Yavor Kirov

And Enigma as a whole

You can use the joints on your fingers on the inner side of the hand. Use your thumb as a pointer. After each repetition move to the next joint. There are 3 joints per finger. 12 for all 4 fingers. I read this trick in a yoga book somewhere.

First of all you are generalizing. Welcome to being a human being 101. We do generalize all the time! So to un-generalize you have to explore if you are being arrogant in a specific situation or not. Not "if you are an arrogant person". Being an arrogant person is whole another thing and you will need to do a ton of self-analysis to be able to tell if you are one. Second step is to choose a specific situation where you've been called "arrogant" or something you connect to it: So in that specific situation... there are two basic options (in my view): A) You are indeed being an arrogant asshole. Congratulations! OR B) You are not being arrogant but that person who is calling you names is most likely trying to manipulate you. How do you tell? Well... I guess you need to tell us more about the specific situation or try to untangle it yourself by thinking/writing about it. I don't know for sure but the language you mentioned in the quotes "having one's head up one's ass" is rude so I can imagine it has been an emotional fight. So were you the one trying to manipulate the other person or they did? Or you both did? And if it was an emotional situation - calling names is just a method of manipulating the other person to submit to you. It rarely is based on the truth. Oh and generalizations work great in fights: "You never get the kids from school!", "You don't love me!", "You're a horrible person!" etc. Again you need to explore specific situations one by one, not generalize. Generalizing will bring you to more generalizations and won't let you untangle the knots you have in your mind. You will just keep sliding... So what do you say, @Tearos ?

Interesting! Can you tell us more of your journey?

it does save locally and can be used offline. Yes.

@Leo Gura Good to hear you are uploading it again. Thank you for this video! It was really inspiring!

I have tried all of Leo's meditations, including the guided ones. I have tried also the labeling meditation described by Shinzen Young. I have also tried zen meditation. This is all over the course of more than half a year already. Meditating at least 20 minutes a day. I have tried Headspace a few days ago, their guided meditations (at least the "take 10" are wonderful). (If you have not heard of it, Headspace is a website and an iOS/Android app that you can download and use on your phone and play guided meditations). I highly recommend them. Just subscribed for the paid plan to try out more of it. It's just that I found a nugget of gold so I want to keep digging. I am wondering why nobody here mentioned them. I think they are doing a great job there. Have you ever tried Headspace. What is your impressions from it?

Yes, meditation "depth" varies, but I believe most buddhas did not have such chambers. So that is probably not going to help much. From a certain point of view your question is very much like asking: " If I put less weights on the machine in the fitness, can I do more repetitions?". Well, yes, you can of course but you are missing the point a bit because one of the "muscles" we train by meditating is focus. As a someone who has hard time focusing I do speak from expeience here. When meditating I try to find a quiet room but that's it. What I found temperature of room/use a blanket/ and comfortable sitting pose/base are important when sittig for longer. If I am comfortable and in quiet that's very mucn enough. It does not get any better if I am in complete silence or if it's dark. Actually anything outside my physical comfort zone excites/stresses me and therefore interferes with my efforts to focus.

That's good. Hope he really get on his diet then.

@Hardik jain I would suggest to you to not expect your father to change, I know it is hard but I have tried tonnes of times and it only happens now and then that a person changes according to my wishes. You can nudge them and help them but in the end it's up to them. So firstly probably accept your father might not change. Second I have some experience in medical school and we have been told livers can regenerate if you let them. The point you did not share with us is is your dad an alcoholic, does he have hepatitis or something else. Because the first requires a serious behevioral change -- getting out of alcohol dependence and the other requires serious medical treatment. I can certainly give you no medical advice but it might be important if your fatger has to change (for example give up on alcohol for example) or he has basically not much to do except being patient and following that diet the doctors perscribed.

One of my best friends who has dyslexia says that the more he reads/writes the better it gets. He did not tell me anything about mindfulness having an impact on his problem. It might help or it might not. If dyslexia is a "physical" impairment of the brain there is not much you can do it. ( I Do not know for sure if it's physical or psychical) ...but from what he told me there are ways to mitigate the problem. For example try to read in a slower but steady pace. This gives you time to re-read the words/syllables you got wrong without others noticing the delay.

there was a zen saying: "Live your life like you have one day left and at the same time live your life like you have a hundred years left." what it means to me is that if you deeply know yourself there will be no difference how much time you have left. If there is a difference depending on your time left -- you got more inner work to do

From my experience: no. Why? Meditation used to have stong effect on my moods when I meditated once in a while. Sometimes I got more nervous than before I sat down. Today it does not do much to change my moods, at least most days. Since meditation is unpredictable in a sense, a relaxing visualisation would be much more appropriate and in place before your appearance on stage.

... @Nick you just found a bug here Although I bet it's not a big issue if this remains unresolved. I can name like super widely used 5 forum softwares right away where you can do the same thing in pretty much the same fashion =) just put [quote_tags='another_username']and write what you will [ / quote]

Probably. However apps don't just appear out of nowhere. It takes someone to make one or pay for one, there is a ton of other challenges stemming from that - bugs, compatibility issues, different OS-es... We just got a free forum with great quality so let's enjoy it for a while at least, before starting to q.q (cry) for an app and other improvements.

I never tried to post from my phone, but on iPhone 6/ Chrome setup i had no problems logging in and browsing the forum.

Audio books are awesome, I sometimes take a walk just to listen to one. If you find a place to sit... Here is one other thing to add that I have not seen here so far. Brian Tracey's advice to "always think on paper" has proved super useful to me. Often problems are too complex to take on in one go in my internal memory so visualizing them on paper with drawings or in text helps immensely. When I don't have to keep all of it in my head, yet I can still see it and see how the different elements could interact. It took me a while to start thinking on paper because there was some feeling I was not very smart if I needed paper to think... but after that feeling went quiet I now do have a notebook on my desk at home and one at the office + several pencils so whenever I feel stuck I start writing ideas or sketching out plans. I assume this has to do with the 5 to 9 rule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_or_Minus_Two) so when a problem has more components than we can keep in mind it seems unsolvable. It's not true. Use paper.

Hey @nima It helps to ask a friend who had many jobs and can advise you on the matter. I did that and I am happy I did. "wanting to learn the job, to know the market" and ... yes, those reasons are valid. Also this is a good way to see how good you are in the field without throwing a ton of money at it. Lack of capital is not a limiting belief anyway.. What I did with my last job was I talked to a friend of mine who had considerably more experience, what he told me (and my thoughts so far) - In a small company , you learn more. The smaller the company is the more you have to learn and handle on your own. It's a great thing you are less replaceable too as the company grows, because you have more experience. People are more open to your suggestions since they are not getting input from 200 people but from just 4-5 so your voice counts. - A big company is more stable. You will probably have more benefits and easier time there. You have to learn less since there is someone to think for you (I do not like that part). I love to come up with solutions to problems. I don't like big crowds. I like it when people consider my opinion. I went with the smaller company and I am very happy with my choice already more than 6 months into it. I should point out I was pretty much a hobbyist at the field before I started. If you are entrepreneurial at least a little bit I would suggest you go for a less-populated company because you will learn more which is a great asset if you want to open a business on your own later. If you decide you do want to still work in a company you will be much more closer to the core and the entrepreneurial nature of it than you would be in a bigger company. Good luck

This quote always reminds me of the archetypes book where it's explained that people all have a predominant archetype behavior (took the link from Google, if it's an affiliate link excuse me, didn't mean to)

That is actually a very powerful realization compared to most quotes around here. It's very practical and down to earth.

First: Hello everyone! I am happy to see you 'round here! First post, yay! So here we go... Whenever I try someone think I get one of these responses: 1) the "leave me alone" response - when people show some "aggression" and want me to stop or 2) when people just nod politely and accept what I am saying on the surface so they do not insult me, but they don't process the information in side their heads... I have noticed questioning works better than just throwing facts at people but sometimes people respond aggressively to that too... I am not sure if we need the whole human race to be enlightened, but certainly would do much better if people were using their brains for at least thinking... So how to make people think on their own?

@Pallero I agree on that people don't start to think out of rationality but often just because of too much pain. This was the case with me like 5-6 years ago. I was pretty much forced to think by my life falling apart in many areas. There were more experiences like before that that had similar effect. Probably I still have much to learn in the future.... On the "serving as inspiration" part I agree too. Serving as an example and a role model is a great strategy I have not considered. Thanks! @Ike Carter @goodguy I myself a often afraid to open doors. It feels like what is behind the door could ruin my "stability" by pretty much blowing up in my face. Some research about what is behind the door before opening it often helps to do with the uneasy feelings. @Truth you are right that people are very hard to change and I have often reached to the conclusion that manipulating people and changing them are two different things where the first one is pretty much impossible. If it is not impossible at least it's not an efficient strategy in life. @caB07 wow that sounds like a long term strategy. Might prove useful. -------- I did not edit my first post but while I was writing I started to realize something. I still wrote the post because I wanted to read your opinions, this is still important. Changing others/making them become thinkers... It's just an ego thing. If we accept that things like IQ do not change much over a person's lifetime it might be an illusion that you can "just make someone think" if they don't have the processing power to do it... ---- To sum it up so far: - It often takes a lot of pain to make people think. Pain inflicted by living in "the wrong way". - People who are a role model can serve as inspiration. - People are afraid of change and change is more easily accepted in smaller steps. Thanks again. I realized it's better to (possibly) serve as a role model and focus on improving myself than focus on others, because if I do control something it's much easier to change myself than do it to others. Cheers