The Mindful Approach to Emotional Pain

Here’s another preview from Just for Right F*cking Now, my 366-day meditational book for people who are wired to deal with their difficult emotions by avoiding, escaping, smothering, and numbing them (the way that is accomplished isn’t all that relevant, but some popular methods include reliance on alcohol and other drugs, over-or-undereating, retail therapy, gambling, sexual excess, and I dunno, impulsively moving across the country to be with some rando girl you met on the Internet without a plan to make it work financially… I mean, that’s common, right? Right?!).

Ahem. Dealing with the underlying factors that cause reliance on ill-fated coping mechanisms is what Recovery is.

One part of that is learning to feel without escaping. When life hurts, just let it hurt. Bringing mindfulness and self-compassion to that.

I went for a huge part of my life with this vague sense that I had all kinds of feelings deep down that I didn’t know anything about. I couldn’t feel my feelings properly. Even though I didn’t know what I felt, those feelings still drove my behaviors…

(and that often wasn’t a pretty sight)

Short-term pain, even when it feels like it’ll decimate me, is now experienced with gratitude. Because processing it instead of smothering it, is a revolution of protocol for someone like me. It’s one of my sweetest keys to a fresh way of life.

Just for Right F*cking Now is coming along approximately one day at a time. I started it in January 2021, so it will be about ready to hit the press in early 2022.