Erlend K

Being an animal is part of being human. Adopting a paradigm/ideology that says your lifespan and happiness shouldnt be limited of external factors, be it water, oxygen or relationship, dosn't change reality.

All that remains then is to figure out who you are and what's the right prosess for you.

Apparently those deals tended to be of the kind "hand over all you gold and daughters, or we slaughter your entire population" Like the armed robber giving you the opportunity to peacfully hand over your wallet. Ghengis Khan seems like a megalomanic psychopat. He murdered his brother over some minor quarrel, and the civilian massacres he carried out were comparable to the Holocaust. Apparently he viewed city dvellers as subhumans only fit for subservience/slavery.

Dude, Im not hurt. Is it possible that you are the one who felt hurt? I would encourage you to keep a healthy scepticism. If you know she is bullshitting about channeling some collective of non-physical entities called Abraham, what else might she be bullshitting about? How likely is she to be a reliable source of truth if her whole stick is based on a lie. Perhaps she's just a con artist ripping of gullable fools who lack healthy scepticism?

We are a social animal, not a solitary one. Our ancestors lived in herds, going milions of years back. To be outcast from the group, as a stone age homo sapiens, homo erectus, cromag etc, meant death. To be with loved ones is in our nature. This is why solitary confinement is such a barbaric punishment and considered a form of torture by human rights organisations. It is why loneliness is more deadly than smoking cigarets. Like most of you, I really enjoy spending time alone. Short term isolation can be wonderful. In the long term tho, we only truely thrive in relation to others. Even if you have bought into an ideology that tells you something different, like that your happiness should be independent from external factors, thats just not how homo sapiens is evolved. Its like claiming you shouldn't depend on oxygen and water, becourse my ideology says so. You can take short breaks from oxygen, water and relationships, but wether your life will be long and happy or not does depend on several external factors.

I like Hicks. I wich she would drop her gimick of pretending to channell that Abraham dude. I get that it's a hard busines to get ahead in and that pretending to be channeling might be a smart marketing trick. It just makes it harder to take her seriously. She does seem to have a lot of wisdom tho.

Journalists have a tendency to sensationalize research findings and draw overly grandiose claims based on limited research. They don't have much choice tho. If they want to compete in the attention economy, they are forced to write sharable articles. As both a meditator and a scientificaly minded person, research like this tends to cause some cognitive dissonanse for me. When I read it my instinct is to dismiss it as silly or flawed. But, being aware of my own bias I try to stay open minded. I would gladely have read the paper refered to, if it wasn't behind a paywall. It's conclusions are (copy-pasted from the cited paper): •State mindfulness impaired motivation to complete cognitive and performance tasks. •State mindfulness had no overall effect (good or bad) for performance on same tasks. •Weakened future focus and arousal serially mediated demotivating effect. •Mindfulness enabled people to detach from stressors, which improved task focus. •Detachment and task focus help explain why mindfulness does not alter performance.

Yup. This should be self-evident to anyone who have spent some time contemplating life. Looking back, all my most cherished moments was spent with the people I care about. My relationship to my loved ones are hands down the most valued aspect of my life.

Luckily, vocal/speech training is a well researched prosess, and absolutely doable. I worked with a logoped/speech therapist myself for a short while. I can recommend it.

OK, thats cool. How much are you making off this trading? Are you making a decent living compared to the time you invest in it?

Im sorry to hear that you don't feel like you are making enough progress, @fireworld . Hopefully we can help you out if you provide some more details: -What are your major short-, mid- and longterm goals? You mentioned losing weight and spending more time meditating. Are these really your main goals? They seem more like means for reaching some goal than as goals in themselves. -What are the major problems/challenges in your life at the moment? -What are you currently doing to move towards these goals and overcome these problems?

What you are going for is a position that feels comfortable, and helps you stay alert and relaxed. Like @Nahm mentioned, the spine should be straight. This is a kind of bio-feedback hack. A straight spine signals to the mind that there are reasons to stay alert. Lying down or reclining signals that its time to chill, and let the mind drift off. Personally I used to sit in burmese position. Lately I have switched to using a meditationbench, as this puts let stress on my knees.

I might be wrong here, but I don't think crypto/forex trading is a viable long/mid-term career option. Your competators in that game will increasingly be tradingbots. Over the next few years these are expected to see a significant boost in sofistication and adaptive/strategic capabilities. They are assumed to easily outcompete human traders. According to a friend of mine who works in finance, banks/funds are mosly just hiring programmers these days, as bots are replacing human traders. When it comes to falling of the path, everyone does this. It is in a way just part of the path itself. You keep following your path - then you fall off - eventually you realize you have fallen off, so you coursecorrect. It's like forgetting the breath during meditation. Once you become aware of having drifted off, celebrate this aha-moment of clarity and then straighten up your course. Every time you do this just look at it like doing a "rep". For each rep you strenghten your "staying on my path"-muscle. Over years and many reps, you gradualy train yourself to stick more and more to the path you have carved out for yourself. About your mom, I'm really sorry to hear about that. I can't think of any good advice about how to deal with that. Hope it woks out for you.

The word "God", with a capital G refers to a sentient being that is all powerful, all knowing and omniprecent. If you are talking about anything else you should avoid using this word to avoid unneccesary confusion and miscommunication If you are talking about all there is use the term "all there is". If you are talking about the creative force of the universe use the term "the creative force of the universe". If you are talking about consiousness, use the term "conciousness". Don't use the term "God". Language is just a toolbox for communicating. Pick the tool that best fits the job: Pick the words that maxemize the recepients chance of understanding what you refere to. Redefining a common word in your own private language will only cause you to talk past whoever you try to communicate with.

Your relationship with your therapist should be as open and uncensored as possible. Just say whatever comes to mind. Whenever something comes to mind you absolutely dont want to share, just tell him "Im thinking about something i dont want to tell you". Then the two of you can explore your feelings around your unwillingness to open up about this particular topic. Don't try to impress him with how insightful you can be. But, if you notice yourself trying to impress him, just tell him "I was trying to impress you now". Then the two of you can explore your urge to impress. Etc.

It is possible that you are periodicaly tensing those muscles all day long, but only notice it during the hightened state of awareness you achieve during meditation. The same way a minor back ache or itch, you normally don't even care about, can feel like excruciating pain during meditation. Muscle tensions during meditation can also be a sign of overconcentration. When it happenes, you might want to check in to see if your mind feels relaxed. If your mind is strained, either relax it or try to stay mindful of the strain, depending on the type of meditation you do.

The word "God" with a capital G referes to a sentient Being characterized by omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence. If, like Leo, this is acctually what you are refering to, then "God" is a good choise of word. If you refere to anything else, then using the word "God" to describe it is just going to cause people to misunderstand you and talk past you. That is simply a bad articulation of what you wanted to communicate.

I'm not sure I could do it at home, never tried. But if you are at a retreat it's kinda just what you do. You know you are there to meditate. You went through some hussle to plan, mentaly prepare for and travel to the retreat. You probably spend some money and dedicated some of your preciouss vacation days to do this. And now your there. You really don't want to quit at this point. So you use your wilpower to just keep at it.

I'm not sure if I understand your question.

I should have specified Mahashi Vipassana. It is true tho that walking meditation is discourged by Goenka. I have never attended a Goenka retreat, but I believe this is one of the shortcommings of Goenkas method. It's not for nothing that walking meditation has allways been a central practice of Buddhism.

Doing 10h sitting meditation a day is not good for your body. In a Viapassana retreat you usually alternate beween 1h sitting, 1h walking. Going to retreat is really though, but that is kinda the point of doing it.

Shyness/social phobia is not a life sentence. It is an extremely well researched disorder, and there are a tonn of stuff you can do to slowly cure yourself of it: Incremental exposure, taking smal social risks, and then rewarding yourself, CBT, cognitive reappraisal, heavy weightlifting, eating healthy etc. Have you tried any psychiatric drugs? I can wholehartedly recommend Nardil.

This is a cool project you have set for yourself. Best of luck! If you are serious about this, and can afford it, I would advice you to work with an experienced psychoanalytic/psychdynamic therapist. Doing this kind of work on our own it's incredibly hard not to constantly consieve oneself. Our minds contains powerful defence mechanisms constantly rationalizing, misleading us about our true intentions, desires and feelings and blocking access to cairtain insights. A good therapist with a fine tuned bs detector can help you access parts of your own mind that you might never gain access to on your own.

I'm really sad to hear this. This is a surprisingly common life-situation. Loneliness is apparently considered a major epidemic in contemporary society. What is preventing you from making friends or finding a partner? There are overwhelming evidense, including from major meta studies and longitudional studies, that strong social bonds are hands down THE main ingredient to a long, happy and healthy life. From what Ive read loneliness even reduced life expectancy even more than smoking cigarets.

There is no secret to happiness. The answer is exactly what one would expect. A: Create meaningful relationships with people you like, based on mutual trust, care and respect. Spend as much quality time with these people as possible, coversing or doing activeties that you enjoy doing. B: Spend more time thinking about whats great about your life than whats missing, and C: Your body should be your temple - lead a reasonably healthy lifestyle. These are the fundamentals - Everything else is frosting on the cake.