sholomar

For chronic pain and other ailments like Fibromyalgia, "chronic lyme" and other hard to pinpoint disorders, try reading the book "Healing Back Pain: The Mind Body Connection" because a lot of chronic pain is actually caused by buried emotions and stress and can be relieved by prolonged mindfulness or Leo's "do nothing" meditation, or use a physical therapist. That book specifically addresses "disc bulges" and the pain related to them though it can be applied to the neck and shoulders or any pain. I still do spinal decompression exercises though even though I read the book just to cover my bases. Plus maintaining good posture helps with the overall self mastery process for me.. a reminder to stick to new habits. I don't have a lot of faith in most chiros, especially when they bring up "subluxations" as a need for continued treatment. They can be good, but so can a physical therapist. If you have disc bulges, back cracking won't do anything. In fact aggressive yoga can just make things worse.. be careful with yoga if you do it, get a good trainer that knows how to prevent injury and which things to avoid.

You could take a double or triple dose of "Natural Calm" which is magnesium citrate, before starting the fast if you wanted... or if you wanted to go hardcore, take the concentrated lemon flavor magnesium citrate you can find at pharmacies that they have people take before a colonoscopy... will empty the pipes and the average person could use the magnesium. https://www.walmart.com/ip/Equate-Magnesium-Citrate-Saline-Laxative-Lemon-Flavor-10-Oz/34772430 That stuff tastes fairly pleasant also... like lemon diet soda.

I've known about proper chewing for years but that's a habit I still haven't made part of my brain yet. It mixes in saliva which helps the body not recognize the food as "foreign" so it can reduce allergies along with making it easier to digest. Thanks for the reminder!

I would not try to nag to him about his diet, just let him be and accept him, but of course eat your healthy diet, that's fine. Nagging tends to sometimes just bring on resentment. If people really want to eat a certain way, they'll tend to do so until they are forced into a corner, such as some sort of chronic disease... they say 1/3 of american adults have prediabetes... from a high carb, high fat diet. I'm lucky my father and I are very alike when it comes to diet and fitness... he eats plant based 4 days a week and I have also lately. My stepfather had heart bypass surgery and his diet is still not the best, but I don't really nag him. It's not going to accomplish anything except fuel resentment. Some people have the attitude they'd rather eat what they love and die early than live on celery stalks, and you know what, that really is fine. There's no right or wrong way to do it, not in the grand scheme of things. Even if my father and I agreed on everything, I still wouldn't want to live with him. Perhaps like others have said, get out on your own so you can be your own person. My father unlike myself is a nagger... he will promote his plant based diet over and over to anyone that will listen to the point of enough already.. chuckle. I'll mention it once.. beyond that, it's up to the individual to make whatever choices they want. I don't know how much you bring it up, but consider that mentioning it all the time might have caused his resentment. I noticed the tendency of the stage greenies here to have a sort of judgement of the lower stages, which of course is normal for greens... but you'd have a lot more peace of mind if you accepted what is outside your control, namely the behavior of others, rather than getting upset about it. To me that's a key part of the self development process, something I continually work on. I don't nag, I just live by example when I can... well when I'm not playing keyboard warrior on other forums. Chuckle.

You'd probably end up passing gas, or worse, nocturnal emissions.

Leo has a video about this one... it's about breaking addictions. Monkey mind is an addiction. If you pay really close attention you can feel the cravings that come along with the urge to be in monkey mind, or your habitual emotional state, habits, etc. Self mastery has been a slow process for me, because I always go back to the old habits which slows growth. Basically like Leo said when he first tried to start giving up junk food, he just sat there, did nothing, and let the craving be there... he didn't distract himself with TV, he just sat there with the craving. Plus the mind can only process so many inputs at once.. it's not a very good multi-tasker, so when too many things come up on the plate, or especially too many stressors, the body will lose it's ability to remain conscious unless extensively trained by you, and then the old habits, emotions,and monkey mind flare up. Consciousness to a degree is just a form of mindfulness... there's a book called the Open Focus Brain that might be able to help train you to stay mindful and in a relaxed state. The more you do it, the easier it becomes. They say it takes 60 days to create a habit. I find I have to almost make new habit creation a part time job, which is fine otherwise I spend way too much time in front of a screen. Chuckle. Nothing that was worth anything in life ever had an immediate payoff. Eudaimonia.

I've found "Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself" to really click with the scientific part of me because it explains how the brain works, how it forms habits, and how to reprogram it to create new habits. It's more about working to fix the dream to make it a happy one versus waking up from the dream though... it's like an in depth explanation of the law of attraction... for waking up from the dream I found this article I came across resonated well with me. https://www.thetruthaboutenlightenment.org/unresolved-negative-emotions-2/karma-part-1/

As someone who is a moderate this 8 minute clip describes why so many americans don't embrace the democrats. https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2020/11/13/maher-democrats-too-often-come-across-as-lacking-common-sense/ "Republicans are the party of don’t wear masks, kids in cages, ‘Lock her up.’ And Democrats are the party of every hypersensitive social justice warrior woke bullshit story in the news. They’re the party that disappears people or tries to make them apologize for ridiculous things.” Maher further stated, “Democrats kept saying in the campaign, you can’t possibly think Trump is preferable to what we’re selling, and many voters keep saying, yes we can. In fact, our primary reason [for] voting for him is to create a bulwark against you. Because your side thinks silence is violence, and looting is not. Because you’re the party of chasing speakers off college campuses and making everyone walk on eggshells and replacing let’s not see color with let’s see it always and everywhere, formerly the position of the Ku Klux Klan. It would be so easy to win elections if we would just drop this shit.”

I'd say it depends on where you are in your personal development journey. If you have achieved all your life goals, are insanely happy, have a loving partner, everything you ever wanted, and your psychology has been sufficiently reprogrammed, go ahead and enjoy the show with your partner. When I look for a movie I look for comedies and light hearted ones. "50 First Dates" is a particular favorite of mine. Basically things that promote affection, laughter, and positive emotions and/or help me expand my tolerance levels for different perspectives in life without being too violent or bloody.

That's a really good analogy.. I was just thinking this today as I was looking at houses around here... there's a shortage of housing all over and a growing trend of large highly liquid investment firms and corporations buying up housing including residential real estate so it creates a scarcity. Another example... it's really easy to be happy and peaceful when you found your one and only and are in a happy relationship with a happy family. As a man who always wanted that but doesn't have it due to being an aspie among other things, it's not quite so easy to just be at peace and be happy and selfless, but I've made a lot of progress with the peace of mind. This can be applied anywhere in life you get scarcity... it's like maslow's heirarchy of needs.. it's easiest to take care of the base before taking care of the top. I'm quite self aware and aware of my selfish aspects.

If all we do when we get enlightened is to end up reborn as a new soul in a universe where life goes in forever in an endless cycle of birth and rebirth, really what's the point of trying to achieve sainthood? It seems like every endeavor done in life is done to chase pleasure and avoid pain... and virtually everything done is pointless because it's all been done, forgotten, done again, forgotten again... In a million years nobody will remember our species and nothing of what we have done will matter unless we've managed to spread around the galaxy but even then in a billion years we will be long forgotten. There just seems to be a sense of futility to life with this knowledge... we do all this personal development to avoid some "unfulfilled" feeling when we get old because we didn't "live life to the fullest?" meanwhile we're just going to reincarnate an infinite number of more times to do it all again, over and over... It's all a mind trick. I'm not really as negative as I appear I'm just pondering.

Great post and I agree. I'm fine with stage greens until they become fundamentalists that support dictatorships, communism, or mass censorship or control of the masses. Anyone who thinks their viewpoint is so right that they want to break the prime directive to try to play dictator because they think they can build a utopia are suffering from delusions of grandeur and don't really understand human psychology. Mass censorship has never worked anywhere it's been tried. Like you said, most emotionally unstable fundamentalists aren't really stage green though. "The closest cultural parallel to the SJW online cancel culture mob of bullies was the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The similarities are creepy to say the least. We're on the same trajectory and will remain so as long as it is culturally acceptable to silence, deplatform, deperson and cancel anybody at all." Bill Maher has been attacking the extreme wing of the democrat party for many of the same reasons. More of a classical liberal he is. https://www.city-data.com/forum/politics-other-controversies/3249316-bill-maher-took-aim-cancel-culture.html

It's best to dollar cost average and invest for the long term. Personal development helps with this because it's emotional decisions that often lead to investing mistakes. Having a disciplined plan in place and not looking at day to day moves is important. Betting on deflation is like shorting a stock. It can work for a while ... timing the market and trying to bet against it, but in the long run, inflation will kill you. There's no doubt about it we've had the biggest market pump in US history in 2020 and everything is in a bubble, but interest rates are so low that combined with unlimited QE and stimulus it affects the risk-free rate of return and makes stocks (and real estate, cryptos, commodities) more attractive than holding cash or bonds. Will we see a period of inflation and deleveraging? Will it be different thing time and the central banks be able to completely prevent recessions by continual pumping, UBI, and helicopter money? Time will tell. It's best to diversify.. I personally have bitcoin, various stocks, gold, silver, platinum, palladium, and rhodium. Also buying a house with as close to zero down as possible and taking advantage of low interest rates to let inflation work for you....

Don't slouch when sitting keeping your lower back in a state of flexion for long periods of time (recliners are bad for this.. people who spend countless hours gaming in a soft chair) because this will cause the disks to bulge outward and hit nerves over time.. usually it won't affect you until your 30's though. Also lifting sloppily.. trying to squat or deadlift with bad form does the same thing. You don't really want this to happen. Work out smarter, not harder. Fortunately at age 19 your body should jump back from injuries quickly assuming you develop some healthy habits. Get an office chair with good lumbar support or a kneeling chair. Sleeping in firm beds is preferable to soft ones also. Move around every half hour to 45 minutes when you are sitting.. get up.. do a couple of cat cows and sit back down. The spine likes movement. Hanging from a pullup bar, doing press ups and extension exercises to work the back the opposite direction and push the bulges back in, core work to support the lower back such as planks, side planks, hip flexor, hamstring, and piriformis stretches, not sleeping on your stomach... all good things. https://the-eye.eu/public/Books/Bibliotik/8/8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back - Esther Gokhale.pdf There's lots of yoga that can do more harm than good if you don't use perfect form also such as forward folding. Core work is more important than static stretching for back pain anyways. Focus on hip hinging or squatting when you lift things in life instead of rounding the lower back. Get these healthy habits in place at your age and you'll be good for life. Most people don't make major habit changes unless faced with a crisis... be proactive in this regard. https://www.mensjournal.com/health-fitness/5-best-and-worst-exercises-for-back-pain-mens-journal/

On top of the gay crowd you have the increasing number of MGTOW and incels.. the less attractive men with boring personalities who used to make the cut back when women were more dependent on men and there were less men to compete with due to wars, but don't really make the cut today because they lack the traits that turn women on like crack (confidence, humor, indifference, edginess, and wild dirty sex) Our society is emasculating men in the school system and demonizing masculine traits but the problem with that is it doesn't mesh with what women's biology tends to see as "sex appeal" so a growing number of men are becoming frustrated with the dating market and society as a whole. They tend to be the target of hate and ridicule when society and culture and biology/DNA helped to produce them. As someone who used to be one, a little bit of sympathy might be better given to them but I understand human nature... we like to bully. I'm fortune to have dug myself out of my hole and am transforming myself, but a lot of them are stuck in their habit loop. A look back at history shows that this is nothing new.. you can see the majority of males never did breed with females during the evolution of our species... the "alpha fucks beta bucks" as it's been known.. it seems like monogamy is a relatively recent thing. We still have a lot of animalistic/tribal characteristics wired into our biology/DNA which is not surprising for anyone who's researched all this. https://psmag.com/environment/17-to-1-reproductive-success Also, homosexual behavior was far more common than some would have you think. In fact if you look at other mammal species homosexual behavior is common. You can also look at our closest genetic ancestor, bonobos, for hints on behavior, as well as the few remaining indigenous tribes that remain largely untouched by humans. It's fascinating.

Agreed... to grow requires eating the vegetables and discomfort. One of my issues with the progressives, and I see it here, is too many of them want to give people a fish, rather than teach them to fish. I acknowledge I'm still too addicted to political forums and much of my own egoic dogma as well. You either choose to embrace new habits and the emotional labor involved or not. There really is no quick fix or magic pill for this. It's going to require discomfort. We live in a society that wants to be comfortable all the time and I think that's one of the challenges we need to look at. It's a balancing act for me.. the ying and the yang.

This seems to be like a great topic to discuss here. Perhaps many of you have heard about it, many of you have not. Some of you would call this conspiracy theory, but it's something the global leaders are not shy or secretive about giving their opinion about. I didn't watch the whole video. I really should before I make any judgment call. I've only seen the comments, read a few websites, and looked at the Time magazine piece on it. I don't want to present a bias in my original post so I'll leave it at that. I see there is one topic in here from August that didn't any bites. It's only recently that this initiative has seemed to go "viral" on other parts of the internet so I made a new thread to discuss.

I found this article quite informative, as I actually had an anxiety disorder at one point, my sympathetic nervous system was stuck on most of the time. https://www.unlearninganxiety.com/amygdala/ There's a star trek TNG episode where the more power they dump into the shields trying to stop this anomaly from hitting them, the worse it got.. sometimes you have to lower shields, and just face whatever fear you have... run towards your assailant rather than away from them... in fact there's a clip of that segment on youtube... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cl_QrHTLWwk A good video. You need to expand your comfort zone. There's no substitute for doing.

I know how I react when I see an awoke progressive on reddit telling me that I should embrace allowing pre-pubescent children decide to be a different gender and encourage the process even using hormones before they reach puberty. It makes me think they are fucking nuts with screws loose in the head. Actually it doesn't... I've come far enough on accepting "what is" to allow them to have their point of view. I still have my orange/blue beliefs that may or may not change. I'm not too concerned about it... aside from the amount of time I waste on politics.

I love this video. Humans in general are so obsessed about people's personality when personality is a very impersonal aspect of someone's life. I see this here of course with people bashing Trump... it's not easy for a person with a well established personality to just go and change... it's like telling a depressed person to just "be happy" ... you aren't doing them any good. It's not that easy. People's personality is a result of upbringing, habits, culture, friends, etc. Psychopaths are very good at playing whatever role they need too in order to win people over to their side. They can be quite charming. Trump is clearly not a psychopath by this definition.. he has the maturity level of a little kid, but I try not to attack him for this because I understand he's not going to change, assuming he's even capable of doing so.

Humans used to eat far more roughage than we do today, everything from exotic forms of plants and roots we don't even consider food today, to bones and organ meats for certain nutrients, along with insects such as grasshoppers (which is in fact why they try to escape from us), which is why we have supplements today. Heck even many supposedly healthy plant based foods are fortified with vitamins, and milk has been fortified forever as have cereals. Salt has been fortified with iodine forever also. I would agree most supplements are not required, but some are, and if they aren't hurting anything I don't see the big deal. I think certain forms of medicine such as Chinese medicine are perhaps overlooked.

Bloodwork isn't enough to test the heart, you should get an echo to check the size of your ventricles, see if your valves are working properly, etc. I have a bicuspid aortic value that regurgitates moderately. At some point it will need to be replaced. This can cause the symptoms you describe. You could also get a calcium CT score but if you are under 35-40 it's fairly pointless to do so. It could be thyroid, stress, any number of things. It might not even be heart related, it could be GERD, ulcers, gastritis, high sodium diet, mineral deficiencies, etc..... Stress causes many modern illnesses, but if you have a congenital issue, it's unlikely any amount of "acceptance" or other spiritual work will fix it.. for example Leo's thyroid issues, my bicuspid valve, type 1 diabetes, etc. Acceptance will allow you to be at peace with what is, which in itself helps. Resisting what is, creates stress...

I don't necessarily think Trump is the best president and thought Obama was a good president but the left and their emotional instability scare me more, so I did vote for Trump again. (He would have won South Dakota anyways so it doesn't matter.) Also I'm not in support of them allowing these protesters to just burn away cities without arresting them and I don't agree with their whole "black lives matter" movement given most of these people who were shot by police were resisting arrest or doing foolish things to bring it on. Now they are talking about stacking the courts if they get elected. I just don't trust emotionally unstable people and the left as a whole seem quite unstable. Yes Trump is unstable too. Both parties are terrible, however I see the left in their current state as trying to undermine the system of checks and balances and take the power they want. I see them brainwashing people in college campuses and not allowing conservative opinion or any sort of political debate. It used to be about freedom of speech and coming to a consensus, now it's all about doing it their way or you are a racist, hater, and get ostracized from society. The polarization is just obnoxious. People act like whiny spoiled brats these days. Honestly I don't particularly care who wins, I'm more interested to see if Amendment A, the legalization of marijuana, passes in my state (South Dakota) I would really like the left to "be that which they wish to see in others" but that's not how I see the party.. I see them to be a dysfunctional, emotionally unstable mess that doesn't have a clear vision they are trying to project.. just "wear masks" and "allow protesting" along with preaching and moralizing to the masses about how racist and bigoted they are (when most of them really aren't) ...until they get some vision, I'll pick the party that is at least psychologically stable (minus their president) .. in the end I usually hope for gridlock.. that way neither party can get much done. Honestly I wish we had 3 or 4 viable parties like in other countries. I won't lose much sleep if Biden wins though. In the end the world won't come to an end either way. I just find stage greens emotionality to be... somewhat off-putting. I am curious to see what this emotionally unstable party would accomplish with Kamala at the wheel and both parties under their control and a stacked court. I would enjoy seeing the result just for curiosity sake.

You know what's so fun? Zelda, Breath of the Wild on a powerful PC using texture mods. Replaying Final Fantasy 10 HD steam version... Far Cry Primal... but I can't. I have different priorities now. I can revisit that stuff perhaps in a decade. In the meantime, enjoy the fact that in 10 years I'm going to have super powerful hardware to use and tons of new content to discover, that will likely surpass these two favorites of mine. No, I probably won't buy that 3080 or Big Navi... why tempt myself to game more? Winters are long and cold though.. I may set up some rule that allows me to game during certain time periods.. for example if the temperature is under 10 degrees F... that way at least I can set limits to make sure I don't backslide into addiction.

They don't take life too seriously and can see things from another person's perspective without getting all butt-hurt by their opinion. It's actually possible to have this ability and be stage blue/orange/green, but it would be more common going up to yellow methinks. I try to accept all points of view and find the nuggets of truth in them if I can.