It’s helpful to hear you relate and understand. I’d love for the clarity of a PCE as an orienting compass, so I will keep pointing myself in that direction.
The instruction is simple but it really is quite challenging in practice, in that the internal emotional world can be viscerally painful. I’m a pretty sensitive person prone to being easily overwhelmed (this is an unhappy and uncomfortable existence, which is why I started seeking out a better way of living in the first place). I really don’t like pain, so often when something in my psyche hurts to look at, I will run away from the challenge. However, I find it hard to return to “feeling good” without direct acknowledgment of whatever it is standing in the way of that, so trying to numb and run away from the feeling I don’t like doesn’t help me.
It’s like there’s this meta-layer of fear of my own psyche. The feelings themselves (grief, fear) can be intense, but they are often somatic and don’t last too long without the fuel of ongoing thought, and even amidst grief or fear I can watch what’s happening in my body and see where I am tensing in resistance to the feelings, which often hurts more than the feeling itself. What also often hurts more than the feeling is the anticipation that the feeling will be bad and painful, the resistance to experiencing it and the desire to escape. I can see that this dread is pointless because it just adds unnecessary pain to the necessary pain.
It takes some real work to unlearn the resistances and avoidances I’ve spent a lifetime leaning on. I can also see why it might be hard for people to do this without a clear PCE for reference; the glimpses of peace I get are incredibly nice, but the addictive, dopaminergic pleasure derived from the habits I use to escape myself is much more accessible, and offers a buzzier thrill. But it doesn’t feel real or complete in the way that the peace feels. I think it might take me some time to break my addictions but the more I observe them clearly, the more they start to fall away on their own.