Let It Fall
Awareness falls on
something,
and then it comes
back in a specific order.
Let the mind wander. If you have a big problem, let it wander in the background first, and after that comes the action. It works better in a chronological sense.
Religion is about emotional intelligence.
Science is about intelligence.
Emotional intelligence is completely timing-based. You want to know where the other person is in their development, and then you say something at exactly the right moment, or vice versa. So religion is 100% timing-based. It is knowing, in exactly the same scenario, whether to say something or not to say something.
The downside of this is twofold: this doesn't mean that what you say is necessarily smart. Also, you can interfere too much with people who actually know how to figure things out for themselves.
You can't actually win the debate on logical terms, but you have a better feeling for where your own emotional development is and where the development of others is. Therefore, a lot of women are unbelievably good at naturally understanding religion, without the higher power.
Thoughts are also examples of things that correlate with emotional intelligence. The better you are with emotional intelligence, the better you can make your thoughts work for you to get the output you want. This is a very tough process.
Emotional intelligence also means recognizing when to let something be for a second.
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Besides timing, emotional intelligence can also be described as ‘life wisdom’. Life wisdom means you realize you don’t know a lot, but you kind of know what to do in any given situation.
Imagine this.
Everything is happening in your body at the same time right now.
Your feet touch the ground. Your skin touches your pants, your chair. Energy is flowing around. Your stomach gets progressively more empty. You have thoughts. You have anxiety, excitement, trauma, that all live inside you at this moment. A lot of those things are happening right now.
Not only does everything happen simultaneously, it also happens on a continuous scale. It’s not that your stomach empties itself in one beep.
Yes, we process a lot of these things in binary terms. Suddenly, the feeling of hunger is overwhelming. Then, another thing is important. Binary points: yes or no.
How amazing is that.
People who are good with consciousness are good at glancing at the state of their whole body and seeing whether the ship is heading in the right direction or not. They look, in a sense, at all things at the same time. Also one by one, but also at the state of one whole thing, which is often represented as “the all.”
So, you do things, and you realize: this works and that works. My whole body is going in the right direction. Or you spend endlessly tweaking one minor thing that is important to you. Things from the past, for instance.
The goal of consciousness is moving your perspective to a whole-body perspective.
Over the years, you can progressively distance yourself more from your thoughts. You also feel the rhythm of your brain and body explaining things to you (the OCD levels).
This is a very spiritual process that requires attention and reflection. Don’t be scared to do the actual work and sit down and think. If something keeps coming back, you sit down and try to fix it. This can be a repetitive behavior, a thought, or an unsolved feeling or memory.
Tip: For a few seconds, only focus on motion in your body
A common practical example is this. If you use motion as a way to look at your body, so you feel the motion of your stomach, lungs, etc., and nothing else, it is sometimes easier to spot where something is stuck.
A suppressed voice or emotion can actually lead to a stop in the motion of your stomach, for instance.
When the Lesson Is Not to Be Too Strict on Yourself
Lessons are valuable. One of the hardest things to do, for me, is not to be too strict on myself. To learn to love my imperfections.
On the other hand, fear is my favorite emotion. But when I am not too critical, I feel my belly relax, stand out, instead of internalizing all my emotions.
Some levels in life are just – well – very hard. Everything has an effect on another thing.
Looking at yourself too strictly is a strategy, a way of looking at yourself, that affects every action you make. Therefore, it is so hard to unlearn.
“Look at this sucker going to work again. He is worthless. He is only an editor. He could have been anything, but he is just an editor. He thought he was so smart, right? Now look at what he became.”
“He makes decisions way too fast, way too impulsively. This gets him into trouble all the time. If only he could make fewer impulsive decisions.”
My counter is: Oh, this hurts. I’ll let that sink in for a while. But I also want to tell you that I am proud of myself. I am still standing, even with all this bad energy circulating inside me. Legacies of insecurity. I believe that I can help others with these things as well.
What helps is to write your internal conversation down. For instance, two minutes’ worth of content.
You just sit and let everything come.
For me, right now:
I feel something, but there is a tear under it. Like a blocked emotion.
I think about the consequences of ADHD on my day-to-day life. Is it possible to function?
I am scared.
I shouldn’t be scared.
I shouldn’t say that I shouldn’t be scared.
I think a lot of people in these generations have these voices within them.
Is it a part of life, or are we exaggerating?
I’m twirling my hair again, see? Restlessness. Is it ADHD, or is this pent-up energy?
I miss the good vibes.
Why am I alive? I am so sad every day.
I refuse to carry this generational burden anymore. I deny it, and we, my brother and I, need to unlearn and eradicate this from our timelines.
I feel that I have to explain myself to myself with every move, even when I am by myself. There is no one listening; I am replaying all the voices from the past.
There Is Power in These Voices
What helps best is to put labels on them.
This is what my friend Y taught me.
This is what my friend O taught me.
This is what my friend N taught me.
This is what my brother V taught me.
This is what my mother J taught me.
This is what my colleague and friend A taught me.
This is what my old colleague F taught me.
This is what my boxing mate S taught me.
This is what my grandmother OD taught me.
This is what my sister-in-law M taught me.
I’m especially proud because this list naturally filled up with women’s lessons. They taught me the most about life.
Another point is that it’s extremely important to take a proactive approach to what happens in your body and how you act. So you sit down and try. If feelings keep coming back unasked, that’s not fair.
There is something very powerful in sharing lessons. Since I have learned so many things from other people, I think it’s time to give something back.
Self-worth, for instance. Identifying how you can eliminate the very negative voice within yourself. Being too strict on yourself. Looking at yourself in a one-dimensional way. I am so sick of some narratives of reality – it’s almost as if you have to explain yourself every step of the way to yourself, if you are not careful.
I used to be very strict on myself. Being very strict on yourself is like having no vehicle to express a feeling you have inside. That feeling of wanting to prove yourself, with that insecurity that somebody else built into your system. I can guarantee you, it was not you when you were playing in kindergarten. It’s also the narrative somebody else smashes onto you about what you have to be, generating enormous pressure.
You can pinpoint this by tracking your own internal conversation.
Write down two minutes of everything that happens within yourself.
Come on, feelings. I want to feel you right now – I don’t want to get caught off guard when I am doing something else.
Reveal yourself to me, or you are the weak one.
If these were my first steps on Earth, there is no way I would tell this to myself. I would be gentle.
I have a lot of creative ideas inside myself.
I followed my whole circle of thoughts. I went full circle.
Let me pull these ideas and feelings out of my head.
Hot Chocolate
Today, I’m not making any difficult decisions. I’m going to let myself feel sad all day, or for the entire workday. I feel like I’m saying goodbye, but I don’t want to say goodbye. Everything is happening so fast.
Sometimes you have to forgive yourself. But sometimes you have to be extremely critical. That’s the hard part.
But most of the time, you have to be critical of the critical voices within yourself.
Make them as literal as possible. This helps take fear out of the equation.
“I saw a podcast where somebody said commuting makes you lose too much time, so I am contemplating whether to take the job or not.”
“Is it fair that this thought circles in my head? The guy doesn’t know my situation. On the other hand, he is kind of right.”
“I have a chaotic head. I can’t focus for a few minutes straight. I am going to perform badly at this job.”
“A lot of chaotic heads are made up of voices that have been cut off.”
“I am proud that I am sitting here, trying to face my own thoughts and feelings. I take pride in that. I could have run. Yet, I am sitting here, trying to write everything down. I have more class than these things.”
Reflecting means that you sit down and go through the past states your body has been through.
You do this so you can learn from them.
Changing the past and making it something else is something we all do, but that makes it harder. Because it has already happened a certain way, from your perspective.
So when you cycle through situations that have already happened, it’s easier to go through the situations exactly as they happened from your perspective. If you change them, it’s like trying to use a magic stick on the past, but you can’t really change that. So you take it as it was, and if that’s very bad, then that’s very bad.
The problem is that people go through bad things when they are young, and you don’t have the capacity to make it a literal situation. So it becomes a feeling or a behaviour. This is why psychological things from an early age really do matter, especially when people go through traumatic things like surgery or abuse, where consciousness is suppressed. You have to try to sit down and pull that sh*t out of yourself.
I know it’s possible, because I did it myself. I sat down and was like, “Show me the money, past,” or I will proceed to move on with my life, and I would not want to be bothered.
What is possible is looking at things that really happened in the past, but from a different angle. You can learn to look at yourself with forgiving eyes for things you did in the past and did not know yet. I basically grew up without a father. I had to learn everything myself. So you can forgive that emptiness within yourself.
But what about the Buddhist approach?
I have no clue why people take the Buddhist approach. If you only live in the here and now, then you can’t learn from the past, and basically you wouldn’t know where your house is, since you need actual knowledge from the past for that. It’s also not a classy thing to do. It’s like saying, “Oh, let’s forget about the past. We only have the here and now.”