flowboy

@soos_mite_ah If you are truly in a position where you have a healthy diet and exercise routine that you like, feels healthy and can stick to, then that's awesome. Many people (most?) don't even have that, and go through cycles of doing something a bit too extreme and then dropping it. If this is the way your body looks when you take the utmost care of it, then the ideal state is to love it just the way it is. That's easier said than done, I know. But put a pin in the difficulty in that for a second. Look at all the women who have a belly like that and love their body as it is. Do you know them? If not, you're not following the right people on Instagram because they certainly exist. Don't underestimate the influence of the people you surround yourself with, also digitally. I personally know some very, very plus-sized women who have come to love their body just the way it is. They do experiment with diet, they may try keto sometimes, but mostly they focus on quality ingredients and what feels healthy to them. It's inspiring because they're not rejecting any part of themselves. And their belly is much, much bigger than yours, I can tell you that much. It doesn't cause anyone else to reject them or think negatively about them or be less attracted to them, because they don't have that dynamic going on inside them. It all starts with how you relate to yourself, and then other people resonate with and start to mirror that. Now for the unaddressed part: why is it difficult to practice self-love and self-acceptance for some, but not for others? That goes back to how someone was raised. Self-acceptance and self-love gets absorbed from primary caregivers. If it was conditional, then someone will learn to accept themselves conditionally. (parents may have shown you more love when you were 'good', whatever that meant, or when you got good grades in school for example) The body image aspect of it is just how it gets projected. Conditional love just gets projected onto the most sensitive, visceral aspects. For women, it might easily go to body image. For men, it might rather go to insecurity about status and achievements (but they may have body image issues as well). So that's an important point I want to make: conditional self-love is a pattern that can manifest in different ways, such as body image, but the way it manifests is less important and should be seen peripheral. You can not heal conditional self-love through addressing how it manifests. A man can not become self-loving by finally becoming that hotshot lawyer or business man. You can not become self-loving by finally losing your belly fat. You can choose to get liposuction, but then the conditional self-love will just manifest in other aspects of yourself. And if you introspect on this, you will find that it already does. How do we address this then? I would suggest first going through a course of inner child work, to get familiar with what needs have gone unmet in childhood. You may believe there are none, or you had a pretty good childhood, almost everyone does. And yet they have problems. Patrick Teahan has good videos on it on youtube. I have a guided exercise that seems to help many people and would be a great introduction. John Bradshaw's Homecoming is a must-read book on the topic, which also contains a practical course. Notice how none of these things directly relate to body image and eating disorders. Because that's just one way that conditional love can be projected. After you've gotten familiar with your inner child's unmet needs and have developed a good relationship with her, you can look at approaches to feel and heal her unfelt pain. This would shift you from conditional self-love into unconditional self-love, without having to practice it every day anymore. It's more of a long term process, but very worthwhile. The most effective path I know of is Primal Therapy, which has fallen out of favor of the mainstream, but me and everyone I know who experienced it have gotten great lasting results with it. Other recommendable paths are body work approaches such as ERT, Reichian therapy, and psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, for example with MDMA or ketamine. There are other therapies that work well for releasing trauma, but always choose something that involves feeling and releasing emotions, not just talking about them. At this point we're in the realm of trauma healing, and you may not think of yourself as someone who has been traumatized, and neither did I, but I consider any significantly unmet childhood need, such as the need for unconditional love, to be childhood trauma in the broad sense. Which is why I recommend childhood trauma healing practices for healthy people who want to develop themselves or improve some aspect of their lives. I value practices and methods of healing that create permanent results, over things that you have to keep doing every day for the benefits to stay, such as self-love affirmations and the like. That's why I only recommend things that I believe have the potential to change someone for the better in a permanent way, without burdening them with a regimen of practices that has to be followed for the rest of their life.

Damn that's eloquent

@UnbornTao At that time I went keto at the same time, so I had a mild 'keto flu' which means a few days of body aches and low energy. These days I eat sugar sometimes, but on most days I don't, so there's no dependency there. Trained myself to buy healthy ingredients, so sugar is the exception rather than the rule and I'm content with that.

Pretty sure "I'm not ready" is a birth feeling for me. I would rather be the one to make myself "not ready" (by leaving things unfinished), than be ready externally, have everything clean and tidy, and have to feel something deeper. Not ready to be born? Incomplete, not done developing? Ooh, I can sense that goes deep. Incomplete = not ready. I also feel not ready to receive love, quite often, especially when my kitchen is not ready, or the tidiness of my desk or calendar is not ready. Having a friend over or my partner would then feel quite triggering and I'm not ready. I've been extremely focused on making things complete since I was very young. At the same time, being so detail-oriented that I needed an impossible amount of time to make things complete, to fulfill my perception of what complete was. When I start a project and it's nearing readiness, I will inevitably find something extra, that also needs to be done or else it wouldn't be complete. Then if I would cut off that extra thing, it's like falling into an abyss. I either complete it or ... death. And yes, I'm happy to be my own cause of this unready feeling in the present. To leave things on my desk, to create a bit of a mess. It's great to have something to point to. Without that... I feel anxiety rising and a black void opening up.

I'll say what needs to be said. This guy needs therapy, not 'Truth'. @Blackhawk Sorry to hear what you went through. Your initial posts in this thread mention two things: Can't have a tripsitter because I don't know anyone I have "naturally bad nerves" Not knowing anyone is a sign of depression and bad nerves means you have anxiety. Not the exact recipe for a good 'set' before this trip - I'm surprised how many people missed that and just encouraged you to go into it, while there's clear signs that your mental health is not in order and you don't have a good support system. Don't blame the community though - you did this together. No one can convince you that a dose of LSD will fix you if you don't convince yourself first. When you've had some time to take a breath and recover - please look into healing, especially therapy forms that address childhood trauma, rather than spirituality and 'Truth', because that seems to be just not what you need right now.

You're keeping the doses low, so even if the setting turns out to be bad for you it will still be very manageable. Don't worry too much about it. That said, you've probably heard "set and setting" They are interlinked, not separate. The helpfulness or unhelpfulness of a setting depends on how it makes you feel (your set) So if being in a house with family around, who you can not tell about your tripping, makes you feel tense and anxious because of the secretiveness, then it's not a good setting. Personally I'm not wired to care super much about what someone else thinks about me, so it wouldn't send me into a bad spiral. A hotel room would, because I'm quite sensitive to the feeling of being out-of-place, not at home, lost. So that would be much more likely to send me into a negative spiral, then again, if I'm looking to face that feeling and see what early trauma it is connected to, perhaps it would be perfect for me. Just not the easiest trip. For someone else a hotel room would feel easy and safe. Go for a place you are physically safe. So don't go wandering off into nature without telling anyone where you're going. You won't be able to use Google Maps when you're tripping, so getting lost is a real possibility. Secrets contribute to paranoia, anxiety and disconnection, so if at all possible, make sure the people in your house know and accept what you are doing.

If you were not repressing anything then you would have a full vividly experienced emotional range, the sensory experience of simply living would be so satisfying and rich that you can hardly bring yourself to do any unhealthy habit on top of it, your level of empathy would be deep and come naturally, life would feel rich and meaningful without having to do much, and you'd be very emotionally stable. Also you'd have vivid childhood memories that go back till birth. Most of us are repressing some stuff Some of us - a lot. That can turn into depression. How can you know? The telltale signs are numbness to certain experiences and overreaction to some others. Anything but what was described above. How can you discover it? Talk to someone who knows how to spot this and who can help you use that as a starting place for healing. (Healing basically being using a systematic process for digging up repressed feelings and integrating them, each piece enriching your life experience until you are no longer experiencing depression) If you want to go the therapist route, look for someone who does Schema therapy, Reichian therapy, Emotional Release Therapy, or Primal therapy. ERT and Reichian therapy are done physically. One session should be enough to see if it works on you. The most important part is that you feel like they get you and you trust them.

@MilenaS Awesome! Really enjoyed our calls and ongoing correspondence ?

Podcast for other people who like to waste their energy debating and debunking He can enlist your help with that, not mine I'm going to practice what I preach here and not engage in debate

That would be a terrible waste of your energy. Let people believe whatever they want. Debating people does not lead to them having better beliefs and thanking you for it. The only reason you'd even want to - is because you are not secure in your own foundation. So start there. The other person is irrelevant. What do you want to believe? How can you act in accordance with that belief, so that it grows stronger?

@Average Investor All these thoughts can be grouped into "overthinking" - it's not that their content is not interesting, but they usually don't reflect the deeper reasons for your action or inaction. It goes like this: I feel something (attraction) Something blocks me from my natural expression of that attraction energy (talking to her) The energy of the attraction has to go somewhere - and so it goes into the mind and disperses into a web of thoughts (what was quoted above) I would say that for you it's crucial to find out what the blockage is in step 2 - what really stops you from following an attraction by expression without even thinking about it. You can't do this by thinking, you can only do this by feeling. This is what I'd do with a client in a session as a first step. Feel into that moment where you stop yourself. What is that feeling? Where have you felt that before? And before that? This really needs to be done from a meditative, relaxed state, again not thinking just feeling. You can ask it some questions and see what comes up (see my guided video)

I would call self-love practices actually pseudo-spiritual, because they are ways in which people try to address their trauma (which is not a real fix). A person who has really processed all their trauma does not need to practice self-love, or even have a concept of it. It is a given. Never need to think about it again.

I can do that in one session. That is indeed what much of today's therapy seems to be about - talk therapy especially, but psychoanalysis is also quite ineffective. All mind, little feeling. You seem to have a sharp intuition!

It is not the values and what you call ignorance, it is your judgment of those values. It's a quality which you judge as negative, therefore suppress in others the same way you suppress it in yourself. Integrating the shadow would put a stop to the suppression and judgment of that quality in others and yourself. (in your case: you would have no problem with stage orange things and not try to suppress those in yourself) Scary, eh?

Still your shadow talking. Your shadow is in the judgment of those values. "superficial", "ignorance" - that's the shadow. Nothing is lurking for me and I don't experience anxiety currently. What is your goal with it? Why would they be able to screw you up?

I'll come with, that sounds like a perfect place for a flowboy.

It can be very useful to distance yourself, find peace, to get perspective and insight on the situation. I'm not judging what you are doing one way or another, I have not enough information to understand what you even mean I'm just responding to the very generalised "Is leaving the most important thing" to which I would say no.

That's your shadow talking. I'm not anxious. I have a long track record of facing my fears head-on. I'm also very much a work in progress. I deal with ego backlashes, binges of unhealthy stuff, lapses in discipline, shame, self deception, and other challenges on a regular basis. I do my best to work through everything that comes up using the techniques I know and more importantly the support of friends, therapists, and coaches I trust, which produces learning, which I then am able to put back into my work helping others.

Funny because you started this topic making all kinds of claims, like sugar isn't bad and junk food won't harm you Insulin resistance is not a "detail". It's a major factor for most chronic disease, and a major gaping hole in your knowledge. I'm not a health expert either. That's @Michael569 I do however open myself to a lot of information from different sources, and don't make excuses for not knowing. You might consider doing the same.

She needs to be committed to her own journey of personal development, as do you, and the relationship needs to serve both of those journeys. If she's growing and learning, and you're out there growing and learning, then coming together to connect is not boring, it is a much needed balancing out. Also a relationship is something you should be constantly evolving. Read books about it. David Deida. John Gray. Having a relationship is definitely active, not passive.

@meadow lol you were at the rave I mentioned. Are there places to find peace at Fusion? I think what made a big difference in my trips is that I could just go sit on the beach and swim and not be swarmed by people.

My money is on escapism. Nothing wrong with some good old-fashioned escapism every once in a while. Everyone deserves an experience of peace. Don't elevate it into a spiritual, high-consciousness thing. Eventually you'll have to face what you're running from. Which is what?

Lol. "High consciousness people would surely think like me, because I'm the highest consciousness person I know!" Really? There's no chance they understand something that you don't, therefore they do something that seems counterintuitive to you?

Leave a toxic family system. Leave toxic friendships. Leave everyone..? That sounds like escapism. Wherever you go, there you are.