Truth

I think you're stressing over the structures too much, go back to your intentions you set for meditation (in your case relaxing) because it's clear your techniques are not serving your intentions whatever your true intentions may be, understand that and you'll find your answer or breakthrough.

"Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water."

@mystic This is good, your slowly realizing how asleep you actually are, and realizing how much you're triggered by the external environment. This is where understanding of awareness and using things like meditation allowing you to detach and not get sucked into the content of thoughts and building this muscle of being able to re-focus your mind to the present moment among other things, Leo has a video on understanding awareness and also a mindfulness meditation video and a bonus I'll mention is "how your mind distorts reality" the more you gain awareness about how you go unconscious the easier it is to be mindful.

I think Eben Pagan could bring some new insight into this --> https://www.youtube.com/user/EbenPaganMedia/videos I think a big part is get done what you know has to get done each day without question ie your "ritual", the stuff you know is gonna grow you, Get that done first (habits) the biggest priorities and the biggest opportunities with some time management structures that Eben Pagan talks about, He talks about a "success ritual" a "Prioritization System" and "Ultra Successful Time Managment System" are some videos to start looking at. This video is actually very helpful and incredibly insightful I just came across

I'm trying to resolve this same issue, I think its looking at the big picture each day, also anything that is outside what you "should" be doing should be considered comfort unless this other thing fits in with your intentions or goals in some form but even this can create excuses so.. Hope others can shed some more light on this as I also try to figure this out.

This video is a very good place for you to start, master your emotions. You're not gonna be able to change your patterns if you aren't aware of them happening in the moment.

It's amazing to me how something as simple as going up and talking to a girl your curious about can be blown out into many extremes. being creepy, being weird, who gives a fuck? If someone told me I was weird for talking to girls I was curious about is that really weird? I think it's more weird to allow yourself to miss the opportunity and the chance to build something with this person. If you're gonna let weird stop you then just follow the rest of the sheep, do what's normal and see how far that takes you. It's just the big issue and what Leo was talking about was people take this to huge extremes, breaking hearts left and right, proving their superiority with hotter girls, better asses, better tits, emotionally using women, lying to women, manipulating women, bragging to others about their experiences and many many other things including how fulfilled in the end you will be from doing this for a long time. Leo means just have a fucking heart and doing it a little more ethically. Give a shit a little about how this might effect these women. If you want multiple women, be polyamorous, have a little more consciousness about how this might emotionally hurt these women if they were to know what you were up to. You can approach girls! Just be aware of what you're doing, why you're doing it and what you ultimately want from this and actually give a shit about the other person in the end.

I personally prefer to chase the intangibles, if I can get those I believe everything else will fall in line.

Yeah you could 100% do that, just know that Leo has already done that, he's already created an amazing structure for everything you need to know and how to stay on this journey including 12 book reviews. Also just know that the investment in yourself isn't the hard part at all, the hard part is you putting in the work to get the results you want, if you have no problems creating structures and putting in lots of reading time then by all means go for it. But if you want to cut that time in half, save up some money and invest in yourself, honestly you should be using both resources. for me in the grand scheme of things, 249$ isn't a lot of money compared to the information he has given. It's honestly nothing compared to having everything you need to know about life purpose in one place. Some can't see the value, in fact most don't even know how to translate that value in the real world, which Leo also shows you how to do.

And that's the struggle. Failing and messing up or "falling into traps" are just a part of life, but you learn a lot from it, failure is the best teacher. We're all gonna fall into a lot of traps, even when we're being aware of the traps and that's okay. Your fear of falling into traps is actually trapping you paradoxically, so be mindful of that, there's actually no traps in the reality, this is what people are really getting "stuck" on, we're all gonna stumble a lot, but as long as we persevere we'll find our way eventually.

Yeah.. but you could also consider it a place to go for people who are really lost and need some guidance.

Final day 7: I would have posted this yesterday but I literally just came home after work and slept til I had to go to work again although I did have some insights they were just progresses of what I've been having insights about so far but anyway, Well, I learned a lot about addictions, although it's still hard for me to step away from YouTube and other distractions, I'm becoming more conscious and aware of how these things are affecting the quality of my life. I feel like I'm on the right track towards my intentions, this posting has been an interesting experience for me giving me new ideas and insights into how I should be growing myself. I hope @Argue hasn't went too far off It's been an experience and look forward to more challenges! til next time.

This is the counter-intuitve and paradoxicalness about this whole thing that Leo describes. Every question or assumption is already based on his projection on reality, and you can also see it as a procrastination to even test or find out for himself, he hasn't even questioned his own pre-existing notions he's already made about his perception of reality, he's already supporting his beliefs and false premises he's already made about reality on top of more of his beliefs and his false premises. How can you find out for yourself if your ego and preexisting notions about what will happen have already been made? Even deeper, the meaning he made when the information entered his mind and the time between when he made his comment was already his projection on reality, ran through his self agenda, ran through his ego and every belief, thought or assumption he's already made about reality to come to his conclusion, or his projection on reality, every meaning, judgement, or evaluation is all part of this defficiency cognition that Leo ascribes. The very thing we are trying to undermine. I'de say the real question is how does one practically do this?

I really think you should just go back to the basics, be the atmosphere, mindful of the content, go meta on yourself (looking at your body in the third person.) to help you refocus on the present moment and do this to continue to re-focus when you notice yourself getting caught up in thoughts and continue to re-focus on the moment, that's where the muscle gets built when you can re-focus. No need to make this complicated, it's really simple. RE-WATCH this one more time to re-ground yourself.

Day 6: I've had a massive breakthrough tonight and I'll continue to build on it but, wow, something so obvious staring me right in the face, I can be so busy running around both internally and externally that it can blind you from seeing what's so obviously in front of your face. first off, I realize that doing nothing counter intuitively is actually more productive and healthier than distracting myself with YouTube or movies, porn, that's the first obvious insight, the second thing I had a massive insight was into what I believe about the world, truly believe internally, not logically, I realize if I can Identify those and create new more positive beliefs this can be massive to creating change. I was doing nothing and I went over my self mastery structure thinking about what the most important thing that I could possibly be doing, and I just got to thinking more big picture, and the obvious thing was self mastery, truly learning and understanding how to master my beliefs, my mindsets, ways of thinking, emotional control over myself, discipline level, mental techniques, visualizations, affirmations. I guess to some degree this is what I've been doing, but having a more focused conscious thought of it makes me realize it's true importance, it's true potential to getting these things down. In fact that's where my technique came from, really digging in and understanding my beliefs, learning how to not create new problems which is massively important. And the final insight that really hit me and actually made me quite emotional when I heard it after doing nothing for an hour, I thought about how my ego wants to be comfortable, wants to resist, rebel, get angry, and that's all petty stuff, but the point I realize on a deeper level, what's truly worse than death? I mean death itself is death, I mean it's over, but, as far as me being alive, my whole belief about death, how I try to keep me safe, avoid rejection, avoid failure, avoid negative emotions, all to ultimately avoid death. What's worse than death as far as me being conscious and alive knowing and being aware of my death? Regret, regretting the opportunity's I could miss, all the things I was scared to do, wasting my life, and this is so pain painstakingly obvious but my beliefs about reality stop me from ever being conscious of this fact, and it's scary to think about what other false premises I believe about reality could be. What else is so obvious? I'm so busy running around with all these false premises, it's like there's this beautiful perfect magic show going on right in front of my face and I can't see it because since birth I've been lead to believe this show is just the way things have always been and never had the wisdom to ask myself or even question the premise of this perfect magic show. I need to continue to ask myself, what is so obvious right here that I'm missing? I realize I've been living on this pile of false assumptions my entire life and now I need to work and start recognizing the obvious truths about reality and align myself with them and understand the practicality of doing that, ultimately undermine my entire world view and stop living in falsehood , which I expect to be very emotionally difficult but worth it. This whole post still doesn't even scratch the surface of what I need to be more conscious of.

Alright day 5: having more thoughts and insights into addiction, very subtle distinctions, during meditation yesterday I got to thinking why I couldn't really focus, yesterday I had insights, new techniques, all these new ways of thinking made me realize that's when I attach to thoughts the most, anything that really serves my self agenda I can't seem to stop thinking about, that's when addiction to thinking and thoughts become a force of nature, I go completely unconscious on autopilot, I fall completely asleep, it isn't until I've exhausted the thinking and have done this purging of thoughts is when I can relax, the monkey chatter calms down, I've known this but I've gain a little more consciousness of it from a new perspective, It's hard to build my awareness when I believe thoughts best serve my self agenda which is what I need to be questioning further. I also had an insight today about accepting the present moment, when I accept the present moment with whatever is happening, whether I feel I'm stuck at work or don't feel like being there, resisting, it's acceptance and surrendering to where you are is really key detachment and non neediness which is one of my intents. It seems as though resistance is also my ego resisting the present moment no matter what situation I find myself in. My ego wants to be somewhere else, but its stuck because it believes it has control which is what I confirm more and more that it doesn't. Surrender, letting go, accepting what is, the present moment, and detachment all seem to be keys to non neediness, and to just ultimately be happier with whatever is happening. There's a lot less you struggling against reality. Just you being aligned with the mundanity of reality and being totally peaceful with where you are, what you are doing, and accepting what is.

A confused, run-a-muck ego can't eliminate itself, it's way to busy doing everything it can to protect itself, in fact everything you do in your life is to protect your ego, self agenda and your self image. Of course you should accept your ego and lower-self, a mature ego accepts itself, a mature ego can be open minded to certain contradictions in it's worldview, a mature ego is open to the idea that it might not exist, you can't do both, you're exactly right. Why? because an ego can't protect itself and kill itself at the same time.

There's a lot of black and white thinking going on there buddy, time for you to realize the massive GREY area that you deny to yourself everyday.

Alright day 4: Been kind of a busy day with work and my daily rituals. today going to work I felt a less and less need for knowledge and music, being present in the moment felt interestingly more peaceful, and I love my knowledge and music. I usually just stuff my face with my music or knowledge, but today that exact thought occurred to me, stuffing my face, trying to resist the present moment, the void, the emptiness, the eternal now, whatever you wanna call it, what actually ended up happening not distracting and stuffing my face with that stuff is I ran into a technique, just as Leo talked about in "How To Be Ruthlessly Effective At Anything" this technique was doing absolute wonders for me for the intention I set, I plan to be using it more and more, that technique involves understanding beliefs, identifying limiting or negative beliefs, and changing those limiting or negative beliefs, with the ultimate intent of systematically stopping myself from creating new problems in my life. I really feel this will help me realize my ultimate intention for this 7 day challenge and help me with much much more. so far this challenge has been a huge new step for me. let's keep going.

Day 3: Really starting to grasp addiction, it seems everything I do, EVERYTHING, is to distract myself of this constant void or emptiness of life. I mean, it's pure emptiness, it just goes and goes and goes and all I do is fill this void with stuff to do, whether that's thinking about things, or distracting myself with YouTube or knowledge even as important knowledge is to me. I sat for 2 hours today, I really got to thinking like.. what if I just did nothing for 12 hours a day? I mean, I got all these important things I should be doing, -- staying with my commitments, my meditation habit, my workout routine, reading habit, planning and strategizing. What if I just didn't do any of that? and it ended up being a really peaceful feeling like, I don't really have to do any of that. it's like all my problems just went out the window, I didn't have to do any of it, of course I still am but, it was still a pretty insightful thing to know that just being and not really thinking, it's actually really peaceful not running around chasing things, after that everything I did felt peaceful, although I did watch a YouTube video or two it wasn't that long like 20 minutes, and then I started focusing on my intentions again without distractions. but that was a pretty big insight for me. Looking forward to keep going here.

Day 2: I've had a ton of insights today, in fact it takes me back to the days when I first started cutting out distractions, but anyway, I had some really deep insights today, but out of all of them the deepest insight was the fact that I've re-focused my life by staying away from distractions, I've literally started a new vision for my life, a new structure, and realized that if I'm gonna be on my path I can't be distracted, at all, I realize that everything I do I have to have a set intention towards my path. If it's not towards my ultimate intention on my path then it's a distraction. And my ego really didn't like hearing that. but I just get the sense that this is how to get change in my life. all my efforts have to be concentrated to reach a breakthrough. I contemplated life deeply today and will continue to but I just realized, this is my one life and I don't want to waste it, and as long as I do my best to stay on my path I can die happy and no regrets (or at least minimize them haha). Everything else feels like a distraction, comfort, instant gratification. I just realize I can't live the life I want if I'm doing that stuff..I don't know how long I'm gonna stay on track here, I realize all these insights and realizations mean nothing unless I commit to them.. I fear me falling back into old ways, being distracted, doing useless pointless crap. But, I gotta try, I'm aware this is all talk. But I'm only writing this because I committed to this challenge of posting each day. So this is me posting

@Argue Go ahead, as my signature says, "good artists copy, great artists steal"

I'm down for this, except I'm gonna mostly contemplate life, I'm only gonna do what I think needs to be done and nothing else, no internet, music, nothing, for this entire week. I'm really curious to see if I can do this, the other day I just sat and did nothing for 4 hours straight and that was pretty peaceful and surprised I could do that but my intention wasn't realized. I'm resisting even posting this, but shit, I feel this is gonna be interesting. I'll post here everyday a little something that I learned or something like that. Here's my personal structure. Intention --> to understand addictions, deeply contemplate life to motivate me to know and do the things I really want, ultimately detach and create non neediness. Anything that fulfills this intention is okay to do. Questions to contemplate --> What would I miss the most about life? What do I want to get out of this life? What is really worth doing? What isn't worth doing? How am I being small minded? How do I need to reorganize my life? Ground yourself everyday in this structure.

Just bought both Awaken The Giant Within and Unlimited Power, excited to read both of them