After the last post I noticed that I could not up-level feeling good and also could not maintain naivete past a certain level and felt that something was amiss. First, I went on vacation for a little less than 2 weeks to some cities in France and Italy this past month with my girlfriend. It was my first time visiting anywhere in Europe so we decided to book multiple cities over the course of that time. I was not able to enjoy it as much due to the constant moving between cities every 2-3 days. I’d say the main issue was the lack of sleep as I could not get my usual amount and we immediately started doing activities as soon we landed. My sleep requirement also seems to be higher than my girlfriend.
Things started feeling sour during the second half of the trip when we were in Rome and Sorrento. My girlfriend really did not enjoy the “oldness” of the cities and this put a damper on her mood. This in turn started to have an effect on my mood too. I was already very tired and I could not continue feeling good so I started feeling anxious and resentful. This subsided towards the last couple days of the trip. But with that said, there were also many enjoyable moments as well. During the first half, I was quite surprised to note that the crowds did not bother me as much and didn’t affect how I feel. Usually crowds make me almost angry for some irrational reason.
After returning back to the usual routine, I fell into a cycle of telling myself off for not having maintained feeling good. Then I also “forgot” how it felt to be naive and also how the experience of pure intent was like and fell back into my old habits. One of the main ones being how ‘I’ try to change ‘myself’ (perhaps like how I’ve described above) and this creates a literal physical discomfort in my head and chest. Usually when this happens I go back to square one.
Square one is the recognition of how ‘I’ am ‘my’ feelings and ‘my’ feelings are ‘me’. Because when you change how you feel by being a different feeling, there’s nothing to solve or think about. Yet I would still feel this literal discomfort in my head. Some deep tendency makes me almost tend towards splitting myself and trying to “work” on ‘myself’ this way. Here’s what I had written down in my phone journal:
The attempting to grasp control of the somatic reaction to a feeling. Being unable to triggers the obsessive tendency to resolve it.
Noted a feeling of resentment behind the visceral recoiling.
When the feeling arises, seeing if I am expressing it or repressing it. Do neither.
The first layer is somatic reactions to the feeling and the attempt to control them while the feeling can’t even be fully felt. The somatic reaction gets mistaken for the feeling. Underneath is a resentment that I’m experiencing anything negative.
As I further stuck with the reactions, I also noted an anger. A sort of telling myself of. It seems to go along with the resentment. The resentment that I have to do any of this. Any work at all. That life isn’t just easy.
Be friends with myself. Be gentle with myself. This will also be reflected onto others. If I am friends with myself and gentle with myself, then I can be so with others.
Look at the facts instead of what something is supposed to be or is not supposed to be.
Return to ‘I’ am ‘my’ feelings and ‘my’ feelings are ‘me’.
Is it simply a habit to break myself in two or is there some other underlying reason?
‘I’ am trying to “look” at ‘myself’. But I cannot. Like how I cannot look into my eyes.I need a complete certainty of a PCE. I need to have another PCE.
What has made me come this far and to stick with actualism all of these years? What is this certainty I have with it?
After a day of reflecting and staying with it, the answer to why it is not all so easy is because I am holding onto the conditioning of resentment and bitterness that is coiled around naivete.
It had become clear how ‘I’ cannot change ‘myself’ by thinking it out but rather to ultimately feel something else (felicitous feelings). When I came back from my trip I noted a feeling of resentment when interacting with my partner. I started looking at my feelings and an allowing to feel my feelings with a fascinated intent. What was in the way of complete peace and harmony with my partner? The initial objection was that I would lose her if I continued. But I could quickly discard that notion as I didn’t really want that kind of relationship (which would only breed more resentment anyways). Then I thought about how could I go past this feeling. So I asked when the feeling was happening, am I expressing this feeling or repressing it? The answer was that I was repressing it by trying to ignore it, do something else, or trying to think about a way out. But if I tried to do the opposite then it seemed like I was expressing it. So I tried to do neither. The only way to do that was to stay with the feeling. The instinctual tendency perhaps is to do one or the other and go back and forth. Then as I tried to do neither, I started to get inklings of an answer. I see-sawed back and forth between being this feeling and then the seeing that it was ‘me’ in my entirety that was standing in the way of complete peace and harmony. This seeing has such a vast understanding and implication to it that my mind seems like it’s being turned upside down. One take away was also the seeing why it was all not so easy. Something I didn’t think perhaps I had but I have to ashamedly admit that I had been holding this entire time. Basically, I had been harboring the basic resentment of being alive this entire time. This seeing took the edge off the underlying feeling.
So I started reading up Richard’s correspondence on Resentment. I reflected on this initial question: “Can I emotionally accept that which is intellectually unacceptable?”. I actually don’t understand how something can be “intellectually unacceptable” or how it’s being used in this question. Is the lack of peace-on-earth intellectually unacceptable? I always saw it as emotionally unacceptable. But Richard writes:
Speaking personally, as a preliminary step twenty-odd years ago, I started to embrace each situation that life provided by emotionally welcoming, readily consenting to, receiving fully and unabashedly acknowledging every circumstance so as to find out, once and for all, just what was going on … and just what intelligence actually was.
So that is what I will try and maintain.
I continued the fascinated attention to the discomfort over the course of the week. Over time I started noticing that I was feeling more and more upset with the smallest of things that people did or how they behaved. Yesterday it went up to a crescendo of deep bitterness and encompassed everything. Every little thing people did (even unrelated to me) felt like a coil around my being. I experienced it as I wrote in my journal above as a “conditioning of resentment and bitterness that is coiled around naivete”. Then at the end of the day it just automatically eased up and that same discomfort was greatly diminished. The same night I experienced an elevated sensuousness. I was not even trying to do it, it just happened on its own.