During lunch in the middle of January, I told her my life has never been better. Every important aspect of it – personal, professional, developmental, health, well-being – feels solid. Grounded. Built on firm foundations. The next day my back went. This has happened often enough that I am prone to using a hushed whisper when declaring how well things are going. This time I thought I’d be okay. Or maybe I didn’t think at all. In any case, it was a slow recovery over the next eight days before things suddenly got even worse.
Bending down to pick something up off the floor, my back went into the kind of spasm I have had too many times before. It floored me. Or rather, I allowed myself to fall to the floor in order to relieve my lower back of any need to wrap the muscles any more tightly around my spine. The muscles relaxed but the mind moved up a gear. In a few hours two friends would be arriving from England for the weekend. I needed to be on my feet. Yet here I lay, jousting with my mind as it offered the repeated suggestion that I might by stuck on the floor for days.
As it turned out I was able to function pretty well. Nonetheless, it has left me wondering about what is happening, especially given my goal for this year: to let go and be empty. The conclusions I have drawn thus far relate to Script (TA) and ego. My script always wants to reassert itself when things are going well, and my ego got carried away with itself for the same reason.
Karaj often talked about our script reinforcing itself if we are not careful. There is a need for vigilance, especially when things are going well (see, Just When We Think We’ve Made It), which makes it easy to conclude that one can never relax. But I know from my experience with the words, ‘don’t get cocky‘, that an instruction or an intention eventually becomes a natural part of behaviour, meaning that you can relax because it is already being taken care of. (Just don’t get cocky about it!)
The ego part of my conclusion speaks clearly to the need to drop our attachment to identity in order to progress further. Very early on in life we become unbelievably attached to our sense of who we think we are. Not only is it difficult to break that attachment, it feels impossible even to imagine that an alternative is either plausible or beneficial. In this case, I and my ego wanted my friends to see all the things I had listed to her a week before. I wanted them to see how well my life is going.
In the next post, I shall explore why what happened was almost bound to happen; why it’s okay that it happened; and why, as Karaj always used to reassure us, it is an indication that I am doing well.
Related posts: Analysis & Script | Undermined By My Own Script | Scripted Pain | Keep An Eye On Your Script | The Ingenuity of Script | The Power of Script |