I think I have a rigid definition of feeling good based on my past experiences. I know exactly what it feels like. That being said though, I don’t really know how to get there consistently. I had a great time yesterday with family as I had decided to be fully intimate. And I ended up feeling pretty damn good. Naive. Free-flowing. And even harmless. But then what do I do when I am alone? It feels like I need other people to channel or be this way.
Hi Josef,
If that way of getting to feel good that previously worked in other contexts, doesn’t seem to work on your own, then for a start, it’s probably context dependent, but just as significantly (or maybe more so) being on our own is when we are most likely to experience the essential malice and sorrow of ‘being’.
There is all the usual distractions, but my experience is it is the most challenging situation.
I find going for walks, or simply deciding to enjoy watching content, or posting here, or reading here, or lately dating.
The list goes on.
I also found it really cool to “skip ahead” and contemplate the “main game” too. What is in the way of ‘self’ immolation right now?
The change of question, with it’s “big time” weightiness dug up quite a bit. It is the main game! Richard was adamant that the Actualism method is an in the meantime thing, the main game is living the PCE fulltime. I can’t speak about the difference, but I know enough to have found that line of thinking really different to the line of thinking which is concerned with feeling good.
In theory, one could feel terrible and ‘self’ immolate. I don’t remember anyone reporting it, but it’s best to keep the possibility on the table, or one will set up a bunch of conditions and hoops and essentially delaying thoughts about the “main game”.
If you are in the mood to dig deeper into the “alone” experience, there is also the “half asleep” states which can easily be explored by sitting comfortably and letting oneself drift a bit.
There is also journalling, recording voice notes, writing here…
There are options.
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And to attempt more helpfulness,
Post it all here, as in I find living “in front” of the people on the forum creates a far different experience of thinking, than thinking on my own.
Exploring publically brings in a dimension of experience, and the possibility of others spotting keys to the issues at hand.
Exactly like you did for me the other day.
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Definitely agree with this. I’ve recently started posting a lot more. It’s primarily because a few weeks ago replies by Kuba, Claudiu, and henryyy radically (and instantly) changed my views on love. Like you said, it adds another dimension of experience. I may be going down the wrong track, and someone else’s perspective can shake me out of it.
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Ah I see. You’re able to feel good around others but not when just in your own company.
I think a good way to go about it is to the bottom-up approach instead of top down. What I mean is instead of thinking of it like “how can I feel good when I’m alone?” Look at it like: “I was with family and feeling great. Now I’m alone and not feeling good. When specifically did I stop feeling good? What triggered it?” Then you can learn how you tick in that one specific way , find out one specific reason why you are allowing yourself to feel bad when alone, and then you go from there.
Right, there is so much that would never had occurred to me.
I found it really challenging a few months back to re-read my entire journal. It slowed me down. I saw that I had skipped over some fantastic replies.
One by Claudiu stood out. Infact, I was just pondering on what factors had lead me to decide to install a dating app and deliberately try and find “someone like me”.
I am now dating an incredible woman. Clinical psychologist who is so different to the women I have been with, I am already being influenced to have greater integrity.
Who knows what contributed to that decision?
I’ve been reflecting on and attempting to inhabit near-actual intimacy. As @henryyyyyyyyyy advised, I looked at what I really wanted. And yes, I want that sweet intimacy with everyone. And not only that, I notice when I am felicitous and innocuous, this extends to things/places/and even this moment. I’ve been having small tastes of this over the weekend. It’s like, I am dynamic and happy as a way of being, so I project it onto whatever is in my current purview. I am not affectively involved and yet I am involved. With my partner however, I am still struggling with this. And love is the cause. The expectations of love still hijack my mind and make me angry. I can see that the energy I am giving this person is lopsided compared to the other people/events/things in my life. But I can definitely see a better option now. The two spectrums of love are obsession vs. withdrawal. But actual intimacy is both in a way (actively involved, affectively detached), and yet orthogonal to both. It’s not in the middle. That being said, I have fears about what will remain when I cannot connect with “love” anymore. It’s like, we have a bonding of misery/suffering on some level and being happy all the time will cause a loss of something.
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Sounds pretty awesome! I enjoyed reading this post. As to what will be left without love you have given it away already 
(quoted above)
I relate to this one for sure, I have felt this many times towards @Sonyaxx, like a need to maintain that sorrowful bond, a sense that in some way this is me looking after her and that I cannot abandon her (abandon the bond of suffering). Kinda fucked up when you think about it 
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Hi @Josef. It seems I have the opposite situation to you. I am cool alone and other people seem to disrupt my felicity/EE.
I am guilty of this too with my wife…and that is the ultimate most masochistic connection I have with my kids. A bond of sorrow…
Alright so my girlfriend got mad at me for some stupid reason earlier in the week, and this brought up all sorts of fear and anger and panic. But I stayed with it (neither expressed nor repressed), didn’t try to patch things up with love as I would’ve done previously. It took 2 days, but eventually I had sort of an emotional release. It seems if you hold a feeling in a trance (put it in a bind) for long enough, it can no longer sustain itself. It’s like my amygdala tapped out and I was catapulted into an experience of incredible purity. Not a PCE, as I was still around, but definitely in EE territory. Here is what I wrote when I was having it (for some context, I was on a zoom call with a group):
My live documentation of my purity experience. Very high sensuousness awareness. These people are talking about self-esteem and I literally couldn’t give a shit because it means so little to me atm. I feel so good it’s unreal. I’m very excited though. I’m supposed to meditate but I don’t want to. I feel relationship concerns at the very edge of my periphery. Lots of stillness. It honestly reminds me of being on drugs. Still have remnants of fear from what’s been going on these past few days. But honestly, this is just so above it all. I stared at some image of the mountains for like 10 minutes while the meditation was going on. To be honest, meditation feels like the opposite of what this experience is.
The fear is that I won’t be able to access this again. But it is also always available.
I had forgotten how incredible experiences like this can really be. Words cannot explain it.
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I have a query which I’m hoping some actualism method adepts will have some insight on.
When I resolve to doing the actualism method, I become so preoccupied with it that I feel like I cannot do other activities in my life unless I am feeling good. Moreover, Richard and geoffrey have stated that the method requires no cognitive function but I have not found this to be the case. I have to spend significant cognitive resources to figure out how I feel, and why. Perhaps my intent is not strong enough to just auto-feel good whenever I notice I’ve started feeling bad?
Am I understanding correctly that the difficulty you’re having is in discerning what your current-time mood is?
If it’s difficult to tell, it’s possible that there may be some dissociation running which conceals your emotions. If this is the case, you’ll have to spend some time determining the reason for the dissociation before the emotions themselves will be obvious. Most often in my experience dissociation only happens when something especially scary is/was happening on the emotional spectrum.
I think a huge part of this is to do with habituation, it’s like any other skill. Initially it takes cognitive engagement to get the thing going, but eventually it goes on autopilot, then you stack another layer on and eventually that does itself also, then the whole thing gets more refined etc.
For me eventually it got to a point where I cannot help but be affectively aware each moment again and also I cannot help but apply attentiveness any time some construct of the ‘inner world’ starts to wreak havoc. I actually tried this a month ago or so, to stop ‘doing actualist stuff’ to ‘no longer try’ and nothing changed
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Thanks for the replies. There is definitely some dissociation going on, because I don’t really know accurately how I’m feeling anymore. There seems to be this fog of dullness, apathy, and drudgery. I wonder whether this has to do with being well-settled in a romantic relationship with it’s associated loss of autonomy, or with the drudgery of daily 9-5 which seems to rob me of my time completely. Going to continue being sincere and discover what is making up this fog.
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Hi @Josef,
At times with depression and anxiety I have had such states. Also, since recovering, I have had relapses of low mood that have definitely been similar. Do you think you have a persistent low mood or anxiety?
What I noticed eventually, was that I was always waiting for some external circumstances or an external stimulus to change things for me. Blaming the physical circumstances around me for causing my emotional distress, having a stressful job due to debts, difficult relationship, 3 young kids, group of friends broken up, ill parent and one deceased and whatever else I could add to my list of why I wasn’t able to be happy.
Now I am having regular felicity and none of these conditions have changed, if anything the financial situation in the UK has made things worse for me. It is definitely an aspect of settling into a particular mindset. However, one has to do other things like get back to a better normal baseline first. Better sleep routine, diet and exercise all help.
I still have difficulty when multiple stressors occur or strong emotional events but things are getting better in the day to day perspective.
Being sincere will definitely help though, in every drop down in mood or when in a more hedonistic high, sincerity and current time awareness are the first things to go out the window.
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This was very helpful. For me right now it’s not anxiety but rather depression. The depression is usually a result of being very hard on myself. Hating myself for failed potential, imagining myself or my life not as it is right now. I don’t want to get into specifics, but that’s kind of the theme right now. It’s difficult to drop this pattern, I’m feeling my way through it currently. Also like you said, I’m getting my house in order with good diet, exercise, and maintaining a good sleep/work routine.
What is it that allows felicity to arise when things are not going according to plan? Do you not take your identity/life circumstances so seriously? With major decisions like home buying or getting married, I have found that I become very serious and the stakes are sky high.
I often tried to understand why I experienced depression and anxiety. I think there are a lot of variables that are hard to pinpoint.
I do think having this extremely harsh internal critic increases the risk of getting it and making recovery harder. I noticed people who I met who recovered quicker seemed to either have very strong religious or spiritual beliefs or not have as harsh a critical internal voice.
My friend who never recovered who introduced me to AF had even more insanely harsh critical internal thoughts. Every social encounter for him he would worry about his facial expressions, how he was standing or walking or talking. There was no peace for him.
If I look at how I have been as a child, I had a very strong sorrowful, nostalgic but also fearful nature. In an aggressive, low empathy family (excluding my mum).
That harsh critic can then latch on to everything, attack yourself for failing your potential, for not being as fit as you were at one point for example, attack myself for being fearful and weak. It was like it could find perpetual ammunition to maintain that feeling cycle.
So many times over the depression period I would lament about the loss of my youth and potential to depression and would just feed that cycle of lamenting without enacting any meaningful change. Feel depressed about having been depressed so long to maintain being depressed.
I guess experientially I have gone through enough terrible things to know you can come through the other side. Like with love, until you have experienced it you can’t write is off as an option but once you experientially acknowledge the good and the bad of that you can make a more sensible choice.
I have had a terrible accident. I have suffered depression and anxiety. I have lost family and friends. When the dust settles the same opportunity…the same question…how do I want to spend this moment I am alive is still pertinent. There is always another opportunity, its not a big deal. This depressed mindset makes every such a big deal and such life or death seriousness.
There is no plan, there is no way that anything needs to be. I definitely have learned not to take my identity and life so serious, or that there is a solution to every problem. Emotionally I was too embarrassed to ask for help, but now if something is going wrong I reach out to those in ny network for help, being it to help childmind or borrow money or something. Then I will help those that I can as well.
I have made major decisions too and have made niave mistakes but whatever outcome happens you can still learn from your choices and make new ones. I find depressions lends itself to a type of unrealistic catastrophic thinking. Even if I lose my house and can’t keep up with the mortgage, i will find somewhere new to live.
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Was listening to “Virtual Freedom” DVD. It sparked something in me to get back on the horse, so to speak. Made me realize that I really do want to become unconditionally happy and harmless. So it’s time for me to get off my ass and investigate this perpetual dullness I’ve been experiencing over the last few weeks.
I am feeling pretty dull. But also deep down I am angry. A lot of my anger is directed at myself:
“why are you so dull, many years ago you use to be lively and energetic”
“why are you feeling bad, you should be feeling good!”
Like @son_of_bob stated above, a harsh inner critic makes one’s life a living hell. I am kind of splitting myself here. Am I not the one being hateful/aggressive towards myself? Why not give myself a wide berth? Why not be totally kind to myself? What will happen if I stop being harsh to myself? What if I relax?
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An investigation that began last night and continued through the morning has culminated. I started with the anger/resentment I was feeling. I was dissociated from it as I was seeing it as “this anger arises and makes me hate myself”. It took me some time to unsplit and acknowledge that I am the one being hateful/angry/resentful. I felt on some level this was related to my relationship/partner. But how? It is because in the pursuit, acquisition, and subsequent maintenance of loving feelings (approval, safety, security), I have taken on my partner’s ethics/values and now mirror her disapproval of me through my own self-anger and hatred. Which got me thinking about how this approval/disapproval structure is a guaranteed road to malice. And that’s what love is, isn’t it? Once yearns for a constant reification of oneself as someone of value. I am important and someone sees me. These might be some of the best feelings in the world. But how can another person guarantee that? They are human, and hence such a relation is bound to be unstable.
With that out of the way, I turned my eyes to feeling good. I have been experiencing tremendous resistance to feeling good over the past few months. So much so that I had given up entirely. Confronting it, I realize that I don’t want to. Why? Because it feels unsafe. The only happiness I should have should be within the bounds of the relationship. Happiness from work or other material pursuits is fine, but feeling good as we know it in actualism feels “illegal”. I must continually worry about maintaining my loving relationship, and if I choose to be happy, I will “let the shoe drop”, so to speak.
The investigation is ongoing.
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