dailydatewithgod

If you have ever committed to spending any amount of time abstaining from complaining you most likely came face to face with your rankles in a way you had not done so before.  What else are we supposed to do about those irritating little elements of life that pop up, if not to vent about them?  Clearly, our rankles represent things that are not working in our lives.  They are the elements that seemingly tear at the smooth and productive life we set out to live each day. Wait, who told us life was supposed to go smoothly?  I keep forgetting. 😉 There are the lines, the traffic, the unconscious actions and words of others.  There is no way to describe them other than to say they are irritating.  What if our rankles say more about us than we would like to admit?  After all, there are some common rankles but we have rankles that are not rankles for others.  What could that mean?  Perhaps our rankles tell us about our current state of mind.  Maybe we could use them as indications of what we are not in acceptance of at the moment.  It is not about being wrong because we are experiencing something as a rankle.  Our reaction to that thing and perceiving it as a rankle is an emotional one.  The people, places, and things we experience as rankles are not in and of themselves irritating. It is our perception that makes them rankles.  We all know of times when we find ourselves neutral to how someone is behaving around us when previously we saw it as a rankle.  Why is it the line at the grocery store is more of a rankle when we are feeling rushed?  The context in our mind is what makes something neutral and creates a rankle.  The good news is we can choose not to fall for the story of the rankle our mind is telling us in a given moment about a person, place or thing.  Breathing and centering in our hearts makes this easier.  Funny how our hearts do not perceive nearly as many rankles in our lives as our minds do.