Yesterday I had a massive anxiety attack in a social situation. I’ve had the feeling before, and I’ve been in similar situations before. Sometime they trigger it, sometimes they don’t, but this time it was unusually strong. I knew the situation was coming up, and I also noticed the feeling beginning to rise. I decided to go through with it anyway and put as brave a face on it as I could; no reason to be weird in front of my friends.
Anxiety seems like such a trivial word for such a powerful emotion. It seems like there should be some great and impressive name for the feeling that can sometimes cripple me in certain situations, but, as far as I can tell, there isn’t. There’s just this unnamed emotion that sucks all the enjoyment out some social situation. I hope that some people didn’t feel avoided. I did the best I could, but I when I reached a certain point, I just had to take off or, I don’t know. I really don’t know what would happen if I just let it all out right there. In a way, it’s just a huge feeling of dread and the only solution is to get away.
As I said, I’ve been through this before. In the past I just stuffed it down or ran away, depending on how strong it was that time. This time, I decided to follow my own advice and find and remove the beliefs that, I assume, underlie this emotion. And I was in for a surprise.
I kept the feeling present all the way home. It appears that it was time for this emotion to go, because, unlike most times in the past, it was fairly easy to keep it present until I had time to work on it, and I dawdled quite a while before I got around to it. Today I’m facing my own duplicity in the fact that, although I knew what to do and how to do it, I was still extremely reluctant to face and deal with these emotions. In the back of my mind, I tend to fault others for not dealing with the emotions that are clearly making a mess of their lives, and here I was doing the same thing! Reality Check!
Yes I did get around to processing these emotions, and, fortunately, they were still easy to get present to. So I dived in. It only took a little while to figure out that the core belief I was up against was “I’m worthless.” It seems that all the similar beliefs around it had already been cleared, but I seemed to have missed this one. The processing was fairly textbook, though a bit tedious. One of the drawbacks of working on yourself is the tendency for your mind to wander. The more powerful the emotion, the greater the tendency to “forget” what you’re doing. I had to pull myself back on course more times than I can count. When you’re working with someone, they can help keep you focused.
In a way, it’s a relief to be able to depend on someone else. On the other hand, though, you have to tell them all those secrets that you trouble facing inside your own head. And also, it seems to me that sometimes having to articulate my emotions, and explain what’s going on to a coach, can sometimes get in the way of we’re trying to accomplish. I guess in any aspect of health, you just have to take responsibility for yourself, because you can’t expect that someone will always be there to take care of you.
So, I finally made it to the bottom and there got my surprise. There I was at the bottom, and all the emotional charge was completely flattened, and the belief was still there. That was something I hadn’t seen on a long time! Usually, once the charge is completely gone, the belief disappears without any further effort. Not this time.
When I was first taught to remove or “pull” beliefs, we always to go through a lengthy process for each one, and emotional charge was not addressed. Looking back on it, it seems rather odd, for the charge often got in the way. Now I’m sure that no belief can be released without removing the charge that holds it in place, but, at the time, we simply didn’t consider it. For that past couple of years, I’ve been secretly patting myself on the back because I’d noticed that I didn’t seem to have to “pull” things anymore, all I had to do was clear the emotions and they vanished on their own. I was thinking that was a sign of my advancement!
Ah well. Today the reality I’d been ignoring is pretty clear, and the mechanics of how beliefs work are, once again, present to me. “Beliefs,” whatever they actually are, come in two flavors. One type, a core type, just is, in a manner of speaking. It seems to always accumulate emotional charge, but it’s not dependent on it. It always must be explicitly released, but it won’t actually disappear until all the it’s charge has drained off. In the old days, we would struggle with releasing beliefs, trying various techniques and approaching the process from different angles, until it finally went. At the time, we didn’t get that we were, indirectly, draining off the charge through all our fiddling.
The second type of belief, is dependent on a core belief. It also contains charge, but it needs to be anchored by a related core belief in order to exist. These dependent beliefs are easy to release, you often only have to look at them sidewise and they go. But they will return, if you don’t deal with the core belief that they are related to. Once you release a core belief, all the beliefs dependent on it become “free floating” in a way, and will often release spontaneously, as soon as they are triggered by something in the environment. If not, a few seconds of focused concentration will do the trick.
I hadn’t come across a core belief in a long time. They tend to be well protected and hard to locate. They disguise themselves so well that we accept them, without question, as “just the way it is.” The most difficult skill I’ve had to learn, in the process I’m calling “enlightenment,” is distinguishing the patchwork of beliefs that make up this thing that I call “reality.” I am coming around to understand that the world you experience is a product of your personal beliefs. Even the most hardened materialist accepts that how you perceive the world is effected by how you feel, and how you feel is determined by your beliefs. But how far does this go, how much does perception create your personal reality?
How much of reality is “fundamental” and how much is a construct of your perceptions? I still don’t know; I’ve been digging for years and still haven’t reached the bottom. How deep does this rabbit hole go?
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