Insights, Music, And Chicken Poop

[jjer94]

the emotional fortress of agape.

Every night before dinner, I say grace.

It’s not your typical Christian grace. I’m not religious, nor am I on very good terms with Jesus.

Instead, it’s an informal grace based on a line of dialogue from the movie Joe Versus The Volcano:

“Dear God, whose name I do not know. Thank you for my life. I forgot how BIG… Thank you. Thank you for my life.”

Upon saying this aloud with gusto, I revisit the emotional fortress of agape. It’s a place overflowing with gratitude, love, and awe for the grand mystery that is life. A positively hopeless place where I know deep down, this is it. A place where there’s nothing to do, nowhere to go, and no one to be. A place where I can say, “If I died right now, that would be okay.”

Then I push out a ceremonial fart on demand and proceed to devour my dinner.

 

Edited February 26, 2017 by jjer94

[askdfjnak]

9 hours ago, jjer94 said:

Every night before dinner, I say grace.

It’s not your typical Christian grace. I’m not religious, nor am I on very good terms with Jesus.

I do something similar when I wake up in the morning.

It's really powerful to take a few moments to just shut the hell up and bow down to reality.

It's taken a lot for me to get to the point where I could actually do that. 
I am a pretty stubborn/arrogant/narcissistic ego you see.

I also stop to contemplate and fully accept my impending death from time to time.

When I do, I like to recite this once or twice.

 

 

[jjer94]

13 hours ago, Marc Schinkel said:

I am a pretty stubborn/arrogant/narcissistic ego you see.

I don't really see that.

Anyway, thanks for sharing! Dayum, I've got to see Book of Eli now. That looks badass.

You're making me want to do the same and recite that in the morning...

[askdfjnak]

On 28/02/2017 at 8:53 AM, jjer94 said:

I don't really see that.

Anyway, thanks for sharing! Dayum, I've got to see Book of Eli now. That looks badass.

You're making me want to do the same and recite that in the morning...

It's not that good, I'd say that clip is the best part.

[jjer94]

a word about Gnosis:

it ain't gonna buy the groceries.

 

[99th_monkey]

i like your website

[jjer94]

@99th_monkey Whoa! A reader!

Thank you 

[99th_monkey]

9 hours ago, jjer94 said:

@99th_monkey Whoa! A reader!

Thank you 

Casual peruser lol

[jjer94]

life is high school meatballs.

Life is messy.

It's like that sloppy meatball dish you ate every Wednesday in high school. A lot of unknown ingredients went into those meatballs. You weren't sure if it was made from animal parts or cretaceous dinosaur meat. The top layer was always slimy. Some of the marinara sauce would make it onto the crotch of your pants. Your classmates would ask if you're on your period as you'd run to the bathroom to wash off the spot.

In spite of this, you ate it anyway. And oddly enough, it was enjoyable. You secretly looked forward to pasta Wednesdays.

The game of life wouldn't be fun if everything were perfect, certain, and easy. The game is fun precisely because it is imperfect, uncertain, and difficult.

Like high school meatballs, you can enjoy life in spite of how messy it is. And really, that's the only way you can enjoy it.

[jjer94]

the pressure to be extraordinary.

One of the reasons I created this journal was to be extraordinary.

Ever since my friend killed himself, it feels like I will scorch my ass if I sit down and do nothing for too long. Peeking behind the abyssal curtain of mortality has made me neurotic. I create stuff to deny guilt, self-hatred, and life's vanity.

I went on an overachieving rampage. I thought, I'll show him how to live. I picked up my acoustic guitar after an eight-year hiatus, started writing music, and taught myself how to mix recordings. I graduated early and began a journey of self-education and discovery. I started writing. One hundred songs and sixty blog posts later, here I am.

But even after accumulating all of this uniqueness, it's not enough. No matter how hard I try to be extraordinary, I will never live up to my mind's expectations. The desire for extraordinariness implies that I lack it.

Self-help raises the pressure to be extraordinary. The Tim Ferriss digital-nomad brigade, Tony Robbins high-energy-extroverts, and self-actualization junkies urge you to live an extraordinary life. They tell you do adopt this practice, drink this tea, move to Thailand, become a life coach even though you have no life experience, and, well... start a blog. They cater to people like me who feel a sense of lack, who don't like themselves as they are, who want to stick out to compensate.

So we do those things, thinking they will fill the void. But they only make it bigger.

[askdfjnak]

22 hours ago, jjer94 said:

So we do those things, thinking they will fill the void. But they only make it bigger.

Funny isn't it?

It seems life's only true work is to step into that void and let the fall wash us clean.

Here's another song I think you'll like:

... and those high school meatballs were so shit, but they were THE shit.

Edited March 18, 2017 by Marc Schinkel

[jjer94]

movie characters poop too!

Movie characters do exciting stuff on film.

Their lives seem eventful. Their failures are short-lived and success falls into their laps. All of their practice sessions are compressed into montages as if someone can master a skill in just a few minutes.

They never film the parts where the characters are pooping, peeing, eating, sleeping, studying, looking out at the countryside, meditating, talking gibberish with friends, or doing deep work. Makes sense, considering movies have a time limit and the show must go on. All the stuff that’s not crucial to the plot is omitted.

But leaving out the mundane gives us a distorted view of the character’s life. Watching movies gives us a false expectation of how exceptional our lives should be.

Life is really 10% what the movie characters do on-screen and 90% of the off-screen stuff.

Learn to enjoy the off-screen activities. Enjoy a slow, steady sunrise. Enjoy a simple breakfast with a piping hot cup of coffee. Enjoy the time you spend with your friends. Enjoy the painstaking hours spent mastering a craft. Enjoy the subtle sound of a low-rider fart that comes twenty-four hours after eating black beans.

You can enjoy those 10% exceptional moments too. Just remember that they too will blow away in the sands of time and merge with the extra ordinary.

 

[jjer94]

OMG! I'm fucking insane!

I'm a scheming love-deprived bastard!

I put so much unnecessary pressure on myself!

I don't know how to relax!

So...I'm back in the somnambulstic state. I reduced my eating window to four hours. I never would have thought I use food for my neuroses, since I'm so skinny (more on that in another entry). But man, with food gone for most of the day, there's just this void, and all of these emotions come out. Stack that on top of increasing my meditation time by ten minutes. Hoooooly shit, so much dissatisfaction with present circumstances. So much loneliness. 

I like to think I'm the only one that's neurotic up the wazoo, for dramatic effect. But I can imagine there are a ton of people out there who have it just as bad, if not worse. And for those people: I feel your pain.

This place, this human realm, is basically just one big insane asylum. It's sad and hilarious.

 

[jjer94]

the silent killer.

I've recently been searching for solutions to my psychosomatic issues. Then I realized, I'm forgetting about the simple somatic issues!

If my body feels like shit, then no wonder why my psyche feels the same way. Maybe it's not all childhood trauma stuff. Maybe it's just the basic physical stuff. 

Most of us sit for 10+ hours per day and take it for granted. But if you think about it, a sedentary lifestyle for a normally active animal doesn't seem healthy. And no amount of 30-minute aerobics sessions can compensate.

I found a book that addresses this problem at its roots. I'm going to partake in its 14-day challenge and do all of the mobility exercises for two straight weeks. Let's see how I feel afterwards. 

 

[Dragallur]

@jjer94 In this way you are lucky you do not go to school anymore

[99th_monkey]

its not insanity... its super-sanity hahahahaha

[jjer94]

silent progress.

Holy cow! I mean back! My back feels so much looser after doing these exercises. 

But the most relief I've received is in my gut. I have a gi-normous muscular band of tension around my navel area. I first noticed it after the events of my friend's suicide. Probably has something to do with the guilt. But after using the 9-inch ball repeatedly on that area...I notice that I can breathe a little better and I'm less in fight-or-flight.

This makes the world a difference. I'm going to stick with it. I haven't even gone through all the exercises yet...

This sort of myofascial work seems to be the physical equivalent of affirmations. In affirmations, the mind is stuck in a holding pattern and by repeating a phrase over and over again, you brute force it out of the holding pattern. In myofascial release work, the body is stuck in a holding pattern of tensions and by repeating the same exercises over and over again, you brute force it out of the holding pattern.

A year ago, I would have scoffed at this stuff. Now, I scoff at me a year ago.

 

 

[jjer94]

veganism.

Wow. How could I not see? I mean, it makes perfect logical sense. But all these years, how could I not see?

Compare the human to all species of the animal kingdom. Compare anatomy, intestinal length, teeth type, tail or no, quadriped or biped, claws or nails, and other physiological features. We most resemble primates, which are fruitarians: They eat fruits, supplemented with vegetables, nuts, and seeds. They used their opposable thumbs and nails to pluck fruit and peel skins.

Before cooking, before tools, before paleo living, before agriculture and the usage of grains... we just ate mostly raw fruit.

I've had digestive issues my whole life: bloating, constipation, reflux, indigestion, you name it. Stack that on top of the band of muscular tension I mentioned in a previous entry, and it's debilitating. I wonder how I grew up all these years thinking that my constipation was normal...that it was just something I had to deal with...while I ate refined breads, sugary breakfast cereals, ice cream, corn-fed meats and poultry, milk, and cheese.

That whole time, my body was probably saying, "Fuckin' A, Brett! Another steak!? Gimme a fucking break! Seriously, feed me an apple please!" But I was too busy being depressed and addicted to video games to actually be mindful of what it was telling me.

For the past six months, I've been paleo/keto (a la Primal Blueprint). It definitely felt better than the Standard American Diet (SAD), but the constipation got worse. The past two weeks, I've transitioned into the cooked whole food vegan diet. While I notice a huge difference in energy levels, digestive issues remain.

Then I did more research and decided to add more raw fruit and vegetables to the diet. A lot more. Like, three times as much fruit as before. Today, I've had around 4 BM's alone, and it's not even dinnertime yet. Holy shit. Literally!

I don't plan on going totally raw for the rest of my life. Cooking is too culturally ingrained (pun maybe?) to avoid. Also, legumes and grains may do some good in the winter. But leaning towards raw seems intuitively the best way to go for health and longevity.

This coming week, I plan on doing a fruit/vegetable fast. Raw vegetable smoothies and fruit only. Let's see how much shit comes out.

Some resources for the curious: The China Study, How Not to Die, 80-10-10 (I think this one's a little extreme for most, but good info nonetheless), Detox Miracle Sourcebook, Forks Over Knives, In Defense of Food, Motha-fuckin John Rose.

 

[jjer94]

day 2: holy shits, body's having fits.

Holy(er) shit! A lot of different symptoms have surfaced, and it's only the second day of the fruit fast.

Here's what I got:

• Random aches and pains. Yesterday, I had a headache that lasted approximately one minute. Today, I had hamstring pain that lasted thirty seconds. All of these random aches and pains are coming and going.
• False hunger. In my research so far, a symptom of eating cooked food is "false hunger" - that gnawing feeling in your stomach you equate to be hunger pangs. Real hunger is supposedly like thirst - near the throat area. False hunger's been going crazy these past two days. To be expected. It's the equivalent of withdrawal symptoms. Even when I satiate with fruit, it's still there. In a sense, we're all addicted to cooked foods.
• Cravings. Another side effect of eating food that we're not supposed to eat is craving. Craving is the body's way of saying that it's malnourished, but we mistakenly equate junk food as nourishment. And so it's an endless cycle. Anyway, lots of cravings have come up - especially for fatty/salty foods, since I'm off paleo now.
• More BMs. A lot more. Yesterday and today, I went thrice. Woohoo! Normally I'm constipated up the wazoo.
• Connectedness. No joke. By eating raw these past couple days, I notice an increased sense of empathy and connectedness with everything. Almost like synesthesia on LSD. Even though my body doesn't feel right, my mood is pretty good.
• Breakouts. To be expected, since skin is an avenue for detoxification.
• Hair loss. I lost, like, a pound of hair today in the shower. A great mental picture, is it not?
• Surfacing emotions. The loneliness and "I can't" emotions are revealing themselves again. I forgot how sad my body feels. It almost feels caged, like it's purposely sacrificing its full potential for comfort and familiarity. 

I actually had an insight in the shower about the loneliness. Introverts like me tend to think that we prefer "alone time." But when we're alone, we're not really alone. We're usually engaged with something, whether it be a book or social media or other solitary activities. Real aloneness is akin to being with yourself without stimulation, seeing what it's like to be in a body. 

I've been avoiding that form of aloneness for a long time. I even avoid it during meditation, as demonstrated by incessant monkey mind. That aloneness is my boogeyman. It's the thing I need to face and embrace. 

In general, this inner work is probably the hardest thing I've done in my life. Setting olympic records, diving to the bottom of the ocean, making a platinum record, and building a successful business seem like child's play compared to facing yourself.

[West]

Hello! The hair loss doesn't sound so good. Not sure if it's the vegan thing or something else.

It's not my intention to make you change your diet, I will just share an alternative that you can consider trying out.

It's called the bulletproof diet. It's similar to paleo and keto, but removes some additional 'suspect' foods and encourages some days with more carbohydrates to keep your hormones in check. You don't have to do the 'bulletproof coffee' thing (I don't), and you don't have to buy the things the creator of the diet sells; just go with the basic foods that you get at your grocery stores.

Here's the infographic:

 

Good luck