i have a lot of resistance to metta / loving-kindness practices, or any kind of deliberate cultivation of positive emotion, and i think a lot of it has to do with feeling like as a kid i was constantly pressured into pretending i was happier and more satisfied than i was
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the practices i've been drawn to instead, like circling or bio-emotive, have felt so tremendously relieving by contrast because they create space for me to express all the unhappiness and dissatisfaction i've been storing up over a lifetime
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focusing on negative emotions does start to feel unbalanced after awhile though. so i've also been taking more opportunities to notice what i like, what i love, what excites me - stuff that's already there but that i haven't historically focused on
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there's a tension here between something like acknowledging and accepting what's already True vs. taking deliberate action to create new Truth that i don't know what to do with yet
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the good news is that the positive and negative emotions aren't very separate anyway. a lot of what comes up for me is grief and where there's grief there's something that was loved, and i can notice and express that love too
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one of the more interesting insights i got from chaos magick shit was an emotion chart stating, roughly, that every emotion _is_ it's opposite, and their union sets are some other thing
so you can often do work with whichever half resonates
this feels v similar and that's rad
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