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Sometimes my mind is stirred up and some relatively persistent fear emerges. It’s relatively weak at first, but intuitively I sense that the fear already has some authenticity and it demands more attention and if I give in I’ll end up dwelling on it, it will grow, and possibly manifest as one or another unwelcome appearance or pattern that might be harder to get rid of later when it’s no longer just a feeling (or a feeling+idea).

So I realized that trying to deny or to straightforwardly banish or to push out the feeling is sometimes not effective for me. I can quickly banish or dissolve most fears when they occur, but once in a while I do come across a rather stubborn one (or even a particularly “convincing” one).

And then I found a little handy device. I realized that if the feeling is too well rooted to just summarily dump it, what I can do instead is domesticate it.

I visualize a box and then I open this box and put my worried feeling (or feeling+idea) into this box and lock it. Then I lovingly and carefully store the box on a mental shelf. So, the idea is, I’m not getting rid of the bad feeling, and I am also not pretending that I don’t have it. Instead I frame it in a way that makes it contained and makes it unable to grow. It becomes more like a pet or a scientific sample instead of a wild beast.

And these boxes don’t need to be permanent. The idea is to tame the feeling to level off the brunt of its strength and to channel its “energy” into something tame. Once the feeling is properly channeled and tamed, it’s OK to forget it, or to deliberately dissolve the box with the feeling in it. So the idea is not to keep these boxes forever, no, but to tame feelings (or feeling+idea bundles) that are too wild and too powerful to just eliminate on the spot as they occur.

It’s too early for me to tell if this affects manifestation very significantly, but one thing I can vouch for is that it gives a huge peace of mind and a sense of control over feelings I’d normally struggle with when attempting to outright negate/banish/dissolve head on. By using a redirect-the-flow attitude I can frame and tame the charged feeling instead, which is easier. If any of you studied any tai chi concepts, it’s the same as: by using a small force one can lead a larger one. Direct opposition is avoided in this method.

  • @syncretikOPMEnglish
    1•1 year ago

    I’ve been doing something like this for a while now. I got some advice from a shaman once that was something along the lines of: “If you have wild animals roaming around, chain them up in the basement. If they start to get loud, go downstairs and feed them. Eventually, they’ll be tame, and you can let them go.”

    That’s exactly what I was trying to say.

    My larger point is that I agree with this approach and have used it successfully, but for me, I’ve found that just putting it on the shelf isn’t a permanent fix. You’ll still want to go back to it from time to time and work with it in whatever way you see fit. But it will cease to be such an obstacle as it was before, absolutely.

    I agree. In my case just doing what I did calmed it way down, so there was little need to feed it. But it’s the same pattern: when something is wild and yet doesn’t look like it will leave on its own, there is way to lead that experience toward something more skillful without trying to do something which can be much more difficult, like an instant transformation of everything.

    Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2016-11-06 13:21:59 (d9no2t5)