Ceremonial Jitters, Redux

Like Ms. Morganstern, I recently had the opportunity to experience ceremonial jitters.  Or, was it emotional jitters?  Or was it excitement?  Or was it a cold coming on?  It was really hard to tell! 

It was hard to tell in part because the upcoming ceremony touched many parts of my life, in addition to being a training for me. 

It was also hard to tell because the physical feelings were much like those I've experienced in a variety of situations.

I've noticed that there are some physical feelings, ones which I associate with emotions, that could actually be tagged in a variety of ways.  That is, I could attribute my feeling of nausea to an unpleasant encounter I had yesterday, or to nervousness about something coming up, or to the fact that I did a vigorous workout too soon after eating.  If I'm not careful, I can easily attribute it to the wrong thing, and end up taking that thing much more seriously than it deserves. 

In this case, I decided to become an observer of myself: to observe what was happening when the feelings came up, how they affected me, how long they lasted.  I learned something valuable to take into the upcoming ceremony: namely, that it was nothing more or less than a movement of my energy, which I could handle in whatever way I chose.

In some ways, this is a basic Red Lodge Year 1 teaching: balanced choreography. And in another way, it is more related to my condition of bodily appearance: how I am in my body, how I handle myself, how well I know myself.  And in yet another way, it's really all about maturity: do I have the self-awareness and self-control to stop myself from going into an unproductive reaction, and just see what's really there in this specific circumstance? 

It's a bit like my experience of performing.  When I first started, I was so nervous I could hardly do anything, and afterward I was totally (and destructively) focused on the mistakes I made.  My reactions were controlling me.  But as I did it more, and worked with those reactions, I became much more able to see them for what they were - energy, nervous energy, fear - and give them their own place at the table for what they brought, without projecting what that might be.  In particular, I was able to turn my attention away from the focus on mistakes.  That made it much easier to keep from making mistakes.  It also made performing much more pleasant, and also usually meant I would learn something from it and come out of it a better performer rather than a more fearful one.

In other words, having those feelings or not was really not important.  What was important was what I did with them.

How Do You Develop Responsibility?

One of the things that bugs me about current US society is the urge that those who make the rules seem to feel to protect us all from ourselves.  Friends from overseas exclaim over all the fences and railings in our parks - designed to keep us from falling over the precipices (and then suing).  We have devices and services to help us prevent our children from seeing inappropriate things on tv or the internet.  We have warning labels on everything.  We have very specific rules about what kinds of weapons we can have or not (did you know that nunchuks are illegal in quite a few states?).  Oh - and motorcycle helmet laws!  And seatbelt laws.  And now, perhaps, we will have mandatory health insurance purchase (in many places auto insurance is already mandatory).

Part of the difficulty, I think, is that we are not willing to accept the consequences of our actions.  We want someone else to pay.  And if we insist that someone else pay, then perhaps someone else has the right to say, well, then maybe YOU shouldn't be doing that.

And what makes us willing to accept the consequences of our actions?  I guess it could be guilt, or a sense of obligation or inevitability.  Ha - just kidding.  Acutally, I think it's respect - primarily self-respect.  If we respect ourselves, we won't be making decisions with consequences we can't handle (in general - there are always potential exceptions).  And the only way we learn this is by practice - starting when we're young and our parents begin letting us do for ourselves, developing and expanding our responsibility as we mature.

Here's a breakdown of different kinds of respect, from the DTMMS site: http://dtmms.org/readingroom/7values/refinement_of_character.htm.

Does this make sense to you?  How have YOU gone about developing responsibility and maturity?  Who were/are your role models?  What was the hardest thing you've learned so far about maturity?