Stoicism Vs Enlightenment

[Scarecrow]

i practice stoicism and no I don't hold any dogma about it. It's been very practical and has helped me a lot. But I'm not to fimiliar with enlightenment and I've not yet began any practices like self enquirey. I wanted to know if there is any clashing between stoicism and enlightenment or it they connect in any way. I'd like Leo to answer thank you. 

[Leo Gura]

Enlightenment will make you more stoic than Stoicism. So fear not.

[Emerald]

7 hours ago, Scarecrow said:

i practice stoicism and no I don't hold any dogma about it. It's been very practical and has helped me a lot. But I'm not to fimiliar with enlightenment and I've not yet began any practices like self enquirey. I wanted to know if there is any clashing between stoicism and enlightenment or it they connect in any way. I'd like Leo to answer thank you. 

It can clash if you identify too strongly with it or buy into self-congratulatorty thoughts about how skilled you are about remaining stoic. I used to identify strongly with stoicism when I was an older child/teen and prided myself on never showing emotions, especially anger, pain, fear, sadness, joy, and excitement. When I was about ten, I used to have other girls scratch me really hard until I was nearly bleeding simply to show how much pain I could take without showing emotion. And at that age, I would relish in moments when my male peers couldn't handle the amount of pain that I could. This aspiration toward stoicism tapered off a bit when I became a teen (and I became a wuss about pain again) but I still liked the fact that I could remain unemotional during almost any situation that most people got emotional about or frustrated about. But what I found later on was that I had repressed away and neglected much of my reality and authentic personality because emotional repression was needed to remain stoic in lieu of deeper insights. I'm actually naturally a very emotionally sensitive person, but I repressed this aspect of myself because I considered it a weakness. I just adopted stoicism because I wanted to feel superior to others so I could like myself. So, you want to drop Stoicism if you find out that it comes from a place that's motivated by the illusion of inadequacy, unlovability, or incompleteness. This is the fuel of the ego. 

Edited April 3, 2017 by Emerald

[Emerald]

42 minutes ago, My_Name_Is_Mud said:

I read a couple of your blog posts a few months ago, and a few things you wrote had me wondering if you have been repressing your sexuality. Do you think it's possible you are gay, or perhaps transgender (a male in a female body)? In some families this can be a huge taboo, and the repression of this stuff can cause some pretty kooky reactions. 

(I am just whistling in the dark here, I don't know you very well and this idea came to me based on very limited information.)

Womanhood is most natural to me. But as a child, I learned to value masculinity more and saw it as vastly superior to femininity. So, I did everything in my power to get rid of all feminine expressions (until puberty when I allowed feminine to semi-feminine appearances to come back into my persona and wasn't really interested in being seen as man-like on the outside) and to emphasize my masculine side. This is what I needed to do to like myself. From this repression of femininity, I became very misogynistic at the end of elementary school. I decided that I was the only girl that was a good person and only hung out with guys. I liked to think of myself as the exception because it made me feel special and as though I was able to escape being perceived as female. This girl/woman hating lasted for about a year until I made some other nerdy and/or masculine leaning female friends in middle school who I really clicked with. They didn't really like (traditionally feminine) girls or femininity either and were very creative and interesting people. We were all social outcasts back then but these were really strong powerful friendships that really helped shape me in a positive direction, more than any other thing in my life at the time. Like myself, several of them turned out to be bi-sexual too. But the outward misogyny lasted in lesser degree until I turned about 12 and started to aspire to be peaceful and passive... which were traits that I always associated with masculinity. So, to external appearances, my twelve year old self wanted to be like Ghandi, Buddha, Jesus, Martin Luther Kind, Bob Marley, hippies, and my dad. Of course, this was just a repression on top of the other repressions. So, the misogyny never really went away and lurked in the unconscious, even though I then decided that I liked/loved everybody and was a super peaceful person. And as I went through my teen years, I continued repressing my femininity and didn't even know it. I had then believed masculinity and femininity to be arbitrary ideas stemming merely from social construct, so I didn't even know it was possible to repress femininity as I didn't think it was real anymore, but only an appearance. So, I still have a lot of feminine repression and sexual repression as well because I have a deep fear that respect, recognition of my achievements/areas of competence, and likability will be ripped away if I orient myself in too feminine a way. Or I fear that I will simply become irrelevant to society and culture if I orient myself in too masculine of a way. So, these are the attachments that keep me from my full expression as a human being. I still care too much about what other people think of me because I decided even earlier on that this was the point of life. I still harbor delusions that fulfillment will come when people recognize my "greatness/superiority." So, it's a complicated mess of things that go way back to childhood. But I am bisexual and I'm not transgendered... but I am deeply tangled up. But it's getting better as I learn to let go and take myself less seriously and figure out that I don't become invalid if I'm not validated by others and that I don't disappear when no one is watching me.

Edited April 3, 2017 by Emerald

[Emerald]

18 minutes ago, My_Name_Is_Mud said:

Your candor is appreciated, Emerald. I am not asking this out of titillation (my last girlfriend was in a relationship with another woman for 5 years before me so I am familiar with it), have you ever "been" with another woman? Do you find men sexually attractive? The GF I mentioned above was naturally feminine (to the extreme) and some would find it hard to believe she was gay when she was with her partner (her gf was "butch"). 

If you are in a conservative area, you might find it easier to be yourself if you relocated to somewhere more "open minded". In the area I'm in almost anything (legal) goes, and no one is trying to "make America great again" because there is nothing wrong.

I haven't had a long-term girlfriend before, as I've spent the vast majority of the past 11.5 years in committed relationships with men. There were only a few months in between the two relationships that I had during this time. But both my ex-boyfriend (of 4 years) and my husband were/are both open to me being able to experience that side of myself. So, it's never really been an issue of not being able to experience the more physical aspects of that side of myself. But I've always been an approach chicken, because the odds of rejection are quite high for a woman approaching a woman. Also, I currently don't have a lot of time to socialize or for spontaneity due to the constance of the task of parenting as well. So, I don't know anyone of the same gender right now that I am both attracted to and feel comfortable enough with. So, that part of myself is quite far away from my priorities for that reason and in lieu of an actual attraction to an actual woman this side of myself is kind of dormant. And despite living in Florida, most people that I know are very accepting of the LGBT community. There are a lot of open minded people here too, if you know where to look for them. So, I'm not too worried about judgment. But I'm definitely attracted to people of both genders, and men I'm attracted to much more often... though my deep attractions are usually few and far between in general anyway. 

[Emerald]

Oops. I just realized that we're way off the main thread topic. If you want to PM me, you can. But I don't want to get in trouble.

[Thinh]

@Emerald Reading your post and I found myself in your post. I usually think that if I'm sad or angry, I have to repress them so that I can become calm. But lately, I realize that my repressing has backfired on me. First, sometimes I stuck into the self-sabotage things. I do things that are not good which I conciously know but I seem to accept it to sabotage me. And after I watched the videos about intuition and read some books about this, I think that turn off my navigation which is my emotions, is not a good thing. So I just want to ask you that have you overcomed this problem or do you have any exerience on this problem? Can you show me some ways to work on this? Thank you.    

[Emerald]

18 hours ago, Thinh said:

@Emerald Reading your post and I found myself in your post. I usually think that if I'm sad or angry, I have to repress them so that I can become calm. But lately, I realize that my repressing has backfired on me. First, sometimes I stuck into the self-sabotage things. I do things that are not good which I conciously know but I seem to accept it to sabotage me. And after I watched the videos about intuition and read some books about this, I think that turn off my navigation which is my emotions, is not a good thing. So I just want to ask you that have you overcomed this problem or do you have any exerience on this problem? Can you show me some ways to work on this? Thank you.    

I do have issues with self-sabotage as well, though it's much better than it used to be. I was reading in the book "The Happiness Hypothesis" by Jonathan Haidt that the mind is like a rider on top of an elephant. So, the conscious mind is the rider and the subconscious mind is the elephant. So, even if the rider wants to do something, if the elephant isn't trained to listen to the rider, the rider won't be able to have control over the elephant due to the elephant's superior strength. So, to get control over the tendency to self-sabotage, the subconscious must be worked on via meditation and other forms of inner work to "train the elephant" to listen to the "rider."

But if you want to both have control over your emotions and to not repress them, you have to go in the opposite direction of repression. So, instead of trying to block the emotions out of your experience, you let them hit you fully and without resistance. This is how you process through emotions. So, whenever you feel emotions, it's important to make a practice of allowing it and observing it mindfully. This will enable to you to have equanimity (akin to stoicism in appearence) and awareness of any emotion. But it's important to make a practice of dealing with emotions as they come up in an open way. 

[Emerald]

3 hours ago, My_Name_Is_Mud said:

Emerald, I tried to pm you but it kept timing out. I wanted to ask you a few things but I'll keep this short:

One of the things was just to make sure you were ok with me giving a few links to some of your videos to a friend of mine who I've been trying to help get his shit together. He's kind of a fuck up regarding life in general. Anyway, I also wanted to give you a head's up--he's a nice guy, but... how to put this... sometimes he can be a little "annoying". I didn't want him to bother you with a bunch of questions so I told him not to make comments on your channel. He has a bad memory though, so in a few weeks if he starts doing that let me know and I'll take care of it. Thanks again.

Sure. You can show your friend my channel. Though, it may not resonate with him if he's not into self-help/spirituality/psychology. You may have to find something else that resonates a bit closer to where he is to get him moving in a more positive direction first before he's ready for deeper levels of development as you find in videos from myself, Leo, or other spiritual-based self-help authors/video makers. You may try someone like Tony Robbins first or someone focused more toward external success. 

[Emerald]

Just now, My_Name_Is_Mud said:

Well said. Just to add a little: although it may sound counter-intuitive, allowing yourself to be "triggered" can help with this process. For example, say you don't like one of the cashier's at a store you shop at because she always makes an annoying remark. Next time you shop there, instead of avoiding her line, stand in it and let her make the remark so you can deal with it internally (because ultimately all these emotions are really just about you), and this gives you practice--and the more you practice the easier it gets. We all have triggers, and they aren't to be avoided, but dealt with and welcomed because each one exposes yet another patch of our shadow we can eliminate.

I second this. @Thinh