Images by: Sam LeVan, Lynne Lancaster

Last week I was sitting in the “pews” during our Sunday spiritual service and noticed a brass placard affixed to the seat in front of me. The seats to the right and left of the one in front of me also had brass placards, both of which were engraved with the names of so-and-so who evidently donated some money and received a undelible record of that fact. The one in front of me was different, however, and seemed to carry a message that was targeted specifically towards Me and the Monkey, and it read:

“Do what love is asking of you in this moment.”

Reflecting upon this message, I found it to be an excellent starting point for the process of quieting our Monkey so as to overcome everyday defensiveness and live a better life.

For those of us who suffer from the disease of the Monkey Mind called defensiveness, we often live life on the edge of a slippery slope, gaining control and serenity of the whims of the ego for patches of time, only to be thrown off the path of higher consciousness when we least expect it. Once off the path, gaining control once again can be Herculean task, like tires spinning in snow, losing traction, losing momentum and burning a lot of energy with little result, all the while slipping down the slope, in the exact opposite direction of where we want to go.

We become aware of a bout of defensiveness and then become defensive over that very revelation, spinning into a cycle of self-loathing and seething temperment that alienates others and only makes our predicament worse. How to stop the spinning wheels? How to slam a “monkey wrench” into the Monkey Mind and at least stop the bleeding before we self-destruct and/or cause ruin to our family, friends, co-workers, neighbors, and strangers alike?

The first sub-task to master in the overall campaign to overcome defensiveness is the art of awareness. It is virtually impossible to overcome defensiveness or any other malady of the mind without first becoming aware of its presence. The trick here of course is to recognize the swelling emotions of defensiveness before they spill out in the form of angry reactions towards those we love or our colleagues. How do we do this when we are in the throws of defensiveness? In other words, how do we increase our present moment awareness, especially when we are in the midst of triggering events?

The most effective way to increase present moment awareness is by dedicating time during each day, away from the world, ideally in quiet solitude, to focus on awareness. In this way, we are building up “reserves” of awareness that we may draw upon in times of need. By growing a reservoir of awareness in times of quiet or serenity, we may turn to these reserves when we are mentally, physically, and spiritually taxed during our everyday lives. Many of us do this in the form of daily meditation. There are many ways to meditate, but simple breathing and silence is a good place to start, if only for a minute or so the first thing in the morning before we do any of our daily tasks and routines. You will be amazed how much simply meditating on a regular basis will impact your ability to overcome everyday defensiveness, even if that’s the only thing you ever do to improve this area of your life.

But this post isn’t about simply meditating, or about doing just one thing, which is why we’ll move onto to the next task, which refers back to quotation above about love. But the Monkey and I wanted to focus on meditation for a moment, because it is so essential to gain awareness before we can unlock the riches of this action, because without awareness we will be unable to even recognize our opportunity to love that moments of challenge are calling upon us to do.

A recurring theme in the lives of us dedicated to personal growth is that of the “call to action.” For those of us of on the path of growth, all situations and events are neither positive or negative. Instead, each event we encounter in our lives is a call to action, a summoning by the divine or the universe or the universal consciousness or fate (whatever verbiage suits your personal belief system) to raise our consciousness to the next level.

Viewed in this light, calamity and hardship are no longer treacherous, scary, or tedious encounters, but are instead divine opportunities for growth. But how do we know what the message is? How do we know how to react when we are challenged or triggered by a situation or an encounter with a stranger or a loved one? This is why going back to the message at the beginning of this post is so powerful, that in order to divine the reasoning behind our challenges and find the strength and direction to respond, we must: “Do what love is asking of us in this moment.”

This is where we learn that life is not about vindication or being right or pointing out the faults of others. The essence of healthy living is to break down each moment and simply do what love is asking of us. Your spouse on your back about being late home from work? Love asking you to hear their concern, and possibly redefine your relationship to work. A stranger driving erratically? Love asking you to slow down, back away. A customer complaining or treating you with disrespect? Love asking you to bless them and find a new way to serve them. A loved one behaving in a way that seems devoid of love? An opportunity for you to find something new and different to love in them.

This exercise is by no means easy, but know this: those of us who are the most challenged by defensiveness are the most blessed with opportunities to grow and expand our love. In other words, those of us who face the challenges of defensiveness on a daily basis perhaps have the most to offer the world, so long as we dedicate our lives to simple principle of doing what love is asking of us in this moment.

One of the most challenging aspects of negotiating interpersonal relationships is deciding who the idiot is.

What I mean by that is, very often when we encounter a distasteful encounter or an argument with another individual, whether it’s at work, with family members, or among friends, we often automatically assume it’s the other person with the problem and if they just saw things our way, everything would be just fine. Walking away from the encounter we often lambast the other individual, telling our sob story to anybody who’ll listen, hoping for them to soothe our upset and join us in our tirade against that person (”How could they say such a thing?”) or in the pity party we throw for ourselves (”Can you believe I had to deal with him/her?”).

Two Sides to Every Idiot

Unfortunately, when we peel back the self-obsessed layer of unreality that prevents us from seeing the world as it truly is (and this can only be done through thoughtful introspection, meditation, or consultation with friends and allies who have attained a certain level of peace and serenity in their own lives), we realize that in most cases, if we’ve experienced an argument or a negative encounter with a perceived “idiot,” there are usually two idiots involved in the altercation and one of them, sadly, is us.

And that generally includes instances in which we are the “victims” of apparent unprovoked verbal attacks. An example: the other day at work I was visiting with a customer who seems to be struggling in his business. When I noticed that he wasn’t generating much revenue with one of our top-selling products, I inquired as to why he thought he wasn’t able to move it. He gave his reasons, to which I indicated that I was surprised, considering the product in question is one of our bestsellers and the best-selling product in its category nationwide, according to an independent data-gathering service (similar to the television ratings service AC Nielsen).

When I tried to show him this data, he accused me of attempting to purposely deceive him, as this data reflected national sales, not sales numbers specific to his region or state. While he may have had a point that the data wasn’t 100% reflective of his particular neck of the woods, in no way was I trying to deceive him. And yet he persisted with that accusation, growing visibly upset and further attacking my integrity, along with the integrity of my company. He then listed a litany of complaints about my company that he has accumulated over the years (pre-dating my tenure with the company). Oddly enough, after teeing off on me and my company for about five minutes, something suddenly switched, and he attempted to jump back to what we were discussing before this topic came up, a behavior that struck me as rather bi-polar (according to my two-bit personal psycho-analysis, of course).

I was reasonably satisfied with my response to his tirade in the sense that I didn’t take his attack personally or say anything to specifically defend against any of his charges. But I wasn’t 100% successful in keeping my mouth entirely shut, however, as I found myself attempting to reassure him that I wasn’t trying to purposely deceive him and that I was just presenting data like I do with all of my sales calls. Walking away from the situation, I was angry and somewhat embarrassed (as a few of the employees in the account witnessed this haranguing). Bottom line, I had a sinking feeling that I could have done something slightly different that would have kept my side of the street completely clean.

A Revolutionary Technique for Dealing With Ornery Folks

Seeing that it is my objective to overcome defensiveness in its myriad forms, I realized that saying anything at all in respone to this guy during this particular encounter was a form of defensiveness and therefore a losing proposition. What I realized was that the best way to deal with people like him is to simply say nothing at all.

Stand there. Take it all. Don’t move a muscle. Don’t crack a smirk. And most importantly, don’t take anything that is said about you personally.

So what is really happening when you are able to practice this advanced technique in overcoming defensiveness? By remaining silent, you are able to:

1) Maintain your cool. Very rarely is it neccessary to react to the insanity of others. There is little reason to compromise our own serenity in the cause defending against a baseless, misdirected, and unconscious attack.

2) Provide breathing space in the form of silence between you and the person freaking out. Silence on one side allows the person engaging in the verbal tirade to eventually hear themselves sounding crazy. The sooner they realize that they have gone temporarily insane, the sooner they will return to sanity. Silence on your part hastens the onset of reality as it encourages the other person to listen to themselves.

3) Practice compassion for that person’s lapse in sanity. This is perhaps the most difficult aspect of practicing silence in the face of a verbal tirade. It helps if we begin to understand that childish behavior and verbal tantrums are very often simply signals that a person is out of balance in some area of their life. So if we’re able to be silent and simply be there, present for this fellow human being experiencing a state of pain, we can suddenly transcend the rather primitive coping mechanism of protecting ourselves, our ego, and our serenity, and instead embrace the truly divine work of helping a fellow being realize that they are out of balance.

Indeed we cannot solve another individual’s lack of balance, but we can help guide the way by maintaining our own. If we can practice compassionate silence in the face of an insane tirade without hurling ourselves out of balance, we begin to realize that the best way to deal with an “idiot,” is to start with ourselves.

Image by Lynne Lancaster

RELATED POSTS:

Overcoming Defensiveness

Overcoming Defensiveness Part II: The Hidden Cost of Unnecessary Struggle

An Inside Job

Photo by: Stephanie L.

The other day I received an email from an elderly in-law that tripped the wire surrounding the Monkey’s Defensiveness Perimeter. In the email he informed me that his lifelong friend had recently died, and oh by the way, that he was disappointed to learn that I never found the time to drop off some product samples from my day job that I had promised to give his friend. The two facts were completed unrelated. His friend died (he was in his 80’s). I didn’t give him some samples of a product I sell. Yet, the wording of the email made my Monkey think that he was trying to correlate those two facts, that somehow my not dropping off the product contributed to his friends’ demise.

I mean, he would never ordinarily decide to write me with news like this about any of his other friends…we don’t really have that kind of relationship. It was clear to the Monkey and me that he was pulling a massive guilt trip on us, which left us for the moment, speechless. Or writeless. Meaning, I didn’t respond to the email. I let it sit a while.

Which was a miracle. How many times have you responded to an email with defensive-fueled fury, only to wish later that you could hit a “recall” button at the top of your screen, hurling the missive backwards through the universe of electrons, safely returning home to your inbox?

I told my wife the story, and how I felt peeved that he was pulling a guilt trip on me, and that me and the Monkey didn’t like how that felt. She explained that he was feeling horrible about the loss of his friend, angry perhaps, and probably wasn’t in the best state of mind when he wrote that email to me. She told me that he is also very proud of me, proud of my military background, and was probably frankly pretty surprised that I never got around to dropping these samples off at his friends’ house, what considering I’m so organized and all.

What I haven’t mentioned yet is that it could be argued that these samples also have a slight medicinal quality to them (they are based on green tea) and he probably reasoned that if I could get these samples to his friend, they may have helped him live a little longer. So in a way, he might have decided that my failure to give him this product helped speed his friend along towards the beyond.

I firmly believe that the samples wouldn’t have extended his life. He was an old man, very sick to boot. The samples in question aren’t medicine. They are sodas, enhanced with green tea. They may have made his remaining weeks more tasty, but they wouldn’t have saved his life.

I knew this and the Monkey knew this and we wanted to tell him that we knew this, and while you’re at it, “Don’t make me feel guilty about your friend dying, I have enough to worry about in my own life without taking on the karma of people I’ve never met!”

But we didn’t. Thank God. Thank my wife, really. She told me to sit down and connect to how I felt. Not about how the Monkey felt, but how I felt. How I felt about learning that the friend of someone I care about died. How I felt about not following through on the request of an 84 year old man to do something nice for his friend. Period.

So I opened up Entourage, started a new message and tried to write. Dear Papa. Damn was it hard to overcome the Monkey’s will to defend himself on this one. I mean, he just installed a new alarm system. The Monkey needed some protection!

So I had to make a choice.

To defend the Monkey’s precious ego, or to reach out to someone with love and compassion.

Isn’t that the essential choice in nearly all of our waking hours?

But was the Monkey pushing me on this one. I stared at the half-composed email. Got angry. More defensive. How dare you call me out for not showing up? How dare you make me feel bad? How dare you insinuate that I could manage my time a little better?

But I won the good fight this time. Quiet the Monkey, I repeated to myself, over and over again. Quiet the Monkey. Quiet the Monkey. Quiet the Monkey. In time, he found a little patch of gray matter in the outskirts of my mind, curled up into a ball, and fell fast asleep, resting up for the next big fight.

With the Monkey catching some Z’s, I turned back to my email and simply told him that I was sorry for his loss and that I was sorry I couldn’t find the time to drop the stuff off. That simple. I hit send and was off to the next thing. Satisfied for the moment.

A few days later I got a two word reply: “I understand.”

And may your friend rest in peace…