"The cure for the pain is in the pain." - Rumi
Disciplined, Mindful Awareness Serves as a Powerful Self-Therapy and Self-Healing Lifestyle.
When Rumi taught, "The cure for pain is in the pain," he's talking about using our Awareness, and concentrating our Attention to watch quietly and objectively, without interference, the rise and fall of emotional-laced mental activity across the stage of our mind.
Like watching a movie that you can feel and experience - and that you WOULD normally feel and experience*
That's the whole world. Billions of people, walking around all day falling in and out of mental events, leaving their bodies behind to walk around and drive and use the bathroom and eat at McDonald's and watch tv before hauling off to bed...on autopilot...at least 50% of the time.
"Uninvolved Observer," I've read it called. The True Self. The Soul. The Overmind. The Superman, etc.
In that kind of deeply mindful, daily meditative practice, we naturally unpack the understanding that we DO have the power to step outside of our imaginary miseries and approach them as mental (or spiritual) Scientists, gaining insights into the fact that WE ARE NOT OUR THOUGHTS, and that a THOUGHT about a thing is not, never has been, and never will be the thing itself.
That kind of knowledge begins to break a lot of hidden psychological chains - painful beliefs and self-harming assumptions - very early on. It gets better from there, over time.
Non-Invasive Psychiatric Self-Repair & Upgrades: Mindful Attention Drills.
If done well and with persistence, a practitioner can begin to put an end to being flim-flammed by wild, untamed emotions and the chaotic imagery that whips them up.
What's more, one begins to understand that our surroundings - our entire environment including everyone (in any medium) we come into contact with - ANYTHING that touches our central nervous system, TRIGGERS (affects) us physically, playing across our physical nature, being taken in as we use our senses.
Everything we take in can tap our memory and bring up something we otherwise wouldn't be concerned with. So, our thoughts, and the influence of taking in the universe through our senses are ALWAYS impacting how we feel in the form of physical and mental reactions (which are physically happening).
You are Never NOT Feeling and Experiencing, You Shut It Out.
We can only fully experience and 'know' that to which we turn as much of our power of Attention as possible. That which is not at the center of our concentrated Awareness is filtered out to background sensation, kind of in the same way a photograph's subjet may be clear while the background features are blurry.
Often, clearer perception is a matter of blotting out surrounding noise which leaves an already-clear Attention Target apparently clearer but only because there is far less competing stimuli.
There is never a moment - ever - when we are not feeling. Why should such an important thing be left uninvestigated, ESPECIALLY if we are in in some form of discontent, unhappiness, or mental gloom?
Mental Activity Investigated is Mental Activity Understood.
The process of facing the feeling while observing it's thought-based, totally illusional content DISSIPATE as moments pass** changes your entire paradigm and frame of reference - revolutionizes your relationship to thoughts and emotions as you experience, probably for the first time, your power to do work upon yourself, without ever worrying about failing.
Why? Because Mindful Attention Practice as an element of your daily lifestyle turns every possible mistake into a winning opportunity.
Our screwups start in our thinking, and this is the practice of turning your mind into a garage where you can lift of the hood and conduct your own intellectual and emotional diagnostics and entirely natural repairs, non-invasive, non-destructive, and free of charge.
In this kind of practice - properly learned - we drop the self-abusive, self-blinding habit of mistaken our reactions for...ourselves.
The daily observance of bad moods vanishing before one's very awareness inevitably bestows the observer with a way out of any attack by dark imagination, no matter how or when it's triggered.
You Can Begin the Mindfulness-based Healing Process Today.
The good news is that it only takes a few seconds to step out of Hell and back into the Heaven of a life unbothered by lies passing themselves off as reality.
There's a lot of really neat things about life that start to move in the direction of anybody who learns to get better acquainted with the difference between a Thought and The Thinker who can never be harmed by their own tools because that higher-level Executive Function is completely immune to their, well, 'NON-EXISTENT' power.
* As an Attention Rookie, don't feel bad about the fact that you, like everybody else around you, spend half your day lost in thought (some people a lot more).
That's just how we end up because nobody teaches us how to control Attention when when we're young, nor the dangers of NOT being masters of our own Attention.
Billions of and billions of human beings - now and throughout history - without any conscious knowledge that we're doing so, because at the time we are so deeply immersed in the thought-based experience that we've lost touch with the fact that...it's only a thought.
A thought that has us hypnotized, for the moment, until it fades to be replaced by something else or is interrupted, forcing us to 'snap out of it,' momentarily back in the room with ourselves until the NEXT moment we trip and fall into the thought trap.
That's what this training deals with - how to escape what is essentially our version of 'The Matrix,' which happens when we get lost in imagination, whether pleasant or negative...because as Neuroscience has documented, it inevitably turns negative if not interrupted.
** No thought or feeling (emotion, impression, mood) can last long without feeding on your Attention. Without Attention, EVERY THOUGHT, FEELING, EMOTION, MOOD, and even ATTITUDE begins to dismantle itself in the mind.
Our bad, very, very, very, very BAD habit is to keep letting undisciplined, unintended, unproductive, repetitive, and sometimes just plain awful content slide in to take its place, and we don't even realize it because we don't have a grip on Attention...because imagination has run off with it.