Painting a Happy Face
Why saying it’s not that bad is what keeps it bad
On the Friday support call a man raised his hand and said he was feeling a mix of things. Good, and “not bad,” he said. “But just a little bit down.”
He had a job interview coming up. Second round. It seemed to have gone well. And that was the problem. He could feel how much his mood was riding on it.
“I’d like to stop letting things like that be the determinant of if I’m stressed or not.”
Then, without being asked: “I guess it’s wanting the control.”
Well spotted.
He kept going. “Then I judge that, and want to control the wanting to control, and then I get tired of that, and then I let that go. But I don’t really get the original layer.”
So I went back to something he had said thirty seconds earlier.
You said there were some good things and some bad. Then you stopped yourself. Not bad.
“Yeah. Maybe when I said not bad, I was kind of trying to cover up that, yeah, it does feel bad. And I don’t want to acknowledge it.”
That right there is the resistance that locks it in.
The body-mind has the reactions it has. Some of them are terrific. Some of them are shitty. That is not a fault in the equipment. That is what a body-mind does.
What happens on top of the reaction is the editing. A feeling arrives and something moves quickly to file it as acceptable. Not bad. A little down. Fine, considering. The edit runs so fast it doesn’t feel like a decision.
But the edit is resistance. And resistance is what holds the feeling in place.
So I asked whether he could let it feel as bad as it did. Without editing it. Without censoring it.
“Ugh. Yeah.”
Five or six, he said, when I asked how strong it was. Then: “I do feel my resistance to it.”
A moment later he found words for what he had been doing.
“I feel kind of like I’m painting a happy face onto whatever I’m experiencing.”
Can you find the one who feels they need to present a happy face? Can you find that individual?
“I feel it. But I don’t know if I could find it.”
There was a feeling, and a place in the body where it sat. So we let it sit there. Then the resistance to it. That was allowed too. Then the sense that all of it was personal, about him and his story. Allowed.
Then: is there peace beyond all of these feelings?
“Yes.”
We stayed there a while. Nobody said anything.
“It was like a noticing,” he said. “Of the letting go. It feels more relaxed. In accepting.”
What if there is nothing to fix here? Nothing to solve?
“I feel that on a deeper level. The mind is quieter and not trying to fix right now.”
“I feel that space more. That noticing that space. I think we all talk about it. I think it’s the same thing.”
“That feels a lot better. That resting.”