Appreciate the nudge, but I don't know that I can do justice to any of those questions.
I can try for the first one a bit, but it's contingent. likes to use "awakenings" as a sort of everyday term that can port all the way into Buddhist-style realizations and beyond.
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If you use Ian's awakening model, an awakening is a multi-level understanding with lasting impact.
This usually requires different sorts of "understandings" to line up. I.e. you may feel something in the head, in the heart, in the body, believe it, think it... simultaneously.
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It doesn't need to hit all the notes at once, but generally the stronger and deeper the awakening, the more parts of "you" are affected.
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In myself, I know there are things I understand intellectually, but struggle to accept emotionally, things I feel that I can't reason with. Etc.
One thing that happens a lot in meditation for some people is these sorts of "aha" moments where you have a sudden mini-understanding.
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Sometimes these feel really transformative, but aren't.
"Ha, I'll never do that again!"
"Oh, now I understand!"
Week later, back to normal.
One way to model this discrepancy is to say that you haven't understood that thing as well as you thought, because it isn't integrated.
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Maybe you understand, intellectually, that:
"This relationship sucks"
"This job will kill me"
"It doesn't make sense to worry"
"I really like cheese"
or some other profound insight besides, but the feeling body doesn't see it, and you're not tuned to remember it notionally.
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So you can converse and sound like you have this font of self-knowledge, but when it comes time to just act in the real world, you:
Don't deal with the relationship.
Don't find a new job.
Don't stop worrying.
Don't buy cheese.
Don't stop suffering.
And so on.
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Here's a few fun things I've learned to do with meditation, that I always forget how to do:
Stop conscious mental chatter
Cool off "hot" emotions (anger, fear, grief etc.)
Not suffer when in moderate pain
Recognize trauma through body language
Anticipate emotions in people
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Almost all of these are useless, because I can't remember how to do them about 90% of the time when I need it.
Partly it's uneven awakenings, where I temporarily "realize" how to do something. Partly lack of practice.
So if anything, I'd always say "practice more, and better".
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up to a point you can use these skills. I've used the pain skills on fairly serious pain, for example.
But all skills are likely to abandon you in the very worst crises.
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Yes, exactly. I can access most of them now (calm, positive general life situation), but it's still very challenging in other situations.
Being at home with my family, for example, I couldn't at all cope with feelings like anger.
As for crises, most of these represent some form of crisis training like you might receive in different lines of work.
Those skills will sometimes not work, but they are taught because they're reasonably likely to.
generally things have to be a bit more extreme for me. But I lost all my "abilities" (not realizations) for about a week after major surgery. OTOH, my (realized) reduction in anger was still there, it was tested and I handled the situation without anger.
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Realizations might trigger mood regulation, but you're still looking at changes that resonate throughout the limbic system, i.e. eventually won't be conditional.
Much of my inability to handle anger at the moment is probably from my old habit of getting angry, stuck in the body.
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