- Thread Author
- #1
Maybe I understand what some people mean when they say that life is a dream or that it is an illusion. From our perspective, everything that happens seems deeply personal, in the sense that we can't seem to do anything but constantly react to life, not make it "react to us". I mean that we seem to settle for the role of being the ones who allow our neurochemical states to be affected by circumstances, when it seems that we have within us the power to change our brain neurochemical states and consequently make life react to us.
It all happened on Thursday, as I was dealing with a complex situation, I was filling myself with hatred and resentment, but I was so tired that the emotion simply had no place in me anymore, and consequently I started to get depressed. I remembered that I had a lot of things to do and I was also tired, so since I have been dealing with these circumstances for a long time, I said to myself “I'm done suffering” and proceeded to feel love for all the shit that was going on. I started by saying I loved the things I didn't like about the world and about myself, after a while of doing these I could feel myself throwing up and feeling nauseous. This seems to be a sign of feeling repulsion about admitting the opposite of what I have been holding all this time in my mind.
After doing this and listening to songs about love just for the sake of it, it seems I acquired the ability to generate this state at will. I began to notice all the defense mechanisms of my ego in the form of thoughts that tried to defend me from pain. I had many realizations about why it was so hard for me to let myself be loved by another person, and it's because I have a very strong tendency to control the external, when in the first place this is an illusion since nothing outside can be controlled, and everything that will happen will happen and is inevitable. In short, I became aware of an ego defense mechanism: a need to control (the uncontrollable).
It makes a lot of sense, in other occasions when I've had depressive episodes, I simply tried to feel love for no reason, and many times they have gone away. This seems to point to the fact that we can actually get rid of the need to be loved if we manage to control our mental states in such a way that we can generate these brain states at will.
I believe that a good starting point to be able to reach this point is the metta or "Loving-kindness" meditation. The idea would be that we manage to replicate this feeling of meditation in daily life when we are feeling negative emotions or when we think things that put us in states in which we simply don't want to be. Probably, this will open the doors to the healing of old trauma patterns and towards a more conscious life, to the point that we are able to modify our emotional states at will.
It all happened on Thursday, as I was dealing with a complex situation, I was filling myself with hatred and resentment, but I was so tired that the emotion simply had no place in me anymore, and consequently I started to get depressed. I remembered that I had a lot of things to do and I was also tired, so since I have been dealing with these circumstances for a long time, I said to myself “I'm done suffering” and proceeded to feel love for all the shit that was going on. I started by saying I loved the things I didn't like about the world and about myself, after a while of doing these I could feel myself throwing up and feeling nauseous. This seems to be a sign of feeling repulsion about admitting the opposite of what I have been holding all this time in my mind.
After doing this and listening to songs about love just for the sake of it, it seems I acquired the ability to generate this state at will. I began to notice all the defense mechanisms of my ego in the form of thoughts that tried to defend me from pain. I had many realizations about why it was so hard for me to let myself be loved by another person, and it's because I have a very strong tendency to control the external, when in the first place this is an illusion since nothing outside can be controlled, and everything that will happen will happen and is inevitable. In short, I became aware of an ego defense mechanism: a need to control (the uncontrollable).
It makes a lot of sense, in other occasions when I've had depressive episodes, I simply tried to feel love for no reason, and many times they have gone away. This seems to point to the fact that we can actually get rid of the need to be loved if we manage to control our mental states in such a way that we can generate these brain states at will.
I believe that a good starting point to be able to reach this point is the metta or "Loving-kindness" meditation. The idea would be that we manage to replicate this feeling of meditation in daily life when we are feeling negative emotions or when we think things that put us in states in which we simply don't want to be. Probably, this will open the doors to the healing of old trauma patterns and towards a more conscious life, to the point that we are able to modify our emotional states at will.
