flowboy

Don't ever say that please. Looking for affirmation from her comes across super insecure. (which it literally is - if you felt secure you wouldn't be so in your head that you had to ask - you'd go by feeling and reading cues. I get that you're too far in it with this girl now that you can't be cool - but at least try to pretend, it's better than nothing) Remove the part from "do you" onwards and then talk bullshit over it, never leave it hanging Nuances matter! Pressure on, pressure off.

@evgn Your unhappiness is not caused by your girlfriend. You can break up with her now but you'll just add to your misery later. It's about how much of a rock bottom you need to hit, in order to get the motivation to fix what really needs fixing, which is: At a certain level of consciousness, you can not be happy whilst this statement is true. The question is: do you need to lose your relationship too, before you actually do something about it?

Super well-written and well-described. A joy to read. Seems like a super healthy practice! Got a good impression from this retreat through these words.

Why are you expecting tons of rejections? Why are you holding a belief that you won't succeed at what you are trying to do by talking to these girls? I can only assume that your mindset is working against you. The built-in excuse to fail, we all have that mechanism. Goes like this: - I'm talking to girls, so I can say that I'm trying, but then also I hold this belief that I don't have time for sex because of university, and I expect to get rejected a ton, so that when I do, it will soften the blow. I did the same thing for a long time, but I find it important to catch that. Here's why: the reason you are getting rejected, is because you expect to. If you go up to someone with the idea in your mind that they will probably reject you, they WILL (some of them will be friendly, but none of them will want to date) - exactly because that energy can be felt. It's the energy of not fully going for it. You can be sure of it that women can always feel it from you that you expect rejection, and will then automatically comply with that expectation. Another way to say it is: you're not willing to get hurt. You can't win if you're not willing to lose. Probably if someone would watch you talk to women, they would spot all kinds of obvious self-sabotaging patterns, that are just there to keep you consistent with your belief that you won't succeed TODAY, or in less than 5 years. I'm saying this because I was the same, in a bad way. I'd literally preframe my proposals with "you probably gonna say no, but would you like to have coffee sometime", that's how obvious it was in my case. I still cringe writing this. And of course it came with all these shifty looks, not holding eye contact, tension, nervous speaking, et cetera. If you decide with your full being that you get laid this week, you will. But maybe you find that you don't really want to - maybe you're not ready, maybe there's something scary about it. Maybe it's really not a priority for you right now. And that's okay too. But in that case, you can skip the talking to a girl a day practice - for if you're not fully trying, fully wanting to succeed, fully willing to get hurt and humiliated, all you're doing is teaching yourself how to fail with women. So you can also quit that, and spend more time on your degree. Either choice is valid. But as long as you have this inner conflict, women will feel that you're not really in, and not really out, and it will make them unattracted.

@eTorro Anxiety is an alarm bell for old unconscious pain that is about to be felt again. So one feels anxiety, consciously, and starts to project all kinds of thinking patterns and logic about what is scary about it, but that's all nonsense. The anxiety just says: "if we stay here, we might feel the pain again. The pain that was too big and overwhelming for us last time" That pain has something to do with a variant of feeling unloved. Unaccepted, maybe. Not good enough, maybe. Maybe a sense of hopelessness, a knowing that you can't just be yourself and express yourself just as you are, and be loved. As a child one of your primary needs is to be loved unconditionally: without having to behave in any particular way for it, and able to express anything and still be loved. There will be many moments where you can learn that this actually is not the case. Moments in your family system, moments in a peer group at school. Probably both. That pain is too big for a young person to handle. You are probably not aware of it right now. That means you need anxiety to warn you, to never get into situations again where you might be reminded of it.

How can you claim that you even know that you've become "more attractive to women" when you've never even had sex? That you didn't pay for? If all you've done is talked to women - great, but they've all friendzoned you, so apparently you didn't do it right. Go get a girlfriend. Sleep with actual women. Then talk about how to be attractive to women.

Meditation will help, but not fix that. It works like this: self-consciousness is a protection mechanism With a violent father around, a child has to learn to watch what they say or do, in order to not set them off. This mechanism starts to lead a life of its own when you are all grown up, even though you don't need it anymore. So now it's active and making you watch yourself in social interaction. It's called hypervigilance and is common with CPTSD. As long as the pain of being a child with an unsafe and violent or absent father, is still somewhere hidden, outside of your conscious awareness, your defense mechanism will be active. The only thing that will help is to dig up some of the unfelt past pain, feel it, process it, and show the inner child that it's not relevant today anymore. That it is safe now. Expect to spend many hours crying spread out over several sessions, to have your problem fixed. But... it really works! As I have seen time and time again.

@khalifa How's your relationship with your father? Has he been supportive, encouraging you to make the choices that are good for you, whilst still having your back and providing guidance? Or has he been either absent or domineering, anything else but a strong non-judging loving entity to lean on? I say this because I have yet to come across a person - client or otherwise - who has trouble making satisfying life decisions - where there was no unresolved father issues if we dig deep enough.

Then you did it all wrong, sorry to say. The life purpose is not some ultimate idea you find by thinking about it. It's something you find by doing, providing value, giving your gift in ever deeper ways. It's like Deida says, an onion that you keep peeling layers off, each layer revealing a deeper life purpose. But you can only find those layers by doing. If you've only sat there with your thoughts for 7 years, you're not telling us the whole story. Because unless you've done something productive in that time, like write a book, it means you haven't been mentally healthy. A mentally healthy person has an innate desire to be productive, to do something meaningful, to be useful to others in some way. To create. Perhaps you have an underlying anxiety, holding you back from your natural drive to do stuff, which you might want to explore. I suggest two things: Therapy Finding a way to monetize your life purpose work now. No excuses. Be creative and try things.

As an INTP, this makes me think of a typical undeveloped INTP - who fancies himself the smartest person in the room, but would rather die than get out of his philosophy armchair and get his hands dirty. Yes, my own shadow side is what I see here My opinion is that a life purpose statement should be the result of experiences providing value and seeing what feels right - distilling a direction from different experiences of giving your gift in various forms in the real world. This is what I always encourage people to do. What Leo also does with his 'small bets' concept. The statement then helps you focus and narrow your direction.

Not if you quit porn and ejaculation for 30 days. I don't need anything external to enjoy a healthy sexual feeling and masturbating. Learn to quit the ejaculation & visual stimulation addiction and you get back to a more natural state.

If you do it right, it's really not that bad. In that position I'd probably just start habitually mentioning my desires whenever I felt them, and then casually talking over them (not waiting for a response) by changing the subject. That it's sometimes hard for me to stay on topic because her physical attraction is hard to resist, that I feel myself getting hard when she mentions X, kind of whatever comes to mind but just putting your sexuality out there without looking for a response. This builds sexual tension, and it can go two ways from there: She gets uncomfortable and the topic has to be addressed. You two decide that you have to take some weeks apart so that you can find another girl to project this energy onto and you can be better friends (if there's actually substance to the friendship) She gets intrigued, doesn't seem to mind, giving you quiet permission to go further and make a move.

this guided release I created helped out some of my clients - give it a try People bond over shared experiences that transform them in some way - meaning, learning by being taken out of one's comfort zone. Think of a person in a stable state as an atom with an equal amount of electrons to compensate the positive charge of his number of protons. In this state his charge is neutral, making him unable to form ion bonds (a deep connection). Now an experience somewhat challenging to his ego, may knock some of his electrons out of his shell - or make him absorb extra ones. This gives him a positive or negative charge, making him attract others with an opposite charge. With those he may form deep connections - an ionic bond. Leaving this metaphore behind, you will form deeper bonds with people when you and them are being challenged and out of your comfort zone, forced to adapt and grow. This is why people make friends in college, but less so at work. In college, everyone is going through the same process of growth together, but when joining some type of work force, most people are already settled in to what they are doing and have adapted to it. For the same reason, going through a challenging or somewhat scary and transformative process together, like joining Toastmasters or a transformative retreat, or some type of volunteering in a foreign country, is far more likely to bond people, than comfort zone activities like going out drinking or yoga classes. In my experience, friends are found at the edge of your interests and your fears.

Must I put this in serious terms? You are trying to teach something you do not master in the slightest. I object to that.

Teach me Sensei. stop, you are making me laugh too hard.

I would say so. I'm basing that on my experience that I found it more disgusting and repulsive in a time where I was much more in the matrix of conditioning - where homosexuality at the time was being mocked and looked down upon by guys who valued "masculinity". When I got out of that matrix, I stopped finding it disgusting at all and even got in touch with some bisexual thoughts and feelings. Which I don't consider myself a bisexual - I just think that most people have some of those feelings - and the degree to which they repress these (because conditioning tells them it's wrong, so it would lead to unacceptance to become conscious of those feelings or thoughts) becomes the degree to which they consciously experience disgust or repulsion instead.

That actually happened. Whilst it's a slightly cringy memory to me now, it's in this context an appropriate example of being yourself towards others. I also struggled to socialize in kindergarten. Also in high school. Lots of bullying and ostracization. I know how to work through it but it's a deep process. Being yourself is a natural born need. Early bad experiences can teach you to suppress that. I had many of those. I learnt to not be myself at all. One becomes a "false self" in order to survive. That false self needs to be destroyed systematically in order to become an attractive non-neurotic adult. It's not an easy process, goes deeper than you would hope, but attractive behaviors come quite naturally as a result.

Am I to understand that you've never had sex, yet you're here proactively spewing advice? I hope that's a joke Thank you for entertaining me.

Imagine an obese girl who doesn't shower or shave, smells bad and wears men's clothes with holes in them, cheeto crumbs on her chin, long hairs growing out of her nose, saying that to her friend whilst pining over YOU. That's you. You're being that girl right now. What would you say to her? How about before expecting guys to fall in love with you and want deep intimacy with you, cleaning yourself up and acting like a woman? That's right. You're not acting like a man (expressing your desire unapologetically), therefore to her you're just as attractive as the cheeto girl. Does being nice and caring really make a difference then, if you're not a man to her? I know, your nice guy behavior is based on a fear that is really hard to overcome, and you're looking for alternate ways to still get what you want. I was the same. Or should I say, I still do that at times if I don't catch myself. But I have taught to express my desires honestly, whether I'm scared or not. And it works. Life is beautifully designed in that in order to get what you want the most, you have to face your worst fear. Go do it.

Rather my point is that too much suffering can lead people to believe that they must find a way out of suffering, that suffering is bad and it is a problem that must be solved, which I think is an understandable misconception. People who experience tolerable levels of suffering tend to appreciate and learn from it. People who suffer more than they can tolerate, can get fixated on 'eliminating suffering' which is an overcorrection, a swing too far in the other direction.

My apologies, didn't mean to steal your teaching thunder with my advanced stuff that really works. Don't mind me. Continue with your simple hacks, please

To me it appears like you're intellectualizing a fear of feeling unaccepted (or whatever the particular feeling tone is for you) by spinning theories around it. These theories are a distraction from a feeling of rejection or unacceptance, which is the core thing to work with. I don't care what scenarios you can think of where acting through your authentic desires can get you in trouble. I can come up with those too. You're acting out of fear, and the women you date will sense that. Stop it

@Someone here You think that suffering has to be overcome. I think that's a mistake rooted in suffering

Did you fit in in primary school and high school? Any bad experiences there? Wild guess because I used to feel like a creep, and it was definitely rooted in bad experiences of not fitting in and being ostracized as a child and adolescent. I did some trauma release on that and it's a lot better now.

The TYPICAL MISTAKE when trying to solve porn addiction, is to think that the porn is the problem. The pornography is just what you chose as a symbolic fulfillment of an unconscious unmet need. You can focus on porn all you want, trying to cut it out, trying to stop masturbating, rewarding yourself, blocking websites, nofap, all that bullshit is just a waste of precious energy. You can quit, but then you still have the root of your addiction. Just that now it's without an outlet. Something is lacking, something is empty inside yourself. An emptiness that you tried to fill with porn. Now needs to be filled with sugar? Or an addiction to working out? Or eating extremely healthy and having to talk about it incessantly on forums? It's all the same. Don't think you're being healthy if you are still addicted to something, trying to fill a deep lack of something. Your porn (or whatever) addiction is a beautiful, perfect window into what needs to be healed inside you. A portal for true healing, IF you have the wisdom to use it as such. Want proof? Or a hint of where to start? Start when you feel the urge. Then meditate and introspect on what you are actually feeling. What is the feeling you have to quench? Then do some shamanic breathing, with the intention of finding out more about what you need and where this sense of lack is coming from. If you have the balls and the follow-through to do THAT, NOW you have an entry point to some real change. If you get there, now the next step to healing will be revealed to you, because feelings will surface that you had no idea were bothering you. Then, all you have to do to really solve it, is to CHOOSE to rather feel those feelings, than do your destructive habit. Messing around with behaviour change and habits/rewards is child's play. Once you've made that decision, to rather feel that which you've uncovered, than do the habit, now you've taken the power back. You don't have to run away anymore, which means you don't need porn anymore, OR video games, OR attention, OR anything else which you could get addicted to next.