Jordan

Thanks for everyone’s replies. After sleeping on it I can see how the advice makes some sense from a certain point of view and strategy for living a good life. It may be suited for someone with a certain set of values and survival strategy. It seems a certain amount of having survival figured out, wisdom, life experience and consciousness is needed to introspect and understand when this sort of advice works. I plan to enjoy live as a human figuring stuff out for himself for a while longer even though I am aware there is no self here and it is possible to be content without understanding how anything works.

This seems to work well for me. Breath in slowly focusing on your third eye chakra for 5 heartbeats, then move on to your throat, heart, solar plexus, sacral and root chakra for 5 heartbeats each. Next exhale starting at your tail bone and moving up your spine stopping at each spot at the spine that is in line with a chakra. 5 heartbeats each until you reach the top of your spine. Continue repeating the process around 10 times until uou notice a state change. If you can’t do 5 heart beats, then start with 4 or 3. It should be a bit of a struggle and like you are out of air. I have a video saved somewhere with similar instructions I can add later when I am on my computer. edit: He explains it here at around 1:52:00

I will probably mostly do mindfulness meditation with labeling as described in Leo’s video. I have a breathing technique I like to do to enter a meditative state before meditating. I also like to forget all concepts for a while like in the guided exercise for realizing you are god video then continuing with meditating. See concepts as oversimplified models of reality and not important. What type do you plan to do?

I am also considering a solo meditation retreat. I was thinking 30 days 10 hours+ per day with some stretching and walking. It might be a challenge being approved at work but I am ok with losing my job if I don't have enough freedom for something like this. I never tried one before so maybe I could do a 2 day trial run on the weekend sometime. I would: -Plan out the food -Make sure your house is spotlessly clean before starting -Make sure the place has fresh air -Define the exact meditation technique you will use and be determined to stick with it without changing it. Include any preparation or what to do if body/emotional pain comes up. -Have a journal to jot down insights that come up when taking a break. -Visualize your plan day by day and how you will deal with issues that could come up then confirm that is what you want to do.

I came up with an Idea this morning. I could make a video series of my growth to show others what is possible if they dedicate time to improving a certain skills. I could do a 10 hour a day for 30 day challenge doing things like: Meditate 10 hours a day for 30 days Learn video animation 10 hours a day for 30 days Move (walk, swim, yoga, tai chi, rock climbing) 10 hours a day for 30 days Public speaking 10 hours a day for 30 days Design websites 10 hours a day for 30 days

I feel like I am coming to the end of a 4.5 year phase in my life where I have been comfortable working 40 hours a week, meditating every now and then, enjoying playing video games, spending time with my girlfriend and rock climbing 1x per week. I would like to make big steps to increase the amount of learning and insights I have every day. I want to have work that is much more creative, help people enjoy their life more. I would like to increase my baseline level of consciousness and develop a much deeper understanding of my mind, emotions, relationships, selling products, psychology, insight, learning, life purpose, my own personality my strengths/weaknesses, my body, my health. I would like to take better care of my body eliminating aches and pains I have. I have enough money to last around 3 years of my regular expenses so if I put all my time into focusing on this, I could take 1.5 years off having a regular job without risking being broke. More specifically I would like to understand and heal my knee pain, back pain, strengthen my body, increase my energy levels, cultivate inspiration/fulfillment, learn how to sell a product, learn how to create my own product and continue learning and having new insights every day. I would also like to spend large portions of time meditating and contemplating. I would like to alternate between trying many new things and contemplating and making new connections about those experiences. I plan to give my 3 weeks notice to my job in around a month after I use up my dental benefits and have a more well formed plan. Anyone have any opinions or suggestions of things I should consider as I start making these changes in my life?

Leo's mindfulness meditation video is great. I started out with focusing on the breath but just the concept of it seems so boring and unappealing. I stuck with mindfulness meditation with labeling for a long time because it is fairly simple and more interesting to me. edit: I just saw you asked for tips and tricks and what your goals/expectations should be. #1 When you are meditating you want to forget what your goals are whatever they are. Get rid of any ideas of getting any benefit from meditation and just do it for no reason. This will give you better results because your mind will come up with many ideas on how to reach your goal which will distract your from actually meditating. #2 You can expect to get a higher sensory/emotional clarity, notice more things, lower stress, see things from different points of view more easily. #3 A good goal to have would be just to do 20 minutes every day at the same time for 30 days. See if you notice anything different.

@ExploringReality Thanks for sharing Kundalini Breathing - you just explained the inhale and stopped. I am guessing you don't just breath in once and you are done. I will see what applies to me. I want to take care of my knee pain before I spend too much time on martial arts. Right now I get pain on the outside of both knees when I walk downhill for 30-60 min or if I run for around 3 minutes. I went to a physiotherapist and he gave me some exercises and stretches to do. I will start out doing those and maybe add more stretches and self massage. I will also see what I can find out online about the causes of my pain and solutions. my training right now is bouldering 1x per week for 2-2.5 hours, 5 pullups 10 pushups alternating as many as I can do for 10 minutes 3x per week. I sometimes do the physio leg exercises but haven't been very consistent with those. I will start doing them every day from today. My diet is the same everyday. rice, broccoli, zucchini , carrots, yu choy(Chinese leafy green vegetable) lamb, butter, salt all chopped up and mixed together. I usually mix perogies in it for dinner which is probably not ideal for health. Making some smoothies might be a good idea to add to my diet. I just bought Leo's Life Purpose course. I will spend a lot of time seeing what advice is in there and follow whatever exercises are in that over the next couple weeks.

@aurum I was impressed several years ago when I saw a Chinese healer take my girlfriend's kid that injured his leg from soccer and couldn't walk and just crack his leg and he was fine after. I said back then that I wish I knew how to do that. It seemed pretty cool. The problem I see is if you do a good job, you have no more patients

This is a great video. I haven't watched it since it just came out. I will start some stretching and yoga and see if it helps. Notes: Pillars of falling in love with life are falling in love with consciousness, health, growth, learning, investing in yourself, execution, creativity. Consciousness- meditate, be inspired by / see / connect with the beauty in art, connect with your present experience, see potential in everything you experience. make your life a work of art. Health - holism and wellness. Make a choice to avoid health traps. Respect your life. Food, exercise, relationships, work, self image, mindfulness, focus, attitude, integrity. Growth, investing in yourself - vision of reading many books and connecting the info is fulfillment, how are you going to grow today in social skills, Learning, behavior change, making distinctions. put yourself face to face with an experiential problem. Execution - self esteem tied to this, feel strong, joy from execution, reading, meditating, working, going to the gym, Creativity - life purpose The reward is all the steps it takes to self actualize. Deliberate practice. Visualization. Doing something new. Facing your fears. Not giving up. Everything you do is something you want to do because it is part of your purpose. Saying no to things that doesn't align with your purpose. Integrity. Find your top values, connect with the joy of looking at beautiful things. Have a super sober life. Build momentum. Living like a sheep, following the path of least resistance is the biggest sin. Set a high standard, take action, just start. Stop doing actions that make you disillusioned with life. Appreciation for things that take hard work. Face/going to battle with your demons. Start now. Live life consciously. Deconstruct reality in a way that leaves you in a state in not knowing and radiant beauty.

@CosmicExplorer I listened to this episode and I do mindfulness meditation as described in Leo's video. They explain that mindfulness is a brief event and not a continuous thing but mindfulness meditation is not the same thing as mindfulness. Mindfulness meditation is done continuously and you ideally will have many moments of mindfulness. Leo is not saying to sit around being partially mindful. The idea is to be fully captivated and have 100000x higher sensory clarity and focus on the object you are savoring not just labeling it and having a light attention on it. I don't really like the idea of constructing an auditor and a meditator to check if you are being mindful. You should be able to tell if you are doing it right if your sensory clarity and focus is increasing a lot. If it is not then maybe you need to look closer into why that is with a technique like they describe in the podcast.

Hi Leo, I am curious if you still use the technique from the guided exercise for realizing you are god video. It seems like a good preparatory exercise before doing something like the mindfulness with labeling technique. Do you do any breathing exercises or forced intense focusing or any other preparatory techniques before your mindfulness with labeling? I am interested in quitting my job soon to take 4-16 months to enjoy my life, learn some new things I am interested in, try out some business ideas for the experience and would like to meditate a lot more. I am very open to doing an intensive solo retreat if anyone has any good resources I should review to make the most out of my effort. I have just been doing the 20 min-1 hour at a time kind of meditation here and there for years.

You might die within the hour too. Enjoy what you have here and now.

20% is not so bad. I wouldn't recommend trying to be 100% efficient. Take the middle path, there is less diminishing returns for your effort. Do the most bang for your buck in terms of emotional effort. Exercise 20 minutes every day, not 2 hours. Work hard 1 hour per day, not 8. Spend time learning 20 minutes a day, not 2 hours. If there is an obvious improvement you can make then do the minimum effort you need to in that area to see a nice improvement compared to the effort put in.

When I read probably 10+ years ago. I took something away from it but it seemed like the whole book could be summarized in a couple sentences. Something like mastery takes time whether you have talent or not. Most people can master any still given enough and proper training, coaching and practice. The stories in the book seemed mostly just a way to tell you this in different ways over and over until you understand.

The condition to happiness is you have to be able to accept the way things are right now. Most people are unable to do that most of the time. If you want to be happier then practice accepting the present moment exactly as it is and lower resistance you have to it. You can be happy with feeling like shit although it takes practice. You don't have to feel unhappy to motivate yourself to improve your situation. You can feel happy and still make choices that make your situation more appealing.

I have been meditating around 40 minutes before bed and not anything in the morning the last 2 days. I have been tired. I slept 9 hours last night and am feeling good now. I have been remembering my dreams. 2 nights ago I dreamt that I met a rock climbing youtuber Magnus and we made a video about shooting BBs at each other wearing safety glasses then I met a SC2 youtuber uThermal and for some reason I thought he know Magnus and I mentioned that I met him also. Last night I was playing a videogame in my dream. I remember picking a hero and breaking boxes to get items and weapons to start with in the game. I might need to go to bed even earlier if I am sleeping 9 hours and still want to meditate in the morning.

Hello, I wanted to create a new journal as I plan to start meditating consistently again. Goal: Meditate for an hour 2x per day without missing a day for 1 year. Plan: Start with mantra meditation for the whole hour where I just spend the whole time focusing on the sound of the mantra as I internally repeat it in my mind. I can also contemplate the meaning of the mantra "Bama Nam Kevalam" which means something like "Infinate love is all there is" Previous benefits: Before it gave me vivid dreams which was really cool. I also saw visions of the future stock market moves which made me some money. Some important things I learned from meditating before is: -Have no goals or expectations as you meditate (yes I do have a goal to meditate but as I meditate I need to start out by forgetting my goals or fantasies of what could happen and just experience what happens as it happens.) -Know it is 100% ok and expected to get distracted, just continue with the practice and be aware of what is happening now. -Set an alarm and have a reason to wait until the time is up - I will increase the time by 20 minutes if I stop and the start again as soon as I can. I will start after I go rock climbing today. 2024-11-10 I will update with how it goes.

I missed a few days. I will see if I can start up again and see how many days I can get in a row 1 hour 2x per day starting tomorrow, 2024-11-26. I set my alarms for 4:20am and 7:20pm repeating every day so I can get ready to meditate by around 4:30am and 7:30pm.

I only did 2x 10 minute sits since I really find it hard to stop and take 10 minutes away from what I am doing. today I will try my best to do a few more times and work my way up to once every 1-3 waking hours over the next week and see how it goes.

I missed a couple days of meditation. I have been spending a lot of time with my girlfriend and value getting enough sleep a lot. Walking meditation doesn't seem the best I am considering doing more shorter meditation sits instead of hour long ones so I don't get back pain from it. Maybe 10 minutes of moving slowly through the chakras with a slow breath around 1x every hour or 2 would be better than 2x 1 hour sits per day. Then I can really put all my effort into it for the whole time and usually I don't have trouble entering a meditative state in around 10 minutes so I should be able to learn to do it much faster if I practice it that much. A possible schedule: 5am sit 6am sit 9am sit 10am sit 11am sit 12pm sit 2:45pm sit 4:30 sit 5:30 sit 6:30 sit 7:30 sit 8:30 sit I am not sure the best place for a 10 minute meditations at work. Maybe I can sit at one of the workbenches that faces to the the wall and pretend I am looking at my computer. I will try doing some today and see how it goes.

I did 4 hours yesterday 2 hours sitting then my back was sore so I did 2 hours lying down. I might do walking meditation instead of sitting meditation because it will benefit my body more. 1 walked for 1.5 hours this morning focusing on my senses and my thoughts. I made sure to think of things in the about the present moment and not bother with future or past. it felt pretty good. I might go for another 1.5 hour walk so I am all caught up with 2 hours per day average.

Finally it is Saturday. I slept in an extra 2 hours from normal. I am 3 hours behind so if I do 5 hours today I will be caught up. I just did an hour this morning. I was feeling really good by then end. I did the focusing on the chakras technique followed by contemplating the difference between content and structure then becoming one with my experience. It felt like I was making love with experience. I feel good right now like my body is having a constant mini orgasm. I play videogames with my uncle and brother Saturday morning so after that I will cook and eat some food then meditate some more.

I did 30 minutes last night and 30 minutes this morning so I am behind 3 hours. Last night I felt bored out of my mind during meditation but this morning I was feeling good like I could keep going for a long time but it was time to get ready for work. This morning I didn't do much mantra meditation. I contemplated what truth was and why I thought my head existed separate from the sensations I have of it now. I felt into my physical sensations and emotions a lot. On Saturday I will see if I can catch up on the time I lost during the week. Hopefully it can be like the meditation I had this morning and I can just sit in bliss for 5-6 hours

I only did 30 minutes last night and 30 minutes this morning so I am behind 2 hours now. I don't think I will have enough time to make it up until Saturday because I want to spend time with my girlfriend. I seem to need a lot of sleep to keep up my energy for meditating. If I have enough energy to do extra I will. I was feeling really tired this morning when meditating so I took a nap instead of doing the last 30 minutes.