This relocation adventure we are on is wonderful and fun but it is also anxiety ridden, scary and very stressful. Thankfully I am an old experienced traveler on this path and have a head full useful knowledge and many techniques I can pull out of my ruck sack as needed. Remembering when I forget that the Goddess is behind and in everything I encounter in life is my pole star always and everywhere. After that I constantly use understandings and techniques I learned from my time on the meditation path.
Mediation has taught me the value of gently watching my thoughts, emotions, and sensation arise, crest and fade away. The idea is to be aware of thoughts, emotions, and sensations as phenomena without necessarily identifying with them as me. Seeing thoughts, emotions and sensations as phenomena allows me to be able, with some effort, to free myself from their more pernicious influences and thereby not get or stay stuck in those all too familiar and awful self-perpetuating loops. Sometimes it helps me and sometimes it does not. When it works for me I can eventually stop engaging with a line of toxic thinking, emotions or sensations and as I do so I can watch them fade away.
Sadly nothing works all the time for us humans so no matter what I know theoretically about meditation I can still very easily get swept away by riptides of thoughts, emotions and sensations. I have learned you cannot fight a rip-tide in the ocean or the mind. All you can do is try to relax and stay afloat until the force of the rip-tide dies down. Then when the force of the rip-tide dies out you can more easily swim back to the safety of the shore. The key when you encounter a mental/emotional/sensational rip-tide is to understand it is not you but a particular powerful loop that has to play itself out through time and space. I have found, after being caught in countless difficult rip-tides in my life, certain principles that help me on average. The first is to recognize a rip-tide for what it is and what it is not. We have real and difficult and time consuming problems and situations we must engage and work through, these are not rip-tides. But when our thoughts, emotions and sensations start to go round and around and drive us crazy and we cannot stop them no matter how hard we try, that my friend, is a rip-tide.
When I encounter and identify a rip-tide I stop taking it as a real thing and delegitimize it in my mind. It is for me, in other words, no longer a real thing I must work with to solve, it is a rip-tide I must survive until it passes. By delegitimizing the thoughts and emotions found in a rip-tide and that might have started it, I can free myself from my past efforts to understand and work through what I was doing before I encountered it. All my efforts can now be focused on surviving the experience in the best way possible for myself and others I might be with until it passes.
I try during a rip-tide to be an observer watching the crazy thoughts and wild emotions and sensations storm through my mind/body instead of a participant perpetuating the storm. An inherently very difficult process can be made a bit easier when I understand it and can switch to being an observer rather than just a participant. As soon as I recognize I am stuck in a rip-tide I commit to constantly let go of taking it personally and believing it has a reality outside the experience of the now. When it works it is very helpful and even though I am usually exhausted when it fades away at least I am more at peace and not completely crazy because I still identify with the storm I just went through.
As I said earlier, nothing works all the time for everyone but at least I have the ability to escape when I can and that is very much better than the long term hells I use to get stuck in repeatedly. So if you have not studied and practiced the principles found in almost all forms of mediation and you are constantly caught in toxic thinking and emotional patterns I urge you to take a walk on the mediation path for a while and discover for yoursel some of the useful treasures I have found on it.
Mediation has taught me the value of gently watching my thoughts, emotions, and sensation arise, crest and fade away. The idea is to be aware of thoughts, emotions, and sensations as phenomena without necessarily identifying with them as me. Seeing thoughts, emotions and sensations as phenomena allows me to be able, with some effort, to free myself from their more pernicious influences and thereby not get or stay stuck in those all too familiar and awful self-perpetuating loops. Sometimes it helps me and sometimes it does not. When it works for me I can eventually stop engaging with a line of toxic thinking, emotions or sensations and as I do so I can watch them fade away.
Sadly nothing works all the time for us humans so no matter what I know theoretically about meditation I can still very easily get swept away by riptides of thoughts, emotions and sensations. I have learned you cannot fight a rip-tide in the ocean or the mind. All you can do is try to relax and stay afloat until the force of the rip-tide dies down. Then when the force of the rip-tide dies out you can more easily swim back to the safety of the shore. The key when you encounter a mental/emotional/sensational rip-tide is to understand it is not you but a particular powerful loop that has to play itself out through time and space. I have found, after being caught in countless difficult rip-tides in my life, certain principles that help me on average. The first is to recognize a rip-tide for what it is and what it is not. We have real and difficult and time consuming problems and situations we must engage and work through, these are not rip-tides. But when our thoughts, emotions and sensations start to go round and around and drive us crazy and we cannot stop them no matter how hard we try, that my friend, is a rip-tide.
When I encounter and identify a rip-tide I stop taking it as a real thing and delegitimize it in my mind. It is for me, in other words, no longer a real thing I must work with to solve, it is a rip-tide I must survive until it passes. By delegitimizing the thoughts and emotions found in a rip-tide and that might have started it, I can free myself from my past efforts to understand and work through what I was doing before I encountered it. All my efforts can now be focused on surviving the experience in the best way possible for myself and others I might be with until it passes.
I try during a rip-tide to be an observer watching the crazy thoughts and wild emotions and sensations storm through my mind/body instead of a participant perpetuating the storm. An inherently very difficult process can be made a bit easier when I understand it and can switch to being an observer rather than just a participant. As soon as I recognize I am stuck in a rip-tide I commit to constantly let go of taking it personally and believing it has a reality outside the experience of the now. When it works it is very helpful and even though I am usually exhausted when it fades away at least I am more at peace and not completely crazy because I still identify with the storm I just went through.
As I said earlier, nothing works all the time for everyone but at least I have the ability to escape when I can and that is very much better than the long term hells I use to get stuck in repeatedly. So if you have not studied and practiced the principles found in almost all forms of mediation and you are constantly caught in toxic thinking and emotional patterns I urge you to take a walk on the mediation path for a while and discover for yoursel some of the useful treasures I have found on it.
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