Serenity

The way positive affirmations work is to say them repeatedly.  It's about training the mind to accept the affirmations as the default belief, rather than allowing those mad little demon voices in our heads undermine our very human need for positive emotions, growth, evolution, change and development.

Prayer is similar.  Saying the rosary.  Using Worry beads. Or Komboloi beads.  Chanting.  Saying a mantra out loud, or silently, when meditating.

It is the repetition that helps.  These quiet, personal, and often short, meaningful stanzas that we can recite to ourselves to give comfort and hope and bring peace.

It is all connected to the breath.  Deep, quiet breathing, as we say our word or verse.  Letting the body and the mind slow down.  Like meditation, prayer and affirmations can slow the heart rate, release the negative energy, prepare the body for the intake of the new and fresh and restorative energy.

So I'll cut to the chase about now:  All the above went through my head in a blinding flash this morning as I turned off the car engine and prepared to step out into the car park at the High School.  (You know what's coming, right?).  This is what I'd said to myself repeatedly since I woke at 4.30am:

God.  Please grant me the courage to change the things I can change.  The serenity to accept the things I cannot change.  And the wisdom to know the difference.

By 7.35am, over scrambled eggs (I burned them to a ruin - never done that before) I'd shortened the prayer to:  "Courage.... serenity.... wisdom... ".  Over and over.

Meditation and mantra chanting is heavenly at the end of a hot yoga session, lying in shivasana pose on my purple yoga mat.  But the serenity prayer was coming out of me in short wee bursts of breathlessness as I crossed the car park to go into the school office: "serenity wisdom courage serenidom wisage courity doswim serecour wisnity..."

Maybe it worked, to pray a little, or a lot, or even in gobbledegook, today.  It isn't going to save my boy necessarily, but it allowed me to talk through the options reasonably calmly with the school, with my prayer going around in my head, and occasionally slipping out of my head and onto my knee where it looked at me compassionately and quizzically (really, it did) when I almost got a little emotional.

He's got one good grace left.  He's been asked to leave the school.  Only four weeks of school left, they would have kept him if they could, but he's made it unsafe for the school community to keep him there.  There's only so much abuse teachers will take (although it's a fraction of what I get from him, and I don't get paid for it) and only so much disruption classmates should have to tolerate.

So he's out.  Not expelled, but released.  Until February.  Oh, good Goddesses and Angels:

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE

 grant me the courage... the wisdom... 

and most of all, the serenity to get through this...

Wishing as always, courage, wisdom and serenity to all parents.  Just say the words.