About two months ago, through some wacky therapeutic techniques, I managed to turn off my inner self-hatred machine completely. This made me much happier, to put it mildly. I entered a categorically different and better emotional climate. It’s not like all of my discomfort went away immediately. It’s just that the question of my worth as a human being disappeared completely from my mental life.
I wrote a giant post about this, as well as a flood of tweets. And, admittedly, as I produced this barrage of noise, I was kind of worried that my experience of Deep Okayness, as I called it, would be temporary. Two months later, that doesn’t appear to be the case. I am still there. My mind still doesn’t have the capacity for self-hatred. At this point, I’m pretty sure this is permanent, or as permanent as these things can be. I could always get an inconvenient brain lesion. But, until I’m damaged in such a fashion, I appear to be a stably self-liking person.
Over this time, I’ve been fascinated by the unexpected knock-on effects. From the outside, I don’t think I’ve changed a lot, I just maybe seem more grounded, sure of myself, friendly, affectionate, present. From the inside, there have been a number of startling changes, beyond the basic happiness improvement.
Thinner Boundaries
The amount of cognitive power that I devoted to self-evaluation wasn’t clear to me. Now it’s clear. I was using a lot of energy to be suspicious of myself, all the time. Staggering amounts of my limited processing power went to flinching away from (or rationalizing) anything that could injure my brittle self-image.
Now that energy is freed up. And where it goes is interesting. A lot of it just flows into making my existence prettier. My sensory clarity has increased. The music is louder, the scents are sweeter. I’m more thoroughly in the world now that I’m less distracted by the issue of what it means for me that any particular moment is occurring.
Also, my personal boundaries have changed, and by personal boundaries, I don’t mean ‘the times when I allow my clients to phone me,’ I mean, ‘my actual sense of where the world ends and I begin.’
Sometimes, in certain kinds of meditation practice, if you focus on the breadth of your awareness, you start feeling your sense of self spread out until it’s intuitively clear that everything composing your awareness is part of you. You feel less like a little homunculus behind the controls of a hairless ape robot, and more like an aperture through which consciousness is flowing. The world seems more ‘in here,’ and less ‘out there.’ You make contact with the porousness of your being.
This is a much easier state to slip into now that my wall of self-concept is a little thinner. So easy, in fact, that I’ve basically assumed it as my default. I feel less separate, on a moment-to-moment level. It feels like my experience is protruding into me rather than lingering outside of my control room. Most of the time, this is a strict improvement; it’s just a higher-definition movie. It also makes me, seemingly, more attuned to other human beings: more responsive, less inhibited, less in my head, more enmeshed with the blips of consciousness around me.
Shortly after my Deep Okayness experience, I visited a painter friend in her cavernous open-fronted LA studio, hung with her gigantic, colorful, squiggly paintings. In this space, where she stood in the middle of a harmoniously complex tangle, on a big patch of paint-stained concrete, with the sun setting behind her, she felt like, and was, the center of my cognition, the central component of my being. I experienced the whole interaction as a work of art, a portrait of her existence, and it was stunning. We had a good talk, too.
But it can get tricky occasionally. Another recent interaction: my wife and I visited a local cactus farmer. His son was beautiful, open-hearted, and welcoming, but also a schizophrenic Jesus-loving amateur hip-hop artist wearing psychedelic pants. Shortly after we arrived, he was rapping at me about his ecstatic experiences with the angels that saved his soul. As with my friend the painter, his energy shot straight into my soul, and, in this case, it was extremely exhausting and a little destabilizing. For the rest of the day, I felt like a little piece of his weird mind was stuck inside me.
I guess it’s helpful to have some remove sometimes. I am now learning to remember that I should cultivate a skeptical distance from those around me when necessary, which is funny, because that used to be my default way of being.
Email Response Time
My average message response rate is way up, and my response time is way down. This might be a funny way to advertise self-compassion to high-achieving people. Just spend a year or two learning to stop attacking yourself with psychic acid, and you’ll clear your inbox twice as fast. Think of how the benefits will compound, how the bounties will accrue.
This is I think another case of realizing how much bandwidth was being wasted on self-evaluation. Somewhere in the back of my head, almost every time I sent an email or a message that wasn’t part of an existing conversation, I was wondering whether I’d just revealed that I was dumb/crazy/rude/psychotic/unlovable. Now I just let the emails flow, and my inbox empties much faster. The emails are probably a little slapdash, but that’s a tradeoff I’m willing to make. I am also less troubled by the messages I choose to ignore.
Friendlier Embarrassment
I still have negative emotions but they’re way different.
Last week I had a coaching call that didn’t go super well. It wasn’t disastrous or anything, I just didn’t think I did a great job. And I was embarrassed, which isn’t surprising—I take my job seriously.
A year ago, my embarrassment would have consisted of:
An unpleasantly warm bodily feeling
A constant repetition of my memory of the embarrassing event
A voice in me telling me how I’m a piece of shit loser who will die penniless and alone
Another voice fighting the previous voice, insisting, impotently, that I shouldn’t feel bad
Now it’s just 1, with a bit of 2. Mostly, I felt the embarrassment as a wave passing over me. In some ways, this made it more intense. I perceived every little embarrassment particle as it grazed my face. However, since the emotion didn’t threaten my personal narrative, it was easier to be in its presence, absorb its message, and then let it go. Whereas, historically, embarrassment has revolted me, that evening I found it cinematic, if still not pleasant. It was like music. It was not my favorite tune, but it was well-composed, and the listening experience was compelling.
My hope is that this change will make me less afraid of potential embarrassment, allowing me to bring more shame on myself and my loved ones in the future, as it serves my interests.