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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It has an active Reddit community and combines classical Buddhist meditation practices with neuroscience.
The purpose of doing shamatha (concentration) before vipassana is to reduce the possibility of a turbulent "Dark Night of the Soul" once you start doing insight practices.
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Oh I know. I was having suicidal levels of Dark Night stuff going on when I was... 17? Long ago.
It's also a function of the method. I haven't had problems with that since 2011 or so.
Losing control emotionally is a failure state, but not the same failure state as that.
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If you've found a method and community that works for you, that's excellent!
I was morbidly shy in my teens. A lot of my problems could have been avoided with early teachers/practice partners.
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I was socially fine, okay but thought I was way more mature than I actually was. Some form of emotional management should really be taught starting with kindergarten and ending whenever your brain fully develops. 😄
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A primary, systematic goal from kindergarten onwards is to condition kids into a form of dissociative suppression, I'd argue.
Ideological kindergarten, schools with different value systems exist, but man. The field is crazy abusive.
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