Hey Vineeto,
I think there is some huge blockage going on here.
I’m investigating this deeply atm.
The moment to moment awareness of being alive has never been the problem, in the sense that I am aware a lot of the time.
However I’m all the time feeling this tightness, like
a physical pain (psychosomatic of course) - some kind of knot of emotional pain which I’m all the time avoiding.
Through awareness the last couple of days I am feeling deeper into this knot. I am feeling more resentment than I knew I had there (perhaps my ambition to feel good and succeed in that way led to a denial of pain).
Another factor is some traumatic stuff that happened - both as a kid and then a few years ago which is when the burnout arose.
I think it caused me to shut down emotionally. I saw a therapist once about a year ago and she said I had a tendency to not be empathetic about what i was feeling, almost like I was staying purely in an intellectual zone. I spoke with one of the basically actually free guys recently and they said they thought I was “downplaying” what I was feeling.
So it’s like this sense of being shutdown, of not being open or delicate, of having a very hard outer shell - almost impenetrable. All the while this sense of disconnection has made it very hard to make sensible life choices or even relate in a normal human way to other people. Like having no intuition for what’s good or right, somewhat like being “off kilter”, or misfiring/malfunctioning (the recent event with that post from 2 years ago being an example of that).
And though aware “all the time”, my awareness does not take me into this pain. I avoid and distract all the time. Like feeling what there is to feel down there will somehow ruin me or something.
This is totally subconscious, because of course as an actualist I’ve wanted to feel what I’m feeling etc and do all the right stuff. But it’s been a cunning cat or mouse game where I’m always trying but not succeeding, wanting to feel good whilst being dragged in the opposite direction.
There’s been more and more triggers lately where I’ve seen a huge internal storm raging under the surface. It doesn’t get expressed outwardly at all, and again it’s like it’s got a lid on it. Like I’m not “allowed” to feel or express what I’m feeling. It’s often not appropriate to the situation. Not sure if this comes from when I was a kid…I was pretty sensitive but would always get harshly punished for what I was feeling.
But now it’s like I can’t run any longer - clearly what I’m doing isn’t working. I think I need to get close to what this is.
At first it’s like there is nothing there, except that kind of physical knot. But the more awareness I apply (with some sense of friendliness or empathy) the more it grows. I’ve found myself starting to tear up a bit and stuff like that when I do it and it does feel good, like the release of a pressure valve.
It’s like I need to allow myself to truly feel. I’m cut off from what’s there…the more I am friendly with myself and caring the more these feelings are seeming to open up.