Summary: As I started to get dressed this morning it hit me. “It” was this overwhelming feeling of unhappiness, heaviness, and upset. I felt miserable. I did not want to go to work. I hadn’t felt this badly in many months. (http://www.mortylefkoe.com/wp-content/uploads/bigstock-Misery-crop-300x265.jpg)I hadn’t felt this way when I had awakened a couple of hours earlier. I had jumped out of bed when the alarm went off after getting plenty of sleep. I had put on my robe and gone down to my desk as I always do to spend about 45 minutes answering emails and preparing my schedule for the day. Then still feeling fine, I had a good breakfast of eggs and toast. It was when I went to the bathroom to start getting ready for the day that this horrible feeling seemed to spring up from out of nowhere. For a few minutes I felt overwhelmed by it. Then I started to use some of the techniques I’ve developed and written about to try to get myself out from underneath this ominous black cloud. After a few minutes the thought occurred to me: “This is a great opportunity to notice everything I am doing to overcome this heavy, dismal feeling, so I can write about it in this week’s blog post. Instead of writing an article with suggestions on how to overcome suffering, I’ll write an article about what I actually did. I’ll dictate my thoughts into my pocket recorder and transcribe them later.” I felt really terrible So here are my thoughts and feelings from earlier today. The first thoughts I recorded were: “It’s hard for me to think; it’s hard to concentrate. I just don’t want to be here. This is really painful.” I used to have this type of feeling at least once a week for most of my life. As I eliminated beliefs and conditionings, these attacks became less and less frequent. I think the last episode was about a year ago. It only took a couple of minutes of focusing on what I was feeling before I noticed a big difference between my experience of painful feelings today and my experience of similar feelings years ago. In the past Morty had been upset. The upset had been inside me and all around me at the same time. There had been no part of me that wasn’t upset. This morning was very different: “I” could detach from the upset and watch myself being upset. It was almost as if there was a separate “I” who was watching Morty be upset. Moreover, I knew I was only having a “feeling”; it wasn’t who I was. I knew it would pass soon no matter what I did or didn’t do. This little exercise didn’t make the feeling go away, but it did create a slight distance between the upset and ME. As a result I didn’t feel totally overwhelmed by the feeling, as I had been years ago. Looking for the source of the feeling Once I had gotten some distance from the “black hole” I seemed to be in, I asked myself: “Where did this feeling come from? What is causing it?” I thought of everything that was going on in my life. Both of my daughters have been going through difficult times recently and I felt that neither have allowed me to help them the way I wanted. They have been talking to my wife Shelly a lot more than they have been talking to me. Had I given that any meaning? I realized that I had given it meaning when I first noticed it, but I had dissolved it quickly. This morning it was clear to me that my relationship with the two of them had nothing to do with the lousy way I was feeling. At this point I noticed that some part of me wanted to hold on to the upset. I had reverted to feeling that Morty was upset. I was so identified with the upset that not having it seemed like an invalidation of me somehow. As soon as I noticed this, I again focused on observing myself having the feeling. As soon as I was able to separate myself from the feeling and watch myself having it, the resistance to finding a way to get rid of it disappeared and the feeling itself diminished in intensity. Then,
