Clearing Out

[mandyjw]

Thinking of the things I haven't seen and done due to my sheltered, scared, secluded life. I know that the long winter only makes spring more delicious. I looked up at the stars and remembered that there's really nothing more unfathomable to see than that. 

I went for a run today and remembered exactly how much I ABSOLUTELY love how the sunlight looks on things. I hope you appreciate how specific and descriptive that is. I do. 

[mandyjw]

Yesterday I had ego backlash in a big way.

Funny I was talking about my son's autism because yesterday my son's aid worker informed that she is pregnant and due in June, when I really have the service just for the summertime because that's when it's really needed. I was in such a low mood for many "reasons" that I ended up going for a 4 mile run in the cold, even though I'm sick and last night I could tell it was moving to my chest.

The night ended with my daughter pooping in her pants for the second time that day and telling no one while she sat on the couch trying to change her clothes herself, then her getting furious with my husband because he wouldn't play along that she was a puppy, which has been going on for a couple weeks now. It's now become an excuse, that she's a puppy. He yelled at her that that's not an excuse that she still has responsibilities to not poop her pants. The word responsibility rang in my head like a bell. 

I tried to put her to bed. She continued the puppy charade with me, continued to scream and cry and then informed me that the water I got her was old, even though I had just gotten it. I finally yelled "ENOUGH", "ENOUGH", slammed the door to her room, slammed the door to our bedroom. My husband came in an I yelled at the top of my lungs, that I had ruined her, spent too much time on the goddamn forum and she was a disaster and completely ruined, and I never should have had kids, it was an enormous mistake. While I was yelling this my thoughts were thinking "I hope he fucking gets the message that he should get off his own goddamn computer at some point too. "

Then the guilt washed over me. I knew it was too late to so goodnight to my daughter so I said goodnight to my son. He didn't respond to me much. The puppy put my entire forearm in his mouth and crunched down hard. I squeezed his nose too hard in response and realized that I was still completely out of control.  

I've never been so tempted in my entire life to "turn back", to quit the forum, the journaling, spirituality, all of it. To write the year I've been here off as a mental break and pick up the pieces of my business and lose myself in slogging through trying to convince myself that I'm a good mother. 

When I was first trying to get my business going, I hadn't established sales online, which took a long time and I relied on shows. I did a show that was particularly humiliating. There were very little sales and at the end, a thunderstorm came up out of nowhere and the tent collapsed on top of me trying to frantically pick everything up. It was a huge loss. I decided I was done. I applied for a job and went for a job interview. "Do you like people, are you good with people." "Sure!" Said the painfully shy girl. I didn't get the job. I never had the choice to give up in the first place. 

Or maybe I'm just pretending to be a "puppy". 

It's easy to flip from love to "hate", (or fury, anger, confusion, hurt), about a person or a thing you do. How are you supposed to flip back and forth when the subject isn't? 

Edited February 23, 2020 by mandyjw

[mandyjw]

Last night I had dream thoughts about the situation that were like "oh look, more things about yourself that you didn't love. No biggy." This doesn't look like what I thought it would look like.

 That's because it's not happening at all!

Exactly.

No, I mean I'm deluding myself into thinking that is anything is happening. There is no progress. 

Exactly.

It's fucking infuriating. Why do I try?

Why DO you try? 

Oh, go take a flying fuck.

 

[mandyjw]

 

[mandyjw]

The spiritual ego is a tricky beast. So it turns out when you drop spirituality, when you take yourself down a notch, (or fall on your ass) there's no right or wrong anymore, not just in theory, and you can connect with people a lot better which is what you wanted in the first place. No dream giving up required. 

People have a natural love and forgiveness for children but at some point that's forgotten and replaced with "well, you should know better". The same judgement can happen with spirituality where people with a certain "level" of consciousness (including oneself) are reacted against, while the "muggles" are loved unconditionally. It's that innocence or ignorance question again.

This forum is amazing, addictive and has the potential to be very problematic when it comes to the problem of the self concept. The self concept that is trying to get rid of its self concept, talks about self concepts with other people also trying to get rid of their self concepts, and the complicated fractal house of mirrors this creates is epic. It causes people to leave the forum and come back more frequently than the natural ebb and flow of interest in it, as if we were talking about golf of something. These backlashes, this forgetting that there are no levels, that there is no self concept as you "dissolve" self concept, and YET, that's not quite right either, (ARE YOU CONFUSED YET?) well it would make sense that there would be an abundance of backlashes for a time. 

Discovered this music video on intuition, it's absolutely hilarious and a great illustration of what we're like when we look for love from a place of lacking it. And like the character in the video, we're so very lovable when we're doing it, but still all we see is our need. 

 

[Lento]

11 hours ago, mandyjw said:

(ARE YOU CONFUSED YET?)

Not at all. This makes perfect sense, because we create the self for a purpose and then we try to deconstruct it for another purpose, but then we forget what those purposes were. That's the whole trick in a nutshell. There's nothing to do and nowhere to be, except where "we" want to go or be. Something from nothing, just like everything else. We're a lie ?

There's not a spiritual ego. Not even an ego to begin with. They're just games, sandcastles, or steps for God's evolution.

Edited February 24, 2020 by Lento

[mandyjw]

@Lento Are you saying you don't take me seriously? 

 

LOVE everything about this.

 

[mandyjw]

Lately it seems like when old patterns of "Oh my god, this is a disaster" come up, or "asking" happens, the solution is swift at its heals (heels, funny "mis"spelling there). The past couple days after the fit I threw in front of my husband about being a terrible mother have been great weather, meaning I get the kids out to play, feel like a great mom and get my outdoor meditation fix as well. It amazes me how quickly I can get things to turn around when I feel overwhelmed by them. 

Last night and this morning just through watching music videos a desire came up to have a female friend, (or be that friend I don't know) who is always pushing the limits, always in the vortex. My two best friends both moved away this past summer. Then today I talked to my sister and sort of awakened to what incredible potential we have to work together in so many ways, but because we're sisters there's lots of "stuff" there that keeps us from connecting and communicating. Over the years as we grow that stuff falls away. She told me today that she wants to talk about our childhood and compare our perceptions of it, I thought that could be really interesting. I "came out" to her about my youtube channel and shared it with her. I've been talking with her about the law of attraction. She is a personal trainer, extremely motivated with her yoga business, also teaches tai chi and does intensive courses to train people to be yoga teachers. She is finishing her degree now and taking psychology courses, and has realized that she needed trauma training to teach people as intensively as she does because it "bubbles up". I've always perceived us to be like opposites in a way, but always similar. I've always turned inward, been the introvert, she's the extrovert, over achiever. Those opposites no longer seem real to me. She no longer seems other than me. I don't know exactly what will come out of it, but I do see that I over looked and avoided something really wonderful here. 

Edited February 25, 2020 by mandyjw

[mandyjw]

 

[moon777light]

@mandyjw one of my favorite songs 

[mandyjw]

@moon777light

 

[mandyjw]

I'm sick, with a bad cough and my thoughts just sucked today so I focused on connecting with belly breathing when I was driving to get my daughter.  A thought came up about a comment I was considering and I thought of a connection to it. "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." "CLOSE, but no cigar." Back to breathing. I thought about how good it felt to focus on my stomach and I thought of the accidental boob on the dream board and Ramana Mararshi's analogy of being like nursing babe. Then *CLICK*. 

I've been looking for my mother outside of myself. 

On 2/22/2020 at 8:11 AM, mandyjw said:

Last night I had a bizarre dream that my mother (who in real life lives in a trailer and has a heart of gold), lived in a ridiculously large mansion with tons of space and kicked me out even though she knew I would have a lot of trouble paying my own rent. I was furious. 

Soooo... many connections. 

Recently something about the "mother wound" came up and I was like, "I don't have that, my Mom is perfect!" 

She is though. That's the thing. I'm a spoiled brat. Where was I driving today? To get homemade turkey soup from Mom's because I'm sick. I'm 31. Last year, my Grandmother was dying and my Mom was not the perfect Mom anymore. She was distracted and wasn't there for me at all. I was having a horrible time for a lot of reasons and called her a lot looking for emotional support and it wasn't there. I ended up awakening shortly after Grammie died. My dependence on Mommy for all my emotional support was gone. I was empowered and when I wasn't, well...who could I talk to about this?

Not my actual mother. I thought about this. I considered it and I mourned it. Some. 

I've been making projections about people on the forum since before I even awakened. It's an emotional attachment, a need. Looking outside for my connection with source. 

 

 

[mandyjw]

My Mom dug up an old Chronicles of Narnia calendar and in it was an old scratch board piece of art work I did early in highschool. She gave it to me today along with the soup. 

It's a lion roaring at the moon. 

 

On 2/22/2020 at 11:36 AM, mandyjw said:

It's a little girl's fantasy. It's pathetic. So you think. Let that lion out of it's cage and it'll bite your fucking head clean off. 

 

On 2/22/2020 at 11:47 AM, mandyjw said:

Roar. 

 

[mandyjw]

Every realization clears the way for meditation, for thoughtless awareness (if you just say thoughtlessness, it just doesn't have the same ring to it), for "channeled" inspired action. 

Monkey mind, says "cool, but I got better shit to do, like throw shit at people." 

I don't know how to reconcile vulnerability and power, but I want to, oh I want to. It is love and truth itself, and cannot be thought. 

[mandyjw]

What did I realize from my awakening?

I'm thinking I should write this out, as it's bastardized and solidified in my memory. At the time it seemed too sacred to communicate. I realize that my perception will change as I write the memory down, that everything is fluid, the profane is sacred, nothing ever happened. Love is alive.

1. Visual changes. My perception of light changed. It felt like certain scenes in movies, where everything is bathed in light. 

2. Scrolling facebook, and instead of boredom and judgment, every single face I saw looked beautiful, perfect, bathed in light. See 1.

3. My heart physically felt incredibly light and open. It was very strange to me to have this center in my chest where love emanated from, a part of body I never liked at all. Had a short lived sensation of levitating while asleep/awake. 

4. Complete self love. See 3.

5. Channeling, and people around me channeling. Waking up in the night with realizations and insights that I was compelled to write down. 

6. Seeing intense connection between things. See 5. Noticing for the first time that song lyrics are mostly channeled. 

7. Perfect almost infallible balance, I noticed it hiking so I tried to balance along some wood logs to test it out. 

8. Impulses and intuition. I went to an area where I've spent hours looking for fossils. I was far from the place I like to go and had an impulse to turn over a rock. it was completely covered in fossils, probably the nicest I've ever found. 

9. Complete love for everyone and lack of judgement. Maniacally posting on the forum. How I never got a warning, I don't know. There was a particularly embarrassing post about the lion connection with Leo's name. Was I embarrassed at the time? NOPE. 

10. A willingness to give everything away. Bought things without a second thought. Bought my tarot cards during this time. 

11. A realization that I couldn't die, that worrying about death was silly. I drove in a snowstorm and even though I still drove carefully I was thrilled by the fact that there was no fear AT ALL. 

12. Intense energy, not able to sleep or eat normally. The night after I got up in the middle of the night and filmed this. 

13. Attention and awareness skipping out. If someone started saying something that I wasn't resonating with, I literally couldn't follow it. Likewise I would scroll the forum and just intuitively know what to read and what to skip. 

14. Nothing is wasted. I remember visiting my parents and watching them dump some homemade kefir they thought was old and exclaim over what a waste it was. And it struck me how incredibly silly that was, and I knew in my heart that nothing could ever be wasted. 

15. The beginning of sensations between the eyes that didn't stop since. 

 

When I get into the vortex, of in a high flying mood, I see signs, connections and have impulses and intuition. Before the awakening I became somewhat increasingly obsessed with light and sunlight overtime  and would purposefully run or look off into light, not directly. For some reason I'd really love to have the facebook scrolling power back. Judgement of other people, even visually persists and I want it gone. 

Enlightenment isn't an ideal to hold oneself to. But it is an inspiring as fuck vision to have for one's life. 

 

 

Edited February 26, 2020 by mandyjw

[mandyjw]

Had a long conversation about spirituality, psychedelics and awakening with my husband. I decided to read this above to him. He said nothing, so I asked what he thought. "Especially the part about the balance, it sounds like an infomercial ,"it slices, it dices!" 

He said some awfully judgmental things about psychedelics and made a comparison that particularity hurt. There were jokes, connection and good communication throughout. Towards the end the conversation went to Christianity, and eventually I realized I am a complete jerk, because I tried to tell him what communion means as a pointer to nonduality and he wasn't coming along with me. Then he told how it was described to him in various ways in church and that he was told that if your heart wasn't in the right place and you still took communion, that you'd be struck dead. And I realized and remembered the amount of fear instilled in him. He was dragged to church every single Sunday, to some of the most fundamentalist churches. I read my Bible on my own free will, with a few lose expectations and morality that was set in my family. To tie it to Leo's most recent video which I loved, you can't expect people to hold liberal "woke" values if they are living in a threatened environment. 

Yet this is exactly what I've done. I'm a selfish jerk. Spiritually, I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth in comparison. We've both made incredible spiritual progress over the course of our lives, and likely he's traversed more "ground" than I have. Partially because he got seduced by the daughter of Satan but whatever, God works in mysterious ways! 

[mandyjw]

 

This quote from Rupert Spira here struck me, "We have the freedom to choose either to be the presence of awareness, in which case peace is continuous, or to be a separate self in which case it is intermittent. We are free to be whichever we want."

Does this mean there are (just in theory, not in actuality) two ways of approaching non duality, one, you stay just as awareness not daring to venture out into emotions and feeling, and the other, you leave yourself free to experience the highs and variables on the emotional scale, to the feel the depths of feeling the aliveness in sorrow and loss, without losing the peace that is there? In other words, you get the best of both worlds, you combine, integrate the two. 

Abraham Hicks has been a key piece of the puzzle for me, as before my mind's interpretations of spirituality and presence were about killing passion and staying "safe" in a way. "Pay attention to how you feel" has so many depths and so much meaning in experience. 

Are the highs actually a separate "self"? I doubt this. Just like the cliche "time flies when you're having a good time" is there a really an ego experiencing those positive emotions? I think it only tries to own them after the fact. 

[Lento]

@mandyjw

I notice you are trying to convey the truth with language and logic.

They usually say that it's not what you think it is, but that's just one piece of the puzzle. The other piece is that it's exactly what you think it is. There is also the gray area in between, which is confusion and uncertainty, but it's also fine and part of the puzzle. It's the glue that holds the puzzle together!

You don't need to hold a perspective of truth because all perspectives are, by definition, limited and, even worse, limiting. Liberation is realising that you can jump back and forth between perspectives without attachment to any (including this perspective). I see Leo making this mistake by trying to define the truth and encapsulate it. But it doesn't work that way.

(I now realised that I used the puzzle metaphor without noticing it in your post at first ?).

[tsuki]

1 hour ago, mandyjw said:

"We have the freedom to choose either to be the presence of awareness, in which case peace is continuous, or to be a separate self in which case it is intermittent. We are free to be whichever we want."

Reality has this interesting property that existence is asymmetric.
There is light, but darkness is merely the absence of it.
There is love, but hate does not exist, it is the lack of love, the distance to it.
Then, there is freedom so absolute that you can tie yourself in knots and be constrained.

The reverse is not true. You cannot have so much darkness that you will start to see.
You cannot hate so much that you start to appreciate the other person.
Finally, you cannot be so constrained that you will feel that you are truly free.

Maybe he's appreciating that fact within spirituality, that presence and separation lie on the same spectrum?
Still, it takes a hell lot of awareness to appreciate the highs and lows of emotional turmoil.

[mandyjw]

@Lento I will TRY and I will FAIL but I'M GONNA HAVE A GREAT TIME DOING IT. Subliminal messages have taken on a whole new creepiness/beauty for me. We parrot each other and don't realize it so much of the time. Disclaimer, I have such a sinus headache right now that I don't even know anything on both a dual and non-dual level today. 

@tsuki Your description of reality as asymmetric is really good. I guess the maya, the illusion is our perceived experience of hate and constraint, unequivocally tied to ego and separate self. Remove either suffering or the beliefs that perpetuate the separate self and you remove the other, it doesn't matter which you tackle. 

Where I'm at now is when I hit suffering, or become aware of it I connect with body awareness or belly breathing. It's shocking how fast things turn around when I'm present enough to do it. It's when I stop trying to fix what I think is wrong, that this is seen because that assumption was flawed in the first place, so of course I can't fix what is wrong, because it never was wrong, that's the suffering!  

 

Edited February 27, 2020 by mandyjw