mandyjw

I've had this happen too. I focused on the background sound (or silence) while mediating or meditated while running for a while and then eventually was able to focus on my breath without hyperventilating. You can also do Wim Hof breathing, or shamanic breathing while laying down, where hyperventilating is the objective.

There's a tendency to want to lock into a way of acting, having no drive to want meaningful relationships is something that can only be in the moment, we can never become someone who has no desires. Wanting itself is not from the ego, the idea of the one who wants or does not want is the ego. Wanting arises or does not.

Sorry about your dad, hoping for the best possible outcome. I think we master our emotions in waves. We make huge progress and think we've got it and then emotion bubbles up and we realize we had been repressing, or had been unconscious of subtle emotions as they built up. We may have identified with being someone who was a master of their emotions and that required us to be a little bit dishonest with ourselves. We think we've failed but then find that we have peeled back another layer of the onion and have to learn to master our emotions all over again, this time allowing us to feel them in a deeper way. Emotional mastery is not an achievement one can own or lock in. Ultimately there's no you to master the emotions, there is awareness of sensations and endless ways to cut ourselves off from feeling them through thought. In other words, allow what is in the moment, no matter what emotions or sensations come up. We shouldn't feel like a psychopath when we are nonreactive and we shouldn't feel like we have failed when emotions are strongly felt.

The image in my avatar appeared to me last night before I went to sleep.

Oh those are fun. These correspond to enlightenment and the spiritual path quite well. Creepy just gets your attention. 1. Brings to light your conflicting emotions of being uncomfortable but also having desire for love to be freely given and out in the open. Consider how you embody love in your everyday life. 2. Triangles are a symbol for ascension, intestines more obviously represent your gut, where deep intuition and intelligence lies. By giving attention to sensations there, taking deep belly breaths during mediation and checking in whenever possible throughout the day, emotions are witnessed rather than repressed, and what ascends from that is that we receive guidance and clarity.

As Leo said about the importance of framework, I think that the internet, access to Leo's and other high consciousness teacher's books and videos and forums like this are more important than access to psychedelics. That said there needs to be a balance of understanding and experiencing. For some like me, the experiencing is natural and I spent a lot of my life believing it was very problematic and trying to be more "normal" and "sane". The understanding I got from the teaching allowed the experience to bloom out on it's own once I understood it for what it was and was brave enough to cultivate/allow it... in a somewhat safe and controlled way. As long as the access to information and understanding exponentially increases ahead of the popularity and availability of psychedelics, I think it will be a good thing. I also think that having people who have been through deep awakenings available for support is super important. I have no idea what I would have done without the forum 6 months ago, and even then having no one who had been through it in person I could reach out to was very difficult at times.

The transition to winter in northern climates can have that effect. Do you take Vitamin D in the fall and winter? You were tested for mono I assume? I would try eating extra carbs and taking a multivitamin to see if it makes a difference, if it does you can try to determine what exactly is out of balance, you don't have to do it forever.

When you educate yourself and have the means to make better choices, it sure does seem ridiculous. We've got the abundance part down, you can imagine what a paradise a cheap grocery store would seem to a hungry farmer 200 years ago. We just need to bring the quality up to match. There have been years and years of people wishing for cheap food more than almost anything else, now we've got it and we're all like "HOLD UP NOW! It's too much!"

This is resistance. Resistance can take many forms, doubt, fear, regret, insecurity, etc. It makes no difference what your life looks like, thrilling or boring AF, if you're always splitting your energy it feels like crap.

It's always only ever you, so don't limit yourself. In my experience true excitement and thrill comes to you and demands to be followed as if it's not a choice. When I try to make it happen there's a lot of resistance, and when I do get the thrilling experience that means that backlash is always right on the heels of it. For example, you know how some people have to drink in order to have a good time socially? That's because the alcohol wipes out their resistance for a short time, then dumps it all in their laps latter. The same thing happens when there's resistance present no matter what choices you make. Follow what feels good and follow your bliss, but be wise enough to discern between wanting excitement without resistance and chasing excitement no matter the cost. Resistance dampens the heights of the thrill that you want anyway, so what you really want is no resistance. It's not the desire for thrill that ruins a thrill seekers life, it's all the resistance he has. Counter-intuitively becoming free of resistance usually means doing things that seem boring, like meditation. True excitement sometimes doesn't seem exciting at all, to the mind or from an outside perspective and that's what's so tricky. A lot of the work that's done in meditation is getting the ability to look at the sky or a little bird and have it move you to tears. We are heightening our sensitivity and the wonder of life becomes breathtaking. At the same time all the big thrilling things we really really want in life, we're often too scared of to let ourselves experience. By working through resistance we drop our fear and clear the way for big desires. Pay attention to the feeling itself of thrill and excitement, rather than trying to sort out with your mind what things are thrilling and exciting. Don't chase a future that will never come, excitement arises now. There's no difference between the feeling of anticipation and satisfaction, we only pretend that there is because we often add resistance to our anticipation. Abraham Hicks is a fantastic teacher for this sort of thing.

@dimitri @egoeimai https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0WQ6W5TuWY

@Serotoninluv Fascinating! One of my favorite painters created his own color wheel and uses the primary colors cyan, magenta, and yellow like a printer does. You cannot mix every color with the traditional red, yellow, blue primary colors. The shades are too skewed. This famous picture broke a lot of people's reality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress Also women see colors differently from men. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/men-and-women-see-things-differently-literally-180954815/

Had a really, really difficult day. I've always hated November. Everything seems dead. I know it's not but it seems that way at first glance. The lonely raw beauty and peace of this place that is so powerful in brighter times of year turns cold, dark and dreary. It's the end of the earth after all. This year I tried very hard to buck this pattern of belief about this time of year. I couldn't sleep well on Halloween night, we got another storm with really high winds. I had forgotten to go outside and do something so I went out in it and I just felt the intense and terrifyingly powerful energy of the wind. It didn't feel like love but it sure did feel alive. There was something nice about being able to write off things as just weather in the past. There was something reassuring about being able to write off bad energies as bad and not my own disconnection. I've been so emotionally bankrupt (not the right term at all but I don't know what is), today, it's been really difficult to be there for a feverish sick 3 year old when you feel you can barely take care of yourself. She insisted that she wanted an apple and I told her harshly that we were all out but there sitting on the microwave was a small gold apple I'd picked from out back and forgotten about. She later told me she wanted a flower. I went out in the rain and picked her two and she insisted I put one in my hair.

How do you think it is that Jesus was able to heal people, "drive out demons" heal mental illness and do other miracles? Do you think Jesus avoided the spirit realm and was afraid to open himself up to it?

@Girzo My mom ended up with a chronic diarrhea, and intolerance to fatty foods after taking antibiotics (for a chest cold) then found she could not tolerate gluten or dairy. Slowly she was able to add back in some fats and discovered that coconut oil didn't bother her at all for some reason. Last year I started getting chronic stomach pain and after many attempts to figure it out ended up following low FODMAPS too. It took me a long time to figure out what bothered me and what didn't but it was a great framework to start from. I still have to follow it loosely. Before the stomach pain started I was on a diet where I was eating a TON of beans and lentils and I wonder if that caused the issue. Now I can only tolerate lentils if they are canned, and only sometimes. I've been adding more higher fodmaps foods in lately and doing ok. I feel a little silly about mentioning this, but this past year I also uncovered a weird sort of connection with a clairvoyant herbal doctor from the 1800's who grew up where I live. He had written a book and has a recipe in it for chronic diarrhea. It's really old and it's a lot of work to make the recipe in full but it might point you towards some herbs to look into if you're interested in herbal remedies. If you're interested I can post it here.

Try strictly following the FODMAPS diet for a few weeks. https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/fodmaps-101#effects

Sick kid, not letting you sleep well, work, get outside, exercise or mediate, and you realize that all the things you do to keep you present and in the zone during the day are fucking bullshit bandaids. Meditation is completely conditional bullshit, and yet, we came here to be and live and want completely conditional bullshit. I stole 5 minutes to mediate upstairs during which and she mixed her popcorn with her milk and tried to hide it in the fridge and spilled it all over the hardwood floor. It was still worth it though. I'm asking for a lot.

Denial isn't necessary, just because you went into something with some unconscious selfish motives doesn't mean that you can't deepen the relationship and see through them at the same time. If you simply reminded young men here to see through their own survival needs, like you're reminding me here, that would be fair. But you're not, you are teaching them ways to act on their instincts, get what they want and perpetuate the self bias.

@Leo Gura I have one lifetime, you cannot separate the evils of self survival with the opportunity of having one life to make an impact. Inspired life purpose and survival are two ends of the same stick. I could list out my own tips and tricks for women to lock down a good, honest, reliable man, which I successfully figured out at 16 years old, but that wouldn't serve anyone. People will call upon different life experiences to teach them the lessons they came here to learn. You can opt out of plenty of them without any suffering when you know what you really want in life.

This entire game and the rules are made up by you. I'm not saying you are wrong about it within certain pockets of society or that you made the game up without the help of others, but you are perpetuating it and teaching it to others. You are making generalizations about women based on your experiences and expectations, sharing them as facts and rules and not considering the effects of perpetuating them because to you every male on this forum is a copy of Leo before he learned how to pick up women and they have to do the same thing you did. That's not the case. You aren't deeply considering the why behind your observations, why don't women like nice guys? BECAUSE NICE GUYS ARE FAKE and assholes underneath it all with an extra layer of deception which is unattractive, so it's better to be with an asshole who is at least honest about it. Just teach men to be honest and genuinely trustworthy and they will do fine. People are as different and unique as can be, and what attracts them to one another is beyond them. Only the male mind would try to come up with a set of rules in order to try to control and understand a spiritual and emotional attraction as fundamental and powerful as the creation of the universe. Only the mind would try to pervert something so beautiful and impossible to understand.

@Nahm Congratulations, I really hope we'll still be seeing you around here.

The problem with being an attractive woman is that being attractive is completely subjective and totally imaginary. Just like Brad Pitt is supposedly attractive and I personally find his appearance somewhat disgusting, every single attractive woman has at some point encountered a man who was completely uninterested in her look or vibe. When society and other men value you based on your looks, and looks are so subjective anyway, you can never ever be sure if you're really attractive or not. I mean society has made huge efforts to try to standardize attractiveness in women, but they can't quite succeed because beauty is the the eye of the beholder. What if you gain 5 pounds over the holidays? Don't put on makeup? Still hot? The best ego boost a woman who bases her worth on her looks can get is to sleep with new men all the time. Is she actually interested in the sex, or is she interested in having that interaction to ensure that she is beautiful and can continue to value herself based on her looks and desirability to men? Who created that need? Did she create that need, or did man create that need in his requirement for women to be beautiful in order to be worth his attention? Or maybe society created that need by setting a beauty standard and deciding what makeup she should wear and what cup size she should have and conveniently providing her options to buy/pay to fix and standardize all of those things? After all, reality is imaginary. Isn't it time to imagine a better one? What's sad is that women are taught that that vulnerability is a personal failing they should get over, instead of a greater depth of experience kind of thing. They often get used in the beginning and then learn to "man up" and use men before they can get used. In a man's world, the only way a woman can win is by thinking like a man and playing the man's game. Or by opting out of the game. Incels are feeling the pain of the effects of a man's world, survival of the fittest/hottest, stage orange society and women who disregarded their femininity, intuition and bought into it. It's played out, it doesn't work. Time for stage green please.

On this forum we haven't decided how to marry the insights we've had into the nature of reality with "real" life. So even if we awakened and we understand the extraordinary power of emotion, we still go along our everyday life and interactions to people with our old patterning. The patterning of one who is naturally open to emotion is going to look very different and unevolved to the patterning of one who is used to always defaulting to logic. We each have different challenges, we could help each other see through those challenges if we could see the mutual connection we have and realize that we are here for each other, in an opposite mirroring kind of effect. The more we focus on what we don't want, the more we get. We don't want bugs, so we mist the entire environment with DDT and we end up with worse problems than bugs. Discover then focus on what it is that you DO want. You want a deeper connection to exist on this forum beyond a connection of logic, of who is right or wrong or who understands reality better. You want something that goes deeper than that, something that transcends duality, something that includes and embraces emotion instead of shirking from it or slapping it away as unevolved nonsense. Who or where else on the internet could great potential for connection exist but within a community of people who is so awake? I have a butterfly chrysalis on my porch right now, but it has been a really long time and it hasn't hatched. Should I pull out the bug spray?

You are the book's author though, you lovingly imagined and created all the other characters in your life and you love them as yourself. @sausagehead Yes, and you can to learn to interact with what you loved about your dog in a different way. Look for what is there, not for what isn't. We're so conditioned to think of things as forms, and are so distracted by them sometimes we don't actually even get to know a person until after they die.