I’m still prone to the moping-brooding-festering sort of thing from time to time, but increasingly (slowly, but still) less so.
Of late, I engage in a quick bit of mindfulness; one of the facets of suffering that makes it, er, itself, isn’t just the pain in it, but that it isolates. Sadness (and anger, and other expressions of it) pushes away and retreats. The mindful bit comes in stopping, just breathing, and telling myself, you are not alone in this. Right now, this very breath, millions are suffering too. I tend to visualize all that suffering, which mine is just a small drop in a horribly vast ocean of, as a great dark cloud. Deliberately breathe that in, and then visualize breathing out light into it.
I take all claims of meditational goodness with large shakers of salt, but personally, that works really well. It’s a practice that works to counter-act the self-isolating factor of bad moods, and reinforce–a tiny bit at a time–the idea that the important bit in life is to not flinch and retreat from the pain inherent in life, but to do what you can to improve it.
Plus, I figure that if I keep doing that kind of thing, I’ll soon be able to bend steel girders with my mind. That’d be a good party trick, I think.
