My wife is going through tremendous physical discomfort right now as she is 6 months pregnant and has nausea throughout. She has a tendency to experience a great deal of illness and pain when not pregnant as well and it has in the past aggravated me to a great extent. She has also had bouts with depression as many people do in this world.

Today she had what we would call a hissy fit – twice. She took out on me her hypersensitivity and tendency to get overly stressed about any issue. Her attachment to emotions is very strong and it comes out in a very emotionally violent manner.

When I can see what is happening, I want to engage her. First I want to defend my ego by fighting back against her. Then, I have begun to be able to stay calm and not react to her and I can see her ego rise into an even greater frenzy and getting angrier. I try not to show emotion or reaction in my non-reaction, but I never fail to be amazed at how rapidly she is capable of exploding into venomous anger. My silence accelerates that. If I try to just speak calmly to her at the moment, then that too explodes the situation. I have to allow her to ride it out. but it is I can tell you exceedingly difficult to do.

It’s always been pretty easy for me to move on from my emotions. I should say, easier than it seems to be for most people in my life. I’ve always been able to see that time spent on emotion is wasted. That is not say that I do not have my times of stress, compulsion, addiction, insecurity, etc. etc. etc. I have plenty and still do often, but now that I am more able to see my emotions, it is becoming easier to watch them float away than it was before for me. While this is a tremendously freeing thing to see and develop in life, it also can make it more difficult to interact with others. This is especially true for those I am close too, that are obsessed with their emotions, stress, and thinking and believe they have absolutely no control over any of it. Its difficult to interact without confusing or frustrating them, because it is so much easier to “move along” from our thoughts and emotions.

This has always been a frustrating quality for friends to understand. They feel like you don’t care about the big important emotions and moments that they care about, but in fact it just seemed pointless to waste energy on things I could not changed and/or that had already passed.

Certainly I won’t stifle the awakening, but it throws me off to see that happening. In addition, I find I am telling less white lies and sharing more things off the cuff than i would have previously. Again, in the normal mode of life operation, this can cause problems, but the benefits far outweigh as long as i try to be as compassionate as possible without the normal delusion within which I used to act.

My wife is the person that I am speaking about and tonight we had a moment where it was painfully evident what was happening for me. She has a tendency to turn everything that happens into a BIG problem that is ongoing. We have a 2 year old son and a baby girl on the way and I want them to sense I what they can be if they awaken and so I don’t want the negative influence over their day to day existence, but I “love” my wife and would never consider a different environment for them. So, I guess I will move along from hear and do the best I can in this moment.

Buddhist Temple Built from Beer Bottles : TreeHugger

Fifty years ago the Heineken Beer company looked at reshaping its beer bottle to be useful as a building block. It never happened, so Buddhist monks from Thailand’s Sisaket province took matters into their own hands and collected a million bottles to build the Wat Pa Maha Chedi Kaew temple.

The more conscious I become of observing thoughts, the easier it is to see how much time is wasted with incessant dreaming of the future and constantly remaking the past. Whether it is the future in 2 minutes, 2 days, 2 weeks, or 2 years, it is an unending gnawing away at nothing. Even as I type this it wonders off into some fantasy of fame from publishing this blog or writing a book or becoming a teacher.

It is amazing the power the ego has to transform our actions from thought. Tonight I was listening to Eckhart Tolle explain how relationships are for the most part, not really relationships, but are in fact us having relationships with our ego or more precisely our ego having a relationship with our ego while we sit passively by watching our thoughts be kidnapped. It is easy to see how our relationships become such disasters, when the 2 people that are supposed to be so in love, are not even the being interacting.

I have noticed lately, than I catch my thoughts more and more frequently. It is becoming “easier” to see how I run on.

The other thing I am practicing is practicing while dealing with my 2 year old. I want to balance his perceptions of life with calmness, so he has a chance to see long before I did. Intercepting thoughts before they accelerate is decidedly more difficult with a 2 year old in a temper tantrum, but it is also getting a little better. Hope his suffering can end long before mine does.