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Finding voicefulness......losing......finding.....practicing..

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SilverLining:

--- Quote from: Muffin buster on February 07, 2011, 12:50:50 AM ---
I imagine that people my age shouldnt be so dirrectionless. I don't really understand myself at this point in life? I mean what defines me?


--- End quote ---

I'm with you on this.  Here I am six months short of 50 years, and I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up...  I feel like I was so swamped by my parents "stuff" early in life that I didn't have a chance to figure out myself until my 40's. 

On the positive side, a lot seems to be coming together in recent years.  And I escaped being tracked into someone else's idea of what I should be.       

Meh:
Just a random thought:

Now that I have realized how much I missed out on with my FOO, I can look at other people's children and feel jealousy or bitterness.

When I was younger I never felt jealously towards anyone and I didn't feel bitter either. I also didn't understand jealous people at all.

I try to compare my feelings of jealousy to what I think my mother's feelings are for me. I'm not sure that I can explain or justify everything my mother does and I wish I would stop analyzing her.

I compulsively analyze my mother or my family. It's probably not "just something to focus on".....I'm sure that the compulsive focusing is somesort of attempt to resove deep wounds.

I think most of the counselors I have talked to try to focus a person on something other then paying too much attention to the disfunctional family...it sort of makes sense.. but whatever wounds we may have we still carry with us.

My mother doens't seem unaware of her behavior she seems fully aware of what she does but with a weird element of denial.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, I'm sure I will end up somewhere.

Meh:
Tonight I'm going to go to a free meditation class at a Buddist Center, operative word is FREE. I've been to similar classes in other locations a couple of times in the past when I was 20-something.

The truth is I hate Buddism. I like to meditate for my own selfish benefit, I don't want to become more compassionate. Maybe I have to justify myself, I was a very sweet person when I was  younger but I'm tired now and really need everything in my life to be about me. Maybe that is not really 100% true. There is going to be a meditation and a lecture that goes along with it and the lecture sounds like it may be relevant to my life. This class may be about being kind to one's SELF rather then to other people. We will see.

When a person grows up with parents that turn them into a doormat those selflessness classes just arn't appropriate, it took me a while to figure that out.

When on a zero level budget it's a challenge to find things to do that make me feel like a regular person with a schedule. I also find it challenging to commit to living here until I am more stable so how can I get involved with anything?

Note about community services--I have never really thought about how other people get by in life that were less fortunate then me, I didn't really care, and I didn't want. I use to look at people that lined up at food banks and think of them as the "others". Maybe it was the way I was raised, my mother is quick to call people "low-lifes". Anyways, I'm surprized to find out how absurdly meager some of the resources are such as bus passes. Many buses I've been on have extra-room here. This is not the most congested city in the world....so I would think that they could give out a few more bus passes to people without weighing down the bus.....but they only give out two bus passes per week. That means a person can get to a place and then get back to where they started from with the second pass.

I don't know why I'm writing this here, I just think it's stupid......if the bus is going to go somewhere anyways even when it is half empty, then doesn't it make sense to let people ride the bus?

Anyways. That proves how incongruent Buddhist philosophy is. Buddist on the inside and Republican on the outside?

I'm exhausted and I didn't do much today, I went for a walk. I hate this sort of physical tiredness, I wonder if it's because there are still lights on when I fall asleep..that can screw up a person's circadian rythems.

 

Meh:
Went to the Buddhist meditation and lecture. I'm not a Buddhism scholar at all, I've read maybe 3-4 books on the subject and have done a few versions of meditations, not enough to grasp very well the full scope of the practice.

What if I don't want to be a better person you know? What if I just want to be a powerful control freak for my own sake?
I like the idea of being in control of my mind and my life. Other people.......well....they are all  "others" to me right now.

I have evolved into a different person compared to who I once was, I'm not sort of a grumpy b*tch.

I sat down to meditate and the thought popped into my mind "I hate these people"---and I don't even know why I was thinking that? Maybe in life, after a while of too many bad experiences, you just sort of give up on being socially "normal" and see some truth that others don't want to admit really exists.--That people are not so great and nice and fantastic--maybe not worth getting to know? I'm seriously insulated and alienated or alienating myself and maybe thats ok for now. Maybe just give myself a break. Sorry Dalai Lama but I'm tired and I feel like I deserve to be a b*tch every now and then I feel like I need to be on attack mode and just be a turtle shelled swirling mass of "I hate you".

When I'm at the building and I start to meditate I realize how out of touch I am with myself. I've done all this new-agey spiritual stuff in the past so I feel like I've been there and done that. I'm really out of practice though. I felt all scatter-brained and caffeinated.

When I sat down to meditate, I felt like I had a tick sucking blood out of my eye lid and a brown recluse spider crawling in my pants. Getting figetty is part of the process for me. Over all it wasn't mind-blowingly life changing.

The lecture included the concept of --"THE STORY"-- as if the story is sort of a bad thing or a pitfall. So it made me wonder if the antagonistic relationship with my nar-mother is "The Story"...It might help for me to see it that way a little bit but I wouldn't minimize the value of self-analyzing my relationship with my mother....I'm convinced that I would have at least hauled off and hit her by now if I hadn't spent so much time reading on this board and writing.

I'm going to eat a pot-sticker and come back to this thought. I'm obsessed with food. I really like to cook especially when I don't have a proper kitchen to cook in that is when I want to cook the worst. Bake a pie, like a fresh lemon or coconut pie.

I feel like Buddhism is a trick to play on myself. I think that my problems with my mother are real and are not just an illusion.

I think there is some useful stuff in Buddhism but I don't believe in reincarnation and maybe not even bad karma.

The story of me and my mother is definitely a bigger story to me then it is to my mother.

Between meditation and lecture there is a 10 minute tea break where people happily untwist their legs, get up off the ground, then walk over to a bar where there is something to drink and chat and talk and blah blah blah.

The blah blah blah face to face with people I don't know mortifies me. I would rather meditate or sit on the toilet in the bathroom or look at a brochure or stare at my fingernails then talk to people that I don't know.

I wish I could relate what I heard in the Buddihist lecture to the way I deal with my mother and my own personal situation better then I am right now. I often feel like I am memory challegeds, I understand what he is saying in the lecture, I dont' ask dumb questions, I really do understand it but repeating it back is a bit difficult. He discussed mainly the idea of three poisons.--agression being one of them, I was surprized when he said that agression describes when a person is just very iritated like we all are here on this board. The way that we react to our Nar-family would be catagorized as agression. I never thought of it that way before, I would agree with that definition. I do feel agressive or angry towards my mother. Although I usually think of agression as being an action word and even though I am angry I don't burn her house down or anything.

It makes me wonder if there is a difference between healthy contemplation compared to compulsive analyzing.

It was pretty boring, I was trying to decide if the guy giving the lecture could pass as sexually attractive or not and how annoying he would be to screw.

sKePTiKal:
Some random thoughts for you...

I think you're right, that there is a way to use meditation to heal yourself... and not just to cover up, escape, or ignore old wounds by seeking some imaginary place within yourself where anger & pain don't exist. The new-agey idea that we become "better people" when we are all peace, love & starry-eyed nirvana-addicts... didn't appeal to me either. There are other ways of understanding buddhist concepts.

I will probably hang on to the idea that there is a good type of anger till I'm ashes blowing in the wind... that was a total revelation to me, when I was introduced to it. That I'm ALLOWED to be that kind of angry - and it doesn't automatically tar me as a bad person. Telling this apart from toxic anger - now, that's a trick and a half. That kind of anger doesn't do a person any good at all... and yes, it is like a poison... maybe there are antidotes... things that render it non-toxic... break it down into non-dangerous single chemicals or something. But the easiest "home remedy" I've found for toxic anger is to simply "get it out of my system"... to vent, bitch, kvetch, whine, accuse, blame... to let it all out... oxygen and light have a magical way of burning all that kind of anger out; removing the radioactivity - and when it's gone... you don't need an antidote. I wrote all mine down; some here... but I didn't think it was fair (I absorbed some buddhist philosophy) to spew that out all over others, all the time. Writing let me do things like write in really BIG letters... really bold... in colors even. Keeping it bottled up - protecting others from how angry I was - only destroyed me. But I didn't want to be a viking pirate running amok all the time either... so the writing was sort of the middle path... to a way out. It let me have my cake & eat it too... coz once my writing session was done, once the "hangover" of intense emotion dissipated... I could more easily go about my day.

I had a weird reaction to meditation for awhile. When I was finally quiet enough mentally, the tears started to well up and roll out in torrents. Since that time, I've noticed that when I'm really, really, really angry... I cry. There is a symbiotic relationship - sometimes - between anger & grief. At least for me. Anger I was used to... but grief scared me half to death. I really didn't want to face what I felt was an endless black hole of feelings of sadness and loss. I felt my loss was of epic proportions... and that, like Pandora's Box, once I pulled the lid off that can of worms... there would be no end to it. Well - there is an end to that kind of toxic anger; and there is an end to "endless" overwhelming flooding loss and grief, too.

But to get started on letting all that out - I needed safety. I needed to know I was safe while putting it all on paper; safe to express it verbally with other people; safe to just finally let the tears roll out until I almost dehydrated myself. Safe to recover from all that emotion and to begin to feel different emotions, too.

When it comes up again now - and it does - it's nowhere as intense; it's more like a fly buzzing my nose or a leg cramp while I'm trying to center and sink into a centered, open meditation. And ya know what? I'm still different than a lot of people - because of having been to hell and finding my way back from it. But, it's in a better way now.

I don't know if there's anything in those thoughts or my experience that would work for you... but help yourself to any of the DIY-healing or home remedy "recipes" that look interesting and feel free to rework them & adapt them to yourself.

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