Thittato

Interesting how I first started writing here around October right after an ayahuasca ceremony I did. I felt a huge pull towards journaling about music again since ayahusca is a very musical psychedelic. There is always a lot of musicians in the ceremonies I've been part of. So my first journal was about me trying to go deeper with my guitar and my djembe. And then, as I cycle through these various interests that I have I went over to drawing again and my journaling became about that. Eventually enough was enough which is another part of my cycles when I understand that I need to re-affirm my commitment to meditation again and stop flying around out there in all kinds of various interests. So for a while I journaled about meditation, which is why this new thread was created for that purpose. And then for a long while I had a parallel process going on with Chess (which is still going on). I am somehow always searching for my path. What is going to be my vehicle here in this world? I think it was good to hide out for a while in the Chess-world, because I've just been so shattered to pieces by the emotional difficulties I've had lately. The difficult emotional processes I go through are triggered by this difficult therapeutic process I'm going through as part of my therapist education (I will only finish this 2nd year now and then quit, altogether the education is 4 years but I need a serious break). So anyways I've been so totally shattered to pieces, and all my old strategies for having a life and a purpose, they have all been dissolved, so I've tried desperately to go back to stuff I used to do before for periods - the art world, psychedelics, guitar, etc etc, but none of it gave me that sense of purpose I had before when I was really going for it with any of these things - I couldn't really build that identity around any of these things as I used to before. So now as this 2nd year is getting close to its end I think I have actually managed to get through this difficult emotional process, at least much of it, and seems like I'm much more on fire again with vitality and spiritual strength. So it was very interesting that yoga was the thing that I was eventually going to land on as part of this journaling as the vehicle to pull me through all this (of course having a wonderful therapist also helped). My main focus for the last 10 years (at least) for my spiritual practice has been vipassana meditation, but now it is time to have something else as my main focus for a while, and I'm planning on spending at least half a year doing yoga as my main spiritual practice. Perhaps I go back to vipassana meditation after a while, but for now it is certainly a good timing to spend more time on yoga. Yoga was originally only meant as a preparation for meditation as I understand it, but I certainly find it to be a good meditation on its own right.

This morning I only did 10 sun salutations, and then I started working directly on all the three poses I'm trying to master. I can already see improvement in all three of them, and that is really motivating. Now I have the choice of alternating between more general programs and self-composed programs where I work directly on these three poses, and that gives me some nice variation. Nice to aim directly for something, and then to add some variation to that and do more general stuff where I work on my general strength and flexibility. Some poses I want to go deeper with, and then to dance around these poses with more general stuff. I'm starting to get a sense of how I can keep this going for a long time.

First time today I did a program that where I worked on all the three peak poses I'm aiming to master. Half of the program was from a guided youtube session on how to prepare for the splits, and the rest of it I improvised on my own. These youtube videos is a really great support, but I like the fact that I'm starting to improvise more and more on my own.

Went for a walk in nature and kept thinking about this connection between yoga and chess, what could that possible be, and of course the connection is ----- martial arts! Chess is martial arts for the mind - a battle between you and your opponent's armies. I like to think that I have this little personal ninja training going on. That somehow all these things I'm interested in are compiling up to a broad set of ninja skills. Perhaps I should add a little bit of martial arts to my yoga practice to really bridge this gap between yoga and chess. Found a cool youtube video: Yoga Meets Martial Arts Practice: Silky Force. "This Yogea practice fuses Martial Arts, Yoga and Qi-Gong as it provides a sense of grounding, a general awakening of the joints, and spaciousness in the mind." Haven't seen it yet, but sounds awesome. And as a social worker in a psychiatric hospital we can have some really violent situations going on sometimes, so some martial arts training would really help with my sense of safety in those situations. Of course we carry alarms, and we are always lots of people in those situations, but martial arts would certainly increase my self-esteem and sense of safety, and contribution with safety to everybody involved when we're dealing with aggression.

Upgrade of yoga and Chess goals So my yoga-practice is going really well, I'm doing it daily and I feel really inspired to continue, so I'm going to upgrade one of the three poses I have as a goal to master from simple wheel pose to one legged wheel pose. I think that is my absolute favorite yoga-pose. Looks like a bow to me, with the leg in the air being a arrow aiming at eternity. Interesting the types of spaces one can get into by bringing the body into a certain pose. For instance with the warrior poses I feel that my warrior attitude is really experienced, and some poses can bring a deep sense of surrender, for instance seated forward fold. Here is a picture of one legged wheel pose that I googled. Also today my next Chess-goal came to me. I'm going to reach 1200 in rating at Chess.com in Blitz-games before I'm satisfied with my Chess-studies. Cool to take it from just being a maniacally enthusiastic beginner to actually becoming a more serious intermediate player. So my goal is to reach intermediate level player at 1200. Feels like this thing has already gotten a lot more grounded and integrated, so I'm not afraid of this interest anymore. Having some yoga-goals keeps my nerdy side in balance. Anyways, so this is a little Chess-sculpture me and a friend made after we smoked a joint after we had played in a tournament together. He successfully beat one of this towns best poker players twice in Chess. Even though this poker player is also a beginner in Chess, it was a huge kick for both of us, because he has some psychological tricks that makes him a dangerous opponent (he always beats me even though my rating is much higher than his. Anyways, this friend of mine, I was able to teach him everything I know about Chess and open his eyes to this same passion that I have for this game in a very short time, so it was a huge kick to share this enthusiasm with a friend, so we went home and smoked a joint and got pretty manic about Chess from all kinds of directions, making sculptures, seeing youtube videos on Astrology in Chess and lots of esoteric stuff haha. We even made a hiphop song devoted to our Chess-mentor. Haha...... It was pretty trippy. So here is our cute little sculpture, and I choose to make it into a symbol for my goal of reaching 1200. Kind of interesting to be obsessed with both yoga and Chess these days. Not sure what the common ground is, but at least they are both from India, which, I guess, is a huge common ground. Yoga for my body, emotions and for my spirituality, and Chess as an exercise for my logical thinking. By the way, I've said before here that weed is no friend of mine, and it still isn't because it is usually waaaay toooo intense for me. Never understood all those people that says it makes them chill. Never been my experience. But anyways, a few times it can be interesting to use it for the sake of creativity, but I'm usually really glad when I wake up the next day and I'm back to normal intensity of life, instead of the super-intensity from being high. So to me I think smoking weed is like a psychedelic trip I can do a few times when I feel like it, but it will never be recreational. It has always been super-intense work to me.

Yes! Actually not really that hard. When one has gained stability in basic headstand it is just to wriggle ones feet into full lotus, but that seems impossible as long as basic headstand feels shaky :-)

Did 10 sun salutations today, then I did that 25 min long yin yoga program mentioned above here, and then I ended with 10 min sitting meditation. I'm working night-shifts these days, and felt a little bit worn out because my sleeping rhythm is a bit messed up, but after this yin yoga program I feel really fresh and ready for tonight's night-shift. I'm starting to feel more attractive again, and more open to other people, and this yoga really gives me a positive vibe, so this is really awesome. I'm pretty sure some more months of dedicated yoga-practice will totally make me into a much more stable person, and that it will help to shake off these emotional difficulties I've had lately.

Haha. So on fire with yoga-inspiration again. 26th of March was the day when my yoga-spark was re-ignited fully again as I did 10 sun salutations in this bath-house that I regularly go to while I microdosed on Peyote (written about here). I've dabbled in yoga for years. Even did a 26-day yoga teacher education in Mexico in 2012, and spent 5 months living in a yoga school in Sweden in 2005, but for the most part my spiritual practice has been more geared towards buddhist meditation - specifically vipassana meditation - but I've always wanted to take physical yoga further, but basically just maintaining it through sun salutations every now and then and an occasional drop in yoga class, and a few courses here and there, and some main-poses that I've maintained just to make sure that my flexibility would not fall beneath a certain level. This time I will take it further. I will tie together all the loose ends in my yoga-practice and build up a powerful daily yoga practice. Perhaps at some point I will go back to vipassana-meditation as my primary focus again, and then move my yoga practice down in priority to perhaps only doing 2-3 sessions per week to maintain my health, but for now it will be my primary focus for as long as it takes to bring this up to a totally new and much deeper level.

Third advanced pose I'm aiming to master As I was resting now before I go to work to work night-shift, the third post I've been looking for came to me. The full lotus headstand pose. This is a pose that I can already do, but only in a very awkward manner, so I'm going to aim towards mastering it - doing it in a controlled and flowing way. Yoga inspiration is totally back. None of these pictures are myself by the way, just random pictures I googled. But first, before really starting to work with these three poses, I'm going to build my practice up again from the bottom up by getting really good at more basic stuff and learning to see how profound the more basic stuff actually is.

Resistance Had some pretty strong resistance towards doing yoga for some days, started thinking I should go back to vipassana-meditation again, and all that, but then yesterday I did that 20 min program mentioned about here - Best Yoga for All Levels * Easy Peaceful Flow - and I did it again just now, and yeah it feels really great, so I'm glad I'm keeping this up. These amazing effects I've had in my body are still here, and I'm building on them getting even more familiar with these simple poses. Guess I was a little manic when I started with yoga again, and overdid it, like I always do, but now it feels really great. I'm getting even more convinced that these pretty extreme waves of difficult feelings I'm experiencing these days are related to my psychotherapist education. As said before feels like all my old strategies for escapism are stripped away and I have to just face these feelings directly. So easy to forget that this is a good process when I'm in the middle of something really difficult, but after a wave has been processes and I feel peaceful and expansive again it all feels really meaningful.

So, this 2nd year in this gestalt-therapist education that I was doing is getting close to its end. I only have one weekend seminar left, one study-group, and to finish writing 5 pages as a rapport of how my year has been, so now I wonder what my next year will be like since most likely I don't want to continue this education, at least not for now. I've started working more again, and that is really nice. Had a little bit of a burn-out during Christmas so I started working less, but now I'm back available for working full-time again. Guess it will take some time figuring out what my next plan will be. Among the various options I have here are a few of them: - Save up some money and travel the world. - Get an art studio to go more into drawing again. - Do some kind of meditation and/or yoga-retreat - Get more into dating and women again. - Devote myself fully to ayahuasca and the Santo Daime church. - Just continue to work as a social worker, trying to settle down even more into the job, and perhaps establish some mindfulness and/or yoga groups through my job. - Some combination of all or some of these things. As I was feeling so strongly for this gestalt-therapist education when I started it, I guess it is only natural that it will take some time to figure out what my next plan will be. Anyways, I made this drawing as an external representation for this looking for what my next direction will be - to help me remember not to stress to much about this but give it some time.

This is also one of my favorite videos of this yoga teacher: Feels like I'm getting more and more into the habit now of having a daily yoga practice. Fun to see how much the body is changing day by day. It is also much less of a big deal. I just do my daily practice, and then my body and mind feels awesome, and then I go about my day. I'm going to do this every day now for a while, and feels like I just trust the natural unfolding that it brings. There is still something in me that is really impatient with results with whatever I pursue, but day by day this thing grows. My main critique of my own sitting meditation practice is that for me it can easily become something complacent about it. Like I just sit down and become lazy and half-focused. I'm sure there is a lot of tools to counter-act that tendency, but for now I'll need the more physical aspect of yoga to really boost my strength and dedication. Perhaps I'll go back to sitting meditation as my main-focus again at some point when I've reached something sufficient with this yoga. At any rate the pull now is to really untie my body in a physical way the way I feel that yoga does. I guess physical yoga was always meant as a preparation for sitting meditation, to clear out the more gross unbalances in order to work on the finer aspects of the mind and consciousness, but yoga to me feels like a very profound meditation by itself as well. Imagine just being in a body that is totally relaxed, strong, flexible, balanced, etc. The body is not a hindrance, nor really something that takes a lot of focus either, it is just relaxed and chill because it has been brought into balance by yoga. Seems so easy as well, to have a dedicated yoga practice in a busy life, because everybody needs to take care of their health and fitness one way or another anyways, and doing that will only give energy and confidence to all the others things that I'm doing. I'll find creative ways to keep this alive, if only just a short program of say 10 minutes some days, and then longer programs on other days. The important thing is just to do something - to break out of the rut of ones daily life and bring my body into a calming and clearing focus through these physical exercises.

So awesome with the yoga :-) Exactly what I need right now. Been really wanting to boost up my level of fitness, and with yoga I get both meditation and some serious exercise in the same package. Been dabbling in various forms of exercise these last years - both running, swimming, hiking, weight-lifting, dancing, and yoga, but now I think it is time to choose one thing and go deeper with it, and yoga is what I have the most experience with from before, so that is a good choice. Been relaxing a bit more around this want to get into more advanced poses as I'm starting to get my taste back for the more basic poses and seeing more how deep they actually go. Anyways, I think I will have to strengthen and become more flexible in a more basic sense - build up the foundation, before I get into more advanced stuff. A little pain in my lower-back is a sign I over-extended a bit working on the wheel pose, so I better just build this up gradually. I think Vinyasa Flow is my favorite so far, but I also like to spice it up with both yin yoga and classical yoga.

Cool! Yin yoga is really awesome! It is the restorative / meditative style of yoga :-)

Another pose that I like to work more on is the split. Seems to work fine to choose some yin yoga program on youtube, or a vinyasa flow sequence, and then after that to have a few "fun poses" that I like to work more on to spend some time on, and then a little meditation at the end. I want to find a third pose that I can also work on together with the split and the wheel.

Gives me a lot of safety to move from sitting meditation to yoga. The emotional difficulties I experience these days are too heavy to just sit with them, so moving around, making my body stronger and more flexible, makes more sense. It also helps getting me mentally more into my body, instead of just spinning around in my head. I'm going to pick out a few poses that I especially like to work on. The first one that comes to mind is the wheel pose. This one:

More yoga Did another 30 min yin-yoga program this morning, and then I meditated for 15 min. I'm totally going to shift the main-focus of my practice on to yoga for a while now, and then only supplement with meditation when it feels natural after for instance a yoga-session. I think it is totally ok to change thing around a little bit now. I've been very dedicated to my vipassana-meditation for a long while now, but now I totally need some change. When the momentum is good with vipassana it is really good, but when it isn't good it can easily get a little slippery, like I'm just sitting there on my cushion being lazy, not really commiting 100% to giving it all my focus, so this is a good period to put my body more into work. The results are guaranteed when one is actually putting the body to work through yoga. Much more tangible. I know yoga and meditation is meant to supplement each other, and they can't really be separated clearly, but they blend into each other.

Yin Yoga Fusion Woah! I did this program twice today, morning and evening, and it was soooooo awesome:

Yoga, and perhaps starting to get ready to move on from Stage Orange - the independent achiver - in Spiral Dynamics? Hmmmm..... I'm still looking for something. Ok, so I've been obsessing over Chess now since beginning of November. That gave my life purpose, but it is sort of fading out, at the same time that it is an addication that comes back again and again, but it doesn't have that fresh vibrant youthful enthusiasm to it anymore. Sort of like old news. Sometimes fun, sometimes frustrating. A friend was over a few days ago, and we were going to have a jam-session with guitar and djembe, it was fun, but our ideas about making it into something, we realized, after hearing the same enthusiasm again and again, that it was basically just talk. We don't have direction with our music, and right now it doesn't really seem like we have the motivation to take it anywhere, so we actually ended our jam-session, and went to drawing instead that evening. That felt more right. And we started talking about going more into art together because that seemed more aligned with our energy these days, and blablabla, but I now that is just going to be talk as well. At least for me. That is old news as well. Something I go back to during times of frustration, but doesn't really seem like I will go anywhere with it. At least not right now. And this vipassana-meditation that I'm doing. I mean I'm missing some outer reference points to measure my progress against. It is only an internal process, and lately I've been feeling that it is a very slippery process that I can't really get the handle on right now. I mean it is totally helping me, but still there is a slippery quality to it that makes me look for something more that I can boost it up with. So lately I've been thinking perhaps I'm headed for a yoga-period again. I need something physically tangible that I can improve on. So perhaps yoga will add that discipline to my life that I'm searching for, at least for a period now? All these skills that I've been obsessing about, I guess they are typical for Stage Orange in spiral dynamics. The independent achiever. Perhaps I'm starting to get fed up with that mentality and I'm starting to get ready to move on. I'm not really saying that I've reached some kind of noble calling, but it is more like I'm getting frustrated by this mentality that I've been trapped in for so long. So much has been focused on skills. I've tried so hard to make art, to play the guitar, to learn the skills I need as a social worker, I even did 3,5 year as a carpenter apprentice to get a license as a carpenter probably just to over-compensate, after I was done with my social worker education, just because I was obsessed about getting some more tangible skills than simply social and relationship skills. Basically just to prove myself. And this whole Chess-thing. That is basically taking it to the level of madness. I've never pursued anything as strategically, tactically, and obsessively as Chess. It is really taking that Independent Achiever mentality to the level of madness within a field that is totally useless. Had I only pursued guitar that way for a month. Holy smokes what results I would have seen. So anyways, perhaps part of this frustration that I'm feeling these days is that I'm starting to see the end of this type of mentality and I'm starting to look for something new that I don't quite know what is yet. I have this artist dream inside of me - like a failed artist calling - that keeps coming back again and again. But I think for me it is purely motivated by this type of independent achiever mentality. So I was talking with a friend here the other day for three hours, and she is teaching mindfulness, and really encouraged me that perhaps I wanted to do something like that. She is pretty humble about it, and says that I have a lot more experience than she has, which is true, but at the same time, she has her life way more together than I do, and she knows what she wants to do which is to teach mindfulness. I don't know what I want to do, so that sort of kicks the legs out under me regarding making use of my experience. It isn't to much use for other if I don't know if I want to share it with others. So I really gave her a lot of credit for being so brave as to put herself out there as a mindfulness-teacher. I think I used to be jealous at her before, but this time I just felt a lot of good feelings around how brave she is, and it felt really good to encourage her, and I took part in her inspiration, and she suggested what about just putting together a yoga or mindfulness group in the psychiatric hospital where I work? Well, I'm not ready quite yet, but my life certainly needs a deeper purpose, and I can't go on like this for much longer, having just random kicks on various stuff, guitar, art, chess, etc etc. So to sum it up - perhaps investing more into my own yoga-practice is the perfect way to work with all this, at least for a little while. That way I would co-operate with my minds tendency to obsess about skills, and my meditation practice needs a bit more support from something physical, and at the same time I'm working on skills that are about transcending the need for such thing and that are about opening up to love, service, devotion, presence, etc. So yeah, I totally think yoga can sharpen up my discipline and my devotion at this point where I am. And if I decided to put up some groups like my friend suggested, going deeper into yoga will only help my self-esteem with that no matter whether it becomes yoga groups, mindfulness groups, therapy groups, or some combination. A lot about this frustration I'm feeling these days has some elements of madness to it - this seemingly total lack of direction that I feel these days, and how rapidly my interests change around, but perhaps if I just continue without giving up, eventually the right direction will appear. I think it is a combination of both effort and letting go. I have to be willing be taken by life in the direction that life wants me to go, at the same time that I have to be willing to put some effort into this so that I don't get lazy or complacent or cynical about the whole thing. Hmmm, there is something very encouraging about writing all this. Feels like I'm in the process of getting clearer about all this. I think I've been close to loosing hope quite some times, but now I feel hope again. Probably I just need to write this all out. Journal and journal and journal, until it all becomes clear. That's probably why I started to journal. Am I ready to let go of my self-obsessed narcissistic ideas about becoming an artist and instead turn towards service and sharing? Lets see how this unfolds :-)

Figure/ground in gestalt-therapy Microdosing feels like getting the whole psychedelic chapter integrated into something that is not such a big deal anymore. Just like a sub-process that is integrated into the background. I've been making the transition with Chess as well from playing less online Live games to playing long-term games with friends where one only makes a couple of moves per day. Makes it much more like a contemplative thing, instead of a dopamine-rush with lots of moves made in a very short time-span. It is very nice to just take a look at the board a few times per day and then spend the rest of the day sub-consciously processing what my next move will be while I'll do other things, until my mind lands on what I have the greatest feel for. In the gestalt-therapy tradition that I study, they call this figure/ground. When something is a very active issue, it is the dominant figure in ones mind, but as it gets processed, it falls back into the ground as an integrated part of the whole. Now I will go and meditate for 45 min :-)

My history with microdosing First time I microdosed was New Years Eve to this year on LSD. Always been curious about that experience, but also so greedy about psychedelic experiences that I always went for the high dose. Now I've microdosed two more times. One time on mushrooms, and today on Peyote. I have to express my enthusiasm for this one more time. It is a really great thing. I allows me to stay connected with the psychedelic experience while at the same time to so easily stay rooted in the normal everyday experience. It is more like an "undercover" psychedelic experience. Feels like everything I've written about here so far today has had like a synergistic effect where all of it: my yoga, my meditation, my drawings, my guitar, my chess-playing, the whole bath-house experience, this journaling, the way I work on processing my emotional trauma, etc etc, has come together into one great microdosing ceremony where today I experienced the best of all of it in a really chill and grounded way. I think the synergistic effect is really something that the psychedelic experience is enhancing. It allows for a way where all the different branches of ones life can re-connect and integrate - seeing the common theme in all of it.

Microdosing on Peyote Great day! Me and a buddy planned yesterday to microdose on Peyote while we went to the local bath house. Been a really great day of swimming, sauna, warm baths, cold baths, and such stuff. Also did some really interesting games of Chess, started on two new drawings that has an edge to them, and meditated two times for 45 min each time. Also did 10 sun salutations in the bath-house. The microdose session started pretty challenging with lots of difficult feelings. The interesting thing with microdosing I'm figuring out is that one often get in that sort of threshold state in-between the normal state and a mild trip, and there is a lot of tension there, but not overwhelmingly much, so it is a good state to work with exposure to difficult emotional stuff. Was so good to lie in the warm baths and just surrender to the experience. I'm figuring that these difficult emotional processes that I'm going through, that my primary purpose in life for now and probably for a long time will just be to really get through with this stuff, and that was the intention I was having for this session - support from the Peyote in order to work really deeply with these processes. I've done Peyote two times before, but this is the first time I'm microdosing it. I have to say I like the concept of microdosing more and more. I was really greedy for spaced out intense stuff before, but now I'm prefer sessions which are easier to integrate and that doesn't take me so far away from my normal everyday experience.

Quote by David Deida Found inspiration in this quote by David Deida today :-) “Unadorned suffering is the bedmate of Masculine growth. Only by staying intimate with your personal suffering can you feel through it to its source. By putting all your attention into work, TV, sex, and reading, your suffering remains unpenetrated, and the source remains hidden. Your life becomes structured entirely by your favorite means of sidestepping the suffering you rarely allow yourself to feel… And when you do touch the surface of your suffering, perhaps in the form of boredom, you quickly pick up a magazine or the remote control. Instead, feel your suffering, rest with it, embrace it, make love with it. Feel your suffering so deeply and thoroughly that you penetrate it, and realize its fearful foundation.”

Strong alternations between expansive and contractive states I'm going through some heavy shit still. Guess it has always been like this, but before I could for longer periods escape into various projects. Now the whole thing is more naked. Yesterday I felt totally free again. Like very expansive and as if my whole being was open and as if I had ventilated out all my traumas, and then today a new wave hits really hard and I'm deep into some emotional stuff. Just meditated for 45 min and it felt like I managed to process the worst of this wave. A bit sick of it all, but I guess that fact that there doesn't seems to be much escape routes anymore is speeding up the process. Like the waves hits really hard but they are also processed very deeply.

Checkmate by Life Had a really great session with my new therapist today. I don't think I've ever felt as strongly as a failure before as I do these days, and we figured out it is because I've used up all my tricks that have prevented me from getting fully in touch with these feelings before. Like my escape-strategies has been used up. I'm corned by life. I'm check-mate. Nothing really dramatic has happened. Well, perhaps a few things. But nothing out of the ordinary. Was so funny yesterday. Oh my god how miserable I felt. Becoming check-mate is really the worst feeling. No wonder most people so quickly give up on chess. And there I'm sitting, along with the best players in this town, and I'm totally feeling that I absolutely suck at this stupid game that I'm ironically also addicted to and that is my last escape-strategy. Haha. Perhaps that was the most beautiful illustration that this game has been able to bring to my meditative/therapeutic process so far. I think all meditative/therapeutic processes wants to get you to a point where you feel absolutely cornered and there is no escape-route anymore but to fully acknowledge your situation in life. Might sound like I'm utterly miserable, but regarding my therapeutic process I'm very satisfied after today's session. We are going to have a weekend-seminar this weekend with this education, and now that I've done 5 sessions with my new therapist I feel back on track again regarding these group-processes that we do as part of this education. Also I got my new books today. That "Creative Process in Gestalt Therapy" book looks totally awesome, so now I'm soon taking the bus for 5 hours to go visit a friend in another city for a couple of days and I'm looking forward to some change of scenery and to enjoy this book on the ride.