Felix: Having done away with dissociation, I’m experiencing a lot more surges of big feelings. I think these feelings have been there underneath the whole time, but I was running from them.
I really got stuck. On one hand, I wanted to succeed, be a great actualist, become actually free etc. On the other hand, the strategies I was employing were anything but about openly feeling.
I was trying to override what I was feeling, to push past it and ignore it (on the way to success, I thought), I was distracting myself and running.
Sometimes I was trying to solve the feelings with real world solutions (i.e. “I need more friends”, “I’m not occupying myself enough”, “I need to do X to feel happy”).
Other times I was distracting and running. Escapism and pleasure seeming so as to not have to deal with negative emotions.
Hi Felix,
At this point it might be helpful to remember that human beings are primed to automatically push negative, unpleasant feelings away.
The trouble is that the energy to push them away is adding to the affective strength of the feeling, i.e. makes it worse. It helps to pay attention to this automatic response and consciously decline rejecting/ pushing away the feeling and just let it be. You will see that this instantly diminishes the strength of the feeling and allow you to get to a reasonable level of feeling good.
Then, and only then, you can have a look at the trigger and sort it out so that the same reaction doesn’t happen again next time in a similar situation. As you said “this moment really is … not something at all to be wasted”.
Felix: Another one was to blame myself. “I’m a terrible person”, “I don’t care about anyone”, “my neurotransmitters are messed up”.
I know from ‘Vineeto’s’ experience, this is really a very persistent habit and well worthwhile extricating yourself from this addiction to blame yourself, especially because it is held in high esteem by a large part of society. Be a rebel in this regard and pat yourself on the back each time you discover and decline such a habitual self-castigation.
Felix: I really put myself in a difficult situation, caught between the real world and the actual world and not flourishing in either.
Just to be accurate, you are not “caught between the real world and the actual world” but rather caught between your old ways and the new way of feeling good come what may.
Felix: Now I can feel what’s underneath without it being mediated by, anything really – even social identity. The feelings are very strong, at times. Very strong fear, for example. At other times, strong sorrow.
Weirdly, even though these feelings are by no means pleasant or easy to feel, it seems it’s a step in the right direction to be feeling in such an unfiltered way. At the same time, when these feelings come up my intent is to get back to feeling good – I do not purposely wallow in feelings of anxiety or whatever. Sometimes I think of Geoffrey saying to himself as a feeling being, “just chill dude”.
Geoffrey is spot on – it’s a more succinct way of expressing what I said above regarding not feeding the feeling by objecting to it.
Felix: That being said, some of these feelings are very sticky. When fear takes over, those feelings push for some kind of action. But other than further anxiety, there isn’t actually much to do but to sit it out (and aim to “tap dance” on top of it – not taking it too seriously lest it ends up in a panic attack).
Fear is powerful – it can easily make me feel like everything I am doing must be wrong. When this happens I am careful not to catastrophise further by going down the route of feeling it’s my fault or worrying about if I never find the actual world etc. It can help to remind myself at these times that the actual world does exist, that I can trust Vineeto and the other actually free people who have done it, and that I am finding my way through the psychic maze and will come out the other side at some point.
I suspect that some of the strong feelings have something to do with control – I’m fighting for my life at times haha. The quotes from Vineeto in Kuba’s diary about naïveté are inspiring. I’ve already proved that a strategic or sudorific or controlled or anxious approach doesn’t work, so I’m interested to see if I can let go… (link)
Before you move on to your next aim, remember that when you fully, i.e. experientially, grasp that ‘I’ am my feelings in lieu of having feelings then you can consciously choose which feeling you rather be, which is, of course, being felicitous and harmless.
As a reminder, here is No. 60’s account how miraculously this worked for him at some point which I posted on 20 January this year (link) –
Respondent: ‘It has taken me a hell of a long time to understand the difference between having feelings and being those feelings. Because I have not clearly understood this, I’ve never quite got the hang of paying attention to feelings without praise or blame, and without notions of innocence and culpability, right and wrong, etc getting in the way.
This makes things very interesting. The moment I regard my ‘self’ as ‘having’ a feeling, I’m split down the middle and there’s a secondary reaction on the part of the social identity (an urge to “do something” about the feeling, which in turn evokes more feelings, and so on). Conversely, if I recognise that I am the feeling, it most often dissolves into thin air – and usually pretty quickly too.
This is great. It’s especially helpful with regard to anger and frustration which have been two of my biggest hurdles to date. Previously, when I caught myself being angry, annoyed or frustrated, identifying and paying attention to this feeling would NOT cause it to disappear. On the contrary, the feeling and the awareness of myself as ‘having’ it would sometimes become like a microphone and amplifier locked into a screaming feedback loop.
I’m really pleased that this is no longer happening. It seems almost too easy’.* [emphasis in original]. (Thursday 28/10/2004 6:55 PM AEST)
Richard: And again there is a reference to how ‘almost too easy’ actualism is. (Richard, AF List, No. 60g, 30 Oct 2005a).
I wish you a lot of fun and success.
Cheers Vineeto