Another thing I found instrumental was the following quote from Vineeto upon Richard’s death, which I recently reread:
Vineeto: Allow any affective energy of shock or sadness to transform and express itself as a deep and abiding appreciation - for Richard’s discovery and words, for the fact that an actual freedom is available now - and further a deep and abiding appreciation for the purity and perfection that exists everywhere around you, both in the natural world (the Four Affect-Free States of Matter) and in human beings including your own flesh-and-blood body (as a potential, apparent in your and other people’s kindness, brought to the fore by your own deep and ongoing appreciation of each person you come in contact with).
The above made me realise that my attempted object of appreciation was not this moment (including other people, the world around me), but rather an ethereal/non-existent/imagined target of projected perfection - a hope of the actual world that repeatedly never eventuated (and thus reinforced a sense of disappointment and failure which kept me perpetually locked out of
feeling good).
In other words, I saw after reading Vineeto’s words that what was required and POSSIBLE was a total relational change between me and “my life” via this moment - in other words a totally down-to-earth and genuine appreciation for being alive, rather than an imagined one. Like I said, now having more of a balanced life (one that would typically give a feeling being a sense of general enjoyment and stability, compared to, say, a tumultuous and chaotic one) seems to have made this step a lot easier than it was before.