I’ve been analyzing desires and obsessions lately as well as how we deal with them. I’m coming to the conclusion that some of the ways we deal with our obsessions end up fueling them. The poison isn’t the medicine, but the poison and medicine feed back into each other.
You think you’ve avoided negative thoughts by shifting to positive ones? Not necessarily.
I started coming to this conclusion two ways.
First, in my energy work, my own Quigong/Circulation methods (you know the ones I discuss carefully since such practices can backfire). Part of that practice is ensuring energies flow smoothly through the body, whether you consider these esoteric energies real or just a metaphor for awareness and relaxation. Such practices make you aware of how your body works, of when you are tense or loose, and how mind and body affection each other.
What I noticed was that, when dealing with stressful situations and ruminations, even when I turned to supposedly pleasant or virtuous thoughts, the tensions remained. In a few cases it would seem even if I’d directed my mind elsewhere, these supposedly more healthy thoughts made it worse. How could I get more tense despite having less negative thoughts?
In terms of Energy Work, it was like I’d have a loop of energy running around in my brain, powering negative thoughts – obsessions, fears, etc. But when I cultivated supposedly positive thoughts, it’d be just another loop. I’d play over something supposedly benevolent over and over, but I was still stuck in a loop.
(This is why, as I have noted, anatomical spiritual models are useful to rethink ourselves).
Secondly, as I noticed these tensions and such, I was analyzing the way my mind worked, supported by my breath meditation. Classic mind-on-breath/breath-on-mind meditations are important, as I’ve held forth on, but one useful side effect is awareness. Now I’m not saying you want to sit down to meditate with that as your goal (in fact, seeking is a barrier to meditation) but hey, enjoy the scenery on the trip
One thing I had noticed in meditation was how loops in my thoughts would work. It was easy to notice a bad habit, but also easy to try to replace it with a good habit. However, when you did that, you’d end up just leaping from habit to habit. Good or bad, obsessions are obsessions and habits can be for good or ill.
I also noticed that I could bounce between one or the other. Either way you got into a habit of looking to have a habit. Trying to get out of a negative obsession with a positive one was still an obsession. In a way you were creating a rut in your mind, and no matter what was in that rut, you would still be in a rut.
No matter the model I used it was pretty apparent – you can get into various negative psychological loops, and you could replace them with positive ones, but were still in a Loop. The two played off of each other.
That was quite a revelation as I had often found ways to cultivate positive habits and they were easy to use to replace negative ones. But the negative ones kept coming back. I had in short, worn a rut in my mind (or my energy channels) that was still there no matter what filled it.
Since that understanding, it’s helped me deal with emotional loops. I can recognize them and I have a metaphor (multiple metaphors) to understand them. I can cultivate habits to step out of the loops and just relax more in general. It’s also a reminder that it’s easy to think you have solved a problem, but are reinforcing part of it.
An emotional loop is a loop no matter how good it feels or what problem you think it solved. I’m also glad to everyone whose work and writing has helped me in meditative practices, they’re why I can see it.