When attachment itself is experienced without the object of attachment, without attention to what you want to have and want to hold onto, when the sensation itself is felt, it is experienced as deep anguish, totally intolerable. We normally avoid this experience by not focusing on it; whenever you are attached you are in this suffering but you don't know it.

Some students never clearly discriminate this feeling of dread because it is so vague and apparently unwarranted. In all cases, the consequences of the loss of narcissistic supplies are revealed more in specific object relations. When the student feels not seen or appreciated, not admired or treated in a special way by a particular important person in her life, she will experience the effect of the loss of mirroring on her sense of self. The first feeling is usually a sense of hurt, insult, betrayal, or loss. She is very sensitive at this point. The slightest indication of not being seen will evoke deep pain, intolerable anguish, endless tears about a bottomless grief. When investigated, rather than reacted to, this hurt reveals an emotional wound of staggering depth and profundity. It is difficult to tolerate at first, and she will tend to fight it off, to react to it and out of it. However, the presence of empathy and understanding, and especially the presence of kindness and compassion, make it possible for her to tolerate the hurt and thus feel it more directly and fully.

Mental anguish, along with the thinking process that produces emotions, is based on the notions of time and causality. You cannot make yourself suffer unless you think in terms of causality and time. When you suffer, usually you’re saying, “Now I’m angry because someone did this to me. Now I’m hurt because such-and-such happened. Now I’m scared because someone did that to me.” If you simply eliminate the thought of time and causality, suffering ends. You could be aware of what’s right at that moment, know that whatever you’re thinking at that moment is actually just happening in that moment. What you feel has nothing to do with what happened yesterday. Just be aware of yourself this very second. Just realize that you are instantaneously emerging. Break the temporal continuity of sensation. Realize instantaneously, right at this very second, that you are emerging. You are absolutely instantaneous emergence. You are not a continuity in time.

She (the soul) feels trapped inside her own skin while she strongly intuits, and frequently knows from direct experience, that her real condition is complete release and total marriage to her beloved, the truth of essence. She is filled with tears and deep sadness for not being in the carefree condition that she knows is her potential, and pained with the anguish of separateness from what she deeply loves.

The slightest indication of not being seen will evoke deep pain, intolerable anguish, endless tears about a bottomless grief. When investigated, rather than reacted to, this hurt reveals an emotional wound of staggering depth and profundity.