The Road To Stupidity

Came to a shockingly obvious realization today. The road to stupidity begins with one of two paths, fear and anger.

I used to work at a job with a boss who was sadistic and I truly grew to fear this man. No longer working under him but still working in the same circles I occasionally see him and I flinch. He greets me and I just spout out some autopilot greeting just to get away from him. I often blame him for a dry spell in my career but in truth my fear had paralyzed me and the avoidance wasted away my time that I could have been advancing. Even with his abusive practice, I should have went over his head but again I was afraid and I thought I could just wait out my old boss and catch up with the next one. Time wasted away and I fell behind, I was stupid.

The second fork to the same path; I've grown up hating bullies, with a passion. Whenever I see it taking place or happening to me, I crack my neck and get ready to brawl. However, my office is not a schoolyard and since all I know is physical defense and not social defense, I end up getting in just as much trouble as the offender. Worse if I threw the first punch regardless of vocal provocation. I would get angry, not react but bottle it up, and work became misery. To the point I lost sleep because I'd get so mad. Not a healthy lifestyle when working long hours.

Today I saw a workplace training video on bystander intervention in abusive situations. When it got to the bullying state I felt my shoulders tense and feet getting antsy in my chair. I recognized my triggers reacting to the fear of the victims in the film and the anger of watching the scenario, both made me draw a blank on the Q&A portion of the training.

However, I began to recognize my reactions to the triggers and I began to, almost meditate, if that's a term. I began to breathe and clear my mind while still remained in the moment and I was able to think clearly and made educated answers thanks to meditation and control training. Any surprise that fear and anger lead to the dark side?

It is one thing to practice the exercises but to recognize and apply the Jedi teachings raises to whole new feeling of achievement. Have any other novices have a silimilar situation?

Nothing so specific, but I have noticed that during times when I meditate more frequently things seem to go smoother and I have fewer of what I call "Meh days."

I've also noticed a bit more sensitivity towards others and stronger feeling of connection to the world around me.

We might have the same boss. I'm finding myself in a position where our principal (I'm a teacher) is retiring in 3 weeks. She's been terrorizing the entire school for months now, probably because she, too, is filled with fear about the future, fear about having done something dramatically wrong that will come to light now that an other person is taking over and looking through everything she's been doing, anger about not being liked etc.

I agree with your assessment: working on yourself (and meditation is an excellent way of doing that - it's also the way I've chosen) will help you prevent situations that you later regret. I had reached a point at which I felt comfortable and competent about handling situations like this, but I got sick and haven't been able to meditate for longer than 5 minutes lately - and bam: there my old way of "dealing" with things appeared again. Instead of keeping my calm, I freaked out last week when she was treating me (and others) like a piece of sh**, saying things that might endanger my career and damaged my reputation - and all out of fear and anger.

On the other hand: we should give ourselves credit for actually analyzing the situation, for identifying its causes and for doing something about it. I think that's worth something, too. While I don't think you can always rationalize yourself out of fear and anger (much of it ist rational - it surfaces due to uncontrollable events and uncertainty), practicing to just walk away from it might help. And learning to just accept things as they really are by means of meditation is probably an excellent way to prepare yourself. Learning to discern between situations that can be changed and that are worth changing and to simply accept all other situations is the ultimate way to personal freedom and equanimity.