Get Over a Crush

Transcript

I’d like to talk about getting over a crush.

Something happened to me a few months back I started to get to know this woman and something grows up inside of me, this kind of love but also a kind of infatuation. Actually not just a kind of infatuation, I was very much infatuated.

And it was difficult for me to deal with in part because I had this sense of my identity, trying to see myself as a spiritual person maybe someone who’s unmoved by the world or something like that.

And maybe there’s carry over from previous idea I had about myself that I was some kind of player and no woman could get to me.

Of course these aspects of my identity, these beliefs I had about myself which really weren’t accurate they made it so much more difficult for me to experience and process the emotions going on within me.

It’s like if I have this idea about myself that I’m too cool or too well balanced, if I experience infatuation that means that I start to try to deny that part of myself. Or feel embarrassed about having a crush which is something human that I don’t need to deny about myself.

I can accept, enjoy and embrace myself and whatever fanciful emotion that tends to occur.

This is an important principle. I guess I might call it stacking emotions or you might call it a vicious cycle.

What happens is I feel the infatuation which is difficult enough to deal with by itself then I feel the embarrassment on top of it. Maybe I start to blame myself.

Maybe I start to blame this woman. Of course it’s not her fault that I fell in love with her or was infatuated with her. It’s really her expressing herself and my emotions are my own responsibility.

Now what I did, of course the important thing I had to do was accept the fact that I was embarrassed, to accept the fact that I was blaming someone else for what was going on and also accept the fact that I was infatuated.

Of course when I can embrace these ideas, my own emotions, they make them so much easier to deal with because I can see the information accurately. If I’m in denial about it, it’s much more difficult.

One important thing that I did as well was avoid the triggers.

Trigger is kind of a funny word, activating event is used more commonly in CBT.

I was learning this song on guitar and it so happens that the persona of this song has a similar name to the object of my affections so every time I’m playing this song, I’m in some way reminding myself of her.

My mind is finding ways to justify these feelings so I’m going through these things in my head, thinking about things that she said and trying to imagine “Well what does that actually mean?”

Maybe there is potential for a relationship, she said this ambiguous thing, maybe she actually does like me in that way.

In this case it didn’t matter if she liked me or not.

Yes, avoiding the triggers and recognizing these thought patterns when they occur.

So if I notice my own thoughts I can be aware and be like “Am I trying to justify this to myself? Am I actually intentionally or unintentionally prolonging my own suffering, propping up my own infatuation with my thoughts.”

Of course it’s a kind of natural tendency and with the society we live in, there’s these certain factors like Disney movies and Rom Coms. We have this certain idea of what romance is, we might get caught in a loop thinking the fact that I have these emotions means something special and she’s the one…whatever.

Those things are quite separate from the emotions, that’s another key point. If we can kind of tease out and observe as somewhat separate, the emotions and my interpretation of them.

There’s nothing wrong with loving somebody but the interpretations of it can cause us a lot of mistakes in out thinking and therefor mistakes in our action. These things can be treated as separate.

Another thing I noticed is I had a feeling of incompleteness. I’ve talked about before the knot in my stomach.

I like what I wrote about this …“tension in the belly, incompleteness. Part of being complete is feeling incomplete. You couldn’t truly be complete unless you had the capacity to appear incomplete.”

The point of this is it is an illusion. You’re not really incomplete, its just that’s what is happening on the surface.

You are complete, you are always complete.

Another point, the thing that was going on in my mind and heart. Its just the thought of her, it’s not actually her.

So what’s going on in my mind, having these projections and having these fantasies about being with this woman, it’s not real. It doesn’t have much to do with her at all, it has a lot more to do with whats going on in my head.

When I can acknowledge that, well I can stop blaming other people for my circumstances, I can also see the information more accurately.

The final thing that is important to remember as I mentioned before there’s nothing personal in the universe as they say in the Toltec agreements.

If someone is there, maybe they’re treating you not so kindly or they don’t acknowledge your emotions or they do and they don’t feel the same and you might have a different idea of how they should behave.
They’re just playing out their own thing, it doesn’t necessarily reflect on you.

If they behave poorly, maybe they’re just acting out their own drama.

It doesn’t mean that you are good, bad or anything else.

It’s impersonal. As impersonal as if you were to drop a piece of glass on the ground it would fall, drop it from you hand and it falls and that is impersonal, things playing themselves out.

Karma in the world, karma in action. It doesn’t reflect on you one way or another, it’s just how things are.

So those are a few things that went through my head.

This might be a bit of a mental construct that I distance myself from my own experiences but sometimes I think these things happen so I can learn whats going on, so I can intimately learn these frames of mind so I can help you guys find ways out of it.

Or even help myself find ways out of it.

That’s the other thing, it’s a fun process, it’s an experience and that is something for you. It’s a gift.

We can be grateful for these difficult experiences, hard difficult, strange unusual, suffering painful, we can be grateful for them.

Lets have a good time even when times are strange.

Thank you for listening and have a wonderful day.