mandyjw

People are sick of politics and pretension. They mistrust what they can't begin to understand. Being a politician requires status, education and money and these things are usually deeply mistrusted by people who don't have those things. Trump is the only option other than that, even though he has money and status he knows how to present himself as the alternative to what has long been hated about politicians. The way he speaks gives people the feeling that they can relate and understand him. People often mistakenly assume that the alternative to what they feel is untrustworthy = trustworthy. It's such an ironic thing that the inequality, especially education inequality in our country makes conditions ripe to elect a President with strong policies that worsen inequality.

I'm dealing with a lot of frustration and disillusionment about the spiritual community as a while. Whole. I meant to type whole. Which I know is an imaginary mental construct. If you are the dealer, I'm out of the game If you are the healer, it means I'm broken and lame If thine is the glory then mine must be the shame You want it darker We kill the flame Am I naive? "The root naïve is a French adjective meaning “natural, just born.” There are two seemingly waring against each other sides within spirituality. Success verses shunning/transcending it. There's incredible joy, love and transcendence to be found on both sides of the spectrum. There's no tipping point, no point of reference. There's no enlightenment. This is a party of big egos, people with egos so big their real work is to deal with them. Or maybe that's just me. Seems to me that spiritual teachers are the biggest devils at the party. Or maybe that's just me. Luke 12:49-53 I am come to send fire on the earth; and what will I, if it be already kindled?

@seeking_brilliance Shhhh... us witches need our familiars. @Ananta So sorry for your loss!

Back on contemplating this topic. A lot of my need for permission is imagining that there's a Big Daddy in the sky and I need to win his love. I spent my childhood trying to please my dad. On top of that there was Jesus, and the heavenly Father in the sky. My love of spiritual teachers is reflected/projected here. If I ever want to do anything big or make a bold stand or have a big goal, the first step is to get Daddy's permission. The Lion King losing his crown, the lion necklace that gave me courage with the broken off leg. At some point you find out that your parents have their own shit. I've had two long standing beliefs in my life. One is that the truth is your power, the other is that you can learn something from everyone. Everyone, no matter how little you think of them has some expertise or point of view that you've never experienced. Everyone is both your teacher and your student. If you stay in the role of student, you never get your permission or discovered your true gifts. If you stay stuck as a teacher you miss all the beautiful lessons that everyone has. Per mission.

@DrewNows Illness isn't anyone's fault. Trees get sick and die sometimes. They don't hold limiting beliefs. Sometimes insects and diseases move in and mass groups of them die. They rot and other trees grow in their place in the light. I try to play the illness avoidance game intellectually the best I can, psychologically, I know that the deepest truth is that all is accepted as an impersonal circle of life. There's a distinction between external action, washing hands, wearing masks, vaccines, etc, and internally worrying about avoiding something.

Fuck. BOOM, right back where I started. Owing. Feeling like I owe hurts. Owing, ouch ow ow owing. All owing. Allowing. Sensing that there's some desires here and they aren't just mine own. Owing and owning, owl wing. Ok Mandy, go home, you're drunk.

How will I know I'm a good person if I stop blaming and shaming myself? Yesterday I took the kids swimming. An out of state car pulled in and just sat there looking out at us, loud music blaring. I instantly felt very vulnerable. Vulnerable turned into "I shouldn't be here, this is my fault." Since eating meat again, I've gotten into shape and have been wearing my two piece swimsuit because the others fit like crap. I feel conspicuous. I remember dressing in tighter than normal clothes once getting read for high school and instantly feeling nauseous. When guys hit on me or comment, I feel guilty. I feel like it's my fault. I should be fat and dress like a slob. I shouldn't stand out. I think the dream about my sister in law points to judging people. My mother in law told me something about her that made me judge her. In fact the dream morphed from my uncle to her, and that uncle is someone I've always judged the most of almost anyone too. Funny that the thing I wore to give me courage and symbolizes what I hold to the highest standard would break in the same symbolic way as the people I want to be like the least. It's all falling apart. There's a line from a Sia song that struck me, "I'm still fighting for peace." I saw a sign last spring that said "Peace One With Another". Of course peace requires pieces and requires them to be in the right places. Connection is duality, it's conditional. Love is duality, it's conditional. Allowing and appreciation and love, all the same. Unconditional, is allowing itself. Allowing All owing

Yesterday something really strange happened that brought up a ton of uncomfortable feelings about money, relationships and spirituality. It goes much deeper than that, a sort of questioning everything and major insecurity, (rather the search for finding security that isn't there) comes up. There's a lot of confusion, and a lot of wanting answers and wanting to know, wanting to be able to trust, but again, I know those things can't be found by the mind. The way it happened was completely accidental but it's one of those accidents that leaves me questioning myself. I've always had this tendency to blame myself for accidents and mistakes immediately and psychologically own them. I've had freakish coincidental things happen in the past that happened because I was super scared of having them happen. I have no control. But I do. The controller is the controlled. I had a childhood where we didn't have much money and my parents worked a lot, but there was this feeling of transcendence in this, rather than much suffering. When I was 9 my parents had a well drilled, but until then they had a well that they had dug themselves. A few summers it would get really low and we had to ration water. We had what Dad called the "oh shit stick" that measured the amount of water in the well. If it was dry we would walk down to the well and measure it frequently. Bellow a certain mark, you said "oh shit." Everything was laughed off and embraced for the most part. Money was limited but not so much that we really suffered for it. My dad to this day has a transcendent love of work, he drives a dump truck from the 1980's and works construction all day sitting in it with no AC. His boss, the owner of the truck is a mechanic, so the truck is pieced together and kept running because he has the skills to do it. He bought a hood ornament for it, it's a silver owl. My dad absolutely loves the truck. He cleans it on his own time, and takes pride in it. It's not even his. Part of me thinks that dad is a loser for not having his own truck. Part of me thinks that he is wise. I suppose that wisdom cannot be attributed to anyone though. Owls have been coming up like crazy lately. In the Brene Brown talk, I noticed that she is wearing an owl necklace. The day before yesterday I visited my mother in law. She asked me to make some owl earrings. My in laws are wealthy. Stupid wealthy. Not stupid as in, really wealthy but stupid as in, see money, spend money stupid. I used to hate them for this but since discovering the law of attraction I've learned to appreciate it and recognize the beauty of the world they are creating. My father in law barely spoke to me, he was working on a new project, a stupidly expensive patio. It bothered me I wondered if he was mad at me. Today he is in the hospital with a kidney stone. Maybe that's why and it had nothing to do with me. I used the word stupid a lot, after talking about wisdom and owls. I suppose stupidity can't be attributed to anyone either. I just stopped to take away a stuffed lion my dog was chewing. It's a lion in a robe with a crown from my Grandmother's house. He completely chewed the crown on the lion's head and now it just looks like a lion standing around in his bathrobe. Kinda funny. I have this silver lion necklace I got when I was a kid. I envisioned God as a lion, and the Chronicles of Narnia fueled that and the fantasy/reality loss of duality quite a bit, I recognize now. If anything big or scary was happening in my life I'd wear the lion necklace. I wore it when I got married, I wore it countless other times. After awakening I thought I needed to get rid of it. I left it at Dr.P's but unlike my favorite antique ring which disappeared immediately, taken by the crows who planted the poison nightshade that set of the chain of events, I tell myself. But the lion charm kept turning up. Then I put it on a leather cord and gave it to my husband. He wore it a while and forgot it. Yesterday I took it off the cord and wore it again. I don't know what this has to do with anything. But after all, relationship and connection is duality, it's the beauty of the rainbow of colors caused by the separation of the light. It's wild and free, completely chaotic, it happens all on it's own. The lion charm broke right before the awakening, one of his legs came off. I told myself i didn't take care of my things well enough and blamed myself for it. Last night I dreamed my sister in law lost a leg. It was a horrible dream and I woke up in the night and felt awful. "Goddamn it Mandy, you ate too much chicken. That's why you have bad dreams. Spiritual people don't eat meat." It only lasted a little while and I felt better again and went back to sleep.

Partially, but my kids eat much better than I did when I was that age, it's just that they get exposed to more stuff than I did. RSV wasn't even a thing when I was a kid. Diet is a huge problem in schools themselves. The school lunches are sub par. The breakfasts they serve now are so bad, it's counterproductive to feed them so much sugar first thing and then expect them to learn. We got school meals delivered for a short time during quarantine and when I fed my kids the cereal and milk school lunches it was much harder to get them to settle down and get my son to focus on his work.

Phew!

The only reason this question is asked is because we live in an age of absolute luxury and choice. You can order take out, hire a house cleaning service, get daycare, there a vacuum cleaners, etc. Running a house, cooking, cleaning and raising children well is a phenomenal amount of work. It's funny how we focus on the remaining problems and inequalities when really, we live in a sort of paradise. Male or female, do whatever you want. Kids or no kids, marry or not, work or not, no one really cares.

If you look at it like a journey of going full circle, a baby starts where an enlightened person might end, in a way. But they are going the opposite direction around the circle and they are going in one direction of developing the mind and the ability to distinguish, then coming back around to dis-identifying with the mind again using those very distinctions and mind they developed. Babies don't distinguish between their hands or body parts and their environment. No inner, no outer, no duality. They have to learn to function but the psychological identification usually (almost always, always?) comes in with that as well. It's that psychological identification, not the thought "my hand" exactly that's the problem. The pain of cutting your finger is not a problem but the suffering of the thought that someone could have avoided cutting their finger or looking for someone to blame for the pain (self or other) is psychological identification/suffering.

Masks are a huge part of the culture for several reasons, Japanese girls even cover their mouths to laugh and smile. Cleaning is an almost spiritual practice. I have school age kids and the amount of viruses and respiratory stuff they bring home is absolutely ridiculous. It's far, far worse than I ever had when I was a kid, my Mom is a teacher and she notices the increase too. Flu B was still going through the school like wildfire right before they closed to prevent COVID. I get them their flu shots and they often get a mild cold when the flu goes through and they will have classmates out for weeks with bronchitis. We really needed to change our hygiene standards in schools and public places before this happened, especially since the world is only getting more interconnected. I think during future flu seasons a lot of the measures doctor's offices have put into place should stay in place. I've always thought when I go out to get a prescription, go to the doctor or groceries when I'm sick (which is unavoidable) I should wear a mask, but everyone would have thought before this that I had ebola or something. It's just the right thing to do, like washing your hand after using the bathroom and before shaking someone's hand.

@allislove Thanks, congrats on being a mod!!! Love the new look.

"Not caring what people think is it's own kind of hustle." Why? Because I can't NOT care. Don't think about pink elephants. Oh......Ohhhh.....!!!! Yes of course. Of course I don't have a soul, and neither does anyone else. Also I can never know victory nor defeat. I sometimes wonder if this youtube channel is going to be the death of me.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” -Theodore Roosevelt "Not caring what people think is it's own kind of hustle."

So this one is a bit weird and sort of shows the more generally thought of as feminine side of spirituality. You're a living painting with a spectrum of color (duality) on a Snow White canvas (nonduality). "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" - I'm Wishing/One Song

No no, remember is a girl.

@kindayellow Strange advice that I find really helps, especially since you mentioned the social media distraction problem. Make a list of things that inspire you. Not big things, but not excluding them but this is really to think small. Comic strips you loved as a kid. That youtube video that made you laugh so hard you haven't forgotten it that you haven't seen in years. A game. A favorite book. A favorite song you haven't listened to. A small easily completed project you could do. Just brainstorm all those things and write them down. When you feel like it, pick one and do it. Try to do two or three everyday. It's amazing how the inspiration for really big life changing inspiration can come from such little things. Inspiration is inspiration. You're wasting time on social media because you don't have the momentum to do big stuff, so the idea is to do little stuff intentionally so it will grow in momentum. Good luck, hope you're feeling better.

Hmm... I have a massive crush on her. She is scary woke/smart. Like in Alice in Wonderland, some people around here seem to talk in nonsense sometimes. We're all mad here.

@DoubleYou LOVE. Especially the first one.

Where are the fruits and veggies?

It helps to appreciate just how subjective looks are anyway. The reason we think it's not subjective is because of memories of peers, Hollywood, magazines, models and popular culture. Even societies favorite "ideal" look changes every decade. It's all built on a foundation of nothing. Attraction is an an incredibly personal, unique, living, breathing artistic thing when it's allowed to be on its own without all kinds of colored perceptions and standards assigning value to self and other in that way. It goes beyond the visual and physical. Beauty can't be quantified. That said, even our most shallow favorite traits we find yourself attracted to are strangely quirky. Most people you talk to have weird, quirky specific things that they are attracted to. I think that women are more free to act on the unique things they are attracted to because they are less afraid of being judged by others for picking a partner based on those criteria instead of what they think they should find hot. Then even your own favorite traits to have in a partner can be forgotten if someone with the right energy walks into your life.

Organ meat was sacred to the Native Americans. Though the quality and toxicity of farm raised meat is likely much different.