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Wake up call

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  • November 28, 2017 at 12:35 am #179649
    August
    Participant

    Why do I feel like I need to always be attaining, accomplishing, achieving to feel ok. To feel happy.  For example I need to exercise, I need to do something creative, I need to have money and I need to have some kind of activities on the weekend. It feels like if I stop and I don’t have these things I will fall apart.

    This week I decided I’d just had enough so I stepped off the figurative treadmill and I’m not exercising for a week. I’m having a rest from the gym and I’m eating whatever the hell I want.  I already feel quite down about it.  What’s the point anyway??  I’m lucky if I’ve got another 20 years left of life. Why even bother going to gym? Why even bother going to work?

    It all feels like such a high maintenance pointless struggle to hold it altogether. I just want to feel a deeper sense of unshakeable peace that cannot be taken away no matter what I’m doing. I want equanimity.  Meditation is something I’ve been doing daily for 6 years but even that feels like part of the monotonous routine to hold it all up.   I’m so over it.

    I need a drastic change. I’ve been thinking of doing an ayahuasca retreat. I need a big wake up because currently I feel like the walking dead.

    • This topic was modified 6 years, 11 months ago by August.
    • This topic was modified 6 years, 11 months ago by August.
    November 28, 2017 at 4:57 am #179675
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Dear August:

    Clearly you need a real change in your life. You can make a change to the worse (no longer exercising, eating anything and everything and gaining excess weight), but it  is making a change to the better that is wise, not to the worse.

    A  hallucinogenic retreat (ayahuasca) is one of the  many temporary solutions to  feeling  distressed. A long term positive solution is, again… what is wise.

    Accept the things you cannot change: your current low paying, non creative job, all of your past, all that life necessarily is and Change what you can change. Make thoughtful decisions, not impulsive decisions.

    We all want  to feel good, feeling that equanimity you mentioned is all I ever wanted I think. Oh, if only I could live that way, forever calm. Increasing calm and decreasing distress is more of a realistic goal.

    anita

    November 28, 2017 at 8:06 am #179699
    Peter
    Participant

    We love to measure our experiences. Am I happy now? What about now? Maybe now? Is this it, was that it? We suck at measuring experience and more often than not the act of measuring/judging an experience kills it and takes us out of the present. Happiness could slap us in the face and we would fail to notice. We suck at measuring and end up telling ourselves crap stories that we then begin to live. We become the stories we tell.

    The practice of meditation becomes helpful once we realize that the practice isn’t something we do is a certain period of time but in every breathe we take. When we make life our practice we notice how the words we use to measure our experience changes the experience and let them go and doing so allowing the experience to flow through us. We learn to dance with our experiences and not against them.

    There is a time for all things. Time to go to the gym as a practice of discipline. A time to go to the gym to engage with our body. A time to go to the gym to socialize, and a time to stay home. All valid experiences that have nothing and everything to do with how your feeling.

     

    November 28, 2017 at 11:36 am #179741
    August
    Participant

    Anita I think you’re missing my point a little. The very idea that gaining excess weight is a “change to the worse” is nothing but just another conditioned concept foisted on us by a society that worships superficial beauty, fitness etc.  Proportionate weight is just another thing that I’m told I need if I want to be “happy”.       This is what I’m saying.  Why must I be fit and the correct weight? Why can’t I be overweight but still feel good? It’s because of my own mind which has a gazillion thoughts and ideas which have been put there by others which I believe.   Why must I have or be doing A,B and C to feel ok?  Happiness or peace dependant on externals is fleeting. I don’t want this anymore.

    I think labelling an ayahuasca retreat as a “hallucinogenic retreat” and temporary solution is incorrect. Yes there are some pyscychedelic effects but it’s more than that, it’s an ancient medicine and from the information I have read has changed many people’s lives for the better. I realise it’s no quick fix but many people report it as being a lot of therapy condensed into a short space of time and helps them to begin to make big changes.

    I’ve tried psychologists at least 6 times and have not found it very helpful. Its super expensive for starters and so inaccessible for most people and the main method they tend to use ie CBT I have not found useful. It’s something I already know and have read about so paying someone a lot of money to tell me about it again seems pointless. They just basically say “go away and dispute your thoughts”. Last time I went to one he decided to stop seeing me because he realised it was not working.

    • This reply was modified 6 years, 11 months ago by August.
    • This reply was modified 6 years, 11 months ago by August.
    November 28, 2017 at 12:13 pm #179753
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Dear August:

    Gaining excess weight is a change  for the worse if it is gaining a  lot  of excess weight, health  wise, mobility wise, quality of life. Otherwise, I agree that social conventions, so many of those create lots of misery, are senseless, often marketing methods to create profit and such.

    I suppose that kind of retreat can work. If it worked  for a single person, it can work for another. It can give you a different perspective as in: so it  is possible to feel this good? Knowing, from experience, that it  is possible is an incentive to heal so to experience feeling  better  and better. Yet, it does take healing  work: as  long as there has been an injury, got to heal.

    I am not familiar with such retreats,   with what this or that retreat includes. I’ll investigate before attending  one.

    Definitely pointless to go to therapy when it doesn’t work for you, or seeing a therapist who doesn’t work for you- no return on the money spent.

    anita

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