mandyjw

Driving a truck is bad for your back, but you can mitigate all that. Get back support, try a special back pain seat cushion for the truck seat, also do yin yoga or other types of yoga and stretching and ab exercises to strengthen your abs and take stress off your back. Also often with meditation we overly value going slow and having the leisure of time, but you can't be intensely present while going very fast, efficiently. You can't get into that flow if you think your life should look a different way and have some vision of yourself alone sitting on a mountain. Surrender into the rush. I mean, you're pretty much some sort of Santa Claus. Driving can be an incredibly awesome activity for focus. Your survival stuff and spiritual stuff aren't at odds.

I had a majorly life disrupting awakening in the middle of having two young kids and running a business. No regrets, it couldn't have been any different. Everything worked out fine, better than fine actually.

It's some people's first understanding of going deeper with spirituality. For others, generally the hard working, hardnosed, truth lovers, it's the last. It took me forever to open my mind up to Abraham Hicks, but I have a friend who just naturally lives that way. Impulsively, spontaneously, and has all the time and everything almost always just mysteriously works out for her. I always thought she was just irresponsible.

This is all an act. Actualized.org is an act, actually in actuality. Just put on a fun costume and have good time.

I'm pretty sure it's very common for the transition to college to be really confusing and difficult. Be mindful of the self concepts you have around yourself being an achiever or a high conscious person. Sometimes these concepts get in the way of connecting with our intuition, knowing what we want to do next, and taking a necessary break to reset and let that inner guidance come in. It's ok to just want to know what it is you want. If you pull up too many programs on your computer at once, you have to turn it off and turn it back on again. While meditation at its best is turning off the computer, sometimes we even have to quit meditation itself again to come back to it again without all our ideas about it and the self concept of one who meditates.

@Name Where does the feeling in your hands start and stop?

The law of attraction fits in seamlessly with nonduality and meditation. Gotta be honest though, the first time I heard about it my reaction was "oh... fuck". The "present moment" seemed a much kinder introduction.

One year my parents grew beans and made my sister and I shuck them. It was AWFUL. There were lots of moldy ones, they are really hard to dry properly and it took forever. Without modern machinery and technology, those staple foods are very labor intensive and do not keep all that long anyway. I think they're healthy but not in huge amounts.

@zeroISinfinity "Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about." Rumi

@GoingHome Fictional stories have an amazing ability to open minds and hearts. There's no self when you're lost in a story. You have to see yourself in the other characters.

@GoingHome My parents love Richard Roar. There are a lot of great bridges to open the mind from Christianity. The book "The Shack" is another one.

The grass is always greener.

Well, if you're tuning in enough to notice that they don't understand you, and you notice that it's creating problems your mind is still working. Can you take some time to yourself? It also helps to record yourself talking, or journal to get thoughts and insights out, then the need to share them with other who aren't open to them doesn't arise as much.

I'm all about appearances and artifice.

Thoughts and beliefs that shoot down and criticize your own creation, (your apparent self, apparent others and dreams and desires) are what keep you from creating it. Constructive criticism is always welcome though.

Healing is creating. Creating is healing. It seems we want to heal so we can create, but one does not precede the other.

Our society is very separate, and independence is overly valued. Our family structures are basically all about the immediate family only, there's no real extended community or family available. This causes isolation with lots of groups of people. Teenagers are left alone with no mentors. In the past they'd be learning a trade or hardly ever alone when their parents worked. That's not true today. This affects their ability to interact with people, only if hurts boys far more than it hurts girls. Most girls naturally know how to relate to people because of how their brains are wired, but we don't see this type of connection as a necessary skill, so we don't teach boys the skills they need to learn it in school. The problem doesn't even come up until they try to find a partner. It's a complete oversight by society. We need to go back towards having tighter communities, larger extended families, or else we need to change our education system completely.

Well, that's why there was a MeToo movement.

The body knows that your mind is a burden but it loves you so much it doesn't say anything about it all. Your mind on the other hand doesn't shut up. So do some stuff that tricks your mind into listening to the body for change.

@trenton In a way they really aren't true. We never remember things quite correctly, even if we are being completely honest with ourselves. What you really want to do is to focus your attention forward on what you want with your life, now. Was there a desire born out of those memories that hurt so much? Is there an inspiring roadmap for how you want to interact with others and face life in the future that is waiting to be drawn out? Take the lessons and the inspiration, make amends if you feel the desire to, and focus forward on what you want. If you can't examine them without too much pain now, focus on something else, something that feels good. Focusing on whether distancing yourself from the memory is right or wrong, actually is only strengthening the memory and the focus on the past. You really want to determine what you want now, and focus on that. If you put your mind to work on figuring out what you want and let go of the memories and self judgement, if there's a lesson from the past memories that is key to getting you to what you want or to be the self you envision yourself to be, it will be shown to you clearly. You don't need to do anything about it, and you can't, that's why it feels so bad to try. What you can do is figure out what you want, and focus on what feels good. Self care is important when you feel the weight of guilt. Make a list of things that raise your mood or things that feel good to you to do. Maybe they are things you haven't thought about in a long time, an old favorite song, an old web comic you used to love, or some thing you've been wanting to do forever but haven't bothered to looking into making a reality. Make it a point to pick 2 or 3 things from that list and do them everyday until self care becomes a habit.

Well there's no duality, so truth and false are a duality, they rely on having an opposite to exist within the mind. Outside the mind there is no love or hate, just Love. There's no truth/false, just Love. The love of truth is a powerful thing, because truth is equal to and the same as Love. Love is neither real nor unreal, neither true or false. So being afraid of lies and trying to avoid what's false will never get you Truth, but the love of it will.

Go experience it. Take a warm bath, go swim in a cold lake and see how the body reacts, do some yoga, go for a run, walk barefoot in forest moss.

Write out a letter to her saying everything you want to say. Cry, scream, swear. Burn it. Or send it if you have to, but probably not. It's likely that there are a few things you write that you might want to actually say or write to her latter. I have a theory that the people who cause us the most pain are the ones who we mutually grow from the most or the fastest. It's like we made some sort of agreement before we came here that we'd help each other align to love in a powerful, dramatic way. If you can't live with em' and can't live without em' you know life is calling you to grow and change. But here's the thing, you have to be willing to communicate and have difficult conversations. It also helps to ask, what do you really want from your mother? What do you really want the relationship to be? Is it possible that while on the surface it may not look ANYTHING like that, that the undercurrent of love is still always there, unbroken? Can you tap into that love that is impersonal and prior to everything else?

I never really appreciated what a beautiful word universe is. uni- one verse- writing arranged with a metrical rhythm, typically having a rhyme. 1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. My son keeps asking who first invented words, which we can't give a good answer to, and just now said he thinks he knows how. He said that people said the word as they did it. And I said "like talk?" and smiled. And he said "dance" and started dancing.

GODDAMN IT. The Ferrari is my journal. Tarot, cards should I really let go of my journal? The Hermit. Fuck.