Jonas

@rush you can do it during meditation, but I was thinking about doing it in your daily life as often as you remember doing it. Just let your life happen without interference and you won't be bothered by anything that might happen to you. It's a form of non-attachment. You learn to not be attached to your actions. After you've practiced this for a while, you can start taking action from that non-attached place.

If you don't want to meditate, don't meditate. You can make much more spiritual progress by observing yourself and being mindful during the day than by sitting still for 30 minutes. That's actually a more valuable skill if you can bring awareness into every minute of your life instead of limiting it to a short time where you sit and do nothing. Some people like meditation and it's great for them. For some reason, they feel the need to convert everyone. Don't listen to them. You know best what works for you and what doesn't. That being said, if you feel the desire to meditate, there's nothing wrong with it and it can be a wonderful experience, but not if you do it just because everyone says so.

@rush Of course they do. It takes a while. I've been practicing constantly for over a year, and sometimes the issues still come back. But instead of every day, it's maybe once a month and I have a much better understanding of why they come back, so I can learn from it every time. It takes time and persistence to change a behaviour or thought that has you've been carrying with yourself for your whole life. And one more important thing. When you observe yourself, don't judge. Don't try to push the thoughts away. Be welcoming instead. Treat those thoughts as friends who have come to tell you something very important. You don't have to agree with them, but you also shouldn't send them away just because they have different opinions.

@10001110101 Yeah, calling yourself good and worthy is a judgment. The problem is that if you think you're good, there's always the possibility that you (or others) can be bad. One can't exist without the other. We're all just human beings, neither good nor bad. Things are what they are and if you can accept them, you can feel good. Feeling good is normal, but most people find reasons to feel bad. You don't need to feel bad to do something and be active. You have this drive that will make you do whatever is necessary without any emotional effort. You'll just do it and feel good doing it, no matter what it is. The problem is that people want a reason for doing things and there isn't one the human mind can grasp. Everyone is just doing something for no understandable reason, but they feel the need to come up with a reason even though there isn't one. If you stop needing reasons and explanations you can live your life in a happy and peaceful way. Just do whatever feels right. It's good that you take care of yourself, but if you do it because you think that you're not good enough, that's not love. Love would be accepting yourself no matter what you do. Love would be accepting that you spend all your time watching TV eating junk food.

@rush I always recommend starting with self-observation. As often as possible, take a break and ask yourself the following questions: What am I doing (right at this moment)? Why am I doing it? Who am I doing it for? How do I feel about doing this? How did I feel when I started doing it? You don't even need to stop doing what you're doing. Just take a step back mentally and observe. Just asking these questions usually will create positive change in your behaviour and emotions.

@Sleepwalker I really enjoy helping people with this kind of problems, so you're very welcome I would love to hear if you had any success applying what we discussed.

@Sleepwalker There are many ways to fulfill these needs to some extent, but the easiest and most effective is to look for those things inside yourself. You really don't need anything to feel happy and content. You could be dying in a ditch somewhere and still be at peace. The problem is that most people think they need something external to feel that way, so they go out of their way to feel miserable so they can attain what they want in the future instead of taking the easy road and getting it right now. How successful have you been with struggling and resisting? How often do you stop yourself from eating when you really want to? What happens before you feel the desire to eat? What do you feel? I used to eat a lot of junk-food and I still sometimes do. I ate because I felt bad and I wanted to make myself feel better. Unfortunately, instead of letting the food cheer me up, I made myself feeling even worse about eating too much, so I was not only eating too much, I actually felt worse after, instead of better. So I had to eat even more. The best way, for me at least, to break this pattern was to accept my overeating and show compassion. I didn't agree with the way I was making myself feel better, but I accepted it. Instead of identifying with the eating, I decided to watch myself eat as a compassionate observer. Instead of putting my energy into making myself feel bad, I used the energy I got from the food to think about ways I could make myself feel good without eating. After a while, I really did feel better without eating and the frequency of my binge eating was greatly reduced. It went from every day to maybe once or twice a month. I'm eating pretty healthy now and I enjoy it. For me, the thing that worked best was to stop resisting and to show compassion You know, it's not a final decision. You can just try for a few days to show compassion instead of trying to stop yourself. Just be there for yourself and show compassion for the girl who feels the need to eat so much. And if, after a week, nothing bad has happened, keep trying for a while longer and see if your situation maybe improves. Just experiment a little. You don't have to take yourself and your situation so seriously. You can have fun trying different things. Acceptance may be passive, but learning it isn't. Acceptance mostly means that you stop judging yourself, your situation and other people and that needs to be practiced. The first step would be to just be aware when you're judging something without trying to change yourself. Don't judge your judging When you notice that you judged someone, you can go inside yourself and figure out which rules you have that cause you to judge. Then you can evaluate if that rule is serving you to feel more happiness (not pleasure), peace and contentment right now (not in the future). If it doesn't, you can think about letting the rule go or maybe replacing it with a more positive one. If you're really adventurous and want to explore yourself more deeply, I highly recommend the book Self-Therapy by Jay Earley. It's probably very different from anything you know about therapy and I really enjoyed reading and applying it.

@PetarKa I think they are very distinct things, but you know that already. I'd just define them a little differently (still very similar to yours, though). You need wisdom for questions like, what should I do with my life, or who should I be friends with? Intellect is for solving logistical problems like solving math problems or finding an apartment. You do see them as different, so why do you think you should merge them?

@Sleepwalker You were labeling that state as shitty. Is that an objective fact? Is there no way that someone else wouldn't mind being in the same situation as you were at that point? And besides, accepting a situation doesn't mean that you're not going to change it? You can be perfectly happy at home and still go out for a walk because you would like to get some fresh air just because you feel like it. In the same situation, you could have thought, "That's what my life looks like now. That's okay. It's only temporary. I don't have to be unhappy about it. However, I'd much rather have my life be the following way. What can I do to get from here to there?" You're right. It's impossible to control which thoughts pop into your head, but you can disagree with a thought whenever it shows up. I used to have some pretty negative thoughts pop into my head constantly like, "no one likes me, I'm too stupid to live, I should kill myself" and I used to take them seriously. After I started to question them and to disagree with them, the frequency with which they show up has gone down drastically. Now, the thought "I'm really happy" also shows up a lot. @kurt described this process pretty well. And I really do believe that it's possible to be happy in any situation. I'm not quite there yet, but I went from very suicidal 1.5 years ago to happier than probably 95% of the human population and I'm sure I can go much further. The key is to always look inside when something "makes" you unhappy. There are always triggers and patterns inside of us and once we resolve them, the same situation won't bother us anymore. And being happy really hasn't made me lazy or accepting of situations I don't want to be in. I'm working harder than ever before and I love it. It's much easier to work if you're not attached to the outcome and procrastination is less of an issue. I think it's really great that you're sharing your story here and that you're open to learning new things

@Sleepwalker Meditation doesn't help to solve any problems. I just do it when I feel like I need to relax and let a few things go. You're right, that self-acceptance and self-development don't go together very well. If you learned to accept yourself, however, your self-development would happen on its own without much effort on your part. That's hard to believe, however, so most people never even try. But you can't just accept your looks, you need to learn to accept everything. Your situation can only be hell if you make it that way. If you'd accept your situation without any expectations of how it should be, why would it be bad? Good or bad are created inside your mind and have nothing to do with the world. The same is true for your emotions. You only feel bad because a part of you thinks that feeling bad or being depressed is appropriate. You can feel good in any situation if you choose to. Looks like you're afraid that you'd stop growing if you didn't feel bad, but that wouldn't be the case. That part of you, which is afraid, would still want you to grow, no matter how good you feel. The only difference would be that you'd enjoy your life instead of being miserable. And if you don't waste your energy on being unhappy, you'd be able to achieve much more

Vulnerability isn't weakness. Showing who you really are takes a lot of courage and strength. The way the ego tries to protect itself actually puts you in more danger than if it was peaceful. If you're peaceful, other people will have a much friendlier reaction towards you than if you're defensive or hostile. And yes, if you reduce your ego far enough, it will dissolve, but you are not your ego and your true self will be able to shine through, so that's a good thing. You'll just have to trust that there is more to you than your ego I don't really like the term ego, because it can cause confusion. Mysticism talks about the True Self and the False/Conditioned self. The goal is to reduce the False Self and strengthen the True Self.

To me, my life purpose became clear after I made progress on the path of enlightenment. How would you know your life's purpose if you don't have a sense of who you are?