The little things...

...in life make up the bigger things in life. Someone told me the other day that they admired my ability to see small things and to focus on them in detail. In order to do this I often need to focus on them to the exclusion of a else, and sometimes the reason for that is I'll have so much anxiety I can't focus on anything if I don't focus on something solid. I mentioned this in the post with the dissociation trigger warning in the title.

The reality is that I often let days go by when I don't see a goddamn thing. I exist. I float through life on autopilot, completely unaware of my own existence. It usually happens when I'm stressed.

If you think about bad things in your childhood, you think about emotions, but have you ever experienced certain sounds, smells or even colors that brought you back to those warm happy moments when nothing could be more perfect?

The reason that we were so happy as children, even growing up amidst negativity, even violence, is that we were able to focus almost exclusively on experiencing the world using the five senses. It was so overwhelming that it was literally all we had time for.

When was the last time you really felt your toes on a soft rug or really heard the sound of coffee brewing in the morning? When was the last time you felt a cold breeze blow against your cheek as you watched a warm winter sunset?

These are the moments that carry us through the ones we can't feel.

So stock up!

posted from Bloggeroid

We Only Lose What We Cling To...

I was going to post on my day one taper but something has happened in the interim that takes priority. It takes priority over an update because how I transcend it will surely affect some of my readers and the decisions that they make going forward. I can't maintain a self-help blog without speaking from experience and without explaining to my readers that I am human, that transcendence is possible.

I lost all of my writing from the last two years.

All of it.

I realized it last night after highlighting some of my writing achievements to one of my followers. In the transfer from one Google account to the next, I had permanently deleted my Google Drive on my old account without backing it up. Since everything was stored in the cloud, everything is now gone.
At first I panicked. Who wouldn't? Then my warrior training kicked in and I had to evaluate the situation from a spiritual perspective.

In Dan Millman's book, Way of the Peaceful Warrior, Socrates reminds Dan to "let it flow, and let it go." This meant that he wanted Dan to feel his emotions about a given thing, and then let them go, to leave them, and the stimulus, in the past. Socrates' responses to life were not predictable, not planned. They were spontaneous. Socrates watched his thoughts and his emotions and his expectations pass like clouds before him, feeling no more connection to them than he would the next breeze. 

Circumventing our knee jerk reactions to things takes years and years of practice.

I'm not there yet. What a gift!

Rather, I was forced to revert back to something I had heard many years ago when watching a documentary on Joseph Campbell and his search for answers about why people believed what they did.

If you had a crystal glass, you could watch the light refracting off of it, brilliant colors. If you had ice and water or even liquor in the glass, you could see the reflection of the light through the fractals. It would look beautiful. Maybe you could even run your finger along the edge and it would make a sound to sing the unspoken potential of every possible color in the Universe.

Suppose then, that you were to drop that glass on the ground and it were to shatter.

The Buddha would be unmoved by it's destruction, because he would know that the moment the glass came into his awareness, it was already broken.

We only lose what we cling to.

I felt the pain of losing the writing and then let it go, embracing the realization that everything I wrote would be published under my own name going forward, that it would be written from the hand of someone who knew that every word was worth as much as he.

I will no longer hide behind a pseudonym.

What falls into our past nourishes our future.

posted from Bloggeroid

Cutting ties with the psychiatric paper trail once and for all...

...I think it's time I start letting my body decide what it needs instead of me trying to manage it. I'll be tapering off my depression medication and completely stopping everything else. I intend to improve my focus by eating well, avoiding simple sugars whenever possible and consuming an array of fruits and vegetables on a regular basis. I also hear that eating less at meal time improves focus and concentration because our metabolism doesn't need to work overtime or pump crash juice (insulin) into our blood stream.

The more we take into our bodies that our body doesn't know how to respond to, the less optimally it functions. It takes more effort to do less work. We feel sluggish, lethargic, depressed and anxious as our biology cries out for us to be migratory, active and happy.

So I have decided to cut as much organic chemistry out of my life as possible. Instead, I will be using a number of essential oils to help me maintain spiritual and emotional balance, patience and focus. I will also begin meditating to allow my body to function as naturally as it would if I were no part of the picture. We push and we sweat and we curse, gritting our teeth against an endless struggle to gain practically no emotional, spiritual or financial ground day in and day out, but we ignore the most literal, physical guru to which we have access...our bodies.

My body knows a hell of a lot more about what it needs than I do. My journey from here forth is to listen to what my body needs, not what my addictive behavior patterns need, not what my get-things-done-as-quickly-as-possible side needs. The optimal relationship is a symbiotic one, meaning A does for B and B in turn provides for A. Our body, mind and spirit need to be in alignment with each other in order for us to function optimally.

Pharmaceuticals are simply no longer a part of the equation for me.  

posted from Bloggeroid

Per request: Managing Intense Emotions

I received a request last night for a post about how to handle intense emotion.

Let me start out by saying that I have a limited emotional vocabulary and in having Asperger's I tend to use only about 10% of it (if that). I'm suddenly reminded of an episode of the Big Bang Theory where Sheldon laughs at himself after recording in his journal that he misses the warmth of human companionship. (BAZINGA!)

One of the most important lessons I've ever learned was that I could start my day over whenever I wanted to.

The Dharma (Buddhist teaching) implies that suffering is derived from attachment. We only lose what we cling to. When we become angry, fearful, distressed or anxious, it is because we expect certain results and believe that desirable results will make us happy.

Results do not make us happy. Letting go makes us happy.


The only thing we lose in resetting at the critical moment, when all else fades from our vision and we begin to plan the unfortunate demise of the offending individual, is the socially appropriated response to whatever situation we are dealing with at the time.

Every single moment afforded us comes in a bran new package, a clean slate to which we can apply absolutely any emotion we want. For said individual, we might, for example, choose to feel compassion, even love. Those who hurt us are our greatest gurus because they accent the importance of kindness in each of our lives.

Access to the Spiritual Current...

You know the moats they have at water parks, where you can float along the perimeter of the park in tubes writhing with human effluvia until you get tired and roll your sun baked body into the current and up the stairs to the next ride?

The Universe has one of those as well, just not nearly as disgusting or overcrowded. In fact, each of us has our own lazy moat, and yes, we are responsible for keeping it clean. There is a constant flow of pristine energy running through each of our lives, even in dream!

I've touched upon this point many times but I feel that its an integral part of a practical approach to spiritual living. In order to learn to live practically in any given situation, we need to learn to experience things on different frequencies.

I have discovered, after 32 years of struggling, that reducing the amount of energy exerted by sharpening our focus to a more definitive causal link can actually result in higher productivity at less than half the cost.

We chase a dog and the dog runs away. We sit, and the dog comes to us.

We run from a hornet and the hornet gives chase. We freeze and let the wretched thing investigate as it will, and it flies away unprovoked.

Looking at it from an extremely literal perspective (why not?), it takes less energy to pull something than it does to push, more energy to express anger than it does to remain reticent. We feel energized after a light meal and exhausted and physical uncomfortable after a huge one.

The common denominator here is that when we try to take physical control of a situation, we dismiss the karmic strength that we have developed over the years, resulting in highly concentrated amounts of energy that we really don't need for the moment being spent on things we really can't afford to be spending it on.

The karmic undercurrent is physical, it just can't be quantified.

The Autism Super Bug: The Drift (Dissociation TRIGGER warning)

Pagans refer to the Drift as a place devoid of happiness, ruled primarily by struggle and a total lack of spirituality. The word, in that context, implies more than its own meaning, in that it suggests that those who find themselves caught in the Drift may experience any degree of truth regardless of whether or not they are prepared to see it. There are doors in the Universe that should remain closed.

One of mine sprung a leak.

I do not pretend to know what caused the leak, but I think my autism makes it easy to justify.

You may remember reading a post some time ago regarding a nightmare I had about the character, Reid, from the show Criminal Minds. In it, Reid was looking down, pacing, pointing at equations, muttering to himself, scared to death because he was trapped in eternity, applying the linear interpretation of time to it's non-linear counterpart. He would need to quickly turn his attention back to the present moment and compute something solid and linear lest his mind begin barking at the heels of eternity again.

This has happened to me a number of times.

It is deeply unsettling to have the eternal void peeking in at you through a keyhole.

You can't escape me! Ever!

Literally...

My only defense against the perpetual ignorance that eternity seems to imply is to plant myself firmly in the present moment, experiencing not time, but physical sensation. This blade of grass is this many inches long, this color, it's in the shade. Perhaps an insect is crawling along it, eating it. How many colors can you pick out in your tie-dye shirt. How many knots does this tree have? The degree to which you can experience a moment using the five senses is the same degree to which you can assign it validation.

posted from Bloggeroid

When life slows me down...

I need to view it as a gift. The 3 R's. Rest. Recuperation. Reconciliation.

The need for rest and recuperation is self evident, but what exactly do I need to reconcile?

I need to reconcile my need for emotional processing against the deficit.

I would like to believe that emotional processing is a time centered occurrence. If this were the case, I wouldn't be more frayed after eight hours of solitude than I would had I spend those eight hours with a three-year-old girl (almost 4 now).

Rather, my experience with quality processing is actually marked by productivity, like writing a song on the piano, reading a book or cleaning my room.

If I were to scrub serenity from chaos, productivity would be my washboard. I've raked my problems into distinct piles on the lawn, scrubbed my way to Zen through thick layers of burned grease.

I have also walked my way to answers shielded from my view for being on a lower frequency than that to which most of us are accustomed, because walking for cardio purposes increases alpha brain wave activity.

Productivity resets everything about us, including our involuntary rythms (heart and lungs).

How odd!

So often when the pup is off at daycare and distractions come up in my Divine Processing Schedule, I feel time closing in around me like four walls and I feel rushed.

In fact I asked a friend of mine the other day "have you ever felt as though there weren't enough time in the day to get done all the doing nothing you need to do?"

Maybe I need less downtime and more time doing the things that actually help me come down.

What helps you come down? What is that something that you haven't done in a long, long time that keeps knocking in soft whispers?

When I was in high school, it was reading books with swearing by Stephen King, feeling the pages between my fingers, sometimes hearing them crinkle. The voice in which King writes makes me feel as though I've relaxed deeply into a soft pile of warm blankets.

That still hasn't changed, not in 17 years.

When you get a moment, lay back, relax and simply watch your subconscious like a movie. If you watch it for long enough, you'll find an answer, or series of them, which had been a part of your life when you felt the safest.

Bring it back to life.

posted from Bloggeroid

Why am I blogging under my real name?

Because I've reached a point in my life where I can justify any decision made out of self-respect. Despite a relatively dark history with the press, I feel that hiding behind a pen name would jeopardize the integrity of anything I write from my soul.

I wish to leave the past where it is and to sort out the tangled mess of cosmic vibrations in my life for my own scrutiny and for yours.

Above each post hereforth will be a widget directed to my writer profile on Constant Content. Legally, I have every right to display it.

Feel free to follow, +1 and share this blog with others. With any luck, one soul, somewhere, will benefit from the questions I have for the Universe, and the answers I've already been afforded.

posted from Bloggeroid

Thoughts are physical...

This is a concept which is slowly being brought into the public spotlight. I believe the book The Secret covered it, and many individuals who regularly affect large audiences seem to be aware of it. Will Smith said it directly. He also said that "whenever you inject extremes into the Universe, you can expect extremes to come back to you." 

High Performance Coach Richard Tosti said that "I become what I think about most of the time." 

If you think about it for long enough, the idea that intention creates reality will resonate with you at some point. It sits at the heart of many religions, particularly Christianity.

"Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you."

Sound familiar?

I don't pretend to know exactly what Christ was implying here, but let us for a moment apply it to the ideology that your brain will go to any lengths to prove you right regardless of whether or not you are fundamentally correct in your thinking. Constant worry that you might fail a test usually results in a failing grade, whereas confidence, unless it is entirely misplaced, will generally afford you a satisfactory grade.

How about this for a thought: No amount of effort goes unseen by the forces that matter.

Have you ever had a bar stool dream, the stuff of grandiosity, a goal that you "still have time to reach?" Many individuals spend years in this limbo like I did, waiting for something to happen to kick them into gear, but is it not true that objects at rest tend to stay at rest? Contrarily, investing your time and effort toward the realization of a goal tends to result in greater opportunities to help that goal evolve as time goes on.

For example, I wrote about five articles recently expecting all of them to sell. They did not. What did happen, however, was that I started to get more hours at work, reductions in bills and ideas for ways to avoid spending money unnecessarily. I attribute this to the Universe taking note of my efforts to improve my financial situation, and rewarding me for kick-starting the karmic conveyor belt.

Take the first step: do something, and the karmic armies aside you will match your energetic assertions to afford you results.

posted from Bloggeroid