Denial vs Letting Go

The mind is an incredible thing. Psychology tells me it is multi-layered, that it contains filters through which we sieve our perceptions and experiences and it certainly feels like that. There are disorders of mind with labels like depression, multiple personalities, anxiety, schizophrenia. I have to pay respects to the complexity of mind.

To come out of the victim-sleep of one who is thrust about by emotions as though they come from somewhere other than one’s self – and really, WHERE else would that be? – is to initially confront the fact of my emotional choices frequently. Years ago, when I first initiated this process, I had limited or no self-realisation. I had the concept of it, I felt I knew what it was and where, however hindsight showed me I was right… but also wrong.

Nothing replaces gnosis, which means knowing, experience. This meant that although there is power in choosing how I feel and respond, it is very easy to slip into a kind of denial, or aversion, of unwanted feelings which is different to letting go of them, different to the awesome discovery of the truth of them and then having them fade naturally.

A person is subject to denial only when she is still completely in the mind. In this way, it certainly is a “choice” how I feel because choosing is a function of mind.  A function of mind which has tremendous value, and saved my life once. But it is limited.

What is denial? Denial is choosing a different story. It is turning my back on a story and a feeling out of aversion; it is not a letting-go.

The story is what creates the emotion. Emotion does not exist on its own. This is part of the “create your own reality” we hear knocked about by modern gurus. Choosing a different story may, for some length of time, allow me to focus on a different emotion. That has value of only a limited scope, a kind of emergency stop gap. Most people use it as a permanent way of emotion avoidance and this only sets them up for an eventual fall. It is like performing continual little denials, glossing over things, putting on a happy face, getting by – it all takes so much energy.

Seven years ago I had post-natal depression, bordering on psychosis. I was suicidal and unable to fully function and had a new baby to care for at the same time. Such is the insult of PND, we can’t even wallow in our grief and anxiety like other depression allows. A psych prescribed medication but I refused and instead researched and read self-help and spiritual awakening books (none of which helped at the time).

After a year or so, I started having panic attacks. Out of nowhere this horrendous doom and terror would creep over me – I could be walking down the street or making a tea and WHAM. I would sweat, my ordinarily rock steady body would start shaking, I would pant, and start looking around for an escape, a literal or emotional escape, anything to stop it. Twenty-four hours a day I could actually feel my adrenals working, literally just under my rib cage, drip feeding me with stress chemicals.  It felt completely beyond my control, I felt prisoner to this whole sordid ordeal with no parole in sight.

I was sent to a week-long silence retreat and it saved my life, in more ways than just literally. There was one outstanding reason for this: it was where I received my introduction to choice. Even with my limited self-realisation I implemented this massive mental shift into the self-mastery of choice. It was part of the retreat, this lesson in choice, it wasn’t any kind of divine hand that came down with a scroll or anything. It had just never occurred to me that I was choosing how I felt. And honestly? Given a different time and place, I may have been highly offended at the suggestion because HECK, I was SUFFERING dammit, WHY would I CHOOSE to feel this way??! Etcetera and so forth.

Had I been closed, skeptical, cynical or the many other things that have held me back in the past, I would have argued with the idea, and walked away still suffering. Instead, I stopped the story, the thoughts, I just STOPPED for a minute, long enough that I was hit with a massive shift in awareness… and I made a different choice.

I came away from that experience changed in some small but permanent way. My depression, which was severe on the clinical scale, was gone, completely gone, and in its wake only an understanding of such pain and suffering (which has been a very useful understanding).

Of course I forgot how to choose for the most part after that. Fell back to sleep, you could say.  I dropped back into victim mode but this time in an ordinary everyday way, not a psychotic way.

Ultimately, thinking about the mind is like looking at your own eye. Without some kind of reflective aspect, using the obstacle to navigate the obstacle has inherent and obvious flaws. It has been only while resting in the truth of my being that I have been able to see the whole universe, and my self, splayed out before me with any clarity.

If denial is turning my back on a fear then letting go is embracing it.

Transference: Catch the Feeling

I’ve known feelings are contagious since I was at least a teenager. My mood affects others, and the closer someone is to me, the more they are affected. And vice versa. This has caused a funny issue lately. I’ve appeared moody to others recently, and this is because I am partly shifted out of victim mode and partly still stuck in it. Sadness, anger, fear and other “negative” emotions appear within me unchecked, as they used to, but now there comes a point where I make a conscious choice whether to continue the emotion or let it go. When I sink deep into the emotion and stop the story around it, inevitably the energy of the feeling dissipates and disappears. This leaves me in peace and with calm and easy joy.

To others, this just looks like perpetual PMS. The issue this creates is that my nearest and dearest are on this ebb and flow with me, unbeknownst to them. I feel like a puppet master. I stomp around in crankyville and eventually, my husband is reacting in that same energy space and if given enough time, so are my children. I move out of crankyness, and they’re still stuck in it. Some more time in my joyful energy and they move out of it with me. And the cycle goes on.

Years ago I read a book by David Snarch called Passionate Marriage and I hold much respect for his important work. In it he discusses differentiation. He says it is a key to a successful relationship, to be able to be in your partner’s space and not take on his/her moods. It sounds logical, which these days automatically causes me to squint with suspicion because logic relies on the mind, and the mind is subject to boundaries.

On closer inspection it begs the question, if transference is unnatural then why does it come so naturally? If energy is not meant to jump from one particle, atom, organism to the next then it wouldn’t. But it does. At the same time, that does not mean it is meant to be, just that it doesn’t automatically mean it isn’t meant to be. And those were a lot of double negatives right there.

I am half of the happiest highly functioning relationship I’ve ever known in real life (I’ve seen some amazing relationships in movies, I must admit), and we have transference and very little differentiation. Is it a part of the magic, or part of the imperfection? Can’t be sure. I do know that if I am sad, it’s nicer when those I love are not quick with a joke and instead seem mournful and concerned.

I think we are most comfortable when others mirror us. It helps solidify our reality, allows us to perpetuate our story which perpetuates our emotions. However, I am not sure it is necessary to actually feel the emotion the other person is feeling, but to approach it from a place of compassion. Compassion for me often meant searching my soul files for experiences that matched what the person was feeling so I could catch their wavelength. Now, I see that it does not necessarily mean suffering with, but is an awareness of their suffering.

Choosing Anger

The deeper I go into self inquiry, the more the twine unravels and the more surprises I find.  It is interesting that they were right when they said we are attached to our dramas, to our suffering.

I’ve done my share of personal growth reading – God bless Deepak Chopra and Wayne Dyer – literally hundreds of books and authors I admit.  I can’t claim ignorance to the idea of negative attachments but like most of those I know and have ever heard of, I had not had experience in it, I had to go on faith.  I’m not a fan of faith, I prefer to get sticky in the goo of things.

I was feeling pissy again.  I know I was overreacting to everyone and everything, I was dramatising and acting out.  I know this.  I know I was modeling Gorf only knows what to my children about how to deal with unsavoury situations.  So when I found myself with a few seconds to contemplate and inquire, I remembered the many times in this journey since learning the truth of emotions – this is a choice… I can choose something else… I am suffering and making others suffer and I can stop this right now… so why didn’t I?

Because I wanted to be feeling exactly what I was feeling.  It was a type of enjoyable.  More shocks to my system on that realisation.  I was now face to face with the truth of my reality, of my choices, with no one to blame.  I carried on being pissy for a while longer and then dropped it.  Later that night I thought about my revelation, as simple as it was it was profound at the same time.  The implications, the depth, there was nowhere in my life this information did not touch.

I thought about circumstances I had gone through, horrendous situations and predicaments, and saw that throughout all of them, bar none, I could have avoided suffering, almost entirely.  For suffering happens for a moment: the moment you are in pain, the slash of the knife, the slap of the face, the loss, humiliation, rape, childbirth, abuse… they are but moments and in those moments, the suffering may exist – the jury was still out on that – but only for those moments.  No longer.  Yet how long we play those moments over and over in our heads.  How long we suffer, unnecessarily.

I thought of my son falling and scraping his knee.  One day, he jumps up and runs off, the next, a lesser fall is a big drama that has him crying in my arms for a long long time.  Why the difference?  He is learning to suffer, to replay in his head, to dramatise and see it in his mind and alter it in some way.  He will eventually subconsciously choose which sufferings he likes, and cling to them.  “Attach”, as the Buddhists say.  I ask him, “Are you upset because it still hurts or because you keep remembering your fall?” even though I know he will just cry louder as an answer.

How odd.  I chose to remain suffering, I chose to stay angry knowing the illusion emotion is.  I had no excuse, I wasn’t as trapped in the illusion as I used to be.  This awesome choice, we all have it.  At any moment, I can choose to soar with bliss and peace.

The Substancelessness of Emotion

I was “having a moment”, uh, you know… cranky, irritated and pissy. I could give you the reasons why but really, what pisses me off might turn you on, and that’s the illusory fact of emotion – emotion relies on a story to stay alive. My story of woe may be your story of a day in paradise so the triggers are irrelevant. I was frowning and crashing pans around while getting the potatoes out of the oven; I thundered through dinner and then sat in a pile of self indulgent pissyness outside while my son had his post dinner toddlerish frolic. This small window of not-much-to-do gave me time to inquire.

I’m shitty, I’m irritated and it’s XYZ’s fault, if only they’d blah blah blah. I chose that moment to STOP the thoughts, the self talk, and dive, head first, into the emotion, into the chaos of it.

The thoughts were actually keeping me distant from the emotion, that was my first whammy. No one told me to expect that. I’m on my own, I realised. I’m discovering this for myself.

Without the thoughts about why I was pissy, I had no choice but to BE pissy, to truly sit and experience pissy. Not act it out. Not repress it. Not express it. Just experience it.

From early childhood until the age of 35 I didn’t feel or express anger very much.  I had it bottled into me by parents, out of love and concern, who did not like to see anger or sadness in their children. It hurts to see your children hurting, and the unchecked feedback is to stop them, not realising that they aren’t stopping the emotion, just the expression of it.  If only it was as easy as “hey, stop being angry”, then we’d all be free!  We kid ourselves with our children, thinking that when we make them stop crying or yelling we’ve healed them.  HA!  Mass cultural self delusion.

The birth of my children had lessons for me, my son’s appearance brought with it lessons in rage.  Woah boy, and wasn’t that fun.  Rage is different to anger, I found, but with the same foundation.  That’s the price you pay for a lifetime of suppressed anger.

I felt fear of anger, I felt I would lose control and maybe even hurt someone… so the fear kept me from really feeling it and instead “acting” it, as we all do. And I am gooooood. I have a great huffy face, and have perfected the door slam.

I chose to know this feeling for once. At first, I felt like I was sinking into it, and I literally felt it physically, moving upwards from my stomach, lurching, so I sank deeper into it, I was ready, “C’mon!” I said, “let’s DO this, mother fUCKer!” and I’m sitting there and this feeling is shaking along and…

… holy bananas, I had to FORCE myself to stay irritated.

Without the thoughts about the people who were “causing” my irritation, without any of the thoughts around it, the irritation DID NOT EXIST.

The emotion required the thoughts to exist. As I grappled with this I fumbled around looking for the pissyness, I conjured mental images to trigger it again but it was too late, my mind had been shifted slightly off kilter.

Wind affects the tree, but wind is not the tree; when the wind stops, the tree goes on.

I started laughing. I couldn’t help it. Like a lunatic I’m sitting there giggling away at the simplicity, the nearness, and at the pureness of emptiness; I was empty of fabricated emotion and this left only joy. A kind of joy, and I long for a decent English word to describe it. My son toddled over and giggled and put his head in my lap, needing no explanation. Adults in the vicinity, not so much; but how can I tell them? WHAT can I tell them? And I started laughing again.

Remember to Wake Up

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The hardest part of confronting my preconceived ideas is remembering to. It reminds me of when I quit biting my nails. Driving in the car with my mother at age 17, I was on her case about her smoking cigarettes… again. Poor woman, I had little concept of acceptance in my teens.  I thought “change for the better” meant “everyone but me.”

This day, mum said something different. She asked, “What’s that in your mouth?” I told her biting nails was nothing like smoking; for starters, it wasn’t going to kill me. She said addiction is addiction and gave me a challenge: if I quit, she’d quit. So I quit, and she didn’t for another 10 years. I digress, my point being, when I was quitting I found the hardest part was remembering not to bite my nails; fighting the urge to bite my nails was easy in comparison. So habitual was it that it was a part of me, I did it without thought. I bit away half my arm before I’d think CRAP, I’m not supposed to be doing this anymore. So I put polish on my nails. That was enough to create a slight shift in how my nails felt, triggering my mind when I started to nibble, and the rest was a cinch.

That is how it is at the beginning of emotional awakening. The way I think and my reactions to the world around me are so deeply a part of me that for years I feared that to stop “being me”, well, who would I be?

When I first heard this idea about ego and personality it was from a Buddhist perspective. I dug the message that my emotions and reactions were a choice, that they are not actually who I am, but how I choose to be in a given moment. Yet, I struggled with it, I doubted it, it made little sense really. I didn’t know what to do with the information either. Men meditated in caves for decades to achieve such knowing. The books and religions and psychobabble made the whole thing sound so complex and frightening and like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow – a big deal. I didn’t understand that you don’t sell books with only one page in them so writers plump it out. This only serves to confuse the rest of us though.

The depths to which my judgments run is still a shock to me. Unexamined ideas on how the world and her people should operate. I was driving down the road with my family near my own house and saw some teenagers skateboarding. Each one had his pants down his ass at different levels, one kid had no underwear on at all and his whole butt was showing. Something stopped me from the knee jerk reaction of commenting loudly at the ridiculous current fashions to the rest of my family and us all having a giggle at his unknown expense.

In that instant I thought it, I checked myself, I examined my thoughts. I said to myself that in many cultures, people don’t wear anything at all, so why am I judging some ass crack? I don’t even personally care about ass crack, in fact, I like ass crack.  I’ve been conditioned to judge ass crack.

Just a simple moment of clarity, not even worth sharing on a blog really, but there it is anyway. Because it IS in the simple things, the little things, for that is where we live. We live in a running commentary of little things, punctuated by occasional big things. If I save my personal examinations for only the big things, I will overlook the majority of my illusions and habits.