Thittato

Another pose that I like to work more on is the split. Seems to work fine to choose some yin yoga program on youtube, or a vinyasa flow sequence, and then after that to have a few "fun poses" that I like to work more on to spend some time on, and then a little meditation at the end. I want to find a third pose that I can also work on together with the split and the wheel.

Gives me a lot of safety to move from sitting meditation to yoga. The emotional difficulties I experience these days are too heavy to just sit with them, so moving around, making my body stronger and more flexible, makes more sense. It also helps getting me mentally more into my body, instead of just spinning around in my head. I'm going to pick out a few poses that I especially like to work on. The first one that comes to mind is the wheel pose. This one:

More yoga Did another 30 min yin-yoga program this morning, and then I meditated for 15 min. I'm totally going to shift the main-focus of my practice on to yoga for a while now, and then only supplement with meditation when it feels natural after for instance a yoga-session. I think it is totally ok to change thing around a little bit now. I've been very dedicated to my vipassana-meditation for a long while now, but now I totally need some change. When the momentum is good with vipassana it is really good, but when it isn't good it can easily get a little slippery, like I'm just sitting there on my cushion being lazy, not really commiting 100% to giving it all my focus, so this is a good period to put my body more into work. The results are guaranteed when one is actually putting the body to work through yoga. Much more tangible. I know yoga and meditation is meant to supplement each other, and they can't really be separated clearly, but they blend into each other.

Yin Yoga Fusion Woah! I did this program twice today, morning and evening, and it was soooooo awesome:

Yoga, and perhaps starting to get ready to move on from Stage Orange - the independent achiver - in Spiral Dynamics? Hmmmm..... I'm still looking for something. Ok, so I've been obsessing over Chess now since beginning of November. That gave my life purpose, but it is sort of fading out, at the same time that it is an addication that comes back again and again, but it doesn't have that fresh vibrant youthful enthusiasm to it anymore. Sort of like old news. Sometimes fun, sometimes frustrating. A friend was over a few days ago, and we were going to have a jam-session with guitar and djembe, it was fun, but our ideas about making it into something, we realized, after hearing the same enthusiasm again and again, that it was basically just talk. We don't have direction with our music, and right now it doesn't really seem like we have the motivation to take it anywhere, so we actually ended our jam-session, and went to drawing instead that evening. That felt more right. And we started talking about going more into art together because that seemed more aligned with our energy these days, and blablabla, but I now that is just going to be talk as well. At least for me. That is old news as well. Something I go back to during times of frustration, but doesn't really seem like I will go anywhere with it. At least not right now. And this vipassana-meditation that I'm doing. I mean I'm missing some outer reference points to measure my progress against. It is only an internal process, and lately I've been feeling that it is a very slippery process that I can't really get the handle on right now. I mean it is totally helping me, but still there is a slippery quality to it that makes me look for something more that I can boost it up with. So lately I've been thinking perhaps I'm headed for a yoga-period again. I need something physically tangible that I can improve on. So perhaps yoga will add that discipline to my life that I'm searching for, at least for a period now? All these skills that I've been obsessing about, I guess they are typical for Stage Orange in spiral dynamics. The independent achiever. Perhaps I'm starting to get fed up with that mentality and I'm starting to get ready to move on. I'm not really saying that I've reached some kind of noble calling, but it is more like I'm getting frustrated by this mentality that I've been trapped in for so long. So much has been focused on skills. I've tried so hard to make art, to play the guitar, to learn the skills I need as a social worker, I even did 3,5 year as a carpenter apprentice to get a license as a carpenter probably just to over-compensate, after I was done with my social worker education, just because I was obsessed about getting some more tangible skills than simply social and relationship skills. Basically just to prove myself. And this whole Chess-thing. That is basically taking it to the level of madness. I've never pursued anything as strategically, tactically, and obsessively as Chess. It is really taking that Independent Achiever mentality to the level of madness within a field that is totally useless. Had I only pursued guitar that way for a month. Holy smokes what results I would have seen. So anyways, perhaps part of this frustration that I'm feeling these days is that I'm starting to see the end of this type of mentality and I'm starting to look for something new that I don't quite know what is yet. I have this artist dream inside of me - like a failed artist calling - that keeps coming back again and again. But I think for me it is purely motivated by this type of independent achiever mentality. So I was talking with a friend here the other day for three hours, and she is teaching mindfulness, and really encouraged me that perhaps I wanted to do something like that. She is pretty humble about it, and says that I have a lot more experience than she has, which is true, but at the same time, she has her life way more together than I do, and she knows what she wants to do which is to teach mindfulness. I don't know what I want to do, so that sort of kicks the legs out under me regarding making use of my experience. It isn't to much use for other if I don't know if I want to share it with others. So I really gave her a lot of credit for being so brave as to put herself out there as a mindfulness-teacher. I think I used to be jealous at her before, but this time I just felt a lot of good feelings around how brave she is, and it felt really good to encourage her, and I took part in her inspiration, and she suggested what about just putting together a yoga or mindfulness group in the psychiatric hospital where I work? Well, I'm not ready quite yet, but my life certainly needs a deeper purpose, and I can't go on like this for much longer, having just random kicks on various stuff, guitar, art, chess, etc etc. So to sum it up - perhaps investing more into my own yoga-practice is the perfect way to work with all this, at least for a little while. That way I would co-operate with my minds tendency to obsess about skills, and my meditation practice needs a bit more support from something physical, and at the same time I'm working on skills that are about transcending the need for such thing and that are about opening up to love, service, devotion, presence, etc. So yeah, I totally think yoga can sharpen up my discipline and my devotion at this point where I am. And if I decided to put up some groups like my friend suggested, going deeper into yoga will only help my self-esteem with that no matter whether it becomes yoga groups, mindfulness groups, therapy groups, or some combination. A lot about this frustration I'm feeling these days has some elements of madness to it - this seemingly total lack of direction that I feel these days, and how rapidly my interests change around, but perhaps if I just continue without giving up, eventually the right direction will appear. I think it is a combination of both effort and letting go. I have to be willing be taken by life in the direction that life wants me to go, at the same time that I have to be willing to put some effort into this so that I don't get lazy or complacent or cynical about the whole thing. Hmmm, there is something very encouraging about writing all this. Feels like I'm in the process of getting clearer about all this. I think I've been close to loosing hope quite some times, but now I feel hope again. Probably I just need to write this all out. Journal and journal and journal, until it all becomes clear. That's probably why I started to journal. Am I ready to let go of my self-obsessed narcissistic ideas about becoming an artist and instead turn towards service and sharing? Lets see how this unfolds :-)

Figure/ground in gestalt-therapy Microdosing feels like getting the whole psychedelic chapter integrated into something that is not such a big deal anymore. Just like a sub-process that is integrated into the background. I've been making the transition with Chess as well from playing less online Live games to playing long-term games with friends where one only makes a couple of moves per day. Makes it much more like a contemplative thing, instead of a dopamine-rush with lots of moves made in a very short time-span. It is very nice to just take a look at the board a few times per day and then spend the rest of the day sub-consciously processing what my next move will be while I'll do other things, until my mind lands on what I have the greatest feel for. In the gestalt-therapy tradition that I study, they call this figure/ground. When something is a very active issue, it is the dominant figure in ones mind, but as it gets processed, it falls back into the ground as an integrated part of the whole. Now I will go and meditate for 45 min :-)

My history with microdosing First time I microdosed was New Years Eve to this year on LSD. Always been curious about that experience, but also so greedy about psychedelic experiences that I always went for the high dose. Now I've microdosed two more times. One time on mushrooms, and today on Peyote. I have to express my enthusiasm for this one more time. It is a really great thing. I allows me to stay connected with the psychedelic experience while at the same time to so easily stay rooted in the normal everyday experience. It is more like an "undercover" psychedelic experience. Feels like everything I've written about here so far today has had like a synergistic effect where all of it: my yoga, my meditation, my drawings, my guitar, my chess-playing, the whole bath-house experience, this journaling, the way I work on processing my emotional trauma, etc etc, has come together into one great microdosing ceremony where today I experienced the best of all of it in a really chill and grounded way. I think the synergistic effect is really something that the psychedelic experience is enhancing. It allows for a way where all the different branches of ones life can re-connect and integrate - seeing the common theme in all of it.

Microdosing on Peyote Great day! Me and a buddy planned yesterday to microdose on Peyote while we went to the local bath house. Been a really great day of swimming, sauna, warm baths, cold baths, and such stuff. Also did some really interesting games of Chess, started on two new drawings that has an edge to them, and meditated two times for 45 min each time. Also did 10 sun salutations in the bath-house. The microdose session started pretty challenging with lots of difficult feelings. The interesting thing with microdosing I'm figuring out is that one often get in that sort of threshold state in-between the normal state and a mild trip, and there is a lot of tension there, but not overwhelmingly much, so it is a good state to work with exposure to difficult emotional stuff. Was so good to lie in the warm baths and just surrender to the experience. I'm figuring that these difficult emotional processes that I'm going through, that my primary purpose in life for now and probably for a long time will just be to really get through with this stuff, and that was the intention I was having for this session - support from the Peyote in order to work really deeply with these processes. I've done Peyote two times before, but this is the first time I'm microdosing it. I have to say I like the concept of microdosing more and more. I was really greedy for spaced out intense stuff before, but now I'm prefer sessions which are easier to integrate and that doesn't take me so far away from my normal everyday experience.

Quote by David Deida Found inspiration in this quote by David Deida today :-) “Unadorned suffering is the bedmate of Masculine growth. Only by staying intimate with your personal suffering can you feel through it to its source. By putting all your attention into work, TV, sex, and reading, your suffering remains unpenetrated, and the source remains hidden. Your life becomes structured entirely by your favorite means of sidestepping the suffering you rarely allow yourself to feel… And when you do touch the surface of your suffering, perhaps in the form of boredom, you quickly pick up a magazine or the remote control. Instead, feel your suffering, rest with it, embrace it, make love with it. Feel your suffering so deeply and thoroughly that you penetrate it, and realize its fearful foundation.”

Strong alternations between expansive and contractive states I'm going through some heavy shit still. Guess it has always been like this, but before I could for longer periods escape into various projects. Now the whole thing is more naked. Yesterday I felt totally free again. Like very expansive and as if my whole being was open and as if I had ventilated out all my traumas, and then today a new wave hits really hard and I'm deep into some emotional stuff. Just meditated for 45 min and it felt like I managed to process the worst of this wave. A bit sick of it all, but I guess that fact that there doesn't seems to be much escape routes anymore is speeding up the process. Like the waves hits really hard but they are also processed very deeply.

Checkmate by Life Had a really great session with my new therapist today. I don't think I've ever felt as strongly as a failure before as I do these days, and we figured out it is because I've used up all my tricks that have prevented me from getting fully in touch with these feelings before. Like my escape-strategies has been used up. I'm corned by life. I'm check-mate. Nothing really dramatic has happened. Well, perhaps a few things. But nothing out of the ordinary. Was so funny yesterday. Oh my god how miserable I felt. Becoming check-mate is really the worst feeling. No wonder most people so quickly give up on chess. And there I'm sitting, along with the best players in this town, and I'm totally feeling that I absolutely suck at this stupid game that I'm ironically also addicted to and that is my last escape-strategy. Haha. Perhaps that was the most beautiful illustration that this game has been able to bring to my meditative/therapeutic process so far. I think all meditative/therapeutic processes wants to get you to a point where you feel absolutely cornered and there is no escape-route anymore but to fully acknowledge your situation in life. Might sound like I'm utterly miserable, but regarding my therapeutic process I'm very satisfied after today's session. We are going to have a weekend-seminar this weekend with this education, and now that I've done 5 sessions with my new therapist I feel back on track again regarding these group-processes that we do as part of this education. Also I got my new books today. That "Creative Process in Gestalt Therapy" book looks totally awesome, so now I'm soon taking the bus for 5 hours to go visit a friend in another city for a couple of days and I'm looking forward to some change of scenery and to enjoy this book on the ride.

Curiosity about my next "psychological rebirth" Holy smokes. So I was at the local chess club this evening, and I was so beaten to pieces, hahhah....... And I'm down at 920 in rating at Chess.com again. It was a bit sad being there. We were only 3 people this time, and a 4th one that came much later. Usually there is about 10, at least, and lots of other people dropping by. An old guy, who is really cool, and who is sort of my local representation of the archetype of a sensai in Chess, started this pub-chess group right after New Years Eve. Felt like something that was really going to grow - so it was a bit strange that now that my energy is running out of this - that the group had sort of also lost its momentum, at least for this time. But yeah I totally suck at something that I've gotten totally addicted to. Hahha........ I mean I was getting some ego out of beating all my friends. But playing Chess casually a few times per year compared to pursuing it academically are two completely different things. To be fair towards myself I probably could have gotten reasonably good at this. I'm sure most people who have the interest can. But I think it will require much more than I'm willing to give. After we where done with the matches I had a beer with one of the guys, and I introduced him to this concept of chess-addiction that I've been researching a bit lately, and he didn't see any problem with that - saying that playing Chess is probably much better than what most people do - spending their evenings watching TV. And from his point of view I can totally see that that makes totally sense. He is probably going to go on and become a teacher in mathematics and enjoy chess as a hobby for the rest of his life. Where as me - a restless spiritual seeker - capable of getting some sort of manic infatuation with pretty much anything - I think I will just have to consider this part of my personal social anthropological studies of all the various types of human cultures that exists. I very much like the buddhist teachings of rebirth when viewed as how we psychologically are born into one world after the other. So this time I had a psychological rebirth into the world of Chess. Wonder which place I will be born into next :-)

Thank you! I'm glad to hear! Pretty cool that there is actually a few people reading this stuff!! :-D

"Josh Waitzkin knows what it means to be at the top of his game. A public figure since winning his first National Chess Championship at the age of nine, Waitzkin was catapulted into a media whirlwind as a teenager when his father's book "Searching for Bobby Fischer" was made into a major motion picture. After dominating the scholastic chess world for ten years, Waitzkin expanded his horizons, taking on the martial art Tai Chi Chuan and ultimately earning the title of World Champion. How was he able to reach the pinnacle of two disciplines that on the surface seem so different? "I've come to realize that what I am best at is not Tai Chi, and it is not chess," he says. "What I am best at is the art of learning."In his riveting new book, "The Art of Learning," Waitzkin tells his remarkable story of personal achievement and shares the principles of learning and performance that have propelled him to the top -- twice." Wow! Thank you! Sounds like a really awesome book :-)

Zen and the Art of Chess Chess as a Zen-koan. Reading deeply philosophical discussions on Chess.com where people discuss whether Chess is a waste of time or not hehehe..... Still thinking about quitting Chess, especially now that I've reached my goal. Wondered if I should set a new goal of reaching 1200, but even to stabilize around 1000 is hard enough, and then what if I reach 1200, then I would probably only want to reach 1400, and on and on, and what is the point of that? I think I understand this game now, and how one gets addicted to improvement. Even though it is a fascinating game, it is still just a game, and when I look at the streamers on youtube and stuff like that, I think the whole scene has a lot of similarities with the video-game scene, especially when playing it online. I've always thought being a gamer was a very ridiculous thing to be, because why wouldn't one want to spend ones time improving in socializing, guitar-playing, meditation and art-making, instead, for instance? Pouring so much time into a game just seems like waste. But somehow I got seduced into becoming a gamer by finding a game I thought was somehow more sophisticated than typical video-games. On the chess.com forum there is a lot of people discussing chess being a waste of time and highly addictive, so I'm not alone in my experience. Found this quote: “[Chess] is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time. ” George Bernard Shaw, Haha...... Chess really gives that feeling of being engaged in something very clever. Ok, I won't just quit over night, and I will probably alternate a bit back and forth with both enthusiasm and skepticism, but at least it seems like this beginner-enthusiasm is starting to wear off. I guess I've seen the process now of refining my game from being an absolute beginner to becoming a serious intermediate beginner kind of, and I'm starting to understand what it takes to maximize my potential, and continuing to pour energy into this the way I've been for the past 4 months in order to reach my highest potential, year after year? Seems like that is what people who get really hooked on this are doing, and totally doesn't seem like what want to spend my time doing. So I guess there will be a gradual fading out. Like now my beginner enthusiasm has already peaked, and striving to become even better totally doesn't seem worth it. But is was fun. I was really curious and fascinated by this whole thing. The game in itself, the people it attracts, etc. I guess with video-games, and similar stuff, one can't just trust the feeling of passion. Just because I feel inclined to do it doesn't necessarily mean that it is a good thing. Had I been hooked to this level on my guitar, or with my drawings, oh man, that would have been some results. But yeah, I will give it some time, this whole thing, to just breathe and sort itself out. No rush to figure anything out. Suddenly I was deeply into this, and it has been an interesting experience so far, so no rush to get out of it. When people get so engaged in an activity like chess, and at the same time people ponder upon the deeper philosophical meaning of actually being engaged in this thing (like I do), the whole thing in many ways become like a Zen-koan, and that's how I will tie this in to meditation this time :-) Zen and the Art of Chess, hehe :-)

Some sudden and unexpected success with my new therapist So now it is getting interesting. My new therapist has been helping me looking closer at how I avoid eye-contact. Or I don't really avoid eye-contact, but I find it more uncomfortable to look people directly into the eyes than probably most people, so my eye-contact probably reveals a lot of my insecurities. I didn't see how this was related to my feelings of grief held as this pressure in my eyes and some feeling of something weighing me down in my whole face, but actually I think she was getting at some energetic blockage that is in my whole face, and tonight when I meditated during night-shift it suddenly felt like my whole face opened up like if it was a chakra that had been blocked but now the energy was flowing freely through it. She was trying to get me to acknowledge and embrace that I felt like a failure (I don't only feel like failure, much of the time I also feel that my life is a really exciting adventure, but for the sake of therapy we try to really root out all these unconscious painful feelings that dominate us more than we usually like to admit), but every time she was hitting close to this feeling I would break eye-contact so she said that I was probably avoiding something here because of that, and yeah, even though this new therapist is a bit more confrontational than I find comfortable, she was really hitting home here. No wonder these feelings, and that energetic blockage in my eyes/face has been really triggered these days. So when I walked home from work this morning it felt like my energy field around my head was really open again and that my vision was much broader, and that I was way more in contact with my surroundings and much less stuck in my own head. I'm pretty sure if I had met someone I knew they would have noticed that my eye-contact would have been much more comfortable. I'm not going to celebrate this as some kind of "finally I'm free!" because my experience is that these kind of openings comes and goes. Most likely it will close and open several times, but right now my face is really open and comfortable. Didn't see how all this was related, but feels like I'm now connecting the dots. What was also cool about they way she worked was that she had me tell her all the reasons why I found it uncomfortable looking at her. For instance I was afraid that she would judge me because I thought she looked a bit strict, and I was also afraid that our relationship would end in a conflict, and lots of other reasons. My previous therapist didn't use himself in this way. He wouldn't put himself out there as a target for all my projections, and that's why I think the tension in our relationship started to build up since there was no way for me to let out my thoughts and feelings about him. He was only helping me with external matters, but energetically refused to make use of our relationship directly as a tool for therapy.

Hey Lucas :-) Thank you so much! That is very heart-warming to hear!! It is so easy to slip out of the meditation-routine. I still do frequently even though I have been meditating for a long time. I see you have a journal here as well. Journaling in combination with meditation has been so helpful to me. I love Leo's principle about self-experimentation. We just got to keep on experimenting until we find those things that work for us :-) I do some combination of zazen and vipassana. Depends what my practice need in the balance between effort and letting go. Ajahn Chah is awesome!

Keep on keeping on So sat for 30 min today. There is still a lot of grief sitting around my eyes in particular and in general there is some kind of mask on my whole face. Something that is weighing down on me. I have this strong feeling lately of being a failure and lonely and without purpose. It always comes back to this. Unfortunately I'm a bit bi-polar, so I never stay long enough in these feelings to get them processed fully. It feel like I dip myself a little bit into them, and then I get some kind of relief, and I get very high and feel that I'm done with all therapeutic processes. I'm amazed at my own ability to fall for the conviction that I'm "done" over and over. But of course, even though this grief is not fully present all the time, I think I can still be able to keep a steady focus going working with this. I was working night-shift tonight, and had a lot of time to meditate, and these feelings where extremely strong, even to the point of feeling that even meditation wasn't working anymore, but at some point I surrendered myself to the experience and it felt that things began to transform. Today the same pressure is still here, but it is much milder. So I will just keep at it. Keep on keeping on, as one of my teachers used to say.

Thank you! Looks really interesting!! I will take a closer look :-) It is exactly the spiritual aspect which is lacking in my education I feel. People in my class don't get that vitality and life-force shining out of their eyes that people who meditate regularly get, even though the psychotherapeutic method is good in itself, but it would have been much better combined with more focus on meditation-practice.

So today I had a study-group together with three people from this gestalttherapist-education, and even though I've been whining alot about this education, I'm starting to get a little bit more optimistic about the whole thing. I really went from idealizing the whole thing intensely, to really hating it so badly, but now I'm getting back to a bit of a tempered optimism about it, while still also, of course, there is some remaining negativity about it. I'm probably quitting after this 2nd year is completed even though the education is 4 years, but at least I completed this 2nd year. But I've fallen quite out on the theory-part this year, so yesterday I ordered two books that seems pretty cool: Creative Process in Gestalt Therapy by Joseph Zinker and Body Process: A Gestalt Approach to Working with the Body in Psychotherapy by James I. Kepner The other books on the book-list has been pretty dry, but these two looks really interesting. Didn't meditate today, except for the 5 minutes I was guiding my study-group, and they really liked the meditation I gave them, so that was nice.

Chess-goal reached, going back to working full-time Hurrah! 1000 in rating reached at Chess.com.... Haha...... Chess must have been my full-time job for the past 4 months, and to "celebrate" I'm going to go back to my normal job again. I got burned out around Christmas because it was too much with all those therapeutic processes I was in as part of my therapist-education, but now I feel fine again. I have 30 % of a permanent shift at my job, which I have been working during this period, but normally I tell my job I'm available for working extra, so they can just call me if they need me, and usually that amounts to me working 100 %. So that is what I will go back to now. I've been delaying it for a while because I've saved up some money and I've been getting used to the comfort of only working 30 %, so 18th of March (which is the first monday after the next weekend seminar in my therapy-education) will be the day that I'm fully available again to my job. If I don't set a date like that I'll just continue to indulge in this freedom until I run out of money. Feels cool to celebrate this chess-milestone this way. Something about this whole process has made me more realistic I think. I'm a very daydreaming kind of type. So for now it will be a normal job, and daily meditation practice. Sat for 1 hour this morning. I felt like a very ordinary dude who was satisfied with having a steady meditation practice.

Identifying which parts of my body are affected by difficult feelings (and some more about Chess...) Today I've meditated 30 min in the morning and 30 min in the evening. Been experiencing some kind of grief this whole day. It was interesting how it felt like it was sitting in my eyes, and also it was connected with my chest feeling a bit sunk in. Like there was some weight pressing down my chest. It felt like one big connected area these unpleasant body sensations that were going from my eyes/face to my chest. I was resisting this experience the whole day, but when I could identify which parts of my body this experience was dominating the most then it felt like I had some kind of map or handle on this thing - like it made it therapeutically interesting to deal with these feelings. I've often felt that I've had some unresolved grief pressing behind my eyes, but I haven't felt that it has been connected to my chest this way before, so now it is like I have a larger area to work with when these feelings come back again. Besides that I've reached my highest rating ever in Chess today - 993 points in Blitz-games at Chess.com - which isn't really very high at all - but I started at around 700 in the beginning of November, so an improvement of almost 300 rating points in 4 months is pretty good. My first goal is to reach 1000, and that might only be one match away, or I might fall down again and it might take several months before I return to this point, which is unlikely, but previous experience has shown that chess-progress comes in ebbs and flows. Anyways, it feels like this thing is getting much more integrated, and it feels like a lot of my other interests are returning now. Who knows how much I want to play after I reach my goal? Seems to me it is most obsessive in the beginning when I'm struck by this beginning enthusiasm, but then after that settles down I realize I just have accept my position in the hierarchy and gradually work my way up step by step. Perhaps this will be an integrated interest that I will carry with me for the rest of my life, or perhaps now that I have gotten a foot in the door and have gotten my curiosity satisfied about this game and the sort of people it attracts that now I'm ready to move on to other things again. Perhaps the most important thing for me was to see the progress of refining ones blunders. At first when one begins in chess one makes a lot of really gross blunders, and then the process seems to basically just be about tightening up the game, but the blunders are never removed once and for all - no, they go through a long process of getting finer and finer. So each step up will just bring me up to a level where the blunders are a little bit more refined than they were on the previous level. So no I can literally see this has already happened - and I can see where I'm headed if I continue this process. Probably that was the most satisfying part of this study - understanding and seeing with my own eyes chess progress happening right before me. I always hate when it feels like I stumble around in the dark - but getting a handle on the learning-process - that is something that I really like. So now this is not so mysterious anymore. The biggest parallels between Chess and meditation that I make these days is the process of landing in my meditation practice and with the physical aspects of actually being part of a local chess-club being my parallel to that. Just continuing to show up. I wanted to quit Chess at some point when it felt too obsessive - but instead I managed to ride it out and now I feel that I have landed and accepted my place in the hierarchy - it might only be a temporary endeavor - but at least I managed to stay with the process all the way and overcome my bi-polar tendencies to either become narcissistic or self-loathing about this. I was also getting a lot of tips from more advanced player on how to improve, and now I have sorted that all out and found out which things I like to practice on to improve. Same with meditation - you got to listen to the more experienced yogi's, but then you got to put all together and make it into something that works for you. In Leo's 65 Core Principles of Living the Good Life, I really liked his principle of self-experimentation - basically that we just got to continue to experiment and experiment until we find what works for us. Also I go to this bath-house mentioned before regularly now, and I'm getting better and better at going into the "ice bath." I'm experimenting with sinking myself slowly and in a controlled way into the water. To begin with it was much more a sense of forcing myself into a shocking experience and getting out of it as quickly as possible - but now I try to ease myself both into and out of it. It is somehow a bit of a traumatic experience - probably at least when done in this "panic mode" kind of way - but when done mindfully and with ease then I think it is a really good thing to get used to. So lots of good things going on. And of course journaling about them makes me more grateful and the chaos settles down and makes my experiments much more into something that is part of a larger and more meaningful whole.

45 min meditation this morning, and now 20 min this evening. Still pretty uncomfortable because of this weed I smoked two days in a row. I was at the local chess club today as well, and I played really bad and it feels like weed is really messing up my cognitive abilities. I know it is only temporary, tomorrow I'm probably feeling like normal again, and perhaps I'm exaggerating, or that there is some parallel psychological process that also feeds into this, but as far as I can remember from my previous periods of smoking weed it doesn't really do me any good. I've never been a stoner, but all my friends were, and I probably would have been one too if my experience with weed had been better, but this is the same old story of almost always feeling like crap when I do it. Well, there was a little honey moon period when I first started doing it, where there was a lot of laughter and interesting philosophical thoughts, but that quickly turned into something unpleasant, and often even the first part of the evening was fun, usually it turned into something unpleasant as the high turned into some kind of slow, unpleasant philosophical stupor. So yeah, same old story. I know what this stuff is. This is not my ally, nor has it ever been.

Was out in the forest today making a fire together with some friends. We smoked weed and I got pretty stoned. Smoked weed with another friend yesterday, and I don't smoke much these days, but suddenly I had the opportunity to do it two days in a row. Can't really say that it does me much good. In fact I rather feel pretty miserable when I do it, like very insecure and philosophical in an unpleasant way. So this is the state I've been walking around in this evening, although it is pretty mild and manageable compared to how it used to be when I smoked before. But anyways, in the context of meditation and self-actualization, I will see this weed-smoking as some kind of exposure therapy. Getting some uncomfortable feelings triggered and breathing my way through them. There never seems to be any end to the sort of self-loathing and shame that I am able to feel, but as they say in gestalttherapy: The way out is through. I'm mildly in a panic-mode right now. Perhaps panic is too strong a word, but my mind is racing - searching for something - some kind of solution to this unpleasant state that I'm in. My whole life is viewed through a lens of misery and meaninglessness. This is an exaggeration - it is not only unpleasant - there is something pleasant as well about this state - but it is that whole ambivalence thing - like being stone is some kind of slow motion suffering. Hard to describe. Looking forward to wake up tomorrow again. Didn't meditate today, but it will be the first thing that I do when I wake up tomorrow. Besides this this whole weekend has been nice and social.

Insights in the bath-house Today when I went to the bath-house and swimming hall nearby where I live I started to think about what are the primary or essential skills in some of the things I'm interested in. - In the vipassana meditation that I do it is to penetrate the objects of awareness so that stuckness turns into flow. The way that I "penetrate" the objects is that I start to look for whatever I can find of some vibratory quality to the object. Even the most solid objects of awareness has some vibratory quality to it if I just look closely enough. - In social work it is to make the people that I work with feel seen, heard, understood and validated for who they are. - In Chess it is "pattern recognition" and there is a very structured way to develop this type of pattern recognition and that is probably the quickest way to get good at the game. - In social relationships and in dating it is probably to add value to the interaction, although that can be specified a lot. When I was at this bath-house I also started to notice that my level of consciousness using this place has become much greater. I've found a really good balance between swimming, sauna, using the "ice bath" being inspired by the Wim Hoff method, using underwater high-pressure currents to massage my lower-back, and the different warm-baths. Before I used to boiled myself too long in the sauna, really exaggerating how much time I spent there so I became so tired I didn't see any use of it, but now there was just a new level of refinement and balance to the whole thing, which was really awesome. It just adds to the whole energy of this forum of how to create an awesome life I think. Even something as simple as going to the bathhouse can be done with a lot of skill and refinement when done consciously. I really aspire to bring this level of consciousness into all areas of my life. The whole bath-house experience really has a meditative/contemplative quality to it as well. Feels like just soaking into the experience of presence while being there. It is very re-rejuvenating when done the right way.