flowboy

Meditation spaces / where spiritually themed events were being organised in the city I lived. Osho groups. Sex positive festivals like Sexsibility are great, met good people there. Don't be complaining about the shallowness of women and then be too lazy or cheap to actually get off the couch and go where the interesting ones are

I literally just told you where ^ ^

Getting rid of neediness is not a contemplative exercise. It's not a spiritual exercise of transcending "the ego". Neediness is a childhood feeling that lingers into adulthood if certain forms of care are not adequately given by parents during sensitive years. The way to get rid of it is to grieve and shed tears about unfulfilled childhood needs during a therapeutic process, which can take a few years. There's many methods to catalyze that therapeutic process, but having insights about it and contemplating it certainly doesn't solve it.

Or maybe I'm just insanely lucky and I keep meeting high quality people everywhere I go, no matter where it's in the park, on the apps, on retreats, on the internet, in the Netherlands, in Austria, in the city, in the countryside in a 200 people town... Must be me. I apologize for my privilege guys. Guess I have the monopoly on all the high quality people who are able to talk about deep topics. None left for you. Oh well.

Sure that makes sense. But then why don't you go to places where you would find them? Libraries, book clubs, psychedelic themed meetups, retreats, whatever you can find. Like that's the easiest thing to do, just go where people would only be if they had some substance to them. Stop with the weed. Join an event where people with substance would go. Be playful and fun with them. Date one. I've met great people at personal development retreats, psychedelic festivals, neotantra workshops, mushroom meditation evenings, you name it. Go to where your niche is. But also I've met people of substance by talking to them as they were walking through a park, or they approached me because they read something I wrote.

I'm dating a solid 8 stage yellow girl who intellectually blows me away regularly, so maybe you should stop assuming that I'm telling you to go get bubbly chicks in clubs and actually read what I'm saying. Or not, I don't care at this point. Also she's not the first woman I've dated who I could talk about spiral dynamics with for example. Did I do that right off the bat? NO. The first interactions were playful and with lots of sexual tension. Because that's how men and women connect. You can't skip these things.

Sure it's healthy to be able to. I'm able to and the healthier I become mentally, the more I'm able to go into deep topics quickly with people. I'm saying one would be neglecting the dynamics of masculine-feminine attraction if one skips things like playfulness, showing leadership, emotional intelligence, courage, basically putting forward your masculine qualities while drawing out her feminine qualities, and tries to jump straight to intellectual discourse, and still expects intercourse. Maybe I'm misreading you and you're already doing that. In which case you should have no trouble getting girls.

What? I speak monads. Do you even applicative functor bro?

No. There's also emotional deep stuff. You guys are blind to the fact that it's sort of neurotic to want to immediately go into deep topics with people - that's not how men and women naturally connect. That doesn't mean that women are not deep. You can tell intelligence through short-and-sweet, playful conversations. Just look at how she makes small and big choices and how she thinks about things. You don't need to grill her on Nietsche.

So you build shopify stores? How exactly are you doing this? Kudos though.

Not just health problems, also emotional suffering. Yes, suffering creates depth. Talks with Christian Sundberg suggest that we are actually here as humans to acquire depth through different flavours of hardship. I've once talked to a woman who was interested in psychology just like I was, and a similar age. And yet the conversation didn't flow at all. Turns out nothing ever had gone wrong in her life yet.

@Vlad_ I feel like I want to give you a good tickle until you loosen up, then grab a girl off the street and put you in front of each other, and talk to you both until you see that you have more in common than you think because you're both humans with fears and desires and a life story who want intimacy. Then leave you to it. But alas, we live in different countries. P.S. weed is not helping you

How are you going to turn a "conversation about something serious" into sex, though? You're so stuck in this "omg why nobody as deep as me", it's totally an ego trip. And I was the same way. People like to be playful and light when they're just getting to know each other. And you know what? It's awesome. It's exhilirating to play and to flirt. Don't knock it till you try it. I've had a lot of benefits from joining an improv comedy course, I can highly recommend it.

I wasn't sure about making this, or posting this, but here it is. Many people have asked what to do next if they have a problem that could be rooted in childhood experience. I decided to open-source the way I work with clients and turn it into a guided meditation. Will it work? I don't know. This is an experiment. I know it works if I do it with someone. I know from feedback I've gotten here that some people have managed to do deep self-healing on their own in this way. Technically, there's no reason why this shouldn't work, except that it just takes some willpower to break through the resistance and express oneself out loud in an empty room. If you want to be my guinea pig, here you go, I hope it helps you. Would love some feedback.

@Ulax Yes, good question. In a healthy body (not under the influence of substances, well-fed, necessary nutrients and minerals present), the subconscious mind will never allow more pain to be let out, than what a person can handle at once. What happens when I guide these sessions, is that at some point, a client will suddenly "lose" the feeling and no attempt to go deeper will yield much. That's the brain cutting off the tap. "Enough pain for today. Integrate" Going back later to feel a bit more, will lead to more healthy processing of pain. In the mean time, during sleep, the brain will prepare to make this memory and just the right dose of feelings accessible for the next session. What can happen, is that symptoms that someone already has, can flare up again. I've seen a case of night terrors coming back once or twice for example. People can have nightmares, and to the extent they already are prone to compulsions and addictions, negative thoughts and things like that, that can flare up again as a result of entering this query into the search engine of the subconscious. It all settles down again if someone takes a break from this work. People who are not mentally healthy shouldn't do this without professional supervision. Psychosis, suicidal ideation, whatever tendency they already have can flare up. People who are mentally stable and physically healthy can do this and get a lot of benefit. I've become more confident and less prone to addiction through doing this, to name a few. My habitual negative thinking and beating myself up is largely gone. I sharpened my disclaimer in the description, thanks. Revisiting memories can not traumatize - that's a myth as far as I can tell - but it can definitely have side effects in the form of the symptoms that the trauma causes, temporarily getting worse again.

Did some reading and here's what I found. The same mechanism through which old pain gets repressed, eventually becomes a cause of chronic disease. Made a video on the topic. Thought we could discuss it here.

So this is what you become when you read a bit about childhood trauma, then your own Pain starts knocking at your door, ready to be healed, making you severely uncomfortable (triggers in your environment, maybe depression and anxiety) and wanting to turn away from it, while also presenting an immensely valuable opportunity to go through it and truly be free from it ..... aaaand you chicken out. ("unplugging from the triggers") I don't blame you though, most people underestimate the massive quantity of pain that is stuck in them. I did too. But if you want to talk victim mindset, I'd say what you should have done is stay in the triggering environment. Don't unplug. If you're otherwise relatively healthy and stable, you should use your triggers to heal. Instead you escaped them, like a victim. You see, trauma healing is the most ballsy thing you can do. It's terrifying, as my clients will confirm to you. And you chickened out. It's fine. Come have a session when you're ready.

@Gesundheit2 That's your repression system talking. You haven't healed at all, if you think that forgetting about it and not taking it seriously means healing. That's just repressing and living in denial. Do what works for you though. *facepalm*

@Jodistrict Interesting reads, thank you for sharing! I've bookmarked them. The titles are a bit misleading, since in my opinion they say more positive things than negative about Primal therapy. The fact that it cures many psychosomatic and neurotic symptoms, relatively early on, is still amazing to me. It should be lauded and adopted everywhere purely because of that, in a perfect world. Janov shouldn't have had such a big mouth and suggest he can cure anyone of anything, he went a bit too far there. Some people it takes 6 years to heal completely, some people it doesn't work for. But hey, how are competing therapies doing compared to that? Not well, not well at all. The concept of healing completely is so rare, it's hardly even fathomed in the world of main stream therapy.

@Javfly33 would it be an idea to join a book club? Discussing literature would force you to use a lot of words that you don't need in the day-to-day. Yes, I definitely think it's possible. I also have a harder time learning languages (German needs improvement atm) than I used to as a kid, but I think it comes down to the fact that as an adult, we have less survival pressure to learn, and we spend way less time and effort. Even practicing with Duolingo for 10mins a day is too much for me to take on at the moment, go figure. As a child in school I'd have to spend hours a day in classes, practice speaking, read literature in that language, write down tables of conjugations and cases... and my survival depended on it (grades). No doubt if I were to do that now, I'd be learning just as fast. If that doesn't work, I'd look into getting more sleep and rejuvenating your brain with psilocybin ?

Yes, don’t use it for childhood trauma. Only for single incidents. I had a friend who had an abusive early childhood, and over the course of her life she slowly improved with different healing methodologies she came upon. Then she decided to go all mainstream, do what the psychiatrist said and get EMDR sessions. She committed suicide after the second or 3rd session. I’m not sure what to think about it exactly, or what happened in these sessions, but what I do know is that EMDR is a very poorly understood “trick” that you have to pay a lot of money for, to the private person who invented it, in order to perform it on people. But the mechanism of action is unclear. And so a run-of-the-mill psychologist can now buy their way into having a fancy session they can offer, and say they work with trauma. Psychiatry is a very young field, we really don’t know what we’re doing. It’s been around for 200 ish years, before that the insane were considered possessed by the devil. I’m of the firm belief that crying heals the brain, and a trauma is something that hasn’t been sufficiently cried over. Because people don’t like to cry, nor can they stand to watch others bawl, because it would remind them of all their own uncried tears, they constantly invent tricks to prevent it, like medication and EMDR, and call them therapy. And they get insanely popular because it helps therapists and patients in the whole wide world avoid tears. Even though the tears are what they need. I’m not sure how EMDR works, what I do know is that you get rhythmically distracted while talking through traumatic memories, and that there’s no bawling. This can only mean that it somehow helps to further the separation of feeling and factual memory, when it comes to traumatic memories (facts and feelings are stored in different locations, we can have factual memories that we have no idea were traumatic because the feeling is disconnected). That’s not healing, that’s a method to help push the pain down further, where it can never be found. If you do this for a car accident because you want to stop having flashbacks, it’s probably harmless and effective. If you do it for childhood trauma, which is a network of different nodes of pain that you need to work through in order to heal, then you’re probably messing up your brain more rather than healing it. Pain always finds a way to create symptoms. When it can’t be connected with its original source (the factual memory, remembering it, crying through and letting it out == healing), it’s unpredictable what it will do but it’s sure going to mess with you in some way. What I said above also goes for hypnotherapy. Hypnosis can be used for good (digging out a blocked memory so we can cry about it), but usually these days it’s used in a harmful way (getting to the traumatic memory and convince the person to see them in a different way, so that they’re not so painful, thereby creating more blockages around the real pain, which is basically hypnotic gaslighting, well-meaning but very misguided)

@Mada_ I respect this a lot. Not just because of the extremely proactive and self-responsible attitude you demonstrate, but also how humble you are when posting about successes. I will actually take inspiration from that.

Awesome

Monday - Wednesday is for my job, Thursday is for YouTube, Friday and Tuesday evening is for my coaching group. That means that I don’t make plans on those days before 17:00. Weekends and other evenings I can make plans with her