Hi Kevin: I hope to read from you again, curious about how you’d respond to the replies you received.. 🤔

Hi Peter: what an impressive, comprehensive essay on (more than) Wanting Food When Not Hungry. It would have been Too Much for the OA (Overeaters Anonymous) meetings I used to attend back in the day, too much to intellectually process while craving pizza and chocolate 😏

But now that I’m not beside myself craving, I can listen to what you’re saying. You’re saying that we (humans) don’t have to Obey a thought or a craving or a desire, don’t have to Fight it, Flight it, Resist it, or Resove to ignore it in hope that it goes away.

Old identity: I am whatever thought passes through me, whatever feeling, craving, fear, desire that shows up, and I must attend to it immediately, fight or flight or.. get my panties up in a bunch in one way or another.

New identity: I am not the thought, the feeling, the craving that just passed through me.

I am the curious observer of these things that pass through me. I ask: what’s underneath these things that are passing through me?

And the answer may be: underneath is the territory, that which is true for everyone, like we all need to be carefree sometimes, to just be.

Did I get you, Peter 🤔?

Hi Roberta: May the mud settle at the bottom of the jar for all of us, may we not agitate ourselves or each other. May we be mud-free 🙂

🫂 Anita

Dear, dear Fried Potato from McDonald 🙂

I wish that you will soon feel better: Clear, Calm, Serene.

It’s Sat 5:39 pm here,totally dark outside. Fire is burning in the Woodstove, Bogart the beagle is stretched out in front of it and I’m typing this message to you on my phone 2 meters away.

By the way, during summers it doesn’t get dark here before 10 pm.

Reads like the death of your friend’s cat really did get to you. I wonder if it touched fear of death or.. fear of life unlived..?

I hope that the Sibiu plan takes place soon enough for artsy Robi 🙂

About the relationship. For one thing, you know that you don’t have to continue it. You have the right to disengage, to end it.

And sincerely, I don’t know if she’s a good match for you. At times I felt hopeful, but I really don’t know

When I think now what woman would be a good match for you 🤔 I’m thinking a financially secure woman, one with a generous, stable income who will share it with you (a woman easier said than done/ found, that is 😉) Living with her and with no one else (no mothers, no parents, no roommates), a bedroom the 2 of you share and your own private room. She’d be an emotionally strong, independent woman, one who lives and lets live.

Seems to me that some of the things you blame your gf would be fair to blame her if she was the match I mentioned right above.

I would like to read more about how or why you experience her as a burden. Not everything is about how you grew up.

I’m scrolling up and down reading and responding, and a little while ago, I almost lost my message, so, I’ll submit this and continue next

Thinking about you, me, hoping and wishing you’re doing all you can to prioritize your physical health 🫶

Anita

How are you, Nami?

🤍 Anita

Hello Peter 🙂

I hope that you have a calm offline time. I’ll reply here to your post from yesterday and the one from today in case you read it when you’re back online.

Thank you for understanding what “enduring” and “tolerating” mean to me. You understood it perfectly.

* I noticed yesterday that you ended your message with your name, like I do with my posts almost all the time. I think that it was the first time you ever did that 🙂

I like your distinction between Noticing stress and being Identified with it, as well as your presentation of Effort and Surrender- not as opposites, as 2 different things (my wording), but 1. I think that my inner world and the outer world would be better places with fewer and fewer opposites.

Not to Endure or Surrender, but both: “a willingness to remain present while releasing control over what happens next.” (your words).

“Sixty years later, the little girl who was holding her breath is still teaching the woman how to exhale”-

This sounds so profound.. the only way I can move toward understanding this is that the little girl and the older woman are not opposites, or 2 different people. It’s not a 👧 or an 👩‍🦳.

I want to welcome the little girl more and more into my awareness, to let her breathe within me. It may be that I (the adult) has pushed the little scared girl away from awareness in effort to push out fear.

I will be 🤔 this.

Thank you for responding, Peter, wishing you well 🤍

Anita

Hi Peter:

You talked about the territory vs the map plenty of times. I think I understood very little of it because for one, I get lost in abstract language.

Tonight, I want to develop the metaphor in ways that are personal and concrete to me. I don’t yet know what I’m going to say, I have neither a plan nor an agenda. I’ll write whateve comes to my mind.

Please feel free, Peter, to disengage from this if and whenever you need to 🙂

I suppose the territory is the same for me, for you and for everyone who has ever lived. One Territory, but Billions of Maps, however many people there are and have been. And within every map, the same words mean different things. “Enduring” for one is not the same enduring for another. Billions of “enduring”.

And for one person “enduring” in one context is different from the same word in a different context.

These thoughts are creating extra static noise in my 👂👂

So, what’s the point of talking, and should each person carry an individualized dictionary of words used, and defining the words within each definition.. oh, the static in my 🧠 right now 🙉

The way I grew up (that map of origin for this individual) was such that.. nature chose for my brain to minimize awareness and participation in life. The unendured danger was that my mother would commit suicide, the ongoing fear. I am feeling some of this fear now, 60 years after I heard her say it (she’s still alive, so I hear). But the F E.A.R was so real.. territory- fear real, not a mistaken map interpretation on my part.

My awareness of the territory (where danger lay) shrank incredibly. And this is how I lived (“lived” in this sentence requires a definition 🙂)

The tics started around that first time I remember her announcing suicide and leaving into the night when I was 5 or 6.

The territory that night shrank for me.

Over many years I developed a map, or maps trying to return to territory (“promised land”?) while all along holding my breath (the ongoing tic), waiting to exhale.

Fast forward to tonight, to our discussion, for me “enduring” means.. here I am breathing, saying to myself: ‘remember this, remember how it feels right now to breathe’

No, I won’t let my map-py rational mind run ahead of territory- me right now.

(I’m enjoying this writing, by the way).

Breathe. Go back to that night (NO!!!) Well, it’s easier to go back there at this moment because I’m listening to “Simple man”, Leonard Skinner.

Back there to that night. Endure.

It was really me. It really happened.

It’s not happening.

Breathe.

“Be a simple kind of man”..A simple Territory Man (Woman) 🙂

Another song, “Hold my hand.. Want you to hold my hand”

What if we’re holding hands, Peter, as I “endure” and as you “notice” 🤲. Isn’t it what territory is about?

“Will you be there holding my hand” (a different song). If I go crazy, will you still call me superman” (three doors down)

Crazy like Peter felt?

60 years ago, the girl that stopped breathing, separated from territory…what’s more territory than breathing..?

Breathe.

(I’ll respond to your last post later tonight or tomorrow morning)

👃 (just because), Anita

Hello again, Kevin 🙂

Yes, I experienced a whole lot of “I want food”.

What worked for me is neither #1- telling myself that I shouldn’t eat because I’m not hungry, nor #2- ignoring the thought (because the thought didn’t ignore me 😵‍💫)

What worked for me was the felt-experience of what it is that I was so very hungry for. I was hungry not for food, but for feeling like a child, a carefree child playing with other kids.

I didn’t get to experience that as a child because I was troubled, lonely, and felt too responsible and sad for my mother, and therefore I lacked the experience of being free to be a child.

Fast forward half a century (!), I got to be a child in 2 social settings, gradually and increasingly, over the course of 8-9 years. Actually, the profile photo you can see, that’s me dancing (Halloween, 2 years ago), truly feeling like a child, or a teenager.

Any of this resonates?

💃 Anita

Good morning, Peter 🙂

Your comment on my “enduring” and “tolerating” wording, suggesting these words carry unnecessary weight, vs your “noticing” (no unecessary weight) reminds me of what you wrote not long ago (I don’t remember where), that you wonder if your 🧠 is using words, or words are using your 🧠 🤔

I think that I do get your distinction while I stand (or sit, ha-ha) by my 2 words above in regard to my own experience of the somatic tension involves in Tourette’s tics.. as well as the social embarrassment when being seen or heard tic- ing.. as well when negative images about future possibilities pop into my brain (I’m typing as I’m thinking, so this is getting long) because the enduring and tolerating stop me from automatically escaping awareness and noticing altogether.

The enduring/ tolerating is like a bridge between the quite severe discomfort I experience- and staying with it.

An image that popped into my mind just now: the enduring is like the weight of a few rocks that prevent my awareness from evaporating and escaping my felt experience.

I wonder if you’ve practiced Noticing long- enough that you don’t need those rocks, and/ or maybe your physical discomfort is not as troubling as these tics that keep hijacking my body.

Maybe 🤔 if I practice enduring and tolerating long enough, noticing will do just fine.

Thank you for this conversation, Peter. I wish you a quiet day of noticing, and myself, a day of enduring, tolerating, and therefore staying with discomfort.

👣👣👣 Anita