Meditation Journal

[Tistepiste]

Keeping this as simple as possible. For now.

I have the tendency to make things way too complex than they should be and start with crazy goals and mind stories about it.

Changing my ways.

The goal is to

- meditate at least 3x a week. 45 min. per session.

- shortly describe what I went through

To

- create consistency

- recognize patterns 

- go inwards instead of outwards

 

[Tistepiste]

First week passed.

Going through a long period of emotional distress that started in December.
Honestly it humbled me. Just shows how deeply rooted my insecurities still are.

After a period of being in monkey mind from the moment I wake up to going to sleep for about a month, things have become more stable again.

Forced my self to watch the breath.

Pain surfaced around my heart area, the usual spot where pain resides in my body. Instead of indulging in that pain, I am trying to observe it.

The meditation sessions went pretty smoothly. 

Edited February 28 by Tistepiste

[Tistepiste]

I realized, now more than ever.

One of my biggest triggers in life is being told how I feel or who I am.

My other triggers are injustice and misrepresentation of who I am

But let's talk about the first one for now.

This trigger has stolen an insane amount of peace in my life. Almost unbelievable.

It's where I know and feel something is not mine, but is being pushed on me by another person that believes whole heartedly I should feel, think or am something I am not.

It's as if I am fighting with an invisible power. I am trying to make sense of what someone else is pushing on me, and a great resistance is created from within.

The attraction is wanting to take that person seriously, because they speak from the heart.

The counter is knowing that my heart is not on the same level.

It's like two hearts fighting an invisible battle.

And it's all happening in the mind.

I think, feel, it roots from "I'm not okay, you're okay"

Where I question my own sense of reality and experience in favor of someone else's. As if they're speaking "truth" while I know they're not.

But who am I to know? Who is anyone to know?

Why state something as a fact when everything is ambiguous?

Creates a lot of tension and circular thoughts.

I am aware of all of this. Now I need to let go. Recognize the pattern. Feel into it. And let go.

But these are just words..

Edited March 6 by Tistepiste

[Tistepiste]

Reflection on the meditation

Quote

 

The meditation routine has not been going as I would have liked; which is expected.
I haven't altered my lifestyle in a way that allows for consitent meditation.

I am slowly moving towards it though. The biggest block is my smartphone.
Youtube reels are so, so addictive.

My phone broke recently, which has been a blessing.
Forced to use an other phone on which I haven't synced my accounts. So I can only access google maps and basic internet.

No youtube reels, no whatsapp, no instagram reels, no nothing.
Instead - redirecting this energy inwards.

Reflection on the post of 7 March:

There's been a few moments in my life where I was told to feel and think someting, and I could not-let-it-go.

What is this thing?

The first time:
 

Quote

 

Was when I told my only gay friend that I felt attraction to a boy. I was 18.
It was the first time expressing this feeling, and I wasn't sure what to do with it.

I also liked girls, I knew that. So it shocked me, confused me, and scared me.
The most logical step in my rational mind was to find someone to share this with that has experience in these types of feelings.

When I told that person, they reacted in a way I didn't anticipate

- They took my "feelings for a boy" as a representation of my whole person, and a coming out as being gay
- Told me that my "feelings for girls" were me not accepting who I am, being scared of who I really am.

From that point, I was more confused than ever.

Whenever I felt attraction for a girl - I heard this voice saying that it's not "true", and that my feelings come for a "scared" place. That I was not being "true to myself"
Whenever I saw an attractive guy - I heard a voice saying that I should feel attraction somehow because this is "who I am"

Rationaly, I couldn't make sense of what my friend was saying - there was no logic to be found his words on so many levels.
But I felt he was speaking from the heart - so I couldn't just let his thoughts slide.

For 5 years I was confused, questioning how I felt in every fiber of my body.

It wasn't until I was 23-24 that I confronted him about it.
Then he said something that finally melted away the confusing pattern that was dominating my brain.

He admitted he was jealous, the day I told him, because he had been in love with me, and when I told him about feelings for a boy - he thought it opened a door for him. When I told him I wasn't sure about it and actually also like girls - he saw it as a threat and also as a projection of a denial of ones self that he struggled with himself.

Even though the mind story finaly stopped, the damage had of course been done. Since then I decided not to label myself anymore.
And stay true to my feelings.

Till this day, I refuse to label myself.
I've mostly done things with guys; sexually and romantically.
There's this lingering question if this is due to the moment in my life I just described above, that rewrote my brain in a way that being attracted to guys gave me peace, and being attracted to girls gave me anxiety, due to this confusing pattern that governed it so long.
It's funny, because prior to that, the opposite was true.

 

 

Edited October 6 by Tistepiste

[Tistepiste]

I have some very distructive patterns in my brain.

90% of my thoughts consist of one of these patterns:

Questioning yourself
Many thoughts start from a question.
The cycle goes like this:
Question → Searching for an answer → Conclusion → Questioning the conclusion → etc.
This keeps you stuck in the cycle.
It doesn’t matter what the thoughts are about - it’s simply how your brain is conditioned to work.

Romanticizing
You create an idealized image of the future in which you come out well.
Many thoughts are rooted in this romantic tendency; don’t believe them - it’s just conditioning again.
Romanticizing → Believing → Daydreaming → Bumping into something that threatens that imagined future → Anger.

Compulsion
Some thoughts carry a strong energy. These stem from fear.
They manifest as compulsive, recurring thoughts.
Fear → Compulsion → Negotiating with thoughts → Conclusion → Questioning the conclusion → Cycle.
Again, this is conditioning. Such thoughts trigger a survival instinct.
They feel overwhelming and impossible to overcome - but recognize the pattern: it’s just conditioning. It’s not truly you; it’s how your brain has learned to operate.

Overconfidence
When meditation goes well, you start thinking you’re the best meditator, the fastest learner.
Then when something gets in the way, you become anxious - because you were doing so well, seeing your potential, and also seeing the sabotage that comes with it.
Overconfidence → Fear → etc.

Challenge
When you become overconfident, you will start challenging the system / the system will start challenging you (chicken and egg?)
Old thoughts resurface to see how you’ll respond.
Overconfidence → Challenge → Fear → etc.

Over-analyzing
You analyze things clearly and insightfully, but you do it too often - turning analysis into a system or escape mechanism under the pretense of “understanding yourself.”
By over-analyzing, you shine too much light on things, making them larger than they need be.

Comparison
You compare previously “resolved” situations (meaning: no longer meeting resistance when a thought about them arises) with current ones that do bring resistance, trying to find out why.
Naturally, this puts you back into the first cycle, which can also lead into the compulsion cycle.

 

Edited October 7 by Tistepiste

[Tistepiste]

Realizations from Vipassana retreat

Insight

During your previous retreat, you realized (even though you hadn’t fully integrated it at the time) that all particles - all matter - are impermanent. Every trillionth of a second, your entire physical system renews itself.

In the current retreat, you saw that the mind is the same.
In a flash, a thought arises and disappears immediately - but by grasping it, that thought lingers. There are always countless thoughts passing through your head, but you choose to re-illuminate certain ones, causing them to stay longer, which in turn triggers the cycles described earlier.

You also understood the suffering that comes with alternating pleasant and unpleasant sensations.

No-self: Nowhere in mind or matter can an "I" be found.

Insight into No-self

Suddenly it became crystal clear:
There is no "I." There is no "person" who acts. Things simply happen.
Because certain conditions exist, the conditions of the mind respond to them - but you have no control over those conditions, nor over your responses.

It is through experiences that you have become who you are, and that you react as you do - but you have no control over that. It simply happens.

Therefore, everything that has ever happened has unfolded perfectly, because it could not have happened any other way at that moment. The circumstances were as they were, and your mind responded accordingly, with all the resulting consequences.

The fact that I am writing this now is due to the analytical tendency that feels the need to write it down. But I am not writing. There is writing.

There is no doer - there is doing.
There is no experiencer - there is experiencing.

When you feel something - who is it that feels?
If you look closely, there is just feeling. There is experience, but no one experiencing it.

And what about focused mind and monkey mind?

Your focused mind is simply mind + awareness + mindfulness.
There is awareness of the processes, which changes the conditions, and therefore new phenomena arise. The system’s responses change because of awareness.

It seems as though there is a "you" making a "choice," but that’s not what’s happening.

Something happens - a feeling arises.
Because of earlier experiences, that feeling now has a certain color or tone.
You can’t control that. Your system reacts to that feeling based on the present context.
When you become aware of this reaction, new conditions arise, from which a new thought (or none) appears, changing the reaction again.

I can’t write it any more clearly for now.

How to let go

By no longer giving it attention.
Thoughts will arise, but stop feeding them - no matter how painful it feels.
If a thought feels strong, receive it with openness, then gently shift your focus.
Don’t be startled when the thought returns - that’s normal.

Effort, understanding, concentration, and faith

All four must be in balance.

Too much effort: the mind becomes agitated

Too much understanding: you begin to overanalyze

Too much concentration: you become drowsy

Too much faith: you don’t develop wisdom

Edited Wednesday at 06:47 PM by Tistepiste

[Tistepiste]

You have to stop denying there's still the fundamentals of OCD inside your system.

Pretending it's not there makes your life miserable in difficult moments.

Pretending it's not there makes you less aware of its mechanics

Pretending it's not there makes you indulge in in it trying to figure out what's happening.

Pretending it's not there makes you love yourself less. 

Pretending it's not there makes you harder on yourself than you should be.

Accept that you have dramatic recurring thoughts.

Accept that you can't solve it on your own

Accept that you have to be vulnerable and accept defeat in order to overcome the battle

There's no winning or losing, there's accepting that these destructive mechanics are there, and that you can make yourself accountable for addressing it in a loving / vulnerable way.

 

Next time something happens that keeps the thought train on a loop for days; weeks; months on end? 
Don't meditate it away thinking your are being "present" with it, and are "feeling into it"

All you're doing is looking at the raw unsettling feeling, with the wish that at some point it will go away.
The resistance is still there. You're looking at the resistance, fine. But then what?
It might dissolve in that moment, but next time it comes up there'll be resistance again.
And then you wonder why.

If possible:

- Talk about it with friends

If not possible:

- Radical acceptance. Accept that the thought might never go away. And that it will keep coming back.

- Use it as an instrument to being okay with being not okay. Actually be okay with it.

But please

Your first tendency is to isolate yourself.
Yourself from the world and yourself from your self.
Layers of isolation in order to isolate your energy on that single phenomena.
You're creating a tunnel vision, thinking this piercing vision will pierce through the forces, but it's manifesting the forces.
You haven't found the way yet.
Not yet.
So don't pretend you can overcome it.
 

Be vulnerable. Talk to people.

[Tistepiste]

From my previous post:

Quote

I realized, now more than ever.

One of my biggest triggers in life is being told how I feel or who I am.

Ok so, I found out that this is due to cognitive dissonance, which triggers my sleeping OCD.

This cognitive dissonance is triggered by 

- Words by people (example above)

- Actions vs words by people
 

The first one is the worst. If someone states something from their truth, and states it as my truth.
Whenever this happens, no matter how well-intentioned, my system experiences it as an identity invasion: an attempt to overwrite my inner reality.

I am a scientist by nature - so instead of denying their truth, I explore my own truth and try to reconcile it with their experience.
If it doesn't match, I question my own experience in every fiber of my body.

The outcome: Rumination, unsettling feeling, re-curring thought loops, feeling of powerlesness, feeling stuckness
 

Instructions on how to get out of the loop:

1. Recognize it.

“There’s a clash between my inner experience and someone else’s version of reality.”

2. Name the mechanism, not the story.

“My brain is trying to reconcile two truths that don’t fit.”

3. Feel underneath.

“What emotion is here - sadness, fear, shame?”
Breathe into that spot.

4. End the reconstruction.

“I already know this story. I don’t need to replay it.”

5. Ground in the senses.

Notice a sound, a smell, or the feeling of your body on the chair.
Let the world remind you that you’re here, not in the loop.

 

Realization:

I have to read more books on pyschology

Edited 11 hours ago by Tistepiste