You watch Actualized videos because

[h inandout]

Deep down, you want god to be some distant entity who can't hug or hold you, because your parents programed you to hate yourself.  You needed someone with harshly neutral opinions to project all your desires for self-improvement (aka self-hate).  I just want approval.  Like literally. I need someone to tell me that my life has enough value that I'm allowed to exist and contribute.  And that's never gonna happen because my mother hates me and I hate her, and even when I find some potential for an ok life, well isn't that just unacceptable. Fuck me!  I don't need a fucking lecture.  I need humanity.

[Leo Gura]

Well, the good news is, there is no boundary between you and your Mom. So you can give yourself the love you want from her, because it's all coming from exactly the same source: YOU! -- the only source there is.

https://www.actualized.org/articles/how-to-love-yourself

It's very useful to stop thinking of love as something you get, but something you give.

[h inandout]

@Leo Gura Thank you.  Apparently I got sucked into hopelessness again, but the this did help.

[Melwyn]

i feel so loveless inside that i dont even know how to give love anymore

[Jamie Universe]

7 hours ago, Melwyn said:

i feel so loveless inside that i dont even know how to give love anymore

1. Walk up to someone (or yourself if your talking from enlightenment context)

2. say "I love you!" 

[h inandout]

@Melwyn I've been doing a lot of this work for a long time, and I can tell you, if you just start doing the exercises, it will be annoying and take a few hours.  Just keep doing them.  Yesterday, rather than staring at my face in the mirror until I felt better, as the self-love exercise suggests I wrote in my journal, "I love and accept myself exactly as I am."  And then I wrote one observation (good, bad, or ugly) in between lines.  I seemed to neutralize the feeling of my skin crawling, and the observation part helped my mind stay focused.  I also had a cup of coffee, which I did allow myself after having worked so hard to quit caffeine because I had to teach a class, and I needed to get out of that funk.  So the two, in combo, seemed to relieve me from despair for long enough.

There is a place where you can actually look objectively at all the bullshit you've survived, and actually kind of laugh at it and have fun with it.  It is real and achievable.

[Moreira]

All we seem to have the I'm not enough thought. We were taught to believe that be need to become flawless, perfect, but the truth is that we are perfect like we are.

There's nothing wrong to try to become a better version, the problem is that we will only take action when we achieve the best version, and this moment never comes.

[h inandout]

@Moreira I'm wondering if you hear the paradox in what you just said?