which caused extra delays. I had a personal errand I needed to run during the day to prepare for weekend plans and I was not able to do that. I was grumpy. And I was struggling with keeping it all in perspective. And, I can admit, I was being a martyr about it. I could not let it go. I allowed it to ruin my night.

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I went to therapy on Saturday. First time in a month. I was telling my T all about how good I'm doing and how happy I'm feeling. I was telling her about my weight loss and how I have all this energy and blah blah. And then I talked about Friday and my crappy day. And I talked about the father & family thoughts that were plaguing me earlier in the month. She goes "Look, you just went out and binged on emotional fast food!" She pointed out what talking about the negative did to my mood, energy and aura.

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This is what Eckhart Tolle refers to as "the pain body." It is something that needs to be fed. I made a statement in my last post that I have not always believed that I have the strength to heal emotionally but that I'm going to choose to believe it. With this choice, I need to also choose not to feed the pain body. And I also need to roll with the fact that I'm going to have bad days, disappointments, things that don't go as planned. But they need not rock my world. I can still choose my positive energy. This is somewhat unfamiliar territory and the pain body wants to go back to the accustomed misery. But I'm so done with that.

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So here is my work in this phase. Finding balance. Not allowing my pain body to demand fodder. Not allowing a bad day to make me believe I was falsely happy before. Not to allow fear of happiness to stop me from moving ahead. Susan, my T, says FEAR = False Evidence Appearing Real. My fears are that I can't heal, I can't be strong enough, I don't deserve happiness and that any happiness I do muster up is a temporary illusion. Those beliefs are indeed false and they serve me no more.