Have you ever gone through several years of numbness and then regained your soul?

[ZenAlex]

So basically, I started to feel dead inside around age 23. It was quite random, I just felt differently one day.

I felt by default more anxious, discontent and depressed.

From age 27-now I've made a lot of changes and live a super healthy lifestyle. I've given up a lot of things I used to do like video games and watching TV regularly, as well giving up regular alcohol and eat healthy.

All these changes have gradually made me feel better, and have sparked a bit of life in me.

But no matter how healthy and self aware I am, although I'm better than I was, that switch that flipped in me at around age 23... has never quite flipped back.

I know I can never been like I was because I'm now 8 years older, but I wonder if there's anything you guys could suggest to make me feel more alive than I am?

I feel OK, I don't suffer much, but I feel a bit void of feeling a lot of the time despite being over the worst of it.

I've tried different diets, exercise, making sure I'm meeting all of my nutritional requirements, gotten blood tests, meditation, hiking outside etc etc.

All of them help. I don't expect to be as alive as I was a kid, but just 20-30% more feeling would do. I feel relaxed and calm, but still quite numb. 

I never getting excited for much, and when good things happen, I feel a small percentage of what I used to feel.

[Ulax]

@ZenAlex I've been very numb for decades now. 

I've spent most of my adult life so far focused on the resolving this issue. 

My current theoretical understanding is that you need to process some significant unconscious emotion(s), and then the numbness will go. So deep shadow work would be my recommendation. Also, it might be that the idea that you need to process something deeply from your past surprising. But I'd offer the perspective that it might be that you are actually just dissociated from some trauma from your past, (side note: I'd include neglect as abuse. From what I've seen it seems neglect can often lead to numbness)

[spiritual memes]

I've met people who have.

[Osaid]

3 hours ago, ZenAlex said:

I know I can never been like I was because I'm now 8 years older, but I wonder if there's anything you guys could suggest to make me feel more alive than I am?

Invoke nostalgia. And then really hone in on those feelings you had before, and ask yourself, why can't you have it now? What does it take to integrate that into your current experience? Go back to what you enjoyed as a kid and reminisce on it. You can use music to do this, or even going for a walk or eating a specific kind of food or playing a certain video game. I've recently awakened some sort of sensitivity by doing this, but it might also be related to this supplement I recently started taking called myo-inositol, or maybe a combination of that and nostalgia has triggered something inside me.

Also, socializing helps since it pushes you out of overly-logical thinking. Talk with friends or family or something. Or just go chill at a café so that you're in some sort of new and social setting.

And also, allow your experience to be experienced without your mental models and mental input. Let your keyboard be a keyboard instead of "God" or "Infinite Consciousness" or "illusion". Let your experience manifest itself how it wants to and let it play with your imagination however it wants.