Hunterad's journal

[hunterad]

@Vineeto

Chrono has just posted a report (link ) that he was experiencing a similar fear of not being likeable and found other feelings lurking beneath that. It may give you some helpful or even applicable pointers.

Yes I definitely have been seeing the connection between my fear of not being likeable with the knowledge that i have harmfulness hidden within me. The more I channel energy into happiness and harmlessness the less I feel like I have to fear from others, it leads to a positive reinforcement loop… whereas when I hide and ‘nurse’ harmful feelings the opposite happens.

I think this is a phenomena I’ve been aware of, but the recognition of what point in this ‘loop’ I can actually make changes is something that’s never fully sunk in. The point where I can actually make changes is in being happy and harmless… which brings me to some of the recent forum happenings that have inspired me to post again:

@geoffrey

As long as you find yourself looking for the door that is tiny (the recipe, the formula, the secret sauce, the psychic gun, the pill, the trick), you’re nowhere near and should instead walk the path.
As long as you find the path narrow, arduous, vanishing, confusing, instead of wide and wondrous as it is, you’re not walking it, you are merely lost in the woods nearby - and should instead find it in yourself to take a first clear step in the right direction, such as making a commitment to happiness and harmlessness.

The door is wide as the universe, just as the path is by imitation.
When one knows what it is one wants, and when one knows what it is one must sacrifice, then only the sensible action remains.

@Kub933

Which is to say that at the core of it there is no pre-set list of conditions which ‘I’ have to tick off as the ‘doer’ before felicity and innocuity is granted to ‘me’ - this is completely the wrong paradigm. It pre-supposes that felicity and innocuity is something that is granted as an end result of some kind of deterministic domino effect, all the while ‘I’ remain passive, waiting.

@Kub933

So instead what happens is that ‘I’ choose to ‘be’ the felicitous and innocuous feelings instead of ‘being’ the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ feelings. Then ‘I’ am no longer operating from the back-seat, ‘I’ am directly and actively involved in how ‘I’ am experiencing this moment of being alive.
Of course as you mentioned this can only work if ‘I’ first fully acknowledge that ‘I’ am ‘my’ feelings, which means that no feelings can be repressed, suppressed or dissociated from.

@Vineeto

You put it well – this is the difference between actively taken life into your hands and changing yourself fundamentally, rather than following the reward/ punishment template and therefore passively wait for an authority, ‘mother nature’, karma or some supernatural force/ entity to capriciously dish out the rewards. In fact, this is one big difference between the straight and narrow path and the wide and wondrous path.

I find myself getting stuck into what Kub described with conditions to check off or actions to take that will lead to somehow receiving happy and harmlessness, as opposed to just being happy and harmless. It’s interesting how even in the very moment of trying to get back to feeling good I do this.

Last week some friends of my girlfriend came to visit who I’ve never fully gotten comfortable with, they still seem like ‘her friends’ not mine. In the moment I was (or told myself I was) trying so hard to be happy and harmless, all the while thinking to myself about how we didn’t really connect, how they were different from me, how nothing I was saying was ‘landing’, how nothing I was doing was ‘working’ to put them at ease or connect.

I was also watching the tightness in my chest, the hesitancy and nervousness in my words, the supressed resentment in my thoughts, thinking to myself ‘how do I fix this?’ Very much a case of not really seeing my feelings as being me, seeing my feelings instead as something that I “know better” than.

The difference between this and actually seeing that I am my feelings and choosing to be another way is huge experientially yet somehow hard for me to grasp conceptually. I think the key that helped me to grasp it was reading the above exchange between Kub and Vineeto, and recognizing how even in that moment where I thought I was trying to apply the actualism method, I was still within that ‘reward/punishment template’.

To be even more specific, I think the exact ‘realization’ which helped me switch over was to realize that I could actually choose to enjoy the experience right now and that would be the reward in and of itself, rather than having in mind the reward as the way that the relationship dynamic would improve if I dealt with the annoying feelings I was experiencing.

That realization led to coming directly face to face with my own objections to enjoying life in that situation, at which point I realized how I was being silly to have those objections because they were self-evidently making my life and everyone else’s life worse, and got back to feeling good. The path is not hard to find it’s just I don’t want to walk down it, but seeing this really clearly is often enough to change my mind, especially when the triviality of my highly specific reasons for not wanting to is illuminated.