Hi Bored, nice to hear from you
Here are some things I wrote, which I hope bring more clarity to what i'm sharing. If you could read and allow yourself to reflect on it..not to see how it fits in with what you already know and think (which will be of no benefit to you), or to 'understand' it intellectually, but to allow something new to come to you, that resonates with you at a deeper level. Let yourself sit with it, even for a day or two if necessary, and see what occurs to you..
You can share your thoughts and what you hear in what is written, and I will take it from there..
First let me mention, that although methods or practices such as exposure therapy can be very useful initially to gain momentum, if someone wants to experience true and lasting freedom from an anxiety disorder, methods or approaches can’t touch the root of the disorder.
I want to make a distinction first that I think is helpful. Our experience of a disorder is always made up of the content (symptom, undesirable thoughts, sensations, emotions etc..) accompanied by the deeply held desire to get rid of it. As when we go through this experience, all we consciously know of it is the content, we believe (understandably so!) that it is this content of our experience that is responsible for our suffering. And so we do what makes sense to us..we try to manipulate our experience in one way or another, however subtle that may be, There are countless different approaches and practices on how to manipulate the content of our experience, and it seems like this is the only solution to our very real problem. The one thing we miss, is that the entire experience, the very context in which the entire experience exists, is a deeply held assumption (something to fix), that to us simply appears as reality. We are living inside this assumption, believing that we are experiencing reality, when in reality we are experiencing our beliefs. We don’t need to fix a problem that we have created in our own minds, we only need to see that it is our own creation in the first place.
In this understanding, there are no methods or practices, because the more we see where our experience of it actually comes from, the less and less it is necessary to do anything about it, that as one sees or realises ‘insightfully’ the misunderstanding that is at the heart of the experience, the experience changes by itself as a by-product. As the misunderstanding falls away, so do all the attempts and practices we are already doing to fix and change ourselves. So instead of adding more ‘sophisticated’ or better practices to fix ourselves, it’s the process of allowing what is already there, to fall away. It is these practices, based on deeply held beliefs about the necessity to fix and control our inner experience, that is the momentum behind the entire experience, that causes the suffering. Without the resistance to ourselves that these subtle yet deeply ingrained practices provide, the symptoms would be fully experienced within us and in a short time would fade away or return to ‘average’ levels. We would experience the full range of emotions or symptoms but the suffering would dissolve, as there would be no resistance to ourselves causing it.
What do I mean by resistance exactly? Resistance is a product of your deeply embodied belief about your problem..not your intellectual ideas, but your deeply embodied understanding, what you believe in your heart to be true. It is your beliefs about the ‘problem’ at the most fundamental level, your very perception of it, based on what seems to be true at your current level of understanding.
So, the problem isn't that you have these strange symptoms, feelings, thoughts or sensations, it is that you have an expectation about them, not to be there. As a silly analogy, it would be like me deciding that people should not wear red t shirts, and after falling asleep to the fact I made up this rule, going outside and being infuriated when I see anybody with a red t shirt. Then trying to figure out how I could stop people from wearing red t shirts, and why people wear red t shirts when they shouldn’t. All my practices and approaches are born out of the fact that I believe people shouldn’t wear red t shirts and I need to do something about it. For as long as i’m asleep to the expectations and belief that i’m living in, then I will experience a conflict between what is, and my desire to rid it. My whole reality will be an expression of that belief and conflict..everything I perceive will be an expression of the misunderstanding that I hold in my heart, and will appear to be and feel to be absolutely true.
It is only by realising that i’m living in an expectation, in an assumption that was made up, that was never actually true..that I will fall out of my belief and wake up to the fact that there was never actually a problem.
And when we wake up from the nightmare we’ve been living in..nothing has changed yet everything is different.
As another analogy..If I couldn’t sleep one night and decided to go downstairs, but didn’t turn the lights on as not to wake my girlfriend, and on going downstairs I suddenly caught the silhouette of a man in my living room. All sorts of thoughts begin racing through my head, my body primed to fight, my heart racing, I charge into the dark and jump onto the figure. After a loud thud and a moment of struggling, I realise there’s no resistance..and no one else on the floor but me. Bemused, I switch on the light to find my suit jacket and a chair..I let out a sigh of relief and laugh, realising the ‘man’ was nothing other than a misunderstanding about what was going on. This analogy points to the fact that when’re lost in thought, when we truly believe something is real (there’s a man in the living room), then we can’t convince ourselves to ‘have better thinking’, or practice an approach to change our experience of what we actually believe to be true (that there is a man there). Experience changes only by seeing and realising for ourselves directly, what is actually true (there is no man). When we ‘realise’ that our experience was made up of a misunderstanding, then our experience shifts automatically, not through effort or practice. This process of realisation or insight is what causes a fundamental shift in our experience of anxiety, it is the process of something (misunderstanding about our experience) falling away, after which it simply makes no sense to do the things we were doing before..we naturally have less concern about everything we were concerned about, as we see that our concerns were based on misunderstanding.
What i’m suggesting, is that anxiety disorder is always the result of a misunderstanding, the experience of mistaking an aspect of our experience for a problem, for ourselves to be broken. We have the freedom to (completely innocently) create the experience of being broken..but it is only ever be an experience. We are all living in the middle of mental health, we just don’t know it. The more we see through the very beliefs that we’re already living inside of, the more we fall into and experience the mental well-being that is already there, waiting, before all the noise and misunderstanding that veils it.