Today Saturday

22/11/08  Feeling relaxed.

Have been doing a lot of releasing recently. I have read  chapter five  Your Key to Serenity in the Sedona Method book. It starts off by mentioning the Serenity prayer.

God grant me the Serenity

To Accept the things I cannot change

Courage to change the things I can

And Wisdom to know the difference.

We use this a lot in AA and I have used it many times when the going gets rough,even though I don’t believe in the conventional form of ‘God’.The second line says it all…. Accept the things I cannot change. The way to do that is to release wanting to change. When I let the ‘wanting to change’ go I am left with a degree of acceptance of what is. If I observe what is, there is  further acceptance.

A releasing question can be ‘ Can I let go wanting to change xyz?’

 To quote from page 128 ‘ When we are focussed on wanting to change a problem, our awareness of the problem causes it to persist. We hold the issue in mind in order to change or resist it’

 By releasing we can either carry out the action or not,we can then see our choices clearly. I remember many years ago when I did some bodybuilding. There were two very successful bodybuilders at our gym. One was very focussed, never spoke while he was training. The other bodybuilder who chatted with everyone, took part in the banter, but did his set of exercise when he did his set of exercises did every bit as well !

I know that over the years I have worn myself out trying to be focussed on various things, only to fail gloriously.

Today my DVD player on this laptop has been playing up. I have let go of trying to fix it,either physically or with magical thinking! I rang the technical guys at PC World and they will sort it next week.A few months ago I would have perhaps broken the thing further by having the obsession to fix it and I would have made mistakes, knowing I was making the mistakes but thinking that somehow the player would fix.This is difficult to explain. I would have persisted in perhaps dangerous attempts to rectify the problem because the problem would have to be fixed NOW.

 So letting go of wanting to change is an excellent method of stopping the internal war. I even noticed today at the discussion group at AA that I didn’t HAVE to give an input. I was happy just to listen.