After a maintenance lull I did whole lot of meditation in the past week – my go-to is Sam Harris’s Waking Up app and the same 3 Tara Brach meditations on Insight Timer that work for me. The former is more cerebral and dissolving-the-illusion-of-the-self-y, the latter is more Mindfulness Classic – pause before you get het up and react to shit, introspect on what you’re trying to get by shooting people with the emotions you’re currently loading into your rifle and figure out if there’s some non-rifle way you can get it. I’ve had a stressful week and ingested a whole lot of the latter.
I read Jessica Fern’s Polysecure last month, which is “attachment theory + polyamory skills”. I commented to some friends that
this and other books are very macho unfriendly? I think it’s possible to write a book about feelings for people who are allergic to ‘feelings talk’ without dropping a lot of what’s valuable, but this author is not trying.
I have the same feeling about Tara Brach.
This seems like a shame. I would have bounced off hard Tara Brach or Polysecure in my teens when I was more allergic to ‘feelings talk’, but I sure would have benefitted from it! And I think that a lot of what makes ‘feelings talk’ the thing it is isn’t necessary to communicate about feelings – it’s stylistic.
(I really wanted to write this post with examples but am too tired to put myself through Polysecure again to find good ones. I might add on later.)
I’m not saying the stylistic stuff – ‘sacred core of your being’, ‘connecting to your own heart’ – is bad and should be stripped out. I’m saying that currently a lot of emotional regulation wisdom seems to be in a kind of cultural silo that’s hard for many people to get into, because a distaste reaction to the style is common. I hate gendered products but find myself googling ‘yoga for men’ whenever I want to try yoga again because I personally can’t stand the thing instructors do where my stretches are supposed to affirm my existence or spiritually put me in touch with the planet. Again, there is nothing wrong with that style. Rock on, every yoga instructor on youtube. But having to effectively learn to codeswitch if you want to read about how to have better relationships seems suboptimal.
I was totally just thinking about this same thing earlier today. I think I’m by nature kind of macho in this way, and averse to feelings talk (though these have been getting less true over time).
What I am really into is contrarianism and being an edgelord, and what’s been most successful in getting me into feelings talk is framing it through that lens: basically “I’m so cool and edgy, I’m willing to talk about my feelings and be vulnerable even if it’s socially weird or whatever.”
But I don’t know of many resources on this. (I guess Mark Manson is sorta feelings talk but macho?)