just pondering this evening how grateful I am to the SR community. I'm specifically grateful to those trailblazers who started & participated in the very informative sticky threads on AVRT in this secular section. It helps me to re-read them.
Lately there have been some good posts on the idea that the AV wants us to believe that stress and painful feelings are too difficult for us to handle. It wants us to believe our problems are more difficult than they actually are.
This past week I've been continuing work on my job search, and at the same time, my elderly mom landed in the hospital with some scary problems. I was stressed by this stuff, juggling job calls and emails from the hospital, etc.
AVRT really helped me with this. I knew I wasn't going to drink over any of this, because I'm a non-drinker. I also knew that the AV could try to exaggerate my reaction to these stressors ... encourage me to think they were more than I could handle. That AVRT concept helped me to sort of "make friends" with the stress I was under. If my stress isn't more than I can handle, well then ...
I can just handle it. Feel it, acknowledge it, soothe it with self-care, trust that it will pass as everything does.
It's not a new idea of course, many buddhist teachers talk of the benefits of radical acceptance of what is. Heck, the big book has a really good passage on acceptance. It's just that AVRT helped me to experience it directly.
Instead of thinking "oh, I have all this stress, I might drink, I better do xyz, oh my god, panic, I can't handle it" .... I'm thinking "oh, here is stress, which I need not fear, let's tread softly while it's here".
dunno if that makes any sense, but it helps me to ramble sometimes.
