new mental motion unlocked, "giving it to the ball"
i found out i can sorta "breathe in" negative tension (cf. IFS "unblending"? gendlin "making space"?) and i can "give it to the ball" and then the suffering sometimes significantly goes down (and can even get to the point where it just feels like mildly uncomfy sensations)
i texted about it to one of my friends, lemme copy paste that here
idk if this is related to breaking reactivity but in the past week i feel like i've finally gotten decent at gendlin focusing, and then i'm sometimes sort of able to decouple myself from the tension of a negative emotion and then within like 30s-5m it feels a lot less like suffering and lot more like "hm my chest/stomach is feeling funny" and then another 30s-5m and the suffering sometimes significantly decreases
i'd like to imagine this is like 1-5% of what breaking reactivity feels like and/or maybe the mental motion has decent cos similarity with fetters 4-5 practices, but also idk tbh lol
it's funny bc the way i've labeled the mental motion in my personal notes is "giving it to the ball" or "asking the ball"
i was doing focusing once (trying to get through writer's block) and then i realized Oh Whoa some tennis players are rly aggressive and it feels like there's so much tension trying to control the ball, they're trying so hard to be a master of the ball, and that feels so constrictive/tense/anti-expansive -- and then like Oh Whoa federer is not rly being a master of the ball, the ball is not his slave, he is dancing w the ball, the ball is his friend, it's almost like he's just accepting the ball's invitation to dance, he is almost like energetically asking the ball "hey ball where do u wanna go?" and then he leads the ball to that place
and then for some reason that's like the only analogy/pointer i have rn for the mental motion lmao
then i applied it to my writer's block moments and it was so so helpful, like usually i'd try to contract/tense and sorta egoically try to find a solution or find a handle on my felt sense, and i'd just be confused for multiple days, but this mental motion was such a laxative, it was so unconstipating, it rly helped me get a handle on the felt sense within 3-30m by "giving it to the ball" / "asking the ball"
then i tried applying it to other constipated things like tension around negative emotion and i was like whoa that's kinda cool it can do that
and it feels pretty reproducible, at least in the past week, idk how itll change