A month in the Center

I just spent the last month housesitting the Nyingma Center building.

I must say that I found it a good experience, although it was harder than I anticipated.

I think that almost none of the things I planned or anticipated went as I had thought, and that can be hard. Still, on the other hand, it was time well spent looking at how I react to being in such a situation.

The particulars aren’t really interesting, but it’s interesting to see how I react to unexpected situations that keep slipping out of my control. I have to admit that there have been points where I’ve been near to crying with the sheer frustration af not getting a handle on things.

I’m not really a masochist, but I do feel that moving well out of your comfort zone is a good thing. The comfort zone is safe, yes, but I become terribly bored and slouchy when I’m in it. I admit, squirming in discomfort is another thing, but the point where things start to grate and you feel like you are wearing an goodlooking, but illfitting jacket is, for me, interesting, because it points towards questions I haven’t thought of or have avoided.

For instance, I still, even though I know I shouldn’t, have a kind of image of the path I’m going to be travelling in the next coming years. Whenever I fail to meet some goal I want to reach in that imagined path, I tend to sulk, get frustrated and even scared that I’ve somehow missed a step I wasn’t supposed to miss. This month has rubbed my nose in quite a few preconceptions about those dreams and aspirations and also started me wondering if I’d even be happy doing things the way I imagine myself doing them.

There have been moments where I was perfectly content to just do the washing up. So why not enjoy that? Looking after the cat was enjoyable, too. Why shouldn’t that be good enough, even though I am technically in a Buddhist Center where things like meditation or working at bettering yourself seem more important?

Still, I’ll be glad that after this week things will be more structured again. I’m not really good at planning my own time and I will be happy to be able to slip into a structure that’s imposed by work hours and deadlines. That grounds me and I feel happy in it. That’s a good discovery, too.

Also, next month it will be two years ago that I’ve entered the clinic and it will also be the end of my formal therapy. Together with my therapist I’ve decided that, while it’s great to have someone to talk to, I don’t really need the counselling sessions anymore. I have the tools to get through the rough patches that will crop up and can stand on my own two feet now.

Of course, if something goes horribly wrong, I can always go back and ask for help, but I feel I have reached a point that I was hoping to arrive at two years ago. It’s good to make that official, so at the end of August I’m going in for a formal end to that part of it.

I also am going to bring a cake to the current patients in there, or at least to the staff on the 24th of August. I’ve decided I want to keep that date alive as my second birthday, and one that means a hell of a lot more than my physical one. Plus, you can’t go wrong with cake.

Have a very good day, all.

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Tags: comfort zone, Nyingma, preconceptions, unexpected situations

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