Natasha Tori Maru

A very good point. Most people resist and suppress. This tends to prolong the emotion and risks thoughts arising tangentially, which can feed narratives that keep the emotion alive. Often we fear the emotion as being worse than it really is. Just let them happen. Identify them. They pass relatively quickly compared to avoidance, suppression or resistance. Anger is normally a secondary emotion to the genuine one.

Calling something by it's "brand name" instead of the actual noun (I would postulate this is different to slang, but still total conformity disconnected to group identity or context etc): Doona - quilt/duvet Velcro - hook & loop fastner Kleenex - tissue Google - search engine/web search Xerox - photocopy Hoover - vacuum cleaner Jacuzzi - hot tub Post-it - sticky note

Shit it is such a hard question - mostly because my blocks have been varied and many not just mental. I would categorise most of my blocks to be in the emotional / feeling domain. And all (mental "thought" or feeling) blocks were based on me resisting or having a poor relationship with the thought or feeling. Not the actual feeling itself. The blocks were essentially areas where my mental/emotional energy was being used in maintaining a narrative, judging or rejecting. Once I worked on those - the excess energy that was wasted in the "block" was funnelled/diverted into action because the action simply felt like exactly what I wanted to do. My largest blocks were 1) approval seeking with men (blocking love + feeling as if I needed to earn love) 2) resistance to "wanting" (I was stuck in "should" and had to allow myself to really want something) 3) judging others (blocked an emotion, I cannot feel the emotion behind the judgement if I am busy moralizing) 4) False belief: wanting money was greed 5) False belief: I only excelled because I was a good looking woman and not due to excellence or aptitude. Everyone will have different blocks for sure - and they are often (but not always) linked to our shadows. What we aren't claiming in our experience. This is why I enjoy being triggered on the forum - if I feel okay to judge someone, it tends to indicate I think "I don't do that" but I probably do, and need to investigate it. I had many blocks I slowly worked through. And they all essentially served one purpose: to steal energy away into mental narratives. Energy that I needed to divert back to useful, available energy. Especially to work in commercial construction. If I think I don't experience something - an emotion or feeling, even a thought - its an immediate call for me to investigate it. I am more often than not just not able to recognise it. I had to sit and redefine emotions and feelings, be able to accurately name and define the feeling. Work out where in my experience they showed up. This was the hardest part of the process for me, as I am not naturally good at identifying the nuances in feelings. Anxiety, worry, concern, sometimes even anticipation - they all (for example) used to feel like the same emotional soup to me. Now I can find the difference in my experience. I used to think I never felt jealousy - but I was actually so busy judging another for some other thing, I was blocking it. ie my mother would show me her amazing op shop finds of silver. I would immediately judge her "she is lazy, doesn't want to work, and just searched for endless dopamine to waste money. She hoards useless stuff". But in reality - I was jealous I couldn't have a day off to hunt for silver. The narrative was feeding my rational brain, bypassing the real emotion of jealously and diverting to suppress the emotion. But that loop > judge > narrative > emotional suppression - that loop! That was where excess energy was looping out of my system like a program eating up memory in a computers OS. In the place of jealousy suddenly happiness for her came up. I had to find those loops. Emotional work, psychology and shadow stuff was a big part - so I think you are onto the right path. There could be other avenues though, this is just what worked for me. It wasn't easy either. I test as INTJ (take that for what it is, MBTI slides into pseudoscience) Not sure if this has anything to do with it, but my inner emotions just aren't so easy to access. 100% and dovetails with where I was going above - I hope I made sense. I didn't revise the above paragraph, just let the expression happen. There are two parts to this that might help - and these are the two things that keep me aligned with the business. One - I love creative problem solving under heavy constraints. I love having severely restricted variables and finding a solution that works in application and for multiple parties. Basically I love solving complex systems problems. I always have. Since I was a child the times where it felt as if a while afternoon disappeared where involved in creative problem solving. The more complex - the better. Painting, drawing, rendering. Building computers, soldering, circuit boards, software troubleshooting. Engine mods. Troubleshooting in particular. I love the process. LOVE it. This translates perfectly to construction because it is a series of moving parts. No project is the same. Many moving targets. Many variables. Logistics, materials, time, costs, critical path items. Quality control. Love it. So it plays to my strengths. I also love working with SOPs and making them more efficient. Refining processes is so fun! And this is what I need to do - learn from each construction project and refine for the next. I love how much change is involved in the troubleshooting. Repetition is a killer for me. While I always loved creative problem solving complex systems and troubleshooting, I would run out of steam when I had a long term outcome to work to - this lead to the below: Two - I had to connect with the outcome. I wasn't connecting with the product of my endeavours in previous careers. I had to feel and connect with what I was producing. And in the field I work in (medical, science, pharma, education, defence construction, federal/state contracts) I get to see one thing that made it worth it - the building done. Constructed. A tangible result. And even better - I was able to connect and relate to the outcome because once it was complete I could see the effect. I could visit and see patients getting life saving dialysis treatment. See mentally ill people get the help they needed. Emergency departments treating people in infrastructure I helped build. MRI's, compounding pharmacies, pathologies for quick diagnostics in emergency situations... all of that. These people I see getting treatment - they don't know me. But I know I helped them. I don't really need them to know me at all. Only that in the end, the outcome of my hard work. My rage, anger, tears, jubilation, 16hr days, panic attacks, laughter - my energy - went to supporting society and humanity. I often sit and visualise buildings done and constructed. It helps. But connecting with the outcome of my work was what got me there. Human connection. One other small remark I might make is regarding spirituality. It helped. A lot. No self was huge for me. Self will not being a thing (but still behaving as if I have agency) also. I stopped being so attached to outcome. I just made sure I was taking action when the greatest probability for the outcome I desired would arise. I have no ultimate control (and I was a control freak). I am at the mercy of too many other people, logistics and variables to commit to attaching to an outcome. This helped eliminate 50% of my latent stress. When I started to deconstruct my own experience and the phenomenology of it, I also begun to stop resisting and judging some tasks as "bad" or "good". Folding the laundry became a purely tactile experience. Cutting the vegetables was so auditory and strange, feeling the vibration and pressure as a sharp knife went through a cabbage with a CRUNCH. Sensory experience in any arena is now welcome. I have my preferences of course. But its all just sensation. I don't hate any of it. I just don't resist. I don't know if any of this resonated. I hope it does! I used to procrastinate a lot. Connecting to outcome through relationship with people was huge for me. I had to feel the result.

Sweet cheers - thanks for your thoughts. What are the sorts of other male environments you consider toxic?

Alternate forms of expression that aren't language based (necessarily) that can release feeling or emotion - this is your common meaning? I suppose feeling or emotion doesn't even need to be a component in your brainstorm - your 3 domains just seem to be a platform to express in some way

This is sort of leading to a good question: what kind of social environments help a man recover agency?

Haha - I actually like Bryan! I find him fascinating. I can be critical though, and often I am way to loose explicating my criticism and not good at enough at highlighting the good. I see him leaning toward a bit more balance and away from the rigidity of Blueprint as it was in its first iteration. His 5 pillars are essential and fantastic - these are the parts of his advice that really move the needle. The rest of his protocol has much less of an effect. But it is VERY interesting. I suppose my main criticism is not with Bryan himself, but with his audience and how they will gloss over basics and jump straight into maxing the .1% with their supplement stack (meanwhile they are up all hours, don't get proper exercise etc). He is an influencer, so I cannot really make him personally responsible for the actions his followers take. The most I might advice is more emphasis on the basics. But that isn't going to sell him books, sell his supplements or generate social media traction to get his brand out there. Hate the game, not the player? But I get it, nailing the basics is harder than it seems. Many repetitions needed to grow the routine/reflex muscle.

I really enjoy analysing forum interactions also (I am sort of obliged to do this). Frequently forum interactions can be chalked down to "User failed to ask: what exactly do you mean?" prior to attacking the argument. Then when they later clarify, it can appear to be changing goalposts or points. It gets messy when someone anchors themselves to their original interpretation. Then there is endless snowball effect of talking past each other or arguments going all over the place. Frustration increases and then rhetoric degrades into crude terminology flung about. Regarding the topic: In terms of stage blue shadow - it makes me wonder as this is another way to frame a potential issue - but might not hit it head on: is more information to diagnose really the answer? If more information solved the inaction problem, all of us would be productivity machines (more information can resolve inaction when it really is the bottleneck, but I need to be careful to decipher that as true)! Information is so easy to access now that gatekeeping is less of a thing. I suppose I would look at myself here: I often like to reframe in similar way (in this case I do often look at things through spiral dynamics), but I don't often feel it gets me any closer to taking action with the information. I can feel like I am, because I am getting closer to (what I feel is) isolating the problem. But it could be a red herring if more information or another mental frame doesn't help - or if I haven't identified my issue as a legitimate information deficit. Usually this ends up with me looking at my own mental blocks, inner narratives and false beliefs that are preventing me from using the power at my disposal. The stage blue shadow is acting to cast light on the rigid structures in our beliefs that beg for inspection.

He got a dog! Good on him. One step closer to engaging and enjoying life, so he isn't stuck in his potentially rigid routine He often looks subtly warn down and strained - very subtle muscular tension in small parts of his expression. What is the bet, that he will come out with a blurb about: Guys, pets are the hidden biohack we all need!!!!! - More physical activity + cardiovascular benefits - Greater social interaction - Stress regulation - Daily structure - Hormone relational bonding: Oxytocin, Cortisol reduction, Endogenous opioids, Dopamine, Serotonergic systems

@Leo Gura Sweet, cheers - I appreciate the glimpse into your process Are the secondary insights that arrive while "logically laying it all" out a cross pollination across systems? Sort of intuitively detecting analogous structure in another domain that might form a link Like synthesising wholism across adjacent domains?

@shubhamsharma What do you experience when you resist the impulse to smoke? What feeling is the biggest? What thoughts come up?

Good morning Leo Time to slam you with a question out of pure curiosity around your process of understanding: When you arrive at an understanding that you cannot yet articulate, do you experience that understanding as primarily tacit (something you somehow "see" before you can explain why) and then afterwards develop the explicit/mechanistic model through contemplation and analysis (reverse engineering)? Or is the tacit understanding (or realization) largely coming from a product of accumulated knowledge and erudition? In your own experience, how much of genuine understanding arrives tacitly, and how much is constructed explicitly from first principles? Do you think there is a "break point" of knowledge where tacit understanding begins to manifest with more frequency? I suppose this is ultimately a series of questions about the relationship between intuition, tacit knowledge, accumulated wisdom, and epistemic rigor. You probably experience both tacit understanding and working up from first principles.

Okay clearly this isn't going anywhere.

This appears to me to be a non sequitur. My point isn't that you were required to stop because the other person asked you to. I am asking whether escalating an interaction remains justified once you've recognized that it has become adversarial and unproductive. Saying "he doubled down and I tripled down" explains the escalation, but doesn't answer that question. Are you evading?

You don't need to totally back down - just stop with inferences about people's psychological state when they tell you to stop. We shouldn't insult. We should try to engage in rhetoric free of condescension. You are explaining a possible mechanism. None of this justifies continually causing offense in an attempt to win an argument. Is continuing appropriate when the negative outcome is apparent and the continuation seems to be serving the participant rather than producing anything constructive? My interpretation is you are evading the wider ethical points I am raising.