Some of the ways I am shaken up, shaken out of my familiar stories…

I am regularly shaken up by life, whenever life unfolds different from my beliefs and shoulds. If I am receptive, I can be with and allow the experience and also inquire into those beliefs. If not, I resist the experience and fuel my familiar beliefs.

I am also shaken up by practices, by tools such as The Work, the Big Mind process, exploring the sense fields, and more.

I am sometimes shaken up by teachers, especially when they cut through confusion in a very precise and clear way. This is yang compassion, and even then can be expressed through yin compassion (conventional kindness and empathy).

Trigger: A teacher I am exposed to who has the belief that he needs to shake people up, but does so in a quite forced way - through exaggerations and drama. This seems far less effective than shaking people up through clarity and precision. Although I find that even this shakes me up, when I do inquiry on my beliefs around it.

Outline…

• shaken up, shaken out of familiar stories (shocked)
• shaken up by life
  • anytime life shows up differently from our beliefs/shoulds
  • can be receptive to it (allow experience, inquire into beliefs) or not (resist experience, fuel familiar stories/beliefs)
• shaken up by teacher
  • through offering tools, find for ourselves (css, big mind)
  • through clarity and precision, cutting through confusion (nice/politely or not)
  • (if follow a “should”, gets a little weird and can easily be seen as somewhat misguided and counterproductive. Ex. exaggeration, one-sidedness, blunt instrument.)