The Urgent Need to Study our Irritations!
Our Irritations are pointers to the imbalances in our lives.
So, How do you spend your days? Do you move from one irritation to another to another all through the day and then tired of all the irritations the day has to offer to settle down in a corner and consume media mindlessly until you feel even worse. If this is not your story you may skip the story and save yourself some pain and irritation.
I get triggered and irritated and I do not know how to get out of it. I stay there for ages until I find a new excuse to be irritated and then shift my base there for a while and this is how I spend my day. Modern life offers no respite — be it the morning news or the Instagram posts anything and everything has the power to trigger me.
It is as if I have distributed remote controls to my life freely to everyone I know and do not know, even to the weather gods I guess so that they can decide how I feel each passing moment. I feel helpless, tired, frustrated and irritated not being able to change anything. Day after day, month after month, year after year — nothing seems to change.
Then, I paid attention! I paid attention to how I get irritated? why I get irritated? and when I get irritated? I realized I am an Expectation machine.
I Expect. I expect something out of every single moment of my life. I want my breakfast to be in a particular way, I want my meetings to happen in a particular way, I want my weather to be in sync with my mood and even the T.V. Series I am watching needs to align with my expectations.
Bodhidharma says “ Do not Seek. To Seek is to Suffer”.
As a child, we are not trained on how to deal with disappointments. We are told not to cry and create a scene and learn to “DEAL WITH IT”.
If you are an adult who has a kid, just pause for a moment and consider what do you do when you see your kid crying or dealing with an irritation? Do you sit with them, listen, understand, counsel, coach or do you turn on the T.V. and play their favourite movie, cartoon, video of their choice and distract them?
We have been brought up in such a way that “Distraction” is the default response to an uncomfortable reality. We are generally comfortable being uncomfortable physically — we carry on with our days with or headaches or stomach upsets or mild flu without much fuss. However, when it comes to mental discomforts and irritations we were never taught to acknowledge, accept and sit with the discomfort and hence we are uncomfortable being uncomfortable.
Each time, you feel irritated — it is a sign of a mental allergy. An allergy you never paid attention to and you are mostly unaware. When you suffer from a physical allergy — you respond differently :
- You acknowledge and accept the existence of the allergy. [ Eg — Dandruff, Sensitive Teeth, Dust Allergy]
- Do something/Change something to negate the effects of the allergy [ Eg — You use anti-dandruff shampoo and your life returns to normal]
- You don’t make a big fuss of the situation and life moves on with minimal agitation.
Now, compare your physical allergy to your mental Allergies. Forget about working on our allergy — we live in denial of the allergy and do nothing to alleviate the pain/suffering and continue to live our lives as victims of fate and circumstances.
Our irritations are pointers to our mental imbalances in life. When and how do we lose our balance because something does not morally, ethically, comfortably aligns to our preferences.
To deal with mental allergies we need to do the hard uncomfortable work as follows:
- Acknowledging and accepting the presence of an imbalance.
- Searching for the root value/moral/belief behind the discomfort/imbalance.
- Studying our preferences — understanding the bias/reason for a particular preference.
- Aligning the value/belief and preference to an altered new threshold to ensure the cessation of suffering due to the allergy.
There is absolutely no easy way to deal with our mental allergies other than paying attention — compassionate attention to our irritations, understand the beliefs and the rationale behind the choice of belief and finally understanding the need for preferred behaviour/outcome and finding an alternate acceptable preferred outcome to bring back balance into our lives.
