It seems to me that a life lived optimally feels most of the time like a smooth flowing stream. Perhaps counter-intuitively, I think this can be the case even in difficult circumstances, but this is a very difficult skill to learn.
I feel that our first hour awake in the morning is a key indicator where we are at. Do you wonder what interesting things will happen, what wonders you will see, who you will meet, what stories you will hear, and what you will learn?
Or are you more like “Dear God, let today be mostly like yesterday. Yesterday wasn’t too bad. Please let nothing awful happen today and please help me get through it without too much trouble, pain and worry?”
The task, obviously, is to get from one to the other, but this is not easy. It is very hard.
The Anaconda Strategy, as articulated by the brilliant but prodigiously fat Winfield Scott, amounted to “to get to Richmond, which is 100 miles away, we have to first get to Vicksburg, which is 1,000 miles away.” And he was right, of course. Vicksburg was Grant’s first real major victory, and how he was made Generalissimo of the whole conflict for the Union. It’s an interesting site. You should visit it.
I am always reading multiple books. A case can be made in both directions, of course, but practically that is what I do.
One current book is “Lean and Strong.”
There is a lot of good content here. I don’t think any of it is particularly original, other than the specific use to which he has competently put it. But it’s a good book. I would recommend it.
What I am realizing is that Cognitive Psychology has gotten a lot better than it was in my first foray into it, back in the 90’s or so. As you would imagine, I’ve read a LOT of self help and psychology books, but other than “Learned Optimism” few were much help to me. They sell the books by making everything sound easy. But it isn’t. Not for me. There is no easy three step process, nothing you can accomplish in three weeks; and perhaps to the point, nothing you SHOULD be able to accomplish in three weeks. There is no Enlightenment for sale on Amazon.
The two specific schools of thought and presumably practice that seem interesting are called Self Determination Theory and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.
And I will note that within these models “safe spaces” and the habit and following demand of being allowed to avoid any hint of unpleasantness is every bit as unhealthy as it would seem to be on the face of it. Trying to structure a world where you always get your way or go into hyperarousal is more or less definitionally pathological.
Martin Seligman (and no doubt a few others) is what some have taken to calling Positive Psychology 1.0. What some are calling Positive Psychology 2.0, which was certainly latent in Seligman’s work, but perhaps better articulated now (I have yet to read, for example, this book ), focuses, more or less, on embracing the suck. On recognizing that life is just fucking hard sometimes, but that some of the BEST stuff comes from all this. You can, to some great extent, make bad experiences good by how you deal with them.
[I will note that another book that had a significant influence on me back in the 1980’s, which anticipated this in what I will call Maturity Therapy, and which he called Moral Therapy, was “The Myth of Neurosis”.]
And what I see in my own consciousness is that latent traumas sit like giant stones in the flow of your consciousness. They disrupt focus. They sap energy by forcing you to learn how to keep them from conscious awareness.
And a stone is a stone, of course. It is a big, heavy, thick object. But we are dealing with emotion, and the reality is that big, heavy, thick things can be gradually worn away with attention. They break into smaller stones, and smaller stones, and eventually become integrated. That integration frees up energy for positive experience. We no longer need work so hard to keep them from intruding–intrusion, of course, being a more or less defining feature of trauma–and that makes openness to good things much easier.
And I have spoken of Dan Siegels SIFT model. I don’t know if he came up with it, but he is the first one I heard talk about it. Sensation, Image, Feeling, Thought. As I have said, I think this is the order, and the two pairs are Sensation/image, and Feeling/thought.
And this morning it seems to me you need a strategy for optimizing flow and engagement at each level. You need a method of dealing with sensation, which for me is Kum Nye.
Images I am feeling poetry works, and perhaps visual art, and perhaps interesting and good film. The scene in the birch trees in Tarkovky’s “Ivan’s Childhood” is a good example. Another odd one that pops in my head sometimes is the mailman riding his bike erratically at the beginning of the Sacrifice. The key is evocation of sensations and feelings, pushing it out in both directions.
And I suppose I perhaps ought to also pair sensation/feeling, and image/thought. That works too. Kum Nye certainly works with the first pair.
And Cognitive Psychology obviously works well with thought.
And biofeedback, including neurofeedback, works with all of it.
I am slowly reconnecting with my spiritual energy, slowly making contact with my real tribe, which is out there somewhere. I cannot begin to describe how excruciatingly difficult this has been. Without being able to say this for certain, I feel I know from personal experience what the experience of war is like, of painful loss, and sustained emotional terror and physical difficulty.
My work continues. It is raining outside, which I have always found pleasant. It is a soft rain, moistening the world.