Active Boredom and In-Session Repression

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 07 May 2006

Repeat after me: There is no such thing as "intense, active boredom." Boredom is the antithesis of intense or active anything. I have to remind myself of this regularly. It's taken me a long time to work out my understanding and get a handle on it. This is an emotional combination I get sometimes before, and often during, a session. The sense of boredom is a side-effect---an artificially caused interpretation actually stemming from internal repression.

It is, basically, an inner part of myself attempting to close down the process, and having no tools to work with except my emotions. If I respond to this sudden 'intense, active boredom' with an end to the session, the subconscious avoidance tactic has worked. It will then try it more, as a trusted tool for accomplishing that end. If I let this happen, I can find myself with what seems an inexplicable, chronic case of Attention Deficit Disorder---before and during session.

Aside from the 'intense boredom' effect, I may also get 'anxiety' effects. This is nothing major; it's a low-level "inner turbulence" is all. But it's substantial enough that, even if I am not paying my attention to it, it may either send me away from viewing and into other ways to spend my time, or it may have an impact on the session itself, as I may be more easily frustrated, impatient, or simply unable to really 'open up' as much as the process requires.

I have never met a serious viewer who, when the subject of issues like this came up, didn't know the subject far too well from their own cycles of experience. The better the viewer, the moreso.

I have met people on the internet who swear 'fear of psi' is not the slightest issue for them though, and assure me they are perfectly ok with knowing the whole universe right now. I tend to think these people don't know themselves very well. In my experience----and observation of others----it only takes a small dose of "the universe" for just about any human to face a profound revision in some core psychological constructs. Which, as anybody who's done it knows, tends to be a little bit exhilarating, a little bit terrifying, and a whole lot internally-exhausting. It requires a constant re-creation of mental frameworks to replace those that get obliterated regularly, and even "in cycles" this is damned hard work, never mind constantly.

Building Your Own Tools

Self-hypnosis is a terrific format for therapy. I got more therapy in a few years, thanks to this model, than a lifetime of well paid formal analysis could have done for me. Followed by a few years of archetype work (such as Steinbrecher's fabulous model), I probably evolved more in a 10 year period than some folks do in a whole life. Of course, I was pretty far down when I began; there was a lot of room for improvement! (....There still is.)

One thing I appreciate about this approach is that it is a proactive way of playing with your mind, using the environment and language it understands. The mind has a language that we interpret symbolically. We can have personal relationships with these symbols----that is dreaming, but dreaming in that sense can be conscious and planned, too.

Some people will intuitively personalize everything. If they encounter the effects above, they may write it into an entire dramatic script of "why" that involves anything from how they feel about a session from two years ago, to whether some secret black intelligence group is involved. This actually allows a good format for working with it. If feeling that "the aliens are suppressing your psi" (for example) makes you want to tell the aliens to stuff it because they can't control me! etc., then why not use that personalization as a tool of its own? I'm management at heart, I care less for the detail than the overall result of getting something accomplished. It may or may not be the aliens or black ops leaning against your becoming omniscient, but I don't care----whatever "personalization framework" will allow you to consciously work with the "avoidance or repression effects" as a specific symbol, something you can have a relationship with, then I feel on the whole that's a useful thing.

You can consciously make a given emotion or effect into a dream-symbol, anything you want, and work with it in meditation. Heal it, talk to it, let your mind be the go-between you need for talking to your subconscious.

You Must Go Through, You Can't Go Around

On a practical level, aside from the psychology, one way to deal with the ADD/boredom/denial effects when they cycle around (for me, most things come in cycles), is to come up with some methodology (if you haven't already got one) that is going to keep your butt in sessionn long enough to accomplish something no matter how you feel. Force discipline on yourself in other areas: a required detail feedback/session review; a required 'presentation session' to cumulate and summarize all the data that (there at the end) you think is most relevent.

Don't let the psyche's typical, constant and cyclical reaction to the destruction you're doing to its foundations, hold you back. Make it a symbol and go talk to it, heal it, ask to have dreams with it, make it clear what you want to do and WILL DO, and then do what you can to help that part of you adapt and deal with it. Your inner self is definitely your friend in RV; validate it even when it is troubled. You have a responsibility to provide accomodation-for-adaptation for your psychology, just like it feels a responsibility to protect you, a responsibility you trample on when you go tune into 'the universe' outside what the ego feels it has a handle on.

Of course, then the ego tries to feel it has a handle on the universe and you become another arrogant viewer bonehead with an ego the size of, well, a universe. But if you're attentive, and don't let that seduce you, that will pass!

Go view! We have to keep viewing. It seems at least a session a day is needed just for keeping the door from starting to shut. No matter what kind of approach you use for your viewing, the one consistent factor that clearly shows in viewer skill is the quantity of "thoughtful, in-protocol practice" they have put into the subject. Do anything you can to make it more often, more fun, more creative, more diverse, anything. But ya gotta view!