mandyjw

That's interesting but be aware that it's a belief with a filter of fear, and of self and other. Everyone else is you. You are not separate from them, you are one. What do you gain by separating yourself from others?

You certainly can but this is one of those areas that is good to merge everyday normal life and meditation. Be as present as you can focusing on your breath, eyes open, looking normal, interacting when appropriate. Other people cannot condition your subconscious mind, it can seem like they have unwanted influence sometimes but it says more about your own susceptibility than them. Is this a fear that can be stayed with and seen for what it is, rather than allowing it to control your experience and perceptions?

Conservatives believe that communities and families should be responsible for people's welfare. The shadow of this is that it makes your acceptance within that community key to your survival, so it means you are less free to be an individual, evolve and so some people are left out of this safety net depending on the consciousness of the community. The good thing about it is that the government doesn't have eyes and ears and often fails to react quickly in a time of need. Also in a time of death or crisis, it's a beautiful thing to see a community come together to care for someone, and it offers much more than financial support but makes them feel loved and connected. For example, a bus driver for my son's school suddenly got diagnosed with terminal cancer, she was given a month or so to live. Her husband is also a bus driver, and so is her son. There is a terrible shortage of bus drivers because the government doesn't understand how important and how much responsibility the job takes, so it's a job that requires immense responsibility and pays very little. The community makes up for this by greatly appreciating and honoring their kid's bus drivers. A huge event was scheduled last minute to raise money (much needed) for her family. The government can put in policies that come from the heart and are a reflection of the people's consciousness, but the government will never have a heart itself. It operates based on rules, standards and policies and will never be able to intuit or react like a community.

By the way, anyone is welcome to comment here if they like, same as with my old journals. Yesterday I was told out of the blue that the aid worker I worked really hard for about a year to find for my autistic son is resigning. It took a while to process. I decided to meditate instead of going outside because it was so cold, but after that I decided to go for a run anyway. When something like that happens it's obvious how mind and ego controlled I still am. My pattern is always to do fabulously in the situation then to complain to other people in my own mind. If I can get to a place of crying or releasing emotions sometimes I realize the event triggered deeper older feelings about things. The run didn't seem to help much, I went home and stretched and was in child's pose and just thought about how I didn't really want to live. When people say they are suicidal on here it breaks my heart and I wish that we were better at offering resources, but in my case I know it's a dramatic thought that comes up. It's a misinterpretation of not wanting to think, not wanting to suffer, of getting stuck in the energy of the moment. It's rejection of life, a rejection of desire, a rejection of purpose. I feel pretty lost when it comes to purpose and direction right now. These feelings only lasted for a minute when my daughter climbed on my back and I knew that opting out and moping for long stopped being an option for me seven years ago when I became a mom. Sometimes this feels reassuring and other times it feels like a prison. Again, all thought interpretation. I dug myself out of it, whenever I went to my computer or especially the forum I felt worse so I cleaned up the house and got out some Christmas decorations and joked a lot with the kids as we put them around. As I was falling asleep a vivid image came to me. It was of a old woman sitting outside at a table, looking healthy and with a look of love, happiness and peace on her face. She looked a little like my grandmother but not quite. I realized she was me. It's interesting how many egoic thoughts I have about not living very long, not wanting to get old, yet also thinking it's a blessing I'm not worthy of.

I should do some research on lucid dreaming. A couple nights ago I dreamed that there was this little bird and he came near me and was losing all his feathers as he flew but he didn't seem bothered. They fell on my arm. I decided I might get bird lice so for the next 10 minutes as I went on with my dream life, I kept asking myself if I needed to wash my arm and having different answers, "No, it's a dream you can't get bird lice", back to "but maybe I CAN because this is real." That's a frequent occurrence in my dreams, that I pop in and out of dis-identifying with the dream. Hmm, same way with waking life too now that I think of it. When I had an awakening, I stopped dreaming, a story dream was very rare for a couple of weeks. Instead I would wake up with intense energy and words spinning and some huge revelation, needed to be written down and processed. I'd sleep for 3-4 hour stretches and that was it. Since then I still have small revelations or feelings of awakening off and on. But mostly I have story dreams again.

No, I wouldn't feel good eating that breakfast everyday. I have found I feel the best when I think very little about what I eat. Obsession with having a clean diet or completely giving up and overeating are both indications that I am unfocused and uninspired in life. Sometimes I want to have something "bad" I don't normally eat and it feels right and I feel great after. Then if I'm not focused thinking comes in and wants to make the spontaneous treat into a habit.

I'd compare it to having a conversation with someone who flatters you but who you inherently feel/know is only out for their selfish interests. You may enjoy the things they say on some level but also be aware of an unsettled feeling in the background. In my experience the ideal diet for me is ever evolving, so there are no rules I can follow without getting into trouble eventually. I found a healthy diet that made me feel and look amazing so this diet became religion to me. After a few months I felt sluggish and went on vacation and had a cheap continental free breakfast with dairy and sugar and a bunch of other stuff I wasn't supposed to eat. I felt amazing and was very surprised. Food I believed would make me feel bad instead made me feel great, at least on this occasion. The exclusion of certain foods has a toll, psychologically mostly, but also physically, so making a positive choice over another is better, but if you have to exclude foods, sometimes it's worth paying the toll until you learn some new habits.

Sex alters consciousness and anything that alters consciousness makes us afraid because we want to live in a society where people easily accept rules and aren't pulled by other forces we can't control very well. The misunderstanding that we are the body creates a lot of discomfort. We know that the body is important to our survival but we also inherently know that we are more than the body, so we actually try to separate from the thing that we think we are. We can't do that of course, inclusion love and acceptance for the body is the only way of transcendence.

The waves on the ocean are a phenomenon created in oneness by the air (wind), the formation of the earth, the sunlight upon it (allowing it to be in water form and allowing you to see it), and of course the water itself. None of these things are separate from each other, each is happening within consciousness as you sit and simply appreciate the beauty of it all. It's magic, it's alchemy, and you are the alchemist, you are the creator and the creation. Your separateness and your limitation is freedom to be a human who can go hike up a cliff and watch the waves on the ocean. Of you can spend your life on the ocean as a fisherman. Or live and die somewhere inland and never see it. If you deny your separation, if you deny your wave like nature you also deny the perfection of the the One. It is helpful to speak of it sometimes in that way especially to people who have always lived their life in threat of being a finite separate self. It is helpful to speak of "letting go". But at some point it is seen that because you are one, you never could have really denied or let go of anything.

@VeganAwake If you say nonduality is true and duality is illusion or false, you've just made another duality. I think that's why people like to say that nonduality includes duality, it's a "yes" to everything, so everything is as true as it is false. Inclusion is more true than exclusion because exclusion is duality and inclusion is not. Which is why it's described that way. I just watched The Little Mermaid and in that moment and now recalling I am just as much Ariel, Ursula, and Flounder as I am Mandy. I am nothing but consciousness yet also including everything within consciousness. The illusion is beautiful, it creates a whole new world of possibilities through creating choice and limitation. It cannot be enjoyed properly without the knowledge of oneness and yet, that's what we came here for.

Was there someone other than me who assumed Nahm was a middle aged woman for months? Cause that would make me feel better.

Is it a fantasy or a visualization? Explore what feeling it evokes or why exactly it leads you to focus, or let go.

@ElhamMaybe it's not about the fantasy, it's about the focus the fantasy allows you to have?

Falling in love with yourself, spoiler alert, you aren't what you think you are.

Look into anything Abraham Hicks, books, clips on youtube.

A couple weird things happened today, I'm not sure why I like recording these synchronicity type things but I really do. I went on a hike this morning. The frost was burning off and I could see my breath slowly dissolve into the air in the bright sunlight. It was surreal. Looong ago there was a farm there, and there are guess what, old apple trees in the woods there. I had an impulse to walk to one but really did not want to. This is a frequent relationship I'm having with impulses. Then I started noticing chickadees singing and more showed up and they all sort of flew to that very tree. So I went to it happily and watched them. One stayed very close to me and I watched it for a while. My son asked what specific meant in the car on the way to the beach. I couldn't define this for him and had to give examples. "So "a dog" is general, specific is when you say, a medium size black dog with long hair." I thought I might see one later having brought this image to mind and later at the beach someone showed up with a black medium sized long-haired dog. It may have had a tiny bit of white on it. At the beach we walked a long way and I realized that we should have been wearing orange because it's hunting season. My mind started imagining us getting shot. "Stop thinking that, you create your reality." A minute later my son found this bizarre rock, it was black with red in an eroded hole that looked exactly like a bullet hole. My daughter picked it up and brought it home with her. It took me another minute to even make the connection. I couldn't decide if I should gas my car up tonight or not, I was dressed like a slob and didn't want to run into anyone, but I felt like I should. The last time I went to gas up I had an impulse not go, did not listen and I couldn't get to a pump. So tonight I decided to see what would happen and went. The gas station was PACKED, busier than I'd ever seen it, but I got to a pump perfectly when I drove in and watched other cars lined up waiting. I cleaned the house for Thanksgiving and found a penny on the floor and got an impulse to google it. This seemed really stupid, as I was busy cleaning the house and it's a penny in terrible condition. My faith was not great but I figured I should have faith and act on it rather than doubt. So when I googled 1994 penny. There's a rare version (not the penny I found) that has letter missing in the Liberty part, just the i and the b. Liberty is a word that has a lot of meaning to me. What does Lerty spell?, I wondered. It's a town in Virginia where Robert E.Lee was born. Pretty funny to have Abraham Lincoln's profile next to a word that spells the home town of Robert E. Lee.

I think so. It's the result of the oneness and connection we always have but are rarely conscious of. Our intelligence is just a small part of infinite intelligence. I never gave chakras and kundalini energy any attention at all, not even enough to even bother considering whether I believed in them or not. After I had an awakening I realized that they were extremely accurate ways of describing/illustrating certain sensations and understandings. Christianity was a huge part of my awakening, but it was because all my life I had contemplated certain things in the Bible, wanting to know the answers and understand but never getting there, and then during the awakening it was like "wish granted" over and over again. The best description of it is again from Abraham Hicks, "the grid filling in", but even with things I never knew I had wanted to know.

@electroBeam There's also something else going on because we are not actually separate beings. Leo is a teacher we all follow so it's obvious when he makes a realization that the rest of us would accept it too. But there's a more subtle sharing of insight and thoughts on a vibrational level happening too. Synchronicity is a really cool sign of this occurring. The void is the same thing that Abraham Hicks describes as the vortex but with different feelings associated with it. And all of this is synonymous with infinite love, it's all just a word, an image or a concept we attach to infinite love. It makes sense that if the void is the purest most powerful love, that our fear stops us from going. The fear has nothing to do with the void/Source itself but is only the gatekeeper. I think it is a confusion to equate fear with the void. So that is how Sadhguru enjoys his rich fulfilling life.

Have you noticed how Terrence McKenna saw elves, some Christians see Jesus, and how a lot of people here experience the void or no man's land and also have you noticed how much that's talked about here? Imagination runs deep. There is no past so all past imaginings are part of you, if there was fear or love powering the emotions behind it, it's more powerful and will come to the forefront when resistance is low.

My best guess is yes, some are, but only because they partially understand it themselves.

Super healthy fast food options, with biodegradable packing, yes please! Seed company, especially offering heirloom and organic varieties Garden, small farm consultant (test soil ph levels for people, build raised beds, make suggestions for soil amendments, garden location, etc) Start a conscious childcare center, emphasis on nature, outdoor time, activities such as yoga, art, music, etc.

Well this was a waste of 20 minutes that COULD have been spent doing butt shaping exercises, and really getting me somewhere in life.

You're trying to get women to submit to doing their best to survive in a game that's rigged against them. Of course some women are gonna upset the game board, throw the cards in your face and storm off. You would too. If everyone agrees to play A MORE FAIR GAME and it will be more fun for everyone.

The purpose of this thread is to share examples of stage green, and here you are suggesting that women would be better off by reverting to stage orange values and focusing on work.

Yes, psychotherapy is definitely called for, however we aren't speaking to mother of the child, we are speaking to the OP who is the child's uncle and from that position he only has so much power of influence. His relationship with his sister and offering help without alienating her is the best way that he can possibly make a positive change in the situation. Often people unconsciously throw away concern for parents out of their protective instincts for the child. In reality this hurts children much worse than examining a family or a situation as a whole and having compassion for everyone involved.