{"id":64,"date":"2008-09-30T08:27:37","date_gmt":"2008-09-30T16:27:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenjones.bravoecho.net\/?p=64"},"modified":"2008-09-30T08:27:37","modified_gmt":"2008-09-30T16:27:37","slug":"another-great-practice-opportunity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenjones.bravoecho.net\/?p=64","title":{"rendered":"Another great practice opportunity"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>My good friend is staying at my house for a couple days. Early this morning, we were supposed to go meet another friend for coffee. But I was no longer in the mood, so I went into his room, where he was sort of still asleep, and said, “I don’t want to go get coffee this morning.”<\/p>\n

He started to sit up and stretch and he made a really loud noise. I said, “Shhhh!” just sort of automatically.<\/p>\n

He said, “You are so weird.”<\/p>\n

I said, “What?”<\/p>\n

He said, “You and your husband are so weird. I talked to your next door neighbor and she said she wished you would make more noise so they could feel more comfortable making noise.”<\/p>\n

I was speechless. At first, it hurt really bad. My best friend calling me weird! I had no idea!<\/p>\n

Even just remembering this makes my arms and shoulders feel all heavy.<\/p>\n

I left the room and went and sat on my bed. I watched the volcanic eruption: anger, blaming, justifying, striking back, resentment. I felt myself armoring up with tension.<\/p>\n

So I started with blaming, and as I became aware of it, I cut it. And then justifying. Cut. And then anger. Cut.<\/p>\n

Then there was a little analyzing, which was nice. I find it a refuge. That hurt lead immediately to fear: I had no control. I thought I knew how my friend felt about me, but he thought I was weird. And then the anger.<\/p>\n

Oh, and the disconnection. That’s what I wanted more than anything–to just disconnect. I\u00c2\u00a0wanted to tell him to get the f* out of my house and leave me alone. Oh, it went on and on. But every once in a while, I could cut it, I could recognize that I was doing it.<\/p>\n

Which doesn’t mean I didn’t take some lovely time out for revenge fantasies.<\/p>\n

And so I am incredibly grateful to my practice. Because I didn’t say or do any of those things. I noticed. And I recognized that it was just me.<\/p>\n

And I got on my bike and went for a ride, and even in the midst of all my turmoil, it was a beautiful morning in the wine country, and the angry moments shrunk down. And by the time I got back home with the groceries, I could concentrate on trying to stay connected. Even as my friend hovered around me, obviously sorry for what he’d said, and scared that I would be mad.<\/p>\n

But the big deal for me is that I felt the hurt and fear first. For me, anger follows so quickly on those feelings that I never get to experience that hurt. It wasn’t pleasant, but it was real.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My good friend is staying at my house for a couple days. Early this morning, we were supposed to go meet another friend for coffee. But I was no longer in the mood, so I went into his room, where he was sort of still asleep, and said, “I don’t want to go get coffee […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenjones.bravoecho.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenjones.bravoecho.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenjones.bravoecho.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenjones.bravoecho.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenjones.bravoecho.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=64"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/zenjones.bravoecho.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenjones.bravoecho.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=64"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenjones.bravoecho.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=64"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenjones.bravoecho.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=64"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}