mandyjw

@VeganAwake Nahm played a part in my awakening and was a complete life line after it when it came to the understanding part. I did not seek him out, it just plain happened that way before he started offering sessions. Still just assumed he was a lady back then. If anyone has any questions I'm happy to answer them. Sometimes I think we get all muddled up because we want to plot how we're doing on a map or know what level we're on. We think over and over in our heads, "Is this adventure over already FOR FUCKS SAKES?" But the whole point IS that this is an adventure, it's sheer freedom, exploration and the key ingredient of adventure is that we don't know what will happen next. We don't know what we are, where we are. It's way stranger (and more wonderful) than we could ever imagine. And you've got friends you never knew you had, who love you more than you'll ever know.

Awesome! I've found that art has a weird way of healing, it can even point out stuff about ourselves that we never saw before. Everything comes full circle.

No. We are prior to moon, light or same. We are prior to unification.

Explore, dream, go for those dreams, follow your heart and go with the flow of your inspiration. Anything in the way of THAT gets burned up. It has to.

I have a job where I don't interact with people either. What I have found is that your brain has to learn and wire itself for speaking and conversation. It also needs time to warm up and go into conversation mode and nerves and infrequent use make that time period even longer. Find a way to practice speaking on your own. Make videos, even if you don't post them anywhere. Speak until you get into the flow of speaking and get comfortable in that flow. With practice it takes less and less time to get there. Listen to yourself back. Note how when you watch a tape of yourself back with an open mind, things look and sound a lot better and smoother than we thought they did when we were saying them. Then find more opportunities for conversations. By circumstance some of us just haven't had a lot of chances to develop good people skills and conversation. This is not your fault, and nothing to be ashamed about. On the positive side, you haven't amassed a bunch of inauthentic ways of speaking and communicating and so when you learn to speak authentically, it's powerful and unique.

Fear and trying to outsmart the devil drives fundamentalism. It looks ridiculous from the outside looking in cause it's like a dog barking and growling at itself in a mirror. But your view from the outside looking in is not really a view at all. If we react to a reaction out of fear and misunderstanding, we are the fear and misunderstanding. We are the dog in the mirror.

Trees, birds and rocks (crystals, etc) are really powerful pointers. They exist in several myths, fairytales and religious stories and symbolism and you can experience that they have a certain kind of power to point beyond form from form. No idea why. Maybe just because we're just especially drawn to them? That whole the universe is built of love thing? I don't know.

By trying to save ourselves from threats we create them. Thinking that our life can be preserved is death. Like Voldemort we split our soul into pieces and hide them for the sake of our own preservation. Surrender to what is completely whole, beyond life and death is already the stuff that we actually are, and so we have found our life.

@abrakamowse I just read that the inspiration for the Rolling Stones logo originally came from a drawing of Kali.

Pay attention to how your thoughts feel. An epiphany is often sudden and seems completely random like it came from nowhere, but it feels amazing. Judging our own thoughts after they have happened is more thinking and judging ourselves. Being curious about our thoughts is being aware and questioning them. The best thing you can do is pay attention to how you feel. Generally curiosity feels great, judgement feels bad.

Maybe not everyone grew up in the generation of incessant "your mom" and "your face" jokes? Hard to imagine.

While I love the direction this thread is going in and don't want to derail it, this was really good.

Peak experiences don't come from doing the right stuff to get them. They come from something like honest curiosity and exploration which isn't a doing. You have to be completely open when you're exploring to having some not so great experiences. If you're exploring music in hopes to find something new you really love, you're going to listen to a lot of music you don't enjoy. See what I mean? Fall in love with the adventure and the exploration itself. Check out Rupert Spira's yoga meditations, yoga, especially yin yoga, any kind of exercise or activity you feel inspired to do. Explore.

An author loves her care-actors very much. She doesn't even have to tell herself that they aren't real. She gave birth to them, heroes and villains, all one in the same. It helps to differentiate between thoughts that sneakily seek a type of purity and escape from suffering by trying to no longer "play" your character, (I quit, and won't play another round, boohoo, sore loser), thoughts that are unaligned with source, Love, or the author's intentions, and thoughts that appear to pertain to a specific character but are also aligned with that Love. A child's play is pretend but also one of the most honest authentic things out there, and so is watching someone who is a master at acting and loves doing it. It's only when we are aware of ourselves as an actor and feel spilt, awkward, out of place and inauthentic, that we are acting out.

Focusing on what you don't want and the not getting of them than on the things you have that you do want and the joy in wanting things in the future and the joy in taking steps toward them.

All creative work comes from the same source. Creator/created itself.

I used to think that too, but then ended up having some pretty weird experiences in this domain. I'm still going to follow my own intuition and feeling as final say over any advice someone writes in a book though, no matter what the "source". .

With no time, no past, nothing to own, and no one to own it really, it's just a wild crazy beautiful gift.

You are just a thought. A thought is a thought. A thought arises that says "I don't like my thoughts" but that is another thought. You can only ever acknowledge thoughts with more thoughts.

Very cool!

I've only had temporary chest pain issues, and it's been helpful. Yoga poses as a routine practice have been a huge help for chronic back and hip issues though.

Yes! If you're getting food cravings often, your diet isn't balanced enough. It's not a discipline problem in the moment, it's that you haven't stepped back and looked at the whole of your diet. Guilt just makes the vicious cycle more vicious. Less guilt, more curiosity. It also helps to accept that a lot of women get food cravings and even food aversions cyclically. If this happens to you, noticing it rather than jumping to the conclusion that you have no self control when you get cravings is helpful. If you find there are times when you are so hungry, you eat 3 times the food you do normally, and you don't judge yourself for it, going with it and accepting that sometimes our bodies need bigger bursts of calories can mean more weight loss than shaming yourself for it and repressing the craving until later. Your metabolism is a living dynamic thing. Another trick is realizing that cravings are sometimes a form of procrastination. So making lists of the things you want to work on, or want to do, including fun things just for yourself that you want to do but are too lazy and unfocused to begin can be really helpful. It can give you the sense of direction that the food cravings might be showing you that you need.

Thyroid levels check? Tried yoga to open up the chest?