flowboy

Question that belief. I had posters from porn magazines plastered all over my room when I was in a relationship as a 24 year old. It's just what I enjoyed at that time. Later I added pictures of my actual naked girlfriend too, for completeness. I don't do that anymore, I'm currently in a phase where I find pornography or any arousing imagery distracting. But it was what was authentic to me at that time. To the extent you are willing to compromise what you privately do in order to be accepted by your girl, she will feel weakness from you and not respect you as much and give you more shit. It's a direct correlation. Because it is weak. She wants you to be strong. You are supposed to do some things that she doesn't like. If she can push you over like that and make you change your behavior in order to be liked, you are basically useless to her as a man. I still have my own issues with this though, I'm not perfect in this area. Sometimes I find myself still having to actively fight some learned shame and guilt in order to be more myself, instead of a nice guy who aims to please.

To me it's kind of silly to want to do all these things to manipulate your trip. Trying to be smarter than the drug you've committed to. The medicine knows best. Trust that it will give you what you need. What you need is not something your mind can predict beforehand, otherwise you wouldn't have to take the medicine. With a low dose, an intention will sometimes be useful and answered. On a moderate to higher dose, your intention doesn't even matter. I also have a higher tolerance for LSD type things. It doesn't really get deep below 2-3 tabs. Just be in a safe calm space physically and mentally, and provide for your basic needs. Practice letting go and trusting what comes up in the days before already, by not trying to micro-manage the experience through making lists of things to contemplate and activities to do and whatnot. This will give you the right set to go into it and receive what you need. Relax, take it easy, but take it! - Terence McKenna

Life is suffering, yes, but trying to overcome your suffering is both your divine purpose and a futile mistake. If life is suffering, overcoming suffering is overcoming aliveness.

It wouldn't be a fun game if everyone made it, would it? That said, what you call awakening is only one outcome of the game. It's what you value, therefore you project it to be the best outcome for everyone. That's your bias. The game is multi-dimensional. Infinitely so. Everyone is moving towards their own divine purpose.

For starters, you're asking her to touch your dick at a park.

Why do you need internet people to tell you what's a waste of time for you? Go explore if you're curious. Do what feels right. Brian Weiss has good regression meditations on youtube.

@integral Ask her about a moment in childhood where she has had difficulty breathing. Maybe she was in the hospital, maybe she was sick for a while. Maybe when she was born she had trouble breathing (umbilical cord around her neck, fluid in lungs, had to be ventilated, was given medications that she had a bad reaction to, anything like that). Also have her ask her mother whether she had health problems or smoked, or any negative event happened or emotional state, that could have led to the foetus getting less oxygen, when she was in the womb. I am willing to bet that you'd find something (if her mother is willing to tell her) The body remembers trauma like that in every cell, and when it is triggered, not just the feelings (in the form of nightmares) but also the physical symptoms come rushing back. Of course, if you ask her, she probably won't remember. But maybe she knows a clue. The 4-ACO-DMT could have reminded her system of an early trauma. Also, psychedelics weaken the gates that keep that trauma repressed, so any psychedelic could have caused this to happen. I'm bringing this up because you mentioned vivid nightmares. Nightmares are signs of trauma that originated in the womb, or in the first 6 months after being born. Traumatic pain after the first 6 months usually comes to the surface in the form of bad dreams, not nightmares. The feeling behind the nightmares will be another important clue of what happened. Ask her what the feeling of the nightmares is. (the content is usually heavily distorted but the feeling is the same as the original trauma) From there, my advice is to let her stabilize and then see if she wants to work with a therapist who can help her uncover and relive her trauma. If she doesn't stabilize, I may know one person who would know what to do but that's outside the scope of this response, send me a message in that case.

Your skin is just a reflection of your overall health. Skin products are the last place you should look if you want healthy skin. I'm not of the belief that we need to put all this shit on our face every day. I don't have a skin care routine. I wash my face with water. My skin is fine, unless I take too much of something, like coffee or unhealthy food. My skin broke out a lot when I was in Spain, where there's a lot of chlorine in the tap water. My diet is mostly fresh-made salads with vegetables and fruit. Some nuts. Some bread here and there but not daily. I don't eat sugar. I don't eat any oils besides lots of olive and coconut oil. I don't eat cow milk products.

@Richard Purdy I highly recommend When The Body Says No by dr. Gabor Mate. In there, he explains the link between cancer and suppression of someone's needs, emotions and boundaries that originates as a conditioned pattern in childhood. It's not that cancer is directly caused by emotional repression, but it is a huge risk factor. The three risk factors he identifies are: genetic predisposition Physical damage like toxins, certain viruses, smoking, unhealthy food, radiation or repeated burning Chronic stress caused by emotional repression Each of these factors individually does not give someone cancer. People who sunbathed and burnt a lot were followed in a long term study. The ones who repressed their feelings developed melanoma twice as frequently as the others. Also it's been studied that people who combined psychotherapy with conventional medicine (the materialistic approach) were way more likely to heal. The explanation for this (paraphrased poorly by me) is that cancer is an immune system issue, in that everyone has cancer cells in their body in all places. They are being created, and constantly being cleaned up by a healthy immune system. Suppression of feelings and repression of early trauma causes a constant stress, an invisible stress that is does not feel like stress (no elevated heartbeat or agitation), but it is there. Elevated levels of cortisol are constantly present, and endorphins are being deployed at above normal levels in order to help the person repress their emotions and not feel. Because it works so well, the person is blissfully unaware of this and thinks they feel fine and are experiencing a healthy emotional range. But actually they have way more endorphins and cortisol in their system, both of which suppress immune function. TL/DR: If I got cancer, I would go balls deep (deeper than I am doing now) on psychotherapy and childhood trauma healing. The therapy has to involve feeling emotional pain that was previously unconscious, and establishing healthy individual self and boundaries. Cognitive behavioral therapy won't cut it. My choice would be primal therapy, but there's others that are more easily accessible. Make no mistake, everyone has childhood trauma and some level of emotional repression, although the levels may vary Read When The Body Says No

I'd be reluctant to believe that at face value, scientist or not, because when you think about the scientific method and what it can do, it can only prove that certain things work to make other things happen. It can't prove that something can't happen. Concretely, you can keep a living brain sample and add a mushroom elixir to it, thereby proving that that specific elixir does or does not cause neurons to grow. I don't think people are having their brain samples taken periodically in a long term study. Even if there were such studies being done, it could at best prove that it didn't happen in that particular person, in that area, in their lifestyle and circumstances and environmental inputs, not that it can't happen. On another note, why do your fears revolve around your brain? I remember being worried and obsessed about my hair n-e-v-e-r coming back. Similar fear. I was 21. For me personally, it turned out to be grounded in the feeling of not living life to the fullest, lacking so much experience I should be having, and the scary prospect of dying/degenerating having missed the opportunities to fully live. (In this case: fully living meant having all my hair. I've revised that definition since )

This was my clue that this: Is very appropriate advice. People with this exaggerated sense of responsibility and being needed eventually tend to develop health problems. (paraphrasing from When The Body Says No here) Often times this is a reflection on how the person was raised. Usually conditioned by a parental figure to push away their own needs in service of the parent's needs, whether it be for emotionally supporting the parent or taking physical care of them, or being responsible for the care of a sibling while the parent is absent / not able. Something like that you can probably find in your history. It's very common that this pattern becomes a character trait the person is proud of, whilst unaware of its true nature. For example: multiple people who were at my retreat had an absent parent, or their father/mother did not have enough time left to pay attention to them or play with them. They became loners and got into reading books at their solitary hideout spot. Before they told that story, they were fiercely proud of being so 'independent' and thought everyone should be as independent as them. Unaware of the original pain it was rooted in.

Nice choice of words

Super direct. However, I'm going to make a point that no one seems to have made yet: if you see a girl and she looks nice and that alone makes you interested in dating her, your standards are not healthy. Is that all she has to do? Be pretty and respond okay to an interaction of a couple sentences? That's having low standards / being too needy. If she looks nice and the first interaction goes well, you should be interested in seeing her again to see how she does the second time. Also known as, going for coffee or whatever and seeing how it goes. You should not reach the point of being "fully convinced" that she's so great before you've *actually* gotten to know her. If you internalize this, you will change the way women respond to you

No. That would be procrastinating on your life purpose. How much sex do you really need? You can literally go for a walk during lunch break at work and talk to a few people, get a couple phone numbers. Costs you no extra time. Do that 5 work days a week, your weekend and next week's evenings will be full of dates.

This. If you "confess", you might put a lot of pressure on the next meeting. Or you might make him feel like he now has to say certain things or respond in a certain way. I see no benefit to a confession of feelings in your situation and there's different ways it could complicate things, much better to just kiss him and go from there.

Wow we have similarities in our story there. I learnt early on that my parents couldn't help me with protecting myself from bullying and also with socializing, because they themselves were clueless, had gotten bullied, were not social. And I had no siblings or friends so I felt like I'm just not gonna survive. Had a deep session yesterday where some of that stuff was processed.

What you are saying basically, is: you want back in the Matrix Which is totally understandable. The content you refer to, is not suited for developing minds who can't see the nuance yet. If you're for example prone to viewing things as either "bad" or "good", well you're going to make all sorts of unhelpful extrapolations, such as "ego is bad", and the idea that folks being full of self-deception means that you can't trust them. I can see how that could easily happen at that age. Instead of looking back, let's review where you are right now. Do you have Maslow's basic needs met? (do you have a good circle of friends, do you make enough money, is your love life satisfying, etc) If not, let's just work on that. What does your heart desire most, which is most urgent? You can pursue money, sex or status any way you want to without feeling like you need it to be happy. The belief that you need these things to be happy, has been broken. That saved you 40 years of misery (in some people's cases) But now you still have some basic needs that are unmet. People you can trust around you. What's stopping you from getting yourself those important basic things?

@Jannes When I help people with shadow integration, there's different components to completing the process: Understanding and mapping it out. Using models to understand better what needs you had as a child that were not met, what defense mechanisms you developed. And what a child in that situation must have felt, and how overwhelming that was. The influence of the parents' belief and shadow on your development. Understanding the inner child and minimizing reactivity. Through inner child work and what is typically meant by shadow work, you can get glimpses of what you must have felt as a child in different ages and situations. You develop a connection and compassion for your younger self this way. In your case, you may be able to catch yourself better when you want to be nice, and choose a different behavior. Deep feeling and completing the grief process. Here's where we get into the shadow for real. The pain is still stored somewhere. It needs to come out. A bit of shadow work and shedding a couple tears unfortunately doesn't do it. Shadow is created because the trauma of unmet needs (in my case, the need for protection, guidance, safety and to be seen, held and supported in my need to belong in a group and defend my boundaries) Unmet needs are then SO painful, that the child can not consciously walk around with it, or it would die. So then it goes into the unconscious. The part that feels the need, must be repressed. Creating your niceness response (a denial of your own true need in the moment) You can bring those parts back to consciousness, bit by bit. There's a lot of crying involved though.

@Jannes The 'killing them with kindness' is a defense mechanism. As you described, during some time in your childhood, this was the way to survive. Now as an adult, it's really hard to get rid of, even though it doesn't serve you anymore. Going into conventional CBT therapy to unlearn this behavior and learn new behavior would be an uphill battle and ultimately not satisfy. You're on the right track with shadow integration. This is a subtle form of neglect. If you dig into your shadow, you may find a lot of old anger towards your father. Wow... this one hit me personally because my parents raised me so similarly! Aggression was in their shadow, so I had to be the nice kid. I wasn't allowed to join martial arts and learn to defend myself against bullying. They didn't see the need I had to be taught self defense, and they didn't want to see how badly I was treated. Because of their shadow against aggression, they pushed me to be a nice kid, forbade me from being tough. And I became a nice dreamy kid, defenseless, in his own world of ideas and dreams, mostly alone and socially awkward.

I still struggle with this at times, but I have to come to a conclusion for me personally. Which may or may not help you out. I really enjoy being single. It's fun to do what I want, sleep with who I want, et cetera. But there's a bit of an agitating quality to it as well, because it's never satisfying. It's not really about validation for me anymore, but there is a sense of not having experienced enough. This feeling was there when I was 15 and others around me were getting girlfriends and having sex, and I felt hopelessly behind. The feeling grew every time I "missed an opportunity" due to being awkward / socially inept / in my head. So now there's a part of my psyche which still feels like it's missing out, but its thirst can never be quenched. I've been with a LOT of women (not a crazy amount, but more than the Leo recommended dose) Every time I have sex, I feel good about it for one day, then the feeling comes back. Stronger. I still feel like I'm missing out on so much, and my mind justifies it by imagining crazier things that I haven't done yet. First, it was this regular thing. Having done that, now I still feel like I'm missing out on this crazy thing that only happens in porn. And it just builds like that. I don't think there's an end to it. So knowing that it never satisfies the feeling, rather even makes it stronger, that's important information. The pursuit itself, fun as it is, doesn't lead anywhere. Unless... You know when to hop on and when to hop off. Even though dating and sex are ultimately not satisfying, they are fun. I will only hop off that train when something better comes along. A woman who is so overwhelmingly amazing that I immediately forget about other women and my fantasies, they all pale in comparison to being with her. Where the match is so perfect that I feel like just being around her feels like home, and at the same time it's growing me in ways I can't even comprehend. I've met someone like that. I did not regret hopping off the crazy sex train for THAT. Other women whom I've dated for a couple months, I just had fun with and seemed compatible with. I still wasn't able to commit. For me, the match has to be really good and compelling, the connection really deep, that it just becomes OBVIOUS that this is the right thing. If not, I find it best to not waste each other's time for more than a few weeks.

@Ingit First we need to separate out the girl from you. This is clearly not about the girl. If a specific girl gave rise to suspicion, that would be about her. However, you indicate that neediness and possessiveness has always been a problem. Therefore, the problem AND the solution are to be found in you, and this has nothing to do with the girl (or who she calls). Ideally, you get to a place where you don't even wonder who she's calling. The idea that she might be cheating or leaving you doesn't even occur as a thought in your mind. If that's where you want to be, we need to explore this fear. Behind neediness and possessiveness is a fear. What is that fear? That she'd cheat? Or leave? Or both? Write that down. Then go one level deeper: And then what? Why is that so bad that you must control it with such desperate measures? Does it mean something for who you see yourself as? Would it mean you would have to feel like a loser, or worthless, or [insert bad self image] if she did? How would it make you feel if that happened? Write all of that down. Then go one more level deeper What is that feeling you would feel, if she did, and when did you feel it before? And before? Have you always felt like this? What's the earliest you can remember feeling this? Where did it start? Contemplating this will affirm in your reality that it's really not about the girl. Which should make it easier to stop your needy and possessive behaviours with her. Because you see it's not about her, you've felt like this a lot. If you want to go even deeper and reduce the terrible feeling you are suffering from when feeling possessive or jealous, try some inner child healing work or shadow work. Doing this once or multiple times will make you less reactive and help you curb your possessiveness. Warning though: it's not easy. It requires focus and emotional discomfort. You must be serious about it.

Woke up in a sweat, almost holding my breath, twice this morning. Two dreams in a row about being lost, having lost something important, no one being able to really help me, the group leaving because their patience is limited and they have to move on - and I'm lost. First dream - I'm driving in the night and my mom is supposed to drive behind me, in a separate car. We are calling on the phone, but then we get confused on which exit we are taking, and I end up losing her. In the middle of a flyover crossing (or is it a parking garage entry? Some kind of circular stairway for cars), I leave the car and start to look for her in the night. I can't find her. Then, I try to return to the car, to call her - I can't find my car. The only car that I see has a different color. I still try to get into it, but it's really not mine. I've lost my phone, my car and my mom now. Second dream - I'm walking in a huge horde of people through a muddy path in a forest. We are supposed to walk towards some place to stay, it has a school campy vibe. I realise I've lost my phone. They gave me a special SIM card too - in the letter where they confirmed my signing up to this trip. I report it to some kind of leadership person. They open a folder with all the SIM cards they gave out - mine's not in there. 4 or 5 other people hand me phones they found - none of them are mine. I feel lost. The group is starting to move on - it's a HUGE group, and they can't wait for one guy (kid, I feel like a kid) who lost his phone. I lost something important and no one can help me. And now the group is abandoning me. Arthur Janov says that dreams are always about something that happened to you - but if the memory is repressed, then the dream becomes a symbolic mashup of the original memory, to deliberately confuse you and help you not remember the original, because that is too painful. Or was once deemed too painful. So then the feeling of the dream is what really happened, but the story gets changed around, and the brain makes a mashup of things from your present and past to create a new story, so that you get protected from recognizing the original story. Kind of like cutting letters out of different magazines in a ransom letter, so you don't recognize the original handwriting, but you still get the message. I feel like this is true - definitely a lot happened in my past where I felt lost, like I lost something important, or the group lost me, no one waits for me, I lost my mommy - different vague memories come up. Janov says that imprints tend to run at three levels - the visceral, the feeling brain and the symbolic. Which means that a theme of feeling lost should have its roots before, during or right after birth - meaning it is remembered by the visceral - then it is further compounded upon by early childhood and adolescent traumatic memories - and finally also in daily life it's still a theme. And that's true - at least I walk around with a fear of losing things. I rarely actually lose things, because I'm so afraid of it. I lost my pipe on the day before I had those dreams - I went back for it and before I found it, I felt a sort of panic - this can't be true, I must not have lost this. Losing things still triggers me. I know someone who lost her phone on the bus so many times - the bus drivers started to recognize her phone. That's incomprehensible to me. Losing something important triggers a primal feeling in me - being lost, being disconnected, hopelessness, imminent death. So then on the visceral level, something must have happened before or right after birth where I felt like I lost something important. I had a short flash of THAT'S RIGHT I lost my mom, maybe I lost her tit, maybe I was in a crib somewhere and I just lost connection with her and didn't know if she'd come back, so I felt like I was going to die? My mom did tell me about an episode in the hospital where she was unable to come and feed me. I don't remember what it was, but I want to. Reliving is curative. I just spent some time trying to relive, trying to get back into that old feeling, trying to cry about it - with limited success. Sure, there's many instances where I felt lost - at primary school, at school camp - all about me feeling lost and the group not waiting for me, just abandoning me, no one helps me or is patient with me. This happened over and over again when I was little. But there's something there - a sort of gut wrenching feeling on the right side of my tummy that says: "yes - there's a lot of pain there". Yeah - one shadow work session doesn't fix that, son. I suspect that that's why I had such an irritated reaction to M's childhood stuff - being abandoned by the father is very close to feeling lost, PLUS I also have feelings of being abandoned by the father that I walk around with, just repressing them casually every day, and so probably I just didn't want to be reminded of my own feelings of being lost and abandoned. THAT MAKES SENSE - I could have been more loving if I didn't have a similar imprint - because of the similar imprint it became too painful.

By BEING it. Have a purpose in your life that you are passionate about and prioritize over sex Have a cool, interesting life that you are satisfied with, do cool things, travel, hobbies, passions, friends, just live a life that she'd like to be invited into. Have women friends and learn to understand, empathize and connect with the feminine Do you have those things? If not, well then it's going to be hard and counterproductive to come across as-if. It's much easier and more satisfying to actually improve your life. It also doesn't take as much effort as you think. Time pointlessly texting girls is much better spent going out into the world and developing yourself as a man. If you are already doing those things... ONLY IF... then worry about calibration and how you come across. The beauty of actually BEING IT, is that it doesn't matter what you text, you can just suggest a time and place and WHO YOU ARE will do the work for you, when you actually are on the date. It's like sitting back and relaxing, while your self-actualized personality shines and draws her in. Then, of course she'll want sex at some point. BONUS TIP: The feminine wants sex as the cherry on top, after the story / adventure plays out. That's why: She doesn't skip to the end of a movie (neither would you) You need to have a fun date with her, or a fun couple hours spread out over different dates, before it's bedroom time She doesn't go home at 11PM to have sex with you, she wants to have experienced a fun night out first You need to not talk about sex, focus on having fun together. Whether you'll have sex (or whether you even like her enough for that) needs to be a fun mystery in her mind until later You talking about "wanna fuck" off the bat, shows that you don't understand women, therefore they don't want to meet you

She was being honest. Why would she give out her number? Because girls like to make new connections. You should only text her if you really want her as a friend. If she's cool, she'll go out with you and help you pick up other girls. If you're going to be secretly desiring to get with her all the time, though, it's not going to work and you shouldn't waste each other's time.