Posting my experiments/trainings and what I am learning here. Feel free to reach out and connect if you do something similar or have something useful to add.
People are increasingly aware of the pitfall of "people pleasing" when it comes to how you treat others.
But I think there is an equally dangerous tendency to adopt an attitude of people pleasing towards ourselves.
Being a people-pleaser towards yourself takes the form of mistaking self-indulgence for self-care / self-love.
That is, the only way such a person knows how to express love towards themselves is via indulging their desires and immersing themselves in comfort.
But often the best self-love we can give ourselves is the gift of boundaries, discipline and challenge.
Just as our relationships with others can grow stronger by speaking hard truths to them, so too can our relationship to ourselves grow stronger by speaking hard truths to ourselves.
There is the truism that we should treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves.
But there is also some wisdom to modelling the way we treat ourselves on our wisest interactions with others.
A big part of that is understanding that self-love often looks like encouraging ourselves to face what is uncomfortable rather than blocking it out with further layers of self-indulgence.
It’s a scary thing to let go of everything.
To really confront the fact that no experience, no person, no thing can ever truly satisfy the full spiritual depths of our being.
That there is no thought, no concept, no percept that can capture the true nature of existence.
That the only way to touch reality in its nakedness is to become naked ourselves - to let go of everything, of the world, of other people, of ourselves, of all our thoughts and theories and desires and dreams.
At first, when you try to do this, it is natural to feel vulnerable and weak. Without body or words or concept to hold onto, it can feel feel like falling into a fathomless void unprotected.
But when we allow ourselves fall, to truly let go, to give up into total faith in the reality that unfolds from total, complete surrender, what we find is that a force of utter, inconceivable power and beauty takes over. To be naked and vulnerable and unarmed reveals itself to be not weakness but the ultimate strength.
Our natural state, our default functioning absent our grasping and resistances possesses a wisdom far beyond anything our limited conceptual minds could comprehend. It needs no protection by thoughts, no clothing in experience, no motivation from desire. Our natural nakedness is luminous, clear, free and utterly perfect in its emptiness.
When we really let ourselves fall into that emptiness, we find that we are in much more intimate contact with everything we let go of than we ever were when we grasped onto it.
Experience reveals its fullness when we do not squeeze it into the shapes of our desires. People reveal their loveliness when we do not dream them into the shape of what we want them to be. Non-conceptual reality contains all the meaning and purpose that was too vast to fit into the strained little concepts we try to clothe it in.
It may all sound very grandiose but I don’t think we need to be enlightened or some great saint to touch the reality I’m talking about here. I think each time we truly let go, truly open our palms and our hearts and the fists of our unrelenting minds, even for the briefest moment, this reality flashes before us like a bright forgotten Eden, at once inconceivably awe-inspiring and as familiar as returning to our childhood home.
It is actually our home. All of this grasping and resistance and conceptualising is what is truly foreign to our natural state.
I would like to say we must simply be not afraid to let ourselves fall into loving hands of reality. But of course we must be afraid, for it is a terrifying thing to let go of every tangible source of safety. We must let ourselves feel this fear, it is our deepest duty, actually, to feel this fear. We must let ourselves fall into this terrifying emptiness, all the way through it, until we arrive at the inconceivable, loving wisdom of the luminous empty fullness that waits on the other side.
We are not walking home, we are falling home, and the only way to get there is to stop reaching for something to grip onto.
@skillfuldreams@nickcammarata oh, now I see what you mean. I was more thinking that humans are still in the loop and you need to coordinate with or around them
@nickcammarata It is not primarily about accumulating wealth to purchase ever more expensive goods. Money functions as a lever that amplifies power imbalances. For that reason, it is unlikely that this lever will be set aside, as doing so would require those in power to relinquish it
i think you get a personality and then you either lean into that and you maybe win or you try to be a different personality than that and then you auto lose
imo a happy relationship isn’t about finding someone worth committing to *or* being someone worth committing to.
It’s about finding someone you love and building a relationship together that is worth committing to.
The perfect partnership isn’t something you find; it’s something you build.
If we manage, even for a moment, to experience nondual perception, our fixation on the outward appearance of things disappears.
The more our obsession with outward appearances fades, the more our inner fixation weakens, and the more the sense of inner solidity and substantiality dissolves.
The more we train in abiding in the awakened state, the more clearly we see the surrounding world as it is — an illusory play devoid of any “solidity.”
Great masters who attained realization could walk on water, pass through rocks, and remain in fire.
The outer elements are nothing but the fruit of deluded perception. No one other than ourselves created them; therefore, when our inner fixation collapses, their seeming existence disappears along with it.
All outer appearances are devoid of substance, like smoke and mist. We perceive these appearances, but only as the magical play of delusion.
Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche