Asklemmy

Nah it’s less like a team rally thing and more like a weekly standup meeting about emotional state, as an exercise to train perception of our own emotional states.

I myself discovered I had absolutely no idea what emotion I was experiencing. What I believed was my emotional state, was a sort of “good” or “bad” depending on how much energy I had to act like I felt good.

I was playing this character, and the character was a positive person whenever I had the energy to be pleasant and act happy. And I played that character for decades from childhood on and wasn’t aware of it.

Just identifying how I felt once a week, and staring it to the group, helped me notice that there was an actual stream of real emotion happening, that I was treating as a sort of background noise to my project of summoning the energy to “feel good”.

It’s hard to explain. I had this universe of emotion that was fake, and I thought it was real. It’s like having black and white patterns, different patterns for different emotions. Angry is diagonal stripes, scared is squares, happy is circles, whatever. Then one day that rips open and behind it are these fields of pure color: blue, green, yellow.

I don’t know what those are.

But week after week we meditate and then after meditation I tell how I’m feeling. And eventually I realized those colors are the real thing that I thought those patterns were referring to. I thought those patterns were the colors.

I wish I could describe it better.