Hi nycartist

I suspect many find themselves in a similar situations.

As a archetype the “liberal” is expected to be kind and listen to all sides and be kind when responding while the “conservative” gets to tell it as it is.  When a conservative offends that’s the offended problem when the liberal offends its their problem. That is of course a very general statement yet I suspect many may be offended by it.

For reasons I don’t fully understand we live at a time where the tenancy is to be ‘offended’ when we disagree.  To “take offence”.  “The Stoic philosophers taught that if you choose not to be offended by others’ actions, you will not be. An offense is up to your interpretation. Instead, treat others with kindness and assert your autonomy.” In other words to be offended one chooses to be offended.

I am not saying that your friends are doing this however a tactic (often unconsciously) to quite someone is to take on the role of being offended and victim.  It is also possible that your friends are offended because their is a part of themselves they don’t want to look at. Assuming someone isn’t intentionally trying to be offensive choosing to be offended is a great excuses to avoid checking in with whether ones values, actions and words are inline with who we think we are and stand for.

Just like your friends you have the right to express yourself especially if  you feel being silent is not being authentic to your self.  It is unlikely you will find a safe place to do so in these charged times. I hope you keep trying.

Its a sad reality but sometimes Love requires a relationship to end especially if continuing the relationship is leading to a distortion.

From the way you are able to express yourself I suspect you will come through this stronger and with healthy boundaries that will enable you to find a relationship and love that is waiting for you.

I can’t quite grasp this “let go” concept. It’s suppose to be good and make you feel good,

I think it may be unhelpful attaching concepts like “feeling good” (good or bad) to the art/skill of letting go.  I think because a aspect of letting go involves removing our labels about our experience as being this or that, and not attaching ourselves to such labels.. When we do this we gain a perspective in which we can view what were letting go of  in a new light. Your kind of looking at yourself looking at the experience without attaching your sense of self to what you see and feel. This does not mean you don’t feel but instead are in a space that allows the feelings and experience to flow.

You might note that it is the ego that attaches itself to the experience and feelings which prevents flow.  So letting go involves ego work. If your clinging to something its likely your ego trying to fix and control something.

To the ego ‘letting go’ feels like dying so its often fear that keeps you hanging on. The reality is Letting go is a kind of metaphorical dying as we are detaching our sense of self from the ego identity which is clinging to the experience and or feelings. If your sense of identity/self is overly attached to your ego  your going to fear ‘dying’ and cling to it for all your worth,  stop flow. (and growth)

When we do let go you might notice that the ego has been placed into its proper place as the part of us that helps us communicate our experiences and making the unconscious conscious.  The ego not the captain of the ship but the link between the engine room and the bridge.

Letting go is not a state of indifference or forgetting but a process of “becoming”  more conscious of our True Selves. Its a process of growth as we bravely observe the experience, feelings and identity were clinging to and trying to fix or control. We ask ourselves why we are clinging to it? What am I afraid of? How is what I find attached to my sense of identity? Should it be? And as we grow and learn we allow the experience to flow.  What might the experience teach us about ourselves if we looked at it without fear or need to attache our sense of self to what we learn. (which would be the ego wanting to be captain again)

The paradox you might be getting frustrated by is that it takes a healthy ego to let go of ego. Meaning you need a health senses of self with healthy boundaries to realize your Self is not that. (letting go requires boundary work) A healthy sense of self with healthy boundaries does not need to cling to or attache itself to a sense of self.

A question the lies behind all wisdom teaching though for some reason never directly asked.  How are you responding to Life as it is.  To Life wonder and horror (as life must feed of life). A seed that does not ‘die’ does not become a tree. That is its wonder and horror.

All the wisdom traditions point to the better answer as being a unequivocal YES. Yes it all the joy and the suffering. Not a easy place to stand and you can only stand in that yes when you are in the present moment as it is only in the present moment that Life Is.  Letting go requires work of leaning to be present. Another irony or paradox is that we work for which no work is required. Thus like Paulo Coelho Alchemist who discovers his treasure was were he started. We return home to see it for the first time.

Unfortunately most wisdom traditions are misunderstood and so many of us answer THE question of how to respond to Life As It Is with a NO – get me off this ride, or a No, we broke Life but we can fix it if we follow all the rules and be good little boy’s and girls.

A honest attempt at ‘letting go’ will require ego work, boundary work, learning to be present and the development of the skill of detachment while staying fully engaged in life. No easy task as the trap will be indifference and withdraw from life.  If you keep at it though and when life asks you to look it in the eye, as it is in all its wonder and horrors and answer the question of how you are you responding? Yes? No? Maybe? Only one of thus answers is flow.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by Peter.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by Peter.

The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly one you can never have – Kierkegaard.

It may be a error to think that ‘letting go’ means forgetting. The reality of life is that it is a cycle of letting go, a cycle of birth, death and rebirth, the reality of each breath we take.

We ‘Let Go’ as we detach our ego from the moment to better learn from it. the ego will attempt to cling, blame, control and identify the moment as being the self. So we detach (this is not indifference) the ego to get perspective.

No experience is lost when we take what we learn forward.  Looking boldly at the best and worse our experiences the path forward become clearer.
Love given and received is never lost. Sometimes love means a relationship ends but it remains Love. The ping pong nature of your relationship born out of love is not the love you need in this moment.

How do you breath through this mental block? We work for that which no work is required. The thoughts that you have are a real as only you make them.

Great question Dom

I think this is one of the most important questions. If you find yourself able to say Yes to life as it is, how do you stay engaged in life. A attribute that is helpful is being able to hold what appears to be opposing ideas at the same time. Getting comfortable with Paradox

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. F. Scott Fitzgerald

How to remain engaged in life and Accept (say yes) to the life (the moment) as it is?  How to “be grateful for the thing you wished most never happened” – Steven Colbert   How to “Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy.” – Joseph Campbell

My understanding of Buddhism engages the idea of Detachment. This is not indifference which would lead to the issues of stuckness your concerned about. Detachment is the practice of acknowledging/accepting the moment as it is without attaching a sense of self (ego) to the experience while living your truth and engaging in that moment. Can you hold the two seeming opposing actions of accepting the moment while living your truth to engage that moment?

This is action coming from a place of humility, honesty… vice anger, revenge… If one is in a brutal relationship the task is to see the relationship as it is and as Anita mentions changing what you can. Love may require that relationship end. Accepting the situation as it is in that moment does not mean you don’t stay in that situation. Accepting may be recognizing that you can’t time travel to undo the moment. Accepting is Seeing the situation as it is and acting on your truth as you know it to be in that moment.

Perhaps the problem comes down to how we define the word ‘Accepting’ ?  If accepting is a surrender you will likely end in indifference. But if acceptance is seeing things as they are then your in a better position to recognize what you might influence

As you said everyone journey is unique… well it should be – As in the Arthurian quest each Knight enters the woods where no one else has entered before.

In the task of Individuation often involves coming to terms with our mother/father complexes. Often influenced by our relationships with our parents however the idea is to learn how create healthy boundaries with regards to how we nurture (mother archetype) and discipline (father archetype) ourselves. You might say take on the responsibly of parenting ourselves. Many people are uncomfortable with such exploring as ‘blaming’ ones parents how ever the task involves seeing ones parents as unique individuals who like all people  sometimes succeeded and failed. its not about blame but becoming conscious of the lessons learned and the sorting out what you wish to keep and what you need to work on. You appear to have started this process.

Though I was never a ‘player’ I suspect there is much you learned about yourself through them. Perhaps the beginning of defining Love – What Loving and being loved might mean at a deeper level. You use the word crush interchangeable with the word love begging the question where the experiences of a crush a experience of love?  How deep did such experiences go?

I would challenge you with the concept of ‘Self Love’. Many people use the words without defining what ‘Self Love’ might look like for them. Perhaps they have a vague imagining of loving oneself might feel like but nothing with regards to what it might look like. What would loving your self look like?  How would you know when you got their? If you did Love your self how would that influence your relating to others? What is the connection? Answering these questions and the questions they create will lead to a deeper relationship with the concept of Love.

The statement Love your neighbor as your self  was not a command its a statement of fact. We can learn much about ourselves and how we Love ourselves in the ways in which we love others.

We forget that the words we use are not the territory.  In your journey time and time again you will be ask to look past the words to what they point to.

Hi Fiest

You seem to have a good handle on how to proceed. I just wanted to add that most people assume they understand what hope is and how to hope. More often then not it gets entangled with existential angst, ego, control, desire for certainty, fear of uncertainty, desire to have life conform to our demands of how it ‘should’ be… Hope confuse as a kind of passive wishing.. waiting for that ‘something’ other then what it is.

Hope is paradoxical. It is neither passive waiting nor is it unrealistic forcing of circumstances.

Hope is like the crouched tiger, which will jump only when the moment for jumping has come. To hope means to be ready at every moment for that which is not yet born, yet hope is not desperate. Those who hope unskillfully settle down for self comfort (verses self care) or for violence; those whose hope is skillful see and cherish all signs of new life and are ready every moment to help the birth of that which is ready to be born.

To Hope is a state of being, an inner readiness. “and yet it would not be wrong to say that the tree hopes for the sunlight and expresses this hope by twisting its trunk toward the sun” – Erich Fromm

The Practice of hope is a art.. perhaps related to the idea of Zen’s doing by not doing…  keeping ones eyes open while continuing to engage with life.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 11 months ago by Peter.

“Most people think of love as a feeling, but love is not so much a feeling as a way of being present.” — David Richo

Hi Jordan

It might help if you define what you and your girl friend mean when using words like soulmate and love. From the what you wrote about your girlfriend who describing Joe as her friend but not having any ‘passion for’ she is likely defining soulmate and love differently then you are.

I am worried that her love for me is not pure. I always thought of love as what’s in the love stories… I really want to understand whether my girlfriend is someone who I can trust completely.

You have answered your own question – you do not trust your girl friend. You want to know if her love is pure and if you can trust her completely and then go that her love is not pure and that you don’t/can’t trust her.

I’ll be honest I had difficulty reading past your concept of love as being ‘whats in a love story’.

Between the lack of trust and romanticized concept of relationships and love I don’t think your ready for anything deeper without out allot of personal work.  Your story reads more about a desire to have control over someone then loving them, writing down our thoughts is a tricky business so if I’m wrong I apologize.

I do not mean to be cruel. This idea of a ‘pure’ love doesn’t mean much to me. I think its something that people just say without defining for them selves what it means to them. And trust comes from having healthy boundaries and sense of self, trusting yourself. If you don’t trust yourself you will never trust another. The idea ‘completely trusting’ to me imply s having boundaries that are so ridged that any trespass will be enough to knock them down, or so week that they don’t exist.

We see things as we are not as they are. If you want this relationship to work you will have to trust her and get over her having any male friends. If you can’t do that , that’s fine, this relationship is not for you. That boundary, that choice/issue is yours. I will say this In partnerships where one gives up (asked to give up) their friends to make the other feel better about the relationship… its not love, its fear and possibly control, not relationship.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 11 months ago by Peter.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 11 months ago by Peter.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 11 months ago by Peter.