Seeing this, the following option opens up:
Well, if I am what’s making work feel unpleasant, shouldn’t I stop doing what I am currently doing?
That seems like the sensible thing to do.
You’re telling me I was the thing prevening work from being fun all this time??
…Yeah, mate!
Yeah, and it can be fun to find the deep instinctual roots (like fear of death, fear of being alone, fear of madness) underneath a domestic conflict that seems superficial at first. If 'm upset by something and it doesn’t go away easily after seeing the apparent silliness of it, there’s definitely something worth digging into.
I’ve been surprised a few times by this lately. I won’t bore you with the details, but dealing with someone suffering from dementia hits some interesting triggers. The interesting thing is, when I can trace those feelings to their deepest root (and it’s an actual process of discovery, not an intellectual shortcut), it’s surprisingly freeing.
Obviously the deep passions are still there waiting to be activated again, but seeing how a trivial event has stirred them into action, it’s like, wow, that’s surprising, that’s interesting! I’ve been surprised to find how much relief can follow from just seeing that (as well as boosting my motivation to go all the way).
Pondering on fictional problems and feeling anxiety about things that never come to be (Zen master wannabe style):
Emotions create problems
and offer themselves as solutions;
To be aware of this is to see the silliness of it all.
I create problems
and offer myself as the solution;
To be aware of this is to see the silliness of it all.
Most mornings, I feel a bit of anxiety before work. I start to fantasize that somehow, something I did was wrong, and I begin to fear receiving a message from either my boss or the manager saying I’m fired or something—lol. Of course, there’s no evidence that anything should be wrong; it all stems from a feeling. Recognizing the silliness of feeling anxious for no apparent reason helps diminish the feeling, but it does take a while to fade some days. Pondering this today, I realized that I believe in emotions. I can tell myself ‘emotions are not facts,’ but the truth is, I do believe them. I think this stems from my spiritualist years, when ‘having a hunch’ about something or someone was actually considered a valuable thing, almost like a superpower. In my early 20s, I had a fascination with intuitive characters and sought to develop that part of myself. It’s also been a big part of my personality to ‘see people’s true intentions’ or ‘see them for who they truly are.’ I now see that much of that is about trusting what I feel as if it were a fact, meaning feeling has been my compass in life, especially when dealing with people and possible future events.
How silly.
Exploring anxiety, I’m seeing for the first time how trust is enmeshed in the emotion; the moment you stop trusting fear or anxiety, they lose most of its power. Like, right now, seeing this, my anxiety went from a 6 to a 1 in a second.
Haha, the elegance of those verses…
I’ve been wanting to reply to this for a few days but I’ve been in the process of resolving this experientially for myself.
I can relate to this sense in which I believe in my feelings. Affective phenomena have this way of capturing attention completely, they carry this power to dictate themselves as the truth. It makes sense as they are there to motivate behaviour.
What I have found though is that it is possible to eventually start seeing through the deception, to get to a point where you are no longer a believer, where you see that a feeling is not a fact.
I have found that it takes a persistent and diligent attentiveness applied over a period of time to get to this point, the kind of attentiveness that is described in the ASA article on the AFT.
At first when a new issue surfaces it’s this big and complex psychological + psychic structure. At this point one is likely ‘sold’ on the drama, both the feeler and the thinker are weaving the deception. But attentiveness is applied and eventually this thing gets chipped away until only raw affect remains.
Then it gets to this interesting point where you no longer have any ‘good reason’ (social identity) to feel a particular way but that feeling is certainly still there, and it commands attention, it places itself as the truth.
I think this is the trickiest part of any exploration because there is no longer any formula, and this raw affect is quite intense to experience, this is the deep sea diving stage.
What I have found though is that at this point I do 2 things. 1 - I allow myself to ‘be’ that feeling fully, no longer engaging in any escapism or distraction. 2 - I simply apply this persistent and diligent attentiveness, this is experiencing ‘myself’ at the very core of ‘being’.
Now if I can stick with it (even though at first it can seem like nothing is happening) I notice that the deception eventually gets exposed.
It’s like I am experiencing this raw affect on one hand whilst simultaneously being aware of the facts of the situation, now it’s not ‘me’ being aware of the facts, the brain does this automatically, ‘I’ only focus on experiencing ‘myself’ fully.
Sooner or later something clicks, and the affective phenomena are seen with clarity to be a blind and crude response, ie it has nothing to do with facts.
This can be extremely freeing at times, and sometimes it goes all the way through to a point where I see that all of the dramas that ‘I’ have suffered literally rest on nothing - a feeling is not a fact.
It’s also fascinating to contemplate that all of reality is supported by this very same deception, which means it also rests on absolutely nothing, and this is possible to see first hand.
Some more observations from how this has played out for me so far. I have noticed that certain dramas (especially the persistent ones) have remained simply because I could not help but feel a certain way in certain situations.
So for example if I am afraid of public speaking, the drama at core is sustained by the fact that each time I find myself in such a situation there is an automatic affective response. Once I am flooded with the fear then all the reasons/justifications for why it is so begin to appear, and then come the reactionary responses etc.
The problem is that all the tried and true methods only gloss over the top and fail to address this fundamental problem. Even trying to investigate beliefs can have one spinning around in a circle, you just cannot deny the strength of the emotion which has been blindly activated and continues to do so each time a similar event takes place, or even just the thought of it comes up.
The cool thing I am observing is that when I apply the kind of attentiveness described in my previous post, eventually that automatic affective response is no longer activated, it kind of wears itself out, because I have felt all there is to it and seen first hand that all is well regardless, so all in all it is no longer necessary.
Now a super cool thing happens when I find myself in a situation where that affective response is no longer activated. This blind affective response was the core building block of the entire drama, which means without it the rest of the drama has nothing to rest upon, it disappears.
So all in all it is feeling good which changes things about.