Yup! About a year ago I went for an in person analysis. From there I’ve just been working on getting better at distinguishing warm and cool colors. It gets more challenging for me when the colors look darker. But overall its helped a lot with having a better idea of what to look for in stores or know if shopping somewhere is going to be difficult.
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I’m having a rough time in life right now. I keep trying to spin it around and excel in the opposite direction. It’s… not working. And if it’s not working that leads me to believe it’s a reaction to circumstances vs a a genuine growth in a direction. What I mean is a sort of reactive individualism. Like I’m having a hard time, I’m part of a minority group, my best approach to this is connection, networking, finding help, finding kind people. What do I do? I blame myself, try to be stronger, try to figure it all out on my own. Objectively it’s a bad strategy. It’s one thing to want to cultivate relying on myself but being able to accept help when needed. It’s entirely different to have a fear of asking for or needing help that drives me to be overly reliant on figuring my life out. It’s about choice and right now I’m not exercising choice, I’m being pushed into behaviors that continue to hurt me.
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This may sound obvious and dumb but more often than not the real struggle is changing ones relationship with perceived " failures ". I can somewhat guess that you want something to go right! For something to work which gives a crystal clear indication that you are going in the right direction. I know that far too well. Yet it seems as if it’s not and maybe the real growth here is finding peace amongst the chaos. It is the hard choice after all when the thoughts & emotions too busy pointing out what’s wrong and isn’t working. Your efforts matter
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You’re definitely right. It can very often feel like failure when my life isn’t going the way I’m trying to get it to go. A single day can be filled with thoughts and fears, the next day it doesn’t even matter and I’m back on track. Maybe I am just too hard on myself with what I expect from myself at any given point in time.
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My doctor adjusted my dosage for my medication. It’s been about 3 days and I feel wayyyyy better. Anxiety is decreased a lot. This was definitely messing with my ability to deal with recon. Yet another moment of me blaming myself for not trying hard enough when I should have taken a step back to assess all the impact of other things in my life.
Anyway one thing that stopped was the excessive thinking and pondering. I just started taking more action because I could. And that just made me feel better. I guess when due to physical factors I’m in a hole, it’s close to impossible to take action so it just results in me ruminating.
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Stillness, stagnation, frozen. Timeless, boundless, lost in perceptions turned inward reflecting back like two opposing mirrors. Nothing changes, everything just is. Deeper look inward reflects more inaction of change. More criticism, more self awareness, less being in the world.The truth, a truth, ambiguous discernments. To break the illusion of depth is to destroy a self imposed expectation of how the inner has to become before the outer emerges. A gust of wind knocking down one mirror shattered, a single act of the outer world. Opening the perception, closing the loop, the inner and outer connected, reflected, bilateral flow. Dynamically changing, freedom of exchange.The paradox of consciousness being lost within the act of consciousness itself.
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I struggle to maintain the balance of honoring the feelings and thoughts from the inside and balancing with an understanding that those are not all innate static aspects of me. The emotions thoughts and feelings are real, but what they represent isn’t always the truth.
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… did you secretly throw some Singularity in there, or is this stack helping you feel more comfortable with this kind of abstract expression? Either way, there’s a very beautiful transcendent message in what you’ve written. Cheers.
EDIT: Especially that last line. I was writing some song lyrics the other day about the “strange alliance of consciousness.”
The paradox of consciousness being lost within the act of consciousness itself.
Remarkable.
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Thank you. No but I did run RoM for a few weeks fairly recently in another journal, like about 21 days ago. It might be some of that. The module subconscious mastery definitely felt similar in some respects to RoM so it might be that too.
I think there is something in this stack though in terms of accepting some aspects of myself that I’m still trying to understand. It might be seductress. Things have shifted since starting to run it. Quite possibly unlocking some stuff from RoM.
I’ve always had these ideas or concepts in some abstract form. I buried them under a weird sort of shame. I dont really understand it. It’s caused a lot of confusion in my life because I’ve tried very hard to suppress a lot of it and just be normal.
Today is April 1st. This day holds a lot of relevance for me because it’s when I committed to living as myself. It’s been one year since facing my fears and moving forward with something I’ve always been deeply terrified of. I still am, but I knew the regret would be something I feared more.
I was going to reflect on my growth today vs my usual habit of feeling like I’m not moving fast enough. It’s been a surreal experience witnessing the aspects of myself I thought were me turn out to be protections for something deeper that was afraid to emerge in the world. But it’s that suppressed beingness that would lend itself to allowing me to feel like I’m in the world, to be connected to it, to interact with it, if I allow it to emerge.
Something that wasn’t allowed to touch the surface. It’s easy to dismiss these feelings and thoughts as ramblings of a mind that just overthinks. But I think that’s due to the privilege of having a fully formed identity that some get to experience, of course it would be weird if you had this innate thing that helped you navigate and understand life, but another individual you speak to can’t relate. My assumption? This is how everyone lives and they just deal with it better than me.
What I’ve learned so far. The piece of myself I had been searching for so long was always there. What wasn’t was the opportunity for that individual to exist in the world. I’ve opened that door, but it’s an all new experience I have to learn and lean into despite how unfamiliar it all is. Like a baby calf trying to walk.
My life has been really complicated. I’ve tried to understand it and I can’t. Despite my best efforts, it always comes back to honoring deeper emotions and feelings and trusting in that. I built a reality and life around concepts that weren’t mine to begin with and lost the understanding of what life is on an intuitive level. I mistakenly assumed that emptiness was life. That’s also been my curse, whatever high level awareness or maturity granted me the ability to get by despite these struggles also doomed me into others perceiving a capacity for life that just didn’t exist.
I don’t know what in my stack is lending me these insights, but I’m grateful for them. I feel like I’m moving towards some sense of freedom that I’ve been looking at for years but I didn’t know how to reach.
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I know nothing about you and your past and current struggles but this sentence I think I can relate to.
Perhaps that emptiness was your salvation yet became a burden at some point and still remains your shackle.
Anyhow, you’re making progress and enjoying it, and that’s all that matters. It’s a long journey back home for many of us. However, I never made it back home… I made myself at home in the coldest place I know. It’s possible, though perhaps not the optimal choice.
Cheers.
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An interesting thought to ponder. But emptiness, isolation, detachment has always been the comfort zone. It’s what I have been continually pulled back to. One of the biggest mistakes of my life was the assumption that the thing I most naturally gravitated towards was the most natural path to pursue. That’s the biggest danger, when perspective is lost and the habits that hold me captive I develop a sort of stockholm syndrome to.
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Now, I’m stepping onto the dicey ground of speculation. Perhaps it’s not so much a comfort zone as a safe zone—or at least, it used to be. This seems to be the residue of defense mechanisms that have lost their relevance yet still maintain a strong hold on you, triggering at the slightest notion of danger or the unfamiliar.
If that’s the case, the emptiness is your survival mode at work, and you probably cannot rid yourself of it for that very reason—if you’ve even intended to do so. The emptiness may be the very core of your psychological makeup, though it’s more a product of what was done to you than a reflection of you as a whole. Yet it’s you nonetheless and needs to be owned. Again, this is just speculating.
The approach I’ve found to work for me (the “Ice” in me, which is at its core a survival mode) isn’t about healing or rooting it out, as it’s just who I am. Instead, I focus on reforging it into the most relevant tool and weapon at my disposal, given my current reality and this is where subs work their magic. The Ice was tremendously outdated—totally misaligned, still set to cope with threats that no longer existed and subs helped me update it, so to speak.
There’s still some residue of that old modus operandi within me, yet I simply ignore it, let it be, and let it pass. It takes the form of pattern-based (habitual) ‘flashbacks’ and feels like somatic memories of what was done to me in the past, as they are merely bodily sensations and feelings. I ignore them, and it seems to help, as I experience fewer and fewer ‘flashbacks’.
Keep up the great work with the subs, mate.
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Thank you. Yes you’re definitely right. It was about safety. I called it comfort zone but that downplays how prevalent it’s been in my life.
We might be using a similar strategy. I’ve come to terms that the damage has been done so to speak. Like you said there’s very little to return to. It’s almost impossible to return to a state of being that never existed. I’ve just picked up whatever pieces I can find and continue to give them an opportunity to grow.
I still haven’t made peace with it. That hope or dream of making my way back to something that never existed kept me going for a lot of years. But I’ve been working on trying to let that go and grieve the loss.
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That hope or dream was probably the most direct response to the emptiness, as our minds cannot remain in limbo unless we suffer from derealization and depersonalization—as I did. All was but a dream. Anyhow, that hope or dream needs to be replaced with a real hope or vision that you can build upon. I think you’re aware of that. It requires a huge shift in focus—moving from an imagined past that never was to a future you can envision, embrace, and create.
This transformation is similar to the act of creation (whether you believe in it or not):
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
It’s mimicking God when you start building your world from emptiness. The heaven and the earth. The pillars of the world. What are they to you? Do you see them? How can you create them? What is the light that illuminates the darkness? Where do you find it? It’s your Genesis, mate, although there is much more in you than that emptiness since as you said:
Treat that emptiness as your void of creation.
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I had a recruiter call me the other day and present a job. And it was such a weird pivotal moment. It would be in the same state I’m currently in which would do nothing for getting me out of here. The temptation to just take it to relieve my anxiety was strong. I’ve been feeling like a failure for not being able to make this relocation happen.
I decided to go on the interview as practice and turn down the offer if it was given to me. It’s today at a later time. Two reasons and intuitive nudges that taking this job would be a bad decision. One, it’s a staffing agency that has a horrible reputation. Two, it would waste my time and energy I could use towards creating a new life for myself.
I also recently realized that 1 min loops are just too much for me and I’ve been causing unnecessary stress by taking on more internally than I can reasonably handle.
My life is stuck in limbo right now. In every conceivable way possible, it’s insane. My apartment is 90% packed up so it’s like I’m not even living here. I’m having trouble securing an apartment lease in another state because I have to have a job in that state and I can’t get a job because I don’t live there. I’m incapable of relaxing because I’m in between jobs. And I am also transitioning my body physically and my gender socially so at times I don’t even get to live a life I want.
I’m on my own. The biggest safety net I have is that if this all catastrophically implodes on itself I can stay at my mom’s because at the very least I have supportive family.
Yeah I think 1 min was too much and I hit my breaking point. Going to take a few days off for this to settle.
Interview wasn’t too bad. I flopped on some technical terms. I can solve complex problems, but ask me standard textbook definitions and I struggle. So that gives me some performative interview stuff to work on.
This was my first professional experience not disclosing anything about me being trans. It was tough. I would say the lead up to the interview had me anxious not because of the technical but the fact that I was on video.
Nobody really needs to know any of that and I’m at a point where sometimes I pass and sometimes I don’t. So being able to maybe fly under the radar and have nobody question my gender is the ideal scenario. Whether or not I can get that I don’t know.
So it’s kinda rough. Not knowing what type of discrimination I might face.
I bought some sushi to feel better
I think I figured out exposure amount and subs, how I respond to them and why recon happens for me.
After running 1 min loops this past week which I thought I was good with, it became clearer as the week went on I was processing some, but the rest was stacking in delayed overload. I’m recovering from that now.
I’ve noticed the more exposure I get, the deeper within myself I go. Like too much attention is drawn inward, this isn’t something I can counterbalance with outside action though because the pull feels like it’s coming from another level I can’t control. It’s too strong, action is not the solution to relieve it.
This isn’t necessarily “bad”, it’s all situational. That deep level of inward introspection is immensely valuable. But like a lot of things with the subconscious and habits, the things done aren’t necessarily going to match up to the outside world. In an ideal world I could go deeper and deeper, not having to worry about maintaining balance in the outside world or survival. But that’s not possible for most people. So it’s important for me to balance that inward introspection to a point where it’s just enough to balance with the needs of the outside world.
I believe this is the deciphered message of this. Which was expressed in what I now look back on as a very heavy recon fueled day
My mistake was after really sitting on this message from my subconscious I failed to realize this isn’t something I have to consciously focus on changing or steer. It’s just a matter of correcting the exposure amount so there’s a balance between inward exploration and outward exploration. If I enter the mirror loop, I know I’ve gone too far.
Still learning a lot about these subliminals and self growth. It’s very easy to enter an illusion of depth and growth for me if I get lost in that mirror loop. Letting go of this idea of pain = more growth will have to be the single most important change I make moving forward. Pain can equally just be reverberations of unresolved emotional conflicts and going the wrong direction.
How can I be so full of myself that I think people are constantly looking at me or judging me, yet also have such a low self image of myself and feel not good enough in the eyes of others?
So much of my life has revolved around what others think.
Why can’t I just let this go? I don’t understand. I have fought this for years. It’s like an awful domino effect where I just dig myself deeper and deeper into a hole, make myself smaller and smaller, sure nothing bad happens but also nothing really happens. And along the way I’m pushed and pulled by the reactions of others to form the habits and conditioning to avoid the pain of being myself at the expense of being myself.
You know what? Screw getting “better”.
Gonna embrace messiness. Vulnerability. Uncertainty. And just continue to grow.
I expend an enormous amount of energy trying to get it all perfect. In the end nothing is ever perfect. Nothing is ever actually better or improved from following this mindset. I’m just a human, a messy human and there’s no way to circumvent that. I’ve been doing this self improvement thing for years now looking for this illusive end state and it just doesn’t exist. More importantly it doesn’t have to exist. My pain has always existed because I thought I had to be more than this, that I had to overcome something, that there was something I had to avoid.
There was always that fear. What if I just… stopped? Gave up on whatever this quest was. The answer, I’d be imperfect, flawed, accept that the goal I had set in my head for years was an impossible thing. Not even a limiting belief, literally impossible. Impossible for anyone to attain because nobody can attain perfection.
That’s been my shield I guess. So long as I continued on this quest for some mythical destination I could continue to turn away from my more vulnerable parts and my innermost deep and vulnerable emotions I couldn’t even look at without disgust. Is it possible to procrastinate being a person? I feel like I’ve done exactly that. I did not earn that right until I hit some imaginary benchmark that oh so conveniently wasn’t even a possibility giving me an excuse to shy away from everything.
Given that, it’s so clear why I have a tendency to overexpose on the subs now. The irony of pushing so hard to enact a change in order to avoid change. My listening habits were structured around that idealistic fake goal vs the real one in front of me.
The biggest difficulty though. Is me putting down that perfection feels like failure. Admitting defeat. Not trying hard enough. I was supposed to be that. My mind is so twisted.