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Originally Posted by jexa
Well, she did disappear. I could not find her at all when I did this exercise. And the world expanded into blackness and I was drowning in it. That was my experience.
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And that's fine. On other occasions your experience is likely to be quite different. What makes a big difference, perhaps the biggest, is how willing you are to allow whatever comes up for you to come up.
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...after I had this experience, it became a story. I processed it in words and began to analyze it. I think I actually do this to the majority of events that noticeably change my emotions in any way, good or bad.
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We all do that! What mindfulness is about, is learning to observe your experience as you're experiencing it instead of reading it back from the record later along with whatever meanings you've attached to it by then.
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As in, given the scalpel, they dissect a kiss, or, sold the reason, they undream a dream. And, writing that, I should caution myself not to make another story out of it. But I will, anyway.
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[e. e. cummings! 
]
Good! When you
notice yourself making a story out of something, that is an experience. Just go ahead and do it, and continue to notice yourself doing it, for however long you do.
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I struggle a lot to tell the difference between my experience and the story-about-my-experience (the judgments, the analysis). This is exactly it. Ha. This is how I experience my "stories." 
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Just keep noticing. "I am struggling." "I am telling a story about my experience." "Now I'm judging..."
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Actually, do you remember the thread after my last session with my old T? At the end of the post, I said something like, "this is clean pain, this is life-lived-well pain."
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That would be
this thread (referring also to
this one). I only caught one of those the first time; thanks for bringing up the other one now. It's clean pain right when you're experiencing it. Afterwards, it becomes just another story. (A good one, though!
)
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I was totally thinking in ACT terms at the time. And at that time, I drew heavily on ACT skills to get me through the whirlwind of crazy emotion.
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And you did seem to get through, and even to benefit from having been there. I do something a lot like that too, though I didn't learn it as ACT so I don't call it that. By the way, I think the most appropriate tribute you could possibly pay to your former therapist is to keep using and expanding on what you learned while you were with her!
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Or, I should say, I have a tendency to use metaphors to trap and trick myself. Even one like distinguishing between clean and dirty pain. But maybe that tendency to trap and trick myself kind of plays along with this idea:[video link] If you know what I mean.
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It's going to take quite a while for that video to load on this connection. I'm also a bit nervous that it may lock up my computer (as has sometimes happened) so I just saved a copy of this post down to here. I love Alan Watts, though!
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Right now it is a story, so I can bear it, but the experience is something different. My brain sometimes starts to scream when I meditate, well screaming like sirens, telling me that this experience is dangerous.
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Good. (1.) just notice that, and (2.) ask yourself,
are you willing to experience your mind screaming at you like a siren and whatever it's warning you against? Either answer is perfectly fine. If you're willing, go ahead; if you're not, don't; and either way, just take what you get.
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And who am I to know whether it is possible that I could approach a gate which would propel me to "another side" and my "self" on this earth would be forever lost? Who knows what makes people really lose it?
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Oh, wow, you're reminding me of some experiences I used to have pretty regularly when I was in my 20s and even some way into my 30s. I'd be alone in the house at night, say, and I'd start wondering: "I
remember that outside my room there's the rest of the house, and the front door, and then the street. I checked the front door an hour ago and it was locked; nothing can get in. I should be perfectly safe here, only... what if it's not the way I remember it? What if right outside my room now is a haunted castle, or a cavern, or hell, or another planet?"
Or later, when I lived in a cabin a few hundred feet back in the woods, I'd be making my way home by flashlight and the trees and bushes would start to look unfamiliar. If it turned out that I was no longer where I thought I was but had somehow ended up on the wrong trail, in a different country, or on a different planet, how would I ever explain to myself how I got there or find my way back? In retrospect I compare such experiences to dreaming (which, I understand, isn't very different in some ways from psychosis).
(Please treat this next part as idle speculation.) It occurs to me that when I'm relying on my mind (story, history, conclusions, judgments, evaluation, and whatever I'm attached to) for guidance, then anything that calls my mind into question -- "How do I know that I'm still on the same planet?" for instance -- feels like a severe threat. If my mind were to let me down once, as by letting me inexplicably get transported to an unfamiliar location, how could I ever trust it again? When I'm willing to be in the here-and-now, though, I can picture myself saying "Ooh, cool, I've never visited hell (or wherever this is) before!"
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The Alan Watts video has loaded about 1/4 of the way by now and yes, I do like it! "After I have suffered enough -- then maybe I'll deserve it". That reminds me of Hayes's "dirty pain" and of someone else's older, absurdly simple suggestion: "Give up suffering." Watts may get around to that himself but I don't know if I'll have time to let enough of the video load.
