Dealing with myself

The biggest barrier to me living in a civilisation as a true human being is not government, banks, bosses, colleagues, customers, parents, friends, events, fate, luck, wealth, housing, pets, other people or aliens.

The biggest barrier, generally is me and more specifically my 'anger' response.

I was recently asked to solve a problem. I like solving problems. So far, so good. I became 'angry' or 'annoyed' when I could not locate a document. I then chose to 'invest' one hour of my time looking for a document that I wanted to see. My 'anger' was completely useless. My 'anger' didn't help find the document. My 'anger' blinded me to the fact that I didn't actually need to see the document. My 'anger' wasted one hour of my time and I was still agitated hours later.

I am not going to blame 'society' for conditioning this bizarre behaviour into me. Or my parents, who really mastered the art of being angry years ago. No, the blame lies entirely with me.

I must have been angry tens of thousands of times in my life. Not once realising, until recently, that this behaviour costs me time, money and my happiness.

To break this social conditioning simply requires me to decide to break this conditioning. There are two stages.

1. Accept that becoming angry is something you no longer wish to do
2. Notice when you have become angry

So, I spent two hours being angry and it took another two hours to calm down.
Perhaps, if I had noticed I was angry after just thirty seconds, I could have calmed down in another thirty seconds.

So, what made me angry? What wasted four hours of my life?
I EXPECTED to find a document within one minute of looking for it and I didn't.

Like I said, I really am the biggest obstacle to living in a civilisation as a human being.

Society installs within us the belief that being angry is something that is caused by other people. This is a lie. Being angry is a choice we make ourselves for ourselves. We then justify our anger by blaming whatever we like, except ourselves.

Society truly is bizarre and so are the members of society it creates.

Why not be something better?

I have written a very short book on becoming better, it is available now. It will be available for free download on February 28th 2017

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mindfulness-Self-Trilogy-Book-ebook/dp/B06VXG8F3T/ref=sr_1_2?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1487491626&sr=1-2&keywords=Mindfulness+of+self