Emerald

I just went back and read that post and I agree. I couldn't feel attraction to a man who said that to me. The intimacy barriers go up if a man tries to tear me down and attraction turns to disgust. Intimacy becomes impossible with someone who puts me down. In order to be intimate, vulnerability is 100% necessary. You can't be vulnerable around someone who tears down your self-esteem on purpose.

I'm sorry to hear that. It sounds like he's desensitized himself through use of external stimuli (i.e. pictures, pornography, etc.) So, this makes it harder to get off to a real tangible woman with an array of human traits and not just an image that can be idealized. I'm pretty certain that it comes from this desensitization and not a lack of desire for you based upon traits that you carry. This is why over-use of pornography is detrimental. It really becomes a barrier to intimacy because people who watch it regularly, develop neural pathways where their main outlet for orgasm relates back to an image and not a real person. So, it becomes easier to get aroused by a picture/fantasy and simultaneously harder to get aroused by a real woman. It would take months of practice for him to condition himself to get aroused by non-image/fantasy based sexual stimuli again.

Thank you!

Note: This will have A TON of generalizations about male and female sexuality. So, there are (of course) going to be many exceptions to the rule. As a woman, I need emotional excitement and sexual tension in order to get turned on. Otherwise, sex is just a chore that I do for my husband. The promise of pleasure or orgasm isn't enough to get me there, because this isn't the main reason I have sex. It's nice to have orgasms, but it really isn't that much of a motivator. I have sex primarily to feel close to my partner and to experience strong erotic emotions. It is my guess that many women operate in this way. I think that a lot of times, female sexuality gets understood in the shadow of male sexuality which is very linear and very easy to operate. For men, it's about getting to orgasm because that's what's biologically necessary to make a baby. There are no complex emotional riddles to solve... just lather, rinse, repeat. But female sexuality doesn't really work this way. It's less linear and has less to do with achieving orgasm and more to do with abiding in a cocktail of erotic emotions and full body pleasurable sensations. So, the pleasure is more diffuse than targeted. So, if sex gets approached in the "let's get to orgasm" mode of thought, it will be at least okay for the man. He will at least have his bare minimum needs met, even if it isn't extremely great. The phrase "Sex is like pizza. Even bad pizza is still pizza." was probably said by a man for this reason. Orgasm for a man equals fulfillment, and is pretty much a given barring an interruption. But a woman needs more than orgasm to motivate her to have sex and to fulfill her sexual needs. The thing that gets me going the most in that erotic mode is feeling like my partner desires me and to see it in the way that he acts toward me. I want to feel like his desire for me (and not just his desire for orgasm) turns him into an animal that just can't control himself. If I feel taken for granted or under appreciated, sex becomes just a mechanical thing that I do to help my partner release. Then I feel bored with the whole scenario, and just don't want to expend the energy. There was a saying that I'll paraphrase on a new age video that I was watching about chakras, and it makes sense. A man penetrates the woman below the waist. A woman penetrates the man's mind with her own mind. This is why horny women are always asking men "What are you thinking about?" It turns a woman on to know that she's gotten inside of a man's head and to know his thoughts.

My two experiences of ego transcendence were catalyzed through use of Ayahuasca. I was able to see my identity as an illusion and lost all fear, even of death. But they were temporary experiences, so being exposed to higher levels of consciousness before I was ready was very foolish and I made a lot of big life changing decisions in the aftermath, that could certainly be called mistakes. But the DMT allowed me to experience deeper levels of consciousness for sure.

If it's law of attraction, it is probably telling people to raise their vibration so that the reality that they project outward is what matches the emotions they want to feel. There is validity to the law of attraction and you could call it quantum jumping because the reality that you experience this moment is completely different than the reality you experience a moment later. So, you are making a jump from the reality you're living now to the reality you want to be living. But I find that so much of the law of attraction stuff misses the point of the whole thing. It makes more sense to say that law of attraction exists for expansion of consciousness and is sensitive to the will of the higher self. But most people try to use it to manifest things to make life easier. But these are usually egoic desires and not desires from the higher self. It tends to go in the exact opposite direction of unconditional love and acceptance of reality as it is.

Thank you.

Your averse reactions are also part of reality. To try to approve of something that you don't approve of is also a resistance to reality as it is. But you do have to realize that it is an expression of source and that your dislike of it doesn't invalidate its existence. It is an extension of yourself simply for the fact that it exists in your reality.

I have noticed that I come in and out of resonance with particular spiritual teachers.

So, I am looking for ideas to deconstruct in Spiritual Autolysis. So, my challenge for this is to try to write something that is true. Here is an example of something that I think is true that needs to be deconstructed: "The only things that exist are sights, sounds, smells, tastes, sensations, and thoughts happening in the present moment within the field of awareness. Everything else is the content of a thought."

This was what my experience was during my enlightenment experiences. I was able to feel the full depth and breadth of my emotions because I was allowing them into my awareness. I felt both positive and negative emotions and both carried wisdom with them. The negative ceased to be negative because they meant nothing about "me". They were just occurrences.

Certainly it is preferable to be free of ego because sanity is preferable. But it still doesn't invalidate being identified with ego. Being insane isn't inherently lesser than being sane. Most people are, so it is most natural to be identified with ego. So, it is ironically more natural to be unnatural. But honor itself is an invention of ego, so neither is more honorable than the other. Neither is more significant. Neither is less valid. If you think about it, we only have 80 years (give or take) to live as this ego. We only have a limited time to be insane. We have an eternity to be the existential self in its supreme sanity. Perhaps, enlightened people are like the slackers that decided to skip the humanity homework of ego-identification.

It is equally valid to live the illusion of ego identification or to see through the illusion. But if you're interested in experiencing what is true, then you have to see through your identification. The ego is a collection of thoughts centered around and related to a single (illusory) thought called "me." You can't get rid of that collection of thoughts, you can only see through the illusion of "I" which will decenter those thoughts and make them less important. This means that you will be free of all neuroses and complexes that arise from your attempts to protect this collection of thoughts called ego. You will realize that psychological harm isn't real because there is no ego to harm. So, it is preferable to see through ego. But it is also perfectly normal and natural to identify with ego. But it is an illusion that causes much unnecessary suffering.

Thank you. Then I will definitely do that.

I would but it's an app for a phone. I tend to stay away from my phone except for when I really need it. I don't want to run the risk of developing a habit of checking my phone too often and being plugged in all the time. So, I have to decline. But thanks for the offer.

You're welcome.

You're welcome. I'm glad that it was helpful. The reason why self-esteem problems come up in the first place is because of various ego protections that happen to conflict with one another. The ego isn't a real thing itself. So, it can't be killed, it can only be seen through. It is the difference between ego repression and ego transcendence. The ego is nothing more than a large collection of thoughts and beliefs organized around and connected to a single false belief, that you are a separate person from everything else in existence. Without this central "I" thought, all of the other thoughts within the collection of thoughts called ego become completely impersonal. So, thoughts that now catalyze feeling of low self-worth, now mean nothing about a separate self. So, these thoughts carry no personalized emotional charge. You can accept your traits as they are. Your thoughts about "you" can't harm you psychologically because there is no separate self to harm. So, I wouldn't wait on the enlightenment work. The more you work on it, the less charge your negative self-talk will have. But there are methods for questioning negative self-talk and replacing those beliefs about the self with more positive ones. So, you can do the enlightenment work along with the self-esteem work. But as you do the self-esteem work, keep in mind that your positive thoughts about yourself are just as illusory as the negative thoughts about yourself.

In that case, I recommend to just say thank you and to be sure to say things that underplay your successes. Like "Thank you for the compliment Uncle ... But he really exaggerates about me..." or (jokingly laughing it off) "you're making me blush." Either way, the tone you want to put out there is grateful and confident but modest.

I'm not 100% sure which one would work better. I think the "do nothing" would work because your psyche is basically like a self-correcting mechanism. If you don't get in the way, everything naturally moves back toward its most natural state. So, simply watching and not intervening can help in this way. Vipassana would work for the reason that I mentioned above because you're actually able to accept and be mindful of your emotions as they occur in your reality. Vipassana is also called insight meditation because it helps you access insights by focusing on reality as it is.

Regarding the pain in your chest, there is a method that works well the many teachers (including Leo) advocate for. It is trusting that the pain has something important that needs to be communicated to you through the emotional body. You just focus on the pain and accept it as it is. Just observe the pain with full attention and mindfulness without needing it to feel better or be any different than it is. Accept the pain completely. So, during meditation, choose the pain in your chest as the point of focus to anchor your awareness to. So, when you find yourself getting swept away by thoughts and distractions pull your focus back to the pain in your chest. Continue to do this throughout your meditation. It is Vipassana meditation. The more you watch it with mindful acceptance and unconditional love, the more you will be able to reintegrate and heal. I call it checking your emotional email. You can't delete it until you've read it.

I'm not quite understanding. Do you mean that he was jealous of your success? Or do you mean that he was putting you down for your successes or insulting you for them? Or do you mean he was bragging about you to others and it made you uncomfortable and you didn't know what to say?

Four months ago, I started a Youtube channel, in the niche of spirituality, psychology, personal development, and awareness of social under-currents. So, my audience is likely to have some degree of cross-over with Leo's audience, but my channel is more about reintegration of disowned traits on the individual and cultural level. I also do book reviews and share insights from them. So, a lot of it has to do with creating mental frameworks and understandings psychologically and spiritually to get past the initial bottlenecks of the spiritual journey and to get on level ground to progress forward in life without fighting various repressions and complexes. It's also for people who have an insight seeking bone and a penchant for plumbing the depths of the human experience intellectually and philosophically. But I also intend to delve into the topic of deconstructing such spiritual frameworks to aide people on the path to enlightenment. I also have topics that relate less to spirituality too that could be enjoyed by people who aren't interested in spirituality or enlightenment. Then I have very New Age topics like my insights regarding my out of body experiences. So, my topics are a real Heinz 57. For this reason and others, I've recently hit a small dip in motivation and consistency, and I'm trying to get back on the horse extra strong. So, I would really like to market to others who are similar to me in the way that I think about spirituality. I tend to be put off by a lot of New Age stuff because much of it thrives off of wishful thinking that isn't grounded in anything solid. But I know that marketing to a New Age audience would be an easier market to target than the "rational spiritual in-betweeners" who tend not to have a strong group identity. I was watching a video today about social media marketing, and it was suggested to refine audiences down to various micro-communities. So, this seems like a decent solution to this issue. So, do any of you have ideas for smaller sects within the 'spiritual community', 'philosophical community', 'psychological community', etc. that I should target my videos to? Thank you

You're welcome. I hope that it's helpful.

Thanks! I use a Sony 3000 / 20.1 Mega Pixels HD camera. I have a green screen that I hang in front of my closet and I light those with two soft box lights. Then I create my rainbow pastel backgrounds in Photoshop to keep my thumbnails and video style consistent. But I pretty much decided on the rainbow color scheme straight off for the channel because the channel art and branding was what I started off with. So, I haven't done anything with any other types of backgrounds. Before getting the soft box lights though, the light backgrounds were difficult to deal with because the green screen was harder to key away.

Like @Jan Odvarko said, S.N. Goenka's 10 day Vipassana retreats are what I've heard the most positive reviews of. They are free, they provide food, and Vipassana meditation is speculated to be the one used by Buddha himself. If I were to do a retreat, I would do this one.