Overwhelm sets in when the mind perceives it has no choice. The tumescent response is to demand a blanket solution. When it cannot find one, hopelessness sets in. This occurs first as the system being locked altogether. The lock does not permit any kind of entry other than a stroke-by-stroke, gentle circumambulation. We must not use any strain.
Pleasure may be able to deactivate the system enough to begin the gentle stroking to see resources and possibility, but on its own it is not strong enough to keep the lock open. Left unchecked, the mind will go back into a locked state. If it’s been in a locked state for too long, it will just go into collapse. In collapse, it doesn’t even attempt to look for creative perception or expression.
Memories of places where our minds were free are even stronger than pleasure to open the lock or stand up from a collapse. Going into those memories when our bodies were relaxed and breathing can offer us access to that same free state in present time. Our minds had once been in that free state, our perceptions opened, and they can return.
Another access point is moments of “overcoming,” when things looked hopeless but something woke up. Not only did we not get stuck but the thing we currently perceive as an obstacle became part of a new, more evolved expression of ourselves. These are pockets we can return to and get resources from. What we need to do is gently stroke for resources and possibilities. If we are in helplessness, our first task is to look for these two other choices. Otherwise, the mind will not awaken its resourcefulness.
We have to counteract the lock or collapse in a stroke-by-stroke coaxing of the next resource. Each next resource is very small. They are just tiny shifts in what can be perceived. This circumambulation will show no result until there is a phase transition. However, we cannot know or guarantee when that will happen. When we hit the phase transition of resourcefulness, an infinite degree of perception becomes available to us.
From here, it may end up that we choose the same thing we did before, but now it is from a place of choices, and each choice from here is different. This phase transition is a simple shift in consciousness. Previously, we felt consciousness was either drowning or in a locked panic. Then, something either removed the hands that have been holding us underwater, or it un-grips the hand that has been holding us in tension. Whichever way we are released, the body is permitted to breathe again. That first breath, outside of either of those states, feels miraculous.
From here, the first thing we can do in order to get our footing in this new place is to genuinely put attention on it and note the naturally arising sensation of gratitude. We must take great care to be deliberate and slow, noting the things we can now see and feel; noting what lesson we learned or what we saw in the grip of drowning. We gently place attention on the new opening.
If we do not take care to get our new footing, what happens is the tumescent mind takes a new form—beginning to build a layer of resentment for the discomfort it just experienced. The mind, not in perfect stillness, is always tracking and building a case for some new manufactured reality. By default, the untrained mind goes to tracking what it has to be resentful for. If we do not disrupt it, we will have gone through this experience of grip or being submerged for nothing—only to get more resentful.
But if we come out and anchor the mind into the new reality that is here, we will turn lead into gold. The underlying lesson is to train the mind to always be stroking approval in our ambient attention. To the extent we can do that, we are digesting material that would otherwise be stored in the system as resentment.
It is especially needed in the times of being submerged or squeezed to have established this habit, so when we are far out of our range of control, it continues at the para-conscious level, where rest and digestion of the psyche occurs. We begin to attain a perspective where all things can be emergent lessons, where every moment of living is a matter of gathering information to understand how laws and customs develop in various psychic regions, how we can navigate that terrain and have empathy for how they play out in ourselves and others.
It removes the judgment of good or bad, because from this perspective, it is all research in terms of how to engage with greater or lesser skill. The “Golden Fleece” we come out with is an understanding of how that specific region operates, why it operates that way, and what we need to engage with it to maintain internal balance even when it may not be our most comfortable inner climate.