The last few weeks, a mantra that has been helping me a lot is "everything is a projection". Or sometimes I say "It's all just your mind being projected." I'd like to share a bit about why this insight has been helpful to me.

This past year I have wrestled with anxiety quite a bit. I know that people who have experienced trauma, in particular, sometimes have very strong emotional responses when that trauma is triggered. We have a hard time regulating our emotions, especially fear or anger, and we have a hard time distracting ourselves from the scary thoughts. It is really difficult to soothe yourself when you are unable to let go of the scary thoughts. And it is really difficult to let go of the scary thoughts if you feel that you may be in actual danger.

A big preoccupation of mine during this time of anxiety and fear has been trying to sort out whether there is any actual danger present. If I am not in clear danger, then I can give myself permission to change the thoughts. But if I am in danger, I feel I need to hold onto my fear in order to protect myself. It can be nearly impossible to tell the difference between appropriate fear and fear that is too much and based in the past, not the present situation.This is a really difficult situation.

Perhaps after a trauma occurred, we blamed ourselves for not having seen it coming or not having been able to avoid it. This blame can be very subtle. When an event is very hurtful, it is normal for us to search for a reason why the event took place. Our mind naturally tries to find some way of understanding what happened and preventing it from happening in the future.

The more painful the event was, let's say a sudden great loss or one that involved some sort of violence and/or betrayal of trust, the harder we will search for understanding, and our minds will grasp for anything that they might be able to learn from the situation and hold on to in order to protect us in the future.

Unfortunately, a lot of what our minds grab on to is not accurate. We may assign causation where it doesn't exist. This results, later on, in our seeing danger in situations that are normal and not particularly harmful.

It is often said in meditative practice that thoughts are like clouds that pass by and our pure awareness is like the sky that is always there behind the clouds. It is also said that our emotions are like the weather. This has been so meaningful to me lately, because the weather never stops changing and neither do our emotions.

When I first discovered meditation, I found so much peace and happiness, just by the changes I was making in my thoughts and actions, without anything in my external environment actually changing. I came to believe that if I continued with meditation I would eventually be able to be happy almost all the time. I would then feel that I was doing something wrong if I became sad or scared or angry. I added pressure to myself thinking that if I were more advanced spiritually, I would not be experiencing these emotions.

Lately, my perspective has changed. I feel that emotions really are like the weather. They cycle. Sometimes it rains, sometimes it is sunny. Flood, drought, fire, mild weather. All of these take place one after another in short progression, and sometimes for longer periods, but they always change eventually to the next one. My recent view is that wisdom allows us to accept and not fight the weather. It may be very stormy for a long time and we may suffer due to severe natural disasters. That's normal and it's always going to happen. Wisdom is accepting it and knowing it will change and not blaming ourselves for it.

This view has been helpful for me, because it means that there doesn't always have to be a reason for negative emotions. They just occur. It's ok when they happen and it doesn't mean I am not practicing correctly. I can just accept that certain times in life are stormier than others. This has to do with external events that occur beyond our control and the reactions we have to those events.

I recently heard Tara Brach say that emotions are a combination of a physical feeling and the story we tell ourselves about that feeling. That has been helpful, too. Whenever I experience an emotion I can break it down into its two parts and ask myself "What is the physical feeling?" and "What is the story about the feeling?" That in itself begins to provide relief.

If I can further accept that emotions, positive and negative just happen, sometimes very strongly, then I don't have to try and change the weather. It's very frustrating to be trying to change the weather! To be thinking that if we were  a better person it wouldn't be flooding right now. It's so much easier just to go, "wow, it's flooding. I better get to higher ground." without feeling like a failure about it.

But when it is our emotions, and we have had the experience of a lot of peace, we can very easily wonder what has gone wrong when we find ourselves suddenly consumed for months on end by terror and/or anger and/or despair. But, no, it's just weather. I don't think it ever stops, no matter how advanced we become spiritually. I think we just get better at letting it be ok that it is happening and reacting sanely in a way that provides us with comfort and aid during the storm.

So this brings me back to the mantra about projection. In my years-long quest to figure out how to tell the difference between real danger and imagined danger, I recently hit on a line of thought that has been quite comforting. I found that it is impossible to have a pure experience if thought is present. Every thought is based on some knowledge of the past. It must be. We can't experience the actual truth of this moment if we have any thoughts about it. So if we are having a thought, we are projecting our past onto the future.

This is helping me let go of some of the PTSD fear. I guess the blame was so severe, even though I really thought I wasn't blaming myself. I just so badly wanted to believe that I could prevent these things from happening again in the future, that I imagined some sort of vigilance would do it. But the price of being so vigilant was very painful and costly in itself. I was tortured by trying to understand whether perceived threats were real.

Something had to give. I had to allow myself permission to stop being so afraid, but that meant letting down my guard and possibly getting hurt again. And possibly blaming myself again for letting it happen, not just once, but repeatedly. It's pretty hard to let that guard down.

One way I have been able to do it is by reminding myself that I can't experience the reality of this moment, and find out the truth about whether I am safe, if I am thinking and projecting my past onto the present. The only way to know what is really going on in this moment is to let go of the thinking. This has been the missing piece I needed to allow myself to release the scary, self-protective thoughts and experience whatever is present in the moment.

And of course, most moments are actually free of a great deal of danger, so releasing the thoughts has allowed me to experience relief mostly.

So, yeah. my mantras for the last couple of weeks are "Emotions are like weather. They just happen." and "If you are thinking, you are projecting your past and not clearly seeing the truth." and these have been very helpful.

Thanks for reading and I hope this helps you, too!