Life is full of stories.  How much attention you pay to any of them is up to you.  Complaining does not have to be listened to.  By listening, you only validate it. It asks you to make judgments all the time.

 

 

All you hear when you listen to complaining is, “This is bad, that was terrible, I hate how they acted, that was wrong, I am angry about something, I am afraid of something.”  As painful as it is to listen to,  the more you listen to complaining, the more of it do you invite into your experience.

Who would do this?

  Resist not evil

 

 

When you see something in your experience that is unwanted, you push back, which creates resistance and conflict.  Rather, when you see something unwanted, withdraw your attention from it.  Endure no negative feeling-states surrounding it.

 

 

Deny the weeds of discord any of the water of your attention.  When you resist evil, you are paying attention to evil, treating it as though it were real and worthy of your attention. That is why it is better to resist not evil.

Would you invite discord and depression into your experience?  If you knew you had invited them, would you not choose instantly to invite differently?

I would like to uninvite discord and depression from my experience. I would like to disable them completely.

You do that by withdrawing all attention from their direction.  Where attention goes, experience follows.  Think of complaints as negative little harbingers of grief and sorrow, poor little mine canaries heralding woes to come.  Send these sad little birds away when they try to alight.

 

 

Do not embrace complaining, indulging it with your attention. Starve it instead.  Do not take its concerns seriously.  Remember its only purpose is to distract you, to keep you endlessly involved in ego’s web.

 

Neither do you get angry with complaining, and go on campaigns and crusades against it, complaining against complaining. No, the only way to disable complaining, as anything else you may want to eliminate from your experience, is to lovingly withdraw your attention.

 

 

Say the conduit prayer over the situation, and then dismiss it with love. Do this each time a negative feeling tries to land on you. Very soon, they will stop trying.

Complaining is the language of decrease;

gratitude is the language of increase

Frances Scovel Shinn