FEELING GOOD ! The What, How, Where, When, etc. of It?

Actualism
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“Feeling Good” is the “doorway into Actualism” and needs to be talked about for it is new and anything but easy, especially for those starting with actualism.

Please also see other Label :

As Claudiu said: * There is certainly a skill or a knack to feeling good. I find it a lot easier to get to feeling good now than I did years ago. And this skill or knack doesn’t have anything to do with successful investigation, it’s like an emotional skill and/or an existential sensing of pure intent that can bring about the quality of feeling good and point me in the right direction.
I also got a sense ( of feeling good ) while falling asleep, that this is really a fundamental shift in human consciousness. I saw it like the way human consciousness basically works now, as a feeling-being, is that while the natural/sensible thing to do is to enjoy and feel good, what we do is we pervert this, we flip it, and introduce a ‘condition’ that must then be ‘satisfied’ before we allow ourselves to feel good.

And as henrrrryyyyyyy ( maybe) said:
It became immediately apparent that ‘I’ don’t have to ‘be’ anything or anyone or ‘do’ anything special to feel good. And what’s more, anything ‘I’ accomplish or achieve or attain or any ‘person’ that ‘I’ become, doesn’t matter at all for feeling good. So in order to be able to do this sincerely this has to be accepted. I think this is why so many people miss the point of feeling good (including me forgetting from time to time) - because ‘I’ have to be willing to abandon ‘who’ I am , and to see it was all for vain.

This is why one of the keys to actualism that is similarly overlooked is RE-associating if one has dis-associated from one’s desires. This is a common theme for people with a spiritual past, Vineeto talks about it directly, and I have certainly experienced it.

With regards to motivation, including motivation to become Actually Free, If you have a block between ‘yourself’ and ‘your desires,’ the desires are still there, they’re just blocked. So one may wonder why they aren’t making any progress, “I don’t have any desires, I don’t have any problems” when really they’re there, under the surface, they’re just being denied. This is also called dis-integration (where the opposite can be called integration).

And it’s essential to genuinely understand oneself to get back to that point where the desires (and fears, too) are fully recognized as extant, as being a core part of oneself.

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Do actualists, feel, feeling good in their bodies, like in the abdomen or something ?

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Does any techniques, like breathing techniques or body awareness ( like henryyyy mentioned) or other techniques have any usefulness for and an actualist’s “feeling good”?

What about “concentration” ? For example concentration on or about current time ( TMOBA ) ?
How do you apply that concentration? Like a mantra ? or in a affective way or what ?

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Not at all! You are over complicating feeling good :slight_smile:

Replace “feeling good” with “generally being in a good mood” or “having fun”. You can’t force yourself to have fun. That’s sort of the point of having fun :D.

The innovation of actualism is that you can extend feeling good for way longer than normal and it can eventually be of a much higher level. But the feeling good itself, at first, is not other than the normal or usual feeling good that everybody experiences, including kids (who cannot possibly have learned any such breathing or concentration techniques yet).

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But I don’t know how to be in a “generally good mood” . It is 8:15 a.m. now.

I try saying to myself and feeling it inside of me [ Happy and Feeling good, enjoying and appreciating this moment of being alive ] and that calms me down and give me a relaxed feeling and I can appreciate that peace and relaxation,

When I try to enjoy this moment of being alive, I am not sure what I am suppose to be
enjoying ( hi pelagash or anyone else with specific advise?). I don’t know how to allow naivete in. I feel like I have very strong intent to feel good, I have tried to apply the method almost all day, for several weeks now, but I
don’t know how to do it ( because it is hard for me to “locate” that feeling good ) , or how to remember the last time I felt good. It is embarrassing to say this but I don’t know what emotions are preventing me to feel good. When I read AF stuff, I feel good for a few hours and I can intellectually carry those insights and try to do the method that way.

I am feeling shame and fear of being a failure now, fear of loosing my life, this moment and not be able to be anything, and have no fun and waste my life away with being idle and worry. Fear really pops up a lot especially
early mornings when I am in bed ( I do not want to get out of bed, as a habit, I like to stay
in bed until 8:00 a.m., no matter what time I wake up ( usually around 4-5 am) maybe because I
am afraid of no knowing what to do for 3 hours and also being afraid of feeling tired for the rest of the day, if I got out of bed too early.

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That’s a very common thing so no need to beat yourself up about it! :slightly_smiling_face:

What I would advise is to set all the actualism stuff aside and just do something fun that you like doing. Examples for me would be going out in nature , going for a hike , rock climbing , walking the dogs etc. Socializing with friends can also be great.

And then when you find yourself having fun - remember that feeling! That’s the aim and the goal.

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Thanks claudiu. That’s a great advise.

I go to the park for a few hours, in the morning and 1 hour in the afternoon, and
sit in front of the pond and enjoy the view and maybe intellectually feel good about applying the
method ( almost the whole time there ). I am either at the park, reading AF stuff, sitting on the sofa trying to apply the method, or a little ( 1 hour of a day of surfing on internet ( news and financial information and related activities.)

btw, should I be writing this stuff in my journal, or is it ok here, I am not sure ?

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I like it here - - I think it’s good we have a specific place to talk about feeling good :slight_smile:

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Hey FrankN! I’ll try to describe what helps me feel good, hope it helps. So, many times I noticed that I wasn’t feeling good, but there wasn’t any particular reason why I shouldn’t feel good. It was like I was having some sort of discomfort in my body that came from an unspecified negative emotion, and although at first I tried many hours looking for reasons why I didn’t feel good, thinking things like “Is this fear? Anger? Am I just afraid of death? etc etc” I’ve found out that sometimes you just have to see the emotion, realise that it doesn’t matter what name you give the emotion, and just see it as something preventing you from being happy right now. I sometimes say to myself things like “behind this emotion there’s absolute perfection waiting for me to stop feeling” or something like that which reminds me I should not put so much energy in figuring out why I’m feeling bad, and simply go back to enjoying the moment.

Enjoying the moment can be as simple as looking around wherever you are while you relax your eyeballs and connect with the pleasure of sensing whatever is in front of you. I sometimes think of words like “pleasure” that give me a mental image of a relaxed body, of openness, and it’s like you let this pleasurable sensations invade you from the outside. And then you keep of sensing whatever you’re sensing with that intention of physically enjoying it, no matter how beautiful or ugly whatever you’re looking at is. You see the shapes, you enjoy them, then you move on to the colors, then the way the light is impacting the objects in front of you and whatever detail you can perceive. This usually gets me in a good mood, and everything around me feels safer. I’m doing it right now while I write this and it feels pretty nice.

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I went to the park for a couple of hours, and just came back.
While there I was emotionally “all over the place”, with mostly bad feelings.

But the last 20 minutes, remembering Kuba’s moving toward felicity/innocuity, I
started to feel a little good, and I started to say to myself : [ “I am silly, having fun is sensible”],
then it became fun to look at things around me, and even folding and sensing of the fabric of
my hat, became somewhat enjoyable.

And now, I am reading the rest of Kuba’s journal, it is talking about “me” being ridiculous :smile:

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That is great pelagash!

I am trying this and it seems to be working, this is very good approach, I hope I can practice it more and more to implement it on regular basis! :appreciation:

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It sounds like you do know what feeling good looks like!! Maybe you just temporarily lost track of it

I recommend keeping going in that direction :smile::stuck_out_tongue:

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Thank you henryyyyyyy for your support and helping me come out of the “depth”.
Your encouragements are very helpful and much appreciated.
I agree with what you said, I lost my way to feeling good and I think I can find my way back now.

I am already in much better mood, 3 ( on the scale of -5 to 10 ) and its all thanks to you guys.

:appreciation:

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I went to the park, this afternoon, and was already in a fairly good mood.
And remembering all the stuff that I read today ( thanks henryyyyy ,pelagash, Kuba, others),
I really was able to enjoy and appreciate the moment, and wow, what a difference form 12 hours ago,
I can not believe the difference ( like night and day).

Reading @Kub933 journal today was especially inspiring and helpful, to realize how “I” was causing sorrow, even though there was nothing happening. I guess it is hard to get out of the claws of “me”, when “I” fall in the throes of sorrow (and malice).

@henryyyyyyyyyy helped me get off the ground today, thanks buddy :slight_smile:

@pelagash, wrote an specific example of what he does to get to feeling good ( it is posted above),
that was much needed and appreciated!

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Maybe this is something to start changing?

I recognize a lot of what I’ve done, intermittently, over the years. These intense periods of reading/applying/trying in isolation have always ended when there was some social obligation that I couldn’t weasel my way out of, and I always remember thinking (once I was doing whatever activity my friends dragged me into :wink:) “what the hell did I think I was achieving with all that mental grinding?”

There’s always going to be the “balls to the wall” period at the start of finding actualism where it feels like you’re reading and making connections until your eyes and brain figuratively bleed, but in my experience there also has to be a time when you step away from it, into “real” life, to try it without the training wheels. That’s also when I noticed real, lasting progress. I’m far from done though, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

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Thank you emp.
What you say makes a lot of sense and I have already noticed myself going in that direction,
both internally and externally. :appreciation:

As Kuba said: “The amazing periods seem to be earned by sorting through all sorts of emotional mine-fields”.

I am also making some palpable headway into applying the method and being aware of how I feel from moment to moment ( and I have caught the cunning identity ( “me” ) a few times, hiding behind “this and that” ). That is sort of fun and exciting like playing hide and seek with “myself”, and it makes me laugh :smile: and amazed at the same time.

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How does one reconcile the below statement by Richard, in applying the method?
I am a bit confused :

Richard: Do you not see, upon a closer read-through, that although I definitively say ‘dependent upon no one, no thing, and no event’ you report how you looked at [quote] ‘the trees waving about in the warm summer air’ [endquote] which are clearly both things (‘trees’ and ‘air’) and events (‘looked at’ and ‘waving about’) by any definition of those two words? … Nothing, but nothing (no matter how unpleasant/ detrimental), can ever take away this sheer delight of being alive/being here at this very moment; one could be in … some insalubrious penitentiary somewhere otherwise utterly displeasureable without this peerless perfection … wavering one jot

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Richard’s talking about unconditional vs. conditional enjoyment here.

He’s chiding because @Srinath (I believe) was saying he was enjoying himself because of the swaying of the trees, where actual enjoying is without direction & unconditional.

I think the best way to look at this is in terms of development…

Depending on where one is at, they may need to begin even recognizing their own emotions, or recognizing which emotion is which, or taking responsibility for their own emotions. Then one has to get to feeling good even some of the time, then one can start feeling good as a baseline, and then gradually into feeling excellent, perfect, all or most of the time.

So this chiding wouldn’t be as helpful to someone who is just needing to recognize their emotion, or figure out how to feel good some of the time. When one is trying to trigger a PCE, there’s no problem enjoying the swaying of the trees or a hobby - because that person is still learning how to do that.

Once there’s a more complete enjoyment happening, then this kind of fine-tuning becomes important

And what is important about it is that in the actual world, one’s enjoyment isn’t caused by anything particular… everything is enjoyable. Everything is perfect. So if enjoyment is being caused by observing the swaying trees, then one has more to do to make the enjoyment complete.

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saw this post by henrryy ( thanks henrry )

the actualism approach, as the enjoyment & appreciation of being alive has everything to do with what’s occurring externally… in fact, there is no boundary between the external and the internal, it is all simply happening as it is happening, in this moment. There is no need to direct attention, as the enjoying-appreciating attentiveness is free to go where it will.

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My(frank) Question: then to apply the method, enjoying and appreciating of being alive, you would place your attention on what is happening externally, (while being aware whether you still feel good or not ) and without needing to direct attention?

Is that to say that: that sensuous is very important ( is the first point of contact with actual world) ??

Also do you pay more attention to “being alive” or “this moment” ? I know this sound strange! :smile:

I am asking because it is not clear for me.