Salaam

@egoeimai you mentioned wanting to know more about resistance. Maybe this might be of value to you.

What do you think it means when people say that another person has an edge to them? Do you know what your edge feels like? Do you have one? Do you know what it's for and how to develop it? We develop our Edge, by being on the outside edge of our comfort and safety and by expanding beyond them. Facing and communing with the things that reside in those places. Risking ourselves and going farther then we did before. Challenge, Resistance, Restraint, Rejection, and Scarcity on one side. Meaning, Success, Growth, Wisdom, and Gratitude on the other side. The first side are the fires we face that temper our edge as people. And the second side, once you pass through are the gifts and adaptations that polish that edge, making us shine, our eyes alight with fire. When you face a challenge, rather than avoid it and adapt as you overcome it. When you face resistance and it doesn't stop or deter you and you adapt as you move despite it. When you can break through the restraints placed on you and expand. When you can buckle down and restrain and shape yourself rather than float and be carried along by pressure. When you can still hold onto your choice and direction when others reject it. When you can face the most scarce of environments within and outside yourself and still build atop that wasteland, creating abundance. When you can do all of the above as a person who you are changes and people pick up on it. You have a strength, a fire to you that others find attractive. They trust you, because you don't lie to avoid facing challenge and resistance. They depend on you because they know you will move forward and not be deterred if you care about a thing enough. The know you will not bow down, because you are beyond the restraints of others and answer to yourself. They know you will burn and bleed and face the darkest and emptiest places and build life on top of it, because your edge is that developed. ... now most people have no idea what such a person looks like. What a matured and fully developed edge expresses as, but at least now you know how to create it for yourself. Let your spirit shine and embrace challenge and the meaning of resistance just as much as you embrace the beauty of love. It takes both sides to be complete people. Scarcity and Abundance. Love and Resistance. Attraction and Repulsion. We as human beings stand astride the edge where both of those sides meet. Expanding from that point into the mysterious depths both realms have to offer. "Rule of thumb: The more important a call or action is to our soul's evolution, the more resistance we will feel toward pursuing it" ~ Steven Pressfield.

Well, you can disagree all you want. You can project how you think I feel all you want, and you can come to inaccurate conclusions about the meaning behind what I've said all you want. You can even mistake passion and intensity for anger all you want. That's all fine with me. I like swearing when I'm passionate about things. I even swear during sex Anger is what we feel when we want things to change. It's actually a pretty awesome feeling when it's harmonized to be honest. I'm deeply thankful and appreciative of it's place in my over-all mixture of feelings. Everything has a place, everything matters, and can be harmonized. Even anger. But anyways, enjoy yourself and just ignore me. I mean, you are a god whose already perfect and decides what's real right? And there is no difference and everything is an illusion and doesn't matter right? Until it does, but then that's just the ego fooling you, the ego that somehow exists even though everything is absolute nothingness and nothing matters right? Lol, it's all good man. You don't have to answer that or defend your beliefs to me. Even if it does look like a children's merry-go-round of cherry picking and logical inconsistencies. Just take my feelings as a challenge to re-dedicate yourself to whatever you feel is right. If you go far enough, you'll see what's the more successful and harmonized strategy eventually.

That's what some people here will tell you, but I personally find that line of thought to be bullshit and the product of extremism. There are a lot of escapists here, people who don't want to deal with their responsibilities, their limitations, their flaws, their challenges, their opportunities for growth, their false sense of superiority, their false sense of inferiority, their vulnerabilities etc. They want to be gods, invulnerable, living in a state of permanent ease and bliss. They don't want to put in effort and be vulnerable and build things. The very clear reality is, each one of us is a self-contained environment, with self-contained issues that need to be handled and harmonized. This self-containment does not mean isolation or separation, no instead it means distinction and difference WHILE STILL BEING CONNECTED AND A PART OF SOMETHING BIGGER. We are both those self-contained environments and part of the larger self-contained environment that is a family or group, and a larger one that is a country, and a larger one that is humanity, and a larger one that is the planet, and a larger one that is the universe, and the largest of them all that is Life. It's a nested principle. Each nest is connected to a larger one and each nest requires time and consideration. None should be demonized or discarded as fake. They all matter. Each one superimposed on top of each other. Why choose to care about only one, when you can care about it all? Of course people will disagree with this, but in order for them to do so, they would have to discard or relinquish their consideration and responsibility for one or more of those nests, which again is bullshit, escapist, lazy, and selfish. So many of these no-self people are egotistical as fuck, to be honest with you. Their like little kids who think the whole universe revolves around them and they create it... yet they can't create a single damn thing in the physical world and instead escape to the safest and most secluded places they can find while other people take on the responsibility of life. All the while proclaiming how loving and enlightened they are. If you just fucking sit there all day, your love doesn't have shit behind it. No effort, no meaning, no actions to actually make things better and more harmonious. You have to touch the world, involve yourself in it, to be a difference.

@HelloThere You learn to differentiate between shallowness and depth, hollow or gray feels vs richness and meaning. You gain a relationship with your feelings of resistance, so you can differentiate between a resistance to something with meaning and richness and depth versus resistance to something that is shallow and hollowed of meaning and vibrancy. Your relationship with comfort changes, so you can tell the difference between needing rest and indulging in the kinds of feelings and thoughts that push us to avoid challenging things that will gives us greater access to meaning, richness, and depth.

Great! That's the tension and resistance telling you what you need to focus on and handle if you want to expand from your current position. I looooooovvvveee, finding those kinds of resistance signals in my body. Please don't run away from that discomfort, don't be a comfort junkie that stays in your cave of safe and doesn't grow. Shed that skin of your comfort zone and grow into more of who you are! If you do, your spirit will grow and your satisfaction and meaning will also increase! People can meditate all they want, but this choice before you is the true measure of growth. Do you avoid it or do you embrace it? This is an amazing opportunity for your spirit!

@Max_V It's simple really, get more in touch with your personal preferences, your personal chemistry. Spend time exercising and getting more in touch with those preferences outside of other people, so you can then bring them into those interactions. Individuate yourself. So you can share that in an authentic way with people when you socialize. You have spent a lengthy amount of time trying to blend in and mirror the actions of others. Now is the time to stand out and be different, be you and to let people respond and react to who you truly are. What do you personally like? What will you personally stand for? What do you personally believe in and value? I've spent a lot of time developing my own values and preferences and views. I believe in them, I've invested in them and investigated them, exploring them thoroughly. What these actions practiced over and over again have done for me is given me a strong sense of self-authority, self-direction, social resiliency, and authenticity. Which, I can then share with others and exercise to lead conversations in new and different directions, just like the other leaders within themselves I socialize with. It makes for much richer conversations with diversity and deep sharing that only come when a person can do more than just reflect back the output of others.

I actually appreciate and am thankful for my fear now a days. Why? Because my fear does not paralyze me or halt my action. Instead my fear just helps me be more sensitive to a situation, it makes me sharper, and it adds meaning and expands my edge based capacities as I face it's resistance and STILL MOVE. That's what you did in your example and you got to bear the fruits of it. That rush of exaltation and liberation. That success. You adapted and gained momentum that will make the same type of situation or similar that much easier to do once again. So no, you don't eradicate fear or become invincible to it, you really don't want to, because then you'd lose that meaning and feeling of success afterwards and it's beneficial adaptations towards our edge. That stuff only comes by overcoming resistance. Instead you grow and adapt with your fear so it harmonizes with you and then you're like me, no longer afraid of fear, but appreciative of it as one of the other many signals your body uses to communicate with you that is also a tool for adaption and satisfaction in life. The key is to move though. We can rationalize all we want in our head to make us feel safe or whatever and that's fine, but all that is secondary to actually taking ACTION like you did. It's only after we take action and pass through that firewall of resistance do we reap the rewards and adaptations that change how we relate to our fears.

It depends on what I'm resisting and the meaning involved. For instance, because of the development I have and the choices I've made my body will often dump massive amounts of euphoria into me at night, that express as these surges of pleasurable tension. I know from experience that indulging in them and letting them escalate beyond a certain point will drain me over time and stress out my body, so I resist that temptation and restrain myself. That resistance feels amazing, while also allowing space for greater coherency and satisfaction that comes from looking after my health and increasing my capacities via temperance. Then there are other times when I'm working on something or starting a new project and I run into beginning stress and it gets uncomfortable and super easy to push it off for another time and not get it done. I resist those feelings of comfort and put in the effort, especially when the motivation and flow isn't there, resisting the drag of inertia and stress. Making it through the plateau, till my body adapts to the project I'm working on and it becomes fun and comfortable again. When working with my sexuality and harmonizing my beast with my heart and my spirit. I have to apply both resistance and trust. Restraining my beast to the point that it doesn't overshadow and ignore my heart and spirit, but not restraining so much that it becomes a repression and depression of my sexual energy. The key is harmonious balance. My whole life is dedicated to balance and harmony and that means the careful application of both acceptance/trust and resistance or in other words attraction and repulsion. These are the strings of my violin and they play in rhythm to make music that is life. I don't just play one string and ignore or demonize the other. I play them both, diversifying them with nuance, so those two strings divide and multiply into millions

I hear often about how my Wife and I's relationship is the exception rather than the rule. But, the things is, while it takes a lot of start-up effort to reach the capacities for exceptionalism, it takes much less apparent effort to maintain them. You expand and adapt, and the previous expansion becomes comfortable, relative to how tough it first was. I feel like all things in life are like that. What was once tense or hard, becomes comfortable, and access to further expansion becomes attainable. Comfort can be such a heroin for people. Sometimes it's the thing we have to resist most, especially when doing so protects meaning and potential. Life is just as much about resistance as it is about trust and acceptance, but they both orbit around meaning and potential. We trust and accept into ourselves that which adds to them and we resist and reject that which saps those precious energies from our bones. Creating love through those efforts. Both enlarging and filling the cup of love so it showers down around us, inspiring more life and love in the world. It's beautiful really.

Well, there are a couple things you might want to consider. The first is their difference in beliefs and awareness from your own and how that plays into their considerations when making choices. They may feel like they have no future, no potential other than jail, they may not believe or care about karma or guilt. They may not pay any attention to the afterlife or they may also be very good at lying to themselves and justifying their actions or blaming someone else. Self-responsibility is often in short supply for people who chronically bring about destruction in other people's lives. The second thing is that there is a difference between easy and satisfying. Staying mired in suffering is actually pretty easy, in that you don't have to apply effort to stay in suffering, it's more the case that we have to apply effort to get OUT of suffering. It's takes less effort to destroy than build, you know? And finally, there is a difference between how we feel in the short term versus the long term when making choices. Long term focus by their nature can often come across with less emotional intensity compared to things that are much more immediate. This reality often fools people, especially when the influence of the short term is high or very intense. This is how people get caught up so often in unhealthy cycles of behavior, like the person who drinks and then wakes up the next day with a hangover and says they'll never drink again, but once night comes around the pain is a distant memory, and their right back to drinking again. Their choices in these situations keep getting influenced by the immediate feeling, while ignoring the long term consequences because the long-term feelings lack the intensity to move them. They don't apply that long term perspective and exercise will or volition to the resistance of that short-term influence for the greater long-term gain.

Ah, sorry it came across to me like you were ascribing to that standard and writing from the belief or view of one who feels they embody it. I feel like there is a lot of fruit to harvest with this discussion, but I understand and respect your feelings toward continuing

You mistake deep experience and wisdom for extreme bias. Why are you closing your spirit off to the realities of the world that come from involvement and being present with it at different intensities? Why stay untested and un-examined in your comfort zone and delude yourself with fantasies and keyboard jockey proclamations when the brutality of the world is clearly evident? I've touched both sides of life, the extreme beauty and brutality. The deep meaning of life and the hollowness. And my spirit is vibrant and alive and joyous because of it. I'm thankful for the meaning I carry in my scars. For standing up over and over again for a better world. There is nothing wrong with being immature from not having touched both sides of life in these ways, but you do yourself a disservice by turning a blind eye to the potential for greater maturity. By not considering the value and truth that comes from maturing because of those experiences. You believe you're empty of bias, but really you're unaware of how sheltered and protected you are because of other people's efforts who have faced and resisted brutality. And neither Ghandi or Jesus were empty of personal bias. Ghandi was a racist and a sexist, who still needed to work on his cognitive and behavioral errors of prejudice which are an intense form of bias. Jesus would knock over the tables of bankers and apparently he cursed a date tree once because it pissed him off. Have you ever read the gospels of Thomas? He was constantly irritated by the people around him. He definitely took things personally and there is nothing wrong with that. I like him more for it, whether or not I attribute any real historical validity to his written accounts. Again, we don't have to be binary or even worse mired in limited absolutism. Superposition is available and very real. You can superimpose personal preference on top of the shared preference of this section of the universe we're in. There can be harmony between the individual and shared worlds without the elimination of one or the other. Why are you so against superimposed harmony?

You do realize you can still have distance within a circle right? There are nuances and degrees of distance within inclusion to be found if one expands their mind and emotions beyond rigid absolutism. And you do realize that all these actions and energies and distinctions exist independent of language right? A dog speaks no language, but it understands and can differentiate between what to trust and what not to trust. I personally interact with the very same energies without words, I read their directions and sensations of presence like a wordless braille. Beauty, brutality, trust, compassion are labels for distinct energies with distinct feelings. Even without the words they still exist, actually without the limitation or containment of words, they become more vibrant with potential. This attachment to extremism and absolutism is quite a limited and primitive direction in my experience. Maybe one day you'll expand beyond your comfort zone with it and continue your own heroic journey. I'm not trying to be snide by saying that, I'm speaking with compassion from my own experience, even if it maybe doesn't come across that way to you.

Why the binary paradigm? No offense, but there is a direction beyond this binary that is much more meaningful and all-encompassing. Plus it doesn't carry the contradictions and corruption of principle via reductive simplicity present in the above view. There are three not two facets to interaction. Not just service to self and service to others, but also shared service. And you do all 3 at the same time. Superposition over binary or oneness or nothingness. The most satisfying, abundant, and meaningful relationships are when you keep harmony and create synergy between all 3 worlds. My World - You have individual pursuits, desires, and standards. You nurture those and spend time on those without isolating yourself. Her/His World - You care and are considerate of the individual pursuits, desires and standards of other people. You support and nurture those feelings of others because you genuinely want them to succeed and you have an abundance of generosity to give. However, you do so in concert with your own individual wants so they balance each other out and one is not being deprived or over shadowed by the other. The Shared World - You have a shared sense of family or community with people where you both are coming together and contributing to the shared pursuits and desires of something greater than the individual wants and needs of everyone in this shared space. However, again you do so in concert with the collective individual desires, so none are neglected or exploited/taken advantage of. It's a three-legged stand and when one weakens through neglect or exploitation the whole thing falters. In a very simple way this is basically the cause for strife in the entire world. People unable to come together in a harmonious manner, so that everyone's individual and shared worlds are nurtured and allowed to grow without neglect and exploitation. No offense, but your missing the point of the hero's journey with this extremism you've attached to. It's not about leaving society, it's about leaving your comfort zone. Going beyond the edges of where and who a person currently is. You are only focusing on the beginning of the hero's journey and not including the reintegration with others, and the expanding of the heroes edges as he or she returns with greater capability and abundance to contribute to the shared space. It's not about the society, it's much larger than that and about the mechanisms of nature society and everyone is dealing with, that the hero goes on his journey to face both within and without as he expands beyond his edges. So when he returns from his travels he can bring with him value that moves all of society forward from it's previous zone of comfort and normality. That's also why your very last sentence is so flawed and out of touch with nature. Even if all of society conspired to help you attain harmonious expansion the hero's journey would still be necessary, because you would still have to expand and go beyond your zones of comfort and face the mechanisms of nature that create stress and resistance as we do so. Growing pains, challenge, and resistance are a part of life and are tied into meaning and beauty. However, the flavor of challenge, growing pains, and resistance would be much more healthy and less twisted and ignorant and extreme if we had a shared world where everyone was dedicated towards such a harmonious expansion. This is feels like such a naive and sheltered view from my experience. Have you ever protected anyone before? Have you ever stood up to someone trying to seriously hurt or rape or kill another? Have you been there every hard step as those people healed? You ever see someone's head get smashed in or know anyone whose been tortured or seen children blown to bits by an rpg and have to pick up the pieces afterwards? I have first hand experience of all but the torture and war and someone very close to me has had to experience those horrible things while fleeing his country overseas. This is NOT a game. This is life, the brutal, horrible side of it that is a contrast to the beautiful, fragile side of it. Go through those things, or tell someone to their face whose experienced it, that it's a game. I bet you'll feel differently afterwards. The impact of that side of life will change you and wake you up from that disconnect. I don't say that in anger. I mean it sincerely and with compassion as someone who carries those scars of understanding. Yes, you are right in that the aim is to approach every interaction with love and understanding, but that alone isn't enough for the brutality of life. It takes resistance as well as acceptance and is also why you shouldn't tunnel vision on what it means to fight and resist. Fighting is about way more than just violence and it always starts within yourself first. It's the ones who fail first within themselves, who leak that failure out onto others and the world they share with everyone else. This world relies on inter-connection and cooperation for it's health and trust is required for that cooperation to happen. So to fight is to resist the corruption of trust both within ourselves and outside in the world. It's not self-service that is evil, evil is the corruption of trust. And again, resistance or fighting is WAY more than violence. A person learns that when they step deep into the brutal fires of the dark side of life and bring healing beauty back from it.

The most satisfying, abundant, and meaningful relationships are when you keep harmony and create synergy between all 3 worlds. My World - You have individual pursuits, desires, and standards. You nurture those and spend time on those without isolating yourself. Her/His World - You care and are considerate of the individual pursuits, desires and standards of other people. You support and nurture those feelings of others because you genuinely want them to succeed and you have an abundance of generosity to give. However, you do so in concert with your own individual wants so they balance each other out and one is not being deprived or over shadowed by the other. The Shared World - You have a shared sense of family or community with people where you both are coming together and contributing to the shared pursuits and desires of something greater than the individual wants and needs of everyone in this shared space. However, again you do so in concert with the collective individual desires, so none are neglected or exploited/taken advantage of. It's a three-legged stand and when one weakens through neglect or exploitation the whole thing falters. In a very simple way this is basically the cause for strife in the entire world. People unable to come together in a harmonious manner, so that everyone's individual and shared worlds are nurtured and allowed to grow without neglect and exploitation.

Nice man, I felt your pain, but also your courage and determination in those posts. It makes me happy to see you've made your way out of those cages and are well on your way to forging your own road And I know what you mean about looking for like minds. The wounded healers, the scarred... those who have felt the pain and fire, but rather being twisted by it, they've been tempered and made stronger, more dedicated and determined to change things for the better. I'm the same way. My wife and I even have a little radio show we do together that's based on practical healing and development in relationships, from people who have been in the trenches. You might like it (this episode was our very first one, it's about how to protect and nurture in both the good times and the hardest and most stressful. It's something I wish my parents and more would have practiced).

Thanks I hope @Shin doesn't take what I said as an insult or attack on him. That wasn't my intention. I feel like I understand what he's trying to say... but in my experience there are further truths to uncover along that line of thought that bring needed clarity, once you've stepped into and lived in the middle of those fires. I only had a brief conversation with the child rapist before I found out what he was in for. Once word got around about what he did, he had to be moved to protective custody because others in general population wanted to hurt him. But, I got a good read on who he was and what he was about I think, while also studying others like him. Same can be said for the dude who chopped that kids head off and all the other people I was around who were killers. I've spent a lot of time around so-called monsters... it's way too simple to demonize them or paint them as sick or deranged. The reality is more complicated than that. The rapists I've encountered were very, very weak men who violate the defenseless in order to feel powerful. They treated others as objects or instruments to further their desires. Taking what they couldn't honestly attract and nurture via a healthy relationship with a mature and developed partner. They are the males who have not developed and harmonized their animal sexuality alongside their confidence, heart/caring, and self-worth. So in order to shortcut that development they force themselves on women for sexual satisfaction and of course find none... leaving violated children and others in their wake. Most likely, they have been raped themselves or in some other way emasculated over and over again, so they try to right that balance, that dissonance inside themselves through twisted means, rather than healing and untwisting... I can empathize with that initial pain and not lose sight of their humanity, while still holding them accountable and responsible for how they expressed that pain and their twisted desires so horribly onto others. So much of this is based in being twisted by pain, which then turns into that pain getting expressed and acted out in horrible ways, that perpetuates the cycle. But, of course there is the part of them that enjoys it. The part that only knows those twisted, shitty ways of enjoyment, and is ignorant of better choices and a better reality. Their fooled by these shitty choices and make no effort to work and hurt and face the challenge of healing towards a better way. It's the same with murderers. Lashing out to stave off pain from others or themselves. Killing for respect, for money, for acceptance, for attention and validation from others... it all stems from scarcity and avoidance of pain. Choosing to keep on destroying because of that pain and scarcity, rather than taking the harder road that demands self-responsibility and building rather than hollow distractions that make things worse and hurt others. They mire themselves in the worse combinations of energy that a human can express. Too hollowed out to risk stepping out of those combinations to invest and create meaning and build beauty.

I don't have socializing only friends, I call those acquaintances. I only have friends who feel and live deeply and we share in those beautiful things. Being vulnerable to another doesn't have to be seen as a burden. The people in my life tell me they WANT to be the one I share my vulnerability with. They tell me, "I want to be the person you trust the most to come to when you need help". That I've been there so much for them, that it makes them feel so happy and helpful to be there for me. Now I don't abuse that desire they have to be there for me. But, at the same time I also don't neglect that desire to share myself or demonize it as me being selfish or a burden on them. There is a balance to be found that is the most healthy.

Heroes are people who risk themselves for something that has deep meaning. Good and evil as concepts leave a lot to be desired, but regardless of the label, there are people and forces that bring about the destruction of things that have meaning and benefit to others. People twisted and pressed by their pain, forces twisted out of balance, whose manifestations have to be faced and balanced, their twisting harmonized and channeled back into healthy directions. The people who face those manifestations and harmonize and re-direct those twistings, risking themselves in the process are heroes. My Wife is a hero. I am a hero (and a monster). All the people I am closest to have been or are heroes in my eyes. You can still love a person or a thing and hold them accountable. You can still love a person or thing and reject it. There is a difference between rejection in part and absolute rejection. There is a nuance here that has to be accounted for. To accept is to internalize, it is different from love. Would you internalize cyanide into your lungs? Would you accept and internalize meat tainted with mad cow disease? Would you accept and internalize blood infected with AIDS? Would you accept and allow a child rapist home alone with your young daughter? There are levels of love and acceptance and trust. You can have an unconditional love for everything, I do as well... BUT, just because I have that love for you doesn't mean I will trust you or accept you and allow you closer to my most intimate parts. Closeness and connection must be built, nurtured, and renewed again and again over time. Have you ever been around murders and rapists? I was sentenced in federal prison with a guy who got life +90 for shooting a kid 7 times and cutting his head off. I was in county jail with this little, weak, frog looking motherfucker who raped his own 14 year old daughter. My own wife was sexually abused as a child and we've spent many years healing and growing together from all that pain. We don't fucking need that shit. There is enough pain in this world that comes honestly from growing and honest mistakes. We do not need twisted motherfuckers like that in order to know what is healthy and what is not. People who usually talk like this or make these assertions are usually the sheltered ones, who have no actual first-hand experience with how twisted life can be and the horrible damage it can do to the most fragile parts of who we are. Their out of touch with it's actual reality and over-intellectualize it from their safe little space. This world is horribly brutal yes, and also beautiful, but to say we NEED the manifestations of these sick manifestations of imbalance? Fuck no, we can evolve so that intensity of imbalance doesn't manifest. We can evolve so that we work and maintain balance without the presence of that shit, destroying the lives of the people who had no defense or help.

Yea, sort of what Leo said. Facing resistance is an integral part of creating and manifesting our ideas into reality. Comfort is nice, but it has drawbacks and you have to learn how to balance and face the drawbacks of comfort and how transitioning from comfort/idleness to creation/work often involves facing the resistance or inertia around our motivation. You have to be able to create when things aren't easy, because it's very rare when things worth creating start off easy. In other words, there are ALWAYS plateaus in the learning process. You have to learn how to move through plateaus, especially when they feel like walking through quicksand while hell monkeys are flinging burning piles of shit into your face. The more you can go through the hardest parts, without "needing" even the smallest amount of hype or pick-me-up the better. So then, when you get through it and it becomes effortless you are able to enjoy it more and not be dependent on that flow to resume work again or face that next plateau. In life we have to grow to be proficient with both sides of creation. The effortless beauty and magic, plus the quicksand hell-monkey shit flinging

The best answer to this question is what I call trinity worlds. My World, Her World, Shared World. You want a fully developed, satisfied, healthy, and happy individual world. But, you also want to care and be involved and aware of other people's individual wants, helping them to be developed, satisfied, healthy, and happy. And, you also want to care and be involved with co-creating and building a shared space or community that is well developed, satisfying, healthy, and happy. If you don't have all three fully harmonized and synergized there will be issues in your relationships. People who only focus on the "my world" are selfish and self-absorbed. People who only focus on the "other's world" are selfless and lack self-centric value. People who only focus on the sharing are appeasers or conformists... We have to be multi-dimensional people in this multi-dimensional world and not neglect either of the above three, because it is in how these three inter-relate that balance is created in our social lives.

Real life is my meditation space. I don't want just a controlled, sheltered environment. I prefer to grow and focus and expand when the pressure is on and the tension is high. When my actions are laden with meaning and I am risking myself, facing challenge. I meditate as I live, splitting my mind so I observe while moving and involving myself with life around me. That's the beauty of superposition. I am both being and becoming at the same time. I am both fully present and fully aware, via synergy and harmony. Immersed but not lost, focused, but deeply involved and connected.

Yup, which brings up another point about the kinds of motivations people have in place when they're in the relationship. The wrong kinds of motivations will leave you with little "umph" when it comes time for the couple to get to sticking their "hands in the mud" and dealing with complicated issues. When things are hard, or touchy situations need to be addressed, people in this category seem to cut things off and halt progress. It's never gonna be perfect or easy or whatever fantasy expectation people have, when idealizing their desire for a partner and it takes a little bit of strength and conviction of choice to stick with it during those tough times. Which makes it that much more important to be able to truly see the different facets of the person your with, so you can make the best choice as to whether or not it's healthy to build the relationship past a certain point and invest that time and energy. Otherwise it's just a cyclical merry-go-round of riding the pair bond rush till the infatuation fades and it's time to find a new partner.

I wish people would shift away from using the word neediness so much and consider going back to dependency. It kind of avoids these blunt force emotional connotations and allows for nuance, because then it's not just about dependence, but independence and interdependence. Three different positions that all have a place, but need to be oriented and expressed in different ways and situations. Women, just like men if their healthy want a balanced and rich/vibrant expression of all three. We want to be independent in having our own mind, tastes, standards, direction/purpose, and the capabilities to bring them to life. Healthy people don't want someone who is easily bent in these facets and becomes dependent on others for the realization and creation of these. We want to be interdependent in the ability to share things with each other, reflecting different states and emotions in a complimentary way, and building lives and experiences together in a cooperative and mutually beneficial manner. We want to be dependent in the area of being able to rely and trust in someone. Not under their power or control, but being able to trust that this person we've shared with is someone we can come to, when we need help or a soft place to rest and heal for a moment. The problems come when people get the time and place and expression of these three positions all mixed up. They get extreme and go all in on independent and "not giving a fuck" while demonizing the other two or they fail to develop themselves and let dependency in so many things become their default state. There are so many unattractive mixtures of these three, but with time and growth we can find a goldilocks zone of synergy that allows for both individuality and attractiveness along reliable lines.