Dear Gaia:

“I’m specifically trying ..to show myself empathy and staying mindful of the present moment by accepting whatever I’m feeling and the reality around me.. break from electronic devices, be more aware of the world around me, slow down, be mindful.. look at myself in the eyes, connect, feel tangibly and in a solid way what makes me, me”- keep practicing these things and get better and better at it.

“I live.. very ‘in-my-mind’, on autopilot, disassociated, cerebral.. Feels shattered, arrested, out of center, existent & non existent in and out of me… it races around in my mind. Did you also feel like this? What do you think about it?”

Yes, I felt like this. I suffered so much for so long, as a child, a teenager, a young adult and onward.

What do I think about it… I think that you better do what I am doing but way sooner than I started, and that is: do all that you can do to lower and lower that suffering. To put it in a different way: do all that you can do every day to die a little less and live a little more.

There is no such thing as magic, no way to make it happen, to no longer suffer today and be happy forevermore (heaven was invented for this purpose- one day, after we die, then .. magic!)

It takes time and a lot of work. I didn’t do the work in my twenties or thirties and my life got worse for it- more bad experiences, dysfunction spreading to a variety of areas, and my life experience got even worse. So the option is not between making progress and making no progress, as in staying in place. The option is between making progress and regressing, that is, you either move forward, or you move backward.

The best place for you to start this moving forward process is in quality psychotherapy. You hire a qualified person with impressive certificates and who knows what he/ she is doing-to help you. You pay the money and you figure: better I do the work because I am paying for it. You want to get your money’s worth.

Without quality psychotherapy, here on this thread- I can help you in the context of this thread. I don’t have a psychotherapy degree and certificates and I am not a psychotherapist. I have no plans of being a psychotherapist, not in person and not online (I don’t think online psychotherapy is possible!). What I do have is a 4 years and 9 months history of reading and studying the stories of hundreds of people from all over the world, often 8 hours days of such learning, a learning I took on myself, a learning that is recorded and retrievable here (starting May 2015).

If you value what I learned here, and what I keep learning, then use what I know to help yourself.

anita