mandyjw

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.

@allislove Today was craaaaazy. Hope I can journal about it tomorrow but this video was incredibly helpful. Also let's just say it's Roger's fault that I learned how to take dents out of metal that I put there today, while I'm giving others credit for stuff.

From the gospel of Thomas, 36. Jesus said, "Do not fret, from morning to evening and from evening to morning, [about your food--what you're going to eat, or about your clothing--] what you are going to wear. [You're much better than the lilies, which neither card nor spin. As for you, when you have no garment, what will you put on? Who might add to your stature? That very one will give you your garment.]" 37. His disciples said, "When will you appear to us, and when will we see you?" Jesus said, "When you strip without being ashamed, and you take your clothes and put them under your feet like little children and trample them, then [you] will see the son of the living one and you will not be afraid."

@DrewNows Maybe someday! @Johnny5

If you're wildly skilled and original in what you do, minimal marketing is all you need, sometimes. If you story is interesting enough, or what you do is unique enough it will catch people's attention on its own. You might really like Seth Godin's books and talks on youtube. He really delves into this sort of thing.

Yesterday I listened to Roger Castillo's satsang, and he talked about something I found really useful to contemplate, which is because we believe we are the body and seek pain and pleasure, we also believe that other people seek pain and pleasure too. So he used the example of cutting someone off in traffic and making them angry. That's the kind of thing that I found so unbearable, causing pain to others, that I felt it was better to retreat from the world, especially since it seemed to be full of people who were quick to blame others for things. Side note, Roger is absolutely incredible, but he just kind of sits and talks so matter of fact like a normal person so you wouldn't realize it, nor immediately recognize the depth and value of what he does. Someone should make him a snazzy intro. Anyway this unwillingness to cause pain to others or felt responsibility for other people's pain has been one of the greatest forms of suffering. Having kids brought this front and center. There's a biological response to a baby crying. I've even woken up completely in the night because a baby across the road cried. The sympathetic pain is sometimes more clearly and directly physically felt. I suppose at the deepest level of misunderstanding it turns into an either or thing, I can sacrifice my life for you or I can be happy. I take a lot of responsibility for other people's pain. This is such a tricky subject because we've been taught to do his, but for girls who are emotionally connected and empathetic it can become monstrous and destructive. Ironically it turns me into a bitch, especially to my husband. I wonder if my feeling like he doesn't do enough, and doesn't take enough responsibility is because I'm taking responsibility for something I don't have control over. I'm trying to control something I can't, which feels awful. Then I assume that feeling awful is because I can't manage to control the thing. When my husband is mad or unhappy I actually get mad at him. The way Roger words it is that suffering is the attitude not circumstantial, and what AH teaches with "if it feels bad, it's not true" Lately life has been so amazing and I've been so uninhibited in going for what I want. There's also a fear that it's because of the time of year, which is ending and becoming complicated shortly with my kids starting school amidst a pandemic, and my mind trying to credit the happiness with circumstances and then fear that those will go away. I also realized that depression is a call to go deeper. Not a "come over here you fucking bitch" call, but an invitation to something so wonderful, you'll hate yourself for not going, and that's what the depression really is.

If in the metaphysical mystic duality fantasy world people apparently have levels of "spiritual attainment" or even natural "talent", if they have their own unique flavor of energy, then places most certainly do too. Seems like every time I try to leave, some world crisis or personal awakening happens. This place be like...

Funny how last night's journal entry totally unearthed the blame/shame theme. There's another layer to it, that I even blame people and myself for blaming and shaming, and it all happens here. Funny the word place got typed as the word blame. There isn't a here and a there.

Started feeling down and knew I needed to take a break from working, which I've been doing a lot of lately. Went to Dr.P's and brought along an old project I made years ago and was excited about and had some sort of symbolic meaning which later tied in to Dr.P's. I learned the irony last year that he had a huge Rebecca at the Well statue fountain yet had a massive problem getting a well or water where his mansion was built. The project is a kind of water vessel with flowers blooming inside. I had the intent of leaving it there, on intuition. I went down by the stream that flows behind the cemetery and filled it with water. I got there and couldn't decide what direction to go in. I heard a loud crash in the woods, something falling from a tree. So I went to the biggest old apple tree and left the vessel in the tree. Found a fresh gold/green apple on the ground, from another tree. The big tree bears later. Ate it and it tasted great. I explored the blame (what, reading this over i wrote blame, and it's supposed to be place. I don't even have auto correct.)place top to bottom last year, going there often. This year I've been much busier with "real life." I could have a fairly booming business if I marketed my memorial products. But I don't know if I want to do that, especially with the kids still fairly young. There's nothing about working with human and pet cremains that bothers me, except the stress of the responsibility, the sending through the mail on something irreplaceable and the lack of creative freedom in doing just special orders. Anyway before I got to Dr.P's I made the intention that I wanted to find something awesome and I let it he intention go because I've gone there "searching" so many times for some revival of the initial discovery there, and played that game many times. I felt better there, just killing time in the woods, noticing things, sort of fantasizing yet being still with nature never ceases to bring out emotion in a way that it can be processed and felt rather than suffered. I walked home and on the way thought to check the free book box again. In it right on top in the place where the "Vanish with the Rose" was on the last time was this. https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Consciousness-Spirituality-Steven-Harrison/dp/1591810132/ref=sr_1_5?dchild=1&keywords=beyond+consciousness+steven+harrison&qid=1597618772&s=books&sr=1-5 this, https://www.amazon.com/Creating-Health-Honoring-Womens-Wisdom/dp/1564553035/ref=tmm_abk_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1597621883&sr=1-16 And a box full of really high conciousness talks. On tape. Mostly focused on healing for women but with more general spiritual teachings too. Guess I'm buying a cassette player. I was wanting something to listen to that didn't take internet since sometimes it goes out when I'm working. It happened to me this morning actually. Some of the titles in there, The Body Tells the Truth: Cellular Life Stories Ilana Rubenfield Margot Anand - The Seven Rhthyms of Love and The Power of Sexual Ecstasy Spicy A bunch of stuff on healing. A total treasure trove. On cassette tape. In a plastic storage bin free book box in a tiny country town. Just about this time, about 9 or 10 years ago, I felt this place was out of some sort of fairy tale. That didn't seem logical so I didn't believe that of course but I felt it and it inspired some story ideas. One time this time of year an apple tree broke off and someone had already graphitti painted "Forever" on a pole behind it. The broken tree bore apples anyway even though it seemed impossible, and in behind in the background was the word forever. It made quite a picture. I just reread my entry AGAIN, and noticed the blame "mistake" again. The tree of life, and the blame. That's why I accidentally typed the word blame. Of course. My mother read to my kids today the story of the garden of eden out of an old children's bible today. My daughter's middle name is Eden. "Have they heard it before?" She asked. "I don't think so." I wondered if I wanted them to hear it. Adam was lonely so God created Eve. That part struck a cord. Am I just here for men's entertainment? Huh. Entertain comes from the juxtaposition of French entre which comes from Latin Inter both words meaning 'together, or among', and Latin tenere, which means 'to hold'. So, literally, entertain means to 'hold or support together'.