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You can say you love yourself and forgive yourself, but there still is a knot of depression or tightness within you.
It can only be relieved of its oppositional threat within yourself by accepting and befriending it: by loving the depression.
To tell your depression you are their friend and will hold their hand is much more potent (realistic) than trying to expel it.
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We stay in opposition to ourselves.
We deny or fight our sadness or depression, rejecting that burdensome tightness within us.
By befriending it, by holding your darkness’s hand and openly loving it, you diffuse the fight and can begin to alleviate the pain.
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Stress thwarts open awareness through intense focus, utilizing the Left side of the brain. Peace allows the non-verbal Right side of your brain (subconscious?) to drift insights and pattern recognition to the surface.
Conditioned to insecurity (precarity) we are experiencing asymmetry.
This produces a constant need for effort as if your shopping cart is pulling to the Left and producing a hideous racket drowning out subtle appreciation.
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The unknown and risk offer excitement and anxiety: the urge to rid ourselves of these extremes drives us forward. This drive is a biological attempt to find peace.
Yet, we are conditioned to no longer find comfort in rest: we can only find familiarity in anxiety.
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Even after a brutal realization, you don’t have to live in it; you can hold it and realize everything that was previously fine is still.
We tend to retroactively extend trauma into the past while manifesting it into our future, but what if we recognize our discomfort as merely a fleeting, subjective, emotional shock?
Such insight can prevent us from shaping the world and our relations to fit our moods.
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It has been said repeatedly: we treat others better than ourselves.
We abuse ourselves with impunity. Our treatment of ourselves stems from a “feeling”, and it is as unjust to feel it as it is to do it to another person.
The problem is, it is not a “feeling”: it is a layer of programming triggering a deep emotion.
Once you get distance from or dissolve your programming, you find your true emotions towards yourself mirror you react to others and the world.
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As you bounce and slide into a new life, letting loose just a bit, your partner remains the stable anchor point.
Are they left behind or left to pull you back? Either way sucks to be them. Next time, try tandem skydiving.
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Positive freedom (unrestricted fulfillment) sounds great until the economy, state, book club, or marriage fail.
Policies, politeness, and social norms regulate chaos, provide stability, and act as guide rails as we achieve goals together.
When the guide rails are weakened or dismantled, we witness a disintegration of the community as communication breaks down and uncertainty prevails.
We’re thinking about where we’re going and which guide rails are necessary to maintain.
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We have a desire; we chase it, catch it, and consume it. We then need another passion. Our hands are full, but as we grasp for more, we inevitably drop once meaningful pieces of ourselves.
There is a "one-in-one-out" policy when we relate to desire as captured objects. You can clutch them to you but only hold so many; thus, they fall away as you dart about in pursuit.
Or, you can let them pass through you as they arise, enjoying them without possessing them. This is love without attachment or ego making demands or expecting reciprocation. And you are still present and full of enjoyment without the grasping.
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Your identity is your form, which is an act. To be “you” is to behave as people imagine you should, even as you imagine “you” should.
However, beneath the act is a profound awareness that is not identifiable: it is formless and still you.
From this formless awareness, the fears, wants, and concerns of the self (the act of “you”) are merely passing desires to which we desperately cling to maintain a recognizable shape.
The idea that “to find yourself,” you double down on “you” only increases the identification with fear, wanting, and desire: you build a stronger shape/form which you then need to maintain.
To find peace, we need “to lose yourself.”
