#1 priority for 2020: Self-care

[tsuki]

 

[tsuki]

I recently started appreciating having a place that listens, so I think that I will start posting again. I guess it's time for a new avatar too.

The most significant development that happened recently was the fact that I experienced how, exactly, I am bringing the anger from my childhood into the present moment. I don't know the exact configuration of events that trigger me, but I have the general picture about the circumstances in which I have a high chance of snapping. 

Currently, I'm working on aggression: it's roots as well as its healthy and unhealthy manifestations. I'm reading Jesper Juul's book on aggression, but I can't seem to find its international title to share.

[tsuki]

 

[tsuki]

False God turns suffering into violence. True God turns violence into suffering.

[tsuki]

Just finished a couple's therapy session with the new therapist and I'm wasted. My wife is crying in the other room. We ate a piece of cake each, a bag of potato chips in half and she wanted another bag for herself. It was a struggle for my inner abuser to let us go.

My abandonment wounds are taking a heavy toll on my marriage, and they interact badly with my wife's financial habits.
I feel at the mercy of my trauma because I don't control the pace of my healing. Even though I'm enjoying some progress, my inner critic demands healing to go faster. I intellectually understand that I'm not guilty of things that I've done because I was reacting to my emotional pain, but at the same time, my inner critic is beating me over it. It's like the line between my heart and reason was cut and there are two distinct entities inside. The emotional part is having a wide swings of moods and the observer is not always there to take care of the ego.

I felt fantastic for the past week or so, even had a spiritual experience akin to my recent awakening, but I had a feeling that my wife is hiding her pain. She denied, but surely enough, I learned in today's session that I was not mistaken. 

I also started to work with my body more. I'm doing physiotherapy for my back and neck pain which synergizes surprisingly well with my psychotherapy. I feel like my body awareness has skyrocketed and I even did some running. For the first time in my life I feel genuinely happy to move and doing it just for the sake of feeling good. I recognize that it's a huge progress.

I'm also very happy and thankful for my work. I find programming a much better fit for my temperament and interests. I'm designing and coding a new cryptocurrency exchange in java. Lots and lots and lots of learning - programming languages, modern ways of developing production grade software, various tools and libraries and data infrastructure (databases, caches, message brokers, etc). I'm also working in a team that learns agile development. It's super intense as I'm working in a team with other programmers. This aspect also interacts with my psychotherapy nicely because I can start some new relationships. It's very refreshing to work with very intelligent people that are a bit younger than me. I'm loving it.

So, overall, I'm still sticking to my 2020 priority and it's evolving. Lots of work to do. I just hope that we can get through this as a couple.

Edited August 6, 2020 by tsuki

[tsuki]

Today was the first time that I actually felt that I was disassociated from the body. Usually, I deduce it through logical reasoning, by examining my circumstances.

Today I decided to call my wife when I was having a break at work and she declined the call. I became anxious because I knew that she had a therapy session scheduled for today and I didn't want to interfere with her relaxations. I was also anxious because her therapist is sometimes critical of me and my inner abuser tends to fuel off of that. We had an intense weekend and she was emotionally exhausted, but I didn't feel like I vented at her. I tend to mistrust my judgement here because she has a habit of being dishonest to protect herself from me.

Anyways, I was pacing around the balcony at the office and I felt it. I felt this unpleasant feeling and was able to recognize it for what it was. My capability to instantly translate my emotions into conscious experience (thoughts) has increased greatly in the past few weeks. I suspect that this success happened because I was feeling absolutely fantastic in the morning. I had a connection with myself that was unlike anything I felt for a very long time.

I feel that my capacity for self-empathy and self-understanding has skyrocketed over the past few weeks. I associate it with my recent spiritual experience where I grasped that the inner child is the body. The boundary between sensations and emotions has somehow collapsed and I can see it as one. This has also helped me to understand the place of reason, and intuition in the greater scheme of my experience.

At the moment, I feel this calmness that is somehow similar to boredom, but it's not as unpleasant. Maybe it's freedom? I dunno.

[tsuki]

I'm spending some time alone because my wife went to see her parents and I'm having a lot of insights into the nature of my trauma.

I'm deeply afraid to build "physical" things in the "real world" because there were incidents in the past in which my efforts were overlooked, or outright destroyed. That is what had led me to build with progressively more sublime material, ultimately leading me towards philosophy and programming. Basically, my ability to conceptualize very abstract topics was a defense mechanism that protected my creativity when I could not express myself freely.

Hmm, this discovery is extremely important to me, but I feel that I'm not supposed to share it. I tried to tell this to my wife over the phone today, but I got annoyed because I felt that she wasn't in the place to receive this message properly. 

Anyways, I really enjoy just how much my body is sharing with me recently. It's really amazing how it is able to conjure up things that were long forgotten. The other day, I was assaulted on the street again. A guy on a bicycle wanted to punish me for walking on the bicycle lane and tried to straight up run me over. I know that he did it on purpose because he maintained eye contact. Fucking prick. I was lying on my bed in the evening, trying to to sleep, and asked myself why was I so upset? A memory came up about a family gathering when my nephew was just starting to walk. It must've been like 15 years ago. Even though I was not conscious of it at the time, I recognized now that I was jealous of him for being the center of attention when he was just starting to walk. I asked myself why I was jealous of him and another memory came up. It was not a visual memory, not a full-fledged scene, but more like body movement itself. I recognized it to be the first person experience of learning how to walk. I had baby arms and legs and I fell on my back, landing on my diaper. I realized that I was jealous of my nephew because I must have been alone when I was just starting to walk. I think that this chain of memories came about because of anger, a bicycle (a thing to be balanced), and the fact that I had to jump back to avoid being run over. Again, fuck that prick!

Today I had a dream from which I woke up crying. I started crying in the dream, in response to the events, and it carried over to the waking state. I don't remember if I ever woke up from a dream this way. It was not a quiet sob, or weeping. I bawed out loud because my cat went missing! I am so happy to receive such gifts from my child (my body)! 

[tsuki]

I had a few epiphanies relating to ego lately and I wanted to share them.

First of all, I'm enjoying some progress in the relationship with myself, or, my sense of self in particular. It all started with understanding of what evil is. Evil is judgement of selfishness. I do not mean that it is evil to judge other people's selfishness, even though that is a selfish act in itself. I mean that there is selfishness, which is to act in my own best interest, and when someone acts in this manner, I can perceive that person as evil. It happens most often when they interfere with what I perceive to be my own best interest. There is a distinct drop in lucidity when it occurs, it's when the child takes the steering wheel, so to speak. Evil is a subjective experience of someone else's behavior. I'm at a loss of words here because I have heard or read these words many times before, but they have not created such a profound shift in the way I perceive human behavior before. 

Anyway, the shift in the way I relate to myself is that I can see that the ego is neither evil nor good. It is completely amoral. It is not concerned with morality as long as it is not conducive to its survival. It is completely, 100%, innocent. It is literally a child. It is a lion that devours a gazelle because it has to meet its calorie intake. It will lie, steal, rape, murder, manipulate and cheat to live. And I find it somehow beautiful, it brings pure, blinding, white light to my mind's eye when I think of it. 

I also understood why there is violence in this world. Like, why would a drug dealer break your arms to make you pay? This epiphany came when I was watching "Molly's Game" earlier today. It's so simple. It is not because you don't want pain, because pain is unbearable and that you are afraid of it. No, people use violence to coerce others to make them more selfish. To make them think of themselves first and foremost. Only then, they will become amoral like the perpetrators. This is also why trauma can result in violent behavior. It is because a traumatized person has an subconscious imprint that tells them "you are not safe in this world". This is why it is easy to mistake a traumatized person for the infamous "evil" narcissist. I'm willing to bet that narcissists are so traumatized that they can't even leave the ego overdrive for a second. 

This is a huge step for me and I'm very glad of this development. It is very helpful for both my individual and couple's therapy.

[tsuki]

I've been pondering love recently. I knew for a long time that it is not an emotion, but I now understand why.

Emotions serve two purposes - they inform me about my relationship to the world, and they mobilize me to action. When I'm afraid, I know that there is a threat and I hide. When I'm angry, I know that I've been hurt and want to defend myself. In this sense, the existence of emotions allow me to take better care of myself and thus, are the medium through which self-love manifests. Emotions are selfish and love is not any particular one of them.

On the other hand, there are emotions that are associated with love and come about in relation to others. For example, there is infatuation, admiration and lust, but these are also inherently self-centered. Infatuation is the attraction to an unspoken promise. A promise that a given person can satisfy our need to be complete (it is also always a call to healing in disguise). Admiration is the call to self-betterment, it has a drop of ambition, or envy in it. Lust is the response to our physical needs and is also inherently about me. None of them go beyond the "I" and are the reason for so many dysfunctional relationships.

I think that the true relationship starts when there is a mutual need to go beyond individual selfishness. A need to meet the other in their own playground. I think that love does not come from sacrificing individuals on the familial altar in favor of creating a collective ego. I think that it comes from wanting to give something to the other person that they really need. It is not selfish, and as such, it cannot be an emotion. Any emotion can accompany love when the response to it is appropriate. It requires constant vigilance to our automatic behavior and true understanding of our individual needs. It can only exist in relationships that are conscious and truthful.

[tsuki]

 

[tsuki]

https://neurosciencenews.com/vr-body-swap-self-16910/amp/

[tsuki]

Today I feel euphoric. I'm totally high. I'm a magnificent creature.

When I left work at 4 p.m. I felt a great sense of accomplishment with what I did today and actually a little bit thirsty for more. I completed a stage in my project and I feel confident that my work is well-designed, and resilient. I'm integrating a lot of interesting technologies in one place to solve a specific problem, but I'm working one level of abstraction above it so it gives me a lot of confidence that it is future proof. The program is also modular and it's a great pleasure to work on. Actually, I just noticed that one module is redundant and its functionality can be split apart into others. I don't know why, but it feels amazing to come up with these ideas. It's a purely intellectual pleasure, these sparks of brilliance are unlike anything I experience.

For the first time in my life, I actually felt today that I want to exercise. I'm not (and have never been) much of a fitness freak and I don't exercise, but ever since I started doing physiotherapy I know that I'm steadily becoming more conscious of my body. This wanting to exercise was a new feeling. It was not that I thought that I should exercise to feel better, or that I logically concluded based on body scan that it's the right thing to do. I felt an itch all over my body, from my thighs, through my stomach and up to my shoulders, that I knew that could only be satisfied by exercise. It is inexplicable how I knew that. There were no intermediary steps between this feeling and my understanding. Thank you, my magnificent body, for speaking to me so clearly and abundantly.

Like I said, I'm a magnificent, euphoric, creature and I like it this way.

[tsuki]

My two week vacation starts tomorrow. I feel that it's going to be a spiritual journey.
I'm in a mood to shoot a few videos and keep reading Frank Herbert's Dune. Just started to read the third book, Children of Dune.

[tsuki]

I feel that this year is the year when I reap a lot of benefits of the basic self-development that I've been doing in the past.

There's been a major breakthrough recently and I want to express it here. I can feel, viscerally, that my interior is a literal zoo and that monkeys are running the place. There are small monkeys, big monkeys, elephants, and giraffes, and guess what? Who's the zookeeper? I'M the zookeeper! And monkeys lured me into their cage! More than that, they told me that this is THE OUTSIDE OF THE CAGE!

It's funny because I only realized this after deciding that I'm going to learn how to take proper care of my animals and actually respect them. I finally understand what respect is. Now, I think that I'm going to step out and live among them. I can feel that some of them are happy, but there are also the ones that lurk in the bushes, watching me silently. It's okay because I am not an animal and because I'm equipped to do my job. I still need help, but I will get there eventually. At least now, I can see them.

Edited September 28, 2020 by tsuki

[tsuki]

My not-a-zoo does not enjoy being called a zoo, so I will stop doing that. It was funny for the first two times, but the consensus found it to be offensive. We are a Matrioshka doll.

Just showing up here and reading this forum for a few hours brought up so much confusion. An old I came up and started its usual self-judgement. Took me a while to let go of it. I think that I will start using the "we" pronoun to signify my multiplicity. The only "I" that is equipped to be the mediator of the crowd is the present moment.

[DrewNows]

Ahh yes the “I” is never set in stone but it does uncover unaccepted patterns of thought.

Glad to see you playing a role on here again to inspire higher seeing states of being within, it’s always reflecting in others 

 

[tsuki]

@DrewNows We're seeing the title of your journal from time to time, but never actually read any of it yet. How are you doing these days?

[DrewNows]

@tsuki this year has been incredible in so many ways, just blown my mind. I am going through all sorts of challenging times, you may not believe half the things that’s happened and I’ve not shared much of it here. I really do believe this is a year of change, so many like myself are realizing their multidimensional nature, the light body transformation is taking place...

I will be offline for a few days while I cleanse, so I’ll have to get back to you if if you have questions or wanna chat about it. You can Pm me too. Hope you’re well! 

[tsuki]

@DrewNows Just hoped for a friendly chat. We do see that your energy is different and we're enjoying it.

[tsuki]

We came here because we missed this place after watching Leo's 9 stages of development series. We feel that we've lost some philosophical/existential depth after focusing on the basics. We also felt that we're missing some of the regulars here @DrewNows @mandyjw @Zigzag Idiot @now is forever .

We're not sure what to write here because our experience is so fleeting.
We grew a beard. We're very fond of it.