I think i nearly got it - please help me

[KaRzual]

Quote

https://www.actualized.org/forum/topic/54980-how-do-i-escape-the-trap-of-the-mind/?page=1

Thank you for your great response in this thread guys. 

Something struck me today that i must contemplate and get perspective at. 

I'm not pretty sure that what i call "being angry", "feeling anxious" and generally speaking "feelings" are actually feelings or just a byproduct of a thought. When i feel into my body - it's fucking crazy but it can be pretty still and calm. HOW IS THAT?

It struck me - I'm creating my unhappiness. Literally. My thoughts are creating so called "feelings" which are not real, not true. 

I'm having these thoughts about feeling thiis and that and i don't really know now if i seriously feel those feelings or those are just thoughts creating sense of "negative" feeling. 

I know this might sound hard to understand but i would love to hear what to do from here. I spend my days lately into practicing feeling. What's the next move? What should i focus on? 

Edited October 6, 2020 by KaRzual

[Leo Gura]

44 minutes ago, KaRzual said:

What's the next move? What should i focus on?

Now try practicing letting go of each specific feeling.

See video: The Power Of Letting Go

If you can feel anger, the next step is to let it go until peace is achieved.

[Bulgarianspirit]

Yes but also, these feelings come, you can't help but be depressed or sad.

It will probably go away eventually, but i wouldn't say we can just destroy our pain.

Learning to be detached helps certainly, but in the long run actually solving your problems might prove more useful.

Be careful of what triggers your anxiety and avoid it,do things that bring joy and make you forget those thoughts and feelings.

Meditation is one of those things. Quieting the mind helps with those feelings.

Edited October 6, 2020 by Bulgarianspirit

[Opaltri]

You are right ,  your mind is layered, I am not sure if you can notice it, but whatever is bothering you , whatever thought story you are having is in different layer, closest I can tell it is like having intention put on something and it plays in background. 

[KaRzual]

 

On 6.10.2020 at 1:40 PM, Leo Gura said:

Now try practicing letting go of each specific feeling.

See video: The Power Of Letting Go

If you can feel anger, the next step is to let it go until peace is achieved.

@Leo Gura Well my approach is kinda different here what you've proposed in Letting Go video. I "get into" my body and try to feel those feelings or thoughts labeled as feelings only to find nothing at all and stillness in the end. Does it serve the same role? Becouse i perceive letting go as an abstract construct and i can't really wrap myself around it.

 

22 hours ago, Bulgarianspirit said:

Yes but also, these feelings come, you can't help but be depressed or sad.

It will probably go away eventually, but i wouldn't say we can just destroy our pain.

Learning to be detached helps certainly, but in the long run actually solving your problems might prove more useful.

Be careful of what triggers your anxiety and avoid it,do things that bring joy and make you forget those thoughts and feelings.

Meditation is one of those things. Quieting the mind helps with those feelings.

Actually i find it a lot easier to solve my problems when staying detached as Leo mentioned that in the letting go episode. I work towards solving things but feelings and thougts are right there right now so i need good technique to not create resistance and FEEL. FEELING creates peace and stillness. 

 

7 hours ago, Opaltri said:

You are right ,  your mind is layered, I am not sure if you can notice it, but whatever is bothering you , whatever thought story you are having is in different layer, closest I can tell it is like having intention put on something and it plays in background. 

It is layered. Layered as fuck. I'm not sure if i can just de-layer everything at once so i focus on being and maybe working at one thing at the time. But i thing i get what you mean with putting attention into something - neurotic thoughts can be really unbearable and affecting my social life so i try to put my attention and focus on what i feel. Then i can really feel into wat others say. That's pretty counterintuitive. 

[The0Self]

Meditation and detachment can appear to help the me a lot. It doesn’t actually help though — maybe don’t take that statement as anything important though — there’s just no one to help, but that’s meaningless to the apparent “someone“ who’s struggling. Liberation is never caused, but I will say there seems to be an intuition here that self-inquiry and, perhaps far more importantly, coaxing a (non) understanding of emptiness (truly just simply not knowing that appearances are exclusively real), can “actually“ “help.” Again, there is nobody to help and there never was.

And by the way, those appearances that appear to be seen as exclusively real are all encompassing. I’m talking about the fact that you know you’re here, or now, or that the past actually happened; about the appearance that the distance between you and the computer/phone screen in front of you is actually based in any kind of reality whatsoever. Those are quite literally all false, as is everything else you could ever know.

Edited October 7, 2020 by The0Self

[KaRzual]

@The0Self Okay. Let's say i could theoretically grasp what you say to me and i could agree that's true. 

But if i'm honest - this sounds like a bullshit to me, atleast for now.

I need pointers. Something to grasp on and continue my road. 

Didn't meant to be mean. 

[JTL]

 

On 6.10.2020 at 1:40 PM, Leo Gura said:

Now try practicing letting go of each specific feeling.

See video: The Power Of Letting Go

If you can feel anger, the next step is to let it go until peace is achieved.

@Leo Gura hey, in your video How To Deal With Strong Negative Emotions , you say, thoroughly feel the emotion. I've been doing the letting go technique for thoughts, but find it hard with emotions, because I dont want to suppress them. Which technique do you recommend to do? 

Edited December 20, 2020 by JTL

[PepperBlossoms]

@JTL Leo has talked about how, if you are having a hard time giving something up, just go ahead and let yourself have it and observe how it makes you feel - once you see how horrible (if any) it makes you feel, you will no longer what to do whatever it is that you are not wanting to do.

So in that regard - go ahead and feel/act on the emotion as you are wanting to and observe yourself closely - what are the impacts?  What do you like/not like about it?

That can then make it easier for reasoning with yourself of - oh okay, yeah I should do this instead of that.

Or - you could find other info too such as the emotion is not the problem at all and the problem was that you didn't know what the problem was - when you know what the root of the problem really is - it is a lot easier to address it.  The emotion could be a distraction from what the real problem is... Just some thoughts! 

Have a nice day.

[PepperBlossoms]

Or the emotion could be a hint/reminder that you have something unresolved and needs more attention.

Yeah I guess just trying to "feel through the emotion" and let it feel however strong it wants to feel to let it run its course/figure it out/get past it/not be able to take it anymore - let it do its thing rather than suppress it because suppressing it may take longer and be avoiding whatever needs to be confronted...

I hope that helped.  It is an interesting topic.  I am sorry you are having the issues.

[JTL]

@PepperBlossoms Thank you for a good answer.
 

The emotions I am struggling with are depression and sadness, and for real I am just tired of them and want to let them go, I think I found some of the reasons I am sad, for some reason I do things that make me sad, crazy I know!! 
So what I will try going furth is to feel the emotion and take a conscious descision If I want to feel this way and if not just let it go. 

[PepperBlossoms]

@JTL  Ahh I'm sorry that you are feeling that way! 

I get sad too sometimes!!  In a way, sadness may seemingly be a pre-programmed response the mind has - there is happy, sad, angry, bored, confused, etc.  It is like going down a pathway and depending on the one you go down and the stimuli you presently receive as well as the stimuli that you have received in the past, you may respond a certain way (like your mind getting programmed with software that just keeps getting more programming added to it every moment - the software in the mind may be programmed to respond with depression/sadness based on x,y,z stimuli based on a,b,c programming!)

I guess it is also interesting just to experience what it is like feeling sad and see how that impacts the view/inpretation/experience on reality.

I also find that walking slow, listening to sad music, or not moving around much can make me sad while walking fast, listening to upbeat music, and getting stuff done will totally change my thoughts/feelings.

I can see that staying in the sadness state is not sustainable as it makes it hard for the body to do what it needs to survive and so the body may tend to do whatever it takes to get out of the sadness state eventually in various ways.

[JTL]

@PepperBlossoms  Everyone gets sad for different reasons , and yeah that could just be normal, For me being a black Norwegian I often get sad over that fact it is hard to be a minority in a mainly white country in the sense, talking about racist experiences and how to deal with them. So when Leo had the video the power of letting go I just knew It could be really powerful. any luck with  the techniques yourself ?

3 hours ago, PepperBlossoms said:

I can see that staying in the sadness state is not sustainable as it makes it hard for the body to do what it needs to survive and so the body may tend to do whatever it takes to get out of the sadness state eventually in various ways.

  haha, yeah it fucks with your body. I have alot of muscle tension because of it and yeah some its hidden its so weird.  

Edited December 20, 2020 by JTL

[PepperBlossoms]

2 hours ago, JTL said:

@PepperBlossoms  Everyone gets sad for different reasons , and yeah that could just be normal, For me being a black Norwegian I often get sad over that fact it is hard to be a minority in a mainly white country in the sense, talking about racist experiences and how to deal with them. So when Leo had the video the power of letting go I just knew It could be really powerful. any luck with  the techniques yourself ?

  haha, yeah it fucks with your body. I have alot of muscle tension because of it and yeah some its hidden its so weird.  

Wow yeah I can see that that would be hard.  I was in China myself for a few months and felt like I was a black person or could relate to how they may commonly feel with how much I stuck out because the population was like 99.99% Chinese people -  I went 3 weeks until I saw another white person and 2.5 months before I saw a black person.  When I saw the black guy, I wanted to go up and take a photo with him just because neither of us were Chinese.  One of my African American coworkers has told me about how the cops would treat her differently because she was black and it was sad.

No I think I am pretty horrible about letting go of stuff other that just finally not caring - saying/being like, okay I don't care anymore. Whatever! (saying the words "whatever" with the preppy girl wrist flick or the low voice stoner method.. any way that works!... and that mindset seems to work for getting rid of the clingyness to something and then eventually I can reflect back on whatever the issue was with new learned things and be able to better connect the dots.  I can see that connecting the dots while strongly holding onto something can blind us so the idea of letting go to allow for some temporary distance can be helpful.  Or another option is to even separate oneself by LEAVING the area and creating distance because you can forget about it because you aren't seeing whatever it is that was bothering you all day, everyday.  

I think I am not the best person to ask about how to deal with racist experiences.  I didn't even notice race till around high school I guess because the schools and my friends were pretty well mixed from the start.. I guess I notice it more when I go to an area that is all one race and find it nicer when the area is just a whole bunch of races because it is just like, okay no one is outnumbered or sticking out here - awesome.

I would say living in a super racially mixed area would be the most helpful but if that doesn't work.. I guess focusing on what you enjoy and getting so freakin immersed in that that it is a waste of time/useless/not helpful to think about the pettiness/drama that people create... if they are trying to bring you down, they are just wasting their own time and energy.

 

[kag101]

I think you're overconceptualizing.

To me, this idea of "tuning in to your feelings" never worked. Paradoxically, this would make me go even more into my rational mind.

What has helped me the most is to let my feelings course through me naturally -- with as less interference as possible. 

[PepperBlossoms]

45 minutes ago, kag101 said:

I think you're overconceptualizing.

To me, this idea of "tuning in to your feelings" never worked. Paradoxically, this would make me go even more into my rational mind.

What has helped me the most is to let my feelings course through me naturally -- with as less interference as possible. 

@kag101 Thanks for the input!! (If that was to me haha)

I guess the question to ponder is: what is too much and what is too little when it comes to thinking and what is natural and what is not natural?  We tend to think ALL DAY whether we realize it or not.

Yeah I agree in that sometimes it is better to just "let things happen" but even then, what is "just letting things happen"?

I also like to think that overthinking is better than underthinking because at least with overthinking, thinking is being done and is trying to get to the root of something while with underthinking, thinking is technically still happening but with no purpose...

SOOO maybe what you are trying to say is that by not having a purpose.. the mysterious issue may reveal itself whereas with purposeful thinking, distractions may pop up that may lead us away from the real root.  I guess I just like the idea of trying to have more control and purpose over my thoughts.. but again that goes to - how much control do we think we have versus actually have?

Sorry yeah I do tend to "overconceptualize" and go all over the place.

[VeganAwake]

Yes it's just conditioned responses that get triggered. Sometimes it helps to look into them a bit, but usually by giving the thoughts and emotions energy it keeps them coming back again and again.... sometimes it's best to just let them dwindle themselves out. ❤