Author Topic: Using Negativity To Heal  (Read 483 times)

Anamika

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Re: Using Negativity To Heal
« on: June 07, 2018, 06:51:38 am »
Yes this is true. You can even seek out media to watch or listen to that relates to whatever you are working on within yourself. Just never substitute media for actually working on yourself. Media can be very enchanting and addicting.

The method I use is to interpret media in the same way I interpret my dreams, which I'll have to delve into later. I don't interpret them quite in the normal way, I use a method I've been working on I tentatively call "Integral Understanding". You can also read Eugene Gendlin's book on dream interpretation, as it strongly relates. Begin by entering inner silence, maintain this until you have a stable silence. Then use Eugene Gendlin's Focusing method (specifically his method called "Thinking at the Edge"), once you have that bodily felt-sense of meaning, and you've begun to define that meaning, you ask a series of questions to take the process even further than it might have gone. As you ask the questions recapitulate the memories and dreams that come. A simple layout of questions to consider, might be:

What does it mean to me? (this one question is huge, I never go without it, and often start and end with it)
What feelings does it trigger? What reactions does it trigger?

How do my current dreams relate to what I'm experiencing while engaging in this media?

Can I see myself as the characters in the story? How does that make me feel?

what are the most essential points?
if I removed everything else that seems to be what would stand on its own as true or right?

What memories relate?
What is its relation to my history?
What caused it? What is its root? Where did it come from?
What is its relation to world history?
How does its relation to world history relate to my history?

How does it relate to my day to day behavior?
What habits relate?
What history do these habits have; where do they come from?
Where does each habit and or behavior begin and the other end? Can you shift your perception of them to see them as all one continuum of habit?
What underlying choices led to the behavior?
What where you thinking and feeling when you made those choices?

The thinking that led to your reactions, what duality does it contain?
What did you view as good or bad, right or wrong, male or female etc? How where these conceptions of duality not entirely universally correct?
What were the motivations and or desires underlying your desires?
What where your true intentions and reasons?
Don't assume you know for sure what it meant to you; what did it really mean to you, don't say you know until you feel in your body that it is right?

Over time, after having done this process for a while, take some time to find any overarching commonalities in your motivations?

What did you know or not know in that situation or context that led to how you felt?


This is still an incomplete process and there is much explanation that could be given for why those specific questions, but simply doing the technique can reveal much.

Mind you this process isn't for everyone, as it requires a ton of disciplining of our thinking apparatus. It is easy when thinking to wander into unrelated stuff, and we don't want to do that hear. Stick with the objective always. There are more fluid free-associative methods, but I recommend those only after you can do the structured disciplined approach for quite some time without your mind wandering much at all.

Also your idea of just recapitulating what comes when watching media is sufficient, this approach is just something a bit more advanced my might consider at some point.

Here is a useful link that relates movies to psychological healing:

http://www.cinematherapy.com/