There aren’t a lot of things I know for sure in this life, but one thing I do know without a doubt is that my wife is the most important thing to me. Quite honestly, I think I’m the luckiest man alive because in my eyes, there is truly no one out there like my wife. I often say, “I don’t know what I did in this life or in a past life, but I’m glad as hell I did it because if it led me to her!” As you guys can probably tell I am crazy in love with my wife and I consider her to be my best friend.
So with that, let me tell you a slightly personal story about a brief moment of frustration I had with my wife about 45 minutes ago….
Don’t worry kids, no one raised their voices and the incident certainly wouldn’t qualify as an argument. Believe me, I’m not stupid enough to complain about my beautiful wife to a bunch of people online….
(I’m not a big fan of sleeping on the couch plus she’s the one who proofreads these blogs for me!)
Nope! Instead, this is a story about me getting in my own way—as I (men) usually do!
Here’s the story:
As you guys know my wife and I have recently decided to move to Vancouver, British Columbia and as I’m sure you can imagine, there’s a lot of work to be done before we pack up and start apartment hunting later this month...
So, today I stayed home and worked on getting our house ready to rent by knocking out a few things like de-winterizing our front and back yards and cleaning the inside of the house.
My wife got home around 4:30pm and that was coincidently right when I had finished up for the day and decided to sit down and take a break. When she walked through the garage door I could sense (or so I thought I sensed) that she had a busy day at work. My wife works her as* off so it’s understandable that she is tired when she gets home.
Being that I had gotten a lot of work done I was stoked to show my wife everything I had accomplished during my busy day. I asked her to follow me around like a puppy as I showed her all the work I had done around the house.
After I was done giving her what I can only imagine was a mind numbingly dull tour of my accomplishments for the day, I expected her to be excited.
For some reason, the way my wife responded didn’t work for me. I guess she wasn’t excited enough and that was all it took for me to get defensive.
Immediately, I started telling myself stories like, “She should be more grateful for what I’ve done” and “She doesn’t even care that I did all this to get our house ready for renters.”
As I repeated these stories in my mind., my body started to tense up and even get warm. I noticed that my heart started beating faster and my face started to feel flushed. I was in full on “Oh, it’s like that?” mode…
Then all of the sudden, it hit me!!!
“DUDE!!! What are you doing?” I thought to myself...
I knew in that moment that I was starting to believe these made up stories that in reality we’re probably about as far as you can get from the truth. I then tried to approach the feeling of frustration in my body with a sense of curiosity.
Within about ten seconds both the feeling of tension and the silly stories had completely stopped. My defensive posture dropped, and I noticed a change in my wife almost simultaneously.
It seemed that by creating space and objectivity around the thoughts and feelings, I was able to signal to her that I was no longer preparing to “battle” so to speak.
My wife immediately picked up on the queue and the pending argument/whine-fest was thankfully avoided.
To me, this little incident only serves as further proof that my meditation practice is working!
Trust me, if it can help a dummy like me it can help anyone!
The trick is seeing our minds with clarity, curiosity and space and the only way I know that can truly deliver on these objectives is mediation.
So, if you’re looking to find a better way to relate to your loved ones or even your friends and co-works, I seriously encourage you to start a mediation practice. If you have one already, GREAT! Stick with it because even if you don’t see the changes in yourself, I’m sure the people around you do.
Thank you as always for reading! Let us know if you have any stories of “proof” that your mediation practice is working!
Until next time,
Many many blessings!
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