Woggy #15: Getting Out of My Mind

As some of you may have noticed, I do on occasion have difficulty completing various significant tasks in my life, ones which some might say would help me achieve "success" in this corporeal world. While you may have wondered if this fact had escaped my personal notice, it of course has not. In fact it is often forefront in my mind, and various solutions to this issue have themselves been an ongoing woggy project.

One such solution that was offered up to me within the past year has been the book Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life. Based on a school of psychological thought called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, the goal in general is to face your problems/ issues/ conflicts directly, accept their existence, and learn how to stop letting them run your life. A good deal of the book is spent explaining and performing mini "experiments" on your mind to show how our mind/brain, useful in most day-to-day problem solving, is extremely tricky and completely unsuited for assisting us in dealing with the tangled self-referential web of emotional and psychological issues inside us. This convolution is particularly pronounced for those of us who have more intense emotional things to deal with, and/or for those of us who have spent most of our lives trusting that our ample brains are certainly well-equipped to get us out of any old trouble we find ourselves in. Being doubly afflicted, I have found this book to be immensely helpful.

However, while almost everything in the book has been amazingly useful and interesting, it is and has been at the same time extremely intimidating, painful, and difficult as it requires you to face all of the various demons you have, with the assistance of your giant brain, found many elaborate ways to hide away from. Not to mention the fact that, as the main point of this book seems mostly to be telling you how to stop listening to your brain when choosing how to live your life, it for obvious reasons makes that same brain rather reluctant to pick up the book again and continue reading, as it means in no certain terms and end to the reign of Brain As Monarch of Life.

So between me, my brain, and my demons, I have been quite on-again, off-again with this book. I'll read a bit, handle all the exercises and readings that aren't too painful to deal with, and then find myself whack right up against a question like this:

"The memories and images I avoid include: ____________"

after which I promptly put the book down ("That's enough for today; we'll pick it up tomorrow, I promise!" my brain fools me). And so it goes slowly, but at the very least, it goes.

And as the awesome, awesome, awesome Lynda Barry says:

"No one had ever solved the riddle by thinking their way out of it."

Things Left To Complete This Woggy Project:

• set aside time to read
  
• write down the answer to above-mentioned troublesome question
  
• continue reading
• begin actually doing the daily/weekly mindfulness exercises from the previous chapter
• keep moving through next stumbling block
• continue reading and doing excersizes until the end of the book is reached