............................ by Stanley
....Having practiced focusing, without even trying now, I find myself noticing small thoughts that before I would have overlooked. They are the quiet little thoughts that arise out of some mood I may be in.
....I’m not what you would call a moody person, but what moods I have are so general, so pervasive, they don’t actually exist – not to me. Other people might notice my moods, but not me. They may ask me, ‘what’s the matter’, and I simply don’t know what they are talking about.
....‘I’m just my usual self – nothing’s the matter !’ I’m irritated.
....Personally, I have a small selection of moods and I move from one to the other depending on all kinds of things. I’m like the weather. On any day the weather is just what it is, sometimes clear, sometimes a nor’wester, sometimes cool. Whatever it is, I’m inside the day’s weather, just like I’m inside a mood.
....A mood is definitely not an emotion; it’s hardly even a feeling. An emotion definitely gets you; a feeling you usually notice. But a mood is something different; it is not even a colour, it’s a ‘tone’, a subtle ‘shade’, it’s the ‘atmosphere’ of your being at any given moment. It often sits in the background behind an emotion.
....A mood has its own thoughts. It has its own opinions and judgments entirely appropriate to it. But never make the mistake of thinking that the thoughts cause the mood – the thoughts are only the outcrop of a mood; but they always match the tone of the mood. They blend with it so much that they tend to be as invisible as the mood itself. From day to day you don’t notice the tables and chairs in your home. While you are having your breakfast, the house furniture is taken for granted. Just so, the thoughts of a mood are part of the mood. Taken for granted. Invisible as you go about your business.
....It all sounds so mild and harmless. So lightweight. But moods dictate the quality of life in ways that don’t overtly draw your attention. They don’t produce immediate crises, but over time they dictate the course life. They determine what happens and what doesn’t happen; who will put up with you and what you can tolerate; the choices you make and the one’s you can’t. Wherever your moods go you are likely to follow.
....The difficulty is that moods are so lightweight. And this is where focusing is so helpful. The one thing focusing does is train you to notice the barely noticeable. Once you get used to this you can suddenly get a vague sense of the mood you are in and the characteristic thoughts attached to it; thoughts you recognise as belonging to it. The mood opens up and reveals so much more. It’s like looking into developing dish and seeing the photographic image gradually appearing.
....As this happens you are no longer inside the mood, but looking at it. Outside it. It’s a very subtle process. But the key is paying attention to the barely noticeable, getting used to paying attention to what is only a vague bodily sense.
....A mood turns out to be a non-verbal physical sensation. Paying attention to this is what we call focusing. The act of stopping and paying deliberate attention to the felt-sense of the body develops the mood’s presence more clearly and yields up what it’s all about. The body’s vague, murky, wordless mood/feeling/sense is where it’s all at. When you get this the mood opens up and you can move on. In future it’s much easier to recognise that particular mood at least. It kind of carries a red-tag from then on.
....A mood is like a finger print – there are no two alike in the whole world. I might tell you I’m sad, but that tells you nothing. It’s an empty label. It has no body. But that’s often how a mood feels when you first look at it. Bland. Featureless. A monotone. When someone tells you they are sad, that’s often what it feels like to them: like sadness without any content. That’s why it’s so easy to think you know what a person means when they tell you they feel sad. But believe me, you know nothing about it – and it’s likely they don’t either.
....Because underneath my featureless mood there are intricate connections to the whole of my life that makes the quality of my sadness different from anyone else’s. As my mood unfolds it reveals a delicate network of meanings that stretch into the most surprising corners of my existence. Times and places that I may have given no importance, or, although I knew they were important at the time, are long gone. Irrelevant.
....This kind of work is very person specific. It has to be. There are no generalisations, no archetypal revelations, no interpretations, no big bangs, just the quite unfolding of a precise mood. And it is so exact. To watch someone going through this is to marvel at how absolutely original this person is, how completely, I mean completely, different to anyone else; and to realise too the utter inanity of all psychological labels and categories and programs.
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