The Boo-Boo Story

We’ve all felt attacked before.  Maybe you were attacked for expressing your point of view.

It hurts, right?  No one wants to be attacked.  Aren’t we all entitled to our perspective?  Doesn’t it make you angry when someone attacks you just for living your truth?  How dare they hurt you!

What if rather than jumping to defend yourself, all fired up to retaliate and attack the offender for your pain, what if instead you took that opportunity to LOVE your own heart more?

Byron Katie boldly says:

“No one has ever been angry at another human being — we’re only angry at our story about them.”

“We’re only angry at our story about them”…

I think in this story we’re angry that they are attacking our beliefs.

Abraham Hicks often points out that:

“A belief is just a thought we keep thinking.”

We are run by our beliefs.  Our beliefs are the stories we follow for what is TRUE in life, and right living.  Essentially those beliefs are just thoughts we keep thinking over and over and over until they solidify into what we believe is true.  Put this way, it kind of sounds like its our own personal programming.

Now in the playground we all share called “Life on Earth”, we run into lots of different people who all have their own stories of what is TRUE for life, and right living.  And now we have been blessed with a whole new virtual playground through the internet called “Social Media”.  More than any other time in humanity before us, we are now exposed through social media to so many stories, and deep seated beliefs that may be different from our own.  What’s more, we can hang out in this virtual playground at all hours of the day and night, and knock up against disparate stories from all reaches of the globe.  Sometimes we get to interact with stories that aren’t even coming from humans but from robots!

You’ve heard of those social media bots right?  Isn’t that an interesting phenomenon?

The beauty of learning that a lot of those online profiles are actually just “bots”, is that it’s such a clear example of how the story they’re espousing is only coming from their programming.  They’re just programmed that way.  They got their agenda from their programmers.  Their story was written in code by a software engineer.

Friends, this is just how we got our beliefs.  This is how we got the stories we believe about life and right living.  We programmed ourselves.  We repeated the thoughts we interpreted from the stories that our families lovingly (at best) shared with us.  We repeated the thoughts we interpreted from the stories we got from our communities, from our peers, from our loved ones and from our heroes.

These repeated thoughts became our beliefs.  And these beliefs became our own programmed agendas.

So when we come up against a story that doesn’t follow our beliefs, or exactly how we believe it should go, then we create a whole new story about that story.  We add labels.  They are “bullies”, or “snowflakes”.  They are evil, heretics, or pious.  Regardless of the label, the point is that you get real MAD at that story.

Their story is crazy, delusional, lost.

Their story threatens your existence.

You need them to change their story.

You need to help them see the light.

Or you need to see that they are taken out of power, they are punished, they are locked up.

These are all reactions because you feel threatened by this story.  A story that you’ve made up to explain why their story is not how THE story should be lived.

Your story of their story could seem so perilous as to feel that their beliefs threaten the safety of us all, even threaten our continued existence!

When it gets to believing that our very existence is in jeopardy, well then fighting is the most logical reaction.  I get that.  I’ve been there.  I’ll probably be there again… until I question my story.

But back to believing this grave story of how wrong their story is. 

This is when you trot out the Facts to back you up.  And we have access to many Facts that can prove our story.  They’re true because they’re facts! They’re facts because they’re true!

Yet here’s the kicker – the opponents seem to come up with just as many facts to back up their story!  Even worse, they deny our facts.  They refuse to see the light, and completely disrespect our opinions, which are of course based in The Truth!

How hurtful!

And when we don’t have facts, but just our inherent (or is it inherited) Knowing, we call that our FAITH.  And when we see them denying the validity of our Faith,  when it looks like they are laughing at our Faith, well that pain is almost unbearable.  It’s certainly infuriating.  To add insult to injury, they’ll throw their Faith right back in our faces.  How offensive of them to discount us and then defend their story based only on their faith, without a single fact to back it up!

It’s so hurtful. And getting agitated and so burning MAD at it, makes it HURT even worse.

Now what if this pain you’re hit with is an alarm coming from your heart to pay more attention to it?

Isn’t that what pain is?  A warning.  If you put your hand on a hot stove, searing pain is going to shoot right at you as an alarm to Move Your Hand.  And you move that hand!

So why is it that when we feel this pain in our hearts, we double down and add to the pain?  When we feel threatened, disrespected, and discounted by someone, we react to that pain with anger, rage, and spewing hate.  We come back at them with our own spin of threats and disrespect.

That’ll teach them!

But why does it feel awful to do this?

Because we’re only adding to the pain in our hearts, instead of paying attention to the alarm that it’s sending us.

What if instead, when we feel this pain we react by sending more love to our hearts?

What if we heed the alarm, and just like how you jerk that hand off the hot stove, what if you pull away from your story for a minute if you feel attacked?  What if you back away from the burning rage, turn away from the fight, and you focus instead on sending LOVE to your heart?

Think about when a toddler falls and gets hurt.  Don’t you scoop him up, and sooth away his tears? Don’t you hold him close and send him love so he can stop focussing on the pain, help him to quiet his little wails, and get back to laughter?

You don’t berate, insult, and rail against his boo-boo and against the gravel ground that he hit.  You don’t fire up facebook and twitter to post that you are ‘Anti-boo-boo’, or ‘Pro-gravel restrictions’.  That wouldn’t help the little one.  That would just freak him out!

Well the same goes for your heart.

There’s a lot of pain out there in the world. Whether you find yourself in the “real” world or online, there’s a chance you could get hurt.

In response, what if you took every opportunity to love your own heart that much more?

There is much love here for you. ~FoxZM