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I’d rather share my awareness and my insights than my feelings. That way I can appear wise to others and impress them. Also, it allows me to avoid the pain, the fear, the grief, and the insanity of my usual thinking.
I catastrophize. I learned to view life as an ongoing crisis. I can do laundry in a panic. When i am feeling low, or depressed, or despairing (which is actually the opposite of feeling my feelings), I go to words like always and never-as in; I will never have a romantic loving relationship again or I will never figure this out-how to live freely from my heart and embrace all of life and living with reliable gratitude and joy.
I judge and I do so incessantly. I judge people without even being aware of it. It’s automatic and unconscious usually. I judge events and places and things habitually. I learned to do this from my parents who learned it from their’s. I live in a very competitive (not cooperative) culture so I am almost always comparing and assessing good from bad, right from wrong, stupid from smart, beauty from ugliness. Just another recipe for sustainable unhappiness. Of course, this incessant judging and condemning is trained on me whenever i am alone and unengaged in some activity that temporarily relieves me of my own self loathing. Keep busy, idle hands and all that shit.
I used to think that enlightenment was learning to be happy all the time. I have judged that pain, fear, sadness, hurt, loss, loneliness is something to be avoided and it’s easy enough to come up with hundreds of tragic strategies to help me past my discomfort. If i didn’t catastrophize and tell myself that these painful feelings will last forever and never go away if I allow them to come out of hiding….it would be so much easier to risk feeling them.
For I know from past experiences that when I have opened to these unfavorable emotions, not only do they pass but they “teach” me important things about my self. Like what to do to take loving care of myself. My pain points out where change in thinking and behavior is needed. Exactly like a hot stove teaches me to pay attention and be careful where I put my hand.
So today at this moment I am blessed with some clarity about how I create and sustain my own discouragement and despair. It’s not easy to change patterns after a life time of practicing responses to life and myself that guarantee unhappiness and discontent with just about everything. It is conscious work. It is awareness work. It is sobriety from running and evading or controlling our emotions. And in a world where the bandaids for emotional pain surround us and are even marketed as the solution for pain, it requires friends and fellow pilgrims who have chosen to be on this same journey with us. We travel this often scary road out of a familiar and somewhat comfortable darkness and further out into light, clarity, love and laughter...together.
