h inandout

Pick one cool as fuck thing you wanna do in 6 months/a year/two years. Whatever seems about on target. Write out a budget of how much money you would need to sustain a fun/chill lifestyle until then, and how much money you would need at that point. Figure out how much you can be contributing to that amount regularly. Find some sort of professional training and/or education that ballparks a career direction. Figure out how much that is gonna cost on top of everything. Then convince your parents to meet you at your deficits. They will be thrilled to be investing in you strategically and in your career. And will support your healthy fun goals too. Because if you have a better career, even if just means more education for the right now, then they don't have to worry about you as much. And you will be doing society a favor by just picking a direction. Honestly, I want to be a singer. But my parents will and have been paying for massage therapy school because it's more of a sure-fire investment. Plus I get to keep working on figuring out how to heal my body and my family. In the meantime I teach English online. Either way, it's a hell of a lot closer to what I want than my fucking useless degree in engineering.

That was a good video to watch while tripping. Haha, thanks.

Swing dancing. (Or any dancing) I think partner dancing is a great way to have fun, to have a three minute connection with someone and then to respectfully move on. It may help you orient yourself to the energies or experiences that you are looking for so that you can advocate that more clearly. It can help to build healthy self-and-other respecting boundaries too.

Lolz. You communicate beautifully. I was also just thinking about how it is possible to extend phonemes (letter sounds), almost like you draw out the tails in cursive. Only, I wouldn't try to hard to do this consciously because it would still be rigid, unless your being poetic in a poetic setting. But in more serious settings, maybe a better practice would be to sink into your seat and indulge in a breath just half a moment before you speak. Again, I wouldn't try too hard to do this, but if it starts to happen naturally, just go with it! It's so beautiful to be in that juicy space where nothing you say is off key.

I have no idea about anything, but.... Maybe you can ask others for forgiveness if you are not able to deliver precision in your speech. But hold a space of confidence and warmth to allow people to slowly fall into the rhythm you are trying to lay down.

Next time you're star gazing, try looking at the depth of the stars.

Oh wow! I clicked on this thread thinking it had to do with the famous stars. But what your saying really makes sense. And is really beautiful. And even kind of mundane! What it bring to mind for me is something I learned from my anatomy and physiology teacher about diffusion. We all stood up and pretended to be molecules diffusing. And as the moments progressed, some of us were on one side of the room and some of us were on the other, all kind of minding our own space. It begs the question, how did the molecules know where to go?

@Outer Where is the research for this? I have a hard time believing it, but I'm not always right...

Undocumented immigrants.

Yoga teachers seem to like to yell at their students for dwelling on their to-do lists, but why not encourage it!? I have so much resistance when I look at my to-do list, and rightfully so, sometimes it's hard to be strategic when you have so much activity going on and you don't know how it's gonna unfold. But I can just use each listed item as an object of meditation, allow the resistance to rise and fall, and then act. Don't even have to bother too terribly much with strategic order.

I also hate that therapists have a bad rap. I read one-flew-over the cuckoos nest as a kid, so I avoided anything to do with psychologists like the plague, but that's so not reality. Some therapists suck, but there are definitely bomb one's too. Therapy is fun, and it's like the only kosher place in the world where you are actually encouraged to complain about life, and where you have someone who gives a shit enough to validate your emotions and help you figure out a way to empower yourself. There's also multiple healing modalities that incorporate the same principles and the same loving care, if you know how to look for them, but start with therapy.

I totally get this. My question to you is what supports would you like to see in place for yourself that would help you release the fear of relapse? If I was feeling paranoid about what my doc and parents thought, I would feel so unsupported! I am not criticizing them, or encouraging you not to trust them, but perhaps you can brainstorm some people that you can talk this out with and have regular conversations with, even if they are about whatever, doesn't have to be a therapist. Are you interested in joining some sort of group or team that could keep you grounded? What do you do to work out your problems? What triggers you, and what will help you most with this? What do you need to feel confident moving forward? I quit my depression meds a long time ago... and I am definitely on your side and rooting for you. Not gonna say I avoided depression completely after the fact, but I did learn a lot about how the mind and the world work as a result.

4-5hours! woah. I went to yoga every day this week and my body needs full recovery. haha. Do you have a coach? Do you have supportive friends? Do you do other fun things to keep your spirits up? Are you financially stable? Do you have a bigger reason for wanting to be a pro? Do you do any kind of cross-training? Do you regularly take time to learn about mindfulness and meditation? I personally believe that you're allowed to have ridiculous at any point in your life, and honestly it makes your experience of them all that much richer. I was just reading about Diana Nyad - look her up! ha! I want to be a musician, and it's a slow as hell process because I also have to do adult things along the way, so I feel ya. I posed the questions above because they are the one's I am asking myself right now.

Love this! Thanks. I feel like I am swimming in a deep ocean of shadows right now, and there is so much going on, so it's really helpful to read your empowering post. Let me see if I can understand Faceless and Deci Belle in my own terms: This process is going to be continuing for some time to come. For now I have realized that I am not my thoughts and I am not my emotions. In fact, I can channel them and give them space and a voice so that they no longer operate on a subconscious level. I have no need to identify with these freshly channelled thoughts and no need to act on them, just hold and love them for the brief moment that they hold their tang then swallow and take another bite. Their instantaneous presence is enough to consider the work complete. And now there is space for new things to arise, and I can simply do the same process with those things, including for suppressed joyful emotions and thought and ideas. Perhaps my entire future is one giant suppressed potential, so shall we get going? IDK, am I even on the right track?

@Pallero aw thanks for that story! @Recursoinominado I've taught a few nutrition/ayurveda classes in the past, and I want to expand to teaching meditation too. My fear is that I don't have a really good trusting relationship with a mentor. I've just read a lot I suppose, and I feel like I just wanna get the information out there! And not worry so much about getting some mentor's approval. It makes me insanely nervous, but somehow, each time I improve my ability to stand solidly in front of whoever has come to the class. I think my advice to myself right now is to go ahead and have the "psychotic fuck-it courage" and then do every single little thing possible leading up to support myself and calm my nerves. Good luck and go gettum!

I would add that the usefulness of personality assessment helps you see how you interact with society and how other people may be doing something completely different, and how ultimately we are all balancing each other out. You can be more of yourself and sometimes you might want to be someone else. You might want to go for jobs or pursue a variety of life strategies that help you make the most of your natural you. But sometimes that doesn't work out, so we look around at all the other people and say why is life working or not working for them? How can I help and support them? How can I learn from their approach? How can I either capitalized on imbalanced characteristics over which I have no control?

I've tried MBTI and found interesting results, although my personality is really quite amalgam, but the exercise was certainly worth my time because it led to some mild insights about how we interact with each other. I don't think I know enough people who use it to feel confident talking about it. I do however, use the doshas: Vata, Pitta, Kapha. Time tested, and the metaphors can really lead to some great insights. But it can also lead to severe stereotyping, which I guess you just have to put up with if you wanna go deeper with it.

@LiakosN Uff! My gut reaction is to tell you to cut her off from her own agony and break up. She is a hungry ghost and needs support from other women to understand her own needs and emotions. If she can't find that outside support, then it is unreasonable to assume she will get exactly what she wants or needs from you with the way things are. At that point it would be good to seperate. Ask yourself seriously, though, if you want a deeper more colorful relationship, or if you are suppressing that desire within yourself. I can't speak for you or answer this question for you. Maybe you are happy with a mild contented relationship at the moment. Or perhaps, somewhere inside of you, you want something more? Either way is okay.

@NoSelfSelf I feel really sensitive to other people's disappointment around "friend zoning" and it is so intense for me that I self sabotage because I know I really don't have male friends, or actually friends at all. If someone were to know how deeply needy and terrified I am on the inside, I would certainly cause them harm, so I definitely have a tendency to isolate myself. I hear what you're saying about guys needing to lean into sexuality otherwise nothing's ever gonna happen, I would think it was a pain in the ass to attend to so many subtleties if I was a dude. I even have a crappy haircut just because I secretly want to convince men to friend-zone themselves. I realize that this is a moot strategy now, and I should just be as fabulous as I want to be and not worry about breaking people's hearts. @ajasatya Yepp. I love sex, and I love making it really juicy, especially after my period. Let's be more brutally honest here though. I could have a booty call in a matter of minutes if that's really what I wanted. What I actually need here is Attention and Allowing and Acceptance, things I did not receive enough of in my childhood. I want my boyfriend to be my rock and my therapist. I see this in myself and it terrifies me. I have had my sense of reality rocked so deeply that I want someone who can stand next to me and literally see from my viewpoint and tell me what it is that I am missing. Who is gonna be able to pay enough attention to me other than someone who is interested in me? Totally fucked I know. I am trying to be my own best friend instead. I think I would like to try the monk lifestyle if I can some day. It seems like bodily desires are much easier to drop in the right Sangha. I have really pressing debts from trying to save an ex with medical issues (yes big mistake, I get it now, why do you think I'm on actualized!? and yes his paranoid thinking is the reason I have seemed to lose track of reality) Anyways, I can't ever seem to hold a job or a home for long enough to get my financial needs met. I think it's frustrating and disappointing that I can't be friends with people, especially men, because I don't want to burden the conversation with my overwhelmingly unmet needs. Having said that, I totally recognize that there are shades of difference between perceived threats and actual threats. I am afraid of letting someone see how much I am hurting on the inside because I fear they won't show compassion. Intellectually, I know this is silly, because it doesn't matter if they show me compassion or not, I can always move on. It is down right irresponsible for me to keep isolating myself again and again and again because I fear judgement and lack of support. I think I just need to be more persistent with clarifying things in my conversations. @alyra Thank you for your sympathies and your encouragement to wait for right timing. I wish I was strong enough on my own two feet, but I see that is in some ways an elusive dream. Do I really intensely need to be independent? Do I really need to fear people's judgement of my actual needs? Good inquiry questions. @HII I did wind up telling him what I said here, and he said he could tell I had a lot of fear, and suggested meditation to help with that. I felt good to have him validate that I really do have too much fear. I think meditation will help if I stop trying to do it alone all the time. You are absolutely right: I want someone to save me, and to not save me at the same time. It confuses the fuck out of me. So I suppose to help me overcome this paradox, I will just look at it from the framework of dealing with issues as they come up, one step at a time. If I get help, so be it, if not, so be it. Half of me wants to be indefinitely isolated until I am a strong independent woman, but the other half of me is screaming inside and demanding a whole and fulfilling life right now!

He is a beautiful man, and he proposed a really sexy idea: let's be meditation teachers together. But a blocked him, and it hurts. He did not connect with a few key facts that I was trying to engage with him conversationally: my intense need for absolute independence, not knowing where the money would come from, feeling not well enough acquainted yet to make life plans together yet. I wish he knew how to establish conversational safety because, who knows maybe he's the shit in every other way. I find that it is hard for men to want to be low commitment friends with me, and I find that makes me feel undervalued, and all that much less likely to want to sleep with them. I am also super triggered by someone wanting to save me. God dammit, why would I be working so fucking hard to save myself if I wanted him to save me. I tried to hint at the difference between codependent, independent and interdependent, but some signal was going off inside me telling me that he's not ready to access that level of conversational nuance, and he definitely won't be able to receive the message from me. Are there any men who feel capable of setting aside desire in order to engage in creating intellectual space, and subsequently space to warm up to one another, first?

I love you for this post. I feel less lonely. I am excited to see how you learn to attend your ego and shaddow over the long haul.

Maybe next time you catch her without makeup and in her I-don't-care-today clothing, look into her eye let her know just how beautiful you think she is as she is.

I would advise her to seek out support from her girlfriends and perhaps a therapist or coach, whatever feels right to her. You are not capable of holding the space for her to unfold the repressed and frustrated aspects of her being. You do not understand her struggles, and your advice to her will bring you endless conflict. Please acknowledge to her that you are not the right person to give advice, but that she deserves support, nonetheless. If she starts to complain again, just say, I hear you and I'm here with you. And simply love her for who she is, and for giving you a touch of girl drama for you entertainment. She is lovely, no matter her money situation, no matter her psychological situation. Just enjoy her for being who she is, no need to change her.

I love your crazy-ass Danielle!

There's nothing wrong with you. You are responding appropriately for whatever realization is trying to come to you. Having a diverse and also consistent support network is definitely a human need. And friends are super cool. If I was into programing I would totally wanna come to your house and take a look at your game development! There is most certainly someone on the internet who wants to do that and would value the time spent Skyping you at where you're at in the process and listen to what your reflections are on the emotional journey that it takes as well. And there is seriously nothing wrong with seeking a therapist. They specialize in this stuff for a reason. They are not creepy or deranged at fucking all. They just see how deranged you are and love you for it. Find someone that makes you feel good.