Keeping It Strictly Simple

Last night I did an edible, turned off the TV, pulled out my journal and did my best to write down what was happening inside my mind. I’m doing some deep dive recovery work from a lifetime of unprocessed trauma. What I wrote about last night felt really significant and I want to type it up and publish it… if just for my own benefit.

“March 17, 2024…

I really don’t want to journal. I want to just take a pass and fall asleep to TV. But I’m also aware that something is off with my mental health. I think I’m having intrusive thoughts or in flight mode from my own mind. I keep running away from paying attention to what it’s doing, then have an added layer of despair over knowing something is up but being unable to remember what to do. I keep scrambling to remember how I got regulated last time. But if I’m recalling it right, if those thoughts about “something being wrong & try to fix it” are always going, how will I feel the space that I can naturally take up with my open awareness? As I recall, the mental state I’m seeking is found below language, efforts, or recollections. I know this is hard to believe but your thoughts that ruminate on getting into that mental state will never get you what you want. You might need to name this part that always talks about that you’ve “lost your awareness anchor” and are “needlessly suffering from thoughts that won’t stop”. They (the thoughts) aren’t you. They can’t point to You, either. Those thoughts about wanting to release thought truly are also just thoughts. And these ones are very intrusive. You are already fully here. There’s nothing you can recollect about your growing lessons that will prompt you to know how to get back to a calm and open mind. These Thought Police (of thoughts & awareness) are still also just thoughts. That’s not meant to be an insult or dismissal of these thoughts, like that they aren’t valued. I know that’s how it felt in religion when you were trained to police your thoughts. It just happens to be the case that thoughts are objects of a felt self experience of pure awareness (which, having experienced it, you know better than being afraid that you need to call it divine or spiritual; it just is).

You “look away” from your Full Self when you notice something happening in your mind that feels “like a glitch”. When you “look away” from it, it feels a bit like shaking your head after a fall.

Trauma: I’ve lost the ability to control the true expression of myself. Like someone else is in charge.

Marie, we’ve got to stop the ruminating on how “my mind is stuck on thought mode and I can’t make it stop”. These dark protectors (the obsessive thoughts) need names because I keep getting stuck in thought loops thinking that something precise and vital has been taken away from me (my full awareness without obsessive/uncontrolled thought). If you name it, Marie, you won’t get sucked into it anymore and will ease into that fuller sense of your Self experience with no effort other than identifying what is not You.

What is my standard, then, for awareness experiencing? That I could eventually sustain attention on my externally rooted sensations and experience (non-thought interoception)? To be able to free myself from chronic thinking is the process I’m looking to learn. I’ve felt the freedom/full awareness/consciousness before. It is real but there are some internal resistances I can’t put my finger on that make me struggle to simply observe certain thoughts.

How will I accomplish this release of chronic thought and enjoy my natural pure awareness with passing objects of awareness? Maybe this is why they call it “the work”? It’s nothing glamorous at this point other than consistently showing up for yourself to sincerely try to be honest about what your ruminations are. Don’t let them just wiggle away and shake the etch-a-sketch in your brain. Promise to yourself you will put serious effort into staying attentive to your thoughts and acknowledging them to yourself. You can get them. You don’t need any of your goals or projects done or books read or therapy sessions in order to “feel better”. It’s this. Refusing to just write romantic things to yourself but really admit to the weird, quirky “glitches” you keep shrugging off in your own mind so automatically. You don’t need to understand what exactly happened to you in your past. It’s just keeping it simple, clean, consistent, and sincere. Listening. Represent what you’re truly thinking beyond the screenplay you idealize your mind to be. You don’t need to learn anything more, Marie. The research got you here but you don’t realize it’s already here. It’s your rehearsed, fearful compliant autopilot that’s in the way. What you want, you can’t feel it by reminding yourself of something. Like, “how did I get that feeling/clarity again?”, “why did it make so much sense for so long and now I’ve completely forgotten what I ‘did’ to feel that way?”

This is not a rush job if you really want to feel better, Marie. You don’t need a learning plan or to watch videos or read about philosophy or do a remedial education path or to tell anyone anything at all.

So what do I do to feel peace? Let the part of me that is trying to figure that out become an object of attention. I notice when it starts and when it stops. If my head is still loud, that means there’s something else, another layer to become aware of. We’re talking about consciousness being the experience of just paying attention to anything you see in your mind… including thoughts about “trying” to let go of thinking, or reflection on the nature of thought, or the activity of the thought being observed right now. Because, yes, those little scream-bumps you ignore/repress inside you are indeed an emotion related to the Now moment that you are in. But you are rejecting that emotion. But we can’t just shift and become the Thought Police, trying to “find yourself” under thought because then the Thought Police fills the lens of the Self experience. But it’s okay. It’s okay that the Thought Police is there doing its thing. It’s not TRAUMA that it’s there. It’s trauma that I haven’t named it, repress it, and ignore it. It’s there doing its thing but it’s causing dysfunction because … simply, I am not thought. And constantly managing thought using thought is adding more thought when what I want is the space of being myself without being identified with the thoughts that do occur. I can’t find my full Self experience when I’m consumed in my thoughts. But if I keep feeling blocks in my brain going up when I try to release thought, then I need to stick with it and name those blocks. Not because they shouldn’t be there, that I’m scared of them, or think that they’re tragic scar - this is just a matter of perspective change.

The story I tell myself about living is the reality I live in. You don’t have to do anything with the thought, not that the thought doesn’t matter. The thought will do a much better job of its job if I can let thoughts be thoughts and I’m what’s left after that. I stop thinking about thinking. I even have an internal Awareness Coach (my new name for that pattern of thinking) that still is convinced that even a small thought could help me remember how to release identifying with thinking. Name thoughts until you can’t name them anymore because then they’ll all have name tags except for you, the Self.

If this is an auto-immune disease of the mind, I need to teach myself that all of these are indeed a part of my psyche and belong here and shouldn’t be attacked or seen as the enemy to purge. By naming them, I’ll be “vaccinating” my mind from fully merging with these obsessive/protective thoughts.

The rat race / burnout mentality will never work for what I want, Marie. You have to put everything down (computer, TV, food, ticks, people) and just work through what’s going on in your mind. You just have to sit still and pay attention calmly. This is a type of self-acceptance. You’re not tragically behind and impaired for life. It’s not shameful that you thought that was the case, though. What happened to you can be undone just by becoming aware of it through self observation and non-judgment. The books you’ve read are all just theory. The practice itself is underappreciated for its simplicity but effective as fuck. Just give yourself your attention and see what you discover as well as continue to check-in on activity as your new experiences mix with your past and perhaps conjure up a long buried emotion.

Your buried emotions (“inner children”) aren’t personal entities who are upset at you and literally in distress right now and you’re failing them every minute that you don’t figure out to stop your thoughts and take up your Self space. You need not exert any effort. Just sit down and wait and see what comes to you. Your effort is not needed. And it’s not divine or magical to become aware of these things and experience yourself beyond them, though it feels like it is due to how unfamiliar you are with your natural self space. But it’s your body mechanistically reminding you of past dangers and the need to be guarded. Maybe this becomes a hobby of mine. Doing an archaeological dig… more like a seated tour down a giant hole. Just keep identifying the activity that occurs when I know I’m watching my mental activity. Listen to yourself think. You’ll be listening to your past. Yes, it seems spooky, but it provides a very real relief, Marie. The more you listen, the more you’ll understand why you’re suffering and will know a different internal anchor as yourself, no longer your survival mode mind. Simple. Keep simple. Just listen to yourself. What are you thinking? That part of me that regularly panics about the nature of thinking and my thoughts, that says “oh no! we’re got stuck in thinking again and can’t remember how to get out!” needs a name. Because it sucks me in HARD. Piglet from Winnie the Pooh? With his voice, it’s clear this is a very scared voice, not someone rational who should be entrusted with overhauling the mental system.