Thittato

45 min meditation today, and then weight-lifting.

Yesterday I did weight-lifting and later I went for a 3 hour long walk in the forest. Today I’ve only been home indulging in Chess all day. There was an energy running through me that needed some creative outlet somewhere, and I was just pouring it all into Chess. 61 games in total today. I don’t think I’ve ever played as many games as this in one day. At first I felt really bad about it, but then at some point I surrendered into it and decided that this day was just going to be all about Chess. This whole process today sort of gained an esoteric conclusion when I won the last game with this symbolic Check-Mate:

Thank you! That is inspiring for me to hear as well. Positive feedback-loop ❤️?

20 min vinyasa flow yoga today. Getting back into the groove with yoga.

Weight-lifting this morning, and then after that 30 min of meditation. Sitting with some grief and sadness today.

20 min vinyasa flow yoga today. Feels really good. I'm so looking forward to see what this combination of yoga and weight-lifting will do for me. Perhaps one of the things I love the most about yoga is the increased sense of mobility. The body doesn't stiffen up and become stuck in a limited pattern. One is really exploring the full range of movement that the body has capacity for. Together with weight-lifting it is near perfect.

45 min meditation yesterday, and today, first my weight-lifting routine, and then 45 min of meditation. So nice to do weight-lifting after I did a session of vinyasa flow yoga on monday again. Feels like yoga is increasing the stability and mobility I bring into weight-lifting. Meditation was very centered and nice both yesterday and today.

3 month project of 45 minutes of meditation per day completed. So in order to finish off my 3 month project today, I did my routine, as usual, of 45 min meditation. After that I did my weight-lifting routine, and then I did a 20 min vinyasa flow yoga program. The yoga was sort of to celebrate the completion of the whole thing, and it felt so good to do some yoga again - it just open up the whole body in a way that only yoga can do. As for what my next project will be I will just let that be open for some time to see what I naturally feel inclined towards. I do think I will need to move my body around some more for some days at least. There has been so much process going on lately, and when it is like that I usually get very much help from moving my body around more in some kind of movement practice then I get from sitting still in meditation, although I have to say the meditative approach I've been following for these last 3 months has been successful - now is just time to fill in with something more that I didn't get from sitting still. Sometimes, when I experience very strong process, the most powerful thing that I can absolutely do is to meet it directly through sitting still in meditation. It can be very transformative. But yeah, there is a yearning towards more movement again now.

45 min meditation today as well. Woke up in a lot of grief and sorrow that I had to sit with in my meditation. Feels more clear now. I was inspired by this poem: Absolutely Clear by Shams al-din Hafiz Don't surrender your loneliness So quickly. Let it cut more deep. Let it ferment and season you As few human Or even divine ingredients can. Something missing in my heart tonight Has made my eyes so soft, My voice So tender, My need of God Absolutely Clear. There is obviously going to be some more waves of this. As soon as I experience some level of romantic bonding with a woman I open up some wounds that I normally don’t experience when I’m shieled off from that experience. It triggers a lot of other things - probably a lot of the loneliness I have grown up with that comes from the lack of being seen and understood by my parents. I thought I was more done with this than I was, but I will use my therapist to work through the remaining layers of what has been triggered. There is also still some self-love that is lacking that I need to work on.

Also 3rd session of weight-lifting now as I came home from night-shift. And then warm shower ended with a cold shower. Pretty awesome. I think 3 sessions of weight-lifting per week is just right for me.

45 min meditation today as well. Really awesome sit. Soft, gentle, still, fresh and focused presence. Really soothing to my whole being ❤️?

45 min today as well. I guess this still counts as saturday since I haven't gone to bed yet because I've been working night-shift. Slept the whole day - I was pretty exhausted - before I went to work, so I didn't sit, but I managed to sit now after night-shift. This huuuuuge wave of emotional turmoil I had going last time I wrote here got released at some point during the night-shift and now things feels really nice again. I might have to surf a few more waves of this, but it is really good to see that it gets released as quickly as it actually does. I think my gestalttherapist was putting a strong process into motion, so maybe I had some deep rooted karma released.

Gosh. I'm so much in process again. I've actually been working a bit with my gestalttherapist again. I've figured that when I'm hanging out with someone I really like my whole body goes into lockdown sort of, because of the trauma I experienced as a teenager when I experienced a very bad romantic situation for 4 years. Like both the romantic situation was really bad, but also the very insecure family situation I was in at this time which created a really bad platform for me to deal with these strong feelings I had for this girl. I guess it will take some work to untie this knot, but seems like we are facing it head on now.

Hmmmmm. Back into wallowing in my family-background. I thought I was over this stuff. I wonder what I can do to get over it. Obviously this failed romance I just had triggered up a lot of this stuff again. It felt like for a long while I was done with all this stuff, but as soon as I develop feelings for someone a lot of it is triggered again. Even though we only met twice, we had 40 days of intense communication over chat, phone and videochat. It almost felt like I had a girlfriend again. It feels almost as if it was a short relationship, and as if now I’m single again and I have to re-orient again and get back in touch with old friends to fill up the empty whole this person left in my life. A bit over-dramatic perhaps, but I remember these cycles from actually being in relationships - it is like you zoom in on one person, and when that relationship is over you have to zoom out again, but you sort of only zoom out to get a good overview over the social landscape (and have some fun) so that you can find a new person to zoom in on again. I guess it will take a while to accept this loss and move on. So far what has been the most meaningful after this has been: - playing guitar - weight-lifting - my job - re-connecting with female friends - connecting deeper with my co-workers - cooking - nature - reading, listening to podcasts, and watching documentaries. Maybe I need to just establish some kind of plan. Like how to get my life back on track by filling it up with as many positive activities as possible and try to reduce the time I spend wallowing in this stuff. Like I should use some discipline. Like I’ve felt a new sense of mastery in my guitar-playing lately, for instance, and when that feeling is there I get filled with hope and joy, so I need to discipline myself into situations which gives me this sense of mastery and takes me away from wallowing in hopelessness and sadness.

45 min meditation today. Feels like I'm generally much more in process again. Todays session begins with pretty heavy emotional turmoil, but then I manage to "burn through" it, and feels empowered at the end of the sit.

45 min meditation today as well. Very good sit. Then weight-lifting after the sit. 2nd weight-lifting session of the week. I have a very good routine going now with that weight-lifting that I will keep up for a while before I start adding more repetitions - got to adjust to this program first.

45 min meditation today as well. Very good and powerful sit. Only 6 days left of this 3 month project.

45 min meditation today as well. Today there was more suffering again. Much anger. My stepmom celebrated her 60th birthday on saturday. I was there, and that triggered a lot of shit in me. Basically my dad manipulated me to live with him when I was 12 and I was falling out with my mom. He used every means he could to turn me against her, instead of being a wise adult trying to soften the situation between us. I felt very unsafe living with my dad, because, among other things, he used to drink a lot (he still does but perhaps he has gotten a little softer over the years), but I was too proud to go back to live with my mom and since she didn't either have any good tools to resolve conflicts, I didn't find any other choice but to continue to live with my dad. Not long after I moved in with him, he found a new girlfriend, who had 4 kids who also came from a troubled home, so I got smashed in together with these troubled kids into a lot of chaos. There has been a lot of alcohol and/or drug-abuse among all of them, and they are all sort of a very gross type of blue-collar working-class people. With my spiritual, artistic and intellectual interests, and being a very sensitive and shy kid, it was very chaotic being grouped together with all these hooligans. Sounds pretty arrogant, hahha, I know, but damn it, they really are a bunch of hooligans. I just have to see it for what it is so that I can better understand my conflicted experience about that whole trauma-soup. And I still experience periods of heart-brokenness about this failed romance I just recently had. So that was also feeding into what triggered me, because it reminds me so much, in a condensed version, of a very difficult romance I had from I was 15 to I was 19 that was part of all this chaos I was growing up in. I'm sure I was projecting a lot of this old experience into the new experience when I was dating this recent lady. But now that I'm writing this I'm really glad that I actually went and celebrated my stepmom, because mentally I was already re-living this period of my life because that romance triggered up so much feelings from that period in my life, so as sort of a psychotherapeutic experience, it was actually perfect to further increase this type of exposure therapy by exposing myself to all these chaotic relationships. I felt like a victim afterwards, but now, thanks to writing about it, it becomes clear that I'm working on some deep shit that it was good to trigger up again. Needless to say, I also have a lot of love for these people. They are part of who I am. We don't have any active conflicts, and there is always a lot of appreciation shown when we meet.. After over 20 years of history together with them, they have become my brothers and sisters. So on to this next thing that is a very important part of my personal development: Strength training. Finally I got my new dumbbells today. I gave away the two 4 kg ones to a friend of mine who is also starting with strength training, and now I have a new set of 8 kilos. Together with my set of 12 kg kettlebells, they are all the weight-lifting equipment that I'm focusing on these days. I've found some very very excellent exercises that I use them for, and I'm very very enthusiastic about this project. Together with meditation, weight-lifting is certainly what I need to boost my self-esteem and my masculinity. I cannot be this tall, sensitive and thin guy anymore, I have to put on just a little bit more weight and muscles so that I just look a little bit more robust - both for my own inner feeling, and for how people perceive me. I was writing that I was going to really take off totally with fitness as a new project beginning next month, but actually I don't think I need to take it that far. I just need to continue as I do already. I've only been back with weight-lifting for about a month, and already I feel much more robust, and this is just the beginning, so I can just continue like this. No need to go all mental about it. So here is a picture of my really excellent and simple weight-lifting equipment, hahaha. I feel so much joy when I look at these weights. They are my new power-amulets. Speaking of which, what I gave my stepmom as a birthday gift was actually an amethyst crystal that I've had for some months and that I appreciated a lot. I see that as a symbolic ritual in turning suffering into beauty through the spiritual transformation that happens through meditation practice. I could have given her some meaningless shit, but I actually gave her something that means a lot to me. And crystals are an excellent metaphor for the beautiful state of mind that meditation can produce when the flow is good.

45 min meditation today as well. Still good, but a bit more distracted today. I wasn't quite getting into gear, but I was surfing on the same momentum I've had these days.

45 min meditation today as well. My meditation was deep, soft, nice and mellow. Interesting how I was getting tired of my meditation only a few days ago, and now I’ve had three days in a row where it has been very fullfilling.

Also did weight-lifting and running today. When this 3 month meditation project is over I think I'm going to go into a huge fitness-project. My goal is just to continue to build stability, self-esteem, inspiration, and life-quality. So fun that a clear project for the fall is beginning to appear. Meditation-Summer and Fitness-Fall. I almost did a session of yoga as well today after the running, but then when I started to calm down after the running I figured it was nice to not exaggerate and rather chill out instead. But maybe my fitness-project can be built around weight-lifting, running and yoga. I want to become as atletic as I can possibly get. But I think the primary focus should be weight-lifting, with yoga and running being supplements.

45 min today as well. A deep, rich, and fullfilling experience.

45 min meditation today as well. Today it was finally deeply satisfying again.

Totally awesome day at work this evening. Such a great flow. I was working with a bi-polar patient that I like very much. We have pretty awesome therapist / client chemistry. The most awesome moment was when she was lying in a reclining chair and I was doing a guided relaxation for her by playing guitar and singing mantras. She is so high in her mania right now that she talks non-stop all day long, but this was the only moment when she was quiet and she thought it was beautiful to listen to and she had tears in her eyes. She said it was a healing experience. With her it is a mutual experience of really appreciating someone. I see her, and she sees me. Pretty damn cool. Among all the challenging situations at my work, moments like these are what really makes it worth it. Feels like I'm back in my purpose again and that I have forgotten about this woman. I will find someone who is far better.

Didn't sit yesterday, so I compensated today by doubling my sitting-time. First I sat for 1 hour, then I did weight-lifting, and then 1 hour with yin-yoga and then 30 min meditation. Pretty awesome session. I'm still a bit fed up with this 45 min of meditation per day commitment, so I'm looking forward to this month is over and I'm finished with this commitment. Only 12 days left.