I've considered myself to be in an in control VF for several months now because the identity has been reduced to a few issues and its been very easy to focus and stay with the actual. These issues though still largely govern the thoughts and emotions I have. I can very easily drop thoughts and "focus" on the actual but there are often intermittent periods where the self settles in gross emotion. Does this mean that I fall out of VF or am not VF? For example, if a night does not go my way, I feel sadness for an extended period.

I must be honest and say that I am unhappy when going through a lot of my day. I am now back in school and find the workload to be seemingly pointless. I have a strong aversion to the work, which creates a sadness. I am having trouble maintaining to be happy and harmless while going through my day of classes and school work.

My best advice for myself is too keep pure intent my focus and watch the feelings but I seem to be in a bit of an emotional rough patch. I say emotional because it is mainly a lagging sadness and aversion to my believed responsibilities.

you know sadness is such a strange thing. i haven't been sad since the week after thanksgiving and that lasted perhaps 10 days. i have been irritated but the two are vastly different or are they? is sadness perhaps irritation with life as a whole. maybe. i suppose felicity doesn't break up the discontent quite enough to make the sadness go away? and you are probably resentful that you have work that doesn't interest you and maybe you are unsure about the career path itself?

i don't know why the sadness went away for me. i remember fully accepting it while i had it and thinking to myself how much better that was than fighting it. but not having is much much better than just accepting it. it can be either a biological thing or a psychological thing. so it can be the either result of an pov that 'you' have lost confidence in yet either implicity accept or are unable to shake. or it can be the limbic system gone haywire. if you aren't in a mental health facility and don't fear ending up in one then i bet it's far far more likely to be an unwise/unskillful pov.

still as i write that i can't say that that rings totally true for me. when 'i' was sad, i wasn't quantifiably more ignorant than i am now. there is no one thing or set of things of which i can say 'that is what i know now that i didn't know before.' everything i am aware of now, i was aware of then. well hold on. there is one thing. i care less about af then i did before. in fact, yesterday was the first day in over 2 weeks that i even came onto this site. that is the only thing i am aware that is different.

as for work that seems pointless, i do a lot of work related studying of my own and can relate. even here on the dho i often find myself overcome by an emotional antipathy towards reading the rest of a post. just today i was reading a manual for work and observed strong emotional aversion to finishing the chapter. I stopped and allowed my mind to wander, maininting awareness as much as possible which allows logic to come back. knowing that emotions are ignorant and self is ignorant, logic is a cure. awareness brings logic to the fore. stop and allow the necessary space for 'self' and awareness and reason to interact. a wholesome 'compromise' will be arranged. don't think but allow thinking to occur. don't dwell but allowing feeling to do it's thing. don't guide the process. just let it happen and see. this in the parlance of the aft is 'neither express nor repress'.

if skillful thoughts begin to predominate then 'whoop there it is.' everything is fine once again and sage course of action presents itself.

if ignorance runs amok, the self refuses to cede then that is a problem. One then must deliberately teach oneself to see the wonder of your room, the pages. 'cultivating felicity' and one must sort through the whole dichotomy of your life step by step until 'you' and wisdom are like an old happily married couple, finishing each others sentences, seamlessly moving in and out of the space of each others lives. this in the parlance of the aft is 'deconstructing the social identity'.


you have written in the past about going out to the bar and the first post in this new thread mentions nights not going your way. bars and night clubs and frat parties is generally pretty stupid behavior. paying $5 for poison that you can get for $1 at the store is dumb nevermind the posion part. of course, at times it may be quite practical to go the bar. but if going out is your typical weekend night activity then therein may lie some of what may aile you. people who ritualisticly drink and/or go out are not emotionally steady. hanging out with emotionally unbalanced people while 'trying' to be 'free' from emotions could lead to a cognitive dissonance which could be felt as depression or sadness.

one more thing. about the time i stopped being depressed, i shifted my work schedule around to something that made a lot more sense. doing so had been on my mind but the old routine was firmly in my comfort level and it took some courage to break out of that.

moral of the story: depression can be the result of a totally f'd worldview and the af method is great at changing that. but it can also me something much more simple like changing up a one or two things in your daily/weekly routine that have ceased to make sense.

*bunch of edits everywhere.

This won't cure you, but try taking some 5-HTP. Some of the times I've done it for a few days, I've noticed a remarkably dramatic effect. It seems to make it easier for these self-perpetuating loops to stop - so if you want them to keep going, you can harbor them, but if you don't, it gives more opportunity to do something about them.

As Jon T said: Another thing that helped was acceptance: "be OK with things happening that 'i' don't like". By that, I don't mean only doing the work (accept that I have to do the work), but the aversion itself (accept that aversion to work will arise). Given that you know it's gonna happen, be ok with it.. what happens then?

Also I don't know if this is true for you, but, while I'd have aversion to doing 'work', I notice that when I'm actually in the middle of doing it there's no problem at all. Only when something comes in and causes me to reflectively + emotionally consider that I'm doing 'work', will the aversion arise.

Thank you guys for your posts.

There are two identities in me. The actualist and the "woman chaser." The actualist enjoys so much being happy and harmless although "he" is obsessed with a final product. The woman chaser thinks he must find a woman to have sex with, get better at dating, go out and develop himself as a person. I am always pulled to go out on a tuesday, thursday, friday, or saturday. I see myself split as these two entities. The actualist one is slowly winning and in doing so, the bar is being raised to a new awesome level.

I am trying to strip out any social identity left. I am doing this by focusing on being happy and harmless and acknowledging that consciousness is happening on its own without help from "me." Both happiness and harmless are vital. I am challenging myself to be happy as much as possible and harmless.

There are other things in my life that I think need changing as well. I see myself as watching to much tv and also as procrastinating a lot with doing my homework. It would be good for my life I think if i can continue changing my daily habits but idk if this is the self talking or whats just better living.