What Can I Do?

What can I do when life gets in the way? It happened the other day. I was hacked and I didn’t know how badly. Had they breeched my computer? Could they get into my bank accounts? And then my phone wasn’t making or receiving calls. I’m so not good at emergencies like this. I don’t know what to do or where to start. My anxiety goes right to my solar plexus, and I freeze up. So, I turn to my husband, Jack. He always knows, at least where to start. But where is my Work at times like this? It seems feeble and far away.

I drove over to Claymont to tell Jack my phone wasn’t working. Waiting for him to come out of a meeting, I met my girlfriend by the garden. She has a long history of inner work too, and reminded me that after all, we are human beings. That tightness in my gut? The tensions in my jaw and neck? That’s nature, that’s what our bodies are wired to do when attacked. Fight or flight.

All I Could Do

I bemoaned the fact that I was reactive, that all I could do was “try” to work (seemingly without success). She told me that was work. She’s right. We are human, we have reactions, and we can work. By trying, I was at least aware of how my state affected me. If not the pinnacle of calm presence and objectivity, I was somewhere between being lost in anxiety and being detached.

So, I put more attention on breathing. At the same time noting tensions that were still there. But yeah, that’s how I am. Throughout the day I became more calm. Even though I spent hours at the bank and Jack had to take my phone to get a new sim. And we both had unrelated “to do” lists calling us. But I paid attention to the sense that we were attending to what needed to be done. Less and less attention to feeling anxious and threatened.

 Life is the Way

More often now, I get the sense that my inner work is slowly becoming systemic. It seems to be there, even when I fret that it isn’t. Like working with sensation, where once the effort was all about having it. Later, one realizes that sensation has always been there, the “work” is to become aware that it is. So even when “life gets in the way,” all one needs is to do is to try to work, as best one can, and let go of the rest.