I feel inspired today. I’m writing this without any idea of what I’m going to write about. Just wanted to put pen to paper — or in this case, cursor to dialog box.
I feel flooded with a sense of “yes-we-can” today. Sure, these feelings are transitory and not to be trusted but it still feels good. I see a lot of opportunity around me.
I feel chuffed at the possibility of being able to express myself through writing. What an incredible miracle — using words to express stuff that goes on in thought-form in your brain box? language has never ceased to amaze me in all these years of living on this planet.
I want to write more frequently. I’ve been saying this for more than a decade now — but well, there you go. I do. I want to hone my craft and get really really good at writing. I wish to be able to create moods and share subtle inner feelings through words. I think the way to achieve this is by writing everyday and by reading a lot.
Something that I understood quite recently with life is this — when you feel bad, it’s not necessarily because of something that’s going on then — it could also be just a habit pattern of sympathetic arousal — what does that mean?
say you encounter a tiger in the woods; It’s scary as fuck and your sympathetic nervous system activates. Your body secretes adrenaline and you go into fight or flight mode. Energy is redirected to strictly necessary functions in order to ensure survival. Unpleasant stuff, subjectively speaking. now, because we have these ginormous cortices (cortex — outer layer of the brain) that can remember the past, extrapolate into the future and work in abstractions, we have the unique ability among all animals to simulate this kind of “encountering a tiger” response in us, at will, even in the absence of any large carnivores.
Memory and Imagination are amazing things but they are also the reason why so many people feel so bad so often. Their brains’ threat detection circuits are always on and people are going through their lives swimming in stress chemicals. In my own experience, there was a long history of poor decision making and extremely high levels of uncertainty. This led to a huge complex of sub-optimal coping mechanisms which each gave rise their own web of negative emotions and coping mechanisms. Before you know it, everything sucks all the time and you don’t think it can ever end. Now, you get into addictions — because something’s gotta give. it hurts too much otherwise. That just fuels the problem — you have even more difficulty making the kind of decisions that you need to make in order to get out of the morass of your life. It doesn’t seem like it can ever end. Well, it can. it takes time. But it can and today, I stand here as proof that it can. It wasn’t easy and it didn’t happen overnight. But that whole web of suckiness can be burned. Here’s the thing I actually wanted to talk about before I started rambling — the thing that I found out quite recently in life is this — when stressful/negative emotions come up in an intense manner, you don’t need to do anything about it. You just need to understand the mechanism of how past experiences and habits are responsible for them and let them be. they eventually go away! This might sound super obvious to a lot of people but to me it wasn’t. It was essentially a get-out-of-jail-free-card when i discovered this. All you have to do is sit and wait, and it goes away? damn. I spent years winding myself up and getting anxious about the fact that i was getting anxious. So many. thousands of hours listening to wise guys on the internet. Reading posts on how to “make it” in life. Jeez. The magic trick is to simply realise how the mind-body system works and then, making good decisions while also understanding that you won’t get positive chemical feedback for a while — until you undo all that negative emotional patterning that has now created a pervasive complex of neuro-endocrine (i.e chemical) patterning in you. To put it more simply — you’ve probably come out of the stupidity that caused you the misery in the first place but now, when you’re getting your shit together and doing the right things, you still feel bad. That’s a. discouraging as fuck and b. confusing as fuck because now you feel disoriented, demotivated and lost. You don’t feel good when you do the difficult thing, so why do it at all? Why not just watch porn, jerk off and smoke weed? That’s why this breakthrough was so big for me. All you have to do is sit and surrender to your negative emotions, without any resistance. They leave you 100% of the time, if you don’t reinforce those patterns again with your mind. Now, that’s easier said than done. Takes some experience, skill, nuance and determination. That’s why I said earlier that it doesn’t happen overnight. But it does happen and boy does it feel good!
NAGHARAJ ABISHEK 