Hi Rick
My feelings on such matters is that after such a breakup a clean break is the best for everyone involved.
If she has asked you to stop contacting her you need to respect that.  Her response to the birthday contact didn’t invite any further contact so its pretty clear.

Sometimes Love requires that a relationship ends. I’ve been there and I know it hurts. Sorry

Hi Lily

Its sounds like you have a good idea of what you need to work on and what you need to do.

With regards with working on understanding your past and how its impacting your present finding a new therapist with that specific goal in mind might be helpful.  I found David Richo books a helpful guide – ‘When the Past Is Present’ and ‘The Five Things We Cannot Change’

For the issue of what you can do now I like what you said, “I think I need to set small tasks for myself and not do too much at once.”

From the list I would start with – exercising more while practicing non-judgment. “Just do it” no thinking required

I challenge you to go for a walk at lunch or after supper everyday for the next two weeks. Doesn’t have to be far.

While your walking,  notice your thoughts. Notice what happens if you label yourself based on the thoughts you have. There is no right or wrong way to take a step,  no right or wrong thoughts.  Each step is only a step each thought only a thought. Feel the wind and the sun or the rain… notice that the thoughts quite and change if you set your attention on the light in the trees…  notice that thoughts flow, they can be observed without attaching ‘yourself’ to them…. Without having to follow them down the rabbit hole…

hi Lily
You are not alone.

There is a time for all things including feeling hopeless. The danger is in attaching the sense of self to the emotion allowing the feeling of hopelessness to define you as being hopeless. Such a attachment tends to end in stuckness.  A mindfulness practice could help with that.

What kind of therapy were you trying?

Getting a handle on how the past may be influencing your present can be very helpful. Such work is a life long process that everyone should spend time on – Know thyself.  That said it is possible to, at the same time work on the smaller doable tasks. For example, putting things off is an issue you can work on without having to attach it to how you feel about yourself. In fact, one of the steps is learning how not to attach judgments about the self to the tasks you set for yourself. One small step at a time.  In that regard working with a life coach could be helpful – such a coach would help you focus on your goals.

The Power of Acceptance: Stop Resisting and Find the Lesson

Hi Nomad (not all who wonder are lost)

You mention that – the reality is that I’m in the present now… the reality is ‘you’ are always in the present. Its the only place ‘you’ can be. When you imagine the future you are bringing the future into the present.

Anyway if I understand, your saying that you can only quite your mind when you are focusing on goals and desire for the future? That your intention of meditation and awakening is to get control or this thing you call ego in order to achieve those desires?

There is a time for everything and this may not be the time worry about process. It may be enough just have started… and being open to learning.

Perhaps a place to start is to come into relationship with the ego. For many the ego is something we are ‘supposed’ to defeat. Its bad… however the ego plays a important role in becoming. Consciousness is a product of the experience tension. Here is a paradox for you – it takes a person with a healthy ego to detach the sense of self from the ego.  A weak ego will experience any attempt at detachment as trying to kill it and it will engage the ‘id’ to fight back.

Try to communicate a experience, to yourself or others without using the word ‘I’. You can’t. Notice that the ‘I’ is a construct of language, a symbol that points past it self to something we don’t quite see. Because we can’t see ‘it’ the error we make is mistaking this construct ‘I’ for the Self . We do this by attaching the ‘I’ to experience, emotions, desires, thoughts… we say and believe ‘I am the experience, I am the emotion = identification and attachment of the the construct of ‘I’  to a illusion which becomes ego – the ego believes ‘I am my ego’. It’s a difference getting to experience the emotion of sadness… and defining the ‘I’ as being the emotion of sadness.

One of the ideas behind meditation is to learn how to observe our thoughts, breathe… in time we notice that the ‘I’ is a constrict, a illusion. As we become mindful of this truth we learn to detach the ‘I’, the ego, from the emotion, thought, experience…  the mind becomes the still point.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 9 months ago by Peter.

― Hermann Hesse “Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.”

“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree.

When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farm boy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.” ― Hermann Hesse

Hi Rhys

Its normal in relationships to worry and experience jealousy… That said the anxiety and panic attacks are your ways of coping with uncertainty, worry and concern. From that perspective the attacks are not connected to your relationship.

The first task then is not to ‘fix’ your relationship but to find a better method of coping with uncertainty, worry and concern. These issues belong to you so be mindful if you start to project them onto your partner. For example, giving your power away by making your partner responsible for your feelings.

If you can try to find a way to create some space where you can ‘detach’ yourself from the experience of panic – as in not attach your sense of ‘I’ to the experience/emotions. (you are not your experiences or your emotions or your relationship…) Here you feel what you feel without becoming what you feel – a difference between ‘I feel sad’ and ‘I am sad’

By ‘detaching’ your sense of ‘I’ from the experience and emotions you will be better able to de-escalate the anxiety creating the space where you can better deal with the concerns you may have about your relationship .

Correction on my initial post – detachment is not indifference or stoicism

Just another note on forgiveness

When a person says they will never forgive, perhaps because they associate forgiveness with letting someone off the hook… The danger is that subconsciously they may be saying “I refuse to let go of the pain that was done to me. As long as I hold onto the hurt… I hurt and punish the one that hurt me… and I blame myself…

Anita is right, you don’t need to consciously go through the process of forgiveness. It may not even be advisable if you are unclear as to what forgiveness means. Anita will help you learn what you need to learn from the experience and so hopefully move on… which can also be an important part of the forgiveness process.

It is my hope that when you do find your way past the experience that hate and anger your feel will have dissipated as the danger is to become bitter.

Joseph Campbell Tells the following story. It may not appear to be about forgiveness however it does I think point to why the process of forgiveness is important to becoming.

A samurai warrior had the duty to avenge the murder of his overlord. After some time, he found and cornered the man who had murdered his overlord. As he was about to deal with him with his samurai sword, when this man in the corner, in the passion of terror, spat in his face. In this moment the samurai sheathed the sword and walked away. Why did he do that?

Because he was made angry, and if he had killed that man then, it would have been a personal act, of another kind of act, that’s not what he had come to do.

The samurai’s mission was not simply to kill the murderer, but to honor his master and fulfill his duty. Killing the murderer out of anger would not have fulfilled the intrinsic call of his duty. To an observer, whether he killed the culprit motivated by honor or anger, it wouldn’t have mattered. The murderer would be dead either way.

But to the samurai, his own motivation made all the difference. He needed a crystal clear answer for why he was taking action, and a reactive response out of anger would not only be dishonorable, it would negate the reason for his quest.

You can choose your response. You can observe an unhelpful emotion take hold, but you don’t have to react. You always can choose to act in a way that honors the vision of the person you truly want to be.

Nothing is just a means to an end. Every action is an end in itself. The path is the destination, right? It’s the journey that matters.

Hi Talia

Your creating a great deal of suffering for yourself. As you have had affairs in the past that did not work out and that this man is married something else is going on which has nothing to do with what this guy does or doesn’t do. Getting to the bottom of that before involving yourself any more may be helpful.

I don’t mean to be cruel but you need to stop contacting married men. I don’t think  “just friends”works for you or that your ready for that.  You like the attention and validation you get from good looking guys however until you discover that such validation isn’t required for a strong sense of self your going to recreate the scenario repeatedly until you learn the lesson.

You might want to create some space, with no men, and really look at what you want for yourself and what you want from a relationship.

David Richo books on relationships might be helpful for you.