subject: What to Do When Life Drives You Up the Wall - The Little Prince Series [print this page] What to Do When Life Drives You Up the Wall - The Little Prince Series
Daily Insight from the Story ofThe Little Prince
For many years i knew there were things about my life that desperately needed to change.
I read self-help books, took courses, listened to and watched talks, and went on retreats, all of which were geared to changing my beliefs about myself and my patterns of thought.
I got some results, but never the fundamental change I sought.
It wasn't until I learned that our beliefs, behaviors, and thoughts are grounded in an emotional charge of which we are often unaware that my life began to truly change.
I didn't end up improving the quality of my thoughts, however. I simply stopped thinking and becameaware. And it happened without trying to make it happen. In fact all the effort I had put into trying to change my thoughts proved to be pretty useless in the end.
The emotional charge we carry within us is the key to all of our behavior and the reason we hold the beliefs we do and think the thoughts we think. Once integrate this charge and everything is different.
Someone asked me recently how we know when an emotional charge has been integrated, as opposed to simply having moved on from a situation in our life that tended to trigger us emotionally.
For instance if you work with someone who gets your goat, and they leave your place of employment, you aren't triggered by that person any longer. Or if you are in a romantic relationship with someone who constantly drives you up the wall, and you divorce, there's no one to aggravate you any longer. How do you know whether you are no longer emotionally reactive simply because your circumstances have changed?
Life is a wise teacher. The universal Presence that pervades the universe, and in which we all participate, is able to orchestrate situations that bring to our attention precisely those things that need to change in our life.
If we have simply moved on from a situation that triggers us emotionally without integrating the emotional charge, a new situation will in due course arise that once again invites us to enter into the process of facing up to our reactivity and integrating the charge that drives it.
We cancount on life to do this for us.
This is why situations keep reappearing in our life that recapitulate situations we have been through before. Until we self-confront,sitting with the emotional pain we are feeling, breathing through it as it slowly integrates, the pattern will keep on repeating itself.
In the fifth chapter of the story of the Little Prince, which I hope you are following in your own copy, we are introduced to a plant that grows on the Little Prince's planet called a baobab. It's actually a tree that grows in Africa; but if you transplant the seeds to a tiny asteroid like that on which the Little Prince lives, it has a devastating effect.
The Little Prince has asked for a sheep and the pilot has provided him with one. Why does he want a sheep? Because a sheep will constantly and consistently eat baobab shoots whenever they sprout on his little planet.
We're going to find, as this story progresses, that the Little Prince left his planet and ended up on Earth because he decided he couldn't take a certain situation any longer and felt he simply had to move on.
But the Little Prince didn't integrate the emotional charge this situation triggered in him before moving on.
Now, long gone from his home, he is seeing things differently. He is realizing the importance of consistency in our attention to those "bad seeds" that arise, which symbolize displays of our emotional charge.
Anger, jealousy, pettiness, a critical attitude, impatience, intolerance, withholding, gossiping, sulking, pouting: all of these and so many more reactive emotions arise from ourunintegrated emotional charge.
The sheep will calmly, daily, consistently eat up the sprouting baobabs as they arisea picture of what we have to do the moment we begin to experience some form of manifestation of our emotional charge.
Here's the beautiful thing this chapter teaches us about dealing with our emotional charge: We don't have to agonize over it, become anxious about it, dread it, or fight it.
All we need is the calm, peaceful consistency of the sheep, so that each time something begins to arise, we take a few minutes to sit with it, feel it, and breathe gently through it so that it has an opportunity to become integrated.
And then the energy that was bottled up in this charge, which allowed us to be so easily triggered emotionally by people and circumstances, becomes freed up and available to invest in living our life creatively.
True to life's wisdom as our teacher, the Little Prince has found himself in another situationthe presence of the pilotthat presents him with an opportunity to become integrated emotionally, so that he can in due course return to his planet a changed person.
