Awakening with Mary O’Malley
The other day I had a few moments of pure unconsciousness. There are a number of reasons why I would like to tell how this came about, but I get ahead of myself. Let us go to the scene of this visitation from the fear and anger that are a huge part of all of our storytellers – the voice in our heads that is talking all day long!
At 8:28 AM I slipped into the pool at my gym for my half hour swim. There was a water aerobics class that began at 9:00, which left just enough time for me to complete my swim. At around 8:55 a number of people had jumped into the first lane and were chatting before the class. I was in the second lane and a man was in the third. At 8:56 I started my last lap which takes a little over a minute. After I had made the final turn, just a few strokes before I ran into her, I noticed a woman who had come under the floating lane barriers and was standing right in the middle of my lane. These lanes are big enough for two people to do laps, so she could easily have stood at the side of the lane to let me pass. But because she was in the middle, there was barely enough room to squeeze by her, and as I did, she hit me with her arm.
Can you imagine what my storyteller was doing? It was affronted. Anger came roaring through me, accompanied with the feeling of being right and making her wrong! The stories in my head were saying: “The class starts at 9:00! This is mylane until 9:00. How dare she!” As I got into the shower, awareness kicked in and saw what the storyteller was doing. Rather than falling into it or being ashamed of it, I asked this angry part of the storyteller to tell me about what it was experiencing. The story calmed down as I listened, but arose again two more times while I was in the shower. Each time I listened to it, it calmed down a bit more and my heart opened up again.
I could see that this is how wars are started, and I didn’t want to allow that level of unconsciousness to take me over! I could also recognize that many times in my life I had played the role of the woman in my lane and felt great compassion for that part of me. And finally my heart opened to the woman. I don’t know what caused her to act as she did, but I didn’t have to put her out of my heart!
There are 3 reason why I wanted to share this with you: