deep okayness seems to be tractable and it is my favorite interest
Joined May 2023
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so it turns out that if you vividly imagine awesome parents taking care of you for a few hours, then you might finally be able to feel a positive emotion like lovingkindness and compassion instead of internally hitting yourself during meditation :)
attachment repair can be a really important prerequisite for many people having a hard time seeing lasting effects from e.g. parts work, meditation, etc!
@securetoexplore is trying to facilitate 250 hours of IPF sessions before the year ends and is looking for people who wanna try it out! he’s super fun and chill to work with and i can feel simple openhearted warmth without relying as much on luck now!
claude remote control is such a cool productivity improvement, only surpassed by voice-to-text in coolness
i can talk to claude while running or pooping or waiting in line for food
i wish this wasnt true but this seems true
if this is a developmental thing that’s been there as long as someone can remember, often you need to borrow someone else’s capacity to feel emotions, which then slowly becomes internalized. basically, talking to another person on a consistent basis about your life is the rec here. ideally this would be someone like a therapist, a pastor, or other trained counselor, but a kind friend or partner is also great (but this can be difficult because if someone is having trouble feeling their emotions, they will also probably have trouble feeling either the goodwill or malevolence of others towards them, which means they often don’t have very supportive company around them and don’t even realize it).
having another emoting, empathetic nervous system around to co-regulate with is ideal, but in the absence of that, other ways of establishing an emotional “conversation” with non-human others can be effective. here i’m thinking of journaling, hanging out with animals or cultivating a relationship with nature, imaginal dialogue with internal figures, or deeply engaging with emotional works of art.
basically, establishing a relationship with a benevolent and understanding other is the name of the game. at first they hold the emotions you don’t have the capacity to consciously experience yet, and eventually the mind learns how to do that itself
“goal is to see a normal thing more clearly, not to find a magic thing”
being able to sit beside an imaginary ideal friend or parent without much fear or anger might be a good checksum before doing metta practice alone?
many have heard the alarm clock analogy, but not many tell you that the alarm clocks can exist across different types bottlenecks!!!!
@aphercotropist (i believe) also had a metaphor i loved that was like there's 10 alarm clocks going on at once and each one you turn off doesn't make that big of a difference until it makes a huge difference like from the last one to silence even each is only "10%"
c.f. chris showing pear’s story
xitter.cf/chrislakin/status/2107…
I asked @Pear_with_legs what he's learned about mitigating his external bottlenecks:
(1) I need to be relaxed for any of this stuff to work. Stressors prevent relaxation regardless of whether they are socially acceptable. If you're naturally fat like me the signal to "EAT EAT EAT EAT" is so overwhelming that I can't do any inner work at all
(2) Sleep apnea is completely crippling. Every description of sleep apnea under describes the magnitude of how bad it destroys your ability to function. Your ability to *change* as a person over a long period of time just disappeared. Inner work just didn't function until I got it treated. I think sleep is underappreciated as a factor that you have to fix first
none of the stuff that works amazing rn worked before I got my sleep in a good position
(3) I'm naturally very tense. I think inner work will *eventually* fix this but it blocks your ability to do inner work in the mean time
So for me focusing on practices that just made me physically relaxed was way more important than like theraputic practices. this includes exercise and nature. Like running, lifting weights, walking in old growth forests was outright more effective for me than most intentional practices
(replying to #1) Can't emphasize this enough. A very large number of people like me have wildly too high appetites. This just destroys your ability to function. Like I could barely think before I got on retatrutide. Working with @myayu_health has fully resolved this, fixing up my diet was a similar magnitude of making inner work function as getting on retatrutide or getting on a cpap was. Like meditation *literally did not work* until I fixed my diet, then I fixed it and suddenly it works.
Also for inner work, because I am not relaxed I have to do a bunch of stuff to make me relaxed. Then it works. Like if we compare an hour of IFS or core transformation to 30 minutes of prep plus 30 minutes of IFS, the latter wins. 50 minutes of preparation and 10 minutes of IFS still wins. At this point I just don't even bother with a practice unless i'm in a state where that practice can actually work.
Exercise, metta, IPF, talking to people, and being in nature work best for me as prep.
I think that the principle is that you need to feel safe for this to work, and there's like a million times more things that can make you feel unsafe than people intuitively think. Like physical danger, but also are you hungry, anxious, do you trust the person in front of you, are you thirsty, have you been doomscrolling, have you been inside all day, like there's a lot of shit that can make you feel unsafe, literally all of these block me partially or completely, prerequisites are a big thing.
I think that's everything
