This week, I had the experiential understanding of why it’s only useful to investigate when you’re feeling good. It all started with problems at work. I have to do this really big project on my own, and after I showed some stuff I wrote to my boss, he basically told me to redo everything. In that moment, I started experiencing tremendous fear, resentment and a feeling of impotence that led to procrastination for many days, which in turn led to feeling guilty and really afraid. I was like a cornered animal, all I could think about was how to get away from this situation (quitting was the only option I could think about lol). Of course, I tried to investigate, read about peasant mentality on the Actual Freedom Trust website and in the forum, and it helped me to feel better for a few hours, but then I would feel afraid again. I said then, ok, ‘let’s not fight the feeling, I am the feeling’, and I would explore being this intense fear, but I still couldn’t go back to feeling good entirely.
One night, I almost couldn’t sleep. I felt like Louis XVI waiting for the guillotine in the public square (I’m laughing now thinking about it, so silly, but it felt so real in the moment 
). It wasn’t until I woke up the next morning that I could see how silly it all was, how I was not only ruining the moment, but that I was, essentially, a distortion. When I feel bad, I stain it all with my ‘badness’, and turn into what feels like a bad trip. By being fear, I take everything near me and distort it into something terrible: my thoughts, others, and the world at large. And then I understood why there’s absolutely no use in investigating while feeling bad. This brain’s ability to think and asses a situation clearly gets completely impaired when I am there as bad feelings. I’m like a swirling vortex that infuses whatever I touch with the qualities of the feelings I am being.
Pro tip for myself: First, you do everything you can to go back to feeling good, and then you investigate. If not, you’re just going to experience distorted thoughts and images (created by you), and it will end nowhere.
Seeing myself in action and seeing what me being here does to this body in such a clear way led to feeling better really fast. It was like waking up from a bad dream, except I was the bad dream lol. Feeling better, suddenly I could see much more clearly the beliefs that were operating the days before. The peasant mentality, the perfectionism, the belief that if I make a mistake, I am worthless. The non-factual conclusions about the world, and about life. And suddenly started to truly feel good again. Today, I actually enjoyed working, and using my brain to try to decipher how to do this project. And while feeling good, I am actually going back to these bad feelings I had, because I find it much better to see the silliness in them while feeling good. When I feel bad, I truly cannot see the silliness in an emotion, it’s crazy how much I believe the distortions created by ‘me’.
Anyway, I want to end this post by saying how much I appreciate the actulist method, and being able to read about all of your discoveries guys. Imagine the days I would have spent feeling terrible had I not had the tools the AFT and your post provide. And the choices I would have made if I had continued to feel bad! Who knows. People I talked to when feeling bad these last couple of days are now like “Hey, how’s everything going? 
” and I’m like ‘Oh I feel great now, please forget everything I said ’