Over the years, I have brought Awareness Practice to the content of my work life many times.  Most recently, I was working with a relationship at work where I was triggered consistently to feel like the wrong person who was bad and could not do anything right.  I was identified as believing that someone else’s opinion of me or judgment of me is actually who I am.  Criticism was verbalized from the other person at times.  Conditioning really hooked onto this criticism to grab my attention and had me believing I was not able to meet the standards.  I believed that I was not good enough and was a bad person.  I felt stuck and depressed.

I started recording twice a day to just let myself say whatever I wanted to say about feeling bad and being stuck.  Then I would listen to it with compassion and attention.  I would then put the recorder in the left hand for the mentor to offer wisdom, love and compassion, and I would listen to this recording.  The main thing I noticed was that I immediately felt better with the first recording of just letting myself say what I wanted to say from the person who felt bad.  If she was able to talk, then the suffering lessened and I felt less bad and less stuck.  As I continued doing this each day, the feeling bad dissipated and I felt happier and freer.  I began to look forward to expressing the feelings of the so-called “bad” person and being able to say whatever I wanted to say.  Some recordings were cursing and angry, some were sad and depressed, some were happy and energetic.  I was able to let myself have feelings and express them in this identity, the one receiving the abuse, with awareness as my companion. 

Conditioning tries to tell me that feelings are not okay and are so important that I have to act on them immediately.  I am a sentient being and feelings and emotions are running through this form all the time.  They only want love, acceptance and, apparently, to be heard.  Feeling bad is not a feeling, it's conditioning telling me stories.  The emotions became beautiful and acceptable, and I loved the person having them as I recorded and listened to her.

Gasshō.

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