As a child and now adult who believes in magic, the interrelation of the mind & the world and the numinous power of thought, intrusive and obsessive thoughts got tangled up in my numinous world-view.
Conventional approaches to OCD, whether CBT, ERP or DBT, although based on a reorganization of perception, felt inadequate in engendering the actual transformation of perception (ie. initiation) that felt necessary to actually eradicate this neural wiring at the root. To re-iterate, the perviously mentioned therapeutic modalities may serve to be effective for many especially given their behavioral bent, but I think I intuitively felt there was a deeper gem to excavate – a potential insight for how to live a deeper and more real life- under the facade of OCD symptoms.
For sake of brevity and clarity of purpose, i’ll lay out the “presenting problem” of OCD as I experienced and framed it from the psycho-mechanical lens instead of a personal one, and then present the “transmuted” experience and framing, and the flips in perception that bridge the two:
Presenting Problem:
thoughts seemed like predators that can “attack”at any moment. Much of my mental and psychosomatic energy was spent resisting an intrusive thought from occurring because the name-of-the-game unconsciously became “keep the thought away”. A thought arising was the dreaded start to a cascade of perceptions that I fear would inevitably result in an inappropriate action. It would take so much energy to resist the inevitability of the compulsion.
Transmuted Experience:
thoughts are empty of inherent value. They can be dropped at any point into the default state of thought-less-ness. The medium of conceptual thought is seen as a purely constructed one based on biological, psychological and experiential predispositions that are created and shaped by choice. what thoughts arise is only a reflection of what thoughts we’ve most strongly engaged in before, consciously or unconsciously. we have free will to put certain patterns of thinking into motion, we have free will to phase out patterns of thinking. The “resonance” of a thought is the psycho-somatic charge of the energy behind it… which does not have to be correlated to the reality of the content of the thought. We can “click in” and “click out” of an entire paradigm of fear/thinking just by remembering the inherent emptiness of “thought” and that it is the energy of belief in it that fuels the reality perception of the thought. the perception of psycho-somatic charge/tension is an energetic state ripe for transmutation; if one is able to “hold the tension” without collapsing into unconscious entanglement with the content of the thought, one is able to integrate that energy and expand the width and depth of embodied consciousness.
Philosophical/existential insights:
–contextualize and discern instead of conflate: contextualizing the role of thoughts, instead of conflating their function, role and influence, allows for one’s relationship to them to naturally be one of lightness, flexibility and allowance. It is much harder to just let thoughts “be” if one’s implicit metaphysical and biological predisposition about the nature of thought is not examined and consciously evolved.
– learning to hold the tension of unintegrated psychosomatic tension/energy: if someone has developed an over-estimation of the power of thought, or if they are getting entangled with the content of the imaginal, it is likely there is a lack of grounding in the other direction… in the body. Shifting one’s focus to the psycho-somatic field at play, perceiving intrusive thoughts not from the lens of the conceptual content but rather from the felt energy that precedes the thought opens one up to the opportunity to re-familiarize oneself with one’s own body, and with it’s extraordinary capacity to create experiences of reality.
–understanding the psycho-mechanics of changing one’s mind (karma): the structures of the mind abide by the laws of cause and effect. habits change one intentional decision at a time and the more momentum one gets in practicing a habit, the easier it becomes. The arisal of undesirable thoughts becomes an impersonal natural phenomenon, the same way undesirable crops may grow in a field if that was what was previously planted. Do the work in tending to the quality of the soil, nourish the seeds you desire, no longer feed those that don’t without fear or impatience, and trust in the harvest of the season to come.