Emerald

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.

This is good. Vipassana meditation is where you focus on an object of focus, usually the sensation of the breath on the nostrils and use this as an anchor point so that you don't get swept up in thought as easily. As long as you're becoming mindful and pulling your attention back to the breath when your attention starts to wain, you're doing it correctly. It is the action of consistently pulling your attention back to the breath that enables you to build your concentration ability.

Thank you!

Was it in the sense of being afraid of being so small and insignificant in an infinite universe? Imagining how inconsequential your actions are because Earth is a small dot in space. Fear of being forgotten after you die? If so, I had a persistent, powerful fear of this until my first enlightenment experience. This fear has weakened as a result of the two enlightenment experiences that I had and years of inner work after the fact. Either way, I would say that you definitely want to explore this fear, and let it hit you completely. Be with the sensation of the emotion in the body without trying to make yourself feel better. Watch your thoughts as they arise but don't attempt to control them or get involved with them. Just allow the fear completely without trying to change it. When the fear comes up see it as an opportunity and not as something wrong.

When we allow reality to be as it is unconditionally, we transform our inner world.

It could be. Thank you for watching my video!

It isn't true that in order for emotions to exist there needs to be a meaning. Emotions consist of sensations in the body in conjunction with thoughts in the mind. Even if the thoughts (meanings) aren't there yet in the case of a baby, the bodily sensations still remain and are interpreted as pleasant or unpleasant.

It sounds to me that you're using masturbation and sexuality to avoid your negative emotions. Masturbation, in itself, won't keep you from enlightenment but an attachment and addiction to it will. I would wager (although I'm unsure) that you may have been looking for validation through sexual pursuit of women. It can temporarily mitigate feelings of low self-worth to feel that you are wanted by many women. If you then relate the sexual response of orgasm to the desire (but perceived inability) to be wanted, it makes sense that you would have jealousy and cuckhold fantasies. It's possible that you don't feel worthy enough to be the main character of your own fantasy. So, you put a stand in man there. But this exacerbates the feelings of unworthiness and you get jealous. Assuming that my assumptions are true, my advice is to look for the hidden beliefs which make you label yourself as being unworthy. Then realize that they aren't true. They are simply the meanings that you've placed upon yourself at particular times in your life that have just hung around. You alone control the meanings and values you place upon everything.

I recommend choosing a point of focus and using this to anchor you from getting swept away in thought. Thoughts are impossible to stop. So you pick something in your reality that isn't a thought to anchor your attention on. So, you can choose a sensation to focus on and just bring your attention back to that sensation when you find yourself getting swept away by the content of thoughts. Many people focus on the sensation of the breath on the outer rims of the nostrils, but you can choose any sensory focus that you want.

Well, you could say that you create the ego in the same way that you create a work of art. You make conscious and unconscious decisions and end up with a seemingly solid creation that has a particular tone and attributes to it that yourself and others attribute a certain meaning to. However, I don't recommend trying to suppress your ego's drive to create a separate sense of self. This was always disastrous when I tried to do this because resistance of any kind goes in the opposite direction of enlightenment. Instead, watch the ego as it spins the self concept with full acceptance of this drive and full knowledge of its falseness. Watch the ego, don't suppress it. On the same ticket, continue to create art but never mistake it for yourself. Don't add "artist" to your self concept. Usually, the latter is more obvious though and you don't have to worry as much about conflating yourself with your art. It happens sometimes though. But in creating ego or art always be mindful.

I came to this thread, and didn't expect to see my face. It's always jarring to see your own face when you don't expect it. Haha. Thanks for sharing my video!

I just made a video about enlightenment misconceptions. One of the points that I addressed was the enlightenment is only happiness idea. I don't want to spam but I just posted it on another thread about destructive tendencies if you want to check it out. But using my enlightenment experiences as a frame of reference, I was feeling my emotions much stronger. So, happiness, fear, sorrow, anger, were experienced in a more intense way. But I had no resistance to them and I didn't make them bad. They were all beautiful and they all had wisdom to communicate to me. They were only there for a short period of time, only long enough for me to get the wisdom from them. So, they would essentially move right through me. But the emotion that was default was unconditional love and peace. So, the negative emotion was a passing phenomenon meant to communicate something to me, but positive emotion was what I resided in. But enlightened people probably don't get self conscious, because self-consciousness exists as a protection mechanism for the ego. If you transcend your ego, self-consciousness becomes irrelevant because there is no ego to protect from psychological harm. They may experience doubt, but only because some things are doubtful. Beliefs can't understand the existential nature, so neither one's belief or non-belief in God would relate to their enlightenment. It would just be a difference in opinion and interpretation. This wouldn't nullify their enlightenment, it just comes as an outgrowth of the limitations of the human lens (whether that person is enlightened or not). You can't really know anything, but you can believe anything.

I was talking about two warring impulses that I discovered during my second enlightenment experience in my most recent video, which is all about what enlightenment is not. It is toward the 18 minute mark of the video where I talk about how enlightenment isn't moral perfection. I noticed that I had altruistic and destructive thoughts which were almost having a chemical reaction between one another, but I was just able to accept both of them and watch them. They didn't mean anything about me. They were a force of nature. The only difference between those urges and a thunderstorm was that one was happening in my internal experience and the other in my external experience. So, I'd imagine that when a person is unconscious to the destructive thoughts that they can take hold of intentions, because the person has lied to themselves and made themselves unconscious. A person could also consciously identify themselves with the negative voice if they feel that it gives them power, or they have made an unconscious rule against listening to anything but the bad voice in a given situation. I consider the former a lot more likely than the latter though, in most cases. I hope that it's helpful.

Life goes on.