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April 1 - April 9, 2022
This dimension of the ego actually fears us feeling utterly wonderful and doing awesome things, because the more wonderful we feel and the more awesomeness we accomplish, the harder it is to feel alienated, separate, apart-from-the-whole.
a strategy designed long ago by your child mind to get you something,
The thing about guilt is that most of us continue to use it long after its value expires. There's no automatic alarm bell that goes off when we become able to fend for ourselves that alerts us: “Now is the time to stop mirroring the emotional dysfunctions of your family; continuing to make yourself feel bad for your ‘sins’ will no longer garner the sympathy of your caretakers, it will only drain you of energy and eventually sap you of the will to live.” And even if there was such an alarm, how could it possibly interrupt such an ingrained habit?
write out “the rules” of your day-to-day feelings and behavior in no uncertain terms, as if you were programming an android to have the same hang-ups and neuroses as you.
treating your list like “reverse psychology affirmations.” Read these affirmations in front of the mirror in the morning with great enthusiasm or with a Disney villain cackle every day for the next week and see what happens.
notice what inner sadistic prohibitions are already operating in you at a previously unconscious level and to make those prohibitions explicit and conscious
When you make them totally explicit and experiment with consciously agreeing with them, you easily see how over-the-top gonzo nuts they are, and your heart just lets them go.
“I am absolutely never allowed to feel good about . . . XYZ . . . (my worth, my body, my creativity, etc.)” Ridiculous, right?
make space and time to honor that sadistic part of you, to affirm the dictates of the Inner Villain in their full glory, to stop resisting them for a moment and instead to go along with them. When you do this, it's as if you allow your unconscious shadow to finally complete a dance that it's been trying to finish for years.
temporarily drop your argument with the inner sadistic prohibition, and instead to play with giving it your full consent for a little bit of time. When fully consented to, when not resisted at all, the inner prohibitions lose their hold (because they're only kept in place by our resistance to them).
The spotlight of conscious thought shines on an idealized version of ourselves and our lives, the vision of how things “should” be.
In the shadows, there is also a kind of grasping attachment that mirrors what's in the spotlight. In the shadows, there is a hot attachment to failure and humiliation and anxiety and rage.
The luminous dark comes when you find the courage to stop grasping after that idealized self-image, and instead for a minute just be the being that you honestly are,
The Work is a practice where you take a stressful thought and you question it, thereby releasing the grip it has over you, which eventually sets you free.
Exercise To do
I had a kind of unconscious commitment to homeostasis—I only wanted to feel a certain amount of the already-familiar kinds of sensations (mostly miserable, turned-off ones) that I was used to feeling.
A havingness level is a kind of internal imprint based on past family and cultural conditioning that determines the amount and kinds of sensation that you're willing to feel before some part of you unconsciously decides it's “too much” or “too good to be true” and then goes into fight, flight, or freeze—usually for some highly fictional (but seemingly factual) reason.
the conscious mind “makes up” a fictional reason to freak out, one that convincingly hides the actual underlying reason that the freak-out is happening (the unconscious need to avoid too much good stuff), thus keeping the imprint intact, thus maintaining familiar homeostasis.
when well-intentioned people tell me to “question my beliefs” as a means of opening my mind. I find it's much more liberating to question my “fundamental truths” because my most potent beliefs are the ones that I don't even consciously experience as beliefs, but just as “the way things are” and “who I am.”
who you know yourself to be, right now, is a kind of fictional-yet-utterly-real-seeming blueprint that defines how much good stuff you'll let yourself have.
describe this in an exercise
as I consciously, deliberately got off on my scarcity kink and practiced growing my havingness level, I felt fulfilled and I simply lost my kinky hunger for scarcity, poverty, and humiliation. It just left.
the usual Law of Attraction crowd strikes me as so dumb because they're only half-right, I realized. We do always get what we deeply desire, but most of us aren't that aware that much of what we deeply desire is some highly unpleasant, painful, secret, repressed, fucked-up shit.
brainstorm about some actions you can take to increase your income and improve your financial situation. I promise you your creativity in this matter will be much improved after you've given yourself some time to lap up the forbidden fruits of your freaky financial torture scene. Now, make a rejection game out of your actions. The game is to do thirty iterations of your chosen action, and get as many rejections along the way as you can.
Do this for writing
The essence of growth is to put more attention on context rather than on content. The content of who you are is totally ephemeral, utterly changeable. Your memory, even, is constantly changing and dying.
It's very easy to get absorbed in content—almost everyone spends their existence completely hypnotized by their thoughts, feelings, stories, worries, doubts, and with trying to get the content to be “better.”
content of our lives (and perhaps afterlives and next lives) becomes exponentially better not so much by worrying about trying to change the content that's happening but by coming more and more to know ourselves as the context—the awareness, the presence—in which all the content appears.
It feels out of reach because you already have it, but you're actively (unconsciously) avoiding
Your havingness level is the amount of sensation and energy that you'll let yourself have before you unconsciously, automatically turn yourself off . . .
these judgments, complaints, criticisms, resentments are mechanisms whose sole purpose is to help you avoid feeling tremendously good, loved, valued, inspired?
“Is it possible that these judgments, complaints, criticisms, resentments are meaningless mechanisms whose sole purpose is to help me avoid feeling tremendously good, loved, valued, inspired?”
What if it has no intrinsic meaning whatsoever? What if whatever “problem” you're hung up about is just a vehicle for numbing yourself to the massive turned-on joy and fulfillment you could otherwise be feeling?
if the content of your experience feels awful, if your thoughts are grim, your energy leaden, your feelings flush with self-pity: I suggest getting very, very curious about what element of reality you're denying, repressing, and hiding from.
notice when you feel some flavor of “good”—close, connected, energized happy, hopeful, prosperous, etc., . . . . . . and then to also notice exactly how long you are willing to tolerate feeling good before you start to turn yourself off with worrying, doubting, getting offended.
Exercise To do
Do you turn yourself off with these kinds of thought patterns so you don't have to feel your good feelings anymore? Notice whenever you feel good and notice when you turn yourself off, and exactly how you turn yourself off. What's your favorite mode of turning yourself off? Is it worry about the future? Or maybe doubting your own value and capability? Regretting a past mistake? Or saying something snippy to your partner to start an argument? How exactly do you turn yourself off? How often?
Exercise To do
When you get very intimate with how subtle (previously unconscious) processes shape the content of your experience, you are much less able to be “taken in” by that content, especially by painful dramas and limited perceptions of yourself
What if you just kept feeling really, really good for a whole week? Why not?
What if worrying and doubting yourself and feeling lacking were just the tools that you use to distract yourself from the work of living centered within the high sensation and high energy of the bliss that is your inherent nature? Can you see a way that all the things you're worried about would rather easily resolve themselves if only you didn't turn yourself off?
rather than resenting that something made you angry, try getting excited that you're angry. Rather than thinking you shouldn't be sad, try celebrating the tender exaltation of your sadness.
Practice liking that you're feeling what you're feeling. Practice liking that you like what you like to feel.
reaction formation occurs when a situation stimulates a forbidden feeling, so before you can become consciously aware of that forbidden feeling, your ego stages an over-the-top performance of an emotion which is opposite to the forbidden feeling, as a way of hiding the forbidden feeling both from you and from other people.
Reacting, covering-something-up emotions have a hard, closed, robotic, repetitive quality to them.
The most repressed item in your unconscious is your own total grace.
Practice The Cheerleaders avidly for a week. Write about what you notice in your journal.
Exercise To do
Pain becomes suffering when we take it personally, as if it reflects something uniquely meaningful (and bad) about us. And of course it does—it reflects that we're willing to take pain personally. Haha!
The way to interrupt the loop is to practice experiencing the pain impersonally.
Tonglen Meditation
Exercise To do
invites you to take the courageous step of feeling the pain fully and bravely, with good humor and kindness, without resistance or resentment, fear or shame, as a heroic act on behalf of all other beings who have the same pain.
When pain and suffering are thought of as universal, and not personal, they can no longer prove that you are uniquely deserving of them.
“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost.”
also had an unconscious, repressed, secret desire to avoid real, intimate relationships that might truly grow and change me.
when humans are turned on by something that their conscious mind doesn't deem acceptable, they will block that turn-on from their own awareness by automatically covering it up with a display of offense and disgust.
