Do you ever catch yourself doing or not doing something and then stop to wonder who the hell you really are? I mean, because the person you thought you were would have never done that thing or not done that thing, right? I realized tonight when a sane part of my brain questioned why I was making it so hard on myself to squeeze lemons with my bared hands, which I hated because I never got enough juice and what juice I got usually ends up in a sore that I didn’t realize I had. I realized that somewhere in my brain I had made up the “rule” that because I usually drank the “Real Lemon Juice” juice in my water and not the real lemons, that now that I had no more Real Lemon Juice and had to resort to the real lemon, I had to squeeze the precious juice out with my bare hands and not use the perfectly good lemon juice squeezer because David had bought that to use since he preferred the real thing to the juice.

What?

Once I realized the rule, of course, I abandoned it and used the lemon juice squeezer immediately which made using real lemons very easy as well as tasty.

It’s just another example of how I can be my own worst enemy sometimes. Have you ever found yourself out with something like this? There’s just enough science in my background that I know that this making-rules-that-don’t-help-myself is a pattern. And I have spent many, many years looking at how I think and behave so that I can wake up enough to make better choices in my life. Still, it’s interesting to see this sabotaging thing that I used to do with big wide sweeping brush strokes in my life show up in something as benign as denying myself the ease and comfort of using a juicer.

The good news is that some part of me recognized what I was doing and questioned it so that I could recognize what was going on and make a different choice. That’s good. I just need to keep listening to that part more often. I think often these days we get to going so fast that we don’t slow down long enough to ask ourselves where we’re going much less how we’re getting there. It’s okay to ask. It’s even better to listen.

I’ve used this analogy before because it made such a big impression on me, I think it was in the second Men in Black Movie’s when they opened up the head of this normal looking guy and there was a little alien in the driver’s seat in his brain. That’s how it feels when all of a sudden we notice a behavior or thought process that we’re doing or having. It’s as if we’ve been asleep at the wheel of running our lives and all of a sudden we wake up.

As one of my favorite meditation songs says, “don’t go back to sleep”. Sometimes life becoming easier for ourselves once we recognize what we’re doing is as simple as using a juicer.

So please, when life gives you lemons……use a juicer!