Light

Why does reading over your own words from another time cause us to feel and see our words so differently? Perhaps, this is an influence of the imprint of trauma on my nervous system. At certain moments, my mind can "stall" under some internally generated pressure. My mind roams and tries to probe, but it doesn't get far. I feel a type of "pressure" on the sides of my head, from the dorsolateral to the temporal bone. This feeling, I know so well - total capitulation - "out of work" - morbidly withdrawn. I feel nothing and so become nothing. Just a consciousness 'watching out' upon a world I feel alien from.

And then I fight and fight to scratch my way back in. That's the instinct. We lose something, we go right back after it. The dog chasing its tail. Which, ironically, is often laughed at by us because it's so ridiculous looking. But we pretty much do the same thing - chasing after the last moment, allowing ourselves to be built up by perceptions in our day to day social interactions. We feel and then we become motivated to anticipate; and in anticipating we provoke a response, which confirms our anticipation, and we follow on in this circular way in our day to day happenings.

There really is a fundamental wisdom about mindfulness. It represents an actual recognition of an 'anterior' aspect in our object-laden thinking. The very reaching motion, the motivation to act at all, extends from a "witness pole" to a "object pole". The object pole can also be more properly associated with the self, since the collection of meaningful objects we experience generates the phenomenological feeling of selfhood.

It can be so hard. Being addicted to weed. Addicted to laziness. Addicted to certain habits of being and thinking. My sister calls me an "addictive personality". But in saying that she occludes the generating activity of a borderline mother.  But it's true. I feel a desperate neediness and desperate anxiety and tension and nervousness and hyperactivity.

My nervous system definitely is a "hyper-reactive" one. I'm sure my physiology now operates along this dynamic, which, in having irritable bowel syndrome, indicates the presence of how deeply involved the body is with the life of the mind. Our perceptions affect our body. Good feelings are "good", but they're also felt to be 'light', as in, barely noticeable, because the pleasure of the thing one is happy about puts into the periphery the effect it generates in the body.

Different body's move and synchronize in different ways. Yet I know that with a change in attitude, a focusing upon my body and relaxing into a state of slow, relaxed breathing, that I can allow myself to embrace affirming feelings of self agency. The body is truly, and absolutely, the key. The issue is connection with life - your life. Your interest in the world "out there" is what makes the world "in here".  But both support the other. The key is being willing to connect with yourself, and for yourself. 

The significance of this gesture feels to me to be at the heart of the human situation: how we deal with the otherness of life. Our place in it; the fact that we do in fact generate a 'self' that is built on a feedback between perceiving and background judgements of perception. The one feeds into the 'working models' of animal-level anticipation.

We are an other to ourselves, and so long as we feel that way to ourselves, we are likely to overlook the way our behavior affects others. Dislodged from 'within', naturally subserves disconnection from without. This fractal like quality is something that appears damn near everywhere we look.