Dear joanna:

I don’t think your anger is cute, I think your anger is understandable. A good man would have taken it seriously.

I don’t remember, neither do I want to remember why I felt that way yesterday, on my walk. This is the  point,- to disengage, to let it go. The core belief that I am a bad person, this I do remember how it came about: my mother expressing her misery and blaming me for it, repeatedly and dramatically, ongoing year after year. Naturally, I believed her.

The verb is to believe. You know when you encounter a person with the strangest beliefs, such as in religion, beliefs you know are untrue? And yet the person believes those things, however illogical, however lacking evidence?

Same thing with these core beliefs that cause us so much misery. We believe. At times, we get a break and consider this believe is not true, but then triggered by something and it is back, this feeling, this belief.

Did you watch the movie A Beautiful Mind? The main character there had hallucinations, he was psychotic. He saw people who weren’t there and talked to them. At one time he found the evidence that they were not real: over the decades he spent time with them, he aged but they remained the same age. Including a girl that never turned to become a woman.

After he realized it, he still saw those people (who weren’t really there) but as he walked by them, he didn’t engage with them, he kept walking. I think he felt that they were there, believed that they were there, but trusted that his feeling did not indicate reality, so he kept walking.

Same with our false beliefs, delusions. We keep feeling they are real, but like the character in the movie, if we don’t engage with them, if we keep walking, they will not stay long and in the future, appear less and less. Over time, maybe, just maybe they will not show up at all.

*will soon be away from the computer for sixteen hours or so, maybe in ten minutes or so, not sure.

anita