mandyjw

So maybe I should clarify my thoughts, in all seriousness, we hold ourselves away from our own inner guidance/love when we create authority figures. We love them. We hate them. We blame those authority figures. Maybe sometimes they deserve the blame within the story, sometimes not, but never, really. It all comes down to inner blame and inner shame. The authority figure is created to try to guide oneself away from blame and shame, but also perpetuates the belief in it. It's needed for a time, and then it's realized that one only creates blame and shame, authority and subject for themselves.

Of course you did. I know that you secretly want to burn the patriarchy with me though. Then we'll really laugh.

Sounds like you can't break up because what you really want to is to move past the guilt and shame in general. So you guilt and shame yourself for not being able to end it. You need a massive dose of self love. Take some time for yourself, by yourself, to contemplate, self care, pamper yourself. Bubbly bath, favorite movie, Ben and Jerry's, mediation, time in nature. Hugs.

There's a difference between making self deprecating jokes, or noting something you want to change about yourself and inner unexamined self deprecating feelings based on a complete misunderstanding of what one's self is. It's important to make that distinction. All hate or ill will towards others is really projected hate and ill will toward one's self. That's why it's so dangerous.

Yes. Depression is a call to go deeper. We tend to avoid depression so it bubbles up and overtakes us. This movement of trying to avoid negative feelings can actually strengthen at the start of consciousness work, and another possibility is that once you start to sit and feel, what you've been avoiding your entire life is now becoming available to be cleared out . If you take a time out and really feel into it when depression first starts to come up, sometimes certain realizations come in, new desires are uncovered, energy is released. The better we are at paying attention to how we feel the quicker we catch it before it gets too dramatic. Not that dramatic is bad. Not wanting negative emotional states is a movement of avoiding pain and seeking pleasure. We really do better to drop the labels of "negative" or "depression" in our own relationship with them (it's fine to use those labels in discussion or to yourself as long as it doesn't have a charge of unwanted behind it, it's the charge and meaning not the label itself) and welcome them.

There have been thunderstorms today and my emotions are all acting haywire too. Crying about how amazing people are, angry about other things and seeing the blame, etc. Listening to my books on tape I found in the free library box with my pink cassette player and thoroughly enjoying them. My first foray into the real healing aspects of spirituality. The variety of tapes in the box on healing and mind body connection is crazy. Started with Christiane Northrup, she is amazing. PMS is actually a naturally occurring psychedelic trip, I knew that, suspected it, needed an authority to tell me so. Purification, crying. So we make fun of it, belittle it and pretend to be above it. I didn't think much of it, but I went to get groceries this morning and had some old money complaining habits come in and then noticed the song playing. "You don't have to live like a refugee."

I sort of read the OP's post as being a more general questioning. Learning to compliment and interact with women and not act like a creep is a huge part of business, sales and career for men. If you want to be a teacher and teach women or sell cars to women, you have to learn to connect without accidentally crossing lines. Approaching a woman in a club or certain settings don't follow any of those rules and can be very counter-intuitive of course, but commenting on someone's instagram photo is a lazy sort of in between gray area.

Truth=Love. Every memory, every story, all history is perspective and created freshly new now. If there's a "true" way to remember the past it's in happy nostalgia, or at least understanding the perfection and inevitability of every moment. Also from a wise but somewhat unenlightened perspective, "Adventures are never fun while you're having them” -C. S. Lewis

DAMN! I never really watched this to the end. Daisies and a farm truck.

I think I've been doing the spiritual practice of ass backwards meditation my entire life. Can you meditate backwards? Well no. You can't.

Pretty little things. Oh fuck. That boomerang didn't take long to come back and hit me.

No, desire itself is not the problem, the individual perspective from which the desire (ego) is attributed is mistaken, that's why it seems to hinder "you". Until you can get to the root of that/let it go you'll only being trying to rid yourself of desire. Your desire will be to rid yourself of desire but only so that you can "trick" your desire into getting what you want. Means to an end kind of thinking, beliefs and assumptions are problematic. No one wants to be used as a means to an end, because they know that they cannot give you that fulfillment and don't want to disappoint you. That's really why a lot of women reject men who act needy, they KNOW the man will be disappointed when he gets what he wants and they don't want to be there or risk being blamed when that realization occurs. Happy fulfilled people are attractive because anything you can add to them is already just adding to something that's already amazing. There's no pressure put on you, and so you in turn are free to be happy and fulfilled in your relationship/engagement. Desire in its pure form is timeless, goalless and works for no one in particular.

So I realize that the root or core of this "problem" (interest/drama in the life story) is that I value some things and not others, and forget that I, ultimately create value myself. I possess this freedom. I possess the power to create meaning. That power is so scary, so powerful, that it's not really a power at all, it's so all encompassing. So I create this story where I'm a 5'3 small framed female living in a world where there are systems in place gold is valued and mud is not, even though our food grows in dirt and gold is also found in mother earth. Then because I believe I am said 5'3 female, I try very hard to place on value on myself, the perceiver and enjoyer of gold/dirt and others going about apparently trying to value themselves, others and everything from gold to dirt to in between. In pure enjoyment/appreciation there is no placement of value. And so the only thing "I" can do is stop valuing and judging myself. So now, I feel like valuing and judging myself. Thank's inner devil's advocate! (moi) I am a silly, silly little creature, who likes pretty things, who likes to play dress up, who likes to play, who likes to create pretty things. I realize all I'm talking about is the same advice AH gives for connecting to source, everything else be damned.

@DrewNows Yeah... rabbits. This embracing femininity thing keeps coming up in various, several ways. A few weeks ago I found a youtuber very mildly famous woman who inspired me in so many different ways and led me in so many different directions on things I want in life. She inspired me to finally finish my house, get back to the things i loved that inspired me that I stopped spending money and thought on, and also in a lot of career related ways, and even some spiritual ones. It all flows in together. I know that I blame men for what I assumed about myself. It's completely on me. Except that paradox of me not existing. What evs. The more I study fashion, glam and beauty which I demonized for years the more I realize that it's really about beauty being subjective and celebrating the weird and different, "pretending" with your best foot forward with confidence. Leo seems to be triggering me a lot recently. The Silencing of the Rabbits. I just checked out his blog and I am a huge fan of Marie Kondo, and she really helped me deepen spirituality. I also felt like I never got to "finish" her advice and put stuff in order, because I minimized stuff down and then realized the renovation was what I wanted. Then I had a toddler, sick dog, awakening, new puppy, and the house never got put together with things that spark joy that much. A little. I also didn't allow myself that. She is also an amazing teacher on the feminine side of spirituality, in my opinion. Going through your physical stuff is huge. Not "peanuts". If you are not or if you are you plus everything, your shit that's surrounding you all the time is also an outward and profoundly telling expression of mind.

@Etherial Cat Of course. Also I never look for feedback from my customers about what they really want to buy and what makes them happy, I ask my competitors who are also selling the same thing to the same people.

Love? Sounds like some spiritual mumbo jumbo a rabbit would come up with to survive, the lion laying down with the lamb or some bullshit like that. Highly self biased survival agenda. Because men need to be able to get laid without committing to the women, so that they can go on to form their very important careers, businesses and the pursuit of enlightenment completely uninhibited because quantifiable success in these ways are more important than anything else. Once the man achieves this very important height of success, women will flock to him for casual relationships and he doesn't have to go out and hunt for these women anymore. Until then his survival drives won't let him give up the idea of women completely so he has to hunt them. Because his quantifiable outward successes are paramount to the world's well being as a whole, women getting in the way of him learning to hunt and saying "what about rabbits and what they want?" is detrimental to all of us.

@DrewNows Thought you meant the woman sawed in half trick. Can you feel the love tonight? You needn't look too far Stealing through the night's uncertainties Love is where they are

You assume a lot. A lot of the women on this forum are older, experienced and some including myself have sons of their own. I've sacrificed hours of my own life and career to get my autistic son the social interaction and experiences he needs so he isn't handicapped that way later in life. I've thought a lot about life from other perspectives, too much about their's and not enough on my own, in fact. Women's voices are discredited enough already without the admin of the forum/youtube star this place revolves around giving the outright advice to discredit them. A lot of perspectives given here are self-biased but the people here are plenty smart enough to sniff that out for themselves.

I've observed that one of the most powerful advantages of being a woman in the community as a whole is that I am suspected much less than men are. There are certain opportunities open to me that men aren't trusted with, mostly ones that the reward of which is emotional connection, but also certain career options such as childcare. Teenage girls/women are much more readily trusted to babysit, housesit and pet sit than teenage boys/young men. If I'm exploring something on someone else's property, I'm much more readily accepted a possible member of the historical society than a man who might be vandalizing. They aren't given the same opportunities and practice to be trusted and to interact, so they sometimes inherently sense that they threaten people. It's a vicious circle, and what you resist persists. The more you try NOT to be socially awkward the more you act socially awkward. Same with creepiness. It's pretty unfair to men how suspicious people are of them. Of course they are socially awkward and creepy, because people expect them to be. On the other hand I've had the experience of receiving inappropriate facebook messages from another married father at a child's birthday party I attended and had no interaction with him at all there. And an elderly man at a gas station make completely crazy comments about my appearance, even though I was wearing a ski jacket. Powerful imagination? I dunno. So I've also been conditioned to be cautious and suspicious. It's like a self-fulfilling prophecy, law of attraction, collective societal shadow thing methinks. If our society valued emotional connection more as a whole we would see the unfairness in not allowing men to participate in it the same way we allow women too. We don't teach it in schools because we don't see it as a skill that is necessary for success in life, because we measure success externally. We see emotional connection as a less important part of life as a whole, so we don't realize that our prejudices are so damaging.

One approach is to really sit with the awkward silence feeling until you're more comfortable with it. Then what you do say will be more spontaneous and less effortful.

@DrewNows HA! That's a good way to put it, like the woman who gets cut up by the magician. Although, isn't that also sort of what sort of what House built in that episode, in reverse? Ohhh weird synchronicity.

Phantom pain of "I"

So a part of me thinks I'm an idiot for sharing all this stuff I share, but it feels good to do it. I just saw the funniest series of clips where these women pretended to be making videos for an audience in front of their partners and talked about their cleaning routines, etc and how committed they are to having this perfect home and life, while they are actually filming their partner's reaction to their bullshit of presenting themselves in a certain light when he well knew reality was another. Seemed to fit with my confusion about my youtube channel. Am I airing my dirty laundry or presenting myself as an authority? Neither I guess. There seem to be two stages, or a full circle path of self improvement. I found Leo's videos in the first place because I wanted to deal with my anger better. To me the height of unconsciousness was my anger outbursts, which I felt were lapses where I completely lost control. At this point I thought I had control. This revelation that there is no I and no control has changed everything and also left me with the funny feeling of "well what do I do about that, then?" Like phantom pain. If enlightenment was about emotional equanimity, then as a female who was prone to emotional outbursts I was in an incredibly disadvantageous place. I don't think I realized how misogynistic I myself was. I equated my emotional reactivity with pain. Roger explained that in the video above so well, I don't think I really realized that until last night. I equated equanimity with respect and value. At the same time something in me completely rebelled against this self imposed constriction. It hated it when it saw it in others, when it saw it in the Christian church or detected hints of it in secular spiritual teachers or Buddhism when I started getting into those things. But secretly, I thought men were better and more important. I thought I was a silly, foolish little creature. I thought that emotional equanimity was a state that I could achieve. I completely colored over that I already was the peace that passeth understanding. I wanted to be that, embody it. Own it. For myself. Honestly, I still do. The past couple days a complete resentment came up for being female. Funny, yet fitting that I've been honoring my femininity and exploring it. I realized recently that I've been blaming men for my own misunderstandings, only in a more... submissive, passive aggressive, self demeaning way? than I realized. I've been idealizing men all my life, loving their strength and calmness, their focus and seriousness. All the back and forths I'm susceptible to, the hormones, whatever I've blamed for keeping me from the very thing I want MOST, that peace. When it was already there. This summer I was so active and lost weight so my cycle went away and it was fantastic. No hunger, no hormonal wanting to overeat and feeling like fat cow swings. No emotional swings. No pain. With the new moon got a flood of hormones in and for some reason I get ovulation pain so bad that for a short time I can barely walk. Happened to me last night sychroncistically. Yesterday my four year old daughter who is intensely creative, strong willed and emotional AF would not leave me alone. I had mess after mess, frustration after frustration. I've been working so hard and going for what I want and part of me made me think my mistake was to care again, to go for what I want. The clean, beautiful house, the successful business and extra money, wanting to look beautiful, the creative expression. Who am I to want these silly things? Eventually after disaster after disaster, and her screaming at me over... silly things , then letting the dog upstairs who ran up and excited peed all over my comforter that takes hours to wash and dry I lost my temper. Of all things I smashed an alarm clock sitting on the shelf. I hit something and really hurt my hand, eventually I went downstairs and found that the order I put up for someone who never showed up had been chewed and was all over the floor. That's when I kicked my stainless steel trashcan which I really like and maybe feel unworthy of having cause it was a little pricey and dented it. I thoroughly scared the dog, who took an hour or so to trust me again. During this time there's a feeling of relief in the body and I recognition that I'm completely not in control of the actions of my body. All logic is gone. I want an orderly life, so I smash things. I previously thought I'm my own worst enemy but now I see it's when I try, try try to control and then this energy rises up that shows me I am NOT in control. And so my entire delving into spirituality was to try to control this event when I'm out of control, which really was a profound sort of awakening in itself.

Fear can bind you to religion, but the love and devotion part, if it's genuine, will only be found to have no source to credit. The credit given to the religion, God, or some figure being the cause of that love and transcendence will fall away, which only deepens, frees and clarifies the "purpose" of the religion, the love of God itself. Often this happens over time in lots of little ways, like disappointments caused by idols acting badly, devilry in the church or organization, disillusionment, some dilemma between what a person really authentically is the the person they have to pretend to be to stay in line with the religious ideals comes up. When we give credit and put our faith in something false it has it's own way of revealing itself. Sometimes there are ways to help someone see just how boundless, free and unconditional the core of what they really love about their religion is. But because it's boundless, free and unconditional it's already perfect as it is.

Found this one to be incredibly helpful recently.