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Originally Posted by rainbow8
How are you today, Jexa?
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I am ok today, not too bad. I was feeling really bad because I called out sick at work and came home and immediately felt better, which means that the "sickness" I was feeling at work was really anxiety, and I felt guilty, and the guilt paralyzed me. Work is really really complicated -- the politics in my workplace have been setting me off majorly lately.
Anyway, that is just to preface that I am on this listserv where a man named Steve Hayes sometimes posts (a prominent and awesome clinical psychologist who developed Acceptance and Commitment Therapy). Anyway, he posted something that made my day better today, and I would like to share it. This was in response to a member who posted some frustrations about how impossible mindfulness and acceptance were. Maybe this will be helpful to someone.
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The mind as it is evolved protects us from tigers, but in the modern world it has turned on us.
ACT will show you how this works and what to do about it, but read that as "show you" not "tell you." If "understanding" was the key you'd have found a way out long ago.
You've been on the list about 2 months ... but this list alone will do nothing for you unless you are doing the work to take your life back from the organ between your ears.
My suggestion: if you don't have a good ACT therapist to work with pick one of the books and focus on the actual practices you find there. Forget about "being mindful of everything in the world all the time" and sit and follow your breath. Forget about "accepting it for what it is" and
practice walking into pain with curiosity and open awareness. If it is not a practice, just leave it alone.
The work is to take your life back from the organ between your ears ... feeding it more chunks of your life in the game of "understanding" will not help even if the words you are trying to understand are ones like "mindfulness" and "acceptance."
Here, look, thru the crack comes a strip of paper. There is a message. "by the way, there are no actual locks on this prison."
Good luck. We are out here.
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Today, I have been telling myself, "There are no actual locks on this prison." Imagine! The whole world unlocks in an instant.. anyway it is not so simple, I keep finding myself back in brain-lock, but slowly.. slowly..
