recipe for a sweet life

My summer romance has recently come to completion, and I want to be intentional during the letting go process to make sure I have integrated the things from the relationship that I want to carry forward as well as released anything I don't wish to repeat.

So I spent a few hours hanging out on my favorite rock in the mountains today, and as soon as my mind finally stopped jumping around like a caffeinated preschooler, I was gifted with a whopper of an insight: Just don't put it in your pie!

Weird, right? Yeah, I thought so too when I first heard it on an Abraham-Hicks CD a while ago. Maybe a bit of background might help to put it into context.

Some of you have commented to me that my recent posts have been sort of fixated on the topics of judgment, criticism, and cynicism. True enough! Those are dynamics I haven't had a lot of experience dealing with in someone close to me until I became involved in this relationship.

So I would be sort of bewildered when he would say something like You shouldn't eat that before bed or You are too involved with your kids. I'm thrilled that I got to experience comments like this, though, because I learned about that little translator in my head that I wrote about before, which turned out to be really good at converting those You-Statements to I-Statements so I could decipher the loving intentions beneath them: I want you to sleep well tonight. I hope we can have some time alone soon.

Friends told me that my translator was all nice and good for now, but they didn't want me to have to use it forever. It became sort of automatic, or so I thought, so I wasn't really worried about it. Sometimes, my translator didn't work fast enough, and I'd respond defensively. I was so curious about those times that I did a lot of writing about it to try to understand and re-awaken my compassion. As you know, writing is good medicine for me.

Okay, now, back to the pie. Here's the metaphor a la Abe:

Life is like a big kitchen with millions of ingredients in the well-stocked pantry -- including flavors that some people savor and other people despise. There's sugar and salt, coconut and rhubarb, mincemeat and peaches, all right next to each other on the shelves. There's joy and anger, appreciation and cynicism, judgment and gratitude, war and peace.

We each enter into this well-stocked pantry intending to bake the pie that is our personal life experience. We add ingredients to our pie by paying attention to them. So every time I noticed his cynicism and tried to understand it, I was putting it in my pie! And I just could not understand why my pie tasted so funny, so I kept trying to add more compassion to sweeten it up.

So to me, Just don't put it in your pie means stop trying to understand it. Stop writing about it, stop thinking about it, stop trying to explain how I feel when hear it. Stop focusing on it! Just friggin' keep my eyes moving and turn my attention elsewhere.

Each person in front of me has numerous qualities I could focus on in any given moment -- some sweet, some bitter. It's not helpful to stand in the pantry looking at the rhubarb or the cynicism and think, Hey, what's that doing on the shelf? That shouldn't be here! Get that outta here. I don't want it to sour my sweet apple pie!

Just because I don't like how something tastes does not mean I have the need or the right to take it out of the pantry. To someone else, it could be a delicacy. It can't get into my pie unless I put it there, so it's okay to just let it be.

I still have a lot to learn about how to keep my attention focused only on what I want in my own pie. I keep peeking over at the mincemeat, thinking maybe I could just sneak a little bit of sugar in there and then it might not taste so bad if it happens to get into my pie.

And every time I look at it, a little bit of yucky meaty goo gets sprinkled onto my apples. But I'll get it figured out sooner or later, I'm sure. It's good that it tastes so bad, because that way, I notice it quicker.