Flow 🧘⛩️👁️

Nothing of this is "real" & your mind's on autopilot.

Psychologist. Writer. Psychodynamic therapist in training. Musician. Meditation. Tai Chi. #Psychodhamma.

[Flow 🧘⛩️👁️ @FloPopp]

I must grudgingly admit, I "like" this:
😂

[Flow 🧘⛩️👁️ @FloPopp]

@TheHeadless235 Might have been my group therapy session today. It's a bit tedious at times at the moment. 😅🙏

[Flow 🧘⛩️👁️ @FloPopp]

True. 😼😽

[𝒢𝒾𝓁𝒷ℯ𝓇𝓉 @AbakpaJob]

every single person who owns two cats has one beautiful idiot and one terrifying demon plotting a coup

[Flow 🧘⛩️👁️ @FloPopp]

@TVachaW Sometimes, it's just some gas. 🤭

[Flow 🧘⛩️👁️ @FloPopp]

May you be like gas in an open space. 💨😵‍💫🙏

[Vacha @TVachaW]

When seeking to expand our consciousness, it’s tempting to think there is some activity of “being more aware” that we need to do.

But ime, it’s more a case of simply letting awareness follow its natural tendency to expand.

Awareness, to me, is like a gas that naturally expands to fit the container it’s in.

Our reflexive tendency to grasp at and resist things constricts the container of consciousness, limiting its ability to expand.

The right mental motion then, is not to actively try and cast more awareness onto our internal world. It’s to release our constrictions so it can expand of its own accord.

We are simply trying to get out of the way.

More like a kind of deep outbreath of release into expansion than a forced inhale of more awareness.

More like an opening the fist of our heart than a hand trying to snatch after clouds of consciousness.

When they’ve scanned the brains of people in expanded states of psychedelic consciousness, they find it is a state of reduced rather than increased neural activity.

A simple shutting down of all the parts of us that block consciousness from expanding into the infinite container of our hearts.

Awareness wants to expand. Expansion is its natural state. We just have to let it do its thing.

[Spill The Memes @SpillTheMemes]

😂

[Flow 🧘⛩️👁️ @FloPopp]

@TheHeadless235 Thanks! Rest it is! 😌🫠

[Flow 🧘⛩️👁️ @FloPopp]

@TheHeadless235 How very fitting! Thanks, JB! 🙏

[Flow 🧘⛩️👁️ @FloPopp]

Being interested will take you much further than being interesting. 🤔🙏

[Mud Wizard | 泥巫师 | (91/100 days 3hr+ practice) @IkkyusDen]

Maybe it's not necessary that I goodhart on "being the kind of guy who lives his calling" in order to impress the girls. Maybe I can just do what I'd naturally do and be interested rather than interesting, for my own enjoyment, regardless of expected profit.

[Prasanna K @prasanna_says]

A tensegrity structure of unmet needs..

Let's start from some basic mammalian needs we need to survive and thrive as a troop...

The four brahmaviharas can be considered basis vectors of the mammalian feeling space.. nutrients we need to grow and love and live together.

Metta => to be kind to each other,
Karuna => to face our pains,
Mudita => to share our joys
Upekkha => to be held steady.

Like any basis vectors, they can define an entire world.

When these needs are met early => everything is smooth and stable, we don't look for substitutes

When they're NOT MET => something gets built to stand in for the lack

That something is a sankhara/knot/schema

And it shows up in two flavours: near & far...

Far defence = armour.
We escape the lack by turning to its opposite. Aka "I really didn't want it! I hate it! It's weak!"

No metta => ill-will. Aimed out, it's mistrust. Aimed in, it's shame.
No karuna => cruelty => "I deserve to suffer."
No mudita => envy. Someone else's joy is my failure.
No upekkha => reactivity. Grasp, flee, grasp, flee.

Near defence = counterfeit.
We manufacture a poor substitute of the missing feeling and cling to it. Aka "I'll settle for this"

No metta => attachment. Love bought by pleasing, earning, merging.
No karuna => pity/self-pity. Falling into the wound instead of sitting beside it.
No mudita => status-joy. Glad only when witnessed, only when winning.
No upekkha => numbness/indifference. Withdrawal that passes for peace — the hardest one to catch, because it looks most like the goal.

What happens when these defences add up on top of each other?

Let's look at tensegrity — Buckminster Fuller's idea — a structure that keeps its shape with no solid core. Rigid struts that never touch each other, suspended in a continuous net of tension cables. Struts push out, cables pull in, and the shape is nothing but those two forces cancelling. The stiffness — the thing that makes it feel like an object — comes entirely from the pre-tension. Push on it anywhere and the load spreads across the whole net, never into one joint.

The sankharas/schemas built up by the lack of the basis vectors create a tensegrity structure. The far-defence struts push apart, the near-defence cables pull in. Defectiveness => approval-seeking => unrelenting standards => punitiveness => and the self-punishment loops straight back to "not enough." The ring powers itself. Each one absurd alone, load-bearing together.

Which is why fixing one sankhara rarely holds. Cut one cable => the tension redistributes => the structure heals around the cut and re-forms. You see through the pattern on Tuesday, it's back Friday with the same face :) You snapped a strut. The pre-tension was untouched.

And the pre-tension is the original lack of the basis vector.

So you don't take a tensegrity apart node by node. You can't. You relax the tension holding the whole thing taut.

Learn to sit in the jhana — metta, then karuna, then mudita, then upekkha.

Generate enough safety, satisfaction, bliss and soak them all in. Your body/mind stops improvising the missing nutrients and starts supplying them directly.

Feed the system the actual nutrient => the needs are met => tension releases.

And tensegrity doesn't sag politely. Past a threshold it loses integrity and drops — not joint by joint, all of it, everywhere, all at once.

That's what release feels like: not a slow repair, the sudden absence of a strain you never knew you were holding. Nothing left to brace against. Nothing pushing back.

So what was standing there, before it came down?

A set of forces held in one shape by an old hunger. No central strut. No solid thing in the middle — only tension, read as an object because it never once went slack long enough for anyone to check.

Which leaves me with one open question:

The structure that drops when the strain finally releases — the one held in shape only by compensating for what it never received — is that what we've been calling the Self?

[Flow 🧘⛩️👁️ @FloPopp]

@camino_delsol_ What can we really know, anyway? 😉😅🙏

[Flow 🧘⛩️👁️ @FloPopp]

@Favwontmiss I'm a good improvisor, maybe one of the best. 😉🎷

[Flow 🧘⛩️👁️ @FloPopp]

Thought is just foam and spray. 🌊🫧

[Laura Matsue @lauramatsue]

The idea that your thoughts completely create your reality is based on the false premise that your conscious waking mind is in itself the master of the universe.

While our thoughts do affect how we perceive reality and those perceptions shape our actions, there is a deeper guiding intelligence to life that goes beyond the mind alone.

There are things that you did not think of that will happen, and there are many cases of Divine grace blessing someone who feels they are in an unredeemable situation.

This is because the mind is meant to be a servant of that deeper intelligence, and it can work with it or against it.

There is a lifeline, which some call God, that connects deeply to our soul and guides the course of events in our lives.

We have a lot of choice in how we respond to those events, but there is an element of mystery to life that once you notice it, your mind cannot help but be humbled, bow down, and surrender.

When the mind gets into contact with this deeper lifeline of the soul and its connection to God, we live the life that we find most fulfilling, and the mind will naturally follow.

At that point, there is no need to force ourselves to think positively, because our mind is now working in deep service and communion with the soul, God and life itself.

[Flow 🧘⛩️👁️ @FloPopp]

This is actually Berlin roadworks.

[eugyppius @eugyppius1]

Roadworks in Germany:
1) The iron rule is that any section of street or pavement, intersection or pedestrian crossing that is most useful to you in your everyday life is most likely to be subject to roadworks. A lot of people think other factors are predictive, such as length of time since last roadworks in this area, relative state of disrepair, etc. Lol no.
2) The first stage of Roadworks in Germany involves a bunch of workers in reflective vests who show up randomly some morning and cordon off the whole area. Then they leave, and the area just stays roped off – sometimes for a few days, sometimes for weeks, occasionally for multiple months. Pedestrians start to dismantle the barriers and walk through the pointlessly blocked-off zone, teenage vandals tag the barriers with "ACAB" and antifa graffiti, weeds begin to grow between the cracks of disused walkway.
3) The next stage of Roadworks in Germany involves the Digging of a Hole. This can be a huge deep hole, a very shallow small hole, multiple holes, or anything in between. Men show up to do this, preferably early in the morning when everyone is trying to go to work, for maximal disruptive effect. After they've dug the hole everyone disappears again.
4) From here there are a few possibilities. Sometimes more workers show up after a few weeks and fill in the hole, and it's over. Sometimes they continue to dig and expand the hole, ripping up pipes and power cables, for weeks and weeks. Sometimes workers appear a month later and install a lamppost or a bicycle stand or a weird railing or a planter for trees or something else nobody wanted at the site of their hole.
5) Very reluctantly and as slowly as possible, workers will repave or retile the area of their Roadworks, often striving to maintain an uneven and maximally scarred pavement to ensure that everything is worse than before.

[Flow 🧘⛩️👁️ @FloPopp]

@TheHeadless235 We'll be spending some quality time together in the near future. Here's amazement and good hopes! 🤗