The Meandering Riff

[LittleMaslow]

I'm starting this journal as a way to let things out because I'm still trying to find my bearings and direction by trying things out and reporting on it, warts and all. I've been at an impasse for the last year or two and I think there is something in my subconscious telling me to just lay low, work on myself and wait for my path to appear. Like the title implies, I'm meandering at the moment but I believe that the process of journaling will leave me with a clearer sense of where I'm going in my life. I'll start off with a little biography and where I'm currently at. It might get a little TMI and depressing from here on out, but that's the whole point of a public journal so I'm not ashamed. I've led a rather dysfunctional existence throughout my 20's and I have been actively trying to make a comeback.

I'm 31 years old, I grew up in a whitebread, isolated part of the Pacific Northwest, was raised Catholic and in a comfortable middle class household in a small city (under 50,000 people). I wasn't sure what I wanted to do after high school and so I've been rather aimless up to this point. I've been pursuing music as a career and I've been on a slow-moving path towards better health and mental clarity for the better part of three years. Some of my first big experiences towards seeing "something else" came the couple of times I did mushrooms and LSD in my early 20's. I saw the chains of my upbringing and beliefs falling away but I also wasn't really ready for those experiences so I became deluded and confused through some of those insights. I was hedonistic to a fault, used to smoke, drink, fap and watch porn, have casual sex with people I didn't want to date, spend too much time on the Internet/social media and neurotically pursued goals while not knowing what I *really* wanted. I went through periods of feeling behind in life, fucked by circumstance of growing up in a place far away from any culture or opportunities. I got myself deep into the victim mentality for too long. I've also had the habit of taking on too much at once out of excitement to counterbalance the feeling of being behind and, inevitably, this would lead me to burnout and stopping and starting lots of projects. In short, I've been trapped in various addictions, delusions and the "doing and having" cycle and having issues with follow-through in my life.

A lot of this sounds kinda negative and since I'm trying to to paraphrase without boring the hell out of anyone reading this: my life hasn't been all sad, I've just become very aware of the negative patterns, bullshit thinking habits and have been actively correcting it. I needed a reboot. I've been on a "coming back to God" trip for several years and have put a lot of what I used to desire on hold as I realized the importance of taking better care of myself.

I've done A LOT of things at this point: affirmations, exercise, EFT/tapping, cold showers, bioenergetics, counseling, meditation, hypnosis, nofap, journaling, solo retreat and other things I can't remember at the moment. While I've gotten some results up to now, I've more recently been trying to purge my unconscious hangups through shamanic breathing and have started a Kriya yoga practice. I'm mostly looking to commit to practices that I find sustainable, be more open about my thoughts and hangups and share experiences, memories, reflections, insights, music I'm listening to, art I like and maybe even career progress I'm making. I started this journal off-the-cuff tonight so I hadn't thought of a way to organize my entries but I'm sure that the process of writing will produce a form for all of this. It's all fair game and, as a final note, there will be blood!

Edited May 30, 2019 by LittleMaslow

[LittleMaslow]

Inner Engineering

Last night, after a couple weeks of debate and research, bit the bullet and enrolled in Sadhguru's Inner Enginnering online program and plan to attend an upcoming live seminar in Denver. I purchased the program mainly on the basis of reading other forum members saying that there is something special about the experience of the live event that one wouldn't get from a simple practice at home. I see this as a "kick start" to a deeper practice. Also, the fact that the Shambhavi Mahamudra practice is short, simple and effective if you do it everyday also intrigued me and, seeing as I plan to travel in the coming months, the brevity and potency is something I can see myself maintaining. Before I enrolled, I have already been practicing the "pre-initiation" kriya exercises from J.C. Stevens' book for about two weeks and have noticed myself feeling calmer (those preliminary pranayamas feel so, so good to the energy system in my body) and will continue to do them up until the event. I've taken Leo's advice on yoga and plan to not mix the techniques of different teachers so I might opt to cut the Om Japas from my routine and stick with alternate nostril breathing, ocean breath and talabya and pick up with JC Stevens kriya techniques after 48 days of Sadhguru's Shambhavi. I've been told by another user with a similar practice that it's okay to do this and I'll confirm it with the instructor at the event. Will report back at a later date!

[LittleMaslow]

Ego Backlash Will Be The Death of Me

Writing this tonight as I experience another backlash. I've been going hard on purification/purging the past couple of weeks and I've been having ego backlashes the whole time, usually after a particularly meditative or releasing experience. The backlashes come on especially after I do shamanic breathing — if I do it at night an hour or two before going to sleep, I tend to wake up in a shit mood. Today, I had a very energetic kriya practice, I started sweating while I was doing ocean breathing and om japas, which made most of the practice uncomfortable. I get pretty bad monkey mind while I'm doing kriya and I'm not so great at ignoring it because I'm still learning how to move the energy around in my body and perform the techniques correctly. I know it'll get better with time, but man, today I was generally kinda pissed off and irritated because of it.

A lot of my old thoughts like "I'm not where I wanna fucking be in life" have turned to "I don't give a fuck about success, music or anything I used to enjoy anymore, I just don't want to fucking suffer anymore" followed by a steady dose of being upset that it feels like it's taking so long despite me only having done about a month's worth of consistent, strong development work. I've done a lot of work in the past (in my exploration phase), but never really developed strong practices or habits because I dabble a lot, get thrown off course by backlashes and trying to do too many new practices at once. That's a thing I really need to work on as far as personal development and enlightenment work goes... developing strong habits and consistency. I tend to get egotistical with this work, too, and get mad at myself for being "sensitive" and "hard case" and being the type of personal who's attracted to personal development because I'm so full of dysfunction, insecurity and repressed emotions. I used to constantly compare myself to my favorite musicians and artists and other people who are doing better than me in the material success world and developed a long-running story that goes something along the lines of "[Insert successful person] got famous and successful and never had to do any of this shit, so why the fuck did the gods decide I was I such a hard case that I have to fucking slog every day to get out of the life I hate in this shitty part of the world AND, on top of that, I can't even get my fucking shitty brain to leave me alone and let me be happy for a fucking week."

All of this, is, of course, more of my ego's victim mentality rising up to the surface to torture me and try to get me to feel bad about myself. I've gotten better at simply watching the thoughts happen and am getting less triggered by the kinds of people and situations that used to get that story running, so I'm proud of myself for truly taking responsibility for these thoughts and watching them disappear. I do wish this would move out of my mind a little faster, but I suppose it's just going to happen at it's own pace and all I can do is facilitate the purification process by keeping my habits going.

 

Edited June 1, 2019 by LittleMaslow

[LittleMaslow]

Starting to Love Life Again (... Maybe Even For The First Time)

I've spent the majority of my life with some kind of depression with its roots in neuroticism. I've never really been comfortable with myself, especially in my teenage years and my twenties. I used to spend a lot of time being concerned about how cool I am, if I measure up to others, what what people think of me and It's a really limiting way to live. What's even more messed up is how much I've worn neuroticism like a badge of honor — I feel like there's a prideful attitude of "I'm messed up, suffering and it's awesome" in the kind of alternative music culture that I grew up in and I embraced that for too long. I'm probably oversimplifying this since there are musicians with serious emotional issues who use music to get that shit out, but I sense that a lot of people are just sorta bluffing and I've sensed for a long time that I was bluffing. But that doesn't mean that it hasn't taken a long time to see through the veil of these bullshit stories that I've been telling myself for about 16 years. Thank god for wisdom and the healing process. 

Last night I had a shamanic breathing experience that went really well. I've noticed these sessions get less emotionally painful as time goes on and I'm guessing it's probably because I've either cleared out a lot of the really big junk in my psyche or I'm waking up a sleeping giant and need to be prepared to face it. In any case, these sessions plus my kriya routine have been making me feel exponentially better and I'm sure the primary reason for that is because of consistency. I already had a pretty clean diet and exercise routine going when I started doing these two things, so some of those basic personal development hurdles were cleared when I started.

Anyways, while I was doing shamanic breathing last night I was consolidating a lot of things I had been researching the past couple of days... namely psychedelics. I experimented with mushrooms and LSD when I was in the first part of my 20's but I did them in the completely wrong kind of way and had several bad trips resulting from immaturity and not knowing how to trip with a goal/intention in mind (although one particular LSD trip pushed me to take music seriously and make it my career pursuit, so I don't totally write off those experiences). I think my early psychedelic experiences caused some abrupt integration in my consciousness because it brought so many things I hated about myself, how I was raised and the world at large to the surface and I thought I suffered some kind of mild psychosis from them. But, despite these bad trips happening, I also realize how they forced me out of the unconsciousness I was living with and have contributed on this long, confusing, shooting-from-the-hip path to where I'm at right now, so there's no use in demonizing those experiences anymore.

So, I've been researching how to grow mushrooms and how to find 5-meo and I'm starting to come up with a plan to see God either in the next month or in the next couple of months. I don't really want to reveal my exact ideas since I don't want to leave a digital paper trail, but it involves a trip out the desert and I'm kinda scared but my fears are mostly just related to money and how much it'll cost for me to do this, but every time these sensations come up, I'm learning to surrender to them and to see that there is nothing but Love waiting on the other side of this experience.

[LittleMaslow]

Realizing The Need For More Shadow Work

I got pretty into shadow work after I got into it about a year and a half ago. I was really existentially angry because I had just turned 30 and was going through a deep sense of feeling like I hadn't done shit with my life yet and, coupling that existential anger with a neurotic feeling that I had to get my life together in the span of a couple of months led me to have a lot of ego backlashes. My projections and judgments also got really bad with one of my roommates (who was an early 20's dude who was really rude to me, treated me like shit and had a really heavy victim mentality) but the experiences ended up being great opportunities for me to extract a lot of toxic, repressed feelings. 

After recently getting into shamanic breathing and doing sessions per week to do a big purge, I've started to notice that a lot of my darkness and shame has drastically reduced but that I still have a lot of judgmental thoughts popping up from time to time but that I'm also not super attached to them and am able to let them drift away. I'm not aiming for sainthood in my personal development and enlightenment work, but noticing that I still have these judgments makes me realize how important it is to stay vigilant when purifying yourself... the neuorticism, negative emotions and judgments might be significantly reduced and inner peace might be filling that space, but there's still a good chance that there's a couple turds that didn't get flushed.

 

[LittleMaslow]

Strong Resistance to The Business Side of Music

When I was around the age of 20, I had been playing music for about 4 years and decided that it's what I wanted to do with my life while I was tripping on LSD with a friend who I had a great musical connection with. I had fantasized about changing the world with our music... but first we had to actually write something incredible, move out of the Valley to a city that was actually relevant and get into the music scene. As you might have guessed, none of that happened and after a long period of delusion, I gave up on my friend and took on this dream by myself. I've moved out of the Valley (my hometown) to two different major US cities but It still hasn't happened. At this point, I've mostly lost motivation for the pursuit. I love to write songs, record and perform, but I hate the business side of it. I hate that the advent of social media has flooded the Internet with artists. I hate that you gotta build a fan base and everything yourself before a record label will pay attention to you or help you... because you don't need them at that point anyways and you've done all the hard work already.

I'll just confess here and now what you're probably starting to read between the lines: I've gotten really fucking lazy. I'm tired, I'm worn out, I'm lonely. I used to be in neurotic pursuit of this dream, hiding away in my bedroom writing and practicing music, feeling insecure and never showing any of it to people because it never met my expectations or even held a candle to my favorite artists. Now that my music has started to get decent and I know that my strength lies in my creativity, I've stopped caring. I half-ass everything. The idea of actually finishing something doesn't scare me... it's the idea of having to fork out money to buy facebook ads, make videos and do all of this promotional shit by myself, without a team or any help and having to learn most of the skills myself. I just don't want to do it. I don't want to work a job anymore, either. I just want to do what I want, what I'm good at and get paid for it, but that isn't reality. I wasn't born to grind away at meaningless bullshit, even if it "makes me a better person." Doing shit you hate doesn't make you a better person, investing time into things that aren't your natural strengths doesn't make you a better person, it makes you less effective and robs you of your potential. 

I'm in a bad mood about this and have a toxic belief system towards work that I don't want to do, so I'm ranting a little bit. One of the biggest problems in my life for the last year or so is that I can't get over this lump in my ego. I sent myself down this road of personal development almost exclusively because my hatred for meaningless work and the toll on my mental health that the forced entrepreneurialism in the music industry has driven me crazy. I apologize to anyone reading this, I'm having yet another ego backlash after logging into an online music marketing course that I bought over a year ago. I can't bring myself to do the course. I understand the information, it makes sense, but I don't want to spend time and money performing the actions on top of trying to write, perform and record everything myself. I have no friends who are musicians and I'm flying solo for all of this. I also hate doing a shitty job on things or overburdening myself with work. I don't like being busy, I don't like feeling unrested. Most of all, I don't want to feel this way anymore and I just want all of this personal development work like meditation and everything else to relieve me of this suffering but it fucking takes forever to feel any benefits and I'm getting pissed off about it again. Everything seems to take too fucking long and I've lost my patience for life. 

Anyways, I apologize to anyone reading this, I have anger issues surrounding the circumstances of the career I've chosen because I'm tired of crawling along at a snail's pace in this career after spending the last decade of my life alone working my skills up to proficiency. I'm also suffering from a lack of self awareness right now and not seeing the next obvious step to take, so I'm just gonna post this and head out. 

[LittleMaslow]

I Need to Jailbreak My Mind

I have been having motivation problems for the better part of this last year. I'm able to write and practice music and come up with things that I think sound cool, but I'm really struggling to have any desire to consolidate it all and write/release an album, which doesn't make sense because I have all the gear that I need to make a professional sounding album at home. I just feel like there's molten lava surging around in my subconscious and I need to release it somehow. I used to get it all out when I'd play or make music but it isn't happening with music anymore. I feel like I'm finally ready to start using psychedelics for personal growth issues and I believe that starting out on some mushrooms will really help me get over the initial hump that I need. For years, I never really did anything about anxiety and depression because I was young, sort of arrogant and ashamed of having mental issues, but now that I've taken the steps to improve myself, I really just don't like all the mental health management stuff I feel like I have to do. It gets tiring and has actually become a new facet of my neuroticism... I'm afraid to travel, go to a bar or expose myself to any of my old triggers and things that could potentially pull me down into old habits and I just want be free of this garbage belief systems and neuroticism. I'm hoping that the amount of research and groundwork I've laid out will help me once I start using psychedelics for therapeutic reasons. One of my first intentions when it comes to using psychedelics is to ask myself why I'm not moving forward in life and to dig up the first artifacts and clues as to how I got this way and what I need to start integrating in order to free myself and raise my baseline.

[LittleMaslow]

Inventory of Memory + Shadow Work

I've been noticing a lot of my bad habits and feelings of angst in my life are usually directed at/caused by not taking much action in my life. I've had a trend my entire life for having this habit of planning everything and starting a project but never following through. I've noticed that I never enjoy following through on anything and often don't enjoy the fruits of my labor because I hate hard work and the longer-than-I-want process that everything takes. It's a deep-seated disposition that I think has a lot to do with America's culture of immediate gratification brainwashing. I've known about this tendency in myself for a while and have never really been able to fully get over it, despite getting better at overcoming obstacles and sticking things out. I grew up in a relatively well-off family — I never really witnessed my family struggling financially as a kid and we lived in a place where it was pretty easy to get by — and I think this has caused me an incredible amount of difficulty as I've gotten older, because, at the core of my being I don't want to grow because of the pain involved and I want to be lazy, especially when long-term goals are a pain in the ass. This has made moving to a big city a difficult process for me, especially because I had no social support systems in the places I moved to and have still never been able to cover all of my bills in full every month. I want to put my head in the sand and just ignore real life because I fucking hate it. Anyways, I didn't mean for this to turn into a victimhood rant, I'm learning a lot about myself as I go on with this process.

I recently started dedicating time to writing out every single memory I can think of so I can do a "life review" and see which parts of my past are still creating sticking points for me. The idea is to create an as-close-to-chronological file of my life so I can look it over, let things percolate in my subconscious and have a more complete view of myself and release the sticking points. Add to this the fact that I'm going to soon be doing Inner Engineering soon (yay!) and growing mushrooms so I can start microdosing. I think this will be some pretty useful therapy for me. On paper, my life doesn't look nearly as messed up as that of most people, but I'm coming to terms with the fact that no matter how things look on the outside, they can still be deeply fucked up on the inside and that's how I've felt for a long time. I used to be in a cycle of shame over this and I think that this is having a big effect on why I'm not moving forward in life and, even though I have noticed "gains" in the quality of my mental experience of life lately, there's still more to work out. One big shift I'm feeling is how this focus on my inner problems is changing a lot of my external problems and desires. I'm noticing that lessening my grip on my external desires (especially need for appearances of success and need for approval) is helping me be happier in general, even if I still have spurts of anger, bitterness and dissatisfaction. All in all, I can feel my dysfunction lessening and my need for everything I used to think would make me happy dissolving. Well, anyways, I've gotta get back to doing this inventory of my memories.

[LittleMaslow]

I Finally Bought The Supplies

I found a straightforward method for growing mushrooms at home and I'm excited to dive into this endeavor. I plan to initially have a couple grams and do a "normal" trip to ease myself back into psychedelics and eventually up the ante and take the heroic dose. Aaaan then, eventually I'd like to microdose to see how what effects that has on my general, baseline mood and consciousness. I'm looking to kick start a new chapter in my life and personal development through this and scrape out the residue of self loathing and depression that was so common in my 20's. 

I'm also gonna be going to an Inner Engineering event in Denver this weekend, I'm excited to learn learn the Shambhavi Mahamudra!

[clouffy]

@LittleMaslow please let us know how your shambhavi is going!

[LittleMaslow]

@clouffy this is my first time replying or being on the forum in a long while, so I'm sorry for not getting back to you. I went through Inner Engineering in June and I've only missed my Shambhavi practice once since I started it. The main benefits I've noticed so far are these: I have a lot more energy, my breathing has improved (I feel "cleaner" in my lungs and just overall feel like more oxygen is getting into my system), I feel less stressed out but when I do get stressed, I have a much easier time letting the emotion/state pass because I'm not particularly attached or involved with it. I'm also noticing how my depressive states have significantly lessened (although I still have a lot of unconscious material that's been messing with me in my dreams and I do shadow work to take care of it). I've started to get into new hobbies almost spontaneously — I started writing again, started making art and learning to draw — whereas, before I would research a topic or thing I wanted to learn without ever actually doing it because I would fear failure and wasting time on things I wasn't good at, but ironically I'd just waste time I could spend doing a new, productive activity with researching a new activity. It's been one of my bad habits. So, I guess Shambhavi may have, in a roundabout way, helped me see my negative patterns a lot better. I'm rekindling love for things that I had forgotten or started to hate (like music). I also started to cut out some of my last compulsive addictions, like coffee, after starting Shambhavi, but I attribute it to Sadhguru's advice and him stating that coffee stimulates your nervous system and "lowers you" over time because of that. I feel like Shambhavi, though it's not like a Big Bang of self-actualizing power, gives me the mental space to "be young again" and feel playful and less serious about things.

All of this is just the start, though, I think Shambhavi is the longest-running habit I have up to this point and I like it so far and the results are cumulative but I don't notice them as huge leaps and bounds, but more as nice little steps forward. Every day I do Shambhavi, I've succeeded in getting just a little bit better. I like to pair Shambhavi with exercise shortly after I wake up, because then I've gotten the "hard stuff" for the day outta the way and I can then get on to work and other productive stuff. I might end up moving on to a longer Kriya practice, but for now I think Shambhavi + my daily bodyweight exercise routine is the perfect length for a health/mindfulness practice. In any case, I really like it. I don't have 2+ hours of time to dedicate to daily practices right now because I also have creative work that's time consuming, but Shambhavi is a short, daily practice that works well for my life right now and I'll probably always "keep it in rotation," since it's a perfect practice for travelers or folks who are squeezed for time. Your mileage may vary depending on where you're at in your life and what kind of changes you'd like to make, but it is a very simple, powerful tool that I imagine can be a lead up into deeper, more committed practices and, even on it's own, I recommend it!! Hope that review helps out!