""Ok, so I'm having an issue with this.
I have dissected how am I experiencing this moment of being alive to it's exact meaning.
And each time I ask that question, I notice what is going on, and the bad things somehow seem to diminish.
I seem to recognize that there is this quality in this body that can always feel good.
My challenge is:
When sh*t hits the fan, like being broke beyond being able to pay your bills. it doesn't do enough for me.
Sure, during the daytime it can calm me down, and I'm truly trying to look further into this, but it only goes so far.
At night, where I don't have the rational mind able to do things, I wake up screaming and/or wake up bathing in sweat. Sometimes I even kick the wall next to my bed because I am fighting something in my dreams.
So the point is, once I wake up and am awake enough to continue the practice, when I'm sleeping and the automatic mind takes over, there is great evidence for turmoil.
How do I deal with this?""
"Simon, you can only deal with it when you're lucid enough to investigate and choose how you are experiencing this moment. So when you're unconscious that's not gonna happen :-) "
Haha, You have a point there.

"Look, are you saying that while awake you feel felicitous or good easily, regardless of your circumstances, but that when your circumstances are challenging (being broke) then you have nightmares and night terrors? Because if so, that may be evidence that you actually
aren't
investigating with attentiveness but are, while conscious, repressing or dissociating from the negative reactions to your circumstances, and they are then popping up when you-as-ego turns off in sleep. Is that possible? "
I have a habit of repressing feelings and find it very difficult to do much more than feeling like I'm only scratching the surface. I have trouble finding the repressed feelings.
Furthermore, they are actually no part of how I'm experiencing any moment of being alive. It's old repressed stuff that I don't feeling anymore unless I actively try to find it and then it's hard to notice what is there
I don't even know why I did this, Nothing bad happened to me as a kid, but for some reason I started to collect and bury all bad emotions and feelings.
"Anyway, the thing to do with this sort of stuff (being broke, dog died, girlfriend left you) in my experience is to see how it (affective judgments of circumstance) functions in real time so you can choose to have felicitous feelings about always available facts of being alive, breathing, sensing, aware, intimate and so on rather than choosing to perpetuate feelings about what has happened, might happen, should have happened, shouldn't have happened, needs to happen, needs not to happen, and so on. "
Makes sense,
"By making this choice consistently I find moods stabilizing and lightening and non-circumstantial well being, appreciative of wide-open and referenceless now-ness, growing. But again, if you get this already and believe you are doing this well already, than perhaps consider whether you are actually doing it or are subtly dissociating from negative reactions, which are then popping up when you-as-censor falls asleep.
--Jake
-Jake"
Maybe I also just need to give this a few months of practice. My sense is that the repressed stuff will come up eventually as long as I keep practicing, I've only been doing this for a few weeks.
Anyway, thanks!