Mad Science with IFS (“Parts”)
 
CW: SA, mental illness, childhood trauma as a general topic, hospitalization, suicidal ideation. My goal was to present my problems in the context of problem-solving; no graphic stories and I did my best to use non-triggering language.
 
Hi everyone,
 
I’ve been intermittently lurking on DhO for a year and a bit. In fall 2023, I started experimenting with insight meditation on top of IFS to address the last remaining pockets of gator-infested trauma swamp that a decade of CBT/somatic therapy/meds hadn’t been able to handle. Examining the underlying mechanics while I dealt with my embodied trauma worked ridiculously well, including in ways I didn’t expect, to the extent that I’m finding it increasingly difficult to remember what it felt like to have the problems I was trying to solve when I started. If therapy and medication could be likened to a “fish ladder” that helps migrating salmon swim upstream around dams, insight meditation was the “salmon cannon” that shoots the fish over the dam; the last year-ish has been a wild ride, to say the least. I’m sharing what worked for me here because Dharma Overground was the first place I’d found other people who seemed to share some of my most baffling experiences, and saw other people put words to my complicated problems. Those problems sucked, and I wouldn’t wish them on anyone. I’m not a technically skilled/trained meditator per se, but I figured this was all worth putting into words for other weirdos who enjoy making tools out of tools the way I do. I can’t guarantee that anyone else will get the same results, since my brain is clearly unusual. I would have loved to share a practice log, but the nature of the content made it really hard to write about for an audience during the process. The idea that any of this would stop seeming “personal” to such an extent that I would feel able to share it with strangers, even under a pseudonym, seemed preposterous when I started, but here we are.
 
The vast majority of my Dharma journey has been neither fun nor my choice. My childhood stream access instructions would be titled something like, “When Life Gives You Lemons, Use Them to Melt Your Brain: How to Turn Overwhelming Sensate Reality into Pretty Pictures”. To make matters more complicated, someone at a party in college did not respect my boundaries while I was in an altered state of consciousness, giving me a brief discourse on the true nature of reality when I said I wasn’t into hooking up because reality kept breaking and I couldn’t keep track of what was going on. This left me in the unfortunate position of being engaged in a process that I did not understand and could not stop, while unable to make progress because the language involved was a PTSD trigger (“reality is an illusion”, “nothing is real”, etc.). I’ve been meditating daily since 2014 while letting the true nature of reality mind its own business; my practice came out of a 16-week MBSR course based on Jon Kabat-Zinn’s “Full Catastrophe Living” that helped me recover from a life-threatening breakdown in 2013. My “practice history” also contains a lot of things I’m not comfortable going into details about; use your imagination. Suffice it to say that my whole entire crazy life story would not fit into a post of any reasonable length, and it isn’t the point. My goal here is to share what helped me with the problems I seem to share with others, so I tried to stick to what was most relevant to that process, though I’m happy to fill things in if anyone has questions (with room for some privacy, obviously).
 
I read “No Bad Parts” in early September 2023, recommended by both my brain doctor and a dear friend who thought it would be a good fit with my strong visualization skills. A couple weeks later, I described “reality partially collapsing, then turning inside-out and falling through its own belly button” to someone who recognized what I was talking about and pointed me to the online version of “Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha”, page 262. Finally, this was the book I’d long ago given up on finding. Here was my glitchy brain and fragmented, melting reality, beautifully described in matter-of-fact language, including swear words. This stuff had been happening to me for most of my life, I’d just had no idea what any of it was. When I tried to track down specific instances in my memories, I often found Fruitions associated with trauma or shock, and weirdly hard to think about. My nervous system seems to use Fruitions as a “circuit breaker” when it gets overloaded, tethering them to overwhelming experiences. I watched my understanding of myself turn inside out as I realized that what I had been experiencing as decades of crippling mental dysfunction was neurologically no different from the outcome of other peoples’ hard work.
 
In early adolescence, starting with a suffering-aspect Fruition that I basically couldn’t think about for decades, for the simple reason that the way my brain happened to shut itself down HURT, my sense of reality began disintegrating in a way that I struggled to explain to my parents. My best efforts were complaints that “reality was always changing for me” and “I was living in a different version of reality than everyone around me”. There were no visual or auditory hallucinations per se, but there was a sense of wrongness in everything I looked at that I could never satisfactorily describe, and a lack of solidity to the world around me. Everything I looked at seemed un-solid or non-real, but not in a way that I could easily put my finger on. Things weren’t distorted, exactly, but nothing ever looked “right” either. My eyes weren’t seeing things that weren’t there—but sometimes everything I looked at seemed like it was squirming away from my comprehension somehow. The feeling of “wrong”-ness and gnawing misery at the core of my being was impossible to put into words at the time, so I didn’t bother trying.
 
I wasn’t telling anyone about the worst of the problems: Disturbing intrusive thoughts, 3D movies fully laden with emotional content, story, and my own empathy with whoever was in them, dumped directly into my stream of consciousness during waking life whether my eyes were open or closed. These weren’t hallucinations or “visions” in the sense that they never intruded on my ocular vision; I saw them in the back of my head, rather than with my eyes. I was always able to identify them as imaginative content, even though they were flagged by my brain as being “visual” information. In terms of frequency or duration, it’s hard to say; sometimes they were triggered, sometimes random, and it varied depending on life/stress/season/etc. The only coping strategy I ever developed was mentally putting a bubble around the experiences and shunting them away from where I was making time, so my mind would never be able to account for what percentage of my waking hours they occupied. I never described these experiences to my doctors, therapists, or loved ones, and explained them to myself in a variety of ways over the years, vacillating between whether I had paranoid schizophrenia or was literally cursed. There was no story associated with these problems, beyond a sense of vague, external menace and a deep, multi-layered inclination to keep the problem to myself. Of the medications I’d tried over the years for other problems (several SSRIs, two antipsychotics, lamotrigine, several benzodiazepines) none had any effect on the intrusive thoughts. I just learned to live with them, with obvious negative consequences for my mental health and overall wellbeing. This problem lasted for around 30 years (I’m in my mid-40s).
 
An inevitable nervous breakdown amid a confluence of additional factors (PTSD, job stress, relationship stress, alcoholism, etc.) led to a diagnosis of ADHD and bipolar I with psychotic features in the summer of 2013, in spite of all the things I wasn’t talking about. My mood and energy were all over the place, I was unable to follow a train for thought for more than ~120 seconds, and my working memory was shot. My brain doctor at the time prescribed 40 mg Strattera for ADHD so I could do my job. This helped get all the horses running in the same direction, but something about watching my brain work faster was exacerbating a deeper problem, and life felt both frantic and pointless. My doctor prescribed lithium chloride for “agitated depression”, which was immediately effective for my mood symptoms at 300 mg. I would have been happy to keep taking it, but even a low dose caused a worrying cardiac arrhythmia. I switched to 10 mg Abilify, which kept my mood from getting worse but didn’t seem to do much to improve it. I felt constantly drained and wasn’t able to keep my eyelids open past ~10 p.m., so I was planning to give it a thumbs-down when someone on my team suggested Latuda. I don’t remember what dose; it definitely affected my memory. It didn’t take long for me to hit the wall. One morning I woke up angry and disappointed to find myself alive, which I took as a sign that antipsychotics were NOT the way to go. I spent a couple days in the psych ward at the local ER at my soon-to-be-former doctor’s suggestion and narrowly avoided a 5150 hold. Something I learned the hard way here: Inpatient treatment becomes a sticky wicket if you do not agree with the treatment plan. That being said, the team of people I met with after a couple days in the hospital did a stellar job.
 
Next up was 25 mg lamotrigine, titrating to a higher dose over several weeks. After I was stable on 100 mg lamotrigine, my doctor added Wellbutrin, increasing the doses of both until I was ultimately taking 450 mg Welbutrin XL and 400 mg lamotrigine daily. My will to live started to resurface within a couple of months, followed by my capacity to feel emotions. At the same time, I took a 16-week MBSR course based on Jon Kabat-Zinn’s “Full Catastrophe Living” and started meditating every day. Over the years, my mood and energy stabilized thanks to CBT, medication/meditation, and lots of exercise. I was finally stable and happy, living and working, meditating daily, taking my meds, and felt firmly entrenched in the reality of what multiple professionals had assured me was an incurable mental illness.
 
Fast-forward to fall 2022, a year before I’d heard of insight meditation. At this point, it’s worth mentioning that in spite of the enduring problems, I would have described myself as a relatively happy person with an enjoyable and rewarding life. For reasons that seemed like a good idea at the time, I transposed mental images from the Hubble telescope onto my ocular perception of the night sky and switched my awareness back and forth between my eyeballs and my mind’s eye until I tricked my brain into believing it was looking at galaxies instead of stars. This led to a colossal disruption of space and time that defies easy description and was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever experienced. Afterwards, I understood that I was not sick or crazy and never had been—the intrusive thoughts were just something I’d had to put up with for a while, and now I was done with them and free to move on. I also understood that I’d just made a huge leap in progress in a long-term project. I was meant to share the extra capacity with others, and to enjoy a life beyond my wildest dreams. I told a handful of close friends about all of it, aware that something HUGE had just happened, but at loss for context. Over the next year, I held on for dear life while I felt my brain physically changing inside of my skull, mostly in the center. I had no idea what to make of it, but I was eating and sleeping fine, none of the people close to me had concerns about my behavior, and none of what was happening to me felt bad or scary. Everything looked different; light diffraction off of reflective surfaces was absolutely mesmerizing, since I could see the light moving through the air. Negative space seemed more “real” than it used to, like a solid thing in its own right rather than being “empty” because it was unoccupied by objects. The intrusive disturbing thoughts ebbed away over the next few months, with my encouragement, and have not been a problem since.
 
Another unexpected outcome from this bizarre experience—within several days, I noticed increasing problems with involuntary movement, especially in my extremities. I broke my hand and found it increasingly difficult to navigate my body through space. After talking to my doctor, we decided to decrease my Wellbutrin dosage and see if that helped. It did. By spring 2023, I stopped altogether. It made logical sense to me that my brain no longer needed help with dopamine; the disappearance of the intrusive thoughts, and finally opening up to people about the fact that they’d been happening, was a huge relief. I kept taking lamotrigine, but hadn’t experienced anything I would describe as mania in years. Despite the shenanigans in my head, I never felt any of the weird energy surges, irritability, insomnia, or lack of appetite that I remembered from my major manic episode.  
 
By fall of 2023, my brain felt like it was done with whatever it had started doing the previous fall but was definitely still at work on a larger project. MCTB2 led the way to Dharma Overground, and I saw kindred spirits describing the same problems and fearlessly investigating their own mental activity. After years of trying to stabilize my mood, egging my brain into cyclical activity felt counterintuitive and the idea of surrendering myself to a process that sounded an awful lot like a bipolar cycle was unnerving. I told my therapist and brain doctor what I was doing, though it also sometimes meant I had to spend half our time explaining what the hell I was talking about, and they both gave me a thumbs-up to continue my experimentation. Thankfully, it became obvious pretty quickly that investigating what my brain was doing didn’t seem to be destabilizing me over the course of weeks/months—no problems eating, sleeping, etc.—so I stopped worrying about it.
 
I started doing more sitting meditation, but the real work took place in daily life (dishes, cooking, gardening, cleaning, etc.). I switched my attention between what I was sensing (usually looking at), how my body felt, and what I was thinking about, then tried to balance them all equally. I decided not to chase Fruitions per se, but to focus on the transition from Re-Observation to Equanimity, which would give them chances to happen and seemed like useful thing to get good at regardless. I focused on an obnoxious constant signal that buzzed along the edge of every single thought without really being a solid entity—somewhere between a noise and a taste in the back of my head. When it felt like I was chewing uncomfortably on metal and I caught myself thinking “I don’t want to feel like this anymore”, especially if I found difficult emotional content coming up, I designated that mental gear as “Desire for Deliverance” and figured the rest out from there. Any time I found myself in the Dark Night stages, which was pretty often, I would see if anything came up in my body, then see if any parts needed attention. I paid attention to the obnoxious noise/taste as I worked with the part and watched how the noise changed as my brain changed gears. It usually took about 45-60 minutes to pop out the other side, usually after a nice, cathartic crying jag and accompanied by a not-unpleasant, post-therapy feeling that would disappear without a trace, leaving me relaxed and calm rather than wrung out after a session with a therapist. The harder I leaned into the feeling of everything rattling apart, the faster things resolved. If I found myself suddenly wondering why my face was wet because I had no idea why I was crying…jackpot. Fruitions happened here and there, usually during walks in the woods. It was easier to spot them after the fact, the best indication usually being a freshly-fallen-snow feeling inside of my head for the next couple of days, especially noticeable when I woke up in the morning. After years of using long, hard, building-connections-in-your-brain-with-repetitive-behavior methods like CBT, I was amazed at how quickly the changes happened, how permanent they felt, and how I could no longer “feel” the way things had worked before.
 
I shrank “myself” to as small an observer as possible by re-training a part with the reminder that “I” just needed to be the impetus to pursue an answer when I found myself wondering “who am I?”, rather than attempting to answer the question itself. Parts helped me shrink the observer by existing in the first place, since if “I” was able to interact with a part, this proved it was “not me”. I gave jobs to parts that wanted them, telling them that if they spotted something I was missing, reminded me to do something important, etc., I would thank them, and they would feel good as a result. The disturbing intrusive thoughts that had bothered me for years have stayed gone, but there were plenty of garden-variety ones, along with anxious rumination. One of my favorite projects was re-training an intrusive-thought-causing-part to draw my attention to counterproductive personal behaviors that I needed to work on. After a snippy interpersonal exchange, I felt the part triumphantly announce it had spotted one. I thanked it for doing a good job and resolved to handle things differently the next time I found myself in the same situation. Some of these mental loops collapsed themselves when I managed to hard-wire whatever they were reminding me of, and others are still doing their jobs. Effectively, it’s like re-training the annoying inner voice that needlessly reminds you of the stupid thing you said 5 years ago to help you remember the stuff that didn’t make it onto your grocery list when you’re in the store, in exchange for saying “thanks, good job”. I started to notice fewer visual distortions after a couple of months; my theory was that when parts from earlier stages of realization were “driving”, I was effectively seeing the world through my current brain’s attempt to re-create neural pathways that no longer existed, producing distorted perceptions.
 
I tested my progress by triggering myself on purpose to see whether things that used to bother me could provoke a bodily reaction—tightness in my stomach, faster heart rate, etc. I don’t recommend doing this unless you are stable, well-supported, and have pathologically high distress tolerance; I don’t think this is a necessary part of the process. I stopped reading/listening/watching once I started feeling physically uncomfortable, switched topics in my head, and tried again later if I needed to. This became a broad, shallow, Wikipedia-based informational faceplant into Buddhism, focusing on the bigger concepts rather than getting into techniques or stories, which tended to have more triggering language. As ideas got de-triggered, I let my mind juggle the big concepts and free-associate them with all the other stuff I was thinking about, including whatever I’d been reading on DhO. I love solving puzzles; this is where the magic happened. The linchpin to the really important part was the following chain of associations:
 
fetters tying one to samsara = reactive neural processes = “parts” = embodied trauma
 
Whenever I worked with a part, I started trying to see each it as each in turn, switching rapidly between those perspectives at increasing speed. This was an abstract version of what I did when I tricked my brain into thinking it was “seeing” what the Hubble telescope saw. Once I got used to interchangeably understanding the same experience as different fundamental concepts, some of which were “me” and some of which were “not me”, switching at ludicrous speed, all those ways of viewing the experience effectively merged. Being able to see my body’s bad personal experiences as themselves, while simultaneously seeing them as an abstract concept unrelated to my body, experiences, or life managed to hard-wire the understanding that my feelings were thoughts originating in my body. It became increasingly easier to spot my feelings getting dragged into the process of brain thinking-about-thinking, using stories from my past to explain why I was feeling like crap when really, it was just the “gear” that my brain happened to be in at the time. I set up a mental loop reminding myself that when I felt triggered, it was because a story from my body’s past experience had gotten dragged into my brain’s “weather system” as it tried to understand its own activity. All of this went hand-in-hand with basic, garden-variety mindfulness during my daily life, which thankfully gives me lots of opportunities to feel physically safe.
 
As more mental processes got cleared out, it was easier to watch the trains of thought come and go, and increasingly instinctive to see everything I could observe going on in my mind as (1) arising and going away, (2), not “real”, and (3) not “me”. Emotionally, things got much, much easier from here onwards. At this point, the nature of the work changed from working with parts on their issues to zooming out and watching my mind doing its thing while it thought about thinking. At this point, the line between when I was and wasn’t meditating got blurry, then disappeared. I wouldn’t call that a problem per se, but I don’t think you can un-teach your mind how to watch itself during daily life, so I suspect anybody wanting to get off the ride at this point would find it difficult or impossible. This phase of my brain’s project had a comfortable, ¾-through-the-learning-montage-in-an-‘80s-movie feel, and I figured this was how things were going to be for a while.
 
Things changed big-time in April, very much out of the blue. Unpacking the experience is beyond the scope of this post, and then some. Suffice it to say that if my stargazing experience had felt like being shaken out of a bad dream, this was like being sucker-punched into orbit (in the nicest possible way). Within 48 hours, I had a dramatic reaction to the lamotrigine that I’d been taking since my breakdown. The changes in my perception and cognition felt like a psychedelic trip, accompanied by crippling headaches. My brain felt like a watch with sand and peanut butter in every single gear, and I could barely function. My doctor and I decided to say goodbye to the lamotrigine and hope for the best, since I hadn’t experienced any concerning symptoms in years (irritability, insomnia, etc.). The headaches stopped, my brain started working again, better than ever. The weird noise/taste in my head left and hasn’t returned. It took a few months for the dust to settle, much like I’d felt in 2022-2023, but once it did, I was fine. 
 
I want to state in the clearest possible terms that medication saved my life. Sometimes, brains need help with their chemistry. If you’re taking psychiatric medication, keep taking it. If it’s doing something harmful or making it harder to live your life, talk to your doctor and address the problem(s) systematically.
 
That being said, I think a lot of people would stand to benefit from further investigation of the places where mental health problems and dharma problems intersect, especially people with apparently “permanent” mental health diagnoses. I don’t have to believe in a positive counterpart to trauma that can cause permanent healing, to such a dramatic and immediate extent that it alters the action of psychiatric medication, because I’ve personally experienced it twice. Both times, if my doctor hadn’t taken my concerns about the reactions to my medication seriously, I would have had correspondingly serious problems.  Over the last few years, I’ve helped multiple friends through similar periods of constructive neurological meltdown after major life events and unexpected experiences, comparing notes on the permanent changes to our minds and lives that we’ve observed over time. We all seem to be going through the same fundamental long-term process.
 
 I’m not saying that the answer is no medication at all; different medication might be the answer. It depends on what your brain is doing, and what you’re trying to do with your life. None of the symptoms that had been present at my breakdown in 2013 (depression, irritability, energy surges/insomnia) have reappeared since I stopped taking my medication, so there hasn’t been anything to address. 2024 was a big year for me, and a lot of crazy things happened, but the cumulative effect has settled me deeper into emotional and energetic equilibrium. Many potentially destabilizing things, good and bad, have failed to send me “over the edge” into anything, in defiance of what I’d been told for years. My usual seasonal mood problems did not materialize this winter. The entire month of December has historically been one big, long PTSD trigger (though 2023 was much easier than normal). Last year blew 2023 out of the water—I genuinely enjoyed it. I know I used to hate the holidays, and I can recall memories of thinking about how much I hated them and why, but I cannot conjure the feelings in my body even if I try. From where I’m standing today, the story that I had an incurable mental illness that would require lifelong medication management is not supported by my lived experience. That being said, treatment for bipolar disorder was unquestionably helpful for many years. Why? All of my doctors have attempted to describe how they thought my lamotrigine was helping me, but none of their descriptions have resonated with what I saw once I started really paying attention. After extreme scrutiny, my current best understanding is that the lamotrigine therapeutically interfered with the flow of electricity in my brain, creating a constant signal that my mind could use to help glue itself back together after my breakdown. By interfering with the way my brain operated whenever it was thinking, lamotrigine effectively helped draw the broken parts of my consciousness towards the constant signal like moths around a porch light.
 
As far as attainment is concerned, I would argue that it’s impossible for me to have “attained” anything, in the strictest sense of the word, because I did not begin this journey intentionally nor with a goal in mind. As far as I’m concerned, I spotted an unfinished biological process underway and helped it along to its apparent conclusion. The implications of this state change are an afterthought compared to the simple daily miracle of no longer getting hopelessly lost in my terrible feelings or consumed by my brain’s compulsive interrogation of its own activity. If life can get better than it is right now, I’m not expecting it to. Nowadays, my meditation practice is driven by curiosity about what my brain is capable of doing now that it’s no longer constantly preoccupied (short answer = lots of cool stuff).
 
Functionally, I’ve attained a couple of important things:
 
1)        I’ve ended up with a dramatically less reactive nervous system.
 
After decades of drowning in my feelings, now I am floating on top of them. I still experience “bad feelings”, but everything happens in my head rather than running on a circuit between my head and my body. I can’t feel my brain’s weather in my body anymore, and familiar PTSD triggers don’t do what they used to. Something upsetting or startling no longer makes my heart pound in my chest or feel like I got punched in the stomach. It's a huge improvement and has made my daily life easier to live in countless ways, starting with my relationships with others. When my body doesn’t react to someone else’s behavior, figuring out how to respond is an entirely different project. This would be the number one reason I would recommend this to people with high distress tolerance whose lives can handle things getting weird for a while. If it works for you too, the benefits of a less-reactive nervous system will ripple outwards to every single person you interact with, from your overbearing relatives to the person who just rear-ended your car.
 
2)        The weird, nagging “reality isn’t real” problems are gone, along with the sense of visual wrongness and constant gnawing unease that has been bugging me since early adolescence. Also, everything looks AMAZING.
 
The oddest thing here is that it’s getting hard to remember was it was like, or how badly or pervasively any of it used to bother me. I can recall the memory of what the sucking misery at the core of my being used to feel like, and “see” how long it lasted in my personal timeline, but I can’t recall the feeling in my body no matter how hard I try. Visually, things finally started to get fully solid/crisp/still/realized in September, starting one night while I was cooking dinner and becoming full-time over the next few weeks. Nothing has changed visually since a particularly nifty Fruition in mid-October that felt getting like a triumphant high-five from all of reality while the sky turned inside-out. I know my experience of seeing things used to be very different, but I can’t trick my eyes or brain into making things look the way they did before. It doesn’t feel like “I” am “looking at the world” anymore so much as floating through a visual field created by my eyeballs. While I can definitely still focus on things, my brain doesn’t de-emphasize the rest of my visual field like it used to. In terms of making daily life better, this has definitely made me a more attentive driver, since my brain isn’t turning fuzzing or dimming my peripheral vision. Another huge improvement: I no longer get overwhelmed by crowds, fluorescent lights, huge spaces, or a combination of all of the above. Big box stores, airports, convention hotels, etc. used to be harrowing ordeals, and now they aren’t. I sleep extra-hard after days that involve a lot of crowds/lights, but I don’t experience the system-overload feeling that I’ve been used to for most of my life and I don’t feel emotionally drained afterwards.
 
A fun surprise: Not only is everything finally solid—every single thing that hits my eyeballs, from one edge of my field of vision to the other, is absolutely stunning regardless of what I’m looking at. A garbage boat parked in front of a glorious sunset doesn’t bother me, and it definitely would have a year ago. Now, I get to look at a beautiful garbage boat covered in beautiful seagulls and a beautiful sunset at the same time, lucky me.
 
I could definitely keep going, but I feel like I’ve made my point. I’m confident that I didn’t invent the wheel here; I’m sure someone else has said all of this more eloquently (and/or more efficiently) centuries ago, in cool squiggly writing. In any case, I hope something about the process I used to figure things out or the way I’ve phrased things will be helpful for people who are stuck in the same place I was.
 
 
Obligatory words of caution:
 
1.        Don’t ride alone—I didn’t do this by myself.
 
I recommend at least a couple of trusted people to cry on from time to time, plus a therapist. If something is too painful or difficult to discuss with other living human beings, beloved dead, pets, and houseplants can be legitimate conversational partners. Figuring out your thought process is the point, not verbally rehashing all of your trauma to another person. If you can easily picture yourself freaking out at your friend/loved one/therapist and asking, “if that wasn’t really ‘me’ back then, how can I tell if this is really ‘me’? now?!?”, this ride is not for you. This is for people who have asked themselves that question so many times they are tired of the question and/or no longer scared of the answer. I would recommend this to people with high distress tolerance and advanced emotional skills who have been dealing with bone-deep loneliness and/or existential terror for as long as they can remember, and those with a pathological sense of adventure.
 
2.        Everything you do with your brain affects everything else.
 
Move slowly and carefully when you’re rewiring your brain, obviously. If you are not already very comfortable with psychoactive chemicals, don’t add them. Always keep your intentions positive, no matter what, and ask trusted people for advice if you’re unsure how to proceed. My personal rules were to help anyone who asked (if I could do so relatively safely) and do my best to make sure all my actions somehow benefitted others.
 
3.        You only need to look at your feelings for long enough to turn them into thoughts.
 
This was a 2-phase process: (1) Turning my feelings into thoughts, beginning with a close examination of my feelings to figure out how they work, THEN (2) Redirecting mental activity towards thinking-about-thinking whenever I noticed that feelings were happening, because feelings are actually thoughts—they’re what your body is thinking about. This mental alchemy is how I avoided getting stuck in what Daniel Ingram calls “the Great Dismal Crap Quagmire”—this was NOT the process of exhuming, fully examining, and resolving all of my issues using insight meditation as a tool. I’m certainly not claiming to have dealt with all of my trauma and psychological crap. This is how I re-framed the crap to make it easier to realize that my past traumatic experiences weren’t “me”, and “my” story could become something different. After a lifetime of feeling lost in mental dysfunction that was never my fault to begin with, I decided that ceasing to be the “me” who had been defined by my traumatic experiences sounded like healthy personal growth, and I would surrender to the process without second-guessing myself, no matter where it took me. This is where the ride has taken me so far. As for where it’s headed…I guess I’ll find out when I get there. Good luck to everyone who’s working hard on their brain’s super-important project, or on whatever comes next.  
 
“It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.” ― Tom Robbins, “Still Life With Woodpecker”

Hi, Lux. Welcome to posting on DhO.

The text editor here often takes MS Word and similarly formatted text and makes it too small to read (at least for me). If you want to fix this, please re-post with a text-only version of your comment. Then the problem will go away.

Thanks,

Chris M
DhO Moderator

Thanks for the advice! I will be sure to just use text only editors for my future posts.

Warmly,

- LiT