74. The Break in the Work

From Rhythms of Focus · 21:30

Show by Kourosh Dini

For those of us with ADHD, wandering minds, and the like, coming up against the feelings of guilt, shame, and frustration at being unable to get our work done can feel like torture.This can lead to anxiety and the urge to run away entirely.Instead, if we sit with these hard feelings to examine where they may be coming from, we give ourselves the opportunity to name it, and give it a tangible presense rather than allowing it to be a mysterious force we are up against. Pausing with this fear then brings with it the possibility that the emotion is our mind's attempt to understand or maybe tell us something.If we can have the bravery to sit with our fears and combine it with the care of giving ourselves space, we are often more receptive to the possibilities which allow us to move forward.And even if we say, "This is all I can do for now," we can invite a future self to return.Transcript I should know this by now. I should be able to do this by now. Maybe I'm sitting at the piano, the spreadsheet, the page of whatever report. Somehow as this work sits in front of us, this tiredness appears, and we might wonder, maybe I'm just not able.Maybe I'm dumb. Maybe I'm not confident enough. There's that moment where the work stops making sense, and the mind reaches for some verdict about ourselves in that. That's where I wanna look at it right now. There's that feeling of tiredness, of bleakness, of confusion, a sense of not getting it, and it can happen anywhere.Recently I'd been playing at the piano. I was trying to understand some jazz chords. Symbols are right there in front of me. I know what they mean. Still, something stalls. There's this cloud that forms, hard for me to memorize, hard for me to know what goes where and when, and somehow it's just not coming to mind.Pushing through, using force often begins with that word of "should." I should get this. I'm not smart enough. I'm not capable enough. We're reading the emotion of confusion, or whatever it is, some negative feeling, as evidence of our own ineptitude. A shift, and the practice of itThere is a way through, and it has a couple of parts that are hard to separate. A shift in how we hold the moment and the practice of that shift over time. What do I mean? The change of perspective is a change of how we look at something. We often hear this in a simple phrase like, "Don't worry about it." But a shift of perspective cannot be done by dissociation. Don't worry about it doesn't exactly work. Otherwise, I wouldn't have a job. We can't simply leave the original perspective behind. There's history behind it, and therefore emotion, which can't be argued with.We don't simply adopt a new view and drop the one that hurts. Instead, the practice is to hold both at once, the old sense and the possibility of the new side by side.This is one of those strengths of the psychoanalytic approach, for example. There we practice following associations. We come to a recognition that conflicting perspectives can be held at the same time. Nothing has to be banished for a new idea to show up. And then over time, one may form over the other. So we begin often by asking how we feel about the story we're telling ourselves. That asking itself can create a space of observation, an area a little bit freer of that belief's influence, even in the act of acknowledging it.That sense of, "Oh, this means I'm dumb." Okay, how do I feel about that idea, that thing that comes to mind? Well, I don't like it, or I'm upset about it, or whatever it is, but it's there.The pause initiates that process, pausing with the emotion, with the pain, with the fear. That space then holds a possibility that the emotion is the mind's own attempt to understand or maybe tell us something.It may not be telling us in the best possible way, but it's saying something. Confusion, at least in this way, is not inherently negative. The first step is to simply stay with it and to notice that the negative charge is something we have added in some way.The shove What turns the emotions negative beyond the perspective is that shove, is it's that I have to study this, the test is tomorrow.When we cut corners in that memorization and bypass the play that would have otherwise let that understanding settle in, we leave the session without having understood.We lose the signal that confusion could have given us. Further, we also deepen the sense that we cannot do things deliberately, that we must rely on these harsh measures against ourselves.Instead, resting our attention on the emotion, on the confusion, or any other negative sense, we can ask, "What is confusing about this?"An answer may or may not come. But more importantly, in that pause, in that waiting with that feeling, we've practiced bravery. What makes it braveryAll right, what makes that bravery? There's this idea I keep returning to from a theologian by the name of Paul Tillich. "Anxiety," he says, "has no object." It's this cloud.Meanwhile, fear has an object…

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