Before we dive in, I wanted to make you aware of a few upcoming offerings.
March 6th: Online Breathwork Journey (discount for paid Substack subscribers)
March 16th: Online Enough as You Are Workshop (discount for paid Substack subscribers)
May 4th - 11th: Sacred Bali Retreat!
The following is an AI-generated transcript of the above video message, for those of you who prefer to read rather than watch. I cleaned it up a bit (got rid of some likes, etc.), but it definitely reads like someone who is speaking. It’s interesting for me to watch the video and feel like I offered some helpful perspectives fairly eloquently and then to read the transcript and feel like I don’t know how to put words together. :) In any case, I’m grateful that Substack offers this transcription capability, especially because I’ve been more interested in sharing through speaking than writing these days. Whether you watch or read, let me know how these perspectives landed for you.
Hey there friends,
Wishing you a beautiful day, a beautiful moment, whenever it is you're tuning into this. I wanted to tell you a little story about my past 24 hours. Actually, going back to last week. I was guiding a breathwork session and as it was beginning, the attendees were telling me that there were sound issues. They could hear my voice, but the music wasn't coming through. I couldn't figure out how to fix it in the moment so I had to cancel the session before it had even begun.
I had another breathwork session last night and spent a good chunk of the day trying to figure out what the issue was between Zoom and Spotify, knowing it was probably just one button that I wasn't figuring out to push. I took my computer to the Apple store, I went on a lot of online forums, but everything I was doing wasn't fixing the situation. As you might guess if you've ever dealt with technical issues (and I'm sure you all have) I was finding myself getting frustrated and annoyed and feeling like this was a huge waste of my time having to put so much energy into this glitchy tech issue.
And what I did was I kind of caught myself in the moment of the frustration, or one of the moments, and in the moment of annoyance I caught myself thinking, oh, I'm wasting my day and I'm wasting my time. It never feels good to think that or feel that way about something.
So I interrupted that thought pattern. I interrupted that way of being with the situation, and I just checked in with myself. I said to myself, Okay, this is an experience that is frustrating and is annoying or can be and you can choose to be in annoyance as you're dealing with it and you can choose to reflect on this experience as wasted hours and wasted time or you can make a different choice. You can choose to open yourself up to the possibility of experiencing this glitchy tech stuff and not knowing how you’re going to solve it or if it's going to be solved or when and bring to that a sense of okayness, a sense of peace.
And what that looked like for me in the moment was just acknowledging that I was getting frustrated and annoyed, and considering what there was I could do about that. What I chose to do in that moment was to do some breathing. Different than the breathwork I practice, a more meditative breath. I chose a breathing pattern where you give your exhale two extra beats than you give your inhale. So if you're inhaling for three seconds, you exhale for five seconds. This communicates to your body, it communicates to your parasympathetic nervous system that you're in a state of relaxation, which then encourages your body to enter a state of relaxation.
So that was something I did that shifted the energy in that moment. Also, simply by bringing awareness to the fact that I was getting frustrated and annoyed and anxious and lost in this idea of wasted time, just by acknowledging it and bringing some attention to it it allowed that energy to dissipate. The reality is it's silly to reflect on anything as wasted time because how can I make that judgment about what I'm experiencing?
It was a gift just to look at a moment that would typically annoy and frustrate me and see if is there was something else I could bring to it, if there was a learning there, a possibility for growth or deeper awareness. That’s not wasted time, that's valuable time if it's allowing for the present moment to be a moment of expansion, of awareness.
And then also what I did was just allow for the annoyance. There's nothing wrong with being annoyed. There's nothing wrong with being frustrated and disappointed. I was looking at the part of my mind that needed to judge even that as me being somehow less than or not evolved as I could be because a more evolved person wouldn't get annoyed by technical glitches. This is what my mind says, but give me the most evolved person on the planet and give them some technical glitches and I would bet my money that they're going to get annoyed simply because these types of things are annoying, and it's okay. But even bringing a sense of acceptance to the annoyance and frustration allowed for the energy of it to dissipate.
What I found myself feeling most of the day as I spent hours working on this (and it eventually got resolved) was that most of that time was not spent in the depths of annoyance and frustration that I would typically feel in those experiences. So I'm sharing this because there's always an opportunity to bring to whatever moment we're in a bit more awareness. There's always an opportunity to ask ourselves when what we're feeling is annoyance and frustration or disappointment or whatever it is, Is there another way that I can be with these feelings while at the same time acknowledging these are totally okay feelings to feel?
I'm consistently looking for ways to be more expansive in my experience of my life and in the perspectives that I bring to it, and in that expansion we can acknowledge it's possible to hold frustration while at the same time holding ourselves open to transcending that frustration and looking at ways to be with it differently. We're wildly expansive energetic beings and whenever I find myself locked into one way of looking at something, especially if that way is creating for me annoyance, frustration, disappointment, misery, suffering in some way, there's an opportunity there to expand the lens, expand the perspective, shift my focus, make myself available to more than just that one way of looking at something. And, at the same time, honoring my humanity and the fact that we sometimes just get really focused on one way of looking at something even when that focus is leading to misery.
There's always an opportunity to offer ourselves grace and self-love and compassion and all of these things that make any moment more palatable, that bring to every moment a bit more peace, a bit more acceptance, a bit more understanding. So I offer that to you, when you find yourself spinning out in some way, be with the spinning out while also making yourself available to creating a reality that lives beyond the spinning out. What would that look like?
I send you all so much love and a deep prayer for all of us that we can bring to whatever it is we're experiencing more acceptance, more okayness, more peace with what is. Yes. That.
So much love to you.
Scott
A Request:
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Our Bali retreat is just over two months away, and there’s still space for you to join us. Join me and David Gandelman for a week of meditation, breathwork, self-love, community and so much laughter and joy. Details here.
What to do when you're seriously annoyed.