Amandine

Well done on the sugar Arc, you've already won a lot of battles here, you'll be soon winning the war the way you're going, I'm sure you'll get back on track with the meditation very soon, good luck to you and have a great Christmas! ?? @Arcangelo

Thanks @BorisBritva all the best for you and your mate, you sound like a good friend supporting him, I hope he gets better, good luck! ?

Thanks @mmKay I really enjoyed reading this fascinating, brave (cold turkey, cold showers) and funny odyssey which I'll be following everyday, you've sure got dedication and amazing will-power (just before Christmas as well), best of luck to you, you're on the right track, don't give up, you can do this !! ? ? ? Poor Sleep Quality "Sugar withdrawal can cause sleep disturbances, which can take away the amount of REM sleep you get at night. When the body is adjusting to a decrease in sugar in the diet and with a decrease in certain hormones, it can cause the brain to work in unnatural ways, and your sleep quality could be affected. As with some of the other previously mentioned symptoms above, poor sleep quality related to sugar withdrawal may diminish by itself and with time, but if you notice that it persists for longer than a week or two, then you should consult with your physician for further guidance". source : https://www.sweetdefeat.com/blog/sugar-withdrawal-symptoms

Great first plan, best one to start with, good luck Bill, you can do this! ? ? A perfectionist walked into a bar…apparently, the bar wasn’t set high enough.

Eye floaters still there. Flashing light came back a little, just in the evening last night. Ha, there may be more to floaters than meets the eye, if this eye-opening website is anything to go by. https://www.eye-floaters.info/ Goal Report Day 9 (Chewsday 24 Dec 2019) ?Goal #1: no wine (not on the agenda for today, tomorrow for Christmas Day I'll be sharing a bottle of champagne with hubby though) Goal #2: minimum 20 minutes meditation (rested my eye today, only did a very short session of meditation, to show up) ?Goal #3: Mindful eating, 4 baby steps (see below, on-going updates during day) ?Goal #4: be brief, 3 baby steps (see below, on-going updates during day) ?Goal #5: minimum 8 hours sleep (11.30 pm, awake 7.30 am = 8hrs) ?Goal #6: minimum 40 minutes indoor bicycle ?Goal #7: minimum 30 mins Wellbox (did a face session today) **************** As a seasoned procrastinator, I've been spending (and "wasting"?) too much time writing on the forum instead of doing the Self Work, which I feel might just be subconscious resistance. I also find I want to help and focus on others here instead of focussing on myself. I really get carried away typing, and sometimes write tons of stuff only to self-censor and then delete a lot of it. As a bit of a OCD perfectionist, I'm a stickler for good grammar (punctuation, spelling, etc) and am also over-concerned with the semantics of my texts so that the meaning of what I'm trying to say will not be ambiguous but is clear and inoffensive to the reader, so I sometimes edit obsessively, even if I see a frigging comma missing. All time-guzzling stuff, which is really frustrating me, life's too short. So will have to establish some boundaries to help me manage my writing better, because I really need to find the time instead to do the self-actualizing work, this is after all the priority here. This "brevity Goal" is a real challenge for me, in fact it is maybe one of the hardest out of all my goals, so have been failing miserably with it over the last few days. My hubby calls me "Madame Flow", I overheard him complain to his friend "I haven't talked to my wife in 3 weeks, I didn't want to interrupt her". Just kidding! Seriously though, I think the "be brief" goal hasn't been working for me because it is too vague and not specific enough, so I've decided to create some baby steps to help, using "minimum/maximum with numbers (which in an OCD way seems to be serving me well so far). I feel a bit guilty limiting myself to just a one-sentence message to people (sorry folks), but tell myself that the reader will actually probably be more grateful having a "quicky" to read than a long, time-consuming missive anyway. I do read what they have to say though, which is the essential thing. So Goal #4: be brief entails 3 important baby steps: 1. Maximum 5 messages a day. 2. Maximum 1 sentence a message. 3. Maximum 5 minutes a message. *************** Goal #3: Mindful eating 8 am Large capuccino Breakfast 12.20 am Muesli 30g Bjorg sugar-free organic "Fibres" muesli, 10g granola, 10g oatbran, 50g fresh forest berry fruits, 10g organic unsalted cashew nuts, 10g dried apricots and 150ml organic sugar-free soy milk. 2 large cups of black tea. Results 1. Seated? Yes ? 2. Only activity? Yes ? 3. mini 30 chews? Yes ? 4. mini 20 minutes? ? 3.20 pm "Pre Christmas Shop" snack Large Capuccino, 6 small vanilla lemon protein biscuits (40g) (30 chews? Yes ?) 6 pm "Post Christmas Shop" snack 50g forest fruits, 2 soy youghurts, 25g Daco Bello fruit&nut mix, large cup of herbal tea (30 chews? Yes ?) Dinner 7.30 pm Chicken satay and veggies 100 g chicken, 200 green beans, a tsp olive oil, 10g peanut butter. Results 1. Seated? For most of the meal, but tasted my dish a little bit before sitting down. Naughty habit. 2. Only activity? Yes ? 3. 30 chews? no counting while eating with hubby but chewed well 4. 20 mins? Yes ? ******************* Goal #4: be brief ? Results ?1. 5 messages maxi? 1st (Bill W), 2nd (Bill W), 3rd (mmkay), 4th (borisbritva), 5th (Arcangelo) ?2. 1 sentence maxi? 1st (Bill W)? 2nd (Bill W)?, 3rd (mmkay)? 4th (borisbritva)? 5th (Arcangelo) ? 3. 5 minutes maxi? (starting from tomorrow) I'll have to hide my keyboard as I'm not "allowed" to answer any more messages for today! I'll have to answer any further messages tomorrow now. I "cheated" a bit by sometimes making the one sentence super long, putting commas where ordinarily I would have put full stops. Or I'd find myself adding a quote, joke, or link to "flesh my message out" as I always have the feeling I could do more, give more, help more, but that also guzzled time as I then wasted time searching on the internet for them, duh, so that's obviously counter-productive. That's why I've added the 3rd baby step today (5 minutes maxi per message), to my 3 initial baby steps. This "be brief" goal might sound anodyne, banal or frivolous, but I'm learning to accept myself better by accepting that my short messages are enough as they are, that I am enough as I am, which is quite new to me. So Less is more. I often put myself in the shoes of another, and have a natural tendancy to want to rescue people, help people, teach people, so could easily spend my whole day on the forum lost in people's problems, replying to requests for help, or advice, etc. so I really have to watch out for this, because I've honestly got loads of frigging things to do and they're not getting done, and the only person suffering from that is me. The "be brief" goal then is to indirectly deal with the latent resistance, because it is easier to spend your time trying to help others instead of turning the focus on yourself. To sum up then, this goal touches on so many things for me: perfectionism, setting boundaries, preocrastination, OCD, rescuing, over-involvement, co-dependency, etc I'm only a Newbie and think with time I'll be able to strike a better balance. Another very good day goal-wise. ? Happy I had thought of breaking the "be brief" goal down into baby steps, and feeling optimistic that that will now help liberate some time for me to advance in my own work. Am a bit worried with my left eye though, the floaters seem less prominent since going out shopping this afternoon, but it's like there's a sort of veil over the eye now (with thousands of tiny specks), and so its vision is less acute. If it continues I will book an appointment soon to get it checked out.

I love the tongue in cheek, I do that a lot!

WTF?! Main points (in bold) from Leo's video The Dark Side Of Meditation You cannot be following actualized.org and not meditating, that's not going to work because the stuff I'm gonna be talking about is going completely over your head because you have no idea what awareness or consciousness really are and how little of it you have unless you've started meditating so that's for the newbies 01:01 but what I'm talking about in this episode is really some advice for those of you who've already installed the habit, have been meditating and are now starting to reach into the intermediate and advanced stages of meditation. So this means you've been meditating consistently every single day for at least six months or 12 months or a couple of years 01:25 what's going to happen is weird stuff will arise as you meditate and you will discover perhaps in a shocking way that meditation is not all rainbows and butterflies the way you initially assumed. Some of the stuff that comes up is freaky, weird and downright alien, and very negative sometimes and it can blindside you and sabotage your meditation habit so what I'm going to talk about here is the dark side, stuff that's counterintuitive, stuff that you would not expect to arise from a simple meditation habit. 02:10 So what is this stuff? Well there's a whole list. Now before I tell you all this stuff I want to preface it by saying that you're not necessarily going to encounter all this so don't go hunting for it because a lot of this stuff can be negative and if you don't experience it that's fine. These are like side effects. If a drug has side effects that means it can happen, it doesn't mean that it will happen to you, but if it does happen to you a lot of this stuff is very common, don't be surprised, you've been warned. 02:42 So firstly expect hyper annoyance and crankiness, this is very common and usually it comes in spells like you're meditating for weeks for weeks, everything's going great, you're becoming more calm and more peaceful and then you reach one week in your meditation routine where you're just annoyed by everything, hyper annoyed by little, little tiny insignificant things that you would think you're totally beyond, like the air- conditioning or the humming of your refrigerator will start to annoy the hell out of you or maybe your cat or dog will start to annoy the hell out of you for no reason and that might take you by surprise, or you just become cranky and you have this kind of spell of crankiness that lasts for a few days or for an entire week or maybe for an entire month. 03:38 Also expect hyper judgmentalism when you become hyper judgmental of everyone around you, especially people that are close to you like your family, your spouse, your girlfriend, your boyfriend, your children, and so forth, expect that. It will come about in spells again, might last for a few days may last for a week, might last for a whole month and I don't want you to be blindsided by that. 04:04 Expect wild mood swings up and down that can last from days to weeks where you feel terrible or you feel really high like you're on cloud nine because you've been meditating now and you're getting growth and everything's feeling wonderful and you think that that's just how it is now, that's your new level, you think you've arrived but a few weeks pass and then you crash into some deep depression and you wonder to yourself "no no I've lost it. What happened? I thought I'd arrived" but see that was just a wrong expectation. The fact is you will have many wild mood swings throughout your entire meditation career so get used to that. 04:47 Also expect feelings of loneliness to come over you, sometimes expect feelings of disgust, anger and frustration and these can vary from very mild forms of these emotions to very, very heavy forms where you just feel like you're the most lonely isolated human being on the entire surface of the earth, or you're just completely pissed off and angry about the the political party and what it's doing to the country or whatever. 05:25 Expect crying, that's totally fine, nothing wrong with that, expect insomnia, sometimes you're going to have these manic episodes where we have a lot of energy come up and you're not going to be able to fall asleep because you're excited to either by new possibilities or you're agitated or anxious about something that might happen. 05:46 Expect depression and meaninglessness to wash over you. I can almost guarantee that if you're going to meditate for longer than a year that you will be hit by some serious spells of depression and that's totally normal, that's par for the course, and you will at times feel like your entire life is meaningless, everything you've done is meaningless, your family is meaningless, your career is meaningless, your relationships are meaningless, even meditation is meaningless and self-improvement is meaningless. You'll experience all this stuff, this is just par for the course. 06:35 Also expect to have interference with your work from your meditation habit. You're going to be meditating and meditating and then all of a sudden you realize "my work, my career, it's so meaningless. Why am I putting all this effort and all this emotional labor into it?" and so you might want to quit your career or you might get disgusted by it or whatever, that's totally normal and usually that comes and it passes so the trick with all these things is to not get triggered by them and then to make some sort of rash move as a reaction against just this negative emotional energy or this fear or self-doubt that's bubbling up from inside of you. 07:28 What meditation is doing is surfacing stuff from your deep subconscious mind and that stuff comes up to the surface but if you don't expect that then that's when you can get into trouble because you will then react against that stuff which is largely illusory, but then you reacting to it can cause some real damage in your life. 07:50 Also expect interference with relationships especially your closest intimate relationship with your spouse or your girlfriend or boyfriend and also your family relationships. You might feel like "oh what am I doing in this relationship? Why am I even married to this person? We're such a wrong match", and you're going to get all this kind of self-doubt going. That's totally normal. Expect some rash judgments, you might feel like "oh okay I gotta quit my job and I've got to get a divorce. I've gotta drop my family and my children and move to a cave in India" . You might have some sort of fantasy like that come into your mind while you're meditating and then you think "okay that's what I've got to do now" and then you go and actually do it, and the mistake is to act on that too quickly without letting that plan or this fantasy just kind of like work its way through you. Usually what'll happen is it'll pass in a few days so be aware of that. 08:53 And other kinds of rash judgments. You might have a rash judgment to sell your IRA and to liquidate all your stocks and all your assets and to donate all that money to charity and then if you act on that too quickly you might come to regret that. 09:11 Also expect suicidal thoughts. I can almost guarantee that if you are meditating effectively you will have more suicidal thoughts than you've probably ever had in your life and that's if you're a normal person. I'm not talking about suicidal people, I'm talking about totally normal people. Me from my meditation habit I never have really suicidal thoughts but from my meditation habit alone, the more I meditate the more suicidal thoughts I have, and that's totally fine. I recognize that. I don't take them very seriously and therefore they don't bother me but someone who's not expecting that could get freaked out by that and could actually maybe think that they're going to take action on it which could become a problem. 10:00 Expect some freak out moments. Some days you just start to freak out and you're not even sure why. You get into an argument with your spouse or your children for no good reason. You're just blaming them for stuff or you're agitated at them. You're snapping at them, you're being passive-aggressive, this sort of stuff. 10:17 Expect ego backlash. This will surely happen to you at one point or another and it'll happen many times and what I mean by ego backlash is that as you're meditating, you're dissolving your ego over time, that's basically what you're doing. But when the ego gets dissolved too much too fast, it tends to come back with even more force than it had before and starts to really behave in nasty petty egotistical ways which is exactly why you might start to get into arguments with people that otherwise you shouldn't have gotten into. 11:05 You might turn back to old habits that you've worked through already like you might go binging on ice cream and on greasy food even though you've already cleaned up your diet. You might go binge on television even though you've stopped watching television for years. You might go start doing drugs again or alcohol or smoking cigarettes even though you haven't done that for years. You might go on a sex binge and go sleep with a bunch of random strangers on one-night stands even though you don't usually do that. You might get addicted to money again. Maybe you've weaned yourself off the pursuit of money and the pursuit of success in business and then you've been meditating a lot and all of a sudden it's like "oh my business, I got to get back to my business, I gotta earn more money" and then you'll go and start chasing that again, so this is all stuff that I call ego backlash. And this can feel demoralizing because it feels like you're taking a step backwards because here you are meditating for years and now you're eating junk food, doing drugs and chasing money again. Like "what's this about? I thought I was supposed to be growing and becoming more spiritual and it seems like I'm just regressing?" but that's just a phase , that's something you have to work through and go further and what I've noticed is that every time I have a strong ego backlash if I am mindful and vigilant of it and just kind of avoid the most negative behaviors, try to limit the most negative behaviors possible with that backlash and just kind of monitor it then usually within a couple of weeks it dissolves and then I'm back better than ever. 12:51 So with all these things you have to understand that these are temporary and when we're told that meditation makes us more spiritual, makes us more aware, dissolves our ego and all this other good stuff, makes us calmer and happier that's true but only in the long run is that true. That's not true in the short run that's where people really go wrong is that they assume it is just going to be straighforward positive linear progression from the moment they start meditating and that's just completely unrealistic 13:27 Expect hyper horniness, sometimes you can be meditating and maybe you've got off porn and you stop having frivolous sex and then you just have this spell of incredible horniness and you want to like jerk off every day or you want to go have sex with a bunch of people and it's like you can't get it out of your system, it's just like you feel like this horniness coursing through you. 13:57 Expect old repressed memories to come bubbling up, stuff that you have completely forgotten about, stuff you might think you've worked through. It's gonna be some traumatic stuff especially if you had traumas in your childhood, stuff that you've repressed, stuff that was very negative, maybe examples like abuse, sexual abuse, any kind, like near-death experiences that you've had, bullying, humiliation, embarrassment, all this kind of stuff that you would normally not want to think about, that will come bubbling up, also family stuff will come bubbling up because many of your memories, the earliest memories, you have are of your childhood and especially if you had a turbulent childhood which wasn't all rainbows and butterflies then definitely expect that stuff to come up and definitely expect all sorts of family issues like mommy issues, daddy issues, sibling rivalries, resentments, all that kind of stuff. 15:07 Expect crazy monkey mind, expect sometimes to have waves of insanity and madness wash over you where you just feel like your mind is like a swarming hive of bees and the more you try to control it the more out-of-control it gets and you just sit down you try to meditate, you try to do your normal technique, and nothing is working none of your normal techniques of working expect self-doubt where you start to doubt yourself, you start to doubt your technique, like this technique has been working for months and now it just feels like "oh man this technique it's stopped working it's not working anymore". 15:57 Expect nightmares, weird dreams where in your dreams you're living out weird fantasies like having sex with your mother or killing people or butchering your dog with a cleaver or something like that, you know unpleasant images in your mind when you're sleeping. to be continued/...it gets worse ... **********

I understood it first as the Law of Attraction. And then I saw it was deeper than that, that you're only ever looking for yourself.

I really enjoyed reading this journal, I love how you write, and can identify with quite a bit of it. I like some parts of the bible but not so much the beginnning (old T) and the end (the Apocalypse bit, too scary for me). This next part looks exciting, I can't wait to see your action plan. And results! Best wishes Bill in reaching your goals, you can do this. I'll be following closely.

I'm so glad you're feeling better. ?

Weighed myself this morning, have lost a pound just by chewing the cud for 2 days. You chews, you lose. I don't know if this is anything to do with my meditation or not, but Just after waking, I noticed a white flashing light in the peripheral vision of my left eye, especially when I moved this left eye from side to side. That soon went to be replaced by greyish floaters and black dots throughout the day. If it doesn't go away, I'll go see the opticien. Goal Report Day 8 (Monday 23 Dec 2019) Goal #1: no wine ? (not on the agenda for today, on Christmas Day I'll be sharing a bottle of champagne with hubby though) Goal #2: minimum 20 minutes meditation (short session but I showed up! Decided to rest my eye today due to floaters) Goal #3: Mindful eating, 4 baby steps (see below, on-going updates during day) ? ?Goal #4: be brief (will have to change the goal, "be brief" is not specific enough) Goal #5: minimum 8 hours sleep ? (11pm, awake 7 am = 8hrs) Goal #6: minimum 40 minutes indoor bicycle ? Goal #7: minimum 30 mins Wellbox ? (did a body session today) ************* Goal #3: Mindful eating 8.15 am Capuccino Breakfast 11.30 am Muesli 30g Bjorg sugar-free organic "Fibres" muesli, 10g granola, 50g fresh forest berry fruits, 10g organic unsalted cashew nuts, 10g dried apricots and 150ml organic sugar-free soy milk. 2 large cups of black tea. Results 1. Seated? Yes ? 2. Only activity? Yes ? 3. 30 chews? Yes ? 4. Duration? 20 minutes ? Lunch 5 pm Croque Monsieur salad 2 slices wholemeal bread, 20g cheese, 140g Iceberg lettuce, 10g mayo, 1/2 tsp olive oil. 1 large cup of black tea. Results 1. Seated? Yes ? 2. Only activity? Yes ? 3. 30 chews? Yes ? 4. Duration? Yes ? 6.30 pm Large Capuccino, 6 small vanilla lemon protein biscuits (40g) as Pre work-out snack (30 chews? Yes ?) Dinner 8.45 pm Tofu and veggies 100 g organic tomato tofu, 150 green beans, dribble olive oil, 10g peanut butter, a few lentils. Results 1. Seated? Yes ? 2. Only activity? Yes ? 3. 30 chews? Yes ? 4. 20 mins? Yes ? Another very good day goal-wise. ? Will change the "brief" goal to a more precise, less abstract one, tomorrow. And hope the floaters/black dots in my left eye are gone tomorrow morning. I googled them, other people apparently get them too after meditating. Am I staring at the back of my eyelids too much, lol? Think it wise to have rested my eyes today, only did a very short session of meditation as I didn't want to miss it altogether.

Wow, I hope he's not a one-off. Families sometimes bring out the worst in us, they certainly know which buttons to press. I actually think you're very brave spending 3 whole weeks with them. ?

Well done @Arcangelo, you inspire me too. Well done on the sobriety! Better you than me though on the shoe removal bit, it's the first day of winter where I am.

Bless you, Arc. Cheers! How did your walking meditation in the park go, by the way @Arcangelo? Was it a magical Mindful moment?

There really is magic in setting goals and saying what you want to obtain. But be careful what you ask for, you might just get it!

Goal Report Day 7 Goal #1: no wine ? (not on the agenda for today, on Christmas Day I'll be sharing a bottle of champagne with hubby though) Goal #2: minimum 20 minutes meditation ?(body still and eyes closed for whole session, no nodding off, progress!) Goal #3: Mindful eating, 4 baby steps (see below, on-going updates during day) ? ?Goal #4: be brief (not there yet, I get so carried away when I start typing, it's all precious time being guzzled away tho') Goal #5: minimum 8 hours sleep ? (11pm, "awoke" 8.15am by the cat = 9 hours sleep, or a bit less considering I could actually hear Fluffy asking me for breakfast at least an hour before, but some things are best ignored ha) Goal #6: minimum 40 minutes indoor bicycle ? Goal #7: minimum 30 mins Wellbox ? (did a face session, will do a body session tomorrow) ************* Goal #3: Mindful eating 8.30am Capuccino Breakfast 11.30 am Muesli 30g Bjorg sugar-free organic "Fibres" muesli, with 50g fresh forest berry fruits, 10g organic unsalted cashew nuts and 100ml organic sugar-free soy milk. 2 large cups of black tea. Results 1. Seated? Yes ? 2. Only activity? Yes ? 3. 30 chews? Yes ? 4. Duration? 20 minutes ? (a bit challenging getting to 20', from now on will add a bit more chopped fruit to help) Ha, weighed even less on the scales this morning. I didn't intend to lose weight with this (my diet starts January 1st, haha) but if better chewing helps the pounds slip off too in the meantime, even better! Beggars can't be chewsers. Lunch 4.15 pm Croque Monsieur salad 2 slices wholemeal bread, 20g cheese, 110g Iceberg lettuce, 1 tsp mayo, 1/2 tsp olive oil. 1 large cup of black tea. Results 1. Seated? Yes ? 2. Only activity? Yes ? 3. 30 chews? Yes ? 4. Duration? 20 minutes ?(the 20' are up and I've only eaten 1/2 of it, I'll do my bike now and have the other 1/2 as a post work-out snack, then after that I'll do my meditation) I'll be getting back down to my ideal weight at this rate. That's not why I'm doing Mindful Eating though. Any weight loss is just the icing on the cake, haha. Post work-out Meal 6.30 pm Finished the other 1/2 of my left-over lunch with another cup of tea and added an apple Results 1. Seated? Yes ? 2. Only activity? Yes ? 3. 30 chews? Yes ? 4. Duration? 20 minutes ? Normally I would eat more than this in a day, but all that chewing really seems to satify my hunger sensations, I just feel more replete. Evening snack 7.45 pm 50g forest fruits, a soy youghurt, 10g Daco Bello fruit/nut mix, 3 vanilla lemon protein biscuits, cup of herbal tea Results 1. Seated? Yes ? 2. Only activity? Yes ? Ate mindfully even if at dinner table with hubby 3. 30 chews? Yes ? Wherever it was possible 4. Duration? 10 minutes ? 10 mins is ok for a snack, it's not a meal A very good day goal-wise. ? Will try to work better on being brief when I type tomorrow. That's letting me down right now.

I'm not kidding, I've only just started meditation and I'm already feeling different, more productive, more self-confident, etc.❤️ I've even miraculously stopped the wine just like that, which beggars belief. Huh, and that's only with a lousy 20 minutes every day. I hate that it has taken me this late in my life to discover it. Leo's a pretty persuasive guy! Nobody (including myself) has ever been able to convince or galvanize me enough to do meditation before. I've had this book on my bookshelf eyeballing me for donkey's years: "Peace of Mind" by Dr Ian Gawler. He actually has a website and does meditation retreats. He overcame terminal cancer through meditation and wrote about it. I had read the book, as you do. And then put it back on the shelf, as you do. And then the wasted years go by, as they do. So glad I came across Leo's videos and this site. I was just innocently googling "karma's a bitch" two Sundays ago, and there was Leo. I loved his explanation straight away. It seems Karma has more to do with the ego (who sounds like the real bitch around here!) than any "carrots and sticks". The only problem now is my addiction to this site. A site with all these resources pooled together and an active forum like this just doesn't exist anywhere else, it's unique. Now I wanna know everything. I understand though the need to vary one's sources and not just fetishly stay on this one site. I started reading some of your journals @zeroISinfinity, sorry I don't "get" them much yet. I'll probably understand them better when my "colour's changed". It looks like a great and crazy party though, haha!! It's actually starting to give me a bit of FOMO. Before coming to this site, I was kinda agnostic, even if my upbringing was solid catholic. I've always been afraid of ghosts and the paranormal so was perfectly happy deciding to just believe "what you see is what you get". You just die after three score years and ten, and kaput, you are no more. No reincarnation, no after-life, no hell nor heaven, nada. I was SO happy believing that. Ignorance is bliss as they say. So as you can imagine, I'm going through a major paradigm shift at the moment, lol. But it's all good. The Real Bliss will come later. Still scared of ghosts though. My dad frightened us when we were kids, threatening to lock us in the attic with the ghosts if we were naughty. Discovered years later that's where he'd kept all his porno mags. Go figure! No wonder he'd frightened everyone away from ever snooping around up there. Still the damage had been done, the phobias created. Since I've been on this site, I've had to put the light on again when I go for a pee in the middle of the night. In case I see or bump into something scary. I'm just going at my own pace right now. Slow and steady wins the race. And starting at the bottom of the heap dealing with the "easy stuff" (the physical stuff) first. My goals are more to do with the body at the moment. And yeah, I'm getting the meditation sessions in. Am even feeling optimistic I may really get a sense of "God" one day. Ha, I'll be able to join in the same "party" then, or at least understand some of the more "cryptic" posts here better. But if I don't, no pressure, maybe in my next life haha. I don't want to spook myself out by running before I can walk. Damn, if only I hadn't put that Meditation book back on the shelf all those years ago! I'd have been way more advanced by now. So yeah, feeling really indebted to Leo for all he's done and is doing!! ❤️ I'm going to honor his generosity by doing the Work.

@V-8 I notice you don't have a "signature". Is this because you can't decide which one to pick, haha? What would be your absolute favorite one? Genuinely curious.

Goal summary Goal #1: no wine (going well) Goal #2: minimum 20 minutes meditation (going well) Goal #3: Mindful eating, 4 baby steps (needs more practice) Goal #4: be brief (feel optimistic I can do this) Goal #5: minimum 8 hours sleep (starting from tonight!) Goal #6: minimum 40 minutes indoor bicycle (starting from tomorrow) Goal #7: minimum 30 mins Wellbox (starting from tomorrow)

Goal #6: minimum 40 minutes indoor bicycle

Thanks @Bill W for the heads-up (that's saved me a few hours), I'll just go straight to the Juicy Journal then. ? Just after one day of doing that yesterday, I was already a bit lighter on the scales this morning. That wasn't my goal (who diets before Christmas? ha, saying that who stops alcohol before Christmas?) but nice to wake up to some pleasant after-effects. Probably be back to where I started tomorrow morning cos forgot to count today. Ha, guess you can't always have your cake and eat it. I'd recommend Mindful Eating to anyone seriously though. Like meditation, it slows you right down. Instead of counting your breaths, you count your chews. Bravo for the recent work you're making on the binges by the way. Better the binge than the booze. ? There's an underlying emotional need for the binges, but you seem to be dealing well with that recently. Does your OCD treatment effect your appetite? Ex-smokers and ex-alcoholics always go for the sugar (same transmitters in the brain). I read a book called "Potatoes not Prozac" by Kathleen Desmaisons (she also has a website called Radiant Recovery). I learnt some interesting things about Serotonin, dopamine, beta-endorphin. And that I was a sitting duck for alcohol priming with an alcoholic father and sugar-addicted mother. Slowly though you will learn how to replace the binges by finding healthier strategies to cope with the need for comfort in the outside stuff. Best of luck in the meantime. Let me know how the Mindless Eating goes if you chews to do it.

@herghly How long have you been meditating? And why do you think it's a waste of energy?

Good luck with all you wish to do this Christmas break. I hope you achieve as much as possible. You can do this! You're very motivated. ??? And ambitious Would the 3 hour continuous meditation sit be a one-off or a daily phenomenon?

Goal report Goal #1: no wine ? Goal #2: minimum 20 minutes meditation ? Problems? Today I kept the same position throughout (my "go to", as favoured yesterday, so a lot less fidgety, but the counterpart is that this body stillness is causing my eyes to close and head to nod off a bit. Solutions? 1. get my 8 hours sleep as I used to (before discovering Leo's site!) and turn my tablet off at 11pm. That'll actually make a good Goal #5: minimum 8 hours sleep because I've become so obsessed with the forum, I've been reading it until about 1 or 2 am for the last week. Usually I sleep from 11pm to about 7 or 8 am, so gotta get back into that groove. 2. Try also meditating earlier in the day, rather than at the end of the afternoon. Experiment with different times. Goal #3: Mindful eating A bit rubbish today, will start fresh again tomorrow. Obeyed hardly any of the baby steps (sitting down to eat, doing nothing while eating, counting bites). Total amnesia. Relapse after just one day! I swear this counting bites malarkey is trickier than all my other goals. It's probably my Inner Child rebelling at having to "stay put and finish her veggies". Was able to stretch the meals out to at least 20 minutes though and did a bit of sitting down, no-other-activity and counting but only when I remembered to. Goal #4: be brief I'll stop there for today.

Wrap your gifts with mobius strips.