Continuation of Conflict, Energy, & Resolution - Day 15

Building on yesterday.

Today I took an opportunity to speak my experience within a conversation with a friend. I noticed but wasn't fully aware of the upset energy I was living in and as during the start of this conversation. I thought that my communication of my experience was purely productive and not emotionally charged (this was blatant denial as I had already experienced some backchat), but from there and after sending my communication I went into more pronounced emotions of anger, self-victimization, and self-aggrandizement, all with backchat before even receiving a response. I also went into a place of anxiety wherein I did not know what the response would be, and I was bracing myself for the worst, which would be disapproval, rejection, and humiliation on the basis of my experience being somehow recognized by the other person as "wrong" or "invalid" and/or the other person becoming upset with me in turn for my expression. Within all of this I noticed an increased ability to remain aware of what was happening within and as me and to try to curtail it with my breath.

It turned out the conversation was quite productive, which is like a nice little positive reinforcement for not being afraid to share my experience from the starting-point of self-honest expression.

Perhaps interesting to note is that I frequently, as in this case and on Day 2, have reactions within and as myself in regards to the making of plans with a friend, wherein I have a tendency to enter and live as paranoia wherein I believe that other people do not actually want to hang out with me but are doing so out of a sense of obligation and/or pity, and in fact they do not actually like me. Within this I feel duped, angry, self-victimized, self-aggrandized at the injustice, and I think of all the past experiences/memories I have racked up to serve as evidence for this interpretation.


I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to deny to and as myself my participation within my emotional energy during a perceived conflict.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to live within and as my backchat about an interaction in such a way that my emotional reactions are fed and exacerbated such that I continue to spiral within my experience away from reality and my breath.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to react from and as a place of anger to a perceived rejection.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to react from and as a place of self-victimization to a perceived rejection.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to react from and as a place of self-aggrandizement as compensation to the grave injustice I perceive within perceived rejection. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to exist in and as simultaneously inferiority and superiority.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to hold onto and use as reference memories of instances wherein I have felt rejected, abandoned, and/or betrayed, such that I utilize these memories as evidence for present self-victimization and self-aggrandizement. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to project memories of past experiences onto present interactions, utilizing extraneous, superfluous, irrelevant data to inform my behavior. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to operate within and as a place wherein my mind experiences, interpretations, and memories move me.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to expect another person to choose their words more carefully in such a way that they can let me down easy and I will not "have to" react like this. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to hold expectations of other people wherein I do not take responsibility for myself and my reactions. I forgive myself for not accepting and allowing myself to be with and as my breath, taking each moment of reality for exactly what it is at face-value until further information is available for more accurate self-honest, self-responsible response. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to interpret basic word usage within communication as communicating more than is directly presented such that I extrapolate meaning and intention from within and as my mind and my reaction.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to become upset with another person because they do not choose their words "as carefully as I do." How often do I really tell others how much and in what ways I appreciate them? How often do I really let others down easy, understanding their perspective? How often do I actually just not care? Never enough, never enough, and too much.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to fear speaking and honestly expressing my experience within interactions, especially when I perceive the potential for conflict as a result of my expression. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to have developed a fear of "conflict" not only as a tense argument but also as a simple incompatibility/nonalignment/disagreement. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to almost always want to agree with or have another person agree with me, and within this I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to react to disagreement from the starting point of my strong desire for agreement such that disagreement is a "big deal" and really I am more angry at and upset with myself than anyone else for having placed the pressure on and as myself to always agree.

(Re-reading the above I want to note how I also "especially" fear speaking and honestly expressing my experience within "positive" interactions, especially when my expression will reveal my attachment to or care for another person, such that I am then vulnerable to that person's response/reaction to me and how they feel about me. It is another instance of fearing rejection/abandonment. I fear, too, many of the honest self expressions involved in physical intimacy, wherein I have a tendency, although not always, to "clam up" and become rigid, perhaps in my physical observable behavior, but definitely within and as my mind experience of intimacy... I'll have to address this at a later date!)

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to engage within and as mind-energy-anxiety to the unknown response after I have communicated myself honestly. This is useless, except to show me a place to look for whether or not I was really self-honest within that communication.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to, from a starting-point of self-honesty within communication, fear the potential rejection or judgment of my communication from another person as being the ultimate conclusive deciding factor on whether or not my communication and thus myself is valid.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to, within my placement of validation as being sourced outside myself, not realize that other people, the jurors I have sworn in to give verdict over my validation, are as flawed and self-interested as I am, and that the only source for validation is from within my own self-honesty.



Moving right along... :) Thank you all.

Conflict, Energy, & Resolution - Day 14

Today things got a little escalated / tense during a conversation with X. As far as I can gather, X was basically experiencing some emotional reactions to a variety of stimuli, such as hunger, stress of change, and stress of work, and I experienced emotional reactions in response to what X said to me. I want to first write some self forgiveness on my responsibility within this interaction, and then write some self forgiveness on the ways that I can see X and X's reactions as a mirror of myself.

We worked it out and apologized and forgave each other and stuff.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to become stressed out, upset, frustrated, and angry in reaction to X's behavior.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to be calm during and immediately after the interaction, but then to let my frustration escalate within my mind after X had left and I was left with my own backchat about the situation.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to remain within the energy of the interaction even after it was over.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to engage in an imaginary confrontation with X within my mind about what I wanted to say about what had happened.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to get so caught up in my backchat that I made a mistake in my work project.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to tell Y about what happened with X as a way to relieve some of the energy I was building up. It was unnecessary and verged on gossip, although it was also fruitful in that Y understood where I was coming from, we were able to bond on a level of shared experience, and Y was able to see that Y was not the only one who had experienced similar interactions with X. I also was able to share with Y how interesting it is that people in general, myself included, are generally very unaware of their reactions and how they create their emotional reactions and need to take ownership and responsibility over these reactions. So in that sense the conversation was supportive and productive.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to criticize X to Y for X's reactions when I myself was operating within reactions.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to go into reaction, especially since I didn't even really go there until after the interaction was over. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to hold on and linger in the immediate past such that even when I had dealt with it quite well within the moment, I began to build up emotional energy carried into the present and projected into the future wherein I thought about the resolution conversation.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to engage in bitter backchat about all that I do for X and how X's emotions are not my responsibility and how X is being manipulative, etc.

In spite of all of this, I thank myself for speaking clearly and directly to X when X said that X didn't like the "vibe" I was giving off and informing X that I would consider how my actions might come off a certain way but that X's reaction belongs to X and is an extrapolation of imagined events combined with stress and hunger. I asked X to please know that if X is experiencing an emotional reaction wherein X believes I am behaving in a way in order to harm X, that I am not trying to do any such thing. Whereas I might normally also react emotionally or retreat into escapism I was able to clarify to X what my experience was and what I thought I understood about X's experience.


As a mirror, in times past & present:

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to let hunger have power over my emotional energy and ability to remain present and with my breath.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to confuse the physical sensation of hunger and low blood sugar with the physical sensation of stress and the sensation that accompanies conflict. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to engage with the combination of these sensations such that I lose contact with my breath in the physical and enter my mind.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to engage in discussions/conversations in ways that escalate them into emotionally charged arguments, wherein I project my emotional energetic experiences onto the other person and into my words, tone, and body language such that the other person then reacts to me and I react to them, and the reactions snow ball.

I forgive myself for not accepting and allowing myself to take space to stop and breathe when I need it when I see that I am becoming emotionally charged.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to play a martyr or victim role within emotionally charged / "heated" conversations wherein I expect the other person to apologize absolutely and identify what is happening as being of the utmost importance as far as injustice is concerned.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to become so defensive within the martyr/victim role that I attack the person who I feel is attacking me, while at the same time expecting them to make me feel better.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to first feel inferior within conflict and to then act out through the superiority of being right, not allowing myself to stop and breathe and see what is real but instead engaging in reactions to reactions.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to be moved by my emotional energy in such a way that it is a motivating factor within my desired outcomes and as such I become manipulative within my behavior as I seek external resolution to my emotional energy. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to continue to discreetly criticize another person even within conversations of apologies.

(I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to believe that other people are manipulative consciously on purpose and not just lost/stuck within their own emotional energies and mind consciousness systems, functionally crying for help through their reckless, grasping behavior.)

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to interact with other people in such a way that I want to possess and dictate their behavior such that they fulfill my voids, validate me, and make my imagination become reality.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to expect other people to do what I want because I am throwing a fit.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to take advantage of other peoples' sympathy by throwing a fit in order to get what I want.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to guilt people into feeling sympathetic toward me by reminding them of all that I have done for them.


I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to feel bad about myself and relationships by engaging in thought energy about all that I do for other people, and why don't they appreciate me? Any of the above that I have not done outright in actual interactions, I have definitely at least done within my mind through and as my thoughts.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to engage in reactions within relationships in my mind and not in reality.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to become so worked up within emotional energy surrounding conflict that I begin to build walls and want to hold a grudge and feel like it is too overwhelming to try to address the issue head on and find a resolution through conversation with the other person. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to become anxious when I think about resolving conflict. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing my body to visibly shake when involved in conflict. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to react to that shaking by thinking, "see, here, this is bad! conflict is bad!" which only exacerbates my reactions. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to prefer the termination of a relationship over honest resolution. I also forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to sometimes just take the burden of all the blame in order to avoid open, honest resolution wherein all voices can be heard. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to fear conflict and fear the process of resolution to conflict. Lots of family history there.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to feel hot and cold toward Y within reactions to my memories of and backchat about Y. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to not love Y as I love all as one as equal. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to ignore how much of Y I see in myself and therefore love Y because I know Y's struggles and I know Y's truth. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to grow closer to Y only because my relationship with X hit a rocky spot.

Past, Future, Here & Now - Day 13

For months I have imagined and hoped for A. Suddenly I find myself imagining and hoping for B. Within both imaginary hoped-for future realities, I am presently learning to reel and real it in, such that I do not invest as much energy, and perhaps eventually none at all, in the future in such a way that neglects and/or inhibits and/or prohibits the actual getting-there through the here and now within the physical as my breath. Within this I must learn patience, I must examine my sense of urgency, I must examine why the here and now is not a sufficient place to reside, I must investigate why I am not always already okay.


I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to invest myself and my energy into imagined and hoped-for futures such that I do not live in the here and now with the physical as my breath.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to align my commitments and loyalties to imagined and hoped-for futures such that I pass up or miss opportunities in the here and now, limiting myself within a framework that isn't even real.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to attach myself to imagined and hoped-for futures such that when and as I see before me evidence for an alternative present which does not promote my imagined and hoped-for futures, or evidence for an alternative future, it is difficult for me to detach, dismantle, and let go of the expectations I have made for my preconceived imagined hoped-for future.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to become so aligned with something that does not even exist yet in the here and now that I limit myself in the here and now and I limit my potential within my imagined hoped-for futures.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to still always engage with imagined hoped-for futures, even if it is an alternative to a pre-established imagined hoped-for future.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to place my well-being in the future and dependent on variables I cannot control.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to almost always be looking to the future such that I do not establish a solid foundation within the here and now such that whatever imagined or hoped-for futures I may invest my energy in, I am not actually doing anything at all to achieve them, and in fact am building up energy that will contribute to sabotage.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to always attach myself to something or someone in such a way that I am rarely not imagining or hoping for something or someone.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to believe that my imagination and hopes can come true by imagining and hoping for them, by bolstering my mind with evidence supporting them and ignoring evidence against them, and basically manipulating and lying to myself about what is real and what can and will be real.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to not participate within the here and now as the only means to achieve any kind of self-directed future.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to blind myself to alternative present realities and opportunities by aligning myself with and committing myself to my imagined hoped-for futures.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to, upon recognizing a future that I would like to have happen, not have the patience to wait and see if that future even makes sense, and let common sense guide me into my future.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to try to take control of my future in such a way that I am not even doing anything practical to achieve it but instead am building up energy within me that manifests as emotional instability and cognitive dissonance such that I will likely self-sabotage and implode on my imagined and hoped-for futures.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to not realize the plethora of ways and instances in which I have already self-sabotaged in my life, and instead have assumed the role of victim or entered confusion and thus anxiety over the lack of control I seem to have. I have control over myself here and now in the physical through my breath and within this I have relative control over my future, but only by living here and now. When I am always looking ahead, I will trip.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to engage with a sense of urgency over making my imagined and hoped-for futures my present, wherein even if these futures are excellent, common-sensical options for me, in trying to manifest them now I am skipping over the process of getting there, and there will be no foundation for these present-futures to thrive on or grow from.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to not be okay with being with my breath, with myself, with the physical, in the here and now. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to learn that it is preferable to live in my mind away from the physical in imagined futures or remembered pasts. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to navigate the present through the lenses and filters of my remembered past and imagined future.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to develop proficiency in existing through my mind in my past and future when I could develop that same proficiency and comfort and stability existing in the here and now with my breath.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to believe that I am not always already okay, that I need something to be different about today, that I need something to be vastly different about tomorrow, and that I need to drag around all the shit from yesterday.

I forgive myself for not accepting and allowing myself to just be, here, now.

New Job Nerves - Day 12

Today was the first day that I noticed, as I let my mind wander to the future, feelings of nervousness about starting my new job in one week. I had figured previously that nervousness would indeed come. I had also recently felt very ready to start my new job and impatient about having to wait. Now, especially when I get into my mindspace and consider the timeline of days until my new job starts, I notice a feeling of nervousness manifesting especially in my stomach as well as a creasing between my brows. This nervousness is uncomfortable and sends me into a reactionary loop of supplementary thoughts and emotions wherein I equate physical and emotional sensations of nervousness with automatically thinking I am incapable, I will fuck up, I am not actually worthy of the opportunity, and I want to hide / avoid / escape, instead of just seeing that I am nervous and trying to understand why.

The weird thing is that I'm not even really imagining any scenarios with the job or interactions to make me nervous. It really just seems to come down to time, and impending doom... I mean change. Which I guess makes sense because within that change there is a lot of unknown, and within that unknown there is a definite lack of pictures and ideas about what to expect. I wonder if there is more to it that I am not allowing myself to realize, maybe that I am suppressing as I try to suppress the feeling of nervousness and go into hiding / avoiding / escaping. Maybe if I actually do try to imagine scenarios and outcomes I can show myself how there really is no need to feel nervous, because whatever I might face, I can handle.


I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to project myself into a future event such that I have an emotional energetic reaction to something that is not here in the physical with me.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to equate the physical sensation of "butterflies" in my stomach and a furrowing of my brow with the emotional state of nervousness, and within this I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to react to my identification of myself as nervous with all of the negative connotations that the word carries for me wherein nervousness is not something I want to feel.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to go from a place of nervousness seemingly automatically into thoughts about how I am not capable, or I am not good enough, or I am not worthy of the opportunity that has been offered to me. It's as if I believe these thoughts to be true merely because I feel nervous, and that I feel nervous because these thoughts are true, because I did not even entertain these thoughts before the sensation of nervousness arose. They feed each other.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to want to suppress my nervousness as a way to avoid facing it honestly. Suppression will only make it grow. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to give the sensation of nervousness so much power that I react to it with escapism. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to believe that I am not capable even of facing nervousness honestly.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to identify change as a "bad" "scary" thing wherein anything new or different is a struggle for me to encounter and I permit feelings of anxiety to permeate.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to doubt myself and my ability to stand in each moment with my breath. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to want to shut down or off in order to avoid / escape uncomfortable thoughts and feelings when I could just breathe and practice being here and now with my breath in the physical so that I can do the same tomorrow and the next day and on my start date.


I have a growing migraine right now and I don't feel very capable of concentrating or articulating. So, that's it for now.

Awareness, Instability, and Behavior - More for Day 11

I am noticing a shift in my attitude at work, and so are my coworkers. I received a "disciplinary" style talk from my manager today for something I said yesterday. It could easily be written off as me "checking out" since I'm leaving soon, but I think it is just as much the surfacing and purging of all that is coming to my awareness. Either way it's not okay.

I have checked out somewhat. I am in a transition. But there's no reason I can't give 100% at this job through next Friday and still give 100% at my new job on the next Monday. So that's fine: that's easy; I'll keep caring and putting forth my best effort.

But I've noticed that, for example, my experience of impatience with myself is manifesting to an experience of impatience in general. This has a few possible facets:

• I am reserving "energy" for myself as I try to stabilize 
• I notice this especially in my lack of patience in engaging in small talk or niceties with people like I normally would. This varies moment-to-moment, mood-to-mood, and person-to-person. 
• This is something that often happens whenever I am depressed, but in the past I have identified it as some kind of ineptitude and within it I have aligned myself with the victim role. Like, look at all the people interacting and connecting. Look at me sitting here feeling sad and alone. Wah.
• Now I see that, while I was kinda down today, I think my introversion had more to do with not expending excess energy on outside interactions and keeping my focus on myself and gaining stability. 
• Whereas in the past I have still expended energy on assuming the victim role and wondering why no one was saving me when I was clearly soooo devastated. 
• Within this conservation of focus and "energy" for myself, I witnessed TWO people crying today! TWO!! One was within a situation where I easily could have offered an ear or a hug, but I didn't. Why? I didn't want to participate in hand-holding. I didn't want to give something that I so often hope to receive and then engage in resentment when I don't. Is it "better" to be there for a person who is hurting? Maybe, I don't know. But I have to stop being there for other people when I'm not even here for myself. 
• Patience with customers, for example, is a performance
• The tendency to be polite and chatty and all of that which comes with customer service or even just your run-of-the-mill pro-social behavior is a performance I've learned to get people to like me, accept me, be nice to me, or to make other people feel good. 
• So as I am learning to be self-honest I am having to redefine how I interact with others and why. 
• Increased awareness brings seeming increase of what's here
• It seems like the more I unpack, the more there is to unpack, and the more I am aware, the more... I'm aware. Obviously. So I become freshly aware of all that I have accepted and allowed within me, much of which I have suppressed or denied or rationalized or justified. 
• I am aware and so I notice it more within me, so it seems to increase
• I am in the process of re-aligning and re-defining and within this I am unstable and within instability I am a little reckless. New behaviors are coming out as I peer in. 

So this is something to really keep in check... Some of the attitudes and behaviors I am noticing are not okay. And they are even less okay in the context of starting a new job and making positive first impressions, which is then double the reason to really come back to my foundation and take this process slow so that I can find stability and trust within myself. Starting-point is key, and the stage I am in right now is laying the groundwork for everything to come. So here and from here my focus will be on myself, my breath, self-honesty, self forgiveness, and patience. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing my attitude and behavior to shift as a reaction to increased awareness of who I have accepted and allowed myself to be.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to be reckless with my words and actions within the context of operating within a system that requires me to behave in a "professional" manner in order to succeed.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to be reckless within my attitude and behavior, not taking self-directive responsibility over who I am in each moment.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to justify, rationalize, deny, and suppress the truth about who I am and have accepted and allowed myself to be.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to not realize that what I say and do makes an impact on people that I don't always know about, and that what I say and do tells people and myself about who I am.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to almost always see criticism as something "bad" and "difficult" wherein I resist it and react to it rather than seeing it as an opportunity to gain greater awareness and understanding of myself and who I have accepted and allowed myself to be. 

Tested out some footholds today and found some solid ones. :) 

Forgiving Myself - Day 11

Question about SF:
When should I apply it? There are plenty of things I could say I forgive myself for, but it doesn't mean I really do forgive myself... it doesn't mean I'm fully letting it go. Should I still say it as a way of starting/continuing that process? To me the answer seems like yes, but only within self-honesty and not within an automatic response.


I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to react to and judge what I see and am becoming more aware of as already existing within myself through my acceptances and allowances.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to become depressed and hopeless whenever I feel unstable or see something about myself I don't like.


I want to gain a better understanding of separation. By not liking myself I am separating myself from myself and from life as all as one as equal... right? But I don't really get what exactly that means, what it means that I have all these parts of myself I've separated or categorized as being separate. How did they become separate and how do I put them back together? What does it mean to be one and equal with myself? What does it mean that I am my depression and my elation?


I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to want to sleep all day until it is absolutely necessary that I get up. I thank myself for getting up and writing this.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to want to retreat when the going gets tough. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to consider turning back and forgetting it all because I identify what I see as too big or too scary. Within this I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to then go into a place of feeling selfish and petty for caring about my little bullshit when there's so much other shit in the world... in that place I cannot move forward and address any of it. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to be overwhelmed by the wall of shit, which is an excuse to resist.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to want to have my hand held.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to want someone else to keep me safe... from myself?

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to remain on and fuel this rollercoaster of emotions and feelings and energy by recklessly engaging in my highs as if I am invincible or capable of realizing invincibility.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to believe that time and space are not factors and that I can erase the contents and reactions of my mind simply by merely becoming mildly aware. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to judge myself when I see that I cannot do this, that I have to take this one step and one breath at a time.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to suffocate myself with all of this when I am still learning how to breathe.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to feel sad and want care and tenderness from another person to shoot me back into feeling good.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to not properly communicate my wants and needs in general, but moreso now because I doubt if I really want them or need them, because I am so busy trying to re-align myself with new principles I don't really understand. Do I have legitimate wants and needs or am I making them up in my mind and reactions?

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to believe that my quiet, meek, timid, and often passive-aggressive and manipulative communications of my wants and needs are enough for another person to even understand at all that I want or need anything at all. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to not be direct. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to wait for another person to act on my behalf. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to not direct my own internal experience, and I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to not act on my own behalf. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to react negatively with emotions such as anger, resentment, worthlessness, etc. when another person does not meet my needs for me.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to place my self-worth and my well-being outside myself.

Delusion of Grandeur - Day 10

I'm working on a post about establishing self-trust within myself, but it's not very clear to me yet so I've set it aside for now.

Instead I want to look at my continued desire to speed my understanding / comprehension / integration of desteni material in such a way that I, on day 10 of writing self forgiveness statements, before even getting to the self corrective statement section of DIP Lite, feel some need to philosophize deeply and consider multi-dimensional, intricate topics in ways that I hope will seem impressive and assistive to others, without first considering the writing's value to assisting and supporting myself for myself as myself. This is actually exactly what I was running up against when trying to write about self-trust: I saw myself writing words I myself did not understand as if I did understand them. Like all those papers I wrote in college that got 4.0s when I didn't even read the material!

Here I live:

• pride
• arrogance
• impatience
• fraudulence
• co-dependency
• self-manipulation
• dishonesty

And now I am smiling in amusement at my own audacity and the realization of this action or desire for action in contrast to how I define myself, which is not as a person who is arrogant, not as a person who seeks power, not as a person who seeks fame or laud or status. Ohhh, but I am, here I see, and I never let myself see before! 

What's the deal here? Who do I want to be, and who am I trying to not be? In creating this persona, from what am I running? 

It's so confusing to me how I can exist within and as this and yet also within and as so many other much more "negative" experiences of myself, such as depression, self-doubt, self-victimization, etc. How can I be so full of self-doubt while at once being so arrogant as to think I have all the answers? 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to speed ahead in this process, as if I don't have every single day, every single breath, ahead of me to walk diligently, patiently, carefully, slowly, and honestly. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to believe that I am or can be some kind of "game-changer." I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to "crash the party"... 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to think that I am some great, awesomely intelligent, insightful, influential being who is here to distribute answers off the top of my head. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to believe that I am special and exceptional. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to live out my pride and ego within explorations of self-honesty. 

I forgive myself for NOT accepting and allowing myself to just take it slow and focus on easily identifiable areas wherein I need to forgive myself and take responsibility. This rushing is promoting anxiety and self-doubt; diminishing self-trust or ability to cultivate self-trust. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to speed ahead my current placement within DIP Lite in such a way that I feel unstable in what I write and say, because I'm basically making shit up sometimes in order to keep up with my ego and/or my perception of how I should be / what I should say. How can I possibly trust myself here? 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to break my commitment to myself to make DIP Lite a priority within my process and to continue to try to write on my blog in a way that is not for myself. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to be a fraud. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to resist self-honesty through accepting and allowing myself to manufacture an ideal presentation through my mind. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to react to writing this with a fear of publishing it. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to react to these words of self-honesty with shame. 

Let's Talk About Sex (Masturbation, actually) - Day 9

Not exactly eager to talk openly and honestly about sex & masturbation, and yet all too eager still to talk about sex & masturbation. So let's go, let's talk openly and honestly and not impulsively.

I have identified myself today as feeling "sexually frustrated." I even solidified it with a sigh.

The last time I had sex was about 7 months ago, and after that I committed happily to myself that the next person I would have sex with would be a person about whom I genuinely care, and who in turn genuinely cares for me. For the most part these past 7 months have passed by without much incident, and indeed masturbation has on average never been a big part of my life, although there's still a lot to dig into there I'm sure, especially surrounding the emergence of masturbation in my lifetime. Meanwhile, when I am with a sexual partner, I am nearly insatiable (but I'm also rarely with someone where I don't try to use sex as a way to feel safe and cared for, among other manipulations of myself and others through sex). So, whatever that means: all kinds of things to be identified and articulated at some point.

I don't know a lot about sex and masturbation from the desteni perspective. What I do know is that as I am listening to the Shocking Secrets of Masturbation series (I have gotten as far as part 4) I am noticing an increased desire to masturbate and increased existence within my mind imagining sexual encounters. It's like someone telling me not to touch the stove because it's hot, so I touch it! It looks so much better when it's off-limits, plus the desire seems to increase with increased awareness through listening to this topic (whoa, this is also relevant to part of why and how I end up choosing sexual partners who really aren't productive, "healthy" choices -- "we love the things that hate us," thanks atmosphere, among many other influences for this realization). 

I also know that apparently there is some mysterious universal consequence to masturbation that I am as of yet unaware of but hope to soon understand. There are a few consequences that I personally experience and am very aware of:

• Active participation within my mind as imagination 
• Counter productive and solidified with action
• Self-abusive desire for orgasm. 
• As Sunette says in one of the earlier parts of the series, it's like saying "Fuck you" to Life. 
• It's like saying "fuck you" to myself, too, when the starting point is what it so often is. 
• Energy sucking vacuum
• Often begins from a starting point of anger, resentment, or depression, if not just selfish desire (which is the same thing anyway)
• Often results in apathy and complacency, lethargy
• Usually experience a "bad day" if I start it out by masturbating 
• Guilt, shame? 
• Focus drained by focusing on orgasm; apathy and complacency result as all energy was placed into achieving orgasm. 
• Once achieved: Nothing else matters; mission accomplished, no residual care for other efforts/pursuits
• If given up on: Sometimes a better scenario actually. Initial shame and guilt and frustration, but then I get over it. It happened (or didn't, hah), whatever, move on. 
• Perhaps increased ease of ability to sustain interest in accomplishing other efforts/pursuits. 
• Knowing all of this increases the urges. Like, a lot. War. 
• Extinction burst? Maybe. 
• Excuse? No. 

I am eager to learn more through listening to this series and any reading I might find. One thing I just found is just a brief statement in the FAQ under "What Does Desteni Stand For":

Masturbation: within self-honest expression within aagreement with self.

I'd certainly like to understand that more and I'm sure it will become more clear. I know I have had a very few experiences with masturbation that I think were close to this, wherein my mind was not imagining scenarios but instead my entire being was focused on the enjoyment and experience of the sensations themselves, myself. Pretty great, not muddied. I suppose this might be a self-honest expression of masturbation.

But for now I want to delineate what happened up to writing this post:

Pretty persistently for at least a week but probably more I have felt an increased desire for sex and masturbation. Today I felt a strong desire for sex and masturbation. Tonight I came home and considered in my mind if I should masturbate. I weighed options, including the consequences I am already aware of above. I took care of some other obligations. I even ended up getting distracted from the idea such that the physical desire was no longer pressing. But it still remained in my mind and truthfully I had probably already decided many moments before that I was going to masturbate, which is obvious by the lack of present physical desire and the fact that I still masturbated. I hesitated briefly, seeing if I might take the opportunity to NOT masturbate. Who would I be? I even mapped out a kind of outline for writing on this topic and the information I've been accumulating here. I thought about how much more productive it would be to get up and start writing this: look at all I was discovering in this little outline in my head! I even considered how in my past experience, masturbation really shuts me off, and how if I went ahead and masturbated I would likely have a hard time getting back into this outline and writing process, which would really be too bad. My dog even got up on my bed and groaned loudly, which I chose to interpret as a kind of intervention on her part. I don't think she likes it when I masturbate. I think she knows it's usually unproductive. As all of this weighing occurred, all of this consideration, even all of this knowing of what the result would be, the desire only grew. I thought: this is scientific, right? I can experiment here and see what happens and write about it, haha. Or, I'll deal with the consequences. They don't matter. Or, but it will feel soooo gooooood. Eventually I said: "fuck it;" I said: "fuck you," and masturbated.

And it was all good and fun and all the things that masturbation is. But after I felt so tired and shut down and off and indeed drained because here I had taken all of the resources within me and put them toward this one thing, and built up all this energy in achieving this one thing, and of course had to neglect my planned outline in favor of this achievement, and so I felt drained and exhausted and out of touch.

This could, of course, go a completely different direction with a different starting point. Masturbation could probably even bring with it greater clarity, motivation, integrity within action, etc. So the problem isn't the masturbation, as I have experienced. The problem is within the starting point, which is a starting point of desire, of resentment, of frustration, of lack, of loneliness, of disregard for life, disregard for responsibilities, and disregard for my self-directive agency within my life and my breath.


Ok, so here we go:

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to identify myself as "sexually frustrated," creating this as an immutable fact within my experience.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to want something I know I shouldn't have, seemingly because I know I shouldn't have it. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to identify desire as bigger than me. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to watch desire grow without doing anything about it.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to actively participate within my mind through and as my imaginations of sexual encounters. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to actively participate within these imaginary sexual encounters through and within masturbation, actualizing my imagination such that it becomes a kind of reality through my physical experience.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to suppress sexual urges out of fear or discomfort or shame. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to delay on writing about sexual urges because I've felt so helpless and also embarrassed. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to let my feelings/emotions move me. Fuck feeling embarrassed! Embarrassment isn't real.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to make a decision consciously and subconsciously before considering all of the options and coming back to my breath. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to stick to that decision even after further consideration and realizations and evidence to act differently.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to find justification for my selfish desire. Within this justification I know I am lying to and manipulating myself.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to give up and give in as if I am powerless. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to know that I am powerful and self-responsible, but abdicating that power and responsibility in favor of a quick pleasurable sensation. I forgive myself for NOT accepting and allowing myself to participate in masturbation from a starting point of power and responsibility within self-honesty.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to allocate all of my resources and energies into masturbation and achievement of orgasm when those resources and energies are best used elsewhere.

And yet here I am writing, so it's not like I didn't recover my resources and energy. Because I am my resource and I am my energy. They don't even really exist, it's just me, here, directing myself.

So I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to fuel my guilt and shame with accepted and allowed experiences of draining and exhaustion and I commit myself to continued practice of self-directive agency within each new breath.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to engage in masturbation through a starting point of desire, resentment, frustration, lack, loneliness, or disregards for life, responsibilities, or my self-directive agency within my life and breath. Again, starting-point is key.

Urgency - Day 8

I feel urgent sometimes because:

- I have unanswered questions
- My emotions/feelings are overpowering and uncomfortable
- I desire something or someone
- I feel unsure within myself and need validation, ie I feel "not okay" and need someone to tell me I am "okay"
- I don't like whatever present circumstances I am experiencing and I want to "fast forward"

I want to break down this sense of urgency that comes with desire and strong emotional energies. Why do I feel so urgent? Here's how I see it panning out:

• exist in mind through imaginary hoped-for futures/unrealities
• experience cognitive dissonance between mind and reality
• experience anxiety due to discomfort of cognitive dissonance and desire to merge reality with imagination
• experience sense of urgency to resolve uncomfortable anxiety
• engage in impulsive thoughts and behaviors which are based on a frantic, frenetic search for relief from anxiety & cognitive dissonance and NOT based in reality or breath
• engage in escapist behaviors such as sleeping, zoning out to TV, or drugs/substance use/abuse

I forgive myself for not accepting and allowing myself to be okay with not having answers.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to identify myself as being unable to handle intense emotions/feelings such that I feel an urgency to have them end.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to seek validation outside myself when I feel unsure of myself.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to want a fast forward button for life and situations/relationships when all I would be fast forwarding into are new experiences with their own challenges for which I would not even be at all prepared because I fast forwarded.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to resort to the answer of a fast forward button in the first place because it is like giving up on now. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to experience and engage with a sense of urgency, which is not being present with what is here and is not trusting myself to withstand/stand within it.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to engage with my mind through imagining potential hoped-for futures, interactions, and unrealities that do not exist. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to play out entire scenarios of interactions and conversations in my mind and I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to experience the emotional/energetic charges that accompany those scenarios.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to not fully recognize the dissonance between what is happening in my mind and what is happening in reality. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to cling onto whatever real-life evidence I have for what is happening in my mind and disregard whatever real-life evidence I have against it or to show me that what is happening in my mind isn't even actually ideal as a future or potential reality. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to live in my mind, placing priority over what happens there above what happens in real life. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to be so disconnected with reality for whatever reason (fear, boredom, feeling aimless, confusion, you name it) that I would prefer to endure the dis-ease that is my mind existence.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to move from a place of cognitive dissonance into a place of anxiety wherein rather than seeing the cognitive dissonance as an indicator that I am lying to myself, I instead feel out of control, frenetic, and in need of some kind of resolution to the feeling of anxiety. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to, rather than stopping the energy of my mind and coming back to my breath and reality, embracing my mind unreality as what I want like a young child who wants a new toy, and engaging in fear of not getting what I want.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to move from a place of anxiety to a place of urgency wherein I feel I desperately need a resolution to the discrepancies between my mind and reality. From this place I go to a kind of fight or flight: either impulsive thought & behavior, or depressive paralysis / suppression / numbing.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to move from a place of urgency to a place of impulsive thoughts, behaviors, and reactions. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to believe that I can solve the urgency, anxiety, cognitive dissonance, and achieve my imagined unreality as reality through impulsive thoughts, behaviors, and reactions. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to sometimes act on my impulses and effectively fuck shit up and tailspin into regret and more of this same cycle.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to move from a place of urgency to a place of depressive paralysis / suppression / numbing. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to let the urgency be so overwhelming that I give up on taking any self-directive responsibility over my life at all and instead retreat into a disconnect from reality. This does at least tend to prove more productive in the long-term than acting on impulses, simply because the numbing tends to also numb my mind which takes me away from the imagined futures and urgency, but it's pretty roundabout and ineffective/unproductive as something to do every time this cycle occurs and doesn't actually solve anything or better prepare me for my next encounter.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to engage in this cycle which takes me far and away from my breath, from feeling "grounded" and "centered" within myself and reality.

Priorities in My Process - Day 7

After last night's post I almost copied and pasted it into my DIP Lite assignment, as I have been recently, and then realized: no, that's lazy and careless. I have an opportunity within DIP Lite to utilize buddy support and take advantage of a format that is more private and thus devoid of temptation to concern myself with page views, +1s, or writing any words that are more concerned with being pretty than with being absolute self honest truth. Fertile ground for digging deep into anything I might otherwise prefer to hide from others or myself. Kudos to all of you for being so open and honest. So I am re-prioritizing DIP Lite as my primary vehicle for walking my process for now, although I do want to continue writing here as well.


I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to try to fast forward into a well-established consistent blogging presence.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to place my blog as my top priority due to a self-imposed requirement that I write here every day so as to seem like all the other JTLers.

Within my self-imposed requirement to write here every day, I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to combine this blog with my DIP Lite writing as a way of "killing two birds with one stone," effectively minimizing the productivity of my writing within DIP Lite.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to get so caught up in and care about page views and +1s such that even if I realize and discover a lot about myself in a post, the progress I make there is discounted by the disappointment I feel when I see I have 1-2 page views.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to sometimes get carried away with a certain style of writing that takes me away from communicating what is honest and into communicating what sounds good. Writing something pretty gives me a positive energetic charge which takes me into my mind and out of my breath, which can quickly spiral away from self-honesty and into ego and personality.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to make the flow and sound of my words just as important as or more important than the content itself.

Writing On and Through Resistance - Part 2 - Day 6

Tonight the words I would use to describe my current (both presently as it is my experience and as an energetic wave) attitude toward this writing process are:

• blocked
• unenthusiastic
• cliche
• fraudulent 

Resistance Pattern:

I notice a pattern emerging wherein I go through my morning intermittently identifying topics I could write about in the evening. I then go through my afternoon not caring as much about identifying a topic and figuring that I will figure something out. I make a to-do list on my phone. I drive home thinking of what I will do first. Usually I intend to write early on, probably after taking my dog out and eating something. But I have a strong long-standing habit of eating while I watch something, so I often get distracted there. Other items on my to-do list, including writing, are neglected in favor of zoning out and/or engaging in a fiction, or other meaningless fruitless tasks. 

Eventually I try to write. And tonight, as I write, and as I see myself typing words that might actually lead somewhere (where am I trying to identify my words as leading? what is my preconceived destination? how am I judging my words? how is this judgment contributing to my resistance? where is this judgment coming from?), I feel an impulse to get up and go take care of something else I've been needing to do. Tonight it is that I feel an impulse to get up and wash my face. Get my face clean, get that out of the way, then I'll be able to focus. 

I justify this impulse as an opportunity to step away from what I have just written, which contains its own current of momentum, which perhaps I find the experience of to be a little jarring, like it's scary to get out what's inside: it's a little scary to open up and let it out honestly. So maybe this is where the impulse to get up comes from just as my momentum is picking up. Like, okay, there's my topic! Now let's delay some more before actually writing on it. So I justify this as an opportunity to step away and "clear my head" while engaging in some other activity, at this stage most often some kind of bodily cleansing activity (at earlier stages before identifying a topic, delay and impulses are frequently more in the realm of consumption: food, media, but not limited to that). 

So momentum picks up and I want to clean myself. At least, that's the pattern so far. This opening up of what's inside perhaps holds a correlative experience to me of being presentable physically. I am about to open up and maybe I don't want what's in there to be seen. Maybe I don't want to show it. Maybe it's not clean. 

Or maybe it's just plain old delay. Maybe I am giving this impulse too much power and meaning. Maybe my face just feels oily and I'm over it. 

The point then is to stop and breathe. And there I notice the anxiety that is strangling my mid-section. The effort involved in taking a full deep slow breath. But I persist, and in persistence of breath I resist the impulse to get up or to click on another tab or in some other way distract myself from what is in front of me. And then I keep writing. And then suddenly I have something written, this time a somewhat specific breakdown of my resistance. Kinda cool. 

Living Words:

Coming back to the words at the start of this post, the identification of which is a strategy I've gleaned from early lessons in DIP Lite of identifying emotions and feelings:

How am I presently living "blocked"?

• I feel blocked because even though there are topics about which I know I could write, I feel limited to some kind of rule about only writing on experiences from my day. This is self-imposed. 
• I also feel blocked because in my consumption of desteni articles and blogs, I find that I relate to much of what I read but am not sure yet how to integrate it within myself and articulate it in my own writing and am more in a stage of marination. I think it is okay and smart to marinate, but it does not mean I have to feel blocked. 
• I also feel blocked physically. The anxiety in my mid-section is a choking feeling; the racing of my heart is as if my blood flow is blocked. 

How am I presently living "unenthusiastic"?

• I feel unenthusiastic because within my resistance I become tired and then apathetic. 
• I feel unenthusiastic because my high energy from the momentum of previous posts has waned. 
• I feel unenthusiastic because without that high energy and without lots of page views or comments or +1s or feedback, I am failing to see the benefit, "what's in it for me," when I write. When really all that's in my writing is in it for me. It's for me. 

How am I presently living "cliche"?

• I feel cliche because writing self forgiveness is monotonous. The thought has even crossed my mind to copy "I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to" to my clipboard so I can just paste it before each line. I do not do this though because in actually typing those words out I am bringing them to life. Nonetheless, it is monotonous and can feel cliche. Really though I think the feeling of cliche is closely tied to the next:

How am I presently living "fraudulent"? 

• I feel fraudulent because here I am participating in an organized systematic form of writing alongside people who have been doing so for 100s of more days than I have, and in a way I feel like I am in too deep or over my head. 
• I feel fraudulent because I know that as I take in desteni articles or other blogs, I begin to feel intimidated by their clarity and focus or their topic depth, and within that intimidation I want to emulate what I read within my own writing, which would be false and not true to wherever I am within my process. Right now I am walking through resistance, not how to practically save the world. 
• I feel fraudulent because I have sort of halfway kinda made a commitment to write every day, but I don't know that I ever really MADE that commitment so much as just decided that it was important and started slapping Day counts in my titles. I have been trying this desteni thing out, and trying it out each day, and then the next. But I don't know for sure what I will do tomorrow, and so I feel fraudulent for implying a commitment to desteni and to blogging through my desire to show up on here every day and write. 
• What is standing in the way of that commitment? What's going on with that desire? 
• I feel fraudulent because I feel contrived. I like to make pretty strings of words. Sometimes the words I write evoke more feelings in me than they do to describe them. I am trying to keep it honest, but sometimes it is tempting to get creative. 

Self Forgiveness:

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing a pattern of resistance to emerge within me and my energy. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to justify some of my distractions or ways of zoning out as necessary to "recharge" or deserved because I worked 8 hours today. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to not have a firm grasp on how to best schedule my time within my current work schedule so that I often look at the clock and wonder where the time went. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to live the word "blocked." I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to limit my writing in any way. Likewise I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to limit my ability to write in any way. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to self-impose both external and internal limitations to my writing, creating a state of paralysis. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to energetically feel "blocked" in my body, in my joints, in my stomach, in my chest and accepting and allowing this as a reason to resist writing. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to live the word "unenthusiastic." I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to become tired and apathetic when faced with resistance. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to first obtain a high level of energy and then to react to the drop of that energy with a drop in enthusiasm or determination. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to identify the end-goal of my writing as anything other than self-intimacy and self-growth. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to check my page-views and to feel disappointed when I don't have any. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to expect support from strangers and friends alike when I know that the reason I am here is to develop self-support. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to believe that what I write is great and warrants lots of page views and +1s and attention and glory. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to crave this praise, attention, and glory. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to live the word "cliche." I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to see this process as monotonous and boring within and through my resistance. I know it is neither monotonous or boring within and through my experience of it. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to live the word "fraudulent." I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to try to adhere to a standard and system of writing that I don't yet completely understand. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to want to emulate the content of other blogs, especially when I am on day 6 and they are on day 3xx. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to compare myself in opposition to and as separate from anyone, setting up a void between us to be filled with competition within my self-interested need for survival. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to pressure myself to have new ideas about and answers to the problems in the world. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to not start with the problems within myself. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to sometimes think, "well, what if there's nothing I need to forgive myself for today?" Haha! 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to play-act the role of a destonian when I am not sure if I am committed to desteni and whatever commitment I have struggles against even the test of my own wavering stance. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to dive into something without being clear in my commitment. It reminds me of the last time I went swimming, in my friend's pool. I jumped right into the cold water, water so cold it literally took my breath away. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to be attracted to pretty strings of words and to feel positively about my ability to create pretty strings of words. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to create pretty, dramatic strings of words especially throughout all of my previous years of journaling, wherein the pretty strings of words were a way to feed my need for attention and validation and also served as a fuel to build up dramatic emotions within me. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing this propensity toward pretty strings of words to persist even within this writing process. 

Writing On and Through Resistance - Day 5

I have now started 4 different blog posts this evening in an attempt to write today. I have given up for lack of clarity, lack of focus, and feelings of incapability in addressing and facing the various topics effectively and productively. I have allowed myself to be distracted, or to accomplish other tasks first. I have even allowed myself to give up, reasoning that technically I already wrote today since my last blog was written around 3am, and my next DIP Lite lesson isn't even available until technically tomorrow. But this also means that technically I didn't write yesterday. Does this mean that I HAVE to write? No. Does it mean, however, that I am making excuses NOT to write? Yes. And what was one of the first lessons I learned with Desteni? To write, and if facing resistance to writing: write about that. So I will face this resistance now and I will write, and I will publish what I write, not in an effort to make a habit out of forcing something out that is not meaningful, but in an effort to make a habit of pushing through resistance, of not giving up, of not making excuses.

The paramount shitty thing about this is that I want to go to bed soon, and I wanted to finish my TV show and eat a cookie, and now I have more distractions piling up on me from either tasks I forgot I also had to do or people who want to talk to me. And so by delaying on writing, and especially by momentarily giving myself permission not to write, I am stuck here, rushing through writing so as to fit in these other obligations and time-consuming activities.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to excuse myself from pushing through my resistance due to a time-stamp technicality.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to excuse myself from pushing through my resistance just because I've been writing about some pretty heavy shit and I believe I deserve a break.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to doubt the importance of what I write because it does not seem like it will be as important as what I wrote last night. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to believe that any part of my process is less or more important than any other part of my process. Within this I commit myself to realize if and when I am sticking to easy subjects as a way of avoiding more difficult ones, even though both subjects hold equal importance within my process. It's all about self-honesty in the starting point.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to be tentative within my writing and be unsure of what subject about which I want to write. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to get halfway through a blog and then scrap it in frustration for lack of ease.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to let a lack of clarity or focus seem bigger than me when I am the one who creates clarity and creates focus.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to conclude that I am incapable of addressing a topic effectively and productively just because I am facing resistance to writing. Within this I do commit myself to only address a topic when I am able to direct myself to focus effectively and productively, but not to give up on writing altogether if not and instead to write about a topic I can address, such as the resistance itself.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to become distracted by impulsive urges, a need for encouragement, a desire for a cookie, desire for some other activity, or communication from other people.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to give up on writing at all tonight and assuming that tomorrow I will feel more capable.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to not complete every item on my to-do list, even if some of those uncompleted items are purely for my enjoyment. For example, I have had painting on my to-do list for a number of nights recently and I have yet to make any kind of art whatsoever. But I guess even that is not purely enjoyment, just as watching a TV show is not purely enjoyment. One is enriching, one is productive, one is stimulating, one is expressive; whereas the other is a distraction, the other is a way of escaping, a way of zoning out, a way of feeding an addiction, a way of existing in an alternate reality. And yet I have managed to watch plenty of my TV show.

So within this I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to, when creating a to-do list, in my mind imagine two activities such as painting and watching my TV show as being interchangeable as far as level of accomplishment if I get to cross them off.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to waste time watching a TV show when I could exchange that time for something more productive that I also want to do.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to put off and forget to do the favor my mom asked of me. I need to do that next, here.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to delay on this writing process which is important to me to accomplish every day, when I have had the majority of my day to accomplish this task.

It's interesting to me to see how within this writing process I am beginning to struggle with priorities and time management primarily due to the resistance factor. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to let my resistance move me.

Breaking Down the Wall Between My Father and Myself - Day 4

Today I had the opportunity to talk to my brother about our family. Typically my brothers and I do not share our experiences within our family. It was eye-opening to talk to him, and very timely considering what I've been writing about. I'm going to just jump into SF to see what I can dig up, because I'm not sure how accurately I can relay snippets of the conversation itself. This has been a 7+ year process, something I've known for over 7 years I need to address at some point. I have tried half-assed at times, but never with much success or progress. In 2 days of self-forgiveness and a very supportive conversation with my brother, I feel like I'm finally getting somewhere. There's a lot to follow, but I'm trying to dig as much as I can, and I'll pick up the digging again soon I'm sure.


I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to refrain from meaningful conversations about our experiences within our family with my brothers. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing this as the status quo, the way it is, even though I am dissatisfied with this as a status quo.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to fear conversational intimacy with my brothers due to feelings of embarrassment or being wrong in my perspective.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to not validate my own experiences to the extent that I do not share them because I feel so in-valid within them.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to not realize and acknowledge the immense value in understanding the perspective and experiences of my brothers, both of whom grew up under much the same conditions I did, and neither of whom chose the coping methods I did.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to dismiss the value of my brothers to me as a way of justifying my resistance to engaging in meaningful conversations with them. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to believe that they are the ones who do not wish to engage in meaningful conversations. This is not true.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to feel as awkward as my brothers sometimes seem within these conversations, and for accepting and allowing that as a reason to not pursue them.

But this isn't why I'm writing.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to build a wall and shut my dad out of my life for the past 7 years.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to side with my mom in their divorce, painting my dad as all bad and my mom as all good. They are both just people who are doing what they accept and allow as their best to be good parents.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to fear and feel anxious about the idea of seeing my dad after 7 years of not seeing or speaking to him.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to further resist interaction with my dad or forgiveness because of some of the pressure I have received from other family members. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to react to this pressure in a way that exacerbates the problem as a point of rebellion or resentment or feeling outrageously misunderstood.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to not acknowledge the ways that my dad showed me he loved me as best he could within his mental illness. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to not see how even though he almost always missed the mark, my dad was 100% dedicated to his family and his children.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to exist within my reaction and my self-victimization rather than trying to understand where my dad is coming from, as if he does not deserve that understanding. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to blame my dad completely for his conflict with my brother even after learning about ways that my brother instigated conflict.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to adopt an identity and personality over the past 7 years as a girl who does not talk to her father: a victim. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to define myself as a victim within my family even before then.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to continue operating within the very dynamics that I have long identified as being so detrimental: triangling through my mother, lack of intimacy with my brothers, shutting out my father, taking on the role of a victim, as if no longer all living in the same house or becoming and adult somehow magically changed this dynamic. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to not investigate my role within this dynamic simply because I identified myself as a helpless observer. Feeling helpless does not mean I am helpless.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to build that fucking wall. That wall is what is making this so difficult. A relationship with my dad is already difficult, and my brothers can attest to this, as they have both maintained a relationship with him on varying levels. But it's not even the relationship that concerns me at this point. It is that moment when I see him for the first time in 7 years. When he sees me for the first time in 7 years. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to build that moment up in fear and anxiety. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to think about the emotions that might arise within that moment as emotions that I cannot handle rather than emotions that need to be released. Within this I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to continually suppress emotions as too much to handle.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to see my mom as all good for so many years. Within this, I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to, upon learning and seeing how my mom is only human, not give my dad the same realization: that he is only human, and he is not all bad.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to be stopped by my fear.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to be stopped by the unknown.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to believe that I do not have directive agency over my internal experiences within my external experiences. I can handle anything.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to contribute to a dynamic in which my dad has been shut out of the life of his family, his career, his life, because he was painted as all bad within the divorce.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to be the daughter that my dad does not have contact with.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing my dad to be lonely and full of shame and to not know how to solve that, but to desperately want to solve that. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to not really see how desperately my dad has only ever wanted us to be happy and taken care of, no matter how ineffective he was at achieving this.

I don't know how self-honest my dad can be. I don't have that answer. But I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to expect him to be anyone other than who he is in any given moment. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to wonder what it would be like to have a dad, as if I don't have one. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to victimize myself in the face of another person, my dad, not doing the things I think he should.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to feel upset that he hasn't reached out to me in 7 years, when in reality he has been respecting my desire for space. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to react to both sides of this polarity.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to accept and allow the suggestion that sometimes it is okay to build walls. I took that and ran with it.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to forget or discount the actions of love that my dad showed all of us simply because they are not socially accepted actions of love.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to believe that the interpersonal, social problems that my dad displayed say anything definitive about me and who I am and what I am worth.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to not realize the true value of sharing these experiences and perspectives with my brothers. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to have never told my brother of pivotal events that took place 7 years ago as to why I shut my dad out, assuming he would just somehow know, or that my mom would have told him at some point. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to never share that with him, and to never ask about what he experienced when I wasn't there.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to desire intimacy with my family members but to do nothing to achieve it out of fear or doubt that it is possible.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to retell these stories to myself and to therapists and to friends until they were solidified in me as truth. They are stories. I believe that the only way to move forward with my dad is to let them all go. There is no use in rehashing. I shall say, "hello, how are you today?"

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to not see all that is within me that is also within my dad. Things that I got from him or learned from him. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to not see the things within my dad which are valuable, strong traits.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to spin all things related to my dad in a negative light. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to create a polarity between my dad and my mom.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to forget many interactions with my dad so that I feel like I don't have many memories of him other than the bad stories I retell.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to continue on in my helpless child personality/character even into adulthood and attempts to grow beyond my coping skills for what happened in my childhood. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to let this helpless child personality/character prevent me from standing up in self-responsibility and self-honesty to see family dynamics for what they really are, and my participation within them.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to believe that there is anything about a meeting with my dad that I couldn't handle, especially in any way that is actually detrimental. If I have to leave early, I have to leave early, and that is really the worst case scenario. Anything else would be excessive emotional energy that I would have to accept and allow.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to realize that by understanding my dad, I can better understand myself, and yet not do anything to move forward with this process. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to not realize just how valuable it is to understand myself within my dad.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to hear about how my dad is not doing well, knowing that he is filled with guilt and shame, and yet to not do anything about that because I feel like he is the adult and he owes something to me. Now I am an adult. I owe it to both of us to break this wall down. Whatever stands on the other side is what stands on the other side, but right now I cannot even see it.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to tell myself and others that I want to reconnect with my dad "someday," but to file that away as some distant or not-so-distant event in the future for which I have to do nothing to prepare because someday I will just somehow automatically be "ready." I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to delay on preparing for this as if the only value of this preparation is specifically to be able to see him in a productive way, when in reality this preparation is for me and is already assisting me in understanding myself. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to see this specific process as too big to walk through, or too big to walk through alone. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to put my trust and money into numerous therapists in hopes that they might be able to uncover an answer that is inside me and that only I can uncover.

Evolution of My Relationship Dynamics from Childhood to Young Adulthood - Day 3

Re-reading my last post, I am recognizing how my young adult relationships are continuations of relationships, patterns, and dynamics which first occurred in my childhood and teen years within and through my family. 

"I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to prefer viewing myself as inferior over viewing a real situation as not good for me, wherein if a dynamic seems unhealthy, I must be the one who is wrong. Big family history on this one, I'll have to get into that."

What I see here is a person (me!) who sees one thing but is told and expected to believe something else. This is a very concise way of describing a prolific pattern for my experience within my family. Abuse, dysfunction, arguments, financial strain: all witnessed, not talked about. Hidden. Denied. Covered with prestige and success. And so as a child I learned that no matter how much I cried, no matter, even, how much I spoke rationally about my experiences, and then no matter how much I hurt myself and no matter how much I starved myself, it made no difference in the reality of what was happening. Is this why I turned in and hurt myself? Maybe partly. If I wasn't right in my perception of these problems, then I must have been wrong. I never consciously thought of myself as the problem or the source of my family's problems. I knew I wasn't even really involved in most of the conflict: I was mostly the silent, young, confused observer. But apparently it was a problem that I saw a problem. In all my observations I saw a problem quite clearly, and I was told time and again that it wasn't there. 

So I have a habit and pattern now of assuming by default that when I see something as problematic, I am wrong. In being wrong, I am inferior. In being inferior, I must do everything I can to prove myself as worthy. In my young adulthood, this has meant compromising myself countless times, primarily in pursuit of male attention, simply because I know my body is a valuable trading point for that attention. With friendships, the tendency is more to just... be really upset and outraged when shit inevitably hits the fan. And it is precisely my inferiority etc. which contributes to that shit, among other parts of my mind and my reactions and my personalities that I have accepted and allowed. 

So:

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to turn outward problems inward simply because in the past my voice has not been heard. New ears are everywhere. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to punish and abuse myself for perceiving reality simply because reality was apparently not a desired frame of reference for my family. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to abuse myself as a substitution for the abuse that I did not directly experience but only witnessed within my family. What's there? More exploring. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to use my body as a commodity for gaining the attention of males. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to be so caught up in the stories of my past that I don't see my present responsibility within my present friendships so that eventually they fail because I am living out and through the stories in my mind. 

"I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to, when presented with evidence of one thing, believe and hope and imagine something else."

Here again I have a manufactured illusion, only this time I am lying to and manipulating myself. I see the problem, and I deliberately ignore it. Why? I have learned and accepted and allowed that this is what one does in the face of a problem. In this case it is not so much a problem within which I have little or no agency, as was the case in my childhood. In this case it is more that I see a problem that I don't want to see, just like my family didn't want to see our problems. So in becoming an adult I accept and allow myself to adopt the habits of the adults who raised me. This is pretty much exclusive to problems in which I actually have direct agency and responsibility, wherein I have already decided I want a certain outcome and therefore I ignore the growing evidence suggesting an alternative outcome is actually what's best. I identify that outcome as being bad, as meaning that I am bad, and so I maintain hope in my original preferred outcome, which only exacerbates the whole problem and dynamic. Vicious cycle. 

So:

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to lie to and manipulate myself into living out a happy, good-feeling imagined reality within my mind and neglecting real-life evidence of problematic dynamics within relationships that will eventually lead to failure within those relationships. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to irresponsibly adopt habits and patterns that I witnessed as a child, when in reality I have complete and total directive agency over my own life, my own habits and patterns, and my own choices within each breath. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to reject or ignore evidence for what is real and therefore is indicative of what is best simply because it is not what I want and I am too afraid to look at it directly and see how it is best. It would have been best, for example, to not continue any number of detrimental sexual relationships in which I have engaged in the hopes that they would result in "true love" and "happiness" upon really actually seeing the evidence that the relationships were detrimental and dysfunctional. 

"I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to hold onto resentment and anger and confusion as a way of playing the role of the victim, abdicating responsibilities left and right because I feel too depressed or upset over some past event to properly deal with today, here, now. For a while, this specific past interaction was practically all I accepted and allowed myself to focus on. Before that, there were other specific past interactions that I would hyper-focus on."

And before those, I hyper-focused on my family. I hyper-focused on my self-injury and I briefly hyper-focused on every single calorie I put in my body, both of which were direct reactions to my family. I have, for almost as long as I can remember, used my family as an excuse for irresponsibility for myself and my life. 

So:

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself focus on issues of abuse and self-abuse as excuses for abdicating responsibility and my self-directive agency over my life. 

"In this I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to COLLECT these memories, memories from years and years of various failed friendships and relationships, holding onto them as central points of my identity and why I am the way I am and why it's okay that I am the way I am, not realizing it is not who I have to be.

"I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to, in the past, utilize the sharing of these memories as a way to gain sympathy and pity from potential new friendships and relationships and as a way to inspire a savior of me in another person, hoping they will pity me enough to want to swoop me up and take care of me and I will finally get some respite and relief from all the pain I have been accepting and allowing myself to carry around. Drop it! I don't need it. I will take care of me. Relief is here."

 My memory collection began in my childhood, when I held resentment and anger against family members for ways I thought they had wronged me or let me down. Me being a child, and the youngest child, and the girl child, all three carrying definitions of inferiority within my mind, it was easy for me to blame my parents or other family members for what problems I developed as a result of the problems within the family, and to see myself as helpless and powerless in the face of these problems, needing someone else to fix them for me. I accepted and allowed myself to BE these problems, to have them define me, to have them direct my actions into self-injury and into an eating disorder and into problematic friendships and relationships. But these experiences and memories do not define me. I accepted and allowed myself to use these problems as offerings for the needs I did not know or refused to see that I could meet myself, for myself. I carried these problems around in my pocket to trade in as proof that I am deserving of care when I have been deserving of care all along.

So:
I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to hold any kind of emotional charge in reaction to any kind of disappointment or injustice ever, but especially beyond the point that the emotional charge is a direct effect of that disappointment or injustice. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing these emotional charges to move into longstanding resentment and grudges closely tied to the memories, words, and pictures of specific disappointment or injustice.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to make excuses for why I should view myself as inferior within my family and incapable of seeing accurately or speaking soundly. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to doubt my ability to see clearly or speak my truth because of what others told me about the things I saw or said.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to believe that because I am a girl/female, I have less chance of being correct in my observations, and I should just follow the lead of the males around me.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to blame my family for the patterns, habits, and problematic behaviors and thoughts that I developed within myself by myself as a reaction to my family dynamic and dysfunction.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to see myself as helpless, naive, young, weak, and incapable of appropriately coping with the problems I saw or incapable of assisting myself out of and away from the problems I was creating within myself. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to believe that I need someone else to fix my problems for me, preferably a knight in shining armor to love me unconditionally and see me as beautiful because of my pain and because of how strong I am for carrying it.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to BE these problems and to manufacture and develop new problems, believing the new problems to be some kind of solution or coping skill for the original problems. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to let these problems bleed into and stain and tarnish my friendships, creating new breeding grounds for more problems and memories.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to use these problems as a currency for buying care and getting my emotional insecurity-based needs met by external influences. I forgive myself for NOT accepting and allowing myself to meet my own needs and take care of myself.


Thank you.