You might already know what I’m going to say in this post, but I’m going to say it anyway. It has to do with the true nature of recovery from “postpartum depression and anxiety” that I talked about a while back.
Everyone that relates to the label of “postpartum depression” or “postpartum anxiety” has thoughts and feelings that they don’t like. In fact PPD and PPA could be defined as experiences of unwanted thought and feeling. So of course, people always want to know how to make their unwanted thoughts and feelings go away, and more importantly, they want to know how long it will take.
I completely understand why you would ask that. For the longest time, I obsessively asked the same question. However, now I know that that question truly misses the point.
You see, once you see yourself for who you are and see your thoughts and feelings for what they are, it doesn’t really matter what comes across your thought and feeling radar. You can relish the human experience with all of its extremes because you know that it is completely safe.
One other thing, when you know who you are and when you know that thought and feeling are just energy passing through you, you also know that the content or nature of thought and feeling really doesn’t matter. Most people are so caught up in what their thoughts say or how their feelings feel. But in reality, our thoughts and the correlated feelings are just our psychology's interpretation of whatever is passing through us at the moment. In other words, they are completely made up and highly untrustworthy - mere outputs of a machine. Even more importantly, they are not indicative of who we, our character, or what we are capable of.
Knowing your true identity as the observer or the presence that witnesses your experience places you above all of that or below it at a deeper level – whatever direction feels better to you.
So instead of asking when a thought or feeling will disappear for good, why don’t you open up to seeing that there is something inside of you, the most true and authentic you, that watches every thought and feeling come and go. This part of you, the true you, is not touched by any part of your experience, and it has the authority to dismiss any thought or feeling that is not helpful and the endurance to wait for it to pass. Funny enough, we are designed so intelligently that when wisdom appears to us in our thoughts and feelings, we act on it without a second thought. That means that pretty much all thought that we don't act on automatically is the garbage output of a machine - meant for the waste basket. Pretty cool, huh?
Photo by Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash