puer aeternus

they taught me how to eat before they taught me how to fish

[Spicy @spicyofc]

the mind-wandering game:

make mind-wandering the temporary goal of meditation

any time you catch yourself focused and on the breath, return to mind wandering about whatever thoughts pop up

during overthinking, this goal feels a lot easier to achieve

i've noticed this game has helped reduce aversion to mind wandering by reframing it as a game rather than a negative distraction

funmaxxing

[Vacha @TVachaW]

There’s in an interesting passage in SN 46.54 where the Buddha talks about how to transform loving-kindness into its maximally liberating form, where he describes the practitioner like this:

“If they wish: ‘May I meditate perceiving the repulsive in the unrepulsive,’ that’s what they do. If they wish: ‘May I meditate perceiving the unrepulsive in the repulsive,’ that’s what they do. If they wish: ‘May I meditate perceiving the repulsive in the unrepulsive and the repulsive,’ that’s what they do. If they wish: ‘May I meditate perceiving the unrepulsive in the repulsive and the unrepulsive,’ that’s what they do. If they wish: ‘May I meditate staying equanimous, mindful and aware, shunning both the repulsive and the unrepulsive,’”

I always find this sutta to be a nice precursor to more Mahayana style emptiness teachings, where the endpoint is total freedom from perceiving either repulsiveness or unrepulsiveness as *inherent* to the object (I do think Theravada teachings lead there too but it’s just a bit more explicitly in Mahayana more often; sometimes Theravada can give the impression that seeing phenomena as having an inherently repulsive aspect is an endpoint).

It’s interesting to me that this formulation is laid out specifically with reference to how “the heart’s release by love” is developed. I do think unconditional love (when combined with the awakening factors) is the closest relative analogue to the ultimate viewpoint of nibbana in that when one loves something / someone unconditionally one can perceive all its / their relative good and bad, whilst maintaining a heart of goodwill and openness towards it / them.

Moving away from suttas / sutras to my own personal experience, I can say that when I touch the moments of deepest release, although the push/pull dynamics of grasping/resistance subside, the beauty, purity, bliss and love remains but is so omnipresent that there is no impulse to try to chase, contain or possess it (and there is nobody left to grasp or resist it in any case). In the deepest release, there is nothing repulsive (or magnetic) at all about phenomena; it is all just empty, loving, blissful awareness.

[Vacha @TVachaW]

One of the most mind-bending skills one can learn is the art of what I call Conscious Fetishization.

If we look deeply at most human desires - they are essentially fetishes.

That is, we are projecting desirability onto something that is not inherently desirable.

We know that this is the case because many of the people, objects and experiences we desire most deeply are not desired at all by other people.

This shows us that the desirability of the person / object / experience lives in us not in the the person / object / experience.

Our desires are something we construct and in almost all cases we construct them unconsciously.

People rarely consciously choose their sexual type or aesthetic taste or their material obsessions. They are usually simply presented to us, fully formed, by our unconscious mind.

But learning how to take conscious control of this process can be extremely liberating.

Because sexual desires are often the most overwhelming, it can be particularly powerful to learn how to construct a sexual attraction to someone.

Once you learn how to construct it, it is then very easy to learn how to deconstruct it. This in turn creates the freedom to desire whatever we want to desire.

And even more powerfully - to deconstruct any desire we wish to deconstruct.

This skill is liberating as the ability to design and deconstruct our desires unlocks the ability to feel unconditionally happy as we can tailor our desires to our circumstances.

I give a few tips in the QT below on the initial steps of how to learn this skill 👇

[Vivid Void @vividvoid]

Maybe the biggest confusion in Western Dharma is the set of instructions for what happens during spiritual practice vs. how to live your daily life. You should sit like a mountain, preferring nothing. You should be a human with many strong preferences when not on the cushion

[Jim Fanara @jimfanara]

@vividvoid I wish someone had screamed this at me when I first started meditating and reading Eastern philosophy

[Vacha @TVachaW]

People fear the concept of "emptiness" in Buddhism because they equate it to a form of nihilism.

But really, emptiness in the Buddhist sense is something close to the opposite of nihilism - it is a portal to discovering our limitless potential.

The Sanskrit word "sunya" that translates as "empty" also translates as "zero" and we can penetrate the liberating power of emptiness by contemplating the relationship between 0 and limitlessness.

If you add, subtract or divide any number by any other number you output another defined number.

The only exception is 0. If you divide any non-zero number by 0, the result is classed in mathematics as "undefined."

This undefined quantity is a close cousin of infinity.

This is because if you divide any number by x, the closer x comes to 0, the larger the number outputted by the equation, tending towards infinity.

In some senses, x/0 is even more infinite than infinity as it is a way of jailbreaking out of the whole system of numbers into what is inconceivable.

The notion of "sunyata" or "emptiness" functions in a similar way in Buddhism.

To say something is "empty" is to say that it has no fixed nature.

And it is precisely *because* it has no fixed nature that all possibilities are contained within it.

This is because if something has a fixed nature, then there is something it cannot be. For example, if something has a fixed nature as "square", then it can never be a circle or a triangle or an oblong. Many possibilities are closed off to that thing.

Whereas something that has no fixed nature has no possibilities closed off from it. There is nothing it cannot be.

This is why it is so liberating to discover the emptiness of one's own nature.

To recognize oneself as empty - as having no fixed nature - is to recognize that there is infinite potential within us.

Or, as the analogy to 0 shows, something beyond infinity - an infinity so thorough that it transcends even the category of infinity, opening a door to what is inconceivable and limitless.

So, when you hear that "your true nature is emptiness", you should not hear "your true nature is nothingness" but rather "your true nature is full of inconceivably limitless possibilities."

Likewise, when we view everything we encounter as empty too, we unlock the door to viewing all circumstances, people and experiences as full of inconceivably limitless possibilities.

It is through these diamond-tinted lenses of emptiness that we are able, like William Blake:

"To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour."

[Vacha @TVachaW]

We're often told to feel our feelings but not so often told *how* to feel our feelings.

If there was a simple answer to how to feel your feelings, then everyone would be doing it all the time.

So, instead I'd like to offer a more complex answer, based in the Buddhist notion of emptiness.

This might seem counterintuitive at first - the desire to feel more seems like a desire to feel more fullness, so how could the key lie in understanding emptiness?

But really, emptiness, fullness, and feeling our feelings are all intimately interlinked.

In the Buddhist sense, "emptiness" doesn't just refer to absence in general, it refers to the absence of a fixed nature.

To say that something is empty in this sense, is simply to say that it doesn't have a fixed nature.

According to the Buddhist view - *everything* is empty, which means nothing has a fixed nature.

At first this sense of unfixedness may seem like a fearful thing but it is actually the pathway out of fear and into feeling our feelings.

This is because the reason we don't want to feel our feelings is that we are afraid of our feelings.

And the reason we are afraid of our feelings is that we think they have a fixed nature.

That is, if there is a feeling on the periphery of our awareness that presents as suffering, then we don't want to bring it further into awareness because we think more awareness of this feeling would mean more suffering.

But to understand emptiness is to understand that this feeling that currently presents as suffering does not have a fixed nature as suffering.

Rather, our experience of the feeling as suffering is something constructed by the mode of awareness we hold it in.

Simply understanding this opens the door to the possibility that bringing the feeling more into awareness will actually lead to less suffering.

It's not that there is this fixed quantity of suffering in the feeling and more awareness will just bring that fixed quantity into greater intensity.

What we discover as we bring the feeling into awareness is that the pushing it away from awareness was actually one of the supporting conditions for experiencing it as suffering.

So, bringing the feeling into awareness actually constructs an entirely new experience.

The mathematics of the feeling is not:

Suffering feeling + awareness = more awareness of suffering

But rather:

Feeling + mode of awareness = suffering

And therefore:

Feeling + different mode of awareness = potentially less suffering

Now, of course, this is not entirely linear. Indeed there may be an initial rise in discomfort as a difficult feeling is brought into consciousness.

But it is exactly this non-linearity that can give us faith in the fact that continuing to hold it in awareness will eventually yield less suffering rather than more.

The more we hold a feeling in awareness that felt at first like a suffering feeling and see it transform into a neutral or positive feeling, the more we gain insight into the empty, unfixed nature of the feeling.

Gradually we can train ourselves to see all feelings not as inherently uncomfortable or comfortable but rather as empty vessels that become filled with comfort or discomfort depending on how they are held in awareness.

This encourages us to respond to difficult feelings with a curiosity to bring them into awareness to see how they transform, rather than being afraid of bringing them into awareness on the assumption that we are just inviting a more intense experience of suffering.

This all seems very theoretical when unpacked in this way.

But this is why the word "emptiness" - despite its prima facie scary connotations - comes to be such an intuitively powerful one.

Eventually, as we apply the wisdom of emptiness, emotions present less as fixed, solid objects to be feared, and more as empty spacious potentials to be explored.

Which makes feeling your feelings as easy and fearless as breathing in a fresh breath of air.

[raf @zoeyduatch]

rewatched obsession and when bear goes to get a “sunshine in a rock” citrine necklace he concludes nikki wouldn’t like it, then he gets the one wish willow and says HE likes that better. that’s his whole thing, guessing nikki’s preferences and concluding they should match his.

[puer aeternus @str8edgeaddict]

little details alluding and building up to just how codependent bear is that ppl keep clocking i recognize in myself and it’s obvious why my past relationships have flopped. like, i’m ashamed, and my eyes sting from the hindsight. i love how all the characters are written sm

[raf @zoeyduatch]

rewatched obsession and when bear goes to get a “sunshine in a rock” citrine necklace he concludes nikki wouldn’t like it, then he gets the one wish willow and says HE likes that better. that’s his whole thing, guessing nikki’s preferences and concluding they should match his.

[Vacha @TVachaW]

Mingyur Rinpoche ❤️

[Hyde 💨 @BreatheLesss]

Average spiritual bypasser.

[Joe Hudson @FU_joehudson]

Discipline built on shame works for a while. Then it burns you out.
Discipline built on love pulls you forward. It is regenerative.

That's what we do here.

Welcome to my account,
@FU_joehudson

[Joe Hudson @FU_joehudson]

Avoid your fear and you're running from life.
Indulge your fear and it's control by another name.
Follow your fear and you'll find an unimaginable aliveness.

[Wystan @WystanTBS]

"If you open your mind to the idea that the Buddha was actually advocating ego development instead of egolessness, you see that there’s nothing lopsided or lacking in his understanding of healthy ego functioning. In fact, he mastered some ego skills that Western psychology has yet to explore, such as how to use right concentration to satisfy the desire for immediate pleasure; how to develop an integrated sense of causality that ultimately makes a sense of self superfluous; how to harness the ego’s drive for lasting happiness so that it leads to a happiness transcending space and time."

👏👏👏

[Aseel Swaid @aseelswaid9]

egyptian poem from 3,300 years ago

[divya venn @divya_venn]

“asian parents don't tell you they love you, they show you by feeding you" but also

"asian parents don't tell you they're scared & traumatized, they show you by controlling your life”

I think a lot of you would like this thread but this part will stay w me for a long time

[˗ˏˋ ´ˎ˗ @lapislagoons]

I have been on both sides of this neither is good

[rosalind lucy @wholebodyprayer]

In my experience for “yoga” to actually result in “Yoga” (original meaning), it needs the following:
- the breath is actually taught not just observed.
- but it is natural and not over-controlled
- asana, pranayama and stillness in a seamless flow
- adapted to your individual needs
- the breath is synced with the movement; not sprinkled on top later
- there are periods of stillness
- its not too complicated, its not like a choreographed dance where you are thinking about what to do next all the time
- there is absolute rest / stillness
- the breath envelopes the movement, it is all about the breath
- the breath is audible but barely, but enough to elongate it, and for the mind to stay with it
- the breath is THE thing
- breath capacity and retention capacity increases over time
- bandha capacity increases over time - not as “locks” but as “gentle cooperation of muscles in the devotion to the breath”
- you begin to feel yourself as prana, as the energy body
- the feeling of aliveness is so beautiful even when there are painful feeligns in it
- the mind slides down into the feeling body and out of rumination. Like a waterslide
- thoughtless states arise naturally without repression or control

[rosalind lucy @wholebodyprayer]

No you probably wont get this from a studio class, & its not their fault - we kept the surface layer & mostly lost what made it actually work like this.
Asana-inspired exercise doesnt lead to the state of yoga
Perhaps confidence, a short peaceful time of exhaustion after exercise

[rosalind lucy @wholebodyprayer]

Let me introduce the definition of yoga - where consciousness via the mind moves in a direction of choice; meaning the whirlings of mind die away