Let me first say it's been rough. After the initial enthousiasm of having the opportunity to work through a fear wanes, I quickly descended into old patterns. It is amazing not only how much these patterns influence me behaviorally -- my voice dissapears, I feel like I constantly have to swallow, muscles tighten, selfawareness increases -- but also how many many thoughts are present. I meditate daily, but I had forgotten how easily you can mistake your thoughts for reality. And that was indeed what happened, for days on end.
The most frustrating thing to me is having the knowledge that your thoughts are unproductive and self-destructive and that the only action necessary to feel better is to see through that, but not succeeding in that very perception. This knowing but not succeeding further fuels the frustration... and thus it spirals viciously. A recurring pattern for me. The answer to this is that there is no answer. You just accept. It's still a lesson I need repeated it seems....
Now, because of some other emotional issues, I was already experiencing high and lows. What surprised me is how fast it can swing between them (a friend of mine said I had PMS :) ) sometimes switching around in half a day.
Waking today, I felt again cognitively besieged. Well, at that point, the thing is you are not aware of that. Your thoughts are your reality at that point.
The ego can be so tricky. For example if your start thinking that you want to let go of an emotion of fear, you tell yourself that's no use because you will still experience the fear and so you will still experience all the bad consequences. Of course, this in itself is also fear -- the very same one, in fact -- but you don't realize that at that moment.
Another maybe more concrete example, let's say you fear losing the validation of a person. So you tell yourself that you have to stop wanting that validation, because that will make your interaction with the person go a better... which is actually the same motivation, because the fact that you want the interaction to go better, means you need their validation.
Awareness and acceptance. It's always these two. Simple concepts, but sometimes so difficult to implement... (Or is that belief in itself making it difficult for me? :) )
Let's get back to my story. So this morning it was an Italian traffic jam in my mind. I was frantically applying all the mental solutions I knew, to no avail. I sat down and meditated three times as long as I normally do, but I slipped off 95% of the time. I didn't think I succeeded, until I noticed when I left that I still felt scared, but I actually felt good about that. I know that's a good place to be. So I just left myself there.
Now I was going to toilet (always an excellent point for reflection :) ) and I noticed how much more freedom I felt. As soon as I became aware of that I felt such an incredibly intense feeling of peace and freedom, that it was way above my normal happiness -- and I'm already a very happy dude. I breathed it in gratefully with big, long breaths.
But it just blows me off my feet how fast this changed from one extreme of being ripped apart by directionless mind chaos, to the other extreme of utter unbounded bliss. Come on, in two hours, such a swing???
I wonder if this is normal or if my growing experience is just increasing my awareness of subtle changes, as is the case when achieving expertise in a subject. And then they say women have it even more! Poor girls, you have my honest sympathy ;)
Wim
