Genesis + RoD Back to Basics

Journals - Major Programs
#21

After thinking on it a bit, I am where I am. I’ve been through this rodeo multiple times in my life. Making improvements, getting carried away and hanging onto them too tightly and avoiding deeper emotions that are still there.

My metric for success is vastly different than what I’ve been told it should be. I will achieve more walking my own path and focusing on my needs vs getting swept away in needing to make radical shifts in my life.

I’m understanding as above so below a lot more. It’s not about having the “correct” positive thoughts and beliefs. It’s understanding what’s currently in my mind influencing my reality. My subconscious is steering, it wants safety. I can’t just rip that away and say “here these things are also safe”, it’s gonna double down on shrinking the outside world. But I can recognize the things I’ve had an almost reflexive action to do aren’t of my own choosing and are just a result of conditioning.

I ran RoD yesterday so this seems very familiar to the merger of worlds module in some ways. That’s part of the reason I decided to run it because any enhanced communication or bridge to the subconscious mind is beneficial. My subconscious and conscious live in two very very different worlds. Often a push pull dynamic vs a collaboration to achieve common goals.

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#22

Not doing great. Staying up till midnight, been slamming energy drinks, just don’t want to feel.

But I’m learning self care isn’t about doing the right things for yourself. It’s taking care of yourself in all situations. That means I’m gonna screw up. Go back to addictions, dissociate, it’s what I do after those things and during them that matters.

This is all going to take time. I’m ok. People will not understand what I go through but that’s fine. In the chaos I can still live my life. My life is chaos, always has been. Maybe not on the outside, but on the inside it’s like a nonstop hornet swarm in my body.

To overcome things you first have to really come to terms with where you’re at. Otherwise you’ll spend too much time in fantasy land waiting for a change that isn’t practical.

I hate myself and love myself at the same time, enough to care that I shouldn’t direct that energy to myself. I’d rather live a life of authentic emotion vs keeping up this positivity charade for the sake of everyone else around me.

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#23

Why did I title this thread back to basics? Well because for me that’s what this journey is about.

Over the years I’ve gotten by, I’ve survived, but i haven’t lived. So now I’m taking a step back and seeing how I really feel about things and working on improvements without the crushing weight of being some failure unable to do the most basic of human things.

I’ve identified with my therapist that I get caught in thought spirals. I don’t “test” reality enough. That means I’m essentially stuck until I start forming positive experiences. Perfect job for Genesis. But it’s a process. It’s about being honest, but not critical to myself.

One thing I’ve realized is a lot of jobs just aren’t healthy. 9/10 you’re interacting with people who haven’t addressed their own issues and it’s just one big dysfunctional family. And my coping strategy for a dysfunctional family was people pleasing, so that followed me into jobs. But I’m working on myself and doing the best I can to leave these outdated coping strategies behind. Unfortunately since I’m an adult I have to engage in a world and environment that can be very triggering. I don’t have the luxury of just going away, building myself up, then coming back into this. So it’s a lot of ups and downs, a lot of frustrations, and a lot of confusion. But I’m doing it.

On the creative front actually ended up following through with an idea for a track to completion and not settling. I’ve wanted to write a legit house track for so long and finally had it come together for me.

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#24

I think I’m gonna throw in Paragon after my next rest period. Something is off about my body. I know it’s my emotional state impacting the physical, but hitting it from both sides couldn’t hurt. Long overdue for getting that sorted out.

Today for the first half of my day I was immobilized. At one point I ended up sitting on my couch nodding off trying to figure out some stuff in my head. Body just wasn’t listening to me today. Eventually I got the energy to do some dishes and then I went for a walk around town. Being mindful of my reaction to people around me. I felt awkward and out of place like I so often do. But then I told myself I have just as much right to be here as anyone else walking around. Didn’t calm me completely but it helped a bit.

After I got back from the walk I stewed in my anxiety a bit. Sat down at my MPC just looking to organize samples and stuff. Ended up just pulling one of the preset programs on the thing and see what I could work with. It was a “screw it lets see what happens” mood. I actually intended to just write whatever without fear and scrap it if it sucked. Ended up kind of liking it and fleshed it out some more. I definitely felt myself be able to let loose with the music and not get so caught up in the technical stuff. Just keep it moving and refine later.

One thing I realized is that capturing the initial spark is so important and then not back peddling on ideas. It’s easy to ruin things by getting overly critical and thinking something can be improved. It’s like seeing a diamond in the rough, you can polish it up and clean it up, but don’t hack at the structure of it. Part of this is learning to accept my own ideas more and be less critical.

And finally I was just in the moment working on this track. But when I came out of it I noticed a lot of limiting beliefs and feelings. I spent a few hours uninterrupted working on it and I felt like I was wasting time or I was neglecting doing something more important. I deal with that a lot. There’s a belief there that I’m fucking up my life by working on music. I think it comes from when I was younger and unemployed, felt guilty about enjoying my time because I wasn’t sending out resumes all day. Yeah, that started my association with “your music isn’t really important, get a job”. So began my descent into misery and suppressing myself.

I’ve come full circle. I went from “music is my passion and what I want my life to be full of” to “well maybe it’s not realistic and I should focus on other things” to “This is important, this is me, this will never change. I’m not trying to escape reality by embracing this, I’m trying to live it”. I definitely have a more mature perspective on things now and see that it’s not that straightforward how to go about this.

But if this stays in a tiny box like everyone has encouraged me to do over the years I will never be happy. I don’t think that’s a flaw in my being and a failure to assimilate with modern society.

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#25

I was just thinking today, the only reason my life is so difficult is because I’ve got all these emotional hangups that keep me in situations that aren’t good for me.

  • Not changing jobs because I’m afraid of being incompetent
  • Not getting into new relationships because rejection hurts too much
  • Not asserting my own needs because I feel like something bad will happen if i do
  • Not trying new things or being able to make mistakes without crushing guilt and shame
  • Trying not to let any of these things interfere with my life, but they do and then inevitably I don’t have the self compassion or understanding which just makes me feel worse when I’m judged for struggling with it
  • Holding more weight in the opinions of me from others than my own. Constant self doubt about being ok as a person.

Like if I could just leave jobs whenever I needed to, get new jobs with ease, deal with people at said jobs. My life would be so much goddamn easier. I think this is what some people don’t understand when people get stuck in jobs. Their inability to leave the job is more telling of their mental health and their past. Emotionally healthy people do not stick around in bad jobs or environments. My biggest issue is trying to build up all these skills now instead of earlier in my life so I’m constantly being torn down in my environment and struggling while just trying to live.

It’s not even confidence at this point I care about. I just don’t want to care. I don’t want to feel pressure to be good at a job, I just want to do it and get paid. And I want to have strong enough boundaries to tell manipulative people who want to guilt me into caring more or extending myself beyond my means to piss off. That’s a hugely conditioned response for me because I’ve always thrown away my own needs in favor of someone else. Empathy and caring isn’t bad, but it has to come from a place of choice, not a re-triggering of old wounds. Otherwise I’ll just be jerked around by others all my life.

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#26

Going to work on these with my therapist. Watching a youtube video now on workplace triggers when you have childhood trauma. Goddamn. No wonder breathing exercises and trying to deal in my job has been so difficult.

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#27

What if difficult and painful don’t have to equal complicated?

What if it’s just hard?

What if you’re just scared?

What if the problem is more similar to the difficulty of working up to being able to run for 30 miles and less similar to decoding an archaic language or finding the cure to a mysterious disease?

I don’t know. Maybe both are true at different times.

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#28

No you’re totally on point. In fact I asked my therapist a few sessions ago if I seemed cryptic. She was like nope, you’re very straightforward, it’s clear what the issue is. I left that session with an awareness about myself. That yes these complicated labyrinths were complexity for the sake of deflection and protection. But nothing mysterious about them, like you said it’s more building up to it and being afraid.

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#29

I listened to this track a few weeks back and holy crap does this represent the beginning stages of Genesis for me.

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#30

For me, personally, something in which I find myself really interested are my Blind Spots.

Why?

Because, similarly to you, I have thought about and analyzed myself a lot. And that means, if there is any given area that I was able to identify and put through the processing plant of contemplation, exploration, and so on; I have probably done that. I kind of maxed out what analysis and self-reflection can do.

But…

On the other hand…

What about those areas that just slip past me? The ones that my mind–possibly due simply to its patterns and “programming”–just stubbornly avoids or elides.

Any decent amount of self-observation pretty quickly reveals the fact that there are gaping holes in my thinking, perceiving, narrating, and world-building.

Once I was done being aghast at that revelation (well, temporarily done anyway), I started finding it to be a great source of hope. We simply don’t know enough to draw confident conclusions about our overall Reality. Little facts? No problem. We’ve got tons of those. Fire burns paper. Winter is, generally, cold. No problem.

But when it comes to time to weave them all together into a worldview? We take huge liberties. We fill in the blanks with heuristics, assumptions, hearsay, estimates, and generalizations. And it’s actually healthy to do that.

But the fact that we’re doing that means that if we’re being honest, we should be humble. And that’s not just humble about our status and entitlement, it’s also humble about our depression, our fear, our anxiety.

I don’t see the Blind Spots as things to be gotten rid of.

It’s more like acknowledge them, and try to account for them. Because they’re going to be there no matter what I do.

On a practical level, blind spots mean that the solutions to “problems” are often much simpler than we realize. I mean objectively simpler. Subjectively, sure, it’s impossible because I can’t see it. But objectively, the key that I’m looking for might be just 3 feet away from me sitting on the ground under a plant pot.

That would probably depress some people. But to me it means happiness is within reach. I can’t see it. But it is possible.

Alright, I’ll stop there.

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#31

I know for a few years I didn’t want to acknowledge blind spots. Not because of arrogance but shame and fear. I felt like if I couldn’t solve everything on my own or understand myself in my entirety I failed in some way. This was compounded by my family actively discouraging therapy because “what’s a therapist going to tell you about yourself when you already know yourself? I feel like it’ll be a waste of time if all you want to do is talk”.

So yeah I welcome my blind spots now because it beats that tunnel visioned focus that led me to darker times in my life. And like you it gives me hope because each time I uncover one and learn from it I see that my perception of reality is just one of many interpretation based on past experiences.

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#32

Exactly

Ontological Pathways to Greater Wellbeing and Freedom

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#33

I was really on an upswing this weekend. Even going into work today I had all these ideas. One of them was an awesome idea for a video game and then I could do the music for it too.

But as I rolled into work, started looking at my pile of work, started considering I don’t know how to program, do 3d design, and barely have much creative output. I slipped into a really low place. Then I had someone come in my office and get loud and upset over one of my techs not being able to solve an issue fast.

That was it, crash and burn. I didn’t want to be there, couldn’t focus, felt increasingly anxious. I tried to break out of it, but didn’t have any luck because I felt trapped.

I listened to my CPTSD book on the way home and it started focusing on emotional flashbacks again. And yup, that’s what I got pulled into today.

First one was just me thinking back to all the times I thought “this’ll be different, I’ll make something really great” and either not having the energy to follow through or trying and quitting. Then feeling like a failure because I wasn’t even functional enough for the real world back then.

Second one with the person getting loud was just my childhood. I won’t go into details with that one.

But yeah. The important thing is not getting upset and dysregulated because I couldn’t regulate myself.

I am however trying to figure out how to break the association with cool inspiring creative ideas and becoming insanely depressed. I want these ideas to uplift me and inspire me, not trigger panic and anxiety. I also want to feel like even though it’s big goals and intimidating, I’m willing to at least try.

Been a rough day, but I’m learning a lot. Number 1 thing I’m getting a handle on is not anticipating how growth comes about because more than likely it’s beyond my current conceptual understanding. Like today. Was this a great day? Hell no. Did I learn more about giving myself compassion and not always pressuring myself to feel good all the time? Yes.

The hardest part with flashbacks in one big swoop suddenly achievements don’t exist, things I’ve done I liked I start finding revolting, the future seems bleak. This combination of things makes it difficult if not impossible to logic my way out of anything because it all disappears. There’s nothing to prop me up except treating myself kindly and I’m not so great at that.

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#34

Genesis continues to work me through stuff I don’t understand.

Yesterday was really rough. Even into the night. I feel an emotional pain and block in my chest, it feels like I’ve got a huge obstruction to free flowing emotions.

Among the thoughts that came along with it. “free expression is bad because I’ll do something others won’t like, and I can’t control that”.

I barely feel things like pain, anger, joy, sadness, it all just feels locked up behind this. I can analyze those things but I can’t feel them. I feel numb energetically. The tap isn’t flowing freely. I’ve been here before, you can’t just shut out the perceived bad stuff otherwise you turn off the whole flow.

A lot of it is scary because I’m like who am I underneath this? Is there anything there? I have this perception that once I clear the block I’ll have this personality under there. But I think I’m afraid all that’s under there is more pain and the truth is that there won’t be anything until I open myself up to more experiences in life and help make sense of my identity.

It’s like being empty inside, but not in a positive way because you can’t figure out what you like, what to do, or how to live.

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#35

By far the #1 thing Genesis is doing is humbling me.

Being able to just be more open up about my own struggles with myself. Real growth, not that approval seeking stuff I did for years.

I’m digging up so much. I’m processing so much. I’m grieving. Part of me withheld a lot of this because I couldn’t handle seeing the mountains of work still left for me to overcome. But I’ve pulled back that curtain and stopped hiding from it. It sucks I’m not gonna lie.

This evening I’m just feeling upset because the childhood I thought I had wasn’t the reality of what I experienced. Layers of denial I still haven’t broken through. Emotionally healthy people are raised in emotionally healthy environments. The fact I’ve struggled with so much for a large portion of my life is not my fault. I’m learning to take that burden off of me and just focusing on how I can help myself.

Genesis is like looking in a mirror internally, it can be brutal.

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#36

Genesis seems to be the first subliminal that made you made you progress on healing in a while (by reading your journal). The most obvious part with Genesis is the healing for you?

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#37

Yeah. So far Genesis feels like it’s given me this ability to acknowledge more emotionally. I’ve been doing a lot of work in therapy as well. But prior to Genesis I couldn’t reach this stuff. It was always me trying to take one of the subs to grow into something else to escape pain.

It’s an experience hard to put into words. I had avoided running purely healing subs for a while because I kept getting trapped in loops of emotional pain. I like Genesis because it uncovers just enough for forward progress and it has other goals which calms me a bit. Knowing I’m actively working on other stuff besides healing in my subconscious makes me feel safer.

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#38

I think this is something that would need to be highlighted for OG healing subs because I was the same running them, ie. I used them to escape pain to no avail.Triggers were brought to surface and I did not know what to do with them.

But only when (much later) I started acknowledging my emotions, my feelings, journaling them and questioning them (what they meant, what created them, what was their origin, what they told about me and my beliefs) and accepting that they would stay as much as they needed to be processed, from a few hours to a few days. That’s when I started to make progress.

It seems Genesis is allowing to accept emotions and understand them, in your way.

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#39

Since 30 second loops are on the table I’m going to start experimenting with variable duration for my loops when I listen. Basically listen to the sub until I start feeling I’m reaching my saturation point for input and just stop it.

Some days that might be 5 minutes, some days 3, some days 45 secs. This occurred to me yesterday while playing RoD. At about 2 minutes I had this feeling like I was a little over stimulated and I should stop the input. But I didn’t because of old habits. But I’ll try this out moving forward.

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#40

I’m not gonna lie, some of this forum recon has been stirring me up a bit. I don’t particularly like walking into threads with a bunch of conflict going on. Not good for my own mental health and just triggers trauma responses in me.

Trying to take better care of myself. But being on a forum that’s high tension and feels like walking through landmines isn’t my idea of a good time.

Ironically this is probably Genesis guiding me away from here for a bit. So I’ll just be chilling in my journal moving forward.

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