Joe tells the story of a young woman who noticed herself manipulating boys by wrapping them around her finger. She didn’t want to be that way but didn’t know how to stop. Joe’s advice: just feel it fully next time you’re doing it. Don’t stop any part of the experience. Two days later she reported: “I didn’t figure anything out, but I just stopped doing it. It didn’t feel good.”
This is the mechanism underneath the upright apology and many other Art of Accomplishment practices. We think we need to figure out the problem, design a strategy, and execute an action plan. But we’ve been trying to “do stuff over it” for years and it hasn’t worked. The pattern persists because we haven’t fully felt what it’s actually like to be in it — we’ve been dissociating from parts of the experience.
With smoking, the approach is the same: pay exquisite attention to what it actually feels like, tastes like, what the sensations really are. You may discover you’ve been suppressing part of the experience to get something else. Shame locked that suppression in place.
The frustrating thing for the action-oriented mind is that this isn’t really “doing nothing” — stopping to feel is itself an action. But it’s a radically different kind of action than strategizing.
Related Concepts
- Awareness transforms behavior where action plans fail
- Awareness changes what shoulds cannot
- Avoidance is the stuckness not the feeling
- Intensifying a feeling moves you through it rather than trapping you
- Shame locks in the very habits it punishes
- We recreate painful circumstances to finally welcome the avoided emotion
- Shame stagnates behavior