Sometimes I lose my peace. I have some strong negative emotion or experience or I’m faced with a very unpleasant person or situation. But I’ve found something very interesting about these rare occasions.
When I look carefully and dig into the emotions, deconstructing the experience of, for example anger, into it’s parts. I get dozens of independent phenomena. Tingling in one area, tight knot in the gut, heat in the chest, neck, and face, restlessness in the feet, increase in the heart beat, sometimes sweat and rapid breathing. And what’s going on in the mind? Repetition, exploration of alternate paths in the past or imaginations of all the ways the future could be. Rumination. And then there are all the parts of the body and mind that are not affected. Interesting combinations occur.
The funny thing is that peak pleasure shares many of the same phenomena. And most of the feelings and thoughts around the body are not unpleasant at all. The body and mind are keeping on and there are only a very small percentage that are poisoning the whole bunch, casting a negative lens on the entire experience.
By deconstructing we can see the real picture: 72 out of 76 of the component parts of the negative experience are not negative at all, in fact they are very pleasurable!
Making this realization can deflate the entire negative experience, calling it out for what it is: a very silly illusion of the mind.