Restless

Being caught up in the self-improvement loop is better than indulging self-destructive alternatives. Still, you’re fundamentally operating from restlessness—wherein: Rather than letting the truest impulses find you, you are busy rushing things. Your mind compels you to bulletproof and forcefeed:

• your ’’brain’’ with knowledge and information
• your ’’persona’’ with newsletters, updates & feeds on social
• your muscles and tendons with (over)corrective stretches and excessive exercise
• your ’’gut’’ with supplements and supposedly nutritious foods
• your ’’soul’’ with spiritual teachings

Etc.

All too busy deferring and buffering against the very wholeness that you seek.

 

Stuff I wish I had been told before entering “adulthood”

Not that it would have mattered (or meant) much, but still:

• Keep warm. Eat for heat. Keep your feet, your hands and nose warm in the colder seasons. Keep blood sugar elevated and relatively steady.

• You are not responsible for how others feel and act. Everybody is responsible for themselves. The slightest sense of guilt and shame you feel signal that you are playing games with yourself.

• All emotional pressure is self-imposed. Nobody is responsible for how you feel. Most of your pain is psychological which can be let go of by relaxing and seeing (through) it. Opportunities for this (in the form of problems and cringeful moments) will recur until there is total recognition.

• Girls are not like boys. Girls emote and they’re geared to react. Don’t be logical with her, ride her emotional waves instead. She doesn’t want to be impressed: she wants to be seen, met, felt, desired and taken by someone who has (loose, relaxed) poise and knows what he wants. Transparency is a big turn on for her. She wants to be ’thrusted’ by someone who can be totally trusted.

• Don’t take yourself (too) seriously. Don’t take things personally. Stay loose, at ease. Keep things light and simple. Stay cool.

• An argument doesn’t mean the end of a relationship. Conflicts are not ominous precursors to impending abandonment. They are an integral part of relationships. Nothing is ever personal, really. All things in intimacy are transpersonal, which is to say: Conflicts are openings.

• You cannot lose what/who truly belongs to you. The truth can’t be harmed. You always have what you need at the moment.

• You do not violate anyone by ’inconveniencing’ them with (your) truth—only your fragile little ego, which is always a good cause.

• It’s OK to be solitary in nature and to be a semi-recluse if that’s what makes you tick & feel alive. It doesn’t mean that you don’t deserve (to) care (for others).

• Don’t rush (into) anything, let things come to you. Things come to you when it’s time for them to come to you. Relentlessly: keep decelerating.

• Whatever you achieve in life you achieve despite your efforts, to the extent you give it space (~pure attention). Your life is a reflection of where you tend to place your attention. The more relaxed you are the more you tend to place your attention where it belongs.

• Wallowing in occasional bouts of sorrowful self-pity and emotionally abusing yourself is perfectly natural but remember that it’s also one of the easiest thing in life you can indulge in doing. That’s why everybody is doing it. Enjoy the odd melanchoholic binge but don’t overdo it unnecessarily. Don’t be a bitch, please.

• Much like everybody else you’ll feel some-one truly special compared to others, the uncrowned king/queen of (your little) universe, unrecognized and underappreciated. And that’s why you are going to struggle to be (seen as) better than ’’them’’. It’s totally futile.

• Your most important task in life is to find out the truth about who/what you truly All else is secondary.

• Nothing is a big deal. All is well, even when it’s not. Just stay available.

 

Qs for the Self-Improvement Folks

Are you still convinced that you can resolve your disagreeable issues? Are you still relating from the illusion of agency? Do you still dismiss the truth of this moment [the real essence of your being]? Do you still prefer to argue with it? Is it still the exhausting spin of your wheels that brings you peace of mind? Do you still need to (repeatedly) crash instead to relax and have a rest?

Become The Weakest Version of Yourself

The concept of becoming a stronger or even worse the strongest version of yourself is a recipe for disaster, if it’s taken literally. To resolve & transcend the issues that plague one’s messed up persona(lity) is an impossible mission from the get-go. You’ll always manifest your neuroses & hangups until you relate from the vantage & confines of a persona(lity). The only way you can engage in real, ’’healthy’’ & robust energetic transactions with the world and other people is when you relate from your true essence, the impersonal realm beyond or rather in front of your thoughts & feelings; when you relate from in front of your persona(lity), in front of your conditioned, functional & dysfunctional PATTERNS of relating; when you relate from the truth of the moment, that is. That’s the only way. The alternative is but silent struggle.

from square 1

you have to keep losing the balance a little
in order to keep improving it

pay attention

your poise intensifies to the extent you take ownership of your wobbles

appreciate your threshold of stress-tolerance in order to widen it:

where you are capable of absorbing an exposure’s impact
without too much somatic desynchronization
that’s where you are at

feel

effortless effort

there is this seeming paradox
of resisting less and less and slowly relaxing into and freely expressing who you already are
and resisting more and more and progressively detaching and pushing away from who you think you are

balance

distraction driven shadow activities
that twist behavior into a self-perpetuating runaway loop
like binging on carbs, music, video games, or clinging emotionally to someone, chasing the next materialistic fix, “biohacking,” etc.
are not bad per se, not something to be eliminated,
they are part of the equation called your self
the trick is to stay on top of more and more of your wobbles with your presence

proactively detox from excessive noise

when you feel excited
when it feels hard to slow down
that’s exactly when you should decelerate

rather than feed into the frenzy
by acting out superficial impulses
(messaging-massaging-binging-etc)
you must ease into that state
you must be with it
and feel deep into it

__

map it, scan your body
which parts seek to escape at that moment
which parts do okay
what is the percentage of your “absence”

gauge things

take ownership
captain your bodily vessel
own its wobbles

relax into Presence
remind yourself that you belong here
to this moment now
repeat: I am here, I belong here

take stock

exfoliate the excess
tend to your “abscess”

witness your poise slowly seep back

all your urges shall be postponed till after you regain sufficient poise
otherwise you accelerate depletion by compounding an energetic deficit

you are not losing or falling or missing out

__

everything you find relevant
and saps your presence by experiencing its lack
is relevant only in your reality tunnel

you are but another opening
another pore
upon the opulent bristle of Presence

calling

what I do has always felt trivial to me
something that I indulged in

something that meant that I am too weak to move on like others

but not any more

I can feel the validity of what I am doing now

it has great value and it has relevance

not many people are mentally equipped for this kind of preoccupation

the methodical release of self-imposed pressures

cultivating the art of letting go

re-claiming a life-style of play-fullness

I am committed to connect lotsa dots
and cross lotsa lines

I am in the business of creating Qs (or cues)
that trigger the state of poise,
of unfazed awareness,
of presence, groundedness, centeredness,
of trust, intuition, appreciation & ease

of suppleness

forever in chase of the apposite phrase
I write
a lot

I am devoted to liberate the specific
from the tyranny of the special

I am in the business of deconstructing the “local” and disclosing “non-locality” too:
my mind is rigged to seek parallels, echoes, resonances
I relish abstraction
I am passionate about detecting underlying principles that relate the seemingly unrelated

poststructuralist self-help

the idea of alignment presupposes an essentialism of sorts

the binary thinking that lurks in my posts has more to it than a dichotomy, though

when I speak of authentic versus inauthentic impulses
(or what Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy discussing love distinguishes as honest and dishonest or natural passion vs disease/excess/defect)
is but the two ends of a spectrum
that like along a moebius strip
fold into each other

virtue and vice bleed into each other
they are not even two sides of a coin
they are one side of a loop
a dynamic unfolding that occasionally “runs away” (spiralling into a vicious cycle)
causing all sorts of dysfunction
(flare-ups, fevers, skin breakouts, aches & pains, diseases of the body & the mind, etc.)
but then over time self-corrects and moderates itself

homeostasis seeps through the cracks of our resistance
that inner voice, no matter how still and how small, is a powerful attractor

on second thought, though
I do tend to bias my logic toward the you discover yourself rather than create yourself side of the argument even though I resonate with the latter
as in there is no essence to which to align,
rather you create yourself on the go
from a core of emptiness