Feel it, and act anyway

In 1919 a Japanese psychiatrist named Shoma Morita, who'd suffered from anxiety himself as a young man, built a therapy that runs against almost everything Western psychology was about to say. Don't analyze the feeling. Don't try to fix it. Accept it exactly as it is, and do what needs doing.

His word is arugamama: things as they are. Morita observed that anxious people spend most of their energy fighting their anxiety, trying to feel differently before they act, and that the fight is the disease. Feelings, he said, are like weather. They come and go on their own schedule, and you don't control them. Actions you control. So the practice is to notice the feeling, let it be there, and act on the basis of what's needed rather than what's felt. The feeling usually follows the action, not the other way around.

Morita's original treatment was severe: a week of bed rest in isolation, then light work, then heavy work, then return to life, all while keeping a diary and being told, over and over, not to fuss about how they felt. The modern form is gentler but the core is the same. Purpose over mood.

It belongs in the month of Awareness because it's awareness pointed at a very specific trap: waiting to feel ready. Most of what we don't do, we don't do because we were waiting for the feeling to change. Morita says the feeling is not in charge. You are, and your job is the next needed action, taken with the feeling riding along.

Here's what I find kind in this. Morita never tells you your feelings are wrong. He only tells you they aren't the boss.