NOEMAYA

Intolerance and Control
When we treat defects as habits, we strip them of their mystery. They lose their heaviness, their psychological fog. We don’t need to dig endlessly into the past for causes—we can focus instead on the future, i.e. the goals that an outdated behavior is trying to reach, which is often to control our feelings but masking the underlying intolerance of certain sensations.

Take addictive behavior as an example. We didn’t become broken only as a result of that behavior . We turned to it because we already felt broken. When we first discovered our chosen escape, it seemed to heal us. Long before the pattern began, we were already restless, caught in obsessive thoughts and compulsive urges. That first rush of relief felt like the lifting of a heavy weight. We fell in love with it because it appeared to fix something inside us.

So if A was the problem, and B was the solution, addiction was simply the story of turning to a solution that, over time, became a greater problem. We walked into it carrying a preexisting condition. Situation A led us to situation B. And yet recovery—healing—works in reverse order: first B must go, and only then can A be addressed.

Why? Because being stuck in situation B makes it impossible to see, address, and resolve situation A clearly.

Imagine someone with advanced atherosclerosis caused by years of poor diet. The cause is obvious: unhealthy eating. But when the arteries are clogged and life is in danger, the doctor doesn’t say, “Just go home and change your diet and wait.” The immediate step is surgery, because you can’t change your diet if you’re dead.

In the same way, healing begins not by tracing causes, but by stopping the behavior that’s destroying us the fastest, behaviors that are designed to mask feelings we’re trying to avoid in confronting reality. Though the chain of events runs from A → B, the path of effective healing and recovery must move from B → A, otherwise we get stuck in years of psychoanalysis and further entrenchment in our own dramas.

Behavior Before Cause
This doesn’t mean the cause is ignored—just as surgery doesn’t mean the patient can go back to cheeseburgers. Removing the behavior creates the conditions to address the cause, but the final goal is always behavior replacement. It is that unsuitable behavior that is negatively affecting us now and not the past causes. Unless we confront what a particular behavior is trying to hide, we cannot become strong enough to move on to a higher plane of responsibility.

So the process is dual:

1. Stop the behavior.
2. Build the tools and skills to stay stopped.

Only then can the deeper work begin. Because behavior itself is a mask—it hides what lies beneath. We cannot see the root until the mask is dropped.

I may not be able to control the feelings behind my behavior, and perhaps I shouldn’t even try. But I can control the behavior. That’s why healing is, at its core, the modification of behavior; it begins by the courage to drop that mask of a behavior and face reality as is, and then a revelation happens: you see a story behind all those masks and sensations, a tape that is being played non-stop, whispering in your ears a drama that you should play and live according to. This is a painful story of hurt, inadequacy, paranoia, etc.. It is this story about yourself that is so intolerable that you have to mask, not the accompanying feeling and bodily sensations that simply carry the story.

The sensations we are trying to avoid are themselves neutral and never hurtful; however, by repetitive behaviors and reactions, we have conditioned those sensations to be associated with parts of a constructed personal drama that’s painful to bear. A monologue has been recorded on the stream of our sensations, like a song on a vinyl. Once you realize it’s jus a recording, you can stop beating the vinyl; it’s nothing personal; it’s not the vinyl that’s hurting you; it’s what you are listening to, so that can help you to stop listening to the old story and instead create and record a new story, a new, liberated version of yourself.

Again, “We suffer more in imagination than in reality.”

And when we abstain from a behavior—supported by new tools—two things happen:

• We finally confront the hidden cause (the painful drama) the behavior was covering.
• We discover that no feeling—fear, sadness, loneliness—can truly harm us.

The path of healing unfolds like this

• Drop the mask (the behavior).
• Learn to sit with and tolerate the sensations the mask once numbed.
• Release the narratives and labels attached to those sensations.

At first this is tolerance. With practice, tolerance matures into acceptance. And with more practice, we realize those feelings we once called “unpleasant” were only labeled so. Stripped of story, they are simply life itself, the raw flux of being. Acceptance deepens into love.

This is where unity emerges. We begin to see it was all a drama, like children inventing roles for play. No one is ever against us. No one is trying to hurt us. It is always us—lost in a story we ourselves created, then forgot was a story at all.

I repeat: none of what you read here is about external reality and the lives of others and the things that happen to us, or happened to us in the past. This is all about the life of the living present, about how to respond to the things that happen. Here, we are not questioning the reality and impact of those influences, and yet we claim that nothing in the past can be a real cause of what we do in the present. What happened has happened but it is as irrelevant to our present life and conduct as is a dream from which we just woke up.

Like Daniel Day-Lewis, who remains in character in between takes and even long after filming, we too are master actors. Perhaps that is why theater, storytelling, and drama are universal: they mirror the way we ourselves live—lost in roles, forgetting we are the playwright.

Avoidance is Masking
Avoidance is the mask. But when one mask falls, other masks fall too: not the masks that other people wear; that’s none of our business. The masks that fall are all the masks that we wear on the inside, all the characters we play at once, conversations and arguments in our head in which we make a mask of other people’s faces and use them to reenact a version of ourselves that is not courageous enough to live in the real world.

What we avoid on the outside, we return to it on the inside and live a personal hell that never ends. So let’s capture of the progression of healing once more:

Avoidance → Tolerance → Acceptance → Love.

The goal is not to make everything lovable or love everyone but rather to love what is as it arises at each moment of life. It’s to be ok with being disliked, to be ok with cutting some relationships, to speak your truth regardless of who is offended, to not make your business to please people, and to be ok if your presence makes others uncomfortable. It’s ok to feel the raw flux of life as it’s lived by you at your deepest depths.

That’s love, real love: to love is to let things be. If you truly love someone, you will let them be as they are, as free as they can be; you become a space, as neutral and encompassing as the space of a room, so that the other person can experience their own presence without the slightest need to hide themselves or be something else. This love transcends affection and is more loving than mere affection. Apply this love to your reality: love what is; let what you feel on the inside be; don’t mask it by behavior. Learn to be ok with the discomfort of letting your truth offend people.

And so the question arises: can you love your suffering?

When you learn to love your suffering, you won’t feel the need to mask it by a show of behavior, an external maneuver that does nothing but distract you from a made-up boogyman of your own making.

Because if behavior is a mask, and that mask is itself covering another mask—the one we’ve placed over our feelings—then perhaps all of life is nothing but a play of masks.

And here is the decisive point: we are fully responsible for our behavior. That responsibility is not a burden but a gift, for it gives us absolute freedom. We cannot always control what we feel, but we can always control what we do with those feelings. At any moment, we can drop an old behavior and adopt a new one. If we see behavior simply as habit, born of repetition, instead of a mysterious thing that must undergo analysis of the root causes before we can stop it, then we also see it can be reversed. Old patterns can dissolve, and new ones can take their place.

All habits can change. All masks can fall. And behind them, what remains is nothing less than freedom itself.