Ever been stuck between two unbearable alternatives?

The Self Salutation Newsletter

Greetings and salutations!

I’m going to pick up a thread from last week, but in case you missed it… the Web-based version of the Self Salutation App is live!

If you want to learn emotional mastery and experience the freedom from negative emotions that is possible through meditation, this is your moment!

The app has an in-depth course on the Self Salutation method for emotional mastery.

It also has a section with guided meditations so you can practice anywhere.

Plus, it has all the material from the Knockout Your Inner Critic Challenge — in case you missed some of that event, or your inner critic has been acting up in new ways lately.

Okay, now onto today’s message…

Today I want to share with you a great way to recognize that you’re in a triggered state—so you can help yourself snap out of it more quickly and get back to a state where you can be connected and joyful.

As many of you know by now, I believe one of the most important—yet least understood—things about negative feelings is that many of them are simply not resolvable—at least not on their own.

A huge number of emotions are simply mental traps. When we’re under the sway of such an emotion, we call it being triggered.

The problem is that you can spin around in these feelings endlessly without getting anywhere—this is part of why we try to set emotions aside and forget about them altogether. They seem to go nowhere.

Much of the anger we feel is like that.

It’s an unquenchable fire. You can burn with it for days. You can try to forget about it but it will just seethe within you. You can act it out but even that won’t bring real satisfaction.

Much of what we call depression is the same. You can flail around in hopelessness and despondency for ages without seeing a way out of it.

When you’re ensnared in these negative states, you can wrestle desperately with what appears to be the problem.

Your focus seems to be entirely justifiable: I’m angry because so and so said this to me. Who wouldn’t be upset by that?

Or I’m depressed because life threw a curveball at me. Who wouldn’t feel down and out if that happened to them?

The thing to understand, however, is that if a negative feeling is not quickly resolvable, then it’s probably not the real problem. It’s the symptom, not the disease.

The Self Salutation is a process for helping you to go beneath the surface feeling and resolve the true problem underneath.

But the first big challenge is learning to recognize when you’re triggered!

Honestly—this is half the battle.

Because of that, I spend a lot of time talking about those triggered states, which I call Syndromes of the Lost Self.

I’ve named them such because when we are under their sway, it’s like we’re covered by a cloud, disconnected from our true selves.

And because we’re disconnected ourselves, we will also have a hard time connecting with others. 

So I hope you’ll pay close attention to this key because it can help you to short-circuit a state of suffering that could otherwise span on for days or weeks under the surface.

The key is learning to recognize what I call the false bind.

The false bind

The false bind is when you believe you have only one of two choices, both of which totally suck.

Being stuck in a false bind is a recipe for suffering, as you can tell.

Fortunately, it’s also an illusion. It’s a faulty way of thinking for reasons I’ll delve into shortly but before I do, let me share a few examples.

If the struggle that you’re faced with has to do with your relationship with your life, like the feeling of being dealt a bad hand like we spoke about last week, then the false bind will show up as feeling stuck between resigning yourself to a cruel fate where your dream of satisfaction is denied, on the one hand, or fighting a losing battle on the other.

The thing is.. in the triggered state this thinking will seem real. You’ll be totally convinced that there are really just these two alternatives.

If your challenge is a relationship with someone else in your life, you will feel the false bind in another way.

If the challenge is with your spouse you’ll quickly conclude that either you will have to surrender to an unhappy marriage for the rest of life or you have to get divorced.

If the problem is with your boss you’ll believe you either have to resign or resign yourself to being treated unfairly.

Why the false bind is false 

The essential thing to understand here is that convinced as you may be in your current triggered state, there are almost never just two drastically opposite options in life.

It’s really as simple as that.

There are always numerous, often countless ways to move forward.

There is a solution that is right for you, that you can move forward with in dignity.

The problem is you will never be able to perceive that path in a triggered state.

Once you can see that you’re caught in either/or thinking, you can begin to recognize that you must be stuck in a faulty way of thinking about your life.

The trick, then, is that instead of taking the false bind seriously, you need to recognize it instead as a sign that you’re triggered and then proceed to extract yourself from that triggered state.

To get to the real problem, you need to go deeper. You need to pry beneath the surface emotion of your triggered state (whether it’s anger at your spouse, boss, or life) to examine a deeper emotion that is at work.

It’s a gross analogy but it’s kind of like a clogged drain. It’s emotional constipation.

Ooh. He went there. Yikes.

Anyway, the point is that you’ve got a feeling that’s undigested, that’s clogged up your heart, and that is what is also clouding your perspective.

Once you pry beneath the surface and tend to the real problem, you’ll see lots of other possible avenues for you to move forward rather than the Hobson’s choice you thought you were stuck in.

We live in a benign world with infinite possibilities.

You know that in your best state.

It’s just a matter of staying in that state more and more.

Hopefully these reflections will help you stay there.

Until next week,

Peace,
Simon

P.S. ICYMI - I recently spoke with Olympic athlete Kami Craig on the podcast she hosts, The Mindful Warrior Radio. We had a deeper-than-usual conversation about the Self Salutation, which you can listen to here.