My Blog
Tools and strategies for owning, valuing, and celebrating your life.
An emotional trigger is an emotional response that is out of character from your typical behavior. A trigger is something that sets off a memory or flashback, subconsciously transporting you back in time. When you're triggered, you're no longer responding to the present situation. Instead, you're running old software, unwittingly trying to repair your past.
Most of us want to live happier, healthier and more meaningful lives. In this pursuit, we often look at what we should DO to be happy, and that seems pretty obvious: do more things you like and less things that you don't like. But, we often look for happiness in all the wrong places. We hold on to so many things that cause us a great deal of pain, stress, and suffering — and instead of letting them all go, instead of allowing ourselves to be stress-free and happy — we cling to them. The Buddha called this habit "mistaking suffering for happiness," like a moth flying into the flame. This means that we confuse our temporary sense of relief or pleasure for happiness rather than seeing how it creates long-term suffering.
For everything, there is a season. A brief moment that is dedicated to a specific essence and place in your life.
Contemplative alertness will unveil the properties of this particular season. It will reveal the depth to which a place and time has relevance to not only this moment but to those moments that are waiting just past the horizon for you.
This past weekend, I had the privilege to step fully out of my scattered, highly-scheduled, responsibility of the early-autumn back-to-school scuffle and into the stillness of the woods of the Pacific Northwest.
A pilgrimage of respite.
