That’s an excellent idea, Zenith: to not visit India at the same time your co-sister is there 👍

Yes, I remember you shared about him not setting boundaries with his parents. It makes sense to think that he has some sort of trauma growing up.

🤔 Maybe his elder brother took on one role in the family (king) so, he took the opposite role because there can be only one king among siblings (don’t know, thinking out loud).

Coming to think about it further, maybe it’s his mother’s pattern: elevate some people (elder brother, one DIL) over other people (younger brother, other DIL)?

🤔 Anita

Good 🌄 Confused:

Yes, I was beginning to feel weird for using the vomit emoji 😐

How would making that list help? I’ll make a tiny (kinda) list that applies to me as an example:

I CAN’T Control the feeling of tension in my body right now, but I CAN Notice it (I just did), and I CAN- at this moment- take a slow breath, and a second one. It helps because for a moment, the tension has eased.

I Notice it eased and I am taking another slow breath because it helped (maybe I’ll build a habit of slow breathing over time, if I repeat this).

Confused: “I am trying to control my feelings all the time”-

You mean by analyzing (trying to think yourself into feeling differently), researching with AI, posting in reddit, etc.?

What if you first empathize with and validate what you do feel?

Example: ‘it sucks to not feel what I want to feel. It’s natural to want to feel happy and in-love. I feel sad and empty and guilty that I don’t feel those loving feelings’

Did you already try that?

😐 🤍 🤔 Anita

HeY 🌙 🦉 Confused:

“I can’t let go of control”- I can’t imagine anyone letting go of all control, just some.

I mean needing control is a natural need.

I suppose it’s about differentiating between what we can control and what we can’t control.

What if you made 2 lists: things you can control and things you can’t control?

(I am 🤔 of dropping the vomit emoji. What do u think?) Anita

Hey Peter:

Whatever comes to my mind this evening (with best intentions):

Peter the boy- an exceptionally perceptive and intelligent boy. He’s told that God is Love but then he’s also told that Love (God) hardens a heart..

Peter’s internal compass 🧭 says: Love hardens a heart? And then Love punishes the person whose heart it has hardened?

Day after day, night after night, year after year, no one to guide Peter toward a dictionary and a map that make sense.

So, Peter is lost in a desert for a long, long time, feeling like the Problem because no one was strong enough or loving enough or capable enough to say:

‘Peter, you are a good boy. You are smart and perceptive and you care about what is true and what is not true.

I see the worried look on your face, I see the questions in your eyes. Can you put words into your questions. I want to hear your questionns because I care about you. No wrong questions”.

That could have been a beginning of a much shorter stay in the desert.

🧭 🏜 🤍 Anita

Hi Peter:

The gap between the map (the rules presented from above with a Promise of reward for all those who follow, a false external compass) and the territory (not rewarded=> feeling like the Problem, distrust in the denied and abused internal compass).

And so, the stream, the music, the flow of grace get suspended within and one is neither alive nor dead (the living dead 🤔)

Entering the Promise land as a 🕺 💃 rather than as a servant- to me- that’s brilliant, Peter!

I want to take a little break and write more this evening.

💃 🕺 🎶 Anita

Hey 👋 Confused:

Yes, the state (not Wash DC), the green side of it. The servers of alcohol are trained to tell if a customer had too much to drink and refuse to serve more. (Sometimes a person enters a drinking establishment already intoxicated, and servers are supposed to detect that).

If someone leaves a drinking establishment intoxicated, at night, let’s say， drives，theres an accident and people get injured or killed, the police that arrives will ask the person where they had drinks that night and write down the name of the place. It’s in the record. Next, lawyers get involved and sue the place recorded (the empolyee/ server also gets fined)

Oh, I think that I remember how the main character in Groundhog day finally woke up to a new day: he gave up on the desire to wake up to a new day and made the best of the one day he kept waking up to. He started paying attention to the positives in that day and was kind and patient with people, unlike before.

I wonder if and how this can apply 2 u..?

🤔 🤢 🦉 Anita

As I am looking at my own heart this late morning, I see a heart previously (In the beginning, a forgotten beginning) vibrating with life, passion, hope and desire (that running on open fields of green grass)

Next, I see a bleeding heart with quickly-forming scar tissue. The living-vibrating parts almost disappearing in the midst of heavy scarring, the whole system designed to stop the bleeding so to survive, however minimally.

But alive it was, in the context of daydreaming/ fantasy.

Only a few years ago, Sarah, the server at the now closed winery, a woman who was there- in my presence- every day-evening she worked there, said to me (after I must have spoken, red-wined: ‘You were always so quiet (until then) I didn’t know if you could talk, or what your voice sounds like.’

It never occurred to me that I was quiet on the outside because of all the troubling noise on the inside.

And now, my heart is breathing life, scar tissue retreating, bit by bit (or lots and lots); flattened cells breathing in a third dimension.

The winery was closed December last year. The taproom I frequented since 2017 closed Friday last. Currently, I have no in-real-life socializing opportunities (the house is filled with stuff from the winery, boxes and boxes of papers and things, no way to entertain here).

I have found nothing more Alive-ing than connecting with people- here on tiny buddha and in real- life. It’s the oxygen that dissolves the scar tissue of the heart.

Does every hardening of a heart start with scar tissue, Peter? I wonder.

🤔 Anita

Hey 👋 Confused:

WA. Closed for good as a place that serves alcohol because the business owners weren’t making any profit, or any significant profit, and the owners of the property don’t want it to be a place that serves alcohol anymore because they’re afraid to be sued if a customer gets into an accident while intoxicated (the business owners of any establishment that serves alcohol buys insurance for that, but the owners were afraid they’ll be sued for any money beyond what the insurance will pay).

There’s a second vomit emoji showing up in my earlier post this morning: the yellow face with the green vomit, see it? (I used the computer to find it. Now back to my 📱)

What you described: waking up with the extreme urge to end things with her, and this urge coming and going many times- it reminds me of a movie I watched many years ago called Groundhog Day.

It’s about a man waking up every morning to the same day. He gets tired of it, being stuck in that way, so he jumps out of a window (or a building, don’t remember), and yet he wakes up to the same day (prior to jumping), yet again.

There’s also a love relationship there. If you’re curious about how he got unstuck and woke up to a new, different day, you can look it up. (I forgot how it happened but will look it up myself next time I have the use of a 🖥

🤢 Anita