Great thread, thank you!
My experience aligns with what you said. Thankfully, I have not had an explosive release.
It was more like: "I have finally experienced the emotion that I tried to avoid years (decades) ago".
And now I can face those situations in a more healthy way.
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Yes, that's the best-case outcome for specific conditioning ("it's OK to be sad about this, actually!")
At some point the process itself becomes self-reinforcing and you just keep shedding stuff in perpetuity.
If you do what I do, anyway. Different methods, different outcomes.
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Learning how to deal with things just disappearing on the fly is surprisingly tricky.
Lots of behaviour tied up in specific emotional conditioning. Lots of other things in your life tied up in those behaviours!
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Good on you to tackle that conditioning well!
My first big release looked like just getting irrationally angry all the time. For months. Not fun.
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Interesting, now that you mention it, I've had irrational anger and anxiety for a few weeks as a build-up to the actual release.
I think what helped was that I was trying to stack up positive habits on top of the emotional trauma, not realizing the trauma was there.
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And once the trauma was released, I felt this immense freedom!
And all the positive habits I was trying to install now suddenly clicked in place.
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Pays to mention I was using bad technique. Emotional processing without a stable concentration practice. No mantras or anything.
You hit the trauma stuff and it's overwhelming, retraumatizing. Just like a lot of misapplied therapy can end up being.
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Ah right, I'm going through concentration practice before I have the guts to tackle vipassana. 😁
The releases mostly came when I hit a plateau with concentration and got a recommendation (from a teacher) to explore mental content that comes up when I try to concentrate.
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Interesting long-term approach!
I do concentration (mantras), vipassana (or something similar) and emotional processing in tiny, rotating cycles. All in one sitting.
I'd just let my practice sort of go at that point, but kept on digging around my emotions. Hilarity ensued...
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When you say emotional processing, do you mean metta (loving-kindness) or something else?
I'm following The Mind Illuminated (TMI) approach by Culadasa:
amazon.co.uk/dp/B01LWVW6KP/
It's a practice that has 10 stages of mostly concentration + some vipassana in the later stages.
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No, not Metta. I have Culadasa's book. Haven't read it in full, but heard good things. Not my method, though.
I started out with Theravada a bit over a decade ago, but my practice now is a syncretic mess.
In this case it's just 's Cutting Machinery stuff, though.
Metta is great for making the process *easier*, but you can do without.
Basically you do the mantra, do the vipassana, so you're really calm, centered and aware.
Then you open up to whatever feelings are floating around your system and let them be felt.
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This is pretty close to somatic experiencing (the therapeutic technique), but a bit more general. Doesn't just work for trauma.
May also be less effective for trauma specifically.
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