aleana said:
Which means I need to focus more on interacting with people and not on my petty problems, etc?
If you want to put it that way, I would say yes, but there's a remarkable aspect of this Work. That is, the more we do for others, on the forum or in daily life, the more side effects we can experience that actually benefit US. So everything good actually happens simultaneously when the focus of attention is on an external context, osit.
Maybe this could be helpful to understand the ideas of pushing our limits and the positive applications of base traits and/or transmutation (if it's not, someone please correct me):
Some time ago I started forcing myself to participate more on the forum. This was not easy due to the way life is currently arranged with various interactive and spontaneous needs from many directions, but I started it anyway as a Work experiment. At first, interruptions were constant. Many times I couldn't finish reading or writing a post without having to jump up and do something for somebody. (Even now, most of my logged in time is spent away from the computer). I held my irritation and annoyance below the neck, forcing myself to act as if I were happy to do whatever I could do even though I felt the opposite. The more helpful I seemed to be to others around me here at home, the more I became 'needed' it seems, so there were times when I would be interrupted and I would swear my physical tension state made me think I was suffering a minor electrocution.
I felt like I knew what I was doing because I read somewhere that the surest way to locate and break up psychological blocks was to devote yourself to others and push yourself to do what "it" (predator's mind) doesn't want to do and to push at every opportunity.
After a month or more of going through this, I was sitting and typing one day, after having been interrupted a time or two, when all of a sudden I froze for a second. My perspective had shifted a bit and several cognitive events happened simultaneously.
I felt a voice from the past, that really wasn't that clear - more like a deep impression that I knew was my dad's voice because I recognized it! It was yelling: G*d d*mn it! Everytime I try to do something, it goes to sh*t! I also felt a momentary cowering sensation and a physical tension of tightening up. I also felt a tad like crying because, in that memory, it seems I didn't understand what was going on.
This was an experience of an episode in my past that had been in frequent restimulation due to triggers in the present.
But that wasn't my program really, just the foundation for it, osit. The actual program that used to run in these situations was to feel intense irritation/anger, to dramatize, making a disapproving facial expression, adopt an annoyed tone of voice and express "my" thoughts about people not doing a better job planning and/or trying to be independent (it was a rather sickening thing to realize about myself). The person on the receiving end of "my" displeasure would either feel bad or react defensively, leading to either an urge to escalate the situation to justify "my" own defensiveness or to just clam up and pout or something in between (which was a more typical reaction).
In a sense, you could say the stored memory WAS the program, just modified in the present moment to fit the present situation.
While sitting at my computer 'hearing' the voice and feeling the associated physical/emotional sensations, I felt a release. I felt several waves of sensation run up and down my spine and arms and back of neck, like chills or something.
Depending on the exact situation, those sensations might have been interpreted as horror, doom or even pleasure, because it was just sensation. (This Work has taught me that such 'feelings' or sensations really have no meaning of their own outside of some context). These sensations finally turned into a feeling I described as joy and my eyes welled up with tears as I realized what was happening: a transmutation of negative emotion.
That's what I believe it was, because it has happened similarly, in more mundane contexts, and each time, I was not bothered by those kinds of 'feelings' again in those kinds of situations. More often now, my focus is on being aware of what's going on in my environment as well as what I'm doing at the moment and I simply direct my attention/energy from one task to another as needed, to the best of my ability.
In fact, the attitude involved seems similar to something we used to say in the Navy: "it ain't nothin' but a thang!" :)