November 14 2024

JOSEPH: This is amazing and answers a lot of questions I’ve had over the years, thank you! So is there an additional step to feeling good after you’ve stopped feeding the feeling? Is it the backing out of habitual emotional patterns that facilitates feeling good? I’ve noticed sometimes that this is usually enough to get me to neutral, and then feeling good becomes a “oh of course!” kind of thing. Sometimes though, I will remain in neutral. Perhaps that’s a sign that I’m still stuck in another emotional pattern. But instead I’ll try to push myself from neutral to feeling good and this usually backfires.

VINEETO: Hi Joseph,

Ok, one obstacle is removed, a bad habit which you identified and declined to repeat, well done. Have you patted yourself on the back for it? Is there another feeling-bad habit still lurking behind the first?

Yes there is, the habit to push yourself!

To understand this habitual pattern and stop feeding it, you need to grasp that ‘I’ am ‘my’ feelings and ‘my’ feeling are ‘me’ – ‘your’ feelings are not something out there removed from ‘you’ that can be pushed into a different position like chess figures.

Here Richard, or rather his co-respondent explains this in detail –

RESPONDENT: ... incidentally, Richard, how can they be ‘an hereditary occurrence’ and be of my choosing at the same time?

RICHARD: You do comprehend that you are your feelings/ your feelings are you (‘I’ am ‘my’ feelings and ‘my’ feelings are ‘me’) do you not? Viz.:

• [Respondent]: ‘It has taken me a hell of a long time to understand the difference between *having* feelings and *being* those feelings. Because I have not clearly understood this, I’ve never quite got the hang of paying attention to feelings without praise or blame, and without notions of innocence and culpability, right and wrong, etc getting in the way.

This makes things very interesting. The moment I regard my ‘self’ as ‘having’ a feeling, I’m split down the middle and there’s a secondary reaction on the part of the social identity (an urge to “do something” about the feeling, which in turn evokes more feelings, and so on). Conversely, if I recognise that I *am* the feeling, it most often dissolves into thin air – and usually pretty quickly too.

This is great. It’s especially helpful with regard to anger and frustration which have been two of my biggest hurdles to date. Previously, when I caught myself being angry, annoyed or frustrated, identifying and paying attention to this feeling would NOT cause it to disappear. On the contrary, the feeling and the awareness of myself as ‘having’ it would sometimes become like a microphone and amplifier locked into a screaming feedback loop.

I’m really pleased that this is no longer happening. It seems almost too easy’. [emphasis in original]. (Thursday 28/10/2004 6:55 PM AEST).

And again there is a reference to how ‘almost too easy’ actualism is. (Richard, Actual Freedom List, No. 60g, 30 October 2005a).

The funny aspect is, as Kuba so perspicaciously pointed out, that humans seem to have no problem feeling bad or sad feelings but when it comes to changing their mood to the felicitous feelings, dissociation sets in. And as Richard pointed out in the paragraph before the quoted one, victim mentality can play its part –

Richard: “(having a victim mentality, it turned out, ran much deeper than the singular mentation such nomenclature indicates).”

Dissociating oneself from oneself can be quite an ingrained habit and it is well worth to establish a habitual affective attentiveness to be able to catch it/decline it when it is happening.

Cheers Vineeto