Complaining, cont'd

“Complaining is one of the ego’s favorite strategies for strengthening itself.”  A week ago, I posted this quotation from Eckhart Tolle.  This idea has been on my mind for a few weeks now, and I’ve been noticing my little complaints, noticing how they cut me off from others, even if only a little bit.  Paying attention to the mind is interesting.  So often, these complaints come to me unbidden, and often, they produce a certain kind of self-righteous enjoyment.

Tolle distinguishes between complaining and informing someone of a mistake that can be made right.

[T]o refrain from complaining doesn’t necessarily mean putting up with bad quality or behavior.  There is no ego in telling the waiter that your soup is cold and needs to be heated up—if you stick to the facts, which are always neutral.  “How dare you serve me cold soup….”  That’s complaining.  There is a “me” here that loves to feel personally offended by the cold soup and is going to make the most of it, a “me” that enjoys making someone wrong.  The complaining we are talking about is in the service of the ego, not of change.
 See if you can catch, that is to say, notice, the voice in the head, perhaps in the very moment it complains about something, and recognize it for what it is:  the voice of the ego, no more than a conditioned mind-pattern, a thought.

 That’s an important distinction that can be tricky.  I can remember times when I needed to make changes in a relationship or set needed boundaries, but often I fueled that necessary work by strengthening my ego using the “how-dare-they” kind of complaining.

I like Tolle’s point that it’s okay to describe mistakes so that they can be “put right.”  I know for myself how easy it is to turn putting things right into a complaining fest about how wrong things are now.  When I notice my describing of mistakes is creating a wall of separation between me and another person or another group, I know I’m not on the right track.

This is an interesting experiment, trying to notice when my mind starts complaining.  It is especially amusing how trivial some of my complaints are.  I wonder if anyone has ever stopped the habit completely.