Inner180

I’m being visited by a family member who is a master at pushing my buttons.  Instead of experiencing the joy of connection, I’ve been going back to the truth exercises over and over.  It went on for two days out of a four day visit, with no relief.

It was so obvious that she is in pain.  And so obvious that I was accepting the invitation to dance an old dance again.  And I couldn’t stop.  (At least that’s the story I told myself.)  And we were having a rotten, miserable time together.

Then I remembered the exercise I wrote about on Day 14—Is our Loved One’s Pain Contagious?  When I initially wrote about it, it was in the context of becoming immune to someone else’s low spirits.  I just discovered that the exercise works with when our loved one is pushing our buttons.

Here’s what I wrote then:  realize that you are bigger than the other person’s emotion—so big that you can hold their emotion without it impacting you.  It can simply pass through you.

I began to imagine that I was literally huge, that I extended ten feet in every direction with compassionate, loving energy.  I visualized this both in and out of her presence.  I almost felt like I was floating, I became so large.

It worked.  Her “stuff” stopped bugging me.  I stopped wanting her to stop, I stopped asking her to stop, I stopped asking her to notice what she was saying and doing.  I was so large, it didn’t impact me. It passed right through me.

It worked like magic.  It stopped.  Our reactivity to each other vanished.  We began to connect again.  Now, we are smiling and laughing and hugging.  It’s downright joyful.