Progress

This is one of those blogs where I dive deep into my own psyche. These kind of posts I write purely to help myself reflect upon whatever it is I’m working through today. Perhaps it might help other people think about their own shit. I don’t know. But anyway, it feels like a warning is appropriate, in case you’d rather come back tomorrow. But, hey, you’re a free agent!

So…. one of the very unnecessary weights that I sometimes find myself carrying is a heavy sense of something (bad, unfair, hurtful) happening, again and again and again, specifically to me.

This sense has, in the past, completely dominated how I feel. It’s taken over, in a growing tornado of self pity and despair, slowly picking up force until it discards me somewhere bleak, where I gradually pick my life up again.

I obviously survived.

But occasionally I see little signs of the tornado beginning again. It’s happened to me in the last few weeks. These days I really want to do something about it early. And I can now. I’ve got some tools. And a lot more experience.

So I look at that sense of “poor me”. That’s all it is. It’s real in my head of course. But that makes it something which is within my control. In fact the ONLY thing that is in my control.

And the memories that provide evidence for that sad heaviness (just a sense) are also just that. Memories. They refer to something in my past. They are gone. But they still pop up in my consciousness. Perhaps because of something that has happened more recently. Which is itself only a memory now.

And all those senses and memories are something that I have the ability to do something about in the moment. If I look at them, if I choose to look at them, I’ll notice that they will and do fade away. If not immediately, certainly at some point. Everything does.

After recognising that, I choose to look at something else. Something a little bit more solid and which is actually happening right now. To help the process. Meditation practices often suggest a focus on the breathing….because it’s such a regular feature of simply being alive. So I focus on that, or on sounds that pop up, or on something visual. It doesn’t matter what.

But the darker thoughts will probably come back. Often quite quickly when that particular “sense'“ is in the room. Why? I don’t know. But I look at them again, notice them just as the mere appearance in my conscious, which they are. And I see that they will fade away once again, just as every single other thing in there fades away.

I don’t feel bad (I choose not to judge myself) because these negative thoughts keep popping up. They do so completely of their own accord. I really don’t actually have any control over when or where that happens.

But I can stand back from them. I don’t try to attack them head on. That never worked.

And usually the thoughts will still return yet again, when this particularly heaviness is upon me. But they continue to exist simply as the neurons in my head, doing their thing, with the material they’ve been given. It’s nobodies fault.

And I return again to focussing on the breathing or the something else that is physically available to my senses in the present.

Gradually the gusts of “sense” and “memory”, become wisps, and they lose any of the power they seemed to have. The heaviness turns lighter. The tornado, thankfully, doesn’t materialise. And that whole adventure in my head is now “something else that happened”. Thankfully, it didn’t dominate me, or take over my life, in the way it has before.

I have in fact simply begun again. And though I will need to go through this process continuously, and I may fail again in the future, I have still made what I believe is technically referred to, in The Manual Of Life, as Progress.