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A lot has been happening this week
I’ve connected with someone new and had the best sexual experiences of my life with them. I had this quote that @hunterad posted in the back of my mind going into it,
and with that attitude and approach in place I was able to enter into purity of sexuality that I had very rarely ever approached before.
I’m still reeling from those experiences… it was a breakthrough into feeling-states that I hadn’t accessed in some time.
She has left town - she lives in a remote part of Alaska and it will be awhile before I see her again, if ever - but I am determined to continue in this thread. There is palpable purity - and fear - and love. All mean that I feel very alive.
I had another friend over to my place last night and we discussed all things life & emotions for hours.
An observation she brought up was that she had recently purchased a house, and that ever since moving out of an apartment into that house, she had much less of a feeling of neediness for a man in her life.
I connected the dots to earlier in the night she had told me that her mother had once told her that she would one day need a stable man in her life in order to be safe - implying that she would never be able to take care of herself.
Now as an adult, divorced, operating a successful business on her own and now purchasing a nice house of her own volition, her mother’s point was solidly refuted. She was now experiencing a peace she hadn’t felt in decades.
It made me connect something I had vague notions of but hadn’t been able to penetrate, in my own issues of security, desire, and parental pressure.
After a night of some of the most intense and lucid dreams I’ve ever experienced, I awoke ready to take my time waking up on the day off from work and continue investigating this issue.
Several times in my life I’ve set off away from home in a bid to ‘make my way in the world,’ and each time after around a year I would return home, discouraged (though glad to be home), in debt, and needing help from my parents to get back on my feet.
This pattern created a few narratives for myself and my parents.
Similarly to my friend, there began to be a belief that I could not take care of myself on my own but needed help - and rather than from a man, it was coming from my parents. I’ve set myself up with a tiny house, which I still don’t regret, but it came out of that attitude of dependency.
That sense of dependency was accentuating a sense of being a ‘loser’, a feeling which has dogged me throughout most of my life.
I connect it largely to my relationship with my father, a dominating personality who is not afraid to use intimidation to get his way with people.
In any case, that attitude has followed me around throughout my life, and I have at different times taken various steps to get beyond that sense of being a loser. I’m glad I have done that, because it has caused me to go on many adventures, expand my horizons tremendously, and become experienced in things which would later serve me greatly in these investigations to become free.
However, that overall sense of being a loser would rarely leave for long.
Another way of describing that feeling, which I have written about here on occasion, is feeling ‘pathetic.’
Once I was able to identify that feeling, and connect it with that larger ‘loser’ narrative, I was able to use @Josef’s approach of 100% committing to the emotion.
It hung on more tenaciously than most other emotional states do, but after a couple of minutes peace overtook me - a purity, directness, and stability of peace I haven’t known in a long time.
It immediately became apparent that my efforts to fight being a loser by ‘winning’ in some way - frequently in my mind related to ‘getting the (right) girl’ - were doomed to failure because they existed in direct relation to the ‘loser’ narrative, which had to continue as an anxiety to maintain the existence of any ‘winner’ narrative.
The answer, rather, is in simply not feeling like a loser.
By coincidence I had something on the AFT open - which page it was specifically doesn’t matter - it was enough to remind me of the purity and simplicity of the actual world. None of these narratives or feeling states are actual. As long as I exist within the narrative I can continue re-combinating & wandering in circles forever and never get out. But escape is as simple as deciding that it doesn’t matter. I don’t have everything I want in life, but I don’t have to feel like a loser. I don’t have to feel pathetically. I can sit in bed on this luminous Monday morning, and gaze out the window at the trees swaying in the remainders of the overnight storm.
And then after a few more minutes, I put some pants on and made coffee.
Glorious.