What actually works?

[WonderSeeker]

Dear self-actualizers,

I'm curious what self-actualization tools you've found the most useful to achieving your life goals.

Of all the...

• self-help subfields
• philosophies
• techniques
• & methods

...you've tried out, which ones have made the greatest, longest-lasting impact on your life so far for you personally?

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What to post:

1) State your age and how long you've been self-actualizing.
2) Name your top 1-3 techniques and how/why they impacted you.

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I'm 28 and I've been self-actualizing for 6+ years.

Below are the two things helped me the most.

1) Psychedelics / Meditation / Reading Spiritual Books

LSD changed my life forever. It helped me (along with Leo's videos) deconstruct and break free from academic/industry science over a 5-year period. It helped me to see my life as a divine adventure I am co-creating alongside the rest of the Universe/God. It helped me confirm that I am creating my own Reality, from the physical to the soul - All of it.

Meditation changed my life forever too. It made me realize that all I gotta do to be happy is sit on my bed or a couch and do nothing. In 2020-2021, I meditated every day without missing a day for 428 days straight. That spiritual campaign jumpstarted a lifelong quest of mysticism and I do not regret it in the slightest. It made me face demons so scary I don't really have a lot left to fear in life. It provided a soothing counter-balance to the inner-hustler within me that wants to just take the world by storm; it provided the ying to my yang. And so much more; the benefits are innumerable. (P.S. Binural beats like Holosync are PHENOMENAL if your life is currently busy like mine. And yet, even with the best technology nothing beats sitting there and doing nothing, distraction-free.)

Reading spiritual books in conjunction with psychedelics and meditation was like — paradigmatically-speaking — replacing a beater-car with a Lamborghini. Spirituality is this crazy battle where you use your own mind to put itself in this place so something more refined takes over: soul/Spirit/God. Well, reading spiritual text got me closer to that elevated place by giving me licks of the God lolipop which only was enhanced with psychedelics and meditation. They all blended together, over and over, until my reality became a living-breathing expression of the universe instead of egoic human will fighting the world over attention and resources. It replaced my a to b understanding of the world with something closer to ∞ so that I was no longer as stuck inside the box.

My favorites are books by Ken Wilber and Peter Ralston. Daniel Ingram's Core Teachings Of The Buddha book was phenomenal as well.

2) Trauma Psychology / Letting-go Guided Meditations / Somatic Healing

I almost put this one at #1. Because honestly, I had a traumatic childhood that screwed me up for years. My mind was so messed up for a while that there were periods when I thought I'd die (2008, 2017, 2024), and I was shocked that I didn't. I'm a highly sensitive person by my nature (HSP), so growing up there were a lot of things that got to me and made me feel like I didn't belong to my family, to my society, to humanity.

Over the past 5 years (and ESPECIALLY the past year), I've made unbelievable progress on my sense of esteem, belonging, and identity. I no longer root my worth in things or processes, but instead on Being. Spiritual work didn't actually get me there, it gave me the theoretical foundation. Shaking trauma out of my tissue using somatic guided meditations and the David Hawkin's Letting Go roadmap (via Julien Blanc's mentoring) is what made all the difference. I began the program 1 year ago and still use the lifetime access lessons to this day almost daily. It's unlockled so many layers of authenticity I didn't know I had in me.

Because this has had such a tremendous benefit on me, I eventually want to work with the likes of Jordan Thornton or Teal Swan to clear the remaining residue. They hit things from different angles, and without sufficient trauma healing, I believe myself and most of us included won't be able to go far with spirituality / psychdelics alone. Trauma distorts spiritual insight more than I thought; if it did for me, then it will for you too.

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I'm curious to see what you share. Make it juicy!

Edited yesterday at 04:00 AM by WonderSeeker

[WonderSeeker]

Bump. This is a solid thread y'all, give it some life