Scout: Being affectively attentive is very painful and exhausting. If I do not suppress or indulge sometimes it still takes literally hours for even neutrality to emerge, and it is pretty fleeting before the next wave of feelings arise. I am agitated and exhausted and in physical pain pretty often, and inviting even more pain by not dissociating when stuff comes up feels like a rough prospect. I recurrently fall back to numbing, because the effort of paying attention to the pain in the way I need to in order for it to pass and not puppet my reactions is daunting and slow to pay dividends.
Of course the numbing does not pay dividends at all, quite the opposite, but in the moment I am beyond grateful to be relieved from the pain, if only for a little.
Are you saying that the moment you become aware how you experience yourself, the fact of being aware makes the experience “painful and exhausting”? Or has it been like that all along, and you were refusing to/afraid to acknowledge it?
Either way, first, stop the habitual response – stop fighting your pain and stop fighting the feelings you experience. Any battle against yourself only fuels the feelings and the pain by increasing the power of ‘you’ to make you feel bad. Personally, feeling being ‘Vineeto’ found that the moment she stopped fighting the feeling (i.e. by being afraid of it), it instantly diminished.
From there, seeing the success of stopping the battle against yourself, you might be able to get to a reasonable feeling good, a little better than neutral.
Then have a look at your resentment. Perhaps you can see (to a small degree at first) how silly it is to waste energy in objecting to being here, since it is a fact that you are here. Then whenever you get a chance, explore this resentment a bit further –
• [Richard]: ‘Back in 1980 ‘I’ looked at the stars one night and temporarily came to my senses: there are galaxies exploding/ imploding (or whatever) all throughout the physical infinitude where an immeasurable quantity of matter is perpetually arranging and rearranging itself in endless varieties of form all over the boundless reaches of infinite space throughout the limitless extent of eternal time and ‘I’ – puny, pathetic ‘I’ in an ant-like-in-comparison and very vulnerable 6’2’’ flesh and blood body – disapprove of all this? That is, ‘I’ call all this a ‘sick joke’, or whatever depreciative assessment? And further: so what if ‘I’ were to do an about-face and graciously approve? What difference would that make to the universe?
Zilch. (Richard, AF List, No. 10, 25 May 2000)
Once you become fairly confident with these two aspects via experiential confirmation (the only proof which counts) you can have a look at how to change how you feel. It requires giving up dissociation, even if only temporarily, until you become more confident. Once you genuinely recognize and acknowledge that ‘you’ are your feelings (including your feelings about pain) then you find that you do have a choice about how you want to experience being alive. Here one of Richard’s co-respondents explains this in detail –
Respondent: … incidentally, Richard, how can they be ‘an hereditary occurrence’ and be of my choosing at the same time?
Richard: You do comprehend that you are your feelings/ your feelings are you (‘I’ am ‘my’ feelings and ‘my’ feelings are ‘me’) do you not? Viz.:
• [Respondent]: ‘It has taken me a hell of a long time to understand the difference between having feelings and being those feelings. Because I have not clearly understood this, I’ve never quite got the hang of paying attention to feelings without praise or blame, and without notions of innocence and culpability, right and wrong, etc getting in the way.
This makes things very interesting. The moment I regard my ‘self’ as ‘having’ a feeling, I’m split down the middle and there’s a secondary reaction on the part of the social identity (an urge to “do something” about the feeling, which in turn evokes more feelings, and so on). Conversely, if I recognise that I am the feeling, it most often dissolves into thin air – and usually pretty quickly too.
This is great. It’s especially helpful with regard to anger and frustration which have been two of my biggest hurdles to date. Previously, when I caught myself being angry, annoyed or frustrated, identifying and paying attention to this feeling would NOT cause it to disappear. On the contrary, the feeling and the awareness of myself as ‘having’ it would sometimes become like a microphone and amplifier locked into a screaming feedback loop.
I’m really pleased that this is no longer happening. It seems almost too easy’. [emphasis in original]. (Thursday 28/10/2004 6:55 PM AEST).
And again there is a reference to how ‘almost too easy’ actualism is. (Richard, AF List, No. 60g, 30 Oct 2005a).
Let me know how you go.
Cheers Vineeto