Felix: Especially with the burnout it doesn’t even feel like feelings it feels more like a “state”, and it’s unpleasant.
Kuba: When I read this something stood out for me and I wonder if it may be what is happening for you. I remember when I was deep into Vipassana I eventually got to a point where I no longer experienced feelings as affective phenomena but rather only as physical sensations
Initially I thought this was a good sign, some kind of progress towards freedom from them. But later on I realised that it only made things worse, because it cemented the feelings as something that was now unreachable/unchangeable. For how could ‘I’ change a physical symptom, it’s not like ‘I’ can stop feeling pain or tell ‘my’ heart to slow down by choice.
Years later when I began applying the actualism method I had to unravel this mess. I remember symptoms of feeling tight, tired, uncomfortable, painful etc. It was like ‘my’ whole body was infused with a disease. I remember experiencing daily these episodes of intense ‘physical discomfort’, later on these turned out to be affectively rooted though.
The tip that allowed me to deal with this thing was @claudiu encouraging me to find the ‘affective flavour’ of the feeling. That instead of seeing only the physical symptom I could ‘taste’ that unique flavour of the emotion that was behind it (even though at the beginning it seemed the emotion was not there). What I did was develop the willingness to ‘taste’ and then fully ‘live’ the emotions which were at the root of this ‘physical discomfort’.
It took a while of consistently chipping away like this (at times this was quite intense too) but eventually they disappeared completely and same for any symptoms of burn out like constant tiredness, feeling painful, tight etc.
Hi Kuba,
What a fascinating story and a brilliant description of it!
It strongly reminds me of Richard’s article about ‘Dissociation and Trauma’, for example –
• [Richard]: ‘… ‘disassociation’, or ‘disassociative identity disorder’ are dissociative reactions or attempts to escape from excessive trauma tension and anxiety by separating off parts of personality function from the rest of cognition as an attempt to isolate something that arouses anxiety and gain distance from it. For example, in everyday life, mild and temporary dissociation, sometimes hard to distinguish from repression and isolation, is a relatively common and normal device used to escape from severe emotional tension and anxiety. Temporary episodes of transient estrangement, depersonalisation and derealisation are often experienced by normal persons when they first feel the initial impact of bad news, for instance. Everything suddenly looks strange and different; things seem unnatural and distant; events can be indistinct and vaporous; often the person feels that they themselves are unreal and everything takes on a dream-like quality’. (Richard, List B, No. 14g, 10 Dec 2000).
Your description added another aspect to it – with deliberate dissociation (Eastern spiritual meditation) one creates a traumatic state which is very hard to escape from, once the dissociation has been successful. This is one of the awful side-effects of Eastern spirituality.
I remember Claudiu talking about how difficult it was to extract himself from the effects of intensely practicing Dharma Overground meditation. Nobody who is promoting this stuff ever thinks of the consequences and ramifications their ‘good deed’ inflict on people.
Thank you for providing this report how you reversed the detrimental side-effects of such spiritual practice … and now demonstrate the experiential success of the Third Alternative. 
Cheers Vineeto