The yoga i feel so lucky to practice & share is a practice of intimacy with All, of making love with life…the union of opposites revealing the source of opposites
It comes via Krishnamacharya, grandfather of modern yoga, but “waterblasted” of religious seeking by UG Krishnamurti
My friend in Berlin was telling about the phenomenon where young people who are like the stand out weird person of their small town move to berlin and have a complete personality crisis/meltdown because nobody a) notices them at all or b) cares
You can definitely change how attractive you are. I’ve seen people transform before my eyes in a matter of days from sexless drudge to vital siren. A combo of relaxation, release, joy, less worry, less facial tension, more pleasure in being.
A young friend expressed his feeling of social anxiety honestly in a yoga gathering.
I just had time to lean in to warn him in a whisper: “after this, several people will come up to you and act strangely”.
“How did you know that would happen?” he said to me later.
Because he had expressed something that many feel but few admit, and because he is young, some rushed to ‘advise’ him… they were rushing to push away their own anxieties, to pack what he had said back into the box
Worst realisations (ie least welcome) i’ve had over the years:
- no one is coming to save me, nobody can
- there are potentially no limits to how bad i can make myself feel and if i choose that noone will be able to stop me
- people who love me are capable of being happy even
So i have a friend who is ACTUALLY love and light, she is the joyful state all the spiritual bypassers try to fake, and people project soooo much bullshit onto her
Amazingly enough i stopped being insane and “co-dependent” once i stopped choosing to be with someone who was constantly rejecting me out of fear of intimacy
My most beautiful female friend: “i can only hang around beautiful women or women who think they are beautiful, same thing, the others resent me too much and are mean”
Sounds arrogant but ive seen it in action and its true
Yes you COULD take a crowbar to your nervous system (extreme breathwork, psychedelics, etc) to prise open the things we protect ourselves from… but there are gentler ways that dont risk completely losing our minds
When did bikini bottoms stop covering the ass. Its so funny, all these people on the beach with 95% of their bare ass on display, but youre not meant to look at it too hard , and everyone is pretending they are still clothed, and would totally freak out at an actual naked person
How to get your time back
- stress less (it doesnt matter so much)
- bathe less (its the stress that smells)
- work less (for most)
- eat less (for most, some eat more)
- spend less (its 90% useless crap)
- groom less (its neurotic)
- care less (just say no)
- vegetate less (shed
You have no time because you have to do “fun” & “entertaining” things all the time because you have been dissociated from the first & simplest pleasure, that of feeling at home in this world & intimate with everything. Clarify that & the need to cheer oneself up all the time goes
Hear me out - what if “my husband doesnt do his share of the cleaning” is because the cleanliness standard is a little bit neurotic, pointless, time consuming and unnecessary?
I propose that a nonzero portion of cleaning is done as OCD or an avoidant hobby
Resist the Professionalisation of Everything
Write as if to your beloveds
Serve food as if to your beloveds
Speak as if to your beloveds
Email as if to your beloveds
Cold-call as if to your beloveds
Advertise as if to your beloveds
Admire as if with your beloveds
Imagine you are a deity. A human contacts you, apparently loving you. They place flowers at your feet. Then they ask how to get enlightened. You realise they dont love you at all and only want to use you as a means to an end. You feel sad.
People with poor boundaries are a total pain in the ass to do anything with, because they will do stuff they don’t want to do and then resent you for it 🙄
Here’s what i would recommend to do with an unlimited budget to create a real, beautiful, happy life:
1. An insane amount of massage - daily?
2. Pay someone to help you declutter
3. Move somewhere quite warm with clean air and rain, and not mouldy
I used to pretty much always drive away from my parents’ house weeping with rage, frustration, disappointment, lonliness, repression or some combination of the above.
In case this resembles anyone else’s situation, here are some things that changed this to mostly harmony
If you want to be ungovernable, you have to be okay with people having hurt feelings & blaming you for them —because consciously or unconsciously we use feelings to govern each other
I cannot prove it empirically, but i find it usefully empowering to look through the lens of “i chose this family. I chose these things i wanted to learn. I chose these difficulties, to clarify these things. This is the deal, i embrace it.”
“Chaotic, compulsive thinking is not a design flaw in the human system that we must medicate or meditate our distance from. It is the intelligence of the body-mind letting us know that our mind has become dissociated from its source, and needs to participate in what is actually
Holy moly industrialised rich country middle class norm is so so so insanely luxurious . This must be like the last days of rome, how can we possibly continue with supermarkets and heated blankets and coconut yoghurt and bamboo silk rugs and excess novels and free libraries and
Almost everyone is in a state of helpless vulnerability like a naked baby lying by a freeway , because their discernment is not working.
To get discernemnet working, you have to:
- stop lying to yourself
- feel all the things you dont want to feel
- admit all uncomfortable
Thinking that youre worse than others is a more socially acceptable form of ego than thinking you are better, because it doesnt threaten people, but its exactly the same deluded mechanism and im ready to treat em just the same in my mind
One effect of a desensitizing, automatifying world, is we end up concentrating attraction on physical visual appearance. But attraction has so many more facets in a feeling body: how someone moves, the timbre of their voice, the mood of being near them, the smell of them, their
@eatingmehole
Hmm. Like a person saying a mix of “oh X that was great what you said, youre doing so well, youre amazing, have you tried hakomi therapy, i used to be like that”
Condescension, unconsciously establishing themselves as someone who doesnt have the issue raised, not vulnerability
Small talk is fine because people themselves are not at all small, & while we bathe in their presence we make these little cute irrelevant noises about each other like piglets grunting
Only when we’re numb to presence do we demand “depth experiences” from others through language
Im looking forward to when experience-collecting (“oh yeah we did the waterfall, oh yeah we did the mudslide on friday”) is recognised as consumerism just as much as purchasing items
The great dilemma for so many of us to break free from, it seems: our parents CANNOT love the way we want them to. No amount of coercion, pleading, sulking, coaching, guilting, yelling, avoiding, serious talks or bribing will make capacity to love where it is lacking. THEY CANT
The conventionally best-looking man i know keeps getting his heart broken because women are drawn to fling themselves at him who don’t actually love him or care about him
(yes he is figuring out how to discern this)
do really good looking people ever know for sure if someone's with them because they really love them or it's just because of their looks? or it doesn't even matter?
If you only allow yourself to get out of things that are wrong for you by being sick, you’re training your body to be sick as the only way to get out of things that are wrong for you
Not that interested in environmental strategies that a dead person can do better than me.
“Reduce footprint”? “Cut emissions” dead people are winning at these
I am interested the unique tasks of the living, that only we can do
Sex is an act of giving, with the whole body / heart, a communication of love. In its degraded form, it becomes and act of taking, trying to get a feeling from another person’s body.
You can tell if someone has authentically mostly finished with their own suffering, because they will spontaneously start being useful to others with theirs. Most people have just stuffed it in a cupboard however its quite obvious.
Saying “i love you today but i dont know how i’ll feel tomorrow” isnt transcendent spiritual wisdom free of all bondage, its avoidance and will bring out the worst in your beloved, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy
Im sad watching a friend break up with her partner & seeing all the usual patterns. It didnt have to be like this.
The usual relationship is just vampiring off each other & calling it “needs” until one person cant take it
Love fails not when i am unloved but when i fail to love
Hello to everyone who is doing their best to love their parents and be grateful to them for being alive despite them being unaware of the permanent psychic damage they inflicted through their own emotional deprivation and the chains of karmic patterns known as ancestral lineage
Adulthood to me feels like no longer demanding parents to have been emotional paragons and instead loving them in gratitude for giving me a body, a lineage, an education, feeding me and not leaving me in the gutter
“They should have done X better” is an unnecessary extra concept
I thought it was bad that the therapists couldnt talk like a real person, but even worse, now the real people have started talking like therapists??
Its demonic because its not REAL, its a patterned language of faux tolerance “im here for you” without real love or humour
“Let me interrupt you. We havent been in touch for a while & its okay. Youre calling to get something & thats okay too. We are inherently connected. Im not mad at you for not being in touch. You dont have to pretend to be interested in my life right now before asking the favour”
I cannot overstate how deeply it is programmed in* to the female psyche to want to be “hot”
I would have traded everything and anything for it
Seemed like ultimate source of power
Because male attention was assumed as ultimate source of power - even internalised
Because male was
I’ve met several guys who feel they ought to be teachers, because they’re just so overflowing with spiritual insight and experience, but they are fundamentally disinterested in, if not scornful of, the lives of others (except as an audience or person to help).
It’s an archetype
Today i send apologies to every person whom i encouraged or even dated without actually feeling mutual love/lust, just because i was insecure & feeding off their admiration. Accidental cruelty. Sorting ourselves out is not selfish.
Youre ignoring the achievements of growing skin, hair, of having a liver, of growing from a single cell, the miracle that is your eardrums, youre ignoring the achievement that is oxygen transfer and mitochondria, the heartbeat, the flush of hormones at the sight of beauty
I sat down with a sweet guy who had been doing ayuascua in Peru 300 ceremonies, now in Bali deeply dissociated into advaita vedanta. Practicing hours a day. Seeking makes people DEADLY serious.
What's the point of believing yourself enlightened when you cannot relate to others?
Me at 24 with my friend Tim… people used to say we fought like married siblings. He was a total genius and the oldest of five boys and lived next door to my hippy flat. I would barrel in to the chaotic family, wake him up, thrust breakfast in his face, throw his wetsuit at him
The test for meditators: can the sexual current flow comfortably in your body, witthout haste, without urgency, without thrashing around, without the need for urgent tension-release orgasm… can you enjoy being full of desire when ‘nothing happens’, can you walk away mid-embrace—
Here’s what happens when you have a child to cheer yourself up and give your life meaning: the child’s nervous system is massively burdened with the sense of being responsible for an adult when it should be the other way round. They learn to adapt themselves to the parents needs,
Is it possible that not everyone feels like they have to spend their life doing something intensely meaningful and sincere? Or is it a hidden universal urge
Some v painful yet common beliefs i see over and over:
- this is my fault
- there is something wrong with me
- this will never change
- i cannot change
- i’m damaged
- other people don’t like me
- this situation is not fixable
What scares me about normal people is that they seem to believe that being normal is a moral responsibility, and they will gang up on you given half a chance in that shared belief
@VividVoid_
My contrarian take having studied illustration for 4 years is that the AI stuff isnt art, but that the vast majority of what gets called art isnt art either, so it doesnt matter. What gives real art power to me is the communication of the perception of the artist, not aesthetics
Its a privilege to be around someone who is grieving. In their rawness they stand close to a door between worlds, a realness, a sharpening of what matters.
"Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person; having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but to pour them all out, just as they are, chaff & grain together, knowing that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and
It doesnt matter in the end how perfect your parents and their attentions were, we all suffer the painful misunderstanding of embodied birth: that i am this physical thing, vulnerable, alone, abandoned by nurturing connection, bound for death. Our independence is interpreted as
Only problem is once i found out this was possible for myself its hard to see the second order effects OF being stressed or worried - my attractiveness massively changes - so its still not safe to base self esteem on this or it will be missing just when we need it most
You cant just bully your mind and body into gratitude… gratitude comes naturally when our full feeling capacity starts being restored so we can actually FEEL the sunlight, the wind, the murmour of trees, the state of an animal, the quality of life
Have you considered how “only able to feel attraction to socially sexy physical appearance” is going to affect intimacy in relationship as we age together…?
I just met a beautiful, upright, intelligent youngish man whose dignity was continually undermined by the need to clarify how nothing was his fault, and i felt such sympathy, because i do this too, and its often an adaption to angry parents/adults
I understand that people notice their mind is insane and want to relief from it. But I'm begging you to go down into the body, into life, into relationships, into the heart, into the wound and heal it... not up and out. Please!
When i emotionally collapse in the face of someone’s reasonable anger, i am depriving them of their moment of just expressing that emotion, not receiving them, and thereby preventing their anger ripening naturally into grief & compassion
“I want to live on a commune with other like-minded people”
= my friendships always dissolve because of the unresolved dysfunctional relational patterns i bring to them, so i would like some friends “on tap” who are trapped there with me and wont abandon me like all the others
Not a seeker any more 🌿 forget it, enjoy your life. Theres nowhere to get to amd nothing to be liberated from. Unity is already the form of reality. We can relax
Yes you can go to a beautiful yin yoga class or a sound bath or a forest bath or a massage or a healing session and sooth the nervous system, and its needed and valuable.
But i am interested in WHY our body-mind resets into stress by default. What is frightening it?
What has helped is acknowledging that it IS like that. That is how it is. And it is not in my power to fix that. It is not my job to change the emotional state or maturity of my parents. It is my job to love them as they are, two people who gave me form and kept it alive.
I found that most of my grief & anger driving away was toward myself—that i hadnt made it work, hadnt achieved depth or intimacy or cathartic release.
Life is better without these ideals
Someone said “people can only meet you as deeply as they have met themselves” & its true