I've been feeling odd since the weather changed. It's entirely bodily, that is, the change is being induced by changes in the season, and not by any experiences I've had in the last 2 weeks.
The temperature has dropped, and for some reason, my body, or nervous system, seems to react with an odd depression feeling. By "depression", I do not my that I am depressed; I am speaking about a body state; a sense of increased sensitivity; a lack of a certain 'feeling' in my body and my ordinary experience that 'sets up' my self-experience: how I think, how I feel and experience myself from moment to moment, and in particular, how I imagine myself with regard to the major changes I've made in my life.
The body formed the 'background', and with that background, I felt a particular "ownership" of my body; a sense that I could steer my ship without finding myself hopelessly disheveled.
This feeling is one of hypoarousal. And with a hypoaroused 'background', I find myself suddenly vulnerable to certain perceptions of self. These ideas of myself - ideas rooted fundamentally in my voice (it's interesting that in the Hebrew language, the word "kol", with a Kaf, which means voice, is phonologically identical to "qol" with a quf, which means 'all', perhaps suggesting that the voice is experienced by human beings as somehow containing the 'essence' of our self experience to the other) - draw me so deeply into fears and anxieties about being 'defective', at not being able to communicate normally, to sound normally, or to feel normally in my related to others; in short, I become utterly entranced by such thoughts because for years I did what all human beings do: I got caught up with my negative feelings, and in desperately trying to 'extricate' myself from those experiences, I was ignorantly "feeding" into a dynamic that my mind-brain-body keeps in motion. The body, brain and mind can be made enervated by such experiences. Consciousness can struggle so strongly against an experience of itself, that, like a dog biting or scratching at an itch, it literally kills itself. By "scratching" at the internal itch, it exhausts itself; one part of the brain, the vagus nerve, responds with a depressive, dissociative, parasympathetic response that challenges the hegemony of the frontal lobes. The frontal lobes, the "house of consciousness", nevertheless seeks to 'scratch' the 'itch', which in my case is my inveterate focus and obsession with the feeling of my voice; the timbre, the pitch, and even the feeling itself in the larynx region. Right now, for instance, I feel a strange tightness there; as well a sense that my ability to 'clear my throat' - another, horrible, long-time obsession bent on "testing" whether my vocal apparatus was working as I wanted it to - feels inhibited. These feelings, I know now have much to do with how I'm breathing while I attempt to clear my throat. The thought "I need to clear my throat", connected as it is with a traumatic state of consciousness, activates processes in my body, in particular diaphragmatic and laryngeal muscles, so that I actually DO feel a tension; but the tension is itself being induced by a hyper-conscious mind, objectifying it's own effort to 'clear its throat', so that as I try, my every attempt becomes more and more subtle, clenching higher and higher muscles, so that the deepest muscles involved in a normal act of clearing the throat - the bottom parts of the diaphragm - are actually too flexed for me to gain any phenomenological 'access' to them. It's as if each successive attempt leaves me a little more 'breathless', and also exhausted, phenomenologically in the quality of my focus, I cannot seem to do anything effective.
I did this for years and year and years and years. It deserves to be laid on a sheet, open before me, with a number as well. My brain-mind is heavily conditioned by this obsession with 'clearing my throat', and it is consolidated by the bodily feeling of a tension in my throat. Between the struggle to speak and communicate, and the struggle to clear my throat, lies a common denominator: how my throat region feels. A strong, percussive vowel-sound, with a strong timbre, is like an oil change for my throat. I repeat such sounds to 'unite' the autonoetic and anoetic parts of my consciousness. The 'autonoetic', or self-related thoughts and feelings, are what we are made of; life only feels as it does and means as it does because we evolved to know other people; which also implied knowing ourselves. The 'anoetic' part, or the part that is largely ignored by conscious while the self is in action, is the bodily experience; the amount of 'energy' passing through the vocal chords from the lungs and body. The anoetic, or physical qualities of speech, actually 'structure' the autonoetic. This means that the quality of your bodily relaxedness, your ability to 'rest' and 'connect' with core feelings and affects, subserves the type of person you experience yourself to be; and even more importantly, influences how other people experience you (this fact makes the experience of tension in the body act a a predictor that others will respond to you in a mirroring way; which, because of the degree of my self-awareness, has a punishing, ironic effect for my self-esteem)
I am too vulnerable at this time to be smoking weed. So why do I do it? Why did I smoke weed and subject my mind to an altered state prone to experience its recent bodily affects as leading to a self-conscious involvement with the voice? I know these things. I know it, but evidently ignore my own wisdom because of the general temptation that the 'want-pleasure' of dopamine arousal creates. The mere presentation of the stimulus - my brother and the oh so transient experience of smoking, and being high - activates neural processes that present themselves again and again to me. I avoided it for the majority of the day, but when it came to 'watching this show', for some reason it always feels so much more attractive, as jon stewarts character in half baked says "on weeeeeed". It's an absurd association that I repeatedly succumb to.
However, I am frightened by these affects and do not want to put myself in any sort of morbid state. My body feels off; but I can control it and HAVE controlled it, by controlling how I respond to the experiences. Do I add to the negative stimulus by adding my own negative evaluation? Thus perpetuating a feedback loop between negative feeling, negative evaluation - in short, the same process that landed me in this current mess? I know too much to allow such a thing to happen. I understand the limits of my free-will and realize that free-will operates 'between the spaces', in the choices I make and the direction I place my attention. I need to resist smoking weed tomorrow and understand that such austerity is necessary, vital even, to my psychological well-being.
Physically, this sense of a 'tension' in my throat will pass. I know it is only a fleeting phenomenon. By itself, it is a feeling; but with me - with my frightened, insistent need to 'control' and "know", in short, to find a feeling and 'be a certain way'; these sorts of thoughts are traps, based on an illusion of a self that is itself transitory, ephemeral, and contingent on the presence and vitality of other human beings. Why care so much about how I'm judged?
I need to care and do care. The self is sensitive and needy, and I need to acknowledge the voice of this sensitive, hurting self within-me. This is the whole wisdom in Philip Brombergs writings on trauma and dissociation. The hurt "me" IS a me, a part of my experience, that I am better off befriending than dreading. What does this mean, in effect? For most of the day, most of the time, I feel good. I wake up, speak, focus on a certain relaxedness in my body, and connect with others in a mostly successful way.
However, negative experiences with mean, rude, or aggressive other people, despite what I may know about the motivation behind their intentionality (and what it supplies for their sense of self), actually do hurt me; I can't help but react to the feeling of being "held" by another mind with a feeling of contempt or dislike. How do I get away from such feelings? Not - as my body has admonished me - by dissociating the feelings I feel. This evidently does not work for the traumatized mind. Compassion seems to be the only antidote; it saves you from hating the other, and more importantly, from distancing your cognitive mind from 'befriending' its affective experience.
Compassion, attachment. The first feelings of life are wondrously, biologically coherent. They give consciousness the 'keys' to its own healing. How else can one but interpret this world, this reality we live in, as an utter miracle? Life is beautiful; good; enmeshed. There is no blame to hand out because we are too embedded to know. But when we do know, when we do know that most important fact - of our vulnerabilities, fears, anxieties, and struggles with shame - the only practicable solution to this trauma and suffering is to 'drop' the selfishness and egotism and immerse yourself in the wonder of existence; and even more so, the astonishing power of love.
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