metaphorically speaking, you need two points to construct a vector that determines the direction you go. that’s not quite how it works bc the optimization landscape can be very hilly and complicated to navigate but it’s not a bad first pass
Conversation
so, when is motivation and action blocked? this story suggests it’s if either something about where you are is blocked out of your awareness, or something about where you want to be
1
1
13
so to unblock motivation and action, you can try to unblock and expand your awareness of either where you are or where you want to be. i see “feel your feelings” as more about awareness of where you are, and “focus on what you want” as about awareness of where you want to be
1
1
16
the goal of “feel your feelings” and crying etc. is not catharsis for catharsis’ sake although i do like me a good cry. the goal is to allow parts of reality into your awareness that you might otherwise be blocking out because they bring up feelings too painful for you to stand
1
17
you’ll know it’s worked when you start having *different thoughts*, when suddenly you’re having new ideas about problems you were previously avoiding thinking about entirely. being emotionally unclogged literally makes you smarter by unclogging your cognition too
1
15
so, how to unblock awareness of where you want to be? that’s where “focus on what you want” comes in. personally i still need a lot of “feel your feelings” here, because the stuff i want has a lot of emotional baggage attached to it too
1
11
it’s easy for twitter to become an exercise in aggressively placing the scariest parts of where we are now into each other’s awareness. there’s a time and a place for these things but it only leads to paralysis if we don’t also cultivate a vision of where to go afterwards
1
1
12
a funny feature of this story is i have not talked at all about “figuring out how to go from where you are to where you want to be.” PCT (and other things, e.g. AT) suggests that this is largely unnecessary! the bodymind’s natural creativity should just take care of it
3
15
i think it makes sense not to get too hung up on that aspect. AFAICT, the "figuring out" ends up being more of the same
i.e. you can notice that you *don't know* how to get from A to B and that's part of where you are --
1
3
-- and once it becomes clear, if it becomes clear, that you don't know and need to know, spontaneous movement toward gathering that information happens
2
2