DianaFr

I personally think that celebrities endorsing a brand has a lot to do with a desire for admiration that we all have. First of all, there can only be brands and celebrities if there are enough people who recognize them as such and "vote" for them with their money, time, energy etc. People tend to idolize celebrities by viewing them as embodiment of qualities they don't see in themselves but desire to have. So if a celebrity endorses a certain product, I might thought - oh, she loves this product and I want to be just like her so I will also get it to resemble her more. Subconsciously I may be buying back a part of myself that I long to have. As for the brand-celebrity match, I think it has to do with identity. Brands have strong and very specific identities. Just like celebrities. Some of them are a perfect match.

Girls love guys for their personalities. Girls love guys who make them laugh and make them feel safe, whatever that means to the particular girl. My question is - what do you mean by love? Is it attention/attraction, a committed romantic love or something in between? Idk, I obviously don't understand much about the current terms of dating, but I think having a wholesome life (friends, hobbies, passions etc.) is something one does by default, not as some strategy for winning attention. If your main motivation with women is to get laid, you will either experience a lot of rejection or you will attract women who are not very high value or are wounded in some way. You can significantly increase your chances of having plenty of sex if you have a long-term relationship you are both actually invested in. Thus, you could consider switching your focus from "girls" to "THE girl". What that means is to actually starting to identify faces and names and personalities from the otherwise faceless pool of girls. Because every girl is a wholesome person as well, just like you.

Haha, what if normies were the ones who hold the truth? This is a thought I've been entertaining for some time since I discovered how my ego was using spiritual development as a way to be superior over others. I'm way more humble now and I'm learning to respect the person regardless of their journey. They're probably way more advanced than me in a number of other areas, so who am I to judge. I'm practicing connection now. It throws half of the spiritual stuff out the window

What being good with women mean to you? Relationships are literally the foundation of human life, including romantic ones. It can only add to your spirituality, as long as you're up for the ride.

You have raised an interesting question... As somebody who has gone through the academic education system, I can definitely agree with you - it can be all the things you mentioned, bullshit, false, biased. It's a system, a very hierarchical one, and it's not exempt from having the weaknesses that such systems tend to possess. But there's also a lot of positives. Community and ability to work side by side with brilliant people, access to research infrastructure and resources, the possibility to lay foundation for an academic career (you get to practice and publish your research in peer-reviewed journals). I personally love the "spirit" of academic environment, the part of it that embodies the true spirit of science beyond the system - it can't really be replicated by working by yourself. I've been through ups and downs academically, and now my take is - don't expect from the system something it is not but focus on things you can and want to take to build something valuable (for yourself, your colleagues, the society, the field of research you choose). It's a very good platform to grow from and experience awesome things with. But there's down side as well, just like any other thing in life. It's up to you, where you put your focus.

You can't really accidentally forget or let go of the perception of temperature. You have temperature receptors built in your body and your brain does the math for you consistently. Also, the system is set up in a way as to preserve the structure of your tissue. Bad things start to happen to your proteins (they literally make up your whole body) even at slight temperature changes. So there's an in-built alarm system as the body strives to preserve homeostasis as much as possible. As for other creatures, yes, nature is quite fascinating, isn't she? I believe tardigrades are considered to be the toughest of them all

I'm not an expert on the topic, but since you do this research for your bachelor thesis, I suggest you use a bit more scientific approach, as that will make the information you gather more usable. You could start by checking out the current theories on brand psychology, consumer psychology, cognition, maybe priming, mental schemes and stuff like that. That should give you an good idea on what a "brand'' is in general and what neural mechanisms are involved. Then go ahead and formulate your hypothesis based on this insight (you will also have identified gaps or controversies in the existing research that you could specifically focus on). Also, your research question is quite broad. It could help to narrow it down a bit and maybe focus on a particular population, or look at the culture context or study a particular brand. That will add much more value and depth to your work. You could then draw up a survey targeting your specific population including questions to test your hypothesis. Or you could do interviews. Or focus groups. Collect data in a controlled way. It should be quite nice at the end

This child could be an opportunity for you to take a look at your own relationship with your parents and consider accepting responsibility for something that is beyond yourself and your individual needs. This is an opportunity for you to mature. The thing is you are responsible for this child. Of course, it’s up to you to decide what you will do with this responsibility.

To be honest, the impression I have about you from how you have described your situation makes me want to suggest that you don’t focus on advice given by other people too much. My instinct says that the way you currently feel has a lot to do with your journey and all the personal insights you are meant to have. It is something that can be approached and discovered from inside by becoming more and more aware of your inner world and the role your negative feelings have. It’s like you consciously know what you want and you do your best to achieve that, but a huge part of you is lost, it’s not taking part in your activities, and there could be a deep longing to find yourself. If I can go against what I said about you not taking advice and still give you one, I would like you to stop reading and start writing instead. To find a way to express your feelings and make sense of them. It could be great if you could find somebody to talk to, somebody who could listen to you without imposing their world view and help you see yourself. Something tells me this could be important to you.

I remember when I was about 20, I was once on my way home from university and this sudden realization hit me – is this really all there is? Is this going to be my life? Is this it? It was a weird feeling because since the age of 16 my dream was to study biology, and now I was doing it, I was studying biology, but did it make me happy? No, it didn’t! Even doing the one thing that absolutely captivated me couldn’t make me happy. I later found out that indeed there was so much more to life than my 20-year-old self could have ever captured, happiness included. So keep asking those big questions and keep looking for what is missing. The point of life is that there is none, unless you take the time to make the point.

Pop culture horoscopes and zodiac sign descriptions are there for fun only. If you want to take astrology more seriously, you should study your natal chart. Your basic personality is best described by your Sun, Moon and Ascendant (their sign and house placement, aspects with others planets, conjunctions with fixed starts, asteroids, etc.). But you also have other planets and points that add even more variety. I used to study Western astrology. What I found especially insightful was personality astrology and natal chart analysis, as well as synastry analysis (composite charts are quite interesting and I find them quite accurate). However, I wasn’t able to find any evidence for planetary transits affecting my life in any specific way (maybe except for the slow moving ones in some occasions). I don’t practice astrology these days any more. But there is definitely something to it. One has to be passionate and in love with astrology. Then it reveals it's true nature and potential.

@charlie cho Haha, this is so obvious, isn't it? Yes, this wound is still pretty raw. I didn’t intend to come across as pessimistic as that. What I wanted to say is that before you can apply your high consciousness values in your work as a scientist and really make a difference, you could be asked to deal with a whole range of practical issues which may turn out to be bigger than you. Please, don’t be disheartened by my inability to make it. There are many others who succeed and thrive as scientists. If you are fired up and have a vision for this thing, I would do nothing but encourage you to go for it all in. Maybe don’t expect your career to be in a certain way, because you never know how things my turn out. Other than that you will still gain a lot, if only you will be willing to invest yourself. Definitely! If you do it seriously, you will have a great opportunity to develop a whole range of personal qualities way beyond your actual subject. This can be a bit tricky. Of course, you need good and broad background knowledge in order to see your work in a bigger perspective. But if you want to really contribute, you have a better chance to do that in a specific niche you’re an expert of. But it takes time and a lot of learning from many disciplines to become a good expert in one. Certainly. Anything that can help you become better and embody your ideals. Not necessarily. Being good at memorizing things is of course very helpful, especially when it comes to things like chemistry or human anatomy, for example. But is that a deal breaker if you’re not? No. It all comes down to knowing your strengths and the way you learn best and then utilizing those strengths as much as possible. But most likely some level of rote learning will be necessary. There’s a huge difference, in my opinion. Studying theory from books is like reading about how to have fun or how chocolate tastes. Doing experiments is like having a bite of that chocolate and having that fun yourself. Through engagement, you can see how things actually work yourself and you can start to interact with them in your own way. But I may be very biased on this. I hated reading theory, it made me sleepy and tired. But I loved working in lab and spent there as much time as I could. I assume there are people who prefer other way around. You should not invest in buying your own equipment. It needs to be properly calibrated and maintained in order to give reliable results. You should enrol in college and get access to their facilities. Before you can do that, keep studying books.

@Leo Gura This is where I totally agree with you. There is just this one thing that bugs me. On one hand there is improvement of society, the bigger meaning behind one’s work. But on the other hand, there is the personal journey and all the limitations that must be dealt with on a personal level. And there must be a healthy balance, since you need to be somewhat well on a personal level in order to endure hardships of changing society. I remember reading somewhere (I believe it was one of physics professors who said that) that if you have pushed the wall the whole day but the wall hasn’t moved an inch, you have not done any work. This really struck me. And I have ever since pondered what the right balance between ‘hard’ and ‘easy’ should be. When ‘hard’ means ‘just keep pushing and you will eventually get there’ and when it means ‘better stop, you not gonna achieve anything’. How do you know the difference.

One of the main problems with being a good scientist is the fact that you need a serious infrastructure to do science in the first place. You don’t just decide to be a good scientist and start doing science at home from your laptop. You need to enter an educational system and earn at least a master’s degree in your chosen field. Then you can start to look for PhD opportunities and do a more serious hands-on research. You need to secure funding for your PhD and your research at a certain institution. You need to make sure you publish at respectable enough journals to earn your PhD degree. Then you can apply for a funding as a post doc. After that, if you’re lucky enough to secure a permanent position at a university, your ability to do research will depend on your ability to attract money for your research which will depend on your ability to publish at high impact journals. And by the way, if you started right after highschool and had no significant delays, you are already in your late thirties when you have finally finished your educational journey and become a full-fledged scientist. At least, that’s how an average scientific career looks in my field. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to complete my PhD thesis because of lack of funding. My field (molecular biology, genetic engineering, cell biology and biotechnology) is insanely expensive and you need to have fancy equipment and expensive reagents to conduct your lab experiments. The science funding in my country is close to non-existent, and on top of that my professor retired, our research group were split apart and I eventually left six years after I started my PhD. I was already 30 at the time and too tired to start it all over somewhere else. What I want to say with my story is that sometimes your ideals and good intentions to become a good scientist are crashed against a system which doesn’t necessarily hold any value for you or your ideals. It’s super hard to speak about enlightment when yet another one of your research proposals has been turned down for funding, your supervisor doesn’t give a sh*t about you, you cannot get your results published because you can’t buy reagents to do the additional tests required by the journal, and you have just received a notice for salary suspension since there is no more money in your group’s salary fund. Yes, I’m complaining here, but in moments like these your high-consciousness world-changing intentions go out the window and you start asking yourself why the heck am I doing all this. Maybe I was extremely unlucky and never meant to become a scientist, but becoming a scientist can be H-A-R-D. The practical aspects of it are sometimes totally incompatible with high-consciousness work.

I’m probably risking looking like a failure to you, but here is my experience. I started my healing journey more or less consciously around 23, now I’m 34 and, guess what, I’m still healing! So I have invested already over a decade and will continue to do so probably for the rest of my life. So when you ask how to speed this process up, my first response is – you can’t really speed it up. You will heal no more and no less than how your inner timing permits and how ready you are to move on to the next level. Also, healing is not really a linear process. Rather, it moves in spirals, so you will probably revisit the same issues multiple times but every time you do, you will have become already a bit wiser and more aware, so you will be able to look at your wounds from a more refined perspective. Here’s what I’ve learned along my healing journey. 1. You cannot undo your past, so you better own it and make peace with it. 2. Self-acceptance is a key to any healing, and it kind of goes hand in hand with the previous point. 3. It’s useless to try to control your healing. It will take it’s time and you better ride with it (otherwise, you create a lot of resistance and make things even worse). Trusting the process is the best. 4. Every relapse is not a step back but a learning experience. If you can choose to view it that way, first, you will cultivate self-compassion which in and of itself is a very healing quality, and second, here is your chance to speed things up because when you heal, you don’t go against yourself, no matter how bad you think you have failed. Instead you become your best friend and supporter, and this attitude allows the process to unfold naturally. 5. It’s important to explore your motivation and understand why you want to heal. What is it that you desire the most deep down in your heart. Chances are high that the very traumas you have endured have a lot to do with the purpose of your life. If you want to heal just to feel good and be normal, probably it won’t take you very far. But if you can see the higher good that comes from healing, if you can see yourself becoming a more compassionate, driven, resourceful human being that is a positive force in the world, now we’re talking. Having a higher purpose and meaning completely changes the way you look at your suffering. Healing ceases to be a destination. It becomes an integral part of your life's path, where you keep growing and learning and doing your best to make your journey worthwile. To sum it all up, you speed your healing up by not speeding it up.

Have you been able to identify the cause of your anxiety? It’s possible it’s a symptom of a deeper problem, and if that’s the case, fighting anxiety would be just like cutting off the branches of a tree when what you need to do is go to the root to get rid of the thing. I don’t have any good online resources in mind. I find CBT very useful, though, but in my experience it works best when one has addressed the deeper issue and then uses CBT to install positive thinking and behaving habits on top of a positive foundation. Fixing anxiety is somewhat similar to fixing the indicator light on your car panel telling you that your about to run out of gas. You can disable the alarm system of your car not to hear it beep and not to get annoyed by it but if you do it you have no way to tell when your car needs maintenance. I can share what was helpful for me. I used to have severe anxiety, up to the point I couldn’t leave my home, do my job, eat in public, pay for my groceries or do many more things that normal people do every day without even thinking. I was really struggling and I felt miserable. The most important shift that needed to happen for me was how I viewed my anxiety. I used to think there was something very wrong with me and that I responded to situations absolutely inadequately. It was when I started to view my anxiety as a completely adequate response when things started to change for the positive. Given all my past experiences and conditionings, it would be abnormal and completely inadequate to respond normally under those circumstances, for anyone. So my anxiety was a very correct and point on reflection of what was going on deep down. I completely changed the way I treated myself. I became compassionate and very understanding of my weirdness and irrational fears, and I gradually changed my life in accordance with the needs of that anxious and crippled aspect of me. I gave myself promise to never ever abandon myself, no matter how “unacceptable” or “wrong” parts of me would be. And it worked! Of course, it’s not a miracle cure but it was a significant turning point for me to finally accept myself like no one had accepted me before. If you feel my story somewhat resonates with you, I wholeheartedly suggest you ask yourself this one question. If your anxiety was a completely correct and adequate response, what would it tell you about yourself?

I'm glad my thoughts resonated with you. If at any point you feel you need to talk to someone, feel free to PM me. Be well <3

Have you tried to answer that question? “What if I don’t make it?” What would happen if you didn’t make it? “…my life depends on healing my shadows and being confident about myself.” Why? What is so bad about living with shadows and not being confident about yourself? I don’t necessarily need to know your answers to these questions. They are for you to look deeply within yourself and see what wants to come up. I can sense much tension and resistance behind your post. It’s like you are desperately trying to pass the spirituality test with an A grade because – so it seems – you think that achieving spiritual perfection (healing your shadow) is a ticket to healthy life. I may be totally off, of course, and if that’s the case, I apologize. But what if you didn’t try so hard? What if your illness is desperately trying to tell you – please stop fixing and perfecting every single bit about yourself? What if all your shadow really wants is your unconditional presence – without ever trying to change it? You are not damaged or broken in any way. I’m not saying that to diminish the hardship you’re going through or to deny your illness. I’m saying that because that’s what I feel in my heart. You don’t need to fix yourself to deserve health and positive future. You already deserve it, right now, even being unhealthy, full of fear and overwhelmed. I hope you will be able to see that about yourself, too. Once more – my apologies, if I missed it or upset you in any way. I just want you to know that you are enough.

@4201 What happens when you escape?

@PurpleTree In general, it's empathy and kindness. For me, the most powerful technique to forgive myself has been the inner child work. To forgive others, it's necessary to place yourself in their shoes and understand their perspective without judgement. But mostly forgiveness is a practice of self-love. You choose to release yourself from the negative attachments formed by putting blame on others and yourself.

@Chives99 Why do you want to be in a relationship? I mean, do you have any positive reasons, other than fear of dying alone in an awful shame? (Having a relationship unfortunately doesn't guarantee you a nice death...) You may be right, in some sense, that people who are not necessarily ordinary, may be limited in the field of dating. But it really depends on the perspective, I guess. There are all kinds of people in the world, and some of them will be your people, including the opposite sex. Most of them will not be. You want to focus on those who are or could potentially be. It could be a good idea to be interested in people in general. Like you said - there is so much more to life, and you never know who you will meet as you enjoy and develop yours. My friendly advice is - don't take it so seriously. Don't take yourself too seriously. You are young, life is somewhat long and there is absolutely no reason to be ashamed of who you are or how your life has been if you have done your best to live it fully.

@ColeMC01 You haven't really been in love, have you?

I guess it depends on your values... What is noble and more developed for you. I can' t say that being a scientist is more noble than, for example, a firefighter or gardener. They are all people doing their jobs. All of them can potentially produce massive value. All of them can put their heart and soul into what they're doing. Or not. I was a molecular and cell biologist for over a decade. I've met quite a few scientists. There are many ego-driven and power hungry folks among them, and there are also those that are motivated by higher ideals, ideas and a need to help. I definitely don't respect scientists more than any other person. We are all human at the end of the day. I think our professions and educations don't matter that much. It's our unique personal qualities and what we do about them that make the whole difference in terms of something being more or less developed.

Practice, practice, practice! Start thinking in English. Record videos with yourself talking (great for feedback). Read a lot to keep your vocabulary rich. Write a lot as well. Become proficient in a few topics you feel really passionate about. Are there any English language courses next to you that you could take? I'm not a native English speaker myself. What helped me was reading A LOT aloud. Actually I started doing that already back at school when I was a kid. Just took my English textbook and read stories from it. My problem for a really long time was being too shy to speak. I was so afraid of making mistakes that I could barely open my mouth. My breakthrough moments were going to study abroad (didn't have much chance), starting to regularly write a blog, and, recently, making YouTube videos.

Such a good excuse to get away with things