Open yourself to negative experience

I came across these passages a few months ago. They stuck with me, and I’d like to discuss them.

“When turbulence or overwhelm reaches a certain register and somatic intensity or psychological pressure crosses some threshold, self-protective strategies kick in. Thought proliferates and survival circuitry fires. It feels like something is genuinely wrong and needs immediate fixing. At that point, I’m no longer oriented toward transparency. I’m distracted by trying to get rid of the disturbance, heal it, do triage on it. The panic-level vulnerability pulls me into managing rather than turning toward. It is here that I meet my discipline.

It’s natural to unconsciously backtest my old protective strategies before fully committing to the nakedness of openness. The psyche isn’t failing when it contracts—it’s checking whether intimacy with raw experience is safe.

Can I really let go of self-reference, or do I need the familiar distance of “someone” managing “something”? This backward movement provides unconscious reassurance: contraction is still available if openness becomes overwhelming.

[…]

Self-attack, fantasy, and dissociation are more comfortable than embodied, immediate, non-referential experiencing. They are familiar formulas. They “work.” They give me a sense of control. They also keep reconfirming the core conviction that there is something intrinsically wrong that must be managed, improved, or hidden.

The irony is that these strategies can easily be mistaken for practice. Self-aggression feels like “rigorous honesty.” Fantasy feels like “devotion to the path.” Dissociation feels like “resting as awareness.” These agendas have an almost demonic momentum.

Meanwhile, the body is left holding the orphaned sensations of terror, grief, and confusion with nobody willing to register them as valid expressions of wholeness.”

What’s striking is how Peter calls out my “sophisticated” strategies of facing negative emotions as a form of escape. A coping mechanism, disguised as spiritual growth. Analytically deconstructing the ego or seeing the hollowness of reality (i.e. a Rupert Spira Q&A) isn’t a path to stability; it’s another way you avoid the present moment. I think the problem starts when we imagine a time when all negative states cease to exist for us. We might label this enlightenment. It’s a trap.

This whole charade–the convincing, the narrative, the transcendence–it’s rooted in fear. Fear of what happens when you face those feelings head on. By running from them, you make them a problem.

Peter has a magical way of articulating the spiritual traps we fall into. I can’t do him justice, please read through his Substack.

In a podcast with Chris Williamson (which I recently referenced here), Alain de Botton is asked why he writes. Here’s his response:

“It began, and it still is to this day, an emotional necessity. I would say it’s a way of coping. I’m an intellectual, not a sort of fancy thing, but I’m an intellectual in the sense that I intellectualize pain. If something horrible happens, my immediate impulse is not to jog or drink or do all sorts of things people do, but it’s to try and think about what — what is this thing?”

Both Peter and Alain are talking about a particular quality in people: how do you respond to pain?

They are all responses we learn which provide temporary relief. But they are built on avoidance of what is in front of you. I don’t mean to moralize avoidance. I am curious, though: what happens if we face those sensations head on?

Peter asks us to bring our attention to the sensation, opening ourselves to the raw bodily experience, and to do nothing else. What attitude do we bring to sensation? Curiosity, openness, tolerance. There is a world of texture, richness, and color in that bodily sensation we write off as anxiety, grief, sadness, or loneliness. In fact, these labels prevent us from seeing the thing as it is. We confuse the object for the pointer.

I should note: start slow, and when the stakes are low. Progressively overload your capacity for raw sensation. Do not injure yourself.