What did I just tell myself?

A client and I are working together outside the massage room to turn a dumpy garage into a cool classroom and shamanic workspace. It's a lot of fun and I'm learning a whole bunch. Mainly about how to do things right, how wrong I've been doing things all along, and that good tools can make a hell of a difference in one's skills when one carpents. I covet his $600 Bosch chop saw. And the cool-o transforming portable Bosch table saw! It folds up like a transformer toy. Fun!

He's a totally cool guy and he's very patient with my ineptitude and with showing me every little thing. I'm grateful for his patience. And I'm a little thrilled that the new shamanic work space is going to have some of my spirit in it. It already has my blood and sweat. We've been working in the evenings and on weekends, and are trying to get it ready for its maiden class during the weekend of June 7 and 8. The openings you see at the right are where we jacked up that half of the roof to make it match the slope of the other half, and the new custom trusses that you see were just put in by us last night. I personally cut, measured and assembled one of them, which consists of a sandwich of two identical truss halves with tricky angles and with 3/4" plywood glued and screwed together to give shear strength at the joints. I'm so proud. The 2x4's strung between them are holding up the old rafters of the existing roof. I feel so butch. Jacking up part of a house. Yippee!

When we work and also when he's receiving bodywork from me, we talk a lot. He's completely into Taoism and somewhat into shamanic practice, so we have a bunch in common and lots of touch points to our conversations. Our talk frequently turns around Toltec ideas, mainly about how we as humans tend to relate to the story that's in our heads about people and events rather than merely reacting to the actual people and events, how we notice this in ourselves and how we practice trying to remain "awake" more. Today we were talking about emotions and about how he feels that emotions arise from the story that we tell ourselves about what's going on, and he said to me, "when I have a particularly strong emotion come up, I ask myself the question, 'What did I just tell myself?'" Which I thought was absolutely brilliant and cuts right to the chase: reminding yourself that you're reacting to the story instead of reality thus helping you stay awake and aware as the Observer and not as the Doer, deactivating what Eckhart Tolle calls the pain body.

I immediately started applying this to the situation with me and the green-eyed lad, and was astonished to actually dissect my feelings and really inspect what it is that I've been telling myself about me and about this situation. Asking myself that one question has given me a depth of clarity and a remove that I haven't been able to get before this. I don't think it will solve all of my problems, but it's certainly a good new tool for the spiritual toolkit. And, as I've learned, a good tool is worth a lot.

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