Making Peace with the Troublemakers

Have you ever felt this way?

"I was feeling all this oneness and peace and then you had to go and ruin it all!"

Have you ever felt this way?

I never have. Just kidding, it happens more than I care to admit.

It's all well and good when I am in my happy place, all spiritual and centered and inspired, reading from my "Essential Ernest Holmes" preparing for class. It's all happy happy happy when I am setting my iPhone's "Insight Timer" to a prescribed amount of time to meditate and everyone knows to "leave Mommy alone."

But my path is not to meditate all day nor is it to read wisdom literature in a secluded room. At some point the rubber has to meet the road and I am called to apply these lessons when I am not in that quiet, inspired, peaceful place.

So today in the "Joyous Living Journal" we are gifted with a lovely thought that helped me so I will pass it along. "Learn to disagree with ideas, not people."

When we find people "disagreeable" or when they appear to be the catalyst to a strong negative reaction it's not them, it's an idea. What is the idea they are triggering? Is it judgement, fear, anger? If we can honestly identify the idea this person triggers we can heal it.

We can read all the theory we want but until we internalize the truth till it cannot be shaken we still have work to do. These "troublemakers" as Pema Chodron calls them, point us to our work. Until we are no longer "hookable" by this person, who is just an idea carrier, we still have healing to do.

Where are you hookable? Come join me in some heightened neurosis.