Recognizing Self-Aggression in the Push Against What Is
Reconocer la autoagresión en el rechazo a lo que es
A student describes noticing that any form of rejection toward present experience feels like a lack of self-love, and how releasing that pattern gave rise to a blissful current. The teacher explains the deeper mechanics of emotional attachment and avoidance.
Recognizing Self-Aggression in the Push Against What Is
A student describes noticing that any form of rejection toward present experience feels like a lack of self-love, and how releasing that pattern gave rise to a blissful current. The teacher explains the deeper mechanics of emotional attachment and avoidance.
Something I noticed just now is that any type of rejection of what is happening, any thought, any feeling, any sense of "this shouldn't be happening" or "something yet has to happen," I started to recognize as a lack of love toward myself, or toward what is, whatever you want to call it. That recognition is itself a form of knowing, and it seems directly related to attachment. I'm trying to describe something I was feeling during the meditation. As I watched that pattern, something shifted, and I started feeling a very blissful current. Perhaps I'll be able to articulate it more clearly after some time, but maybe you can say something about what I'm describing.
It sounds very clear to me.
The mechanics of emotional attachment
Usually, the attachment is to a certain emotional state. We create stories that direct our attention, our mind, and our emotions into that state. At a deeper level, this doesn't feel good. We like those emotions, we attach to them because they help us. In the deepest sense, they help us maintain a certain identity, but more importantly, they help us not feel something else. They help us not feel pain or fear in ways that, from a very young age, we learned to avoid because those feelings were too disruptive.
Self-aggression as a side effect
What I think you're getting in touch with is the side effect of putting energy into those emotions and stories. It feels like self-aggression, which is what you're describing, because it has to start from the position that what is happening now is not okay. At the deepest level, what you are is now. So by creating this conflict with what is happening, you are in conflict with yourself.
Usually we're not aware of what that does. It's like being sad or stressed and having the habit of drinking in order to not feel the sadness. We learn to prefer the sensation of intoxication over the sadness, even though doing it over and over again habitually starts to become a form of self-harm. At a more subtle level, it's the same with what you're describing.
Noticing the pattern and bypassing it
In a sense, you're starting to become aware that it doesn't feel right. What I relate to in what you're saying is that recognition of a lack of self-love. You're starting to notice that this mechanism, which feels like a lack of self-love, can in a sense be bypassed. You can choose not to engage with it, not to energize it, and then you start to experience a sense of space, a current, a well-being.
That usually starts to happen when we are able to meet the deeper feelings we are trying to avoid. It is always going to be some form of fear or pain. It could be shame, it could be all kinds of things, but at root it is a form of fear or pain. As we learn to be present with those feelings, we are able to disengage from the habits that create the emotions we're attached to. That sounds really good.
It's remarkable to see. It's as if any form of knowing, any form of "this should happen, this shouldn't happen," is an aggression. A lack of love.
Exactly. And from that place, you can then choose ways to navigate. You can choose to go in a certain direction, but it's not because you're trying to avoid what is happening now.
Yes, that's nice.
Good to hear.