Thittato

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.

Curiosity about my next "psychological rebirth" Holy smokes. So I was at the local chess club this evening, and I was so beaten to pieces, hahhah....... And I'm down at 920 in rating at Chess.com again. It was a bit sad being there. We were only 3 people this time, and a 4th one that came much later. Usually there is about 10, at least, and lots of other people dropping by. An old guy, who is really cool, and who is sort of my local representation of the archetype of a sensai in Chess, started this pub-chess group right after New Years Eve. Felt like something that was really going to grow - so it was a bit strange that now that my energy is running out of this - that the group had sort of also lost its momentum, at least for this time. But yeah I totally suck at something that I've gotten totally addicted to. Hahha........ I mean I was getting some ego out of beating all my friends. But playing Chess casually a few times per year compared to pursuing it academically are two completely different things. To be fair towards myself I probably could have gotten reasonably good at this. I'm sure most people who have the interest can. But I think it will require much more than I'm willing to give. After we where done with the matches I had a beer with one of the guys, and I introduced him to this concept of chess-addiction that I've been researching a bit lately, and he didn't see any problem with that - saying that playing Chess is probably much better than what most people do - spending their evenings watching TV. And from his point of view I can totally see that that makes totally sense. He is probably going to go on and become a teacher in mathematics and enjoy chess as a hobby for the rest of his life. Where as me - a restless spiritual seeker - capable of getting some sort of manic infatuation with pretty much anything - I think I will just have to consider this part of my personal social anthropological studies of all the various types of human cultures that exists. I very much like the buddhist teachings of rebirth when viewed as how we psychologically are born into one world after the other. So this time I had a psychological rebirth into the world of Chess. Wonder which place I will be born into next :-)

Thank you! I'm glad to hear! Pretty cool that there is actually a few people reading this stuff!! :-D

"Josh Waitzkin knows what it means to be at the top of his game. A public figure since winning his first National Chess Championship at the age of nine, Waitzkin was catapulted into a media whirlwind as a teenager when his father's book "Searching for Bobby Fischer" was made into a major motion picture. After dominating the scholastic chess world for ten years, Waitzkin expanded his horizons, taking on the martial art Tai Chi Chuan and ultimately earning the title of World Champion. How was he able to reach the pinnacle of two disciplines that on the surface seem so different? "I've come to realize that what I am best at is not Tai Chi, and it is not chess," he says. "What I am best at is the art of learning."In his riveting new book, "The Art of Learning," Waitzkin tells his remarkable story of personal achievement and shares the principles of learning and performance that have propelled him to the top -- twice." Wow! Thank you! Sounds like a really awesome book :-)

Zen and the Art of Chess Chess as a Zen-koan. Reading deeply philosophical discussions on Chess.com where people discuss whether Chess is a waste of time or not hehehe..... Still thinking about quitting Chess, especially now that I've reached my goal. Wondered if I should set a new goal of reaching 1200, but even to stabilize around 1000 is hard enough, and then what if I reach 1200, then I would probably only want to reach 1400, and on and on, and what is the point of that? I think I understand this game now, and how one gets addicted to improvement. Even though it is a fascinating game, it is still just a game, and when I look at the streamers on youtube and stuff like that, I think the whole scene has a lot of similarities with the video-game scene, especially when playing it online. I've always thought being a gamer was a very ridiculous thing to be, because why wouldn't one want to spend ones time improving in socializing, guitar-playing, meditation and art-making, instead, for instance? Pouring so much time into a game just seems like waste. But somehow I got seduced into becoming a gamer by finding a game I thought was somehow more sophisticated than typical video-games. On the chess.com forum there is a lot of people discussing chess being a waste of time and highly addictive, so I'm not alone in my experience. Found this quote: “[Chess] is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time. ” George Bernard Shaw, Haha...... Chess really gives that feeling of being engaged in something very clever. Ok, I won't just quit over night, and I will probably alternate a bit back and forth with both enthusiasm and skepticism, but at least it seems like this beginner-enthusiasm is starting to wear off. I guess I've seen the process now of refining my game from being an absolute beginner to becoming a serious intermediate beginner kind of, and I'm starting to understand what it takes to maximize my potential, and continuing to pour energy into this the way I've been for the past 4 months in order to reach my highest potential, year after year? Seems like that is what people who get really hooked on this are doing, and totally doesn't seem like what want to spend my time doing. So I guess there will be a gradual fading out. Like now my beginner enthusiasm has already peaked, and striving to become even better totally doesn't seem worth it. But is was fun. I was really curious and fascinated by this whole thing. The game in itself, the people it attracts, etc. I guess with video-games, and similar stuff, one can't just trust the feeling of passion. Just because I feel inclined to do it doesn't necessarily mean that it is a good thing. Had I been hooked to this level on my guitar, or with my drawings, oh man, that would have been some results. But yeah, I will give it some time, this whole thing, to just breathe and sort itself out. No rush to figure anything out. Suddenly I was deeply into this, and it has been an interesting experience so far, so no rush to get out of it. When people get so engaged in an activity like chess, and at the same time people ponder upon the deeper philosophical meaning of actually being engaged in this thing (like I do), the whole thing in many ways become like a Zen-koan, and that's how I will tie this in to meditation this time :-) Zen and the Art of Chess, hehe :-)

Some sudden and unexpected success with my new therapist So now it is getting interesting. My new therapist has been helping me looking closer at how I avoid eye-contact. Or I don't really avoid eye-contact, but I find it more uncomfortable to look people directly into the eyes than probably most people, so my eye-contact probably reveals a lot of my insecurities. I didn't see how this was related to my feelings of grief held as this pressure in my eyes and some feeling of something weighing me down in my whole face, but actually I think she was getting at some energetic blockage that is in my whole face, and tonight when I meditated during night-shift it suddenly felt like my whole face opened up like if it was a chakra that had been blocked but now the energy was flowing freely through it. She was trying to get me to acknowledge and embrace that I felt like a failure (I don't only feel like failure, much of the time I also feel that my life is a really exciting adventure, but for the sake of therapy we try to really root out all these unconscious painful feelings that dominate us more than we usually like to admit), but every time she was hitting close to this feeling I would break eye-contact so she said that I was probably avoiding something here because of that, and yeah, even though this new therapist is a bit more confrontational than I find comfortable, she was really hitting home here. No wonder these feelings, and that energetic blockage in my eyes/face has been really triggered these days. So when I walked home from work this morning it felt like my energy field around my head was really open again and that my vision was much broader, and that I was way more in contact with my surroundings and much less stuck in my own head. I'm pretty sure if I had met someone I knew they would have noticed that my eye-contact would have been much more comfortable. I'm not going to celebrate this as some kind of "finally I'm free!" because my experience is that these kind of openings comes and goes. Most likely it will close and open several times, but right now my face is really open and comfortable. Didn't see how all this was related, but feels like I'm now connecting the dots. What was also cool about they way she worked was that she had me tell her all the reasons why I found it uncomfortable looking at her. For instance I was afraid that she would judge me because I thought she looked a bit strict, and I was also afraid that our relationship would end in a conflict, and lots of other reasons. My previous therapist didn't use himself in this way. He wouldn't put himself out there as a target for all my projections, and that's why I think the tension in our relationship started to build up since there was no way for me to let out my thoughts and feelings about him. He was only helping me with external matters, but energetically refused to make use of our relationship directly as a tool for therapy.

Hey Lucas :-) Thank you so much! That is very heart-warming to hear!! It is so easy to slip out of the meditation-routine. I still do frequently even though I have been meditating for a long time. I see you have a journal here as well. Journaling in combination with meditation has been so helpful to me. I love Leo's principle about self-experimentation. We just got to keep on experimenting until we find those things that work for us :-) I do some combination of zazen and vipassana. Depends what my practice need in the balance between effort and letting go. Ajahn Chah is awesome!

Keep on keeping on So sat for 30 min today. There is still a lot of grief sitting around my eyes in particular and in general there is some kind of mask on my whole face. Something that is weighing down on me. I have this strong feeling lately of being a failure and lonely and without purpose. It always comes back to this. Unfortunately I'm a bit bi-polar, so I never stay long enough in these feelings to get them processed fully. It feel like I dip myself a little bit into them, and then I get some kind of relief, and I get very high and feel that I'm done with all therapeutic processes. I'm amazed at my own ability to fall for the conviction that I'm "done" over and over. But of course, even though this grief is not fully present all the time, I think I can still be able to keep a steady focus going working with this. I was working night-shift tonight, and had a lot of time to meditate, and these feelings where extremely strong, even to the point of feeling that even meditation wasn't working anymore, but at some point I surrendered myself to the experience and it felt that things began to transform. Today the same pressure is still here, but it is much milder. So I will just keep at it. Keep on keeping on, as one of my teachers used to say.

Thank you! Looks really interesting!! I will take a closer look :-) It is exactly the spiritual aspect which is lacking in my education I feel. People in my class don't get that vitality and life-force shining out of their eyes that people who meditate regularly get, even though the psychotherapeutic method is good in itself, but it would have been much better combined with more focus on meditation-practice.

So today I had a study-group together with three people from this gestalttherapist-education, and even though I've been whining alot about this education, I'm starting to get a little bit more optimistic about the whole thing. I really went from idealizing the whole thing intensely, to really hating it so badly, but now I'm getting back to a bit of a tempered optimism about it, while still also, of course, there is some remaining negativity about it. I'm probably quitting after this 2nd year is completed even though the education is 4 years, but at least I completed this 2nd year. But I've fallen quite out on the theory-part this year, so yesterday I ordered two books that seems pretty cool: Creative Process in Gestalt Therapy by Joseph Zinker and Body Process: A Gestalt Approach to Working with the Body in Psychotherapy by James I. Kepner The other books on the book-list has been pretty dry, but these two looks really interesting. Didn't meditate today, except for the 5 minutes I was guiding my study-group, and they really liked the meditation I gave them, so that was nice.

Chess-goal reached, going back to working full-time Hurrah! 1000 in rating reached at Chess.com.... Haha...... Chess must have been my full-time job for the past 4 months, and to "celebrate" I'm going to go back to my normal job again. I got burned out around Christmas because it was too much with all those therapeutic processes I was in as part of my therapist-education, but now I feel fine again. I have 30 % of a permanent shift at my job, which I have been working during this period, but normally I tell my job I'm available for working extra, so they can just call me if they need me, and usually that amounts to me working 100 %. So that is what I will go back to now. I've been delaying it for a while because I've saved up some money and I've been getting used to the comfort of only working 30 %, so 18th of March (which is the first monday after the next weekend seminar in my therapy-education) will be the day that I'm fully available again to my job. If I don't set a date like that I'll just continue to indulge in this freedom until I run out of money. Feels cool to celebrate this chess-milestone this way. Something about this whole process has made me more realistic I think. I'm a very daydreaming kind of type. So for now it will be a normal job, and daily meditation practice. Sat for 1 hour this morning. I felt like a very ordinary dude who was satisfied with having a steady meditation practice.

Identifying which parts of my body are affected by difficult feelings (and some more about Chess...) Today I've meditated 30 min in the morning and 30 min in the evening. Been experiencing some kind of grief this whole day. It was interesting how it felt like it was sitting in my eyes, and also it was connected with my chest feeling a bit sunk in. Like there was some weight pressing down my chest. It felt like one big connected area these unpleasant body sensations that were going from my eyes/face to my chest. I was resisting this experience the whole day, but when I could identify which parts of my body this experience was dominating the most then it felt like I had some kind of map or handle on this thing - like it made it therapeutically interesting to deal with these feelings. I've often felt that I've had some unresolved grief pressing behind my eyes, but I haven't felt that it has been connected to my chest this way before, so now it is like I have a larger area to work with when these feelings come back again. Besides that I've reached my highest rating ever in Chess today - 993 points in Blitz-games at Chess.com - which isn't really very high at all - but I started at around 700 in the beginning of November, so an improvement of almost 300 rating points in 4 months is pretty good. My first goal is to reach 1000, and that might only be one match away, or I might fall down again and it might take several months before I return to this point, which is unlikely, but previous experience has shown that chess-progress comes in ebbs and flows. Anyways, it feels like this thing is getting much more integrated, and it feels like a lot of my other interests are returning now. Who knows how much I want to play after I reach my goal? Seems to me it is most obsessive in the beginning when I'm struck by this beginning enthusiasm, but then after that settles down I realize I just have accept my position in the hierarchy and gradually work my way up step by step. Perhaps this will be an integrated interest that I will carry with me for the rest of my life, or perhaps now that I have gotten a foot in the door and have gotten my curiosity satisfied about this game and the sort of people it attracts that now I'm ready to move on to other things again. Perhaps the most important thing for me was to see the progress of refining ones blunders. At first when one begins in chess one makes a lot of really gross blunders, and then the process seems to basically just be about tightening up the game, but the blunders are never removed once and for all - no, they go through a long process of getting finer and finer. So each step up will just bring me up to a level where the blunders are a little bit more refined than they were on the previous level. So no I can literally see this has already happened - and I can see where I'm headed if I continue this process. Probably that was the most satisfying part of this study - understanding and seeing with my own eyes chess progress happening right before me. I always hate when it feels like I stumble around in the dark - but getting a handle on the learning-process - that is something that I really like. So now this is not so mysterious anymore. The biggest parallels between Chess and meditation that I make these days is the process of landing in my meditation practice and with the physical aspects of actually being part of a local chess-club being my parallel to that. Just continuing to show up. I wanted to quit Chess at some point when it felt too obsessive - but instead I managed to ride it out and now I feel that I have landed and accepted my place in the hierarchy - it might only be a temporary endeavor - but at least I managed to stay with the process all the way and overcome my bi-polar tendencies to either become narcissistic or self-loathing about this. I was also getting a lot of tips from more advanced player on how to improve, and now I have sorted that all out and found out which things I like to practice on to improve. Same with meditation - you got to listen to the more experienced yogi's, but then you got to put all together and make it into something that works for you. In Leo's 65 Core Principles of Living the Good Life, I really liked his principle of self-experimentation - basically that we just got to continue to experiment and experiment until we find what works for us. Also I go to this bath-house mentioned before regularly now, and I'm getting better and better at going into the "ice bath." I'm experimenting with sinking myself slowly and in a controlled way into the water. To begin with it was much more a sense of forcing myself into a shocking experience and getting out of it as quickly as possible - but now I try to ease myself both into and out of it. It is somehow a bit of a traumatic experience - probably at least when done in this "panic mode" kind of way - but when done mindfully and with ease then I think it is a really good thing to get used to. So lots of good things going on. And of course journaling about them makes me more grateful and the chaos settles down and makes my experiments much more into something that is part of a larger and more meaningful whole.

45 min meditation this morning, and now 20 min this evening. Still pretty uncomfortable because of this weed I smoked two days in a row. I was at the local chess club today as well, and I played really bad and it feels like weed is really messing up my cognitive abilities. I know it is only temporary, tomorrow I'm probably feeling like normal again, and perhaps I'm exaggerating, or that there is some parallel psychological process that also feeds into this, but as far as I can remember from my previous periods of smoking weed it doesn't really do me any good. I've never been a stoner, but all my friends were, and I probably would have been one too if my experience with weed had been better, but this is the same old story of almost always feeling like crap when I do it. Well, there was a little honey moon period when I first started doing it, where there was a lot of laughter and interesting philosophical thoughts, but that quickly turned into something unpleasant, and often even the first part of the evening was fun, usually it turned into something unpleasant as the high turned into some kind of slow, unpleasant philosophical stupor. So yeah, same old story. I know what this stuff is. This is not my ally, nor has it ever been.

Was out in the forest today making a fire together with some friends. We smoked weed and I got pretty stoned. Smoked weed with another friend yesterday, and I don't smoke much these days, but suddenly I had the opportunity to do it two days in a row. Can't really say that it does me much good. In fact I rather feel pretty miserable when I do it, like very insecure and philosophical in an unpleasant way. So this is the state I've been walking around in this evening, although it is pretty mild and manageable compared to how it used to be when I smoked before. But anyways, in the context of meditation and self-actualization, I will see this weed-smoking as some kind of exposure therapy. Getting some uncomfortable feelings triggered and breathing my way through them. There never seems to be any end to the sort of self-loathing and shame that I am able to feel, but as they say in gestalttherapy: The way out is through. I'm mildly in a panic-mode right now. Perhaps panic is too strong a word, but my mind is racing - searching for something - some kind of solution to this unpleasant state that I'm in. My whole life is viewed through a lens of misery and meaninglessness. This is an exaggeration - it is not only unpleasant - there is something pleasant as well about this state - but it is that whole ambivalence thing - like being stone is some kind of slow motion suffering. Hard to describe. Looking forward to wake up tomorrow again. Didn't meditate today, but it will be the first thing that I do when I wake up tomorrow. Besides this this whole weekend has been nice and social.

Insights in the bath-house Today when I went to the bath-house and swimming hall nearby where I live I started to think about what are the primary or essential skills in some of the things I'm interested in. - In the vipassana meditation that I do it is to penetrate the objects of awareness so that stuckness turns into flow. The way that I "penetrate" the objects is that I start to look for whatever I can find of some vibratory quality to the object. Even the most solid objects of awareness has some vibratory quality to it if I just look closely enough. - In social work it is to make the people that I work with feel seen, heard, understood and validated for who they are. - In Chess it is "pattern recognition" and there is a very structured way to develop this type of pattern recognition and that is probably the quickest way to get good at the game. - In social relationships and in dating it is probably to add value to the interaction, although that can be specified a lot. When I was at this bath-house I also started to notice that my level of consciousness using this place has become much greater. I've found a really good balance between swimming, sauna, using the "ice bath" being inspired by the Wim Hoff method, using underwater high-pressure currents to massage my lower-back, and the different warm-baths. Before I used to boiled myself too long in the sauna, really exaggerating how much time I spent there so I became so tired I didn't see any use of it, but now there was just a new level of refinement and balance to the whole thing, which was really awesome. It just adds to the whole energy of this forum of how to create an awesome life I think. Even something as simple as going to the bathhouse can be done with a lot of skill and refinement when done consciously. I really aspire to bring this level of consciousness into all areas of my life. The whole bath-house experience really has a meditative/contemplative quality to it as well. Feels like just soaking into the experience of presence while being there. It is very re-rejuvenating when done the right way.

Landing Meditated for 1 hour and 15 min today. So more and more lately it feels like I have finally landed in my meditation practice. That is a bit ironic after having meditated pretty intensely for 17-18 years, but this whole time there has been a lot of on and off dynamics, and it has mostly been driven out of desperation, and I have tried out so many different practices and guru's and whatnot. This journaling has really helped with this. It is like I'm just some ordinary dude who has for instance joined a martial arts club, and feels fine about going to this club Mondays and Wednesdays, a little bit of homework in between and a few tournaments each year, and no rush to make progress out of the ordinary, but a trust that by simply showing up again and again things will take its natural course.

Sat for 45 min today. Felt really good. It is an interesting feeling when I feel that I get to the core of my being. When suffering doesn't distract me, but I have momentum going and I go directly into the suffering and it quickly dissolves, and every time that happens I land more and more in "the quiet place."

Really glad how much it helps my meditation to write these notes. As I see it this journal has two main-purposes: 1. Improve my meditation technique. 2. Deal with the challenges that distracts me from keeping up a daily practice.

Sat for 45 min this morning. I was getting the feeling that there has been like a race-car competition between my meditation technique and my obsession with chess these days, and that finally in this meditation the momentum was fully with the meditation technique again. Felt like a "transformator" this meditation - transforming stuckness into flow. I will go and sit for 30 more min just to see what more stuckness I can find and work on.

The Sacred Feminine in Chess Another thing I've been thinking a lot about is how the sacred feminine manifests in chess. When I started drinking ayahuasca 8 years ago, it was as if I started developing a relationship with the Queen (the holy mother of unconditional love, the sacred feminine, etc) the way she took the form through the medicine of ayahuasca and that particular flavor. The way I experience her she is sort of violent and compassionate at the same time. Ayahuasca is a pretty brutal medicine, and it feels like getting churned up by the cosmos in a brutal way, but then coming out of the process in bliss. The way I relate this to chess is ironically how the Queen is the strongest piece in that game. They also have a chess goddess or a chess muse which they call Caïssa, and when people become really hooked on chess they describe it as being possessed by Caïssa. The inner landscape of my mind these days is totally filled up with images from the chessboard and all the pieces, but it all has a bit of the same churning fractal geometric quality that I feel when I'm tripping on ayahuasca (and many other psychedelics for that matter), and especially when I apply my meditation technique to this process that I'm in. When I'm winning I feel great, but when I'm loosing I feel like an idiot. But as one of my chess mentors said - this comes from a wrong perspective. Loosing a game is great, because then you get to analyze what you did wrong so that you can improve. So in the deepest sense of it there is no winning or loosing - there is only going deeper in ones understanding and knowledge of this game - which in many ways is symbolic for the game of life. So by trancending the artificial duality between winning and loosing, one gets to a deeper sense of passion, love and wisdom. But loosing is painful - so it takes some purification to get to a point where one is ok with it. And winning feeds the ego - so even here it takes some purification to not get infatuated with it. So I have totally gotten possessed by Caïssa, and I see many similarities between her spirit and the spirit of Queen Ayahuasca. In the deepest sense, all aspects of life points back to the same love and passion that is the juice at the core of this existence that all mystery schools points back to. And I'm starting to believe that all kinds of passions can actually be seen as mystery schools bringing one back to deepest mysteries of this life, an giving one a greater sense of wisdom and mastery of this paradoxical process called life. It is always back to surrender and giving up control, especially when one starts to feel that one has some mastery going on. Life will find a way to pull the rug out from under ones feet again and again no matter how well one feels that one does. So please, dear Caïssa, teach me how to be humble and kind and always willing to learn and improve.

Structure, hobbies and social life getting more integrated So I've been having two female friends living in another city across the country visiting me this weekend. Not romantic, but still great to have some female companionship. We've been partying hard, and done a lot of creative stuff, and already my apartment is tidy and clean again. Love to have this daily To Do list going. Makes it so easy to get an overview over what I need to do for this day. I also managed to squeeze in a lot of Chess even though I was very social this whole weekend, so I was really glad that I could keep my drive going with Chess and at the same time take care of my responsibilities as a host and a friend. Seems like this Chess thing has already gotten much more integrated. And seems like I just have to accept that I have gotten totally hooked. As long as I manage to keep a good structure in my life, I think it is just healthy to have some hobbies that I have a lot of passion for. The problem is if I start to neglect everything else and starts to only sit in front of my computer all day long to play online, but that should be easy to avoid. I mean, my life would totally suck if that started to happen, which I have already gotten a taste of those few days when that happened. It also probably wouldn't help my Chess-playing much at all, because my self-esteem would totally hit rock-bottom. Now, after having cleaned up my my apartment, and written this journal-entry, I will go and do my meditation for 30 min. It is interesting that most of the day my mind is now in "Chess mode," so I will have to get that balanced with bringing my mind to "presence mode." One of my meditation teachers told me about two different modes we can keep our mind in. Narrative mode and experiential mode. Narrative mode is all the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and where we are going and what we are going to do, etc, while experiential mode is what is needed to get enlightened - that is turning away from all the stories and just experience life as a sensory experience going on in the present moment - and with the stories, just experience for instance how they are felt in the body as a sensory experience. So what makes this pretty interesting is that when I just totally allow my mind to roam around as much as it wants in my fascination with Chess, I can still use my meditation technique to strip that experience down to a sensory experience. It is like instead of being totally identified with the state, I instead make the state into an object that I investigate and dissect with my meditation technique. Basically my meditation technique is vipassana - and that is trying to see my sensory experience as something that is vibrating and in a sense of flow and something that is always changing. So basically how this Chess thing supports my meditation is that when I just totally allow myself to indulge fully in this obsession, then it actually becomes easier to dissect that obsession with my vipassana teqnique into a sense of flow on the sensory experience level. As I've written here before, when sensory experience level starts to vibrate, I experience it as that Qi Energy all over my body starts to flow more. Stuck and frozen experience turns into a sense of flow. So basically I just have to allow my Chess-obsession as fully as possible, and then use it as an object to enhance my meditation practice. And since passion and having something to get a sense of drive going in my life really adds to my energy and inspiration, I think I can use this added sense of inspiration and energy as something I can re-invest back into my meditation practice. It is like making my obsession into an ally instead of an enemy. Pretty cool :-)

Ah, great! Thank you!! :-)

Great feedback! That is a very good summary of the whole thing :-)

Getting to a point of rest after an obsession has run through its cycle Did 10 sun salutations today, and then I meditated for 30 min. This whole Chess-thing doesn't feel like any problem today. Today I was more afraid of finding the whole thing too boring and demanding too much work to get anywhere with it, so pretty much the opposite of feeling obsessed with it. Feeling a little depressed today, somehow, don't know why, but seems like whenever an obsession has run through its course, I feel drained and empty on the other side of it - longing to feel driven and occupied with something again. You could say I've taken on the identity as an aspiring Chess-player for a while now, and now I'm searching in a mild depressed panic for something else to take on as a manic identity again. But this is rather the point where I should just lean back, and not try to search for anything, but just surrender to this state I'm in, and see if I can find some rest here instead. Feels like I'm getting better at identifying these cycles. I'm starting to breath deeper as I'm writing this. Like finally this search that has been going on today for something else than what is here right now can get to a point of rest. Anyways, totally feels like I can accept the level I'm at with Chess, and that I don't need any huge and intense project to get better in a rush, but that it is a nice hobby, among my other hobbies, that I can check in with every now and then without it having to take over my whole life at all. I will meditate for 30 more minutes right now just to marinate myself some more in this feeling of surrender and rest I'm falling into now. Gosh, so good to write about all these things. I totally believe that all these things can get into a balance now. I just need to continue to journal about it and meditate. Also I'm working with these obsessions through the therapy-education that I'm participating in. This therapy-education itself was something I was very obsessed and inspired about, but now I just think it is boring, but probably this is a good place to get to. Perhaps boring is what I fear the most - but that is certainly something to become better friends with. This whole thing feels like coming back home again. These are some of my favorite meditation-instructions. A friend sent them to me some years ago. I think they are from the tibetan mahamudra tradition. Here they are: Let go of what has passed Let go of what may come Let go of what is happening now Don’t try to figure anything out Don’t try to make anything happen Relax, right now, and rest

Even more on Chess 2 So this has been a great morning so far. Started off doing some weight-lifting, and then some yoga, and then I meditated for 1 hour and I could sit in full-lotus for the whole hour. It was actually really comfortable, and when by body was warm and flexible because of the exercise I did just before I sat, then I could land much deeper in this position than I've experienced before. Then after that I went for a walk. And my apartment is still tidy and clean. So nice with getting my structure better. I find I can get much more out of the day when I make a list of the things that I want to do during that day. Also this thing about Chess seems to have landed much more. I will probably continue with this sport. I just need to get i better regulated by my structure, so that I don't obsess about it all day long. Also there has been some ego-crushing around this activity that was pretty shocking. When I get obsessive and manic about something I feel really powerful and strong, and I was able to beat all my friends who are just casual players because they almost haven't invested anything into Chess, so I started to build an identity around this interest, but when I actually came to real life club where people had actually made this into a sport in their life, some of them for a whole life-time, well, then my ego was crushed to the ground when I realized what a total and absolute beginner I am. But that is the healthy part of submitting to a discipline where ones own abilities gets feedback from real life standards, otherwise I could just obsess around in my own mind as much as I wanted to, but this reality checking brings me back to ground again, and that is usually painful in the beginning. It is the same thing with all my other hobbies. With the exception that there is not such a clear standard with them regarding if my performance is well or poor. But I obsess about them the same way, and then eventually I have to just shut the door on them because it gets too obsessive and I feel drained and sick of it. But seems like these other things are getting into balance, and I believe my interest in Chess can also be brought into a healthy balance. And why would I even want to build an ego around being someone who beats my friends in Chess? Isn't it much healthier to be an enthusiastic beginner that is just proud of his enthusiasm for a sport and his willingness to learn and which is also much more humble and knows that it is going to be a learning curve for everyone and it is just a matter of being trained or un-trained? It is the same trap I fall into over and over when I put my self-worth into the skills I'm interested in and forget my intrinsic value as a human being - the same value that we all share. So this was a nice way to expose all these unfortunate bad learning-habits that I have, and just settle into the role as an enthusiastic beginner, and not basing my value (or lack of) on this or on anything else for that matter. When I woke up this morning I was so glad about what I wrote here yesterday, because it was such a relief to get it out. So I think this journaling so far has actually brought much more balance in my life. And my self-development is in many ways showing a lot of results, and there is less mental masturbation. I just want to live a fun and balanced life. It is actually pretty simple. But seemingly it takes a lot of work to become simple :-)