Arman

What does your inner-talk look and feel like?

Hey it happens to me sometimes too man. If someone pee's right next to me I can't go. For the record I don't have general social anxiety and I would say I'm actually more comfortable in most social circumstances than most, but I still have this 'problem'. No need to make it part of your identity. It used to bother me but it doesn't seem like a big deal to me anymore. As a result of that I am more relaxed and it becomes less of an issue. Just looking at the fear and accepting it will go a long way and slowly dissolve it. Here, for the record, I think a lot more people than you think experience it. This may help you create some inner ease around the subject. and just look at the related comments and the thumbs up:

Mindfulness Bell app which routinely chimes to draw your awareness into the moment

I'd be a liar if I said I was good at avoiding it. The narrative seems to be the natural and spontaneous product of the negative state itself because the thoughts are just resonating at that frequency. How to avoid negative states is another thing altogether. I've found that recognizing what's happening (that caught in illusory narrative) is what slowly starts to release the power from it. Frankly, trying to avoid it seems to make it worse so my advice would be not to try to avoid it but recognize it as a natural thing to enter contracted states as a result of expanding and growing, and to surrender to that experience as best you can when it arises.

Gratitude is a kind of celebration of something. Imagine you have been stuck inside a freezing cottage for a whole winter and one day you finally have a heater. You would feel very grateful for that heater. Notice that gratitude is not inherent or automatic to a thing or circumstance though, because someone who may have always had heating may not express any gratitude towards it - so it's something you can choose. Take for instance the chair you're sitting on - can you feel grateful for the fact that it's relatively comfortable and that you're not sitting on a stool? (And if you are sitting on a stool, can you be grateful for the function its serving and that you don't have to be sitting on the ground?) Practice with small things. Gratitude is something that is consciously generated. It is a feeling of warmth, well-being, appreciation, celebration.

Just sharing the experience that I had. For the record I still love psychedelics.

If the title of the thread caught your attention then this discussion is for you

I'll stick to salad

Cos one day I took them, had an extraordinarily strange and difficult experience, and the next day I woke up with a very shaken brain and body that took a few years to fully recover from. Bad luck, but it happens. It was fairly moderate brain damage - short term memory and information recall was highly compromised and it was difficult to communicate effectively, especially for the first few months. These are just a few effects beside many other stranger ones. It was kind of hellish and scary but thankfully the brain is highly malleable and I think by now I have recovered almost fully but sometimes I wonder if I am as sharp as I could be. For the record it was an 'ayahuasca analogue' which contains DMT, A plant mixture (in this case it was just capii vine if memory serves) and an MAOI. The MAOI does dilute the clarity of the issue and may well have been the culprit for adverse reaction - but I did take a smaller dose some days prior to test with no ill effects (didn't trip either) so it doesn't seem like it was an 'allergic' reaction. My set and setting were about the usual for trips and I had a dozen or two prior experiences with various psychedelics - almost all of them highly positive. I've also had some friends that experienced psychotic breaks or long term traumas from single psychedelic experiences too, but in those cases it seems set and setting was highly questionable.

Were you feeling frustrated or in an uneasy place when you wrote this post? I ask this because I have found that when I am upset and in negative emotions, I often weave a narrative that nothing I have been doing is working and that everything is the same. When I am clear and happy however, the gains are obvious and encouraging. Can you be sure that you are the same person you were 4 months ago? Often if we are changing constantly and incrementally, it is difficult to be aware of just how much growth we have made - particularly if we are focused on the challenges in front of us. A puppy can double in size in a few weeks but I doubt he hardly notices. Four months is not necessarily a lot of time, but still, if you have been practicing regularly then I expect there will have been some changes in your life. Are you being completely honest to your whole self? What are some of the smaller gains you have experienced? Can you share those?

Nice. Hard not to love someone who wears a giant mushroom for a hat. Was actually watching this episode today after seeing this hilarious pic:

Often a great deal of these emotions and energies are suppressed and mindful awareness allows it to surface as a result of intent/willingness/spaciousness. This simply means that sometimes things appear to get worse before they get better because you're experiencing more of what was hidden. It's a good thing and an indicator of progress. If you are feeling very overwhelmed by an emotion then it's ok to work with it in bits and pieces. Over time you'll make a lot of great progress. It's important to recognize and remind yourself that you're doing well and that while on the surface things appear to be getting more difficult, actually you are making good gains. Keep up the work and you'll start to see yourself gaining more practical freedom in life. Be with the anger and allow awareness to shine on it for as long as you feel capable, and when you feel you can't do it anymore, then do your best to relax and move on to something else. It is also possible to access the courage you have to remain with the anger and dissolve it at levels deeper than you didn't think you could stand. Just keep it up. Anger is a difficult thing to work with and when you are penetrating it deeply then it can be very intense. Recognize the difficult and remind yourself of your greater goals in order to re-contextualize the degree of challenge.

How do you get muscles during/after strength training?

If you haven't already, check out James DeKorne's Book of Gnostic Changes, freely available online. It has compiled various translations and commentaries for each hexagram and I've found it to be the most insightful and comprehensive resource on the subject available. The introduction chapters are really high quality too.

Uhh... take it from someone who did suffer brain damage from the use of psychedelics - they absolutely can damage you. Blaming harm-potential on the law of attraction and fear may not be fruitful. If one could negate the biological and physiological implications of a substance completely then they're probably beyond needing psychedelics in the first place. The term 'psychedelics' covers a broad range of substances, many of which have not been tested and verified through time and study, particularly many newer research chemicals. LSD and Mushrooms are probably chief among the list of safest psychedelics - but to assume they can never damage you, and particularly, but not necessarily from misuse, is naive. Fear driven propaganda is not helpful but neither is the reactionary and reflexive opposite stance of choosing to believe that they are "never going to damage you". Perhaps you have not experienced negative effects for yourself, but in my experience, many have, and this is not just third-party anecdotes of dudes jumping out of windows. For the record I still think psychedelics are great.

A personal conversation by a member of the MBT community Foad and Tom Campbell. For anyone who is in or has been through similar experiences, my hope is that you will find this conversation as cathartic and inspiring as I did. 'Thomas Campbell is a physicist, lecturer, and author of the My Big T.O.E. (Theory of Everything) trilogy, a work that claims to unify general relativity, quantum mechanics, and metaphysics along with the origins of consciousness'

What if the guru you picked sucks?

Are you suggesting PCP for consciousness work?

You can just eat it raw If you don't like the flavour you can mask it with something like yoghurt I never saw the point of making teas unless you are consuming large quantities Do lots of research first. Do you understand the responsibility?

Yup

Nice! It's awesome to find an area of interest/dedication. Good job for exploring this interest. It's doubtful - but should you be expected to be masterful in something that is relatively new to you? That you have not even started? Then keep meditating You will want a LOT of mentoring and consider taking courses that teach you how to teach. There are tens of thousands of meditation teachers out there and if you wish to make this your life purpose than you want to be on the leading edge of the ability to serve people; to discover a way of offering much more than a youtube video or a few articles would. If you want to be a good teacher it will likely require much more than having meditated for a while and knowing how to do guided meditations. It will require life long dedication, much research and studying, practice, time, energy, love, resources and the ability to become disciplined and productive in your life. Seems like you're already discovering and moving into that understanding so good work. Do lots and lots of research. And then do more research. Learn sales and marketing. Any skillset can be monetized as a service. Has it not been done before? One way would be to work locally coaching people or start a meditation group. Another way would be to generate an audience through free online content, value & personal branding and use direct response marketing to sell a course or service. That's just two ideas of many routes. Good luck in your exploration

I think it can be a useful tool, especially for noobies. The criticism that I have heard is that it can be used as a crutch. Might possibly limit the depth of ones practice or make a person dependent on the music to achieve certain states which makes it more difficult to meditate if you don't have your music and the environment you're used to.

I love love the elegant minimalist design!

Great animation/production. You have a great voice for this stuff. What kind of mic are you using? thx for sharing

My experiences are similar to yours. Part of the reason the 'down' portions are as miserable as they are is because of the attachment to being high and the resistance to being low. Part of the issue is thinking that it is problematic or that something is wrong. Notice the assumption that you are supposed to be happy and successful all the time. I have heard that belief described as 'unique to modern western civilization'. It is a destructive belief because it denies the rhythms of nature and self development which leads to frustration, confusion and lowered self esteem because every time the pendulum swings the other way it's an opportunity to beat yourself up. What has helped me to grow and evolve through the fluctuations is constantly keeping in mind the idea of the 'rhythms of expansion and contraction' that are fundamental to this world and a part of all systems. Without sounding too esoteric: night always follows day, what heats up will cool down, flowers open and close, etc. These rhythms directly apply to the inner journey and particularly the expansion and contraction of the psyche. Holding this in mind helps to avoid becoming too 'zoomed in' to any one aspect of the experience. This expanded awareness in my experience seems to accelerate the process which makes the highs less frenetic, and the lows less miserable. You can then honor the difficulties as opportunities and you will have a more intuitive motivation to become less 'grabby' of the good times.