My heart is not my enemy, but I think it is
I can't seem to work today.
Lately, the concept of how experience is processed has come into my circle of awareness.
It would seem that I am dysfunctional in this regard.
Having always been an intelligent person and a highly emotional person, I've danced both with control and the utter lack of it. Somewhere along the line, I decided for reasons that I don't understand, to short circuit the feeling of things.
It seems to me that I could have done this because I don't trust my feelings. Or because I view my feelings as out of control and damaging. Or because my whole life has been pain and I just didn't want to hurt anymore. Or because I wanted to function in the world and my feelings, being huge and overwhelming, are problematic in that regard. Or I see them as being problematic. So, in the interest of being normal or whatever, I just started to shut them down long ago.
So now, I filter all experiences, information, and stimulus through an intellectual paradigm. I shield myself from the uncontrollable nature of feelings by dealing only in academic analysis. I repress and limit and suffocate my feelings so that they don't get in the way, and I analyze everything. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the analyzing. It's something that I find fun in my warped way. Maybe just because it's something I'm good at, something I can control and understand.
But this is not the way it should be. Thoughts should gear feelings and feelings are the guides we use to decide on a path and map out a life, etc. Now maybe we shouldn't always use feelings, but as a species we generally do. I don't, however. I plot, I micro-analyze, I strategize. And in my work, it works out well. But in my life, it doesn't. And the thing is, the only feeling I am really familiar with anymore is fear.
While I was at Gabriola recently, I had the opportunity to deal with this to some degree. I explored my feelings of blind hysterical rage, gut-wrenching sorrow, and briefly at the break of dawn, some minimal joy. Apparently, despite my fervent belief that my feelings are huge and out of control, they aren't so bad. They say I need to learn to be okay with feeling and to feel within parameters that I can handle. I'm told to lean into my feelings, despite how out of control and uncomfortable they make me. This is harder than it looks, folks. Because most of what I feel falls under the "negative" side of the line. And really, I don't want to spend the rest of my life in and out of bouts of depression as a result.
But living life at a permanent, yet bearable, state of moderate pain (6/10 as Tessa scores it) instead of ups and downs doesn't seem to be working out so well either. There is no spontaneity, almost no happiness, no real highs and lows, just a constantly tightly wound wire of trying to keep the boat steady. Trying to keep everything level and not falling apart. So I don't feel and instead intellectualize everything. In that process I wrap ideas around and around myself. I also become desperate desperate to understand everything. Nothing haunts me more than questions of "why? why? why?" I drive myself instead with the NEED TO UNDERSTAND. But as a wise man said to me a few weeks ago: "Some things you will never know. You will never understand. No one will give you these answers or explain it to you. And you need to be okay with that." This is now my mantra: you must accept that you will never understand.
I have started meditating (like a proper hippie/cult convert), with the hope of achieving some sense of inner strength and ability and faith like I have when I'm staring out at the ocean from Gabriola. Because it is only my lack of faith in myself that holds me back in life.
As I told Sebastian: it's like a game of poker. What do you bet? What cards do you give up with the hope of a better hand? What losses are you willing to accept the basis of the risk?
I have reached a strange place: what I've been waiting for over the past 3.5 months has come. I'm trying to crack open my feelings and trust them to guide me. But this is like walking the 401 with a blindfold on.
What can you stand? Under what conditions can you be happy?
"I'll go through it all again,
Watch their doubtful smiles begin,
When the visions that I see believe in me..."
-John K. Samson
Lately, the concept of how experience is processed has come into my circle of awareness.
It would seem that I am dysfunctional in this regard.
Having always been an intelligent person and a highly emotional person, I've danced both with control and the utter lack of it. Somewhere along the line, I decided for reasons that I don't understand, to short circuit the feeling of things.
It seems to me that I could have done this because I don't trust my feelings. Or because I view my feelings as out of control and damaging. Or because my whole life has been pain and I just didn't want to hurt anymore. Or because I wanted to function in the world and my feelings, being huge and overwhelming, are problematic in that regard. Or I see them as being problematic. So, in the interest of being normal or whatever, I just started to shut them down long ago.
So now, I filter all experiences, information, and stimulus through an intellectual paradigm. I shield myself from the uncontrollable nature of feelings by dealing only in academic analysis. I repress and limit and suffocate my feelings so that they don't get in the way, and I analyze everything. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the analyzing. It's something that I find fun in my warped way. Maybe just because it's something I'm good at, something I can control and understand.
But this is not the way it should be. Thoughts should gear feelings and feelings are the guides we use to decide on a path and map out a life, etc. Now maybe we shouldn't always use feelings, but as a species we generally do. I don't, however. I plot, I micro-analyze, I strategize. And in my work, it works out well. But in my life, it doesn't. And the thing is, the only feeling I am really familiar with anymore is fear.
While I was at Gabriola recently, I had the opportunity to deal with this to some degree. I explored my feelings of blind hysterical rage, gut-wrenching sorrow, and briefly at the break of dawn, some minimal joy. Apparently, despite my fervent belief that my feelings are huge and out of control, they aren't so bad. They say I need to learn to be okay with feeling and to feel within parameters that I can handle. I'm told to lean into my feelings, despite how out of control and uncomfortable they make me. This is harder than it looks, folks. Because most of what I feel falls under the "negative" side of the line. And really, I don't want to spend the rest of my life in and out of bouts of depression as a result.
But living life at a permanent, yet bearable, state of moderate pain (6/10 as Tessa scores it) instead of ups and downs doesn't seem to be working out so well either. There is no spontaneity, almost no happiness, no real highs and lows, just a constantly tightly wound wire of trying to keep the boat steady. Trying to keep everything level and not falling apart. So I don't feel and instead intellectualize everything. In that process I wrap ideas around and around myself. I also become desperate desperate to understand everything. Nothing haunts me more than questions of "why? why? why?" I drive myself instead with the NEED TO UNDERSTAND. But as a wise man said to me a few weeks ago: "Some things you will never know. You will never understand. No one will give you these answers or explain it to you. And you need to be okay with that." This is now my mantra: you must accept that you will never understand.
I have started meditating (like a proper hippie/cult convert), with the hope of achieving some sense of inner strength and ability and faith like I have when I'm staring out at the ocean from Gabriola. Because it is only my lack of faith in myself that holds me back in life.
As I told Sebastian: it's like a game of poker. What do you bet? What cards do you give up with the hope of a better hand? What losses are you willing to accept the basis of the risk?
I have reached a strange place: what I've been waiting for over the past 3.5 months has come. I'm trying to crack open my feelings and trust them to guide me. But this is like walking the 401 with a blindfold on.
What can you stand? Under what conditions can you be happy?
"I'll go through it all again,
Watch their doubtful smiles begin,
When the visions that I see believe in me..."
-John K. Samson
posted by venbot | 11:40 a.m.
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