PsiloPutty

@Salvijus It's a Vipassana meditation retreat. Really looking forward to it! It'll be a challenge for me.

Damn, I'm sorry you're hurting so much. You're not crazy, and it's impossible to make some people (even awesome people that we highly esteem) understand the things going on in our minds. That can be frustrating as hell, but realize that wanting someone else's validation isn't being quite true to yourself and your beliefs. I do it too, so don't be hard on yourself. If you haven't tried meditation, it will help you sort your mind out a lot. Make it something that you do every day, not just when you think you need it. Find something healthy that you can do TODAY that improves your mood even one iota, and DO it. Go walk for 45 mins. Buy lunch anonymously for the dude behind you in the drive-thru. Anything. Enjoy feeling happy that you performed an act of kindness to yourself or someone else. Do the same thing tomorrow. This is a game of increments. Today is a beautiful thing, so do something good for yourself. You're fucking worth it, man.

@Erlend K I do have a 7-day silent meditation retreat (my first one) scheduled next month, and it's workable for me to do another retreat later in the year, but at this point I don't feel capable of taking more than 7-10 days off at a time while still being able to maintain my career at its current level. I'm open to the possibility of looking at my career in a less serious way as time goes on, though. I don't feel the same now as I did a year ago, so I can't say how I'll feel in a year's time. I'm open to change.

@Vytas Yep, feels like I'm getting the hang of it. I survived some hornyass days in there, so I'm sure I can do it again!

Haven't checked in for a while, but I'm still going strong. Thankfully my crazy horniness has waned into a much more manageable tension. I'm not thinking about whackin' off all the time now, which is great. Shit, it was tough for a while, and maybe it'll come back, but for now I'm cruising.

I've been on edge for the past 2 days....anxious, thought loops, grumpy, and just feeling bad because of it all. I was trying to figure out why, and it occurred to me that the only thing I've changed in my life recently has been giving up masturbating a couple weeks ago, and I don't currently have a girlfriend, so no intercourse. Do you think it's possible that it's behind my mood? I'd have to rewind my life 20 years to find another time where I went 2 weeks without a sexual release, so it's kind of an uncharted area. I'm finding it hard to not touch myself after I lay down at night. It's almost like torture to masturbate and stop myself before it's too late, but I've done that a couple times. I don't think that's a long-term strategy for success or peace of mind, though. Normal stuff for this stage of no-fap?? Edited to add: I've noticed that my concentration/attention hasn't been very good during my morning meditations, too. Another thing attributed to the stage I'm at with no-fap?

I'm bumping this thread just to see if there are any other opinions of this guy and whether or not he's teaching the real thing. I've watched a couple of his other videos on Kriya philosophy and I can tell for sure that his heart is in it, but that's not everything. I don't know enough about it right now to tell whether or not that's all he has going for him.

I think your subconscious mind takes a lot better notes than you think. I don't think writing down insights is necessary, but by all means do it if you like. I think that you will carry the benefits of the insights along with you, whether you train them into your conscious mind, or just let them exist peacefully in your subconscious. It's kind of like having a full belly and being okay with not remembering all the good foods you ate to get it that way. Enjoying the fullness.

I don't know if it's the daily meditating that I've been doing this year or what, but lately I've had a lot more flashes of childhood memories pop fleetingly in and out of my mind during the day. They mostly seem triggered by or connected to smells, and they flash by so quickly that I don't have time to put a precise finger on the memory, like the where/when/who/what part of the memory. I'll maybe see a glimpse of a room I was in, an object, a feeling or a thought, but it's so slippery that I haven't been able to hold onto them long enough to analyze them. Anyone else?

"Even in your death your enlightenment will be immortal in what your splash in the river of existence has had on its overal movement." I love this line!!! Do you regret your gender operations now? Most transgendered folks say that much of their lives were spent feeling like they were occupying a body that didn't truly belong to them. If this was true for you, do you think that the constant awareness that you weren't in your own body acted in a catalytic way in your enlightenment?

No, if they grow, that means you did it correctly. Think of them like carrots or any other garden veggie. If you planted carrot seeds and eventually had carrots growing, would you wonder whether you did everything right? Nope, because the proof that you did it correctly is right before your eyes. There aren't any carrots if you fuck it up, just like there won't be any mushrooms if you mess up the process.

I'm trying to not assign any real meaning to it, and it may very well just be because I'm eating, exercising and sleeping better.

Yeah, it just seems to be happening a lot more than usual these days. Like I said, I'm unsure why, but wanted to see if maybe it was a common occurrence after doing a few months of personal growth pursuits. *shrug*

@Matt8800 Ha, I use a similar metaphor: that of an observant, patient spider, waiting for anything to *plop* into his web.

Lots of good posts in this thread. OP, have you considered growing your own mushrooms? There are grow kits that are very easy to work with.....and it can be kinda fun watching your little buddies grow.

For a 15-minute session anything would work, but the longer the session gets, I would think the more apt you'd be to nod off to sleep if you were too comfortable. My goal for my 45-min sessions is to find the most comfort I can without nodding off asleep. I'd rather err on the side of too LITTLE comfort, because that has meditational benefits if you can sit through the pain/discomfort the whole time.

Well, what you were doing sounds better than sitting there thinking about chicks or the new season of your favorite TV show. If you were thinking about non-duality, that's at least worthwhile, so don't kick yourself too hard. Just make the switch to an actual meditation technique and you'll see the progress you were wanting. Meditation can be as simple as sitting there for 40 minutes just paying close attention to your breath going innnnn and ouuuuut, over and over. When a thought or image pops up, acknowledge it and let it go, coming back to focus on your breath. That's a simple breath-focused meditation. Better to find this out after 4 months than to never find it out, so get back at it.

I think you're right. Edging is straight up masochism. Thank you.

@herghly Hell yes, I'm in. It'll be good for my soul. I appreciate your words. @Ether Honestly, the most I've ever meditated in one sitting is 60 minutes. So how am I gonna do 10 hours of it a day? I don't know, but I do know that it's highly attractive to me for some reason, and that's enough to get me there.

A new day begins! I woke up so horny that I wanted to paint the walls with cum......but didn't.

Thank you very much for your reply! I'm going to do one in a couple months, so I'm super curious.

I've been stumbling onto some priceless posts here lately, and the post above is one of them. It's frustrating yet compelling to read it and to know that you are trying to convey something real that you know, and although I can see the rope you're offering, I just can't seem to grab ahold of it and hold onto it. I guess I'll just be happy for now in seeing the rope.

@Leo Gura Thank you. That was extremely astute and simple to understand, if not to execute. That post helped me immensely. Often times, people's responses strike me as esoteric riddles that I have to pore over and guess at the meaning. Your last post got through to me 100%. I'm going to hold on to that and read it again from time to time as the months go by. Hopefully I will start to see it in color eventually.

Off topic here, but how did you enjoy your retreat? What did you do after you were dismissed in the evening? Just go straight to bed? Lay there and think? Was the retreat what you had expected?

I'm finding that it's overwhelming if you immerse yourself into it ALL at the same time. I think even an extremely motivated person might give up if they try to apply to many self-improvement angles at once. Since most everyone agrees that daily meditation is one of the most effective and time-honored ways to change the way you look at and interact with yourself, others and life in general, that's going to be my main self-improvement activity this year. I'm a deeply curious person, so the temptation (it's a drive, really) is there to learn and implement a couple dozen techniques simultaneously, but having scratched the surface of that, I've found that it only discourages me, because when I do that, I don't know whether I'm coming or going, because my mind is so busy trying to do and think everything correctly. Without losing my curiosity, I'm going to mainly focus on meditating this year. Then I'll reassess and likely incorporate something new along with it for next year. I'm worth taking the time to do this process mindfully. I'm take Leo's advice here and tackling things one by one. I'd imagine that, as time goes by and we build experience on top of the knowledge we acquire, there will build a momentum to the progress.