When we experience agony, we often wish for the time before that agony. But if you remember, the slate was not clean then either. Remember your canker sore? Remember the sprained wrist? Remember the inevitable confrontation with your mother, coworker, or friend? That was the affliction that ruled you last month.
Life is affliction. There’s not some unafflicted life you could be living. This is what life is, trials and overcoming.
Don’t you wish life was like when we were kids?
Only the version of my childhood I’m convinced I had.
Don’t ever forget that the human brain is like anything else, if you beat it up when its forming those dents carry on. All the time you spend underneither negative emotions, feeling helpless to change them, feeling like depression and anxiety, shame, guilt, remorse, listlessness is like a tide you can’t help but get swept up in—this is the result of a brain that never developed the ways of thinking that can tread water and swim back to shore or climb aboard a life raft.
It’s not your fault. And you can still develop those tools.
When I’m stuck in depression/listlessness, I have to look at myself as if I’m another person and call myself dramatic. It deflates the severity of the feeling and allows me a break to jump out.
A death spiral of anxiety requires full distraction with a tv show, social media, or a movie. Just reset the whole brain as fast as possible.
Guilt requires the meditation on the fact that I was always going to be the person who made that decision. And I live in this world now. So there’s no use pouring thought into a hole in an attempt to fill it when the hole doesn’t even exist.