Parking Anxiety, the Ego, and Me

I went a bit crazy on my trip to Seattle.  I was expecting a little personal turmoil.  The trip was rife with potential emotional overtones. My son was graduating from college, and I had planned to stay several extra days to care for him since the Monday after the Saturday ceremony he was having an operation on his knee.  Did I worry about the stress around either of these events?  NO. 

I worried about parking a car. I'm not kidding.  Here's what happened. 

Our boy's girlfriend was off on a trip to Europe, so her apartment was available for my use during my stay.  It was a lovely place to be; a jewel box of an apartment filled with beautiful pieces of art, inspirational poetry, and great literature ( I got some good reading done) and only a ten minute walk to my boy's place. 

The only problem with this solution was where to put my rental car. Parking in Seattle is insane.  My boy's girlfriend had a permit on her car allowing her to park on the street without being ticketed.  She also had a spot in her building's parking garage.  She told me to take her car out and park it on the street, and put my rental car in her spot in the garage.  This girl is an angel.

 

The problem?  Her car is huge and the spot is small. I could barely get the rental into it. Fitting her car into it, even though I knew she did it all the time, looked to me like trying to squeeze a EEE foot into a size 6 pump. This picture is the closest I could find to how difficult I imagined it to be. Now, I'm a pretty good driver, and have parallel parked on the steep hills in the streets of San Francisco, but for some reason, this task filled me with white-hot fear.  I wasted nights of good sleeping time trying to figure out how in the world I was going to park that car.  See what I mean?  Crazy.

Anyway, and not surprisingly, all went very well; but it disturbed me to be so affected by the potential of trouble.  It  took me right out of the moment and into a horrible parking revere.  These bouts of anxiety struck me as one of my common  and very annoying thought patterns, and I wondered how I could avoid this incredibly powerful anxiety energy in the future. 

I decided to take the problem to my network chiropractor, Lisa Hartnett. I'll sum up here what she told me. 
She said I was taking the whole thing too personally.  The "I" that was going crazy and being anxious is not who I truly am. All that negative energy patterning is my ego.  The "I" that I truly am is never crazy, never anxious, and never worried.  The true being that I am, that we all are, is our untroubled, happy-to-be alive, eager-to-experience-the-contrast, blithe and powerful Universal selves.

Lisa pointed out that I was lucky.  Now I knew very clearly how to tell the difference between messages from the ego and messages from the Universe.  Ego messages will cause discomfort.  Every time.  (Even praise, that flatters the ego, carries with it the desire for more approval and the flip-side fear of its loss).

Universal messages are always ones of joy, connection, peace, empowerment, and love. Heed those messages and wherever you are is heaven on earth, even a dark Seattle garage.

Love, Kristine