Intense sadness, anxiety, and feeling bad about myself do not feel good. No matter how many times I experience them, they still feel real. Like things are actually bad. There's no hope or purpose. Something is going to go very wrong.
Why is that a gift?
To be clear, I'm not saying that it's not great to feel good. When I feel good I often have more energy to pay attention to other people and empathize and maybe help in some way.
But a lot of times I'm not in a particularly great flow state or whatever, and I'm also not noticeably feeling bad. I'm just cycling through my normal habits. If I stop to think about it, I might be able to identify a background sense of unease, but it's not front of mind. It's easy to get kind of stuck in configurations like this.
On the other hand, when sadness or anxiety comes, it sucks. But, it is something tangible. It forces me to put my attention on it. That does something. The attention slowly causes the energy of the negative feelings to evolve and transform. And it seems like that energy is always meaningful in some way. There's a richer sense of experience hidden inside what seemed to be undesirable. A vividness in the world, sort of like my vague memories of being a kid with potential wonders everywhere.
So in that sense I think it's a gift when my attention is focused by the bad feelings coming to a head. Maybe they come to a head in different ways for different people. Like a violent confrontation or something.
I don't always make good enough use of the times when I experience bad feelings, though. Sometimes I'm under time pressure or for some other reason I give those feelings the bare minimum care to feel OK enough to proceed with external life. Then things can accumulate and get really bad, turning into physical health problems.
On a brighter note, with a good enough meditation or other spiritual practice, I wonder if it's possible to keep enough awareness on those internal energies so they can be processed without coming out so unpleasantly at all. I'm not sure.
