Hi everyone! I’m new here and really excited to connect with like-minded people. I’m interested in mindfulness, meditation, self-growth. If anyone would like to chat, share thoughts, or just make a new friend, feel free to message me or reply here. Looking forward to good conversations and positive vibes!

Hi Peter

I really appreciate your thoughts! ❤️

I used to as well, as a child. 😊 Now, I tend to read to solve problems.

I read that it is important to label your feelings and theirs, as well as to link to a cause. I guess it teaches them to understand and express emotions.

Was it complicated growing up, since your parents didn’t express their emotions? Did you have to learn how to manage emotions by yourself?

That is a lovely way to look at things. Thank you! 🙏

Haha well it’s good that the not knowing instinct is finally coming in handy. 😂

Hi Everyone
I’ve been silent over the last few weeks as I struggled with doubt about the work I had done and experiences I’ve had with the relationship of the temporal (duality) and the eternal (non duality). Of being connected to the web of life. I fell into analyses paralysis-depression of my Type 5 personality, doubting if I ever understood what it meant to process the past and or emotions.

Alessa asked if I learned how to manage emotions and my first thought was, yes, realized that managing emotions is not necessarily having a good relationship with them. Emotions, Feelings, states of mind, thoughts, memory everything gets so tangled to the over analyzing mind.

In the rising and return of every breath I lost connection with the return. Metaphorically I have a tendency of holding my breath.

Something W.H. Auden surfaced: “We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment, and let our illusions die.”

Then Alan Watts words about fear: “The instant we become motivated by fear, we become unfree. So long as the mind believes in the possibility of escape from what it is at this moment, there can be no freedom. When you are freed from being out to improve yourself, your own nature will begin to take over.”

Begging the questions: Is improvement a type of resistance? Do I, can I, trust life’s flow?
Why do I resist owning the realizations the processing of emotions and events has taught me? Am I afraid to ‘know’ and make mine what I experienced as healing? Has my identity been linked to being broken?

Fear one emotion that I have a solid relationship with, a prison of my making refusing to notice that the doors and windows have always been open.

Krishnamurti encouraged individuals to examine their thoughts, feelings, and motivations to understand how their minds function and what drives their behavior. I didn’t notice before, but the intent is understanding on how the mind functions and noticing how that drives behavior. The mind not the experience being processed driving behavior. I feel that this is an important difference as I notice my minds tendency to create the problems it is at the same time trying to solve.

Last night as I lay awake with thoughts coming I gave up I picked up the book The Dispossessed by Ursula Guin.
“He would always be one for whom the return was as important as the voyage out… that indeed the very nature of the voyage, like a circumnavigation of the globe implied return. You shall not go down twice to the same river, nor can you go home again. That he Knew; indeed, it was the basis of his view of the world. Yet from that acceptance of transience he evolved his vast theory, wherein what is most changeable is shown to be fullest of eternity, and your relationship to the river, and the river’s relationship to you and to itself, turns out to be at once more complex and more reassuring than a mere lack of identity. You can go home again, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.” (Something for the heart as the mind trips all over itself – longing to return, knowing he can’t, but can as he never been – ‘knowing that as a truth.)

At the end of our exploration, we return home and see it for the fist time… a Truth – the possibility of every breath.

I suspect I’ve confused anyone attempting to follow as it relates to the Sun rising and return contemplation. For me it supports my feeling that in my fourth quarter of life that the time of self improvement as a intention/goal has passed and time to trust the realizations and truths of the relationship of the temporal and eternal I have experienced. I know this goes against most self-help advice but for me its something I intent not to question again. Their is a time for all things, including the time to let go of the notion of fixing and engage life as it is.

Dear Peter: I am about to post to you next in your own thread “Old Journal- things that pierce the human heart”.

anita