Confused ?

[Rishabh R]

Guys and women of this forum - How you all deal with emotional suffering ? I have gotten confused with so many high quality tools such as embracing suffering through acceptance of reframing it by thought processes or questioning the thoughts,assumptions or beleifs that cause you all to suffer ? 

Which tool you all use regularly? Lately have been using embracing suffering ,observing my thoughts and questioning the thoughts, assumptions and beleifs which cause me to suffer .CBT or Cognitive reappraisal also works for me.

Edited 6 hours ago by Rishabh R

[PolyPeter]

I guess it depends on the depth of such suffering.

also, a key distinction is that suffering is not the same as pain

you can feel pain, and not suffer through it

but you can feel pain, and make a whole story about it and create more pain because of this narrative, and then it becomes suffering

 

When I'm in pain, what usually helps is to first give it my whole attention, feeling it fully.

Then, try to understand it, because if you don't understand the root cause of such pain, it'll become a source of anxiety

and then, it depends on the type of pain

 

if it is pain that comes from relationships, accept them as they are, but if you need to keep distance, that's an option. 

If it is physical pain, maybe external help is needed, traditional medical doctors or curanderos are options.

 

what I use the most is giving it (the pain) my full attention WHILE remembering that this pain is not me, and that my essential self will always remain untouched by anything, even temporary, or chronic pain. This allowed me to overcome a lot of shit.

 

hope this helps!

[Rishabh R]

@PolyPeter Are you talking about feeling the pain fully which I mentioned as acceptance and at the same time having a detached identity ? By the way acceptance helped me a lot and also other practices I mentioned too helped a lot .

[Boost]

Keep yourself busy with small meanings in life. 

[Boost]

But also it depends on the level of your development. My high level life coach said that I'm well above avarage in consciousness. If you are just an avarage level, then I can maybe coach you a bit.

I have some bad emotion coming up at the evening. This means that if the too deep then even above avarage people struggle. But maybe yours aren't so deep. 

[Rishabh R]

@Boost 👍

[PolyPeter]

4 hours ago, Rishabh R said:

Are you talking about feeling the pain fully which I mentioned as acceptance and at the same time having a detached identity ? By the way acceptance helped me a lot and also other practices I mentioned too helped a lot .

Yes, exactly, but I'd be careful with the word "detached." The way it usually gets used it sounds like keeping distance from the pain, and that's actually the opposite of what I meant. If you pull away from pain to avoid feeling it, that's avoidance, and it comes back.

What I'm pointing at is two things happening at the same time, and they don't compete:

- Full attention on the pain. You let it be there completely, no resistance.

- Remembering that this pain is not you. The essential self isn't something you build or hold onto as a new identity, it's what's already there once you stop gripping the pain as if it were you.

So it's not "I feel the pain over here, and my detached self watches from over there." It's closer to: total presence WITH the pain, and in that presence it becomes obvious that you are not it. The non-identification isn't distance, it's clarity.

That's also why acceptance works for you, I think. Acceptance is the first move (feeling it fully), and the not-being-it is what acceptance reveals once there's no resistance left. They're one move seen from two sides.