infinitenrgy

I have gotten myself into a pickle I don’t know how to get out of. I don’t know what to do with my relationship with girlfriend. I feel so alone, I have nobody I can turn to with this. I feel stupid for even having the feelings I am feeling and I feel like it's my fault, but that also doesn't feel like I'm being fair enough to myself. She promised me things were going to change when we moved out of my moms and that’s all she needed in order to finally get her shit together and start doing better. She is depressed, negative and anxious more of the time then not. She is also extremely needy. Every weekend I find myself stuck in the apartment half of the day until she finally goes to work because she doesn't want me to leave. It never usually gets voiced out loud but last night she said that she wants there to be a rule where I can't leave until she does if we are both home when she has to work. This completely destroys my productivity on weekends. Even once she leaves I feel so annoyed, irritated and drained that I still can't motivate myself to get right up and go to work. I feel so resentful towards her. Half the time I'm being passive aggressive and she doesn't know why and this probably adds onto her problems and makes them even worse then they already are. But its hard not to be passive aggressive when I feel used and unsupported. I feel unloved in return. I feel like she needs so much from me that it ruins my mindset for the whole day sometimes and it just doesn't feel fair to me anymore at all. This kind of stuff has been eating me up since we moved and I feel so deeply involved and attached to this that I can't escape and I have nobody I can go to for help. I have been having so much anxiety on my own that suicidal thoughts are a daily thing for me now. I know that’s something I would never do, but I get so depressed that it starts becoming the only thing I can think about as an option. I want to be there for her and I do love her. Some days it is easy for me to deal with all this and I do great but other days I feel like I deserve so much more and I'm not sure if I am ever going to get it from her. I feel like I could never express these feelings to her because it would just make her feel way worse then she already does and put serious pressure on her shoulders that I don’t think she could handle. I need someone who supports me. I need someone who see's what I want out of this life and see's what I am trying to do in this world and someone who motivates me to keep going and accomplish my goals. At certain times this is her, but usually only once I've gotten so low that it’s completely obvious to her that I am in no position to keep helping her that it flips around and she starts to help me. I let her help me and tell her its just my own depression and bad thoughts when deep down I really know that it's coming from the dynamic of our relationship. Most of the time I am holding so much in trying to stay strong for her as long as possible and even when I do show her how upset I am I never actually voice to her why. How do you tell someone you don't know if you can handle giving them the love and help that they need? How do you tell someone that you need more support from them when the whole problem in the first place is that they can't even support their self? I just feel so stuck. I don't want to leave her, I see us having an amazing future together on the good days. When we work together things feel like they are good and can turn out great in the end. She is my best friend in life after all. But I don't feel like she has been supporting me to do better, it is impossible for her to see or for me to tell her how much she holds me back sometimes. I feel like I'm in a vicious circle where I get away from this when I go back to work but even at work I feel depressed because then I am stuck there and I still can't do what I really want to be doing. There is no mental trick I can do for myself to get out of this. I don't know what to do. I'm trying so hard to better myself and get to a good place where I can be happy and start to think about a new job or a new career doing something I love, but I feel so held back by the person who is supposed to be pushing me along. We haven't had a sexual relationship at all in almost a year now. We have had sex here and there, but it was unfulfilling for both of us. We have talked about it many times and that has become another thing I am not sure if we will ever be able to get through and fix. I want to have sex. I crave sexual intimacy and love from a women so fucking deeply that it hurts and its become something that I just indulge in porn to hide from. To the point where I feel like if any women were to throw herself at me it would just be irresistible. I feel disgusting for that because I pride myself on not being like my father or my stepdad and never cheating or hurting my loved one in that way. But it is times like this that I understand them and where they were coming from. They were hurt too. They felt unloved probably longer then I can even imagine. They were stuck too. There is only so much love a man can give without receiving anything in return before he starts to feel sick, used and unlovable. At the same time as feeling bad for myself and feeling like I deserve more, I feel guilty for it. I feel like a real man is strong enough to handle this and that Is all that motivates me to keep going most days. I feel like I'm wrong to feel this way, she isn’t purposefully withholding love or wanting me to feel this way and she does want the best for me, I know she believes in me. So how can I blame her for making me feel the way I do. It's not her fault she is so broken and needs the amount of love and attention from me as she does. She has had a hard life and part of the reason why I love her is because she has been strong enough to make it this far and I think we could go way further and really do something amazing together. But without her to blame I can only blame myself and frame it in a way where it's my own mental creating this depression for myself. How can I blame her for my own jerking off and wasting the rest of my day once she's gone to work? Half of me says I'm unsupported and unloved and I don't get the sex that I desire so I do what I have to in order to keep going. But the other half of me says I am only doing this to spite her to try to get her to see how hurt I am with actions and get her to change without even telling her it's something I need to change in the first place. She knows easily when I have had a day where I did a lot vs a day where I did nothing. That part of me thinks I shouldn't even be hurt in the first place and I'm just making excuses to not do the work I need to in the little time I have. I know being a random person reading this it might not make much sense as I have left out so many details. This Is just a journal I have written to get these feelings out into words that I have been holding in for awhile. I know posting this isn't going to solve anything but maybe someone here can shed a little light for me and show me where I might be thinking in a fucked up way. I don't know what to do other then keep it pushing and trying to be better at navigating all of this regardless if I think I've only gotten worse as time goes on.

I had an experience recently with an interesting human I would like to get some of your opinions about. The human is my girlfriend's brother, Mark. I'm going to try and keep this explanation story short and sweet but there is a lot to explain. Mark was very into psychedelic's from an early age, doing lsd for the first time probably around age 13. I have known him since middle school and he wasn't always the way I am about to explain he is now. Me and him are both age 20 now. About a year ago he bought a large amount of nn dmt because he really wanted to try it. He lived with his brother at the time and had been for awhile and me and daisy (my girlfriend) would go over there and visit them every once in a while. They both did the dmt and would talk alot about there crazy experiences and try to get us to try it as well. We both never did because we didn't feel ready or like it was the right time in our lives for that kind of mind blowing experience. Anyways, back to Mark. Dmt was not the only thing he would try during this time period. Eventually I found out he had also tried ketamine and molly and had long periods of time where he would do them everyday. Neither one of the two brothers had jobs because of covid and they were staying in the apartment for free. They also talked about how often they did the dmt that I realized he must have a shit ton of it because they never talked about running out, later on I found out he still had like 4 grams of it. Eventually Marks brother called the cops on him and kicked him out of their apartment together, this came as a shock to us because we thought they were good together. Later we found out from his brother that mark had been emotionally abusing and sometimes even physically abusing him for the past couple months and he was just trying to ride it out, but eventually had enough. Long story short Mark had went to stay with his friend and got his own room at their house for 40$ a week, but still didn't want to get a job so he got kicked out of there too after a screaming match they had. So then we found out he was sleeping outside and we told him he could stay with us to get himself together. I am going to try and explain how he has changed and his outlooks on the world now and I'm am curious what you all will think has happened to him and his mind. I am personally very into leo and the stuff he talks about, I love the ideas of spirituality and have experimented with lsd and mushrooms plenty of times before so even though I have yet to have an awakening, through leo and using psychedelic's I have pretty good grasp on what its all about. Mark on the other hand, uses these drugs with no good foundation on what its all about. He doesn't have a leo or someone he uses for guidance and explanation, he just explains it all to himself. Talking to him about spirituality was incredibly twisted because he never leaned towards the love parts of god. He would talk about how he had an awakening a couple months ago and how that’s how he knew he was a special and different person because nobody else was having the realizations that he was. He would talk about how he has god inside of him and how he has no ego, but then in the same conversation talk about how people stare at him constantly because of this glow and light that he has and that he knows everyone can see. When I would question this glow/light and say that I'm not sure what he is talking about or say that I don't see it, he would ignore me and keep talking or he would look at me as if I am lying and say come on bro I know you see it. He would talk so much about other people and how they use demons against him and how hateful people and the world are. He would say that there are demons everywhere here. He would talk about how he didn’t even really want to be alive because he has seen the after life and he knows it is so much better then here. He didn't want to get a job because he wants to be free. I tried explaining to him that the reason I have a job is because I am purposefully sacrificing my freedom to have the ultimate freedom later on, that I am trying to build up this snowball effect in my life where eventually I no longer have to work the job I don’t like and I can transition into something I love and that’s how I will get my freedom. But he would reply with why don’t I just be free right now like him, saying stuff like you don’t need this house you really don't need anything except to just be and exist. He would talk about how he just wants to be free like a bird and I would try to explain that even the bird has to go and hunt for food to eat but he would just ignore that or find an excuse for it. Each conversation was more about him being right at the end rather then finding an actually logical solution for how he was going to figure out his situation. This dude was living in my own bedroom with me, his sister (my girlfriend) and my German shepherd dog in my moms house and he didn’t understand and even got pissed off when we told him he couldn’t bring Percocet into the house. He doesn't care that percs are highly addictive and ruin peoples lives he thinks that he is above addiction and he has 0 problems with it and he just wanted to have fun bc he had been too sober since he has been living with us. He would talk so much about how he loves himself and that’s why people are jealous of him and hate him because he is so to himself and they want to be this chosen one that he is but they aren't. The way he would talk about his self love, was actually him talking about how selfish he is. I tried to explain to him that the way I think about self love is that I also need to love everyone else too because they are literally me like we are all the same thing. We had talked about oneness before but he didn’t seem to actually grasp that he is not the only one with god in him and that we are all god, so he didn’t understand my view on self love and he just shrugged it off saying stuff like but yourself should always come first over anybody else. He literally asked me at one point why he couldn’t just "be" or just exist on my couch and stay here doing nothing but that. I tried to explain that we all want to be free too so its not fair to us that we have to work for this house and you can just stay for nothing and that actually what I am doing by asking him to get a job is me loving myself by having that boundary because him staying could only be temporary as he needs to eventually move on to getting his own place. His response was questioning why any of us needed to work and that we could all be free like him if we wanted too. He even said that it wasn't loving myself but hating him for me to kick him out if he didn't want to get a job. In the end of him staying with us he chose to leave. He would rather live outside then give up his "freedom" or any of himself just to please us and do what we wanted him to do. He literally didn't want to be told what to do at all. An overview of how he was and the way he talked about things would be very narcissistic. He would be talking about how shitty other people are and how he doesn't think he is better then anyone else but then continue to talk about how he indeed was better then everyone else. Every conversation would go in circles with contradictions left and right never coming close to a real conclusion. From a spiritual perspective I believe that without proper theory or foundation he has been using these psychedelic drugs so much that he now has a twisted view of the world and what spirituality is about. He is very close to what leo describes as the devil. He believes that he has some kind of godly spirit that is rare and nobody else has rather then the realization that we are all god and the same exact thing. I'm curious what you all think about this. I believe that psychedelic's show everyone the same things and then we use our own minds and egos to interpret it and that reality can get really twisted up through this because you just end up explaining it however you can. To me it seems like this guy is losing his mind and its really sad to see. I think it's important to lose your mind but only carefully and responsibly. Have any of you experienced someone like this?

@Forestluv I really like what you said and I will have to consider doing some breathe work. I haven’t tried it yet bc when I first researched it, it didn’t look very appealing to do at all but I’m willing to work with that knowing it’s a practice that could have some real benefits for me. As for what you’ve said about the penguins, I feel like I’ve come close to a similar breakthrough with the same scenario you described except when I start to get close and feel strange things start to happen, I notice and then the fear kicks in. I love the penguins but my ego doesn’t want me to become them lol. I guess I’m shying away from giving them complete love in this scenario. Could you touch more on what you said about not needing to journey to some astral plane? What does this mean exactly? I’ve yet to have a experience where I’m taken out of the room I’m in through my mind, or having out of body experiences. It seems like I’m very attached to my body and that’s definitely one of the things that starts to freak me out the most is when I feel like I could let my body go, I no longer want to do it. Does this mean you could have a breakthrough while still remaining in the same room and still being in your body? Every time for me it feels as though my body is starting to disappear, usually from my feet going up to my head. Every time it reaches the point of my legs it’s too real for me and I shy away from letting go and surrendering and my heart starts pounding. At the same time things will happen like the top of my tv seems to start fading away, but I tend to get scared of that in the moment even though Ive done plenty of learning about what that experience is suggesting to me. It’s like when I get close to realizing truth I don’t actually want it to be true anymore bc it’s terrifying lol. Thank you so much for your response and help I really appreciate it.

@Nahm First off this response is very advanced and wisdom packed that it has given me a lot of learning to do as well as a lot to think about. I haven’t had time this week to get started but I need to read about those words and meditations that you linked me to bc I haven’t done much of that at all and I’m lacking the experience with it that I need to fully understand everything you are saying. If you could touch more on this feeling never being in the future that would be awesome because I am a bit confused by that. I really like the idea of bringing this to the trip because I feel like normally I go to the trip for that. I’ve been wanting the trips to being that to me. Very helpful, thank you so much.

@Girzo I haven't had a breakthrough yet so when I am in that moment and terrified it is very hard to believe its a good price to pay because I don't know what I am about to get lol. It makes me change my mind that breaking through is even something I want to do and the main thing on my mind when this is happening is that I'm about to die. The first couple times I got close I curled up in bed like a baby scared but my last trip I knew what was going on and remained relaxed even though my heart was pounding. I believe you are right though, if I didn't change my mind on breaking through and tried to keep pushing through it then it would probably pass quickly and be amazing.

@acidgoofy I really like the idea that psychedelic experiences are about facing my fears, I'm gonna go into my next trip with those intentions. Thanks man

@acidgoofy I will def have to work on contemplating the fear. I have a strong desire to experience it until things start to get weird and it might be about to happen and then the fear kicks in and ruins the rest of the trip bc I don’t want to experience it anymore once I get scared and tell myself I’m not ready for it

Long story short, I’ve been doing psychedelics for about a year. I got into them before I found Leo and mainly used them for fun, but after I found Leo I have been very interested in having a breakthrough experience. I’ve mainly done acid about 20+ times and I’ve done mushrooms a few times too. My craziest trip was a 4 gram mushroom trip that terrified me and actually is what led me to learning about breaking through and how ego death is similar to enlightenment. After that trip I did another mushroom trip eventually but it gave me the same vibes as the terrifying one and I couldn’t enjoy it, so after that I stuck to doing lsd. Im always pretty comfortable on lsd but there has been a certain point in all of my recent trips where I start to feel uncomfortable there too. I had one high dose lsd trip where I was smoking outside and started to feel like I was becoming everything around me and like I was dying. I felt like I wasn’t ready for it in that moment and realized ego death sounds beautiful until you are looking right at it and your going to die. It was like I had a choice in that moment to keep experiencing that and see what happens or run into my room and distract myself with watching plant earth instead. I was terrified of dying so I ran and watched tv. This seems to be a re accruing thing that happens to me now in all of my trips even in low doses. Not as intense, but I seem to keep finding my way to what feels like a breakthrough point, but then being there terrifies me, makes my heart beat fast as shit and makes me feel like I’m not ready so I distract from the experience rather then letting go into it and surrendering. Each time I get to this point it scares me less and is getting easier to ease into each trip. I’m just wondering if all I need to do now is work on letting go and surrendering into that? Or is there more to the fear I’m experiencing when I get this deep?

@GroovyGuru Its funny because for awhile when I was in the mindset of leaving I was preaching to them everything I was learning and basically trying to force them to grow so I didn't have to get to this point to help financially. Now I feel like the only way I can truly help them learn from me and grow is by showing them my own growth and selflessness through helping with the bills and setting up systems that show them how we can all clean rather then me forcing them to or being angry about it. Thank you for your reply and good luck with your student loan debt, check out Dave Ramsey!

I have been understanding Leo's videos much deeper lately and have been listening to them in an order that I believe led me to having a very life changing realization. This realization is probably the most profound one I have had since I started listening to Leo, even though I have had many others before. This one has changed the way I am thinking about my future and has allowed me to clear up many obstacles I had holding me back from taking real action right now. I'm sorry it is so long but I had to go into a lot of backstory in order explain exactly how my life got flipped inside out. Thank you for reading and please let me know what you think! Since I was young I knew that my family was struggling with money and I built a very strong identity around the idea that this wasn’t going to be how my life would go. That I would do whatever it took in order to ensure I didn’t struggle with money because I saw how hard it made things for my family. We weren’t broke or starving but we were living paycheck to paycheck without tons of real meals. I saw how all this was affecting my mom and my step dad, their relationship and things I wanted to do in my life and I made a commitment very early on that this life wasn’t going to be my future. I had a friend in middle school who’s dad was a manager and said when we were old enough we could both be bus boys at the restaurant. For all of middle school I had long hair down to my shoulders and I died it all kinds of colors, I loved my hair and I was very attached to it. When it came time to get the job in 9th grade 2016, they told me I needed to cut the hair bc it was a very nice restaurant with specific dress code. I don’t think I would’ve cut my hair short again for any other reason than I knew I wanted to start making some money, and I didn’t hesitate. I got a buzz cut for that job and saved my first grand to put towards a car. My big thing was that I knew part of the reason my family was struggling was bc they could never get ahead with the bills enough to start saving any money, always going into the negative and playing catch up. This led me to thinking that saving as much money as possible was the most important thing I could do so that I have it when I need it. I also knew there was no chance of anyone buying me a car like a lot of my friends were getting, so it was very important to me to save as much as I could. I was 15 years old saving 80% of everything I made. Eventually me and my friend cut ties which meant I couldn't work there anymore so I had to find a new job. June 2017 I got a job at a waterslide rental place for the summer. This was a good job and I was able to save 3 grand to put towards my car. I bought my first car in February 2018. I continued working at the moon bounce company on the weekends in the summer of 2018 while starting my electrical job and working there during the week. This was a hustle and I saved everything extra I made at the waterslide company. I did the same thing in the summer of 2019 and eventually quit the waterslide job during that summer because it was starting to be too much for me to work that many hours and I started to value my free time more than the extra money. In 2019 is when I graduated and started working full time at my electrical job and I immediately set it up to out 20% of everything I made into a savings account. Eventually I had to spend a little more than half of what I saved for a new car, which led me with around 4,000 left over. Since then I have saved up a total of 16 grand that I have today without really budgeting too much and just being carful with how much I was spending. I started my electrical job at 9$ an hour in the summer of 2018. Only two and a half years later and I am now at 17$ an hour in 2020. Now back to the main point about my family. Up until this past week I have held this mindset of saving as much as possible to have security for my future. My family has still been struggling this entire time and during 2020 things turn a turn for the worst. My step dad and mom got divorced and he moved out (this had been coming for years, they have had a toxic relationship since I was little). Covid 19 is what drove them to their limits and they couldn't stand each other anymore, while at the same time my stepdad was losing his job also because of the virus. I did lots of arguing with him and my mom over the bills trying to help by teaching them things I learned about saving money and lowering bills because I didn't think the problem they had was lack of money, I thought it was lack of management. I worked out a plan for all the bills with my mom and stated that as long as my step dad was sending the money he promised every month then everything should be fine and she would have plenty of extra money too. Sadly this didn't work out and he hasn’t been sending money for months now. Eventually I got to a point during this where I decided this was my life and I didn't want anything to do with their problems. I had to make sure that I was saving as much money as possible for my own future and it wasn't up to me to help either of them with the bills. I had this grand idea that if I saved as much money as I could to build a foundation for my life, got out of this house asap, and then eventually found my life purpose down the road, then I would be able to help 10x as much as I could now. I have always had a vision of myself as being rich one day and doing whatever it would take to do it so I feel very strongly that if I put my mind to it then that will become reality. The problem is that living at my house is really toxic and I have been wanting to leave since my step dad moved out. The money problems, the divorce problems, the house is always a messy disaster from my 3 brothers and my mom bought 6 cats through the years. I also have my German shepherd dog and girlfriend living with me in a small bedroom. It is very hard to be focused on personal development and growing myself with all of this going on but my options for leaving are very limited and if I did leave it would probably largely be because of my terrible relationship with my mom (mainly because I blamed her for all of these problems) and we would never talk again. I had a plan to leave for awhile with a place to go set and ready, but eventually came to realize this wasn't a good idea because I would be paying rent and be in a unfamiliar area even further away from my job. I also didn’t want to leave because part of me knew I would never talk to my mom again after all of this. Me and my girlfriend talked a lot about this together and eventually decided we would be much better off building our futures if we were able to stay right where we were at. This was a hard thing to come to grips with because of all the obstacles in the way of doing personal development and just being happy at home. Together we put together a plan to talk to my mom about all the changes we needed to see happen and I finally stopped blaming and hating her so much. Part of this plan was for us to knock down a wall in the house to get a bigger room (we put the wall up to separate one room into two, so we will be knocking it back down to have the rest of the room we originally needed for my step dads office), and I also decided to start giving my mom 200$ a month for rent instead of paying the one 80$ bill I was paying for her (I should have been more grateful I haven't been forced to pay them much at all this whole time). Before this I had been ignoring everyone in the house because of how much I hated being there so I had no idea if my step dad was still sending money or not. During our talk I was made aware that he hasn't been sending anything and the mortgage is 6,000$ behind along with a couple other bills and my mom is currently 700$ negative. Literally a day later I listened to Leos video about goodness and it hit me really hard that I should definitely not be saving all this money and just holding onto it for my future and that I should now take charge not only with getting everyone to clean up and having better relationships with them, but also with paying the bills and helping my mom get everything paid on time. I haven't set up a budget yet or done the math on how much I will be able to give her while still saving some money for myself, but I definitely want to give her as much as possible. I now vision a future where I help my mom get her money situation straight before I do anything else for just my future. I was at work when I listened to that video and that realization that helping her is what I should be doing hit me like a hammer in the head. It felt like that part of me that wants to save all this money for security for my future had to be let go and had to die and this terrified me. I cried half of the day because of this and I felt terrified about all the work this meant I had to do. Questions surfaced like what if I will never make it out of this house because I wont be able to save nearly as much money anymore? What if I help her and she doesn't do her part with the money and still asks me for more? What if I help and it is still not enough? How will I be able to save enough to buy a house to leave this place and then build my future career? It felt like my life had just flipped upside down, and it did. See my original way of thinking was that I needed to get out of here asap in order to be focused on my personal development enough to figure out what my life purpose is and to start working on it. I thought that escaping was my only option for a good future. Leo changed the meaning of good for me that day, I no longer saw helping later when I am rich and it wont hurt as good. I now see that sacrificing myself now to help everyone around me in this time when they really need it as good. My intuition has showed me how terrible I will feel in the future when I left my whole family behind to pursue my future without thinking much of them at all. The thinking that held me back from this realization was the blaming on my mom and the world for the family that I grew up in. I didn’t think it should be my problem to help her because I didn’t choose to have this family or life and that I should focus on getting out of it. Now I realize that I have just been rejecting the reality of my life and that even though I didn't choose it, it is still my responsibility. Just because on some enlightened level my family isn't even real is no excuse to treat them the same as any other people. I grew up with these people and they will always have ties to my life, I want these relationships to be as good as possible, not forgotten and left behind. This realization also allowed me to see how much action I CAN take right now to change my life and I no longer have to wait to leave to start pursuing my life purpose. If I take this route of helping her, then I will still be living here for a few years which means I can actually start figuring out my life purpose right now. I'm still scared about what this means for my future, but it is clear to me now that even though this move is extremely counterintuitive, my higher self's intuition says that this will make me way happier in the end even if it means sacrificing my old future plans and having to create new ones with a new path. Even if it means I have to work my shitty electrical job for longer then I originally planned, that’s the real hustle. Not getting to the finish line asap, but taking my time to make sure I'm doing it right and creating real happiness through that. I know this was really long so thank you for reading and please let me know what you think about this. I'm curious what others will think about my realizations and if anyone can relate to having one feel like it turned your ego inside out. Lastly I want to thank Leo for his work, I found him about a year ago now and I knew it was a gold mine from the beginning. If anything will be the reason I don't let my ego fuck up my life it will be because of Leo. I would still be lost and confused without you, thank you so much and I can't wait for more!

I started reading, "Taming Your Gremlin" about a week ago. That is where I picked up the phrase, "simply noticing". The past few days I have been crawling out of a stressed and depressed state and started feeling much better because of it. This is a journal I wrote earlier today, I'm curious what others will think of some of these insights I came across recently and even just while writing it. Thank you for reading. The more times I fall back into a depressed state, the more times I come out of it feeling effortlessly happy. I noticed this time that each time I start to feel happy again, I have the same exact realization, that the only reason I had been unhappy and depressed was because I was choosing not to be. This choice is not some clear thing in my mind in the moment of it happening, but it is there in a very subtle way. My mind is always uncontrollable and thinking back on my depressed states, I notice that during them I am taking my mind very seriously. All the endless questions and confusion that my mind brings up creates a feeling of tension when I am taking it seriously. By taking it seriously I mean that I convince myself somewhere along the line that the questions and concerns in my mind are something I need to actively be figuring out, and once I am convinced again to do this it becomes a nonstop endeavor. I end up constantly straining my mind trying to figure myself out just by thinking about myself and my "problems". This starts to build up a lot of "should's and should not's" in my mind. It is very subtle, but I start to get frustrated with myself because of everything I believe I should be doing and everything I shouldn't be. Good examples would be, "I should be meditating every day" or "I should have quit smoking by now" or "I shouldn't be smoking weed everyday". These beliefs set up some kind of a set of rules that I have for myself and if I am not following those rules than I start to feel guilty and frustrated and question why I can’t be who I wish I was. This leads to constantly trying to "figure out" how I got to the place I am now (thinking about the past) and how to go about changing myself by means of some chronological order, like if I want to be like this, then first I need to change this, then this, and then that will create the domino effect of success that I am looking for. Doing all of this thinking and planning out of my future takes me far away from the present moment and leads me to only wishing things were different. This is exactly how I am creating the depression for myself! I literally won't allow myself to enjoy the present moment and who I am today because of who I strive to be like. Solving this starts with simply noticing exactly how I am imprisoning my own self with all my personal judgments. If I am not on the track I believe I am supposed to be on it creates resistance of happiness from all the worrying and thinking about how to fix or change it. If I want to be a less stressed and angry person, I need to accept the present moment of who I am and not live by any self limiting rules. This doesn't mean never try to change anything about myself, only not to worry about the changing process. Let change happen naturally. Let go of control. Simply notice who I am and what I want to change. Simply noticing allows me to take a step back from myself and just observe my ego without being involved in doing any of the changing myself. While I am in the mindset of simply noticing I see much clearer how I wont allow myself to be happy when I am so involved in all the thinking, worrying, and figuring out. Simply noticing is very counterintuitive because my mind doesn't understand it. My mind believes that if it is not actively trying to make these changes, it will never happen and I am not truly working towards anything really life changing. It convinces me that If I continue certain behaviors any longer, I wont get anywhere that I want to be and that those behaviors are what is actually preventing me from thriving on life and figuring out how to fix that is what I am supposed to be doing. While it may be true that behaviors like smoking weed everyday, vaping, and jerking off to porn too much may be preventing me from being the best me I could be, worrying about all of it and trying to change it is just another thing on that list. All I really need is the vision of my best self, who I want to someday be, and the process will happen on its own. This is so counter intuitive because my mind does not believe it. This makes me wonder what my mind is really even good for. I'm not sure, it seems to trap me and lead me away from my goals more than it helps me move towards them. I mean, the only reason I have goals at all is because of my mind. It is terrified of living an unfulfilling life and wants to do whatever is possible to make sure that wont happen, but while worrying about creating a fulfilling life for myself my mind is unaware of the fact that it itself is what created the idea and belief of what a fulfilling life is! It's like a dog chasing its own tail. My life is already fulfilling everyday regardless of where I want to be in the future, as long as I focus on being happy regardless of the outcome of things and just making the most of what I have today, then the future doesn't even matter, it never even existed in the first place! Only the present moment matters. I wish my mind understood this more regularly, in fact maybe this is what I should be striving towards more than anything else.

So the last time I posted on here it was about trying to help my depressed girlfriend. This time It's with the same girl so it might help reading that one because I talked about how we got together, how long we have been together and all those details. I just need advice on this specific situation today because I am extremely confused on right and wrong and what I actually even want right now. So the situation is that earlier this week I had an old female friend text me on snapchat. I used to be very close to her and my girlfriend never liked her. She sent me a video of us from when we were way younger since it was on her memories I guess and we ended up talking about how good of friends we used to be. These days she wears a lot of goth makeup and outfits (looks ridiculous) so at one point I said, "so what are you like now, the same goofy you just dressed hot asf? " After that we continued talking catching up on stuff, even talked about psychedelic's a little bit. Now to side track a little bit I have to explain that when we were younger we never did anything seriously sexual (if I'm honest its only because she never gave me the signal to really go for it, always was talking to several other dudes and I was just the best friend") although I would slap her ass occasionally back then. Several years after we stopped being friends we were talking randomly and because of my past best friend status I was able to get nudes from her for a little bit. Eventually I shut this down but kept the photos on my phone long into my relationship with my girlfriend, eventually deleting them fearing she would see them. Now this time my old friend was texting me, (not to excuse my actions) me and my girlfriend had not had sex for about 2 months due to her having long periods that end with long infections due to some birth control problems she says (she has a thing in her arm for it), so I got a very strong desire to find a way to ask her for nudes and I did it. I knew she would send them. It was also perfect timing because during these past 2 months of been extremely stressed out about how bad porn is for me and how I'm addicted because I can't make it past 3 days without masturbating and watching porn. It causes me to be late to work in the morning, lose love for my girlfriend rather than loving her more, and to have less energy a lot of the time I feel like. This is where it get's complicated because weirdly enough my girlfriends had a dream around this same time that I was cheating on her and she was stressing to me how worried she was now, so I immediately deleted all the pictures worried she would go through my phone and she did go through it this morning. She is now extremely mad at me and all she saw that made her mad was the sentence I quoted at the top about how my friend is hot asf now. She is threatening to break up and doesn't want to talk to me. This happened this morning and she is at work right now. I tried explaining to her that there is a huge difference between the way I and all men think about love and sex. That I love her and I want to build a future with her, grow and accomplish all our goals together because she is my best friend (this is where she previously knew / thought I stood with her), but one of my biggest struggles in life is that I don't know how I could possibly be with just one women sexually for my whole life, I am only 19 years old. I feel like having that experience might be important for self actualizing in my life at some point, I really don’t know if this is something that society has imprinted in my brain that this isn't even possible and I am just using it as an excuse or if it is something actually worth being concerned about. At the end of the day she truly is my best friend, I love her and only want a relationship with her, but our relationship is already set up with the idea that we are going to be together forever, so one fuckup like this is extremely saddening to her, now thinking I am a liar and un loyal, keep in mind she doesn't even know about the nudes at all. The only reason I put that in this is because I need help analyzing my true intentions, and if she does stay with me, how do I get around this problem of being unsure that I can only be with just her sexually forever?

@Elise Yes i totally meant videos that will help me learn how to change myself to be better for this situation and I totally get what you mean about her being receptive enough. I was so confused for awhile when I first found Leo, why she wasn't just as interested in it as me. It took very hard work to point out to myself my own insecurities (Stuff like feeling the need to prove to her I'm on a good path by always projecting everything I'm learning and expecting her to be able to keep up. Another I noticed was how often I took her feeling bad so personal as if It means I'm not good enough) that I had to change if i wanted to stop the arguing. So that being said I'm doing a lot better with just being compassionate (I know there is still more growth to be had) and not arguing with her even when she starts cussing me out for something silly I did, i notice a lot quicker now that it's really not me she's mad at and as long as I stay calm and don't worry, the storm will pass easier and faster. I think the hardest parts for me right now are keeping my own mental in order and not letting her drain my energy. Also it is still very hard to cope with the fact that we are on two different levels in a way. This is what cause's most of my frustration and I'm not sure why exactly. It's tricky and i feel a lot more of a separation from her that leaves me feeling a bit lonely at times. I think something I really lack is self love, since you wrote me the first response that's what I have been thinking a lot about. Thank you so much again for all your advice, you have no idea how much you've cleared up for me already

@Elise Thank you so much. Everything you said was just what I needed to hear, you're awesome. I have watched a lot of Leos content but not everything, what would you suggest?

There you go, Sorry it was my first post and i just had to get it out