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Crucial Awareness

Reading this could not have been more timely. There is this individual (let's call her Q) that I need to deal with quite routinely in my personal life. She is one of those people no one particularly likes and each person has their own reason. Getting to the level of universal love or revulsion sets a person apart from the masses. Most of us are the mediocre in-between place loved and disliked by a relative minorities. For the most part those who know us can't summon up any strong feelings - they are largely indifferent. If we are lucky more people love us that not. 

But Q is not one of those average people. She is very easy to dislike and promotes more intense feelings than that among those who know her well. I am sadly in that mix. Recently something she did infuriated me to the point that I started to shake with anger just reading an email. It took me a minute to understand the effect she had on me and that prompted a great sense of failure - to give someone that much power over me is something to be shameful about. I tried to summon myself best I could and get on with my day and reading these lines brought some calmness

We must remember that we create our own anger. No one makes it for us. If we move from a particular event directly to our reaction, we are skipping a crucial awareness, a higher perspective on our own reactivity. What is that middle step, that deeper awareness? It is mindfulness about our own beliefs, our attitude, our understanding or lack of understanding about what has really happened.

I had indeed been missing that crucial awareness phase, not taking the time to think why Q was having such a severe reaction on me. Putting some thought to that question, I realized that her actions made me feel vulnerable - in the moment I could feel like my efforts to achieve certain goals were all in vain. In a sense she was able to generate that angry energy from my own insecurities. Where she stands out from the average person who can do just about the same things is the precision of her strikes - she is able to generate pretty strong responses from many people she knows well. That is to her credit and our collective lack of self-awareness. 

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