Having a stage blue shadow

[Natasha Tori Maru]

1 hour ago, LordFall said:

What do you find helps you get rid of your mental blocks?

Shit it is such a hard question - mostly because my blocks have been varied and many not just mental. I would categorise most of my blocks to be in the emotional / feeling domain. And all (mental "thought" or feeling) blocks were based on me resisting or having a poor relationship with the thought or feeling. Not the actual feeling itself. The blocks were essentially areas where my mental/emotional energy was being used in maintaining a narrative, judging or rejecting. Once I worked on those - the excess energy that was wasted in the "block" was funnelled/diverted into action because the action simply felt like exactly what I wanted to do. My largest blocks were 1) approval seeking with men (blocking love + feeling as if I needed to earn love) 2) resistance to "wanting" (I was stuck in "should" and had to allow myself to really want something) 3) judging others (blocked an emotion, I cannot feel the emotion behind the judgement if I am busy moralizing) 4) False belief: wanting money was greed 5) False belief: I only excelled because I was a good looking woman and not due to excellence or aptitude. Everyone will have different blocks for sure - and they are often (but not always) linked to our shadows. What we aren't claiming in our experience. This is why I enjoy being triggered on the forum - if I feel okay to judge someone, it tends to indicate I think "I don't do that" but I probably do, and need to investigate it. I had many blocks I slowly worked through. And they all essentially served one purpose: to steal energy away into mental narratives. Energy that I needed to divert back to useful, available energy. Especially to work in commercial construction.

If I think I don't experience something - an emotion or feeling, even a thought - its an immediate call for me to investigate it. I am more often than not just not able to recognise it. I had to sit and redefine emotions and feelings, be able to accurately name and define the feeling. Work out where in my experience they showed up. This was the hardest part of the process for me, as I am not naturally good at identifying the nuances in feelings. Anxiety, worry, concern, sometimes even anticipation - they all (for example) used to feel like the same emotional soup to me. Now I can find the difference in my experience. I used to think I never felt jealousy - but I was actually so busy judging another for some other thing, I was blocking it. ie my mother would show me her amazing op shop finds of silver. I would immediately judge her "she is lazy, doesn't want to work, and just searched for endless dopamine to waste money. She hoards useless stuff". But in reality - I was jealous I couldn't have a day off to hunt for silver. The narrative was feeding my rational brain, bypassing the real emotion of jealously and diverting to suppress the emotion. But that loop > judge > narrative > emotional suppression - that loop! That was where excess energy was looping out of my system like a program eating up memory in a computers OS. In the place of jealousy suddenly happiness for her came up. I had to find those loops. Emotional work, psychology and shadow stuff was a big part - so I think you are onto the right path. There could be other avenues though, this is just what worked for me. It wasn't easy either. I test as INTJ (take that for what it is, MBTI slides into pseudoscience) Not sure if this has anything to do with it, but my inner emotions just aren't so easy to access.

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I think understanding my psychology will help me solve it because otherwise it's like I stand in my own way. 

100% and dovetails with where I was going above - I hope I made sense. I didn't revise the above paragraph, just let the expression happen.

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So I feel like it's an issue of lack of alignment with what I'm doing so I'm not that motivated or it's a problem with my psychology that I gotta solve. How do you keep motivated to work on your construction business?

There are two parts to this that might help - and these are the two things that keep me aligned with the business.

One - I love creative problem solving under heavy constraints. I love having severely restricted variables and finding a solution that works in application and for multiple parties. Basically I love solving complex systems problems. I always have. Since I was a child the times where it felt as if a while afternoon disappeared where involved in creative problem solving. The more complex - the better. Painting, drawing, rendering. Building computers, soldering, circuit boards, software troubleshooting. Engine mods. Troubleshooting in particular. I love the process. LOVE it. This translates perfectly to construction because it is a series of moving parts. No project is the same. Many moving targets. Many variables. Logistics, materials, time, costs, critical path items. Quality control. Love it. So it plays to my strengths. I also love working with SOPs and making them more efficient. Refining processes is so fun! And this is what I need to do - learn from each construction project and refine for the next. I love how much change is involved in the troubleshooting. Repetition is a killer for me.

While I always loved creative problem solving complex systems and troubleshooting, I would run out of steam when I had a long term outcome to work to - this lead to the below:

Two - I had to connect with the outcome. I wasn't connecting with the product of my endeavours in previous careers. I had to feel and connect with what I was producing. And in the field I work in (medical, science, pharma, education, defence construction, federal/state contracts) I get to see one thing that made it worth it - the building done. Constructed. A tangible result. And even better - I was able to connect and relate to the outcome because once it was complete I could see the effect. I could visit and see patients getting life saving dialysis treatment. See mentally ill people get the help they needed. Emergency departments treating people in infrastructure I helped build. MRI's, compounding pharmacies, pathologies for quick diagnostics in emergency situations... all of that. These people I see getting treatment - they don't know me. But I know I helped them. I don't really need them to know me at all. Only that in the end, the outcome of my hard work. My rage, anger, tears, jubilation, 16hr days, panic attacks, laughter - my energy - went to supporting society and humanity. I often sit and visualise buildings done and constructed. It helps. But connecting with the outcome of my work was what got me there. Human connection.

One other small remark I might make is regarding spirituality.

It helped. A lot.

No self was huge for me. Self will not being a thing (but still behaving as if I have agency) also. I stopped being so attached to outcome. I just made sure I was taking action when the greatest probability for the outcome I desired would arise. I have no ultimate control (and I was a control freak). I am at the mercy of too many other people, logistics and variables to commit to attaching to an outcome. This helped eliminate 50% of my latent stress. When I started to deconstruct my own experience and the phenomenology of it, I also begun to stop resisting and judging some tasks as "bad" or "good". Folding the laundry became a purely tactile experience. Cutting the vegetables was so auditory and strange, feeling the vibration and pressure as a sharp knife went through a cabbage with a CRUNCH. Sensory experience in any arena is now welcome. I have my preferences of course. But its all just sensation. I don't hate any of it. I just don't resist.

I don't know if any of this resonated. I hope it does! I used to procrastinate a lot.

Connecting to outcome through relationship with people was huge for me. I had to feel the result.

Edited 2 hours ago by Natasha Tori Maru

[NewKidOnTheBlock]

7 hours ago, LordFall said:

What keeps you around on this forum then? You use it more as a place to vent? 

Because I haven't found those real ass communities that serves my specific goals yet, but I'm slowly starting to discover them. Also I have never been trying to keep myself completely busy like I am trying to now. This is a place for lunatics and lost people, is the way I see it