Thanks for the insightful comment! There are a few good points I want to highlight here:
Unfolding is emotionally powerful and can lead to the “highest clarity of mind in recent memory”
Yet it’s difficult to make real progress with unfolding
Backsliding / not making progress can lead to a negative feedback loop where “repeated inaction makes you feel like a failure”
Taking action quickly is a good way to not backslide
I think this correct, and there are two things I want to add to this to help connect these ideas to a bigger picture of healing over time:
The first is about the correlation of wellbeing and insight. You describe speaking to a friend and finding “elating and motivating” possibilities. One part of this is that putting two minds together helps with unfolding. But there’s also the fact that being with someone socially feels great and charges emotional batteries. Being in this well-resourced place allows looking at problems and seeing new possibilities, and having the emotional bandwidth to believe its possible to act in new ways. I.e. agency and wellbeing go together; stuckness and anxiety/depression go together.
So the trick, really, is to create a positive feedback loop over time of increasing wellbeing --> more insight --> more action --> greater agency.
The second is that there is meta-skill in learning to remember and act on the insights of unfolding. A friend described it through the following metaphor:
You’re walking down a street and fall into a pothole. This is something that has happened to you before, many, many, times.
Eventually, you learn that you can get out of the pothole on your own. This is amazing, and you’re surprised that being in or out of the pot is a choice!
Eventually, you learn that you can use the same techniques to get out of the pothole each time. This gets faster and faster, and while some holes are bigger than others, you’re gaining confidence that falling into a pothole isn’t the end of the world.
Eventually, you learn that you can avoid potholes and not fall in at all. Over time, potholes become less and less frequent (and at this point when you fall in, you get out very quickly).
Eventually, the road becomes so wide that that majority of your life is pothole-free.
These are “stages” (bigger, more permanent shifts) rather than “states” (momentary elation / inspiration).
Your examples are good because they show what it looks like to kick off the healing feedback loop of going up stages. And they also imply what can happen in the opposite case, of the destructive feedback loop of stuckness/pain.
Thanks for the insightful comment! There are a few good points I want to highlight here:
Unfolding is emotionally powerful and can lead to the “highest clarity of mind in recent memory”
Yet it’s difficult to make real progress with unfolding
Backsliding / not making progress can lead to a negative feedback loop where “repeated inaction makes you feel like a failure”
Taking action quickly is a good way to not backslide
I think this correct, and there are two things I want to add to this to help connect these ideas to a bigger picture of healing over time:
The first is about the correlation of wellbeing and insight. You describe speaking to a friend and finding “elating and motivating” possibilities. One part of this is that putting two minds together helps with unfolding. But there’s also the fact that being with someone socially feels great and charges emotional batteries. Being in this well-resourced place allows looking at problems and seeing new possibilities, and having the emotional bandwidth to believe its possible to act in new ways. I.e. agency and wellbeing go together; stuckness and anxiety/depression go together.
So the trick, really, is to create a positive feedback loop over time of increasing wellbeing --> more insight --> more action --> greater agency.
The second is that there is meta-skill in learning to remember and act on the insights of unfolding. A friend described it through the following metaphor:
These are “stages” (bigger, more permanent shifts) rather than “states” (momentary elation / inspiration).
Your examples are good because they show what it looks like to kick off the healing feedback loop of going up stages. And they also imply what can happen in the opposite case, of the destructive feedback loop of stuckness/pain.