The goal is “No matter what, I am always going to be okay.” This is different from:
“Everything is going to work out” — This one is sneaky, because it sounds a lot like “I am always going to be okay,” but it usually has a little wink-y “… because I get the thing I want in a yet unknown form” appended at the end. The work is to shear off increasingly sneaky layers of “and then I got what I wanted.”
“I’m going to feel great all the time” — Actually, feeling horrible (sad, angry, anxious, in pain) while still enclosing the horrible feeling in the warm container of “this is permitted” is the work. Everything is permitted; nothing is larger than what grants the permission.
“I will be more tranquil in ways others can sense” — It’s true that being able to internally generate a profound feeling of okayness often results in people behaving more warmly towards you, but this cannot be the final barometer. Part of “I am always going to be okay” is allowing yourself to act in ways where part of you is like “girl you know this is crazy,” while the most calmly authorative part of you is like, “okay.”
Sequencing is important, and there is no one correct direction to trend when altering emotional distance. What I mean is: when you are suffering, you need to 1) bring clearly into your awareness the part of you which is in pain, 2) distinguish it from the rest of you, 3) cultivate a sensation of warm groundedness in that rest of you, and 4) move towards your pain to embrace it. The work is gently teasing out those soft partitions and figuring out when to create distance vs when to collapse it.
Keep peeling back the layers of observer until it dissolves. For example, I might have a chain of reactions like: get anxious —> begin to deflect by scrolling or something —> wait no come on stay with the feeling —> huh, wait a second, that sounds like an opposite yet still equal tensing —> it seems like mentally I just threw a heavy object back and forth a few times —> I am finely analyzing —> how cute and endearing —> (wordlessly) I’m watching —> (even more wordlessly) contains everything happening at once, but further away so everything is correctly in perspective and not fisheye-lensed.
The first observer is usually not the final observer; tone is an important quality in determining when to stop. For me, I like to think back to when I wake up from naps in the afternoon sun in the botanical gardens. Usually I am graced with a sensation of alert restfulness, and when I speak, it’s from a place of easy, non-egotistical surety. If I have found the enclosing force that speaks with that tone, I’m usually done zooming out, or close to done. “Done” often feels like an almost-absence, like an ostensibly homogenous substance that is really particulates of grace and good-will suspended in an infinite field.