Shouting at Flowers

This post is about how to make flowers grow faster by reading motivational speeches to them, understanding how to apply the right amount of guilt and punishment, and ‘encouraging’ them to be more responsible and less lazy.          Ok lets be real.

The heart is like a flower. You can’t make a flower grow faster by shouting motivational speeches at it (basically human society in a nutshell), or by giving the flower discipline and punishment for its ‘misdeeds’ of inherently existing in this reality. Pointing out the flowers flaws and telling it to take a good long constructively critical look at itself.

I am thinking about the concept of ‘watering the good seeds’ in my life. Like a garden! lol. Noticing what observations were the ‘most helpful’. And just noticing them and feeling good about it. the feeling helps me remember that things are safe and good. It is a habit to go into my mind for answers instead of trusting the feeling to remember what is important. the heart knows things. it has a knowledge to it. and it learns things, all the time, even when the brain isn’t thinking.

We humans think we are so different and superior from other animals. that our intelligence makes us different and above them, alienated from them. yet at core we are very similar. we are bonded to the same primal physical needs plants and animals have. we need the light, the out doors, the social connection, food and water. nourishment. kindness. trees aren’t giving motivational seminars to other trees about how to “evict their inner wussy.” we people are a lot like trees. If you aren’t in the sunlight, you grow in funny, you tend to accumulate a lot of doubts and worries and feel empty inside. it’s not your fault that you weren’t put in the sunlight. but people will judge you harshly as though this was your personal failure. Yet as a human we do have the option to pick ourselves up and re-plant ourselves in the sunlight. for a time i moved to California. because i realized i didn’t need to suffer any more, because i genially felt happier in the sunshine and heat and i could tell the people there felt happier too, like a multiplying effect. we don’t always have that choice to move to California. i had to move back. but we can still choose to spend more time ‘in the light’ in the places that make us feel good. don’t blame yourself for the bad things so much. no one ever ‘wants’ to be bad. think about what you need and how to bring more of it into your life.

I had this dream where one or two people I know who i think of as being ‘anxious’ kept coming by and removing things from my bead room or living room. In the first part my best friend kept purchasing potted plants and putting them in his living room. Then the anxious person would come by the ‘clean up’ there was a ‘busyness’ about it. They would remove the potted plant by some kind of misunderstanding that they were doing us a service, when in fact my friend just bought that and wanted it there. “She keeps taking my plants. this keeps happening.” he said. During the dream i wasn’t really aware that the person taking the plants was anxiety driven. during the dream i figured she had some kind of reason for doing it. In the next part of the dream i kept making drawing on big pads of paper like i had wanted too for some time. the drawings were turning out pretty well but this person came by and removing them for some reason. in the dream the  people were people much older then me, so they were like role models, i would figure that what they were doing was for an important purpose, like they were taking the plants and the art for some kind of important reason. Another layer to the psychology of it all. When in fact the people taking the plants were driven by anxiety and i didn’t make that observation until after i woke up.

Looking back on it after i woke up: These were people I identified a part of myself in them. the dream was about me and not them. but i won’t say that ‘all dreams are about you’, some dreams are very much about your relationships to society or other people or the events of the day. it’s not all your goddamn fault! the kind of negative self focus is a problem in society. this relentless self improvement effort. it become like a loop. trying harder. going nowhere. I’ve learned to be kinder to myself. I realized that when i got anxious i would start ‘problem solving’ in my mind, and that emotion and the thinking about it would effectively ‘remove’ positive observations i had already made in the previous days our hours. it was like going backwards, even though it felt like i was ‘being productive’ and ‘problem solving’, i was getting caught in the fear, removing positive emotions, forgetting to notice the good things i and improvements i had already made in the previous day. The anxious people were my anxious thoughts and feelings. the ‘cleaning up’ the ‘problem solving’ / ‘being productive’ was actually removing the flowers, the fruits of the previous day.

I have to water those positive seeds, those good observations about what is going right. to get out of the fear. to grow the good things in life. so those positive observations can seep down into my heart, and i can more forward in life as a choice my emotions have made, and not as a choice my brain is forcing me to do. My brain is sort of like my mom ‘forcing’ me to be more social. I’m noticing even when i force myself to do things all the time, the things i should ‘want’ to do, it seems like courage, but just becomes another kind of stress loop. stress under the guise of courage. you should force yourself to be with people all the time. you shouldn’t force yourself to have fun. at some point you have to be honest, i -want- to have fun, i -want- to feel connected to people. the wanting is a more powerful emotion. but the fear and the worry makes us afraid to just relax and want. sometimes relaxing is scary. because when we relax we notice more. our perception expands, we notice all kinds of scary things we weren’t even aware of when we were in the stress mode, busying though life on autopilot, when we really take a moment to relax and remember what that feels like in the heart, we notice more, the good and the bad and that in itself becomes scary. so we jump back up into the mind. not even noticing the reason why, and forgetting that we ever even found away into that better stronger state of being.

The anxious people in my dream were (like) my thoughts. it came from something real, something ‘out there’ that started right from the beginning perhaps, in the early years of growing up, and shaped something ‘in here’ in me. even though the thoughts were anxiety driven. I took them for something ‘important’ or ‘productive’ and this is in my waking life. not the dream any more. in that way my relationship to my thoughts was just like my relationship to the specific people in the dream. the thoughts were ‘older’ they had been around for a long time, a habit in me from the beginning i hadn’t even noticed could be different. i just figured it was the way reality was. but when something scary happens, i didn’t need to go into my brain and think about it. i can just let it roll off me. i don’t have to use logic to make sense out of fear feelings. that isn’t ‘being productive’. just because something has been ‘going on forever’ or ‘everyone is doing it’ doesn’t make it more right.

(Naturally Social ‘hang out space’ Event) All people have passion. All people want something. it feels good to be healthy. addition is just a trauma symptom. there are hidden traumas everywhere effecting our behavior. it isn’t a ‘disease in the mind’. it’s a feeling. a feeling of not feeling safe with people. humans and other animals are a socially driven species, we learn to function on our own for long periods and even thrive temporary when removing ourselves form the community in a bigger way, but this is a trauma coping mechanisms, not true ‘thriving’.

Being part of the community is not the same as ‘conforming’ to all it’s pressures and abstract ideals. There is something to be said about being around others yet ‘holding on to yourself’. Maybe someone is talking to you a lot and won’t stop. it isn’t your responsibility to answer their every question. what matters is that you -feel- connected to people, a sense of ease and rhythm and flow in the group. that you could relax, laugh at a joke, look into someones eyes, the words quickly can become very distracting, we get caught into this race to become ‘smarter’ that is perpetuated by society and is a huge distraction blocking the way to the true simplicity of feeling of love and connection between people when we take time to relax with each other and allow them to flow.

We can draw out this passion in all people, adults and children, but talking about it, complementing it, etc, asking about it, sharing out own passion leading by example to thereby encourage others to share theirs. just by existing int he world we encounter lots of pain, loneliness, emptiness, it all boils down to one word, ‘suffering’. you think you have to discipline and motivate your kids al the time on top of the suffering that already inherently exists in reality, the burden of just existing in this survival based universe / plane of existence. we criticize the defeated, the poor and the injured for not being ‘motivated’ enough to seeded in life and get rich and famous. the intention is wrong, the goal is wrong, the criticism is misplaced. lots of people fight against it. but the habit is too easy, it’s too old, we are used to fighting battles against ourselves and each other we don’t even need to fight. this physiological war of winning love and motivating ourselves to be better and smarter. Society has this way of teaching us, in a subliminal or subtextual way that we are ‘inherently bad’ or inherently at fault. we start assuming we are at fault or have made mistakes. the problems in our life seem ‘logical’ when they start as something emotional we have never even notices is there. when we don’t make peace with the ‘this is my fault’ emotion, we don’t let in the happiness, the rainbow river of positive emotions that flows between us and others, so therefore we never even know it is there. we never even know what is really feels like. so problems in life seem logical, we never notice this emotion that blocks our way to an even more powerful kind of connection then we thought was possible.

The ‘autism’ thing never made sense to me, some doctor thought i was high functioning autistic? when i was 12? yet i noticed times when the shyness would just go away completely, and that i could get more connected just by looking for more of those ‘times’. the good times. I realize I had a lot of free reign when i was young, lots of time to think for myself and be creative, it was mind-expanding and thinking deeply about the universe relentlessly even as a child, i was fascinated and always learning….. i never had to deal with the strict discipline and conditioning some families had, free thinking was encouraged in my family…… so it was hard to accept the simplistic pigeon hole of mental illness. it never really made sense to me. if mental illness is a fixed condition in the brain, they why did it just totally vanish in certain situations? i was never convinced i was ‘ill’ in the brain, yet there this habit, it is trendy to convince people of my generation they have an illness. it seemed like everyone i knew had one. it was like candy.

Sometimes i felt like i was in a ‘cloud’ and other times i felt this potability for infinite love and connection, yet the ‘cloud’ really didn’t feel like a ‘mental dysfunction’ or something that was permanent, but i didn’t really know what it was that made me feel disconnected either. and slowly over time i felt more and more disconnected, I became ‘insecure’. As i grew older i became more set in the ways of society, earning approve for the love of peers, striving to prove myself to the larger community, to ‘get the girl’. trying to get ‘smarter’ to impress people, and on the flip side of it all was this fear that there was something wrong in my brain. They told me i was learning disabled too, in elementary school. Normally i don’t even bother mentioning this.. but it is relevant. They told me these things, I knew that wasn’t true, even though as a kid i was creating complicated fantasy novels, and stop motion movies, designing computer games, and doing all kinds of things. So I really questioned what i was told regarding my ‘brain’. It really made no sense. I used to be really concerned with proving people wrong, but that really is part of the problem, so i don’t even bother with it now. the people who believe these things aren’t the people i want to be around. Something made me shy away from people as a kid. But that wasn’t ‘mental illness’. That was such a creepy way to describe people. And that was the truth, every time ‘mental illness’ came up, it felt creepy as hell, it felt fake, and depressing, what were all these adults doing? Sitting in a room feeling depressed.

The only thing we really need to worry about in life is putting food on the table. The love part, that should be the nourishment, the healing. Sometimes i can mean that we have to flip our perspective on life to see love as the food, the sustenance, the nourishment, and not as the thing we have to ‘strive’ to become, the final ‘enlightenment’ that will make us finally truly lovable. The enlightenment is right here. you are already enlightened. you have suffered enough. just by friggin existing in this reality. With all the confusion of it all. addition isn’t laziness. addiction is a trauma byproduct. Filling the void with food and pleasure, that really needs to be filled with love (human light emission, human energy). Selfishness isn’t greed. It’s trauma. All of it is trauma. That’s what our society doesn’t get. We are afraid to let the love in. As a species. It is too strange too massive and too simple to comprehend. How could so many struggle with something so simple, how could so many follow a misguided approval seeking pattern, because it’s the hive mind, it’s our connection, when we don’t know what to do we look to others for guidance, everyone is looking to someone else, know one knows that they are doing, but thought history this has created a massive and ongoing illusion that we all ‘know’ what we are doing. the head mentality. group think. hive mind.

Trauma isn’t something you can simply talk people out of, you can’t mind your way out of it. Trauma is much stranger then we can know, love and healing have to be felt, experienced, we are all equals in this, we are discovering truth, not inventing truth. The teacher is the learner, the learner is the teacher. Children have feelings and questions they don’t understand because society itself doesn’t have the answers, yet instead of just dismissing the question of the child as childish, i try to always look at things with a fresh take, they see the world unclouded by habit, but children are far from perfect, yet they teach us things we have forgotten with time.

Trauma is strange, because reality itself is strange. For a while I hesitated a bit to use the word ‘trauma’ because that implies we ‘know’ what it really ‘is’ that gets in the way in life. Yet Trauma is a popular concept that is easy to understand and is becoming more popular than before so I fall back on it, and don’t want to go overboard with my radical theories about what ‘really’ gets in the way. trauma is something we are ‘ready’ as a culture to understand. yet still i find it too ‘mental’ and too ‘self’ or ‘individual’ focused, it take the focus off the community dynamic and how it effects us as individuals, and off the fact that we -physically- exist in reality and are constantly effected by this, it puts us into the mind and keeps us looking inwards for our ‘faults’ to too great an extent, the same old dilemma, like a decent step up from ‘mental illness’, yet the word ‘trauma’ is a good starting place. It gets us a bit out of the ‘mental’ and more into the ’emotional’. Society as a whole is ready to ‘grok’ the concept of ‘trauma’ and that it exists beyond traumas of injury, trauma can also be from emotional injury and it is important to recognize both. and accept that you can be traumatized even when nothing goes ‘wrong’, because it is equally traumatic when nothing goes truly ‘right’ in your life, as is the case for many. Yet if i were to find a word for what really gets in the way of connection… i might upgrade it further to something like… Ok i haven’t decided yet, but fun to think about. Well i have one idea, but it is way to radical, so we will stick with this for now. Understanding Trauma has put me further in the right direction, getting into the emotions more.

It’s hard to really ‘know’ the Universe, but when we group up in fear that we can’t find love and purpose in the greater community, that we can’t attract the love we want, that is trauma, we don’t think it is, we just call it, being an ‘awkward dork’, but it is, fearing we don’t belong is so unconscious, yet it gets in the way, we don’t even notice we are doing it, getting in our own way, it is instinctive, it goes deep into the emotions, and it isn’t really about the mind or the brain in a significant capacity enough though society is constantly telling us it is. it isn’t your fault for not trying harder. it’s the opposite. When i talk about Trauma i don’t want to get into that all to deep rut or pitfall of saying, “all the problems are in your mind” and you can do anything if you just have the right “mentality” this gets us sucked back up into the mind, when I talk about trauma i am really talking about emotional trauma. one way to release  is you process the past emotionally. that ’emotional’ part is key. it isn’t like a science project or a mathematical equation. emotions aren’t logical, yet they effect everything we can do. you have to feel what heeling the emotional feels like, only you can to that.

Trauma isn’t just in the past. Some psycho therapy can get really focused on the past to the exclusion of the present. The past has it’s values, we hold on to it in our emotions, and don’t even resize it, just taking time to notice feelings we are holding on to has this way of shedding light on them, and soundly there is this deep body’ release’ we just let it go, just by noticing it, we feel a shift.

Trauma can be very ‘on going’ in life, and i feel this gets overlooked, it is often happening right now. the trauma is continually ‘renewed’, ‘refreshed’ in a lonely and stressed out world. Every moment is new, and we relive the dark times. life is harder then we give it credit for being. Just existing can be hard. And that’s why having ‘fun’ isn’t ‘lazy’, it’s important to take all the fun you can get. yet have it in a healing way that connects you to people and the things that matter, not fun as  away of escaping the things that scare you, fun to fill a void never full. it should feel like the fun is lifting you higher. it isn’t just about what you are doing. often the intention is the most important part. healing is on going and not just about the past. feeling disconnected is traumatic, the trauma becomes on going because you are always disconnected when you get in that cycle, you can’t just ‘let go’ of the trauma without also ‘letting in’ the love. the light. the energy. this part often feels like it gets left out for me. We get really good at ‘letting go’ of things, us spiritual seekers, yet we also need to ‘let in’ the love, if there was an absence in our lives. When you talk about trauma as this ‘thing in the mind’ and forget the heart-love part of it, the people part, it gets very mental and circuital. WE focus a lot on the individual person when talking about trauma, it gets deeply psycho analytic and takes years and decades and life times, it’s all on you and your personal barriers that you personally individually need to overcome if you do enough deep processing work no yourself over the years…….. yet trauma is also largely and significantly a group phenomena that is ongoing in this very moment, and when you shift it in the entire group it can shift very quickly. your energy is connected to the energy of everyone else in the room. we are like these beacons of energy, these receives, we are community creatures. When you change the energy of the group decades of on going generational trauma aka deep unconscious emotional fear (emotional fear responses to social and group situations) can be shifted, it gets straight to the emotion, and shy shut don’t people open up, because they -feel- the vibrations of the group, and only the group love can create that vibration. one on one is ok, but years of relating to people and working through the problems one on one takes out an essential part of the equation. we are a group animal. and group healing shifts everything. when everyone in the group wants to heal and be vulnerable and talk about love and self love, that’s when big healing happens, you just don’t get there one on one. Even just remembering times when i was part of a group or community that valued ‘self love’ those times i really felt connected, and just the memory has be a guide to help me find that in myself, to reach out and recreate that kind of self love community atmosphere.

It took me a long time to accept this , but finally i decided i had suffered enough, it became too obvious too keep ignoring it, as much as i feel afraid of gathering, all the best times in my life had been during large gatherings. the reason i failed to see it, failed to accept it, was because i was making life unnecessarily complicated for myself. the truth was simple. the group itself was healing. it didn’t matter so much who is was talking to our how i was trying to connect with them, just being there and enjoying it was what really mattered, time and time a gain, i saw this was true. i was afraid that by becoming a more social person i would become exhausted and i wouldn’t have time or energy to write books, do the creative things that were a real driving passion in my life, i was afraid that to break my social boundaries i would have spend even more time being social, at one point i stopped even allowing myself to be alone… yet this was just anything over compensation for something. when i first started to experience ‘getting high’ on the social vibes of life, the good kind of high, i started to ‘flip the other way’ from introvert to extrovert. to rely on this social energy all the time. yet this lead to a crash.

I was forgetting an important part of myself, the passion, the art, the creativity. in my big quest to be charismatic and get the girl, ironically i left out something important, the valuable that all those ‘nerdy’ ‘social isolation’ activities acutely brought to my life. i saw it as the problem. but the art way my passion. what i need was BOTH. the people, and the fun, the strange personal private fun that was hard to fully communicate sometimes. every strange creative little thing that made me happy. all that wasn’t a distraction it was part of my spiritual quest, my human quest. all that alone time creative stuff was a major place of passion and healing that also connected me to others because it made me happy and witty and funny. There are many sources of energy in life. Now i do anything and everything that makes me happy. there isn’t any one thing that summarized my routine. My life is variety itself. Variety is the healer. I do different things not because i ‘know’ it will ‘work’ and connect me to people, but because it ‘feels’ good, and the feeling connects me to people. Everything becomes vastly less complicated when you let your feeling be your guide, your compass, your radar. it is all to common to undervalue the power of the heart and the power of feeling in our modern fast passed productive mind driven world of ambitious thinkers and noble strives. We are always getting better and stronger.

Society is trying to heal your trauma, yet it is also creating it. it is all very confusing. maybe you should take a nap. Take a break from all these mixed messages. LOL.

Society wants us to heal, yet at the same time it is trying to hurry you back onto that peer validated ‘productivity’ track. helping you to let go of shit quick so you can get back to work folding letters and packaging boxes or waiting tables or something. It’s time to ‘achieve’. “Have you done anything productive today?” My friends mom asks her every day, she looks exhausted. And the follow up question from my deep soul self, “who cares!!??”

We do what we have to do, work is work, we go to work, make a buck, but you won’t heal if you become too ‘familiar’ with that ‘exhausted’ feeling in life.

That’s how it was for me, life was just fundamentally exhausting and sucky. even in the exhausting lame situations that you can’t avoid you have to focus on the good, the energy, the fun, and start to see that there is something really consistently good in the world. it helps knowing other people have it, and i think i was always unconsciously instinctively modelling those other people, even now, often they themselves may not know ‘how they do it’. it is more important to feel it then to know it. joy and success is like this feedback loop established over time. but it is more then ‘mentality’ it is more then the ‘mental’, the synaptic firings in your mind. healing and positive momentum in life is very emotion based, feeling based. often we talk ourselves out of feeling the feelings. we became ourselves. argue with ourselves. be the feeling is deeper then all that. it’s not your fault. feelings aren’t logical. the mind is logical. you can’t logic your way out of trauma. You just have to notice how you feel. It sounds almost too obvious. but it takes time and practice.

Exhaustion becomes so normal to people like me, that we don’t even really know what feelings feel like and they way they guide us to where the energy and power of life is. When you are really getting more and more into your feelings, they become like this compass, like this radar that leads you to where the energy and connection is in life, and you don’t even have to think that much. It’s like you life is powered by this internal magnet. and that’s what love is, it’s magnetic. It becomes so normal.. just forcing ourselves to do things all the time, we think it is ‘admirable’ yet when you create momentum with your feelings by enjoying all little things in life, that momentum carries you, and then you don’t have to constantly ‘tell yourself and ‘make yourself’ do things. life gets easier, and people treat you with more respect. it is a win win. and the other way is a lose lose. yet even people are in this ‘lose lose’ place life they need our kindness and not our criticism. the criticism is already alive and well in the minds of these people, yet the outside world is always here to provide more of it somehow. the criticism and ‘identification’ of problems … becomes the problem itself. the ‘shouting at flowers’ phenomenon. a flower is just a flower. if it doesn’t get enough light and droops over, that doesn’t mean it has ‘mental illness’. A complex neural problem of the flower that has gone wrong permanently in it’s flower brain. It doesn’t have flower autism. or flower schizophrenia. It doesn’t have restless flower syndrome, to be cured with some kind of an inorganic chemical in the shape of a pill with a fancy name like “abilify”. It’s just a goddamn flower. Stop reading into things. Stop projecting problems. You just have to keep watering those good seeds, being grateful for the things that make you happy in life day by day. that creates momentum. magnetism.

The fear, we don’t even notice we have it, but it is an instinct that gets in the way around people, we mimic what the group is doing, and we prevent ourselves from really ‘feeling’ the group vibe, enjoying the vibes, socializing becomes a type of ‘productivity’ we discuss how we can self improve and get better as individuals and people. but there is a subtle underlying stress behind it. not everyone does this, but even those who are truly comfortable don’t always notice how much anxiety is driving society itself. it is so all pervasive, so everywhere. we are afraid to challenge it. it doesn’t have to be a rebellion. it can be as simple as having self kindness and gratitude for the good things. the big ambitions in life are noble, yet they are top heavy, they make us exhausted and actually bring us down sometimes. the fear cuts us off from feeling our other emotions, like in the heart, and the emotions are what tap us into the energy, the energy the group emits, and the energy of our own creative feedback loops, the energy that connects us to the sunlight, plants animals and people around us. the vibes, enjoying the simple things, the colors of your room. this hidden fear mode, that resides in the instinctive ‘herd’ (the bonds of our animal emotional nature) cuts people off from the energy. but shifting it can be very simple the moment you start to notice it. so much of healing is as simple as ‘noticing’ things. but it can feel like stepping into another dimension. it is almost too simple, too easy to accept that life could be like this at first. when you are used to the harder way, earning love and success by being constantly relentlessly ‘productive’. a lot of it has to do with how we relate to people. you can’t really heal the trauma by being alone too long. whatever problems happen in your life, you can’t let it convince you you aren’t worthy of being around people. even when you are injured and broken, you still are connected to the love of people. we are a social species. that is how we ‘harness light energy’ we have evolved this way. because human together are like batteries, we circulates this energy, like some kind of massive organic power plant. it is very simple and effective. yet we grow up learning that attracting people is all about the ‘skills’ you have learned mentally. we live life on this ‘verbal’ demon, i can’t stand to be around people who are so ‘verbal’ and doesn’t seem to read any emotions, even the most obvious ones, yet this is the kind of person society produces. we think people want to laugh at our clever jokes, and are inspired by our brilliant statements, but the energy is even more attractive, even more healing.

Spirituality tells us that we can ‘earn’ this energy if we do lots of yoga, mediation, dieting, working out, if we really are fully devoted… yet this has a way of becoming another system of control. it is the same thing all over again. ‘productivity’. again i had to let go of all that. and get back to the simple truth. how do i feel about people. it was hard to understand at first. it seems like we are ‘independent’ units. but it took me a long time to realize that humans thrive in groups, it seems almost obvious now. it feels hard to think of yourself as ‘needing’ other people to be happy. but when you make the choice to seek groups of people more often, if you were someone like me who didn’t go to gatherings every often, you will ‘feel it’, you feel that the flow of energy is ‘natural’ and it is different then ‘neediness’ or ‘consumption’.

It isn’t neediness because you are with others, but you stay connected to yourself, you get into your body and the emotions, and out of all the mental stuff of trying to understand others minds, the competitiveness of it all, the rat race, you feel emotions and relax, and the feeling is attractive and healing. you think about what makes you happy, and that in and of itself becomes attractive, it becomes a starting place for more. Socializing is like watering plants, you grow a bit at a time, you water the good seeds, water the good thoughts, and they bare fruit and flowers. People who work too hard all the time start to look malnourished, they shrivel up, the stress isn’t natural, it feels predictable, yet notice what relationships in your life are ‘productivity based’ if you feel you need to accomplish things all the time before you can speak to someone, maybe the health value of that relationship is something to question. for some this is the only way we learn and know how to relate. it is ok to want to be friends with someone just because they make you feel calm. when you feel calm, the other person feels it too, that you are becoming more natural and connected.

the irony of it all is that people work to hard and shrivel up and feel exhausted and crash and feel lonely and don’t even know there is another modality of being in the world, a different way to ‘relate’ to the universe itself, with people and when alone. this kind of doing ‘whatever’ nourishes your emotions and feeling at any moment, this constant, heeling the feelings mode of being. it is done together and alone. it has to be both. we are a social species yet you don’t have to be constantly around people to be happy, that also becomes another system of control, a compensation mechanism for not knowing you to just ‘be with yourself’. that is also very healing. it is healing ‘creativity’. for a whole different kind of reason. socializing is very energizing for me, yet being on my own is deeply relaxing, and gives me time to cultivate this different kind of creative independence that is hard to do if you are afraid to be on your own.

You start to ‘feel’ that being around the group is the natural way, because the energy flows through you. if you don’t plug in your phone it runs out of battery. we are nothing but strange creatures floating on a big rock in space. we adapt by harnessing energy. more people = more energy. it isn’t wrong to just soak it up. to just party your way to happiness. addition is the byproduct of trauma. when the fear is gone, you see that ‘fun’ is not an indulgence, society tells us to work for love, but there is a much bigger epidemic to heal, all the productivity is not making the world better, there is so much emotional healing that needs to happen, and what we call ‘bring productive’ becomes like this anxious distraction, from the real pain, the lack of feeling like we matter in the community, to each other. You can give yourself permission to enjoy life. even when it seems almost like everyone is telling you not to. because healing yourself and feeling more healthy and vibrant is the most effective healing to others to. leading by example. and doing this isn’t as easy as it sounds, because it means face fear, letting go of what we don’t need, the stress, the attachments, not just letting go but letting in the love. you matter. you are awesome. Saying that to yourself. Saying it to others.  There is so much pain out there, yet it has this way of becoming totally invisible. people who are too disabled to work are forced to, people are sick or emotionally traumatized, but society tells them they have an ‘illness in the brain’ and call it ‘autism’. the rich treat the poor like they are unmotivated drug addicts, when really no one has it harder. You learn that suffering is your fault. if you are not happy it is your fault. it sounds like a motivation speech. Motivational speech GONE WRONG. Motivational speech GONE SEXUAL. just kidding. that’s a youtube joke. Ironically it is joy that is a major healer to the pain. Joy allows us to see things more clearly. Not telling people to force joyfulness and block out the sadness and bad things. but having kindness for the struggles of life. the invisible struggles. there are so many disabilities that you can’t even see with your eyes. and many others who are healthy enough still end up living life in a kind of loop, because you feel like you are not good enough, and it becomes a cycle. you start invalidating yourself. assuming others don’t want to talk to you, and you miss the real reason. sometimes people really just are busy and it isn’t your fault. when you keep going for the love and the joy, it becomes a positive feedback loop. and this is courageous. it feels good, and it is like partying for life, yet is is also a path of great courage.

There are greedy people out there. there are people out there who abuse power. yet we choose to put them in power. a massive part of our population votes for them and supports their power. because that massive prat of the population is acting out of trauma. Ignorant people will ride that wave and use it to get rich and powerful. but the true problem isn’t the one dictator, or the criminal, the figure head, or the bad villain man, it is the massive amount of emotional trauma in the way people relate with each other, the loneliness, the projection of our inner emptiness onto the outside world in the form of hate and fear. that ‘Hitler’ that ‘bad man’ on the top, is like a distraction of sorts, a straw man / you might call him a scapegoat of sorts, he is propped up by countless people who want to feel connected and alive and purposeful -through- him. we want that shared sense of purpose, so we elect someone who makes us feel connected, we feel connected when we all rally together over something. even if that something is racism. or a chronic drive to become smarter and better. It could be money. School. Business.

There are all kinds of things we do to feel safe, to give us an ‘excuse’ to ‘belong’ around other space. Even spirituality. Spirituality is not an exception. It starts off as this amazing blessing in our lives, to take on some form of a spiritual practice.. but soon it is another system of control, we accept this is the best it will get and get into a rhythm, a comfort zone with thousands of others and stop searching beyond the routine for answers and freedom.

(Voldemorts last dying soul in the fetal position on the left represents the condition of the ‘heart’ in an overthinking brain productive world)

Schooling makes us feel connected, yet makes us feel like we need to score A grades all the time or even A+ to be really of significance, to have ‘social worth’ to others, and that is totally upside-down as to how people really connect. it becomes a habit, thinking we need to study hard and be smarter all the time just to have social value to others. Relaxation makes us feel connected. yet we rely on these ‘pseudo communities’, these ‘excuses‘ to connect. The excuse connects us. Yet it is also a distraction, because it keeps us afraid, afraid to connect without the ‘excuse’. I have friends because i have drug buddies. I have friends because I have drug recover buddies. I have friends because of work. I have friends because i met them at college and earned their recognition by proving myself as a smart funny person…….. etc, etc. it gets problematic.

It’s time to take love off the ‘pedestal’. Many people less qualified and way more goofy and misguided then you have an abundance of love and success in their lives, just look around, the love and it is freely available to them. if you struggle, it’s not because you aren’t good enough. many people radiate light, and have success and respect while only trying half as hard as you are already trying. many less talented and less awesome people then you have more love in their lives. shatter the illusion. love isn’t something to strive for and battle for and stress out about. it is right here. that said, it isn’t obvious. but over time, you can shift the momentum, create the feedback loop of love. you may not be the next Jesus, but if you start on a much smaller level, this way is still much easier then thinking earning the love needs to be a complex task. water the good seeds. find the love though harnessing the natural subtle energies of your body. creativity. kindness. honesty. the little things. the big ambitions crush us. miss herp and mr. derp don’t worry about big ambitions, they just love all the time because it feels good. yet this is the most powerful way to make a difference in the world and cultivate the things you want over time.

We don’t need a ‘reason’ to connect. You don’t need a  ‘reason’ to want to walk up and talk to someone. Or to simply smile at someone. because the reason is love. Societies keeps us thinking we needs reasons to reach out. that there is something more important and more healing then being around people. It isn’t even just about the talking, it isn’t that essential to walk up to strangers and talk at them relentlessly to ‘break’ some kind of inner ‘mental limit’ as I so tried many times. But it is important to feel connected. it isn’t easy, but it could be. Sometimes it feels like the easy way is the only way. so i find ways to make it easier. We have a kind of ‘stranger complex’ in America or maybe even across the world. Everyone is a fellow human. We tend to fear strangers and people we don’t know, they could be up to no good, they could be insidious shady perverts, or they could be — ‘so good’ — that we don’t even deserve to look at them.. etc, then we are the ‘stranger’. We ‘stranger’ ourselves out of the picture. Other animals have simple minds, they don’t fear each other. They just do things as a group. They act together. Migrate together. Feel together. Herp derp. It is important not to be brainwashed though in to doing whatever people say is right, this can be a tricky distinction, be around others, yet notice the instinct to ‘copycat’ them, don’t mimic every single thing they do just to be cool or garner respect in society, first really think about if it feels right and value to you. Don’t be afraid to go agnist what you are told. the ‘assumptions’ we all make.

You can just ‘be’ around the group and feel your own emotions and unique creative happy thoughts and ‘not’ subscribe to any kind of complex ideology or peer pressure. it takes time to feel into what that even means. to do it your own way, yet still make a choice to be around people. i always got the ‘do it your own way’ prat. i know i felt 100x happier when i thought for myself, but i didn’t get, what i didn’t get, was that i could still do this, be my unique creative self, while around people. i was afraid that being around others meant loosing myself. school felt boring, too much dry information, too much stillness, to many long hours. i lost myself in the mundanity of it all. yet being at home all day with mom clearly wasn’t the answer either. hiding a way in personal passions. visiting a friend now and then, yet not being part of a bigger ‘group’.

You can go to school, be around a larger group, and still find times to ‘have fun’. You have to create the fun. Even just as a thought. It doesn’t have to be anything big, bold, stressful and courageous all the time. Fun can be as simple as it sounds. Just think about what you like. that changes your vibe. changes how you feel. you can be goofing off internally and the teacher will never know it, they will feel your joy and love you for it and know that you are a good attentive student even when you are just thinking about something like “cartoons” or “people you are attracted to” or “art projects” like 70% of the time. The courage to have fun and enjoy yourself in little ways. That can change the world.

We humans and or complex minds, create much to be afraid of. And all that becomes an excuse to disconnect. Even if you are talking to people yet afraid of what they are thinking all the time, that is a kind of disconnection, it makes you exhausted, makes you want to run back to something else that ‘feels good’, what if connection could ‘feel good’, what if ‘feeling good’ was the primary reason to do it. It wasn’t always so obvious to me.

Animals don’t make things so complicated, a herd of cows isn’t trying to raise their kids to be the next ‘baby Einsteins’ or get straight A’s to beat out their other classmates, so that they can ultimately beat out other nations in the great race for SCIENCE and advancement. Animals know how to just be. Maybe technology isn’t about getting better and smarter and making the next mind blowing complex innovation, maybe even human tech can be used to help us get more in touch with nature and ourselves. a natural technology. other animals don’t think as much as we do. it is a gift, yet it also gets profoundly in the way. Animals just gather and follow their feelings. They aren’t driven by different religions and schools of thought and prejudiced, they just gather and chill. Herp. Derp.

Getting in touch with that inner ‘animal’ you is grocery underrated. The ‘animal’ means your instincts feelings, natural social impulse to just be goofy and laugh and look at people, to think about simple things that fill you with excitement). Stuff that isn’t really about the brain. Feeling raw emotion. feelin it and feelin it. I always used to think and think about how to get women to like me. For many years it plagued me. Finally… i just stared to see myself as an ‘animal’ of sorts, like a dog just chilln with the other dogs. I imaged it like this. that’s how it felt. dropping the intellect. it was almost like being ‘naked’. It felt like i was lying to people, smiling at them, without having anything interesting planned to say, without using my brain practically at all… but they just smiled right back. and i was like ‘hey!’ this is way the hell easier then what i was doing before. i just just smile to people and listen to them talk and say very little, yet i feel connected. Dogs don’t worry about weather they are good enough, they just run right up to people. They don’t worry about there ‘intellectual contribution’ to the global conversation. they have an emotional contribution, just by existing. even in there final moments when death and illness take them, they keep trying to stand up, keep going for the love. because it just feels right for them. I’ve learned a lot from lust looking at animals. Keep things simple. And girls like that. I am true to my emotions. I can be an intellectual. But i do things first and foremost because it feels right. A moth doesn’t need an ‘excuse’ to go to the lamp, it just goes to the light.