Seeking guidance

[Jadzia]

It seems like it’s mostly kind of a gap or a nothingness. I look for what’s behind the story of Honeybear, and there’s nothing there, and it’s a gap, or like the mental space that happens when you’re startled, except not so brief like that, or like a subtle feeling of falling. I guess when it feels like freedom it’s because there’s a little elation to seeing how insubstantial the story is—I’m not actually what I thought I was.

Beautiful.
Ok, this gap or nothingness can sometimes be the answer to a question, showing that that what was believed simply doesn't exist. Quietness shows the same
Yes, and you sure are not what you thought you were.

There’s just a sense of freedom. There’s not a separate me that feels freed.

Wonderful.

What’s upsetting is mostly that so much of the story of myself has been incredibly painful for so much of my life, and to see that it’s not anything at all is upsetting. I’ve generated an immense amount of pain for so long, and there isn’t anything real behind it. This is confusing, because it’s felt so real, and then there’s a kind of grief about all of that needless pain and about what a sad waste of an existence it is to have lived like that. (I know that this is a story, too, but I’m just telling you what comes up.)

Did you generate the pain or did it just happen and was just what is, as well?
It is no use beating yourself around the head with this.... life is about everything, living through pain, through love and joy. There was no choosing of falling for the story and sticking with it with all its consequences. Life is happening. All is well.

Also, since I’m still generating pain for myself based on my stories, that feels confusing as well—like, why won’t it just stop even though I can look and see that there’s nothing behind it? I know rationally that habits are often hard to get rid of, but it feels confusing and upsetting anyway to not be able to stop it.

This pain felt in the story is there, it can't be stopped, denied or rejected. It is a paradox, no story and yet the pain is still felt. All the emotions and feelings want and need to be seen to be released.The pain, the frozen emotions or the ones welling up have to be dealt with, lovingly, full of compassion for the character and patiently. There are a lot of different techniques to do so, they go from Emotional Expansion to psychotherapy.
So what is the difference to before?
It will become much easier over the time, as the resistance becomes less and the story less sticky. Then it is just allowing what comes up and embracing it. It is a bit like a mother invites her akward kids into her arms and just allows them to be, no fixing, no trying to repair or making better - just lots of love. Over time the identification with the story will weaken.

Love,
Jadzia

[Honeybear]

this gap or nothingness can sometimes be the answer to a question, showing that that what was believed simply doesn't exist

Yes.

Did you generate the pain or did it just happen and was just what is, as well?

It just happened.

It is no use beating yourself around the head with this.... There was no choosing of falling for the story and sticking with it with all its consequences.

Yes. Thanks.

This pain felt in the story is there, it can't be stopped, denied or rejected. It is a paradox, no story and yet the pain is still felt. All the emotions and feelings want and need to be seen to be released.The pain, the frozen emotions or the ones welling up have to be dealt with, lovingly, full of compassion for the character and patiently.

Ok, thanks.

It will become much easier over the time, as the resistance becomes less and the story less sticky. Then it is just allowing what comes up and embracing it. It is a bit like a mother invites her akward kids into her arms and just allows them to be, no fixing, no trying to repair or making better - just lots of love. Over time the identification with the story will weaken.

Ok, great.

Thanks, Jadzia.

Love,
Honeybear

[Jadzia]

If you like you can start now to simply sit with emotions. When you feel one, invite it, embrace it and allow it to be.
Just this. It is not about the story just about loving what is and accepting it.

Share what you find.

Love,
Jadzia

[Honeybear]

I found it difficult to affirmatively invite, embrace, and love painful emotions, so I’ll keep working on that, but I was able to kind of relax into them and allow them to be there in a way that felt like a little bit of a relief. I noticed that this sometimes released the story a little bit as well.

On a different note, I was wondering if we could go back and look again at what you said about there being no separation anywhere, because I’m still not clear about it. I get the part about there not being a separate me somewhere inside of myself that is distinct from experience, so in that sense, I can see that there’s no separation between me and what I’m experiencing, just because the “me” is gone from the equation. But can’t there still be other kinds of separation? Like, for example, you said that I took things too far when we were talking about language and I was thinking that if words come up in my own mind from who knows where, and if we can’t really know what words mean because they are only arbitrarily assigned to their meanings and bear no direct relationship to the things they refer to, then maybe in some sense I couldn’t really know what the thoughts in my own mind meant since I don’t know where they come from. If I understood you correctly, you said no, that it’s only true of other people’s words that we can’t be sure what they mean. Doesn’t the fact that I can know what my own words mean but not other people’s suggest some kind of separation? And then at a much more basic level, when I look at what’s in front of me, I see a bunch of objects on the table, and the napkin seems separate from my keyboard. I know that in theory it’s all just color, and that the lines between the different forms require concepts to decide which parts get categorized as distinct objects, but as we discussed before, for me, the concepts are imposed simultaneously with the seeing, so I never actually have an experience that’s just color—my experience is of objects that seem separate. When you say that there’s no separation anywhere, is that how you’re experiencing things—like as really not being separate? I don’t know how to do that. I can see them as not being separate from me, since that me is just a fiction, but I can’t see them as not separate from each other.

Thanks, Jadzia.

Love,
Honeybear

[Jadzia]

I found it difficult to affirmatively invite, embrace, and love painful emotions, so I’ll keep working on that, but I was able to kind of relax into them and allow them to be there in a way that felt like a little bit of a relief. I noticed that this sometimes released the story a little bit as well.

Well done. You already noticed the benefit with this lets call it excercise though it is more an attitude.
Most of us learned that there are emotions which are wanted and the other ones, the unwanted ones. We crave the one sort and don't want to feel the other sort. Sometimes life offered too many challenges at once and we couldn't cope, so emotions got stuck. Each time something is left, which is attached to a story. And yes, stuck emotions mean stuck story.
There is one thing which is good to know about emotions: They take a something one could imagine as a spiral movement in, getting tighter and tighter, winding up, at one point the maximum is reached and then automatically the release the tension, the sort of spiral out happens and emotions can be released.
Being loving, accepting is the energy needed for emotions to go to maximum tightening and to be released.

I get the part about there not being a separate me somewhere inside of myself that is distinct from experience, so in that sense, I can see that there’s no separation between me and what I’m experiencing, just because the “me” is gone from the equation.

This is all LU is about. The first big step. The: Hey, I don't exist the way I thought I am, I am not what I thought I am. Self not being the thinker, experiencer, doer, manager and so on. There is a flow, life happens.
That's it.
Are you clear about this, or do you have any more questions.

Yes, there is no separation at all.
Like the subject object split you describe.

nd then at a much more basic level, when I look at what’s in front of me, I see a bunch of objects on the table, and the napkin seems separate from my keyboard.

This is for after LU to get. We stop at a point.

[quote....]we can’t really know what words mean because they are only arbitrarily assigned to their meanings and bear no direct relationship to the things they refer to....,[/quote]
We can agree on what words mean, sometimes it might need clarification, but all in all it works quite well. The question here was do words have a connection to what they refer too, they don't. They are just abstracts. Knowing a word doesn't mean we know that what it describes.
So you sort of know the words turning up, since you learned each and every one of them.
Our look on teh world and on what is on the other hand is tainted by the overview we have on life. If I see myself as separate I will find lots of proof, if I see that it isn't like that, I will find lots of proof too. :-)

Love,
Jadzia

[Honeybear]

Most of us learned that there are emotions which are wanted and the other ones, the unwanted ones. We crave the one sort and don't want to feel the other sort. Sometimes life offered too many challenges at once and we couldn't cope, so emotions got stuck. Each time something is left, which is attached to a story. And yes, stuck emotions mean stuck story.
There is one thing which is good to know about emotions: They take a something one could imagine as a spiral movement in, getting tighter and tighter, winding up, at one point the maximum is reached and then automatically the release the tension, the sort of spiral out happens and emotions can be released.
Being loving, accepting is the energy needed for emotions to go to maximum tightening and to be released.

This is very helpful and very kind.

This is for after LU to get. We stop at a point.

Ok, great.

Our look on teh world and on what is on the other hand is tainted by the overview we have on life. If I see myself as separate I will find lots of proof, if I see that it isn't like that, I will find lots of proof too. :-)

Mmm hmmm. Interesting and helpful.

This is all LU is about. The first big step. The: Hey, I don't exist the way I thought I am, I am not what I thought I am. Self not being the thinker, experiencer, doer, manager and so on. There is a flow, life happens.
That's it.
Are you clear about this, or do you have any more questions

I am clear about it! But I want to double-check about what I think I got and didn’t get from this process, just so I won’t have any doubts about whether I missed something.

As we’ve discussed, when I started this process, I had seen that there wasn’t a separate self inside of me based on answering some of the questions in Gateless Gatecrashers, but that insight wasn’t enough for me to understand it clearly. In retrospect, I think my mind needed to come at it from more angles to be sure. So going through this process with you, and looking particularly at how the story of Honeybear is just a story, and at how actions are running independently of thoughts, and at how there’s not a chooser or an observer, all made it much more clear that the thing I thought was me isn’t there at all. This was quite an amazing process, because in some ways it seems so simple, but I never would have been able to do it on my own. So thanks very much to you and LU for that magic.

What didn’t happen, though, is I didn’t lose the feeling of being a self. When I’m going about my day, I mostly feel like a self in just the same way I did before, except there are periods where the sense of self feels like it’s there, but a little diminished. We’ve discussed this a few times before, and what I think I’ve understood from you is that this is fine because the sense of self doesn’t disappear at this stage in the process. I just wanted to make sure one more time.

Thanks so much, Jadzia.

Love,
Honeybear

[Jadzia]

Yes, you were close when you came here and yes, sometimes it needs a bit more looking to drop the doubts.

The sense of self, as already written, drops later, when other stuff is seen as the illusion, construction it is.
For the moment one thing is good to answer:
Does the sense of self point to anything?

If you have a look at the past time, what changed the past weeks?
How does it feel to see that self is just a character in a story, a carefully woven one?

Love,
Jadzia

[Honeybear]

For the moment one thing is good to answer:
Does the sense of self point to anything?

No.

If you have a look at the past time, what changed the past weeks?

Well, besides what I said above about seeing much more clearly that there’s not a separate me in here, I think the main thing that’s changed is that I have a much deeper understanding that the story I tell about myself is just a story—an “add on” as you call it. In some ways, this understanding feels like nothing, and in other ways it feels very profound.

How does it feel to see that self is just a character in a story, a carefully woven one?

At the moment, it feels great! There’s such a feeling of freedom when I contemplate that. Earlier it was upsetting, but right now it’s not.

Thanks, Jadzia.

Love,
Honeybear

[Jadzia]

Did you notice a change in your reactions to circumstances, to what happens, to people?
How is the flow of life?

Love,
Jadzia

[Honeybear]

Did you notice a change in your reactions to circumstances, to what happens, to people?

A little bit, but nothing dramatic. For instance, a couple of days ago, someone did something that really hurt my feelings. I felt terrible about it, but at the same time, I had the sense that my idea about the person and what she’d done was just thoughts and the idea of the me that she’d done it to was also just thoughts. While I was feeling terrible about it, knowing this didn’t seem to help much and was just sort of in the background, but then the bad feeling dissipated, and it seemed to do so much more quickly than it would have previously. But I think that for me to feel really sure about whether something has changed will take a while. For example, my meditation practice, frustrating as it has been, brought about some dramatic changes in my psyche in the first few years I was doing it. These changes were quite significant and seemingly permanent, but it took me at least a year or so to feel sure that that’s what had happened. This seems different because it’s a distinct insight, but I think that because I didn’t have any fireworks or a big shift, it will take me a little while to know whether there’s been a change in my experience, as opposed to the change in how I see myself, which feels more clear.

How is the flow of life?

I’m not sure what this means exactly. Life seems the same, and not like some special flow or anything.

Love,
Honeybear

[Honeybear]

After I wrote you, I had another similar experience where something made me feel really terrible, and I had this sense of, oh no, this is going to be a big downward spiral of terrible feelings. At the same time, though, I had the sense that the painful feelings were based on thoughts about me and about the other person, and that they were merely thoughts. Then after a pretty short time, the painful feelings just vanished. It was so interesting! They were really intense, and then they were gone and the whole situation didn’t seem like a problem anymore. This was very different from how my emotions normally work.

[Jadzia]

While I was feeling terrible about it, knowing this didn’t seem to help much and was just sort of in the background, but then the bad feeling dissipated, and it seemed to do so much more quickly than it would have previously.

There is less stickyness and that helps a lot.

After I wrote you, I had another similar experience where something made me feel really terrible, and I had this sense of, oh no, this is going to be a big downward spiral of terrible feelings. At the same time, though, I had the sense that the painful feelings were based on thoughts about me and about the other person, and that they were merely thoughts. Then after a pretty short time, the painful feelings just vanished. It was so interesting! They were really intense, and then they were gone and the whole situation didn’t seem like a problem anymore. This was very different from how my emotions normally work.

Beautiful.
Two things make stuff less sticky:
the lessening of identification with the character
and
the lack of resistance, the allowing of emotions, the allowing of what happens.

Just for the next days, simply observe how your life unfolds, what happens, what is the same, what is different. Go explore! :-)

Love,
Jadzia

[Jadzia]

Somethings missing ;-)
Please do feel free to share what you find.

[Honeybear]

Just for the next days, simply observe how your life unfolds, what happens, what is the same, what is different. Go explore! :-)

Will do.

Somethings missing ;-)
Please do feel free to share what you find.

What does this mean? What is missing?

Thanks, Jadzia.

Love,
Honeybear

[Jadzia]

:-)
Sorry the last sentences was missing, that's all.

Love,
Jadzia