One of my religious beliefs is that everything was created spiritually before it was created physically. I have found a practical application of this religious doctrine in my personal interactions.
I am anxious about doing new things and yet new things must be done. One day my wife needed help picking up some steel panels for our son to replace one of the panels on our roof. I was not involved in the discussions until my wife informed me that she had borrowed a vehicle and a trailer to go and pick up the roofing panel. My immediate reaction was one of anxiousness and fear as all of my experience with driving with a trailer had been bad, to say the least.
We set off for the roofing supply company with anxiousness and I had anger growing inside of me. We needed to get onto the highway using a county road without signals. This was usually done by crossing the Northbound lane of traffic and then stopping on the median until it was clear to proceed in the Southbound lane of traffic. It was a particularly busy traffic day. and it took us quite a bit of time to get across the Northbound lane into the median.
By this time I was truly scared and angry. The length of the vehicle and trailer made it more difficult to get everything safely into the median unless I parked at a much sharper angle than I usually did. This, however, resulted in me having difficulty seeing the Southbound oncoming traffic. I was stewing in my anger toward my wife when I started creating a verbal response to let her know just how much I hated that she had placed me in this situation. Then I had a quick thought about the end results that verbalizing the anger. I did not want to fight with my wife and suffer the consequences. At that moment I realized that my angry thoughts were spiritual creations that I didn’t want to be expressed, and if I didn’t want to express them why was I creating them?
From this stressful experience, I discovered that creating angry, sarcastic, or mean responses spiritually in my mind put these thoughts on a shelf in my mind to be hurled out at some time in the future. I began repeating in my mind, “Do not create!” as a mantra to keep my mind occupied and avoid creating a spiritual store of angry comebacks that I had no desire to use at a future time.
Avoiding the spiritual creation through the use of the, do not create, mantra has become a standard coping skill that I use when I find myself beginning to stew in anger. In doing this I deny my angry self of easy-access-spiritual-created-ammunition that can be transformed into ammunition of angry words expressed in physical interactions.