For people who know me these days it’s probably hard to imagine me as a really angry person…
But I was.
Not all the time, but some of the time.
Not just angry, but once in a while–bordering on rage and on a couple of occasions, it was out of control.
And that wasn’t all that long ago either.
These days, I’m calm, solid, strong, vulnerable, happy, more focused, more connected, more spiritual and more in love with life than ever and I’m not angry at all.
So, what changed?
Wasn’t I still that same person who threw a lawn chair and created a scene with my ex wife after one of our son’s little league baseball games?
Wasn’t I the guy who got explosively angry while in a car full of happy family members while Christmas shopping… all because I thought somebody was trying to tell me how to drive in a way I didn’t like?
And wasn’t I the same guy who threatened to knock a door down so I could get in and “calmly” talk to someone about why he was upset about a situation…
Of course I am still that same guy and of course I still get angry and I still get upset.
Anger is a normal and natural emotion.
But, the change in me is remarkable.
And its all because of one thing…
A new understanding of how our minds work and about how life works.
I now completely understand why I used to get so angry so quickly and how I don’t have to have that as my experience anymore and… If you are someone who gets angry (or has any experience you would rather not have) neither do you.
What would happen is simply this…
I would have a thought that I believed and thought it was real about how I wasn’t going to get my needs met,how I wasn’t going to be happy or how something else was about to happen that I didn’t want to have happen.
Sometimes the thoughts would happen so quickly and my reactions would happen even more quickly that sometimes I wouldn’t even be aware of how I was reacting.
The intensity of my reactions was nothing more or less than the intensity of my thinking that I was believing in the moment.
That’s it.
Nothing more.
Nothing less.
When I started to see that all that was ever going on was that I was reacting to a thought that I was believing.
When I started to see that my thoughts were transient, were always flowing and always shifting and changing and these stories i had created in my head (and was believing) were not anything to be feared or afraid of (because and no thought or emotion is ever permanent) everything changed for me.
This change didn’t happen all at once but over a relatively short period of time I started to see that I was no longer anywhere near as angry as I used to be.
I almost couldn’t get angry anymore because now I was seeing the truth.
The truth that no thought could ever make me angry, upset, irritated or agitated unless I believed it to be true.
Then things got really fun when I started to see how infrequently the things I thought were true (and used to believe) were actually true.
It was like some kind of Bull#$÷+ buzzer would go off in my head all the time.
It got to be almost comical.
I started seeing how much of the time I had made up some story about me, the people in my life, what they wanted and what I wanted and how different they were and what it meant and on and on and on.
Crazy.
Here’s what I’m finding these days…
When people start to wake up to the truth that we are always and only living from our thinking (that we believe) in every moment– everything changes for them just like it did for me.
You stop living out of your stories from the past or the future that aren’t really real.
You live in the present moment with much more ease, grace and flow.
Your relationships get smoother.
There are less fights and arguments.
You feel more loved and connected.
People want to spend more time with you.
In short, life gets easier and your whole world totally changes.
When you are no longer living and reacting from the stories that you’ve made up in your head about how life is (or will be), then a whole field of possibilities begins to open up for you that weren’t there before.
And this, my friend is a good thing.