Hey Vineeto, thanks for the encouragement and lovely to hear from you.
I don’t know exactly what animated me to write that post in exactly the way I did - I was in a particular state at the time (feeling good but there was something maybe a little bit…enlightenmenty wi the some lofty blissful feelings getting mixed in that I could detect) and it’s not my usual way of writing. It reads a bit haughty in retrospect but I had no self consciousness about writing it at the time!
When in less lofty territory I am currently “practising” the method in the most basic way. It amazes me that it works but it’s also clear that there are a number of blockers that can stop the actualism method from being straightforward and obvious.
The main thing being of course, the nature of feelings themselves. They are very strong and once a particular mood or emotion has come about, it can be (apparently to oneself at the time) very hard to shake. I notice a tendency in myself to either deny (“everything’s fine and life’s good”) or to wallow (clinging harder to the emotion, indulging it, having feeling-led thoughts and fantasies about it all).
I wouldn’t say the feelings are arbitrary though (though in a global sense, yes they are). Following them and listening to them you can kind of feel out their origin, their “message” and the type of worldview that they paint. For example I’ve identified a kind of sorrow I sometimes get that causes me to separate myself from the entire world - usually triggered by major failure. It’s a childish (and fairly likely rooted-in-childhood) kind of “everyone wants to hurt me” sorrowful feeling with a scorched earth “nothing will ever be good enough” bent. I don’t feel it that often - I’m more likely to experience what I’ve identified as it’s counterpart - which is a sense of needing to achieve, needing to overcome difficult circumstances, and needing to win at something in order to fix myself in some way. It’s if/when that plan fails (which it inevitably does) that the isolating sorrow is triggered. Cue a desire to listen to emo music and analyse my life from every possible angle as to how it all went wrong haha.
But indeed, feeling out emotions only gets you so far and the resistance to getting back to feeling good can be strong. I’ve been finding that it really helps to think of “nipping in the bud” even if I am already deeply in a feeling. That may sound dissociative but it’s not actually, it’s more like a cue to stop expressing the feeling basically (and a reminder that it’s not all as deep as the feeling makes it seem, that feeling good is just a step or two away).
This can create a quick touchstone with the present moment and now in a more felicitous form, which comes as a positive surprise and then it’s easy to appreciate that one is suddenly feeling much better.
It’s amazing how this achieves the “end goal” of feeling good now and then I no longer have the urge to do all the analysing (of my life) and intellectualising (about actual freedom) that I subsequently realise I was doing.