The Behavior You Think You're Stuck In
El comportamiento en el que crees estar atrapado
A question about habitual patterns, the hidden gains behind avoidance, and the layered relationship between thoughts, emotions, and deeper feeling.
The Behavior You Think You're Stuck In
A question about habitual patterns, the hidden gains behind avoidance, and the layered relationship between thoughts, emotions, and deeper feeling.
In those moments, it's all the character, and there's no sense of anything else. I liked what you said about the risk of speaking up versus the risk of not speaking up. It was almost like there's always a flip side. The thing I was doing was also creating an alternative risk: it's actually going to get worse if you don't say anything, which is what happened. So in a way, avoiding a feeling is actually making it worse, potentially.
Whenever we are experiencing something that's happening and we say, "I have this habit or this behavior that I'm kind of stuck in," it feels like we're a victim of a behavior happening to us that we cannot control. Whenever that's happening, look for what you are gaining from it.
There's actually a behavior that's repetitive because we are choosing it, again and again. That's often what's hard to see, because it will reveal something about us that we either don't want to see or don't want to feel. But it's really about feeling, because if we see something about ourselves that we don't like, we experience it as a feeling we don't want to have. For example, shame or embarrassment, or the realization that we're actually doing something that's kind of mean.
To see that it's not just a behavior out of our control, to see that it's actually something we are choosing because we prefer it over something else: that's the work. At the core of it, the process is to see more deeply and feel more deeply. That process of growing up is what liberates.
And through all of it, know that everything you're choosing, everything you're feeling, everything you're thinking, none of that is you.
Is it like you're choosing a character trait that seems more appealing? For example, I would say there's something about being too assertive that feels kind of repellent. Is it a difficult feeling caused by a part of your character that you don't actually want to accept or embrace? Is that what you're saying?
The gain behind the pattern
That's just one example. Where you feel there's a habitual behavior, where it feels like you're stuck in a repetitive pattern, the way out is to see that you're actually choosing it. Consciously it's subconscious, but recognize that there is a choice, and then investigate: why would you be choosing that? What is the gain?
It's an inquiry into the psychology and nature of our humanity. What I'm suggesting is that you will likely discover it's something that's helping you change the feeling tone. It's helping you feel this instead of that.
Often what I was pointing to is that there's an aspect that is hard to see. One aspect is hard to feel, because I'd rather feel this than that. Another is that it's hard to see our humanity, our animal nature. We are divine beings, but also animals. And animals have been developing genetically with traits that are often hard to see, hard in the sense of uncomfortable.
The freedom through this is to fully see our nature, human and divine, and not reject our animal nature. By making it completely conscious, by seeing it fully, our choices can be free from instinct. Free doesn't mean not having instincts. Free means that if the instinct right now is pointing left, I can still choose to go left or not.
Boundaries as relationship
On the practical level, whenever you're in a situation around boundaries, think of it less as a boundary and more as a relationship. How can you relate to something differently? It will begin with yourself first. How can you relate with what you're going through more directly? And then from that deeper relating, you can relate to the situation or person differently.
In a sense, more authentic, honest, true relating is more intimate, even if the relationship with that person calls for a strong no and an ending of that relationship. But often that's the exception.
Are thoughts and feelings two sides of the same coin, where we mostly choose to see only one side? And if they are the same, how do we know which one came first, and why is it more important to engage with the feelings and not the thoughts?
The layers of thought, emotion, and feeling
My answer is that it's important to engage with all of it, but it's layered. I would say it's less two sides of one coin. That's a useful metaphor, but I would describe it as feelings at the deepest level, emotions on top of that, and thoughts on top of that.
We usually live with awareness only at the surface of thoughts, with very little depth in our awareness of emotions. Thoughts and emotions together are actually mind. I would say thoughts and emotions are the same, and they produce a cycle. Emotions validate thoughts, and thoughts produce emotions. A thought is an imagination of a situation that invokes an emotion. That's what happens when we watch a movie. We get immersed, and we have emotions that are not real in the sense that they're not actually happening in our life, but we have the emotional experience because we identify with a character.
This happens because that's how the mind works. You can imagine something and have an emotional response to it. But then what happens is the emotion gives a sense of embodiment. The emotion sends a message to the thinking mind: "Don't you see? This is what reality is. Don't you see that the anger is justified, or that the thought that I have to take this action is justified?" The emotion makes it embodied and real. It has a certain quality of validating the narrative.
The cycle of thoughts and emotions
This is a mental process that is cycling. The thoughts and the emotions I can distance from. In a sense, I can disidentify from them. I can relate to them and experience them. Because often I'm not actually that in touch with emotion; it's a surface emotion. And the narrative being sustained by that emotional world isn't questioned. It is seen as reality. As we look into the emotional landscape and feel more deeply, we can now see the story in its full nature.
But then there's something even beyond that, which is feeling. It will be hard to distinguish emotion from feeling, but feeling is going to be more subtle, more deep, and more simple. In a sense, what we are longing for in our human experience is to feel more, and we are longing for that because we are living on the surface of thought and occasionally emotion.
So you're saying that the feeling is more real than the thoughts and the emotions?
You could say it's deeper, closer to our true nature. In a sense, everything is real. What happens is that things aren't what they seem. Thoughts don't appear as thoughts; they appear as reality. But they are as real as anything else. By "reality" I mean what is true in our experience, in our story.
I guess it's kind of hard to distinguish between feeling and emotion, like you say. As with thoughts, the emotions come and go, but I guess the feelings are more sustained.
When feeling breaks through
That's exactly how it is. The more we do this work, and especially the more we engage with different kinds of meditative inquiry, what can happen is this: the instant you shift into feeling, the whole reality of the mental and emotional world you were in vanishes. You see it as completely distant and somewhat dreamlike, like a memory. Something that felt completely, absolutely real, as in "this is what my reality is now," and then you shift into feeling. This can happen for a few seconds or a few minutes. From that new perspective, and after, there's a lingering shift in effect: "That whole narrative, that whole emotional world, it was just there to help me avoid this deeper feeling."
I'm sure we've all had that experience, though it might be hard to recognize it or remember it in that way. It's a really important part of this work, because as we see and disidentify with the narratives of what we are, it opens the door for these deeper feelings.