Thanks for your reply Vineeto - I appreciate it must be hard to track the inner workings of a feeling being and what’s happening but I appreciate your efforts to understand and help.
I have actually been finding this knot thing incredibly helpful. I mean it’s painful/has the essence of suffering but being “stuck” in this way is inviting progress as I deeply ask myself what it’s all about.
I think my description of going back to being a beginner may create the impression I have 600 layers of unexplored identity layers. Whereas i don’t think that’s the case.
As I feel throughout the day I’m mostly always aware of what I’m feeling. It might be anxiety, it might be boredom. The problem is that the “pain” point that these feelings create is not being relieved, but rather coalescing into a sum of its parts - a “pain” identity of feeling like I’m always carrying this heavy weight around or have my hand in a hot plate.
I’ve been going deeper and deeper into this. Why am I always feeling some version of bad? What would it take me to not feel this way?
This has been taking me into naïveté. Its effect is amazing…this is the path forward I think. As an identity, I’ve given myself nowhere to go so to speak - all the usual doors to escape are locked because I know that any of the usual human pathways I could take are mere repetitions of the same old cycles, that they wont work, that nothing will ever be as “I” want it. I’ve tried to dominate myself, to dominate life - and that has “brought me to my knees in a sense” - it’s not going to ever happen like that.
All I know each moment again is that I want to feel good, that I don’t want to feel bad, and naïveté is helping me find this….its not possible to define what it is. But it’s what is manifest when I am naive.
So indeed, I’ve been applying “emergency naïveté” so to speak haha. Having no other option, I have had to discover naïveté for myself -the hard way, and against my natural inclinations which are anything but that.
I came to the dog park tonight and just sat there, and felt this pain; this ennui; this Duḥkha. The pain of being, the resentment for being alive itself. And I just had enough, I asked what it would be like if I didn’t feel this. Can I put this burning coal in my hand down.
It’s hard to say how things changed but they did.
- Neurochemically, in that I felt a lot better
- Physically, in that my nervous system relaxed and some tears came up as a natural consequence of that
- Perceptually, in that the dog park turned into a wide wondrous plain that could have been in an exotic place like Africa or on a distant planet
It’s continuing now and I’m seeing things so differently. It’s not a question of my beliefs in this moment or that about this or that topic. It’s more like my whole belief in myself, and where I am. It’s like I change to seeing with a universal lens, not a self-centric/maligned egocentric one.
On the other side of me and my problems there is this total wonder, and a sense of being anywhere/when.
So indeed all these problems I’ve described - the identity making to impossible, feeling trapped, doing everything right but everything being wrong …it seems to be my way into naïveté.
Stuff is opening up. I see a way forward, and an open door.