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Who feels? Who is aware?

Although "you" are still there, just not different from anything else.

Hi, in this topic I want to share some tools that can help you when the shit hits you really hard. Breathing exercises! I find it very helpful in my own life and use all the time, although I greatly underestimated the power of it before and thought that it's not effective. When can you use it? - addiction urges - depression attacks - panic/fear attacks - social anxiety attacks - procrastination/resistance to something - impatience - in your bed if you can't fall asleep and agitated Exercises Exercise #1 "I'm a balloon!": This is my interpretation of 4-7-8 technique. Inhale as hard as possible and then hold your breath with your throat muscles. Relax your belly and chest, hold air only by your throat. Wait for 5-10 seconds and blow air through your lips (not slow nor fast). I find that it works better when you sit or stand with erect back. Exercise #2 "Can't get enough!": Breathe fast and deep 50-200 times. Yup, just that. You can experiment with depth and frequency. Exercise #3 "Am I enlightened or just high?": Combination of two previous exercises. 3-30 fast deep breaths and then "inhale as hard as possible and then hold your breath with your throat muscles...". Experiment with amount of breaths before you hold it, I discovered that when you sit or stand you need way less breaths than when you lie to make you high. Caution: this can literally make you knock off a little. Exercise #4 "Captain! Our ship is leaky!": Clench your lips and breathe deep through this slit with a little effort. Clench lips both on inhale and exhale. How to use this? When you experience any strong emotional issue you have 2 choices: concious intellectual responce and reactive behaviour. Unconcious reactivity is: giving in your addiction, eating, drinking, having sex, jerking off, watching porn and any other thing that just distracts you from issue instead of working on it. Breathing exercises are one of the possible ways of actually working through your emotional states. It won't cure you from depression or addiction or hypomania but if shit hits you really hard you can use breathing as a mean to avoid destructive behaviour. It really works! Start small and make a commitment to do one of the exercises every time your emotional state arises for one week straight (#3 is most useful from my experience). For example, you can make a breathing routine to use it before sleep in bed, something like: 1) 100 breaths x 3 2) Exercise #3 x 10 3) 30 slow breaths through clenched lips. Very helpful if you are impatient and can't fall asleep, entertain yourself in bed! Usually, when you feel intense emotions/states it's not just enough to do one exercise, probably you will need to spend like 10-30 minutes to achieve significant relief. Try this and post what you've got! Share some other exercises that you came up with. Mindfulness meditation works really well for increasing your sensitivity for emotional states, you can recognize them arising and work through instead of reacting. P.S. Sorry for grammar, I'm not a native speaker.

Yes it makes sence, English isn't my native language either, I'm russian Sure why not! Notice everything that grabs your attention, it's like watching a film on the screen, if there is no picture on the screen - notice that. Watch this video: This is tricky. I have read that awareness happens in nothing and aware of it at the same time. But this is some vague intellectual shit, I prefer to not conceptualize that much, practically in meditation it just feels like nothing, you just aware of nothing. I didn't go that deep yet so I can't tell you precisely, @Leo Gura maybe you can?

@Peter Zemskov Because our country was building for communism almost whole 20th century, then we suddenly became capitalists. Such a big system as government has big momentum, it can't be rebuild right away (google: homeostasis), takes some mistakes and worng turns. This, plus people were not allowed to participate in politics for decades therefore they have no experience in that and choose wrong people.

@Clint Eastwood Are you from Russia?

Putin seems to be on the stage that is family/tribe oriented: purple. Look how many of his friends are getting rich. Russia in general hmm, good question, probably we are moving from blue to orange.

Questions are to make you shut up and listen.

A student asked his teacher to fix bugs in his program. Teacher gave him disk with CIH virus. The other student asked the teacher for program with no bugs. «Fool!» — said teacher — «Why don't you ask for bugs with no program?» And hits his head with a hard drive.

@Alex90 How about awareness muscles, do you work on noting/mindulness too? It seems to me that you lack noting of your thoughts, thats the key, it's impossible to think of who you really are. You need to shut up in order to EXPERIENCE who you are, you can only shut up by noticing that you think first, you are the one that is noticing thoughts. Shut up and notice noticing, listen to the silence that happens when you don't think. That's you! You are always there! Right fucking now! Stop for a minute and try right now. Listen harder! As hard as you can! SHUT UP AND LISTEN! You can develop this capacity of noting your thoughts and not get tricked by them by meditation/mindfulness. When mindfulness muscles are good you can shut up and listen who you are faster, thoughts don't trick you, you clearly realize each of them as a thought. If you didn't work on this you probably don't even notice that you are lost in thinking, believing your thoughts instead of noticing them as temporary disappearing objects.

Yesterday I did 3 hours of self-inquiry, I didn't wake up but my mind became segnificantly quiter, I felt like I'm more in touch with nothing, couple hours after that I went to jog and after like 20 minutes of jogging I became a little sad and thought that I lost that connection to nothing, right after that I'm like "WHAAAT?? WHO THE HELL HAS LOST CONNECTION TO NOTHING? WHO IS THINKING THIS? WHO IS SAD? HOW IS IT POSSIBLE TO LOSE CONNECTION WITH THE VERY PLACE THAT YOU ARISE FROM?" damn, that shit is so obviously simple, closer than your own face! HOW CAN WAVE BE SEPARATE FROM WATER? Also this revealed me once again how experience is different from knowledge, I have heard a million times all that I experienced yesterday, but man, that understanding is like nothing compared to the real deal, like how recipe is different from dish, how picture is different from reality. Understanding is just another thought that is happening in the field of awareness that you are, any time you think you understood something try to play that thought in you mind again "I understand" and be aware of it, it's just a thought! Not what you are looking for! Who is thinking that thought? Who is aware of the voice in your head that is reading this text?

12:20-14:00 - this is how successful self-inquiry feels like