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I’m in a bit lower of a mood today. I think it’s a bit of recon and something came to my attention that might be a bad thing, or might be nothing.
I’ve taken what steps I can to find out and come up with a plan for dealing with it. Now we wait. -
It was interesting. Last night after I checked on that financial thing and determined that I didn’t have the problem I thought I did, the anxiety dissolved into low grade euphoria. That is the power of taking action to resolve reconciliation.
I think that at least sometimes what we’re feeling as recon, anxiety, discomfort, ect, is actually the part of our subconscious that wants to get in line with the script pushing us to do something in line with it. If we do that, we feel good. -
I’m getting a mild headache listening to DE. It may be recon, it might be the way my bone conduction headphones are pinching my head, or it might be allergies or weather change.
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I am getting these weird little pulses of emotion occasionally. It’s fear. It’s like some part of me is being pushed to do something that really scares it. It’s kind of like I felt when I was standing on a high dive for the first time as a kid. I was somewhat afraid of both heights and water, so I had a pretty scary moment a d hesitated a lot before jumping. I feel that exact same feeling for, like, a nanosecond.
The thing about that memory though is that it felt really good when I jumped and was OK.
Stage three is asking me to do something that scares me on some level. I don’t know what it is, but it makes some amount of sense. Stages one and two were about giving up the bad parts of the old me. I was sick of them and ready to give them up, so that wasn’t that frightening. Stage three seems to be about actively stepping into the new me, and that’s uncharted territory.
- I felt my thoughts going down an old negative road where I vividly imagine a negative scenario and have a hard time stopping it. In this case it was us receiving a rejection letter for my wife’s disability. Because of course because we never catch a br…….
I cut it off HARD “FUCK THAT!!! That is NOT my new reality!”.
Hard to describe here, but it was partly my own directed thought and partly felt like a kind of automatic mental reaction. Matter of fact, it felt a lot like The Negator which automatically dismissed all of my positive visualization as “just fantasy”. Except it was a lot more sudden and forceful.
It simply destroyed the mental scenario in an instant. Usually they try to come back around when I try to interrupt them. This time it was just gone.
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I’m feeling low grade nervousness and stress today. Some part of my subconscious is having some trouble with something in stage three.
I think I know what it is from paying attention to my self talk.
For some reason it’s having issues with the concept of expecting good things to happen on a regular basis.
I think that’s it because I’m starting to semi consciously apply the concept to real situations. IE I’m telling myself “Self, instead of dreading checking the mail because there might be collections notices or bad news in there, look forward to it because there might be checks and unexpected good news in there.”. Part of me is onboard with that, but it’s making another part really grumpy. -
The wife called her lawyer and clarified something. We’ll have an answer on her disability appeal before the end of September. Then we’ll know which way to go. I am expecting good news.
- The recon has cleared, at least mostly now that I’m at work. I’ve never quite felt it like that. I could feel the argument going on inside my head. I don’t know why it was relatively easy to remove my default setting of expecting something negative to happen at any given moment, and it’s giving me trouble to replace it with a similar expectation for something good to happen any minute.
It’s happening on the level of self talk with only a little conscious guidance, but I don’t seem to believe it on a visceral level yet. Something in me is having a really hard time with that concept. Maybe it’s just a foreign concept and whatever part of my mind is in charge of generating those feelings hasn’t figured out how to yet. Maybe it’s afraid that the whole thing won’t work to manifest a better life, and it’s protecting me from disappointment.
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I find my mind bringing up times when I have felt that optimism. When I did expect the surprises that life throws my way to be good. And times when I have gotten good things out of the blue, and when things have gone my way when they didn’t have to.
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I have very little experience feeling that optimism and expectation so it seems DR is trying to get me to piece it together out of very brief times in my life. It’s also trying to show me all of the times that manifestation, with and without subs, has worked in my life. I would be in a lot worse situation if it didn’t work. I think this is to give me faith in the process.
- I’m going in and out of recon on this one. I felt good for a few hours after my loops last night and then back into anxiety about financial problems. I feel a little bit of that upon waking up this morning, but it’s not too bad.
I think I’m going to take thee processing days from DE this week instead of my usual two.
I am aware though that the stress I’m feeling now is not close to the gut churning torture I would be feeling if I were in this same situation without subs. The first summer I went through after things started getting really rough on us financially and the MS really started hitting my wife felt a hell of a lot worse than this does.
- My recon got pretty bad after I wrote that. Then I did something. I had promised myself that I was going to open an envelope that I hadn’t because I was worried that it might represent a big problem. I have had a big problem throughout my life with saying that I’d deal with things like that later, and “forgetting”. They wouldn’t get dealt with and the problems would get bigger. One of the things I said I was going to do is look at things like that.
I went downstairs and looked. It wasn’t that bad, and the recon cleared up.
I started this journey to get my shit together and destroy my success ceiling this year. It seems like stage three is going to push me to action and not take any excuses.
- It’s been a couple of hours since my DE loop, and so far, no recon. At least not that I feel.
An interesting thing happened during my loop. I was getting a bit of that dread/stress/sword of Damocles feeling that is often how I experience recon, and I was just able to release it. I’ve always tried to push it away, and it never worked. I’ve certainly heard to let go of a bad feeling before, but it was just meaningless words that I had no idea how to act on. The technique just came to me. Odd, and hopefully useful in the future.
- I’m home, about to go to bed. No recon feeling all night. Toward the end of the night I started to feel really good. Kind of calm, centered, confident. It’s hard to describe, there’s more to it than that, and I’m not used enough to the feeling to be able to put it into better words than that. Something is definitely starting to happen.
Right on, man!
- The recon I’ve been feeling after my loops don’t come back after I ran DE last night. Something shifted during that loops.
I took action on two of the things that were worrying me when I got up this morning. I confirmed that one of them wasn’t a huge issue that needs to be addressed right now, and the other was solved easily.
Seems that where stage one dealt with thinking, and stage two dealt with the emotions that that thinking caused, stage three is alternating my behavior patterns that the flaws in thinking and emotional patterns caused.
Where the thought of facing something that might be a problem caused me a lot of discomfort before, now NOT facing it makes me uncomfortable.
Your journal is a continued source of wisdom and development! 
Thanks. I suppose it’s been quite the journey this year and I may have changed more than I think I have. I’m not quite to the halfway point yet either.
**Stage 3 Cycle 1 Week 2**
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I felt really good this weekend. I was very productive, and getting all of the stuff I get done every weekend just seemed a lot smoother and more effortless than it has before. The nervousness and anxiety over how things might go and things that might go wrong in the next few months were entirely gone. I wasn’t thinking about those things much if at all.
After I ran my FPU loop this morning, I noticed that I felt downright victorious. As I got ready for work it felt as if the hard times we’ve been in for the last few years are already over. Like I’ve already won. -
Then I started thinking about how glad I should be that I went through them. As rough on me as they’ve been, they’ve really forced me to get my shit together, find effective tools that would help me and become a better, stronger man who can rise to the occasion and push through for myself and my family. That has happened because I was challenged, and wouldn’t have if I had had an easy time of it for the last few years.
I attribute the shift in attitude toward these things to The Forge. I can’t give it credit for the events because they go back to long before I discovered Subclub. I am just realizing that I am coming out of this made of much sharper, harder steel than I went into it. -
The wife and I worked together on a number of fairly complex things this weekend. There was zero conflict between us and everything went well. She didn’t try to take charge, “correct” me or anything like that. This is pretty amazing actually.
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When I came downstairs today, the wife looked at me and said that my gut looked smaller and tighter. I said that I had been noticing a lot of development in my pecs and arms. She said that she saw that too and I was looking great.
This is very notable because she almost never makes a spontaneous positive comment like that.
- My workout was great tonight. I was able to push a lot harder than I have before and really leave it all on the table. Besides my wife mentioning it, I’m really noticing results in the mirror.
Previous times in my life when I’ve gotten on a workout program, this is where I’d find a reason to slack off or outright quit.
I know why now. It was that low success ceiling. As soon as I noticed that I’m on my way to getting as strong as I want to be or looking like I wanted to look, some part of my subconscious freaked out and made sure to derail my progress and put me back to the mediocre baseline that it was comfortable with.
I see no sign of that happening this time, and that is a VERY good sign.
- I realized something and it’s kind of hard to describe. My mind had a kind of background noise of anxiety and frustration all the time. I didn’t notice it much because it was behind my surface thoughts and feelings. It’s kind of like the slight buzz you sometimes hear behind a radio station. You only really notice it when it goes away. Same here. I noticed today that it was greatly reduced. I feel a lot more relaxed in general than I have in a long time.
I didn’t have as much directly positive thinking while getting ready for work this morning, but there just wasn’t that carrier wave of worry for it to compete with, so perhaps it didn’t have to be so forceful.
- I think that the reason that reason that the background stress is going away is that I’m coming out of the survival mode that I’ve been in for the last four years because of financial problems and probably since childhood. It’s that emotional state addiction going away on a deeper level.
I’m simply realizing that I don’t have to feel like that anymore. The things I worried about like they were existential threats, aren’t. Don’t get me wrong, some very inconvenient and or unpleasant things could theoretically happen. But A I don’t think they will, and B if they do, I’ll deal with it. Bad things have happened before, and I’ve always managed to live through it and bounce back.
Matter of fact, I’m wondering why I was so afraid of a lot of the things I was. I mean having to move and live in lesser accommodations for a while would suck a bit, but it wouldn’t kill anyone, and I make enough money that theres no chance of winding up homeless. And why was I so fearful of not getting the jobs I put in for.
Answer: The only real threat in either case was to my ego. I didn’t want to see myself as someone whose financial problems reached that level. It threatened my self image, so it triggered a survival stress response to rival an actual threat to my survival.
And that was a feeling that I had become so used to that I subconsciously kept myself in it.
- The job thing is really interesting now that I look at it. It threatened my self image either way. If I never got it, then I’m a loser who can’t get the job I wanted. If I got and held it, then that would make me more successful, competent, awesome than my negative self image could deal with. It perceived both outcomes as existential threats, so it kept me in a very long painful cycle of perpetual trying and failing. I was stuck between the success ceiling and the success floor.
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That background stress feeling is still gone today. I did have a couple of visualization flashes of the wife being denied for disability, but they lacked mental force and were easily interrupted.
I’m not thinking entirely positive just now, but I’m well on my way. -
I am definitely thinking positively about myself. I was thinking earlier that I am on my way to becoming the guy I felt myself turning into when I was nineteen.
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I got my Sennheiser 280 pro headphones this morning. I’ll see if that makes a difference with my Ultima tomorrow morning.
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I actually won something. I don’t think I’ve ever actually won a prize like that before. I’m not sure when I’m going to get around to running Heartsong, but it’s a nice thing.
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I did my first loop of FPU on my Sennheiser HD 280 pros. It sounded different and it seemed to hit differently. After it finished my mind felt clearer. I felt focused, but I don’t know what I was focused on. I’m sure that means that my subconscious was a lot more engaged with doing whatever FP was telling it to. Throughout the day, I had no visualization of negative outcomes at all, and not many semi voluntary positive ones either.
I realized that the constant semi forced visualization of the outcomes I wanted wasn’t an entirely good thing. It’s kind of like constantly opening the oven to check on something while it’s baking. It means that I’m worrying about it, and it actually interrupts the process.
I got a strong sense that my subconscious was saying “stop worrying about it, I’ve got this.”.
The attitude I’m developing is that I take it as a fact that everything is going to turn out the way I want it to. I’m looking forward to it, but not giving it that much thought. It’s almost like I know the weather is going to cool off sometime in the fall. -
Money manifestations are showing up. In this case I’m going to be working a lot of overtime for a while starting the last week of the month. It looks like it’s going to be that way for a while. I may have to grind for it, but I am very grateful for the opportunity to do that. This will give us the opportunity to get through until the wife’s disability comes through, and possibly to get a bit ahead after that.