by Tom Tomaszewski | Mar 6, 2024 | ALIENATION, DESOLATION, FRUSTRATION, HELPLESSNESS, HESITATION, INEXPERIENCE, MONOTONY
Insight and information can help you avoid repeating past ways of feeling, thinking and acting. You need to protect your capacity to think with that information, rather than to remember it. Your capacity to think freely is what will keep you safe and doing life the way you want.
Here are three things that you can do three times each day which will help prevent your body from becoming overloaded by negative intensity… worries, resentments and so on … the kinds of thing that will leave you stuck. causes a loss, sometimes a radical loss, of momentum. These three things promote positive intensity: the joy of being able to feel relaxed and thoughtful, the pleasure of being in harmony with your life, and the ability to start and stop things when you need to.
Box Breathing
Experiment with different amounts of time for the in-breath, pause and out-breath to see what suits you most for a situation. Box breathing is something you can always turn to discreetly
Don’t get taken for a ride
Stop being taken for a ride. Go and see films specifically to explore whether staying watching them or leaving is the best option. After you leave you need to be able to tell someone why you left. How long can you stay before you’re confident the film is not going to deliver what you need? You can experiment like this with any kind of experience, really. Always hold a place for your right to leave, work out how to do this in ways that feel right for you and others (ie storming out might not be the best option – quietly departing might be instead. Do you really want to make a point? What will the effect of that be on?
Instant sound bath
Buy a tuning fork or two and sound these close to your ear for an instant experience of being present in the world, connected to something outside of you that leaves you feel grounded in yourself.
by Tom Tomaszewski | Jan 17, 2024 | INEXPERIENCE
INEXPERIENCE / FEAR
All of the ‘whats’ you invest in can help you understand who you are. The pronouns you choose, the titles you accept, anything and everything you take or have to take as a measure of yourself can show you what you might otherwise never see. You. All you need is a way of noticing who becomes clear, in the way you feel, in the way you think, in your behaviour, when you are circumscribed like this.
Rules provoke a reaction
Rules provoke a reaction from who you really are. Find another person who can reflect back to you who they see in you without spoiling that reflection with too much of themself. It isn’t so much a case of who you are is what you do, as who you are is how you do things.
by Tom Tomaszewski | Dec 15, 2023 | INEXPERIENCE
INEXPERIENCE / FEAR
People take all kinds of supplements: everything from Vitamin D to lavender oil capsules. If you have a fear of something and you know, rationally that there’s something disproportionate about your fear try doing this. First of all, don’t dismiss this fear. Invite it into your thoughts carefully, like you might let someone into your house who’s come to repair something. You wouldn’t leave you purse on the table where they were working unattended, would you? What else might you not do? Let your mind get into ‘safety mode’.
Once you have introduced the thought let another one in that doesn’t feel connected, and which you can do something about. Cook something, for example. Watch something. Anything that really engages you. Don’t let your mind go back to the original one apart from for the odd glance now and then.
After a while see how you feel about that thing you fear. Maybe you’ll fear it less. What other emotions come up after you’ve done this. Notice them. Then get on with another thing. Whatever you do … do SOMETHING. Just make sure it is very low risk indeed.
by Tom Tomaszewski | Nov 2, 2023 | INEXPERIENCE
INEXPERIENCE / FEAR
Think about one of those optical illusions where you see something … and see something quite different if you look at it again. It’s the same image but you see it differently. Most importantly: it feels very different.
Ask yourself: does your life feel worth it? If the answer veers towards yes then we might assume something happened in your early life where your carers regularly and helpfully mediated whatever life threw at you. If the answer is less certain than perhaps an important sense of protection was never granted you. You learned to live in FEAR.
Living your life in FEAR means somehow remaining hidden, protecting yourself by not being quite ‘there’: presenting a facade, existing in other places (for example in your professional work or in your art. These can be places where you can more safely be yourself because different rules apply compared to the unpredictability of everyday life).
Live your life as if it is absolutely worth protecting. Live it as if you believe this. You need the feeling that comes from such an experience; not, to begin with the experience of believing in the thought of your life being worth protecting
With the feeling that comes from the experience of living your life as if it is worth protecting you can lead a life where you might then feel yourself. Without an experience of this feeling you may never feel yourself.
See life differently to feel it differently.
Life begins properly for you when there is barely an as if. There’s a feeling of you and felt from this place life will seem so different. Possibilities, opportunities, connections and experiments will occur to you that would have remained hidden when you were.
by Tom Tomaszewski | Oct 27, 2023 | INEXPERIENCE
INEXPERIENCE / FEAR
You may have heard people talk about ‘attachment’, meaning the way you feel a solid connection to someone or something in the early years of your life and how this affects your relationships as you grow older. People with attachment problems often hesitate (see the posts about HESITATION).
What about your connection to the future? All of the drives are involved in trying to ferry you, in as good a state as possible, to tomorrow. Let’s look at your FEAR drive for a moment, though. INEXPERIENCE troubles you if your responses to your FEAR drive have been difficult. Part of managing how to safely do things, to assess risks, for example, engages with how present you can feel right now – and in the future. Discovering how to find a sense of safety that isn’t also likely to limit you (hiding all of the time, for instance) will leave you with a sense of direction.
You will find yourself sticking to arrangements that you make, and plans that you draw up for yourself because you know that a certain degree of selfishness is essential if you are to be of any use to anyone apart from yourself. This way the future happens best. Not as a fantasy that avoids difficulty or the truth but as a movement resilient enough and fluid enough to give you the best chance of imagining yourself happily doing something in the future.
How can you get this kind of thing going for yourself? Arrange some things each week just for yourself and stick to them. Talk to other people who do things that you feel you’d like to do. Approach them, whoever they are. My career has been hugely affected by people I have approached like this and who took time to offer me some advice.
Don’t hold back. What have you got to lose, really?
by Tom Tomaszewski | Oct 15, 2023 | INEXPERIENCE
INEXPERIENCE / FEAR
If your instincts for safety have been compromised you’re likely to end up forever hanging out in the mainstream, eating what most people do, listening to what most people listen to, believing in things that most people think are reasonable … or eyeing the mainstream as a place where lies get told, where the truth is being buried and in which your interests are never being served. The mainstream, in other words, preserves you perfectly or seeks to destroy you unmitigatedly depending on where you swing to in your struggle to accommodate FEAR.
The secret to complacency or paranoia is the same. Go wide and deep, not narrow and shallow. If you’re standing in what gets called the mainstream or consider yourself outside of it … be kind. Look to be open when you can. Embrace complexity.
Spend as much time as you can working out how you can safely do these things and you’ll discover something your life never easily granted you: how to cope with feeling frightened.
