Roland | positive loop

look I know it looks like I was unemployed for a while but I was becoming a wizard. it’s important

With the proliferation of known meditation techniques these days, learning simple concentration is increasingly out of fashion. This is a great shame imo, especially at a time when everyone’s attention is so scattered. Learning to concentrate is such an overpowered skill and foundational for pretty much any other meditation practice you might do. And also for pretty much any non-meditation activity you might do. Learning to concentrate also builds will power, which not only turbopowers any activity we do but also makes us more free to choose *which* activities we do. I do see a lot of meditation teachers pussyfooting around concentration these days. People find concentration hard at first and want things to be easy. So teachers start to learn that if they downplay concentration, their teaching will be more popular. Also concentration is very simple (different to easy), which makes it seem less exciting or advanced who associate complexity with depth. Simply returning over and over again to the breath or another meditation object doesn’t lend itself to fancy manuals or special-sounding bespoke techniques. But it’s very simplicity is part of the benefit, especially in a world addicted to complexity. Much of the jumping around between techniques people do is also driven partly by trying to find some technique - any technique - that doesn’t ask them to concentrate. But the truth is that any form of meditation - even the most open of open awareness techniques - benefits from having built up concentrative power. And many “advanced” meditative techniques that seem less concentrative presuppose a baseline level of concentrative power to be effective. If nothing else, it allows you to remain stable in whatever your meditative goal is - even if that goal is open awareness. If we think of meditation as a set of skills rather than a set of states, learning concentration will increase every other kind of skill you could care to develop. And don’t let any meditation teacher convince you that it’s not a skill worth developing.

Therapy as a Neurodivergent person is insane cause ive prepared a 10 page thesis on the intellectual roots of my feelings just for my therapist to ask "where do you feel it in your body??"

Spiritual Self-Defense 101 for citizens born and raised in the Default Culture: - Reflexive skepticism of frictionless things. There is always a cost to convenience. - Being lied to is demoralizing --> cut out sources of lies. If it makes you depressed, demoralized, hopeless, weak and disempowered, it is not a good thing to be exposing yourself to. There is no virtue in misery and empathy decoupled from action is just moral narcissism. - Your body inherently knows itself. If something you are doing is bad for you, the body will tell you. - Functional intuition requires removing the layers of abstraction between you and it. In other words, if you will only listen to your intuition when you have a comprehensible rational explanation for it, you are neutering it in service of Something Else. - There are transcendent things and they are not for sale. Anyone selling you transcendence or peace as something that can only be bought is lying. - The culture you were raised in has its own self-interest. You must identify what those self-interests are if you want to have a chance of figuring out where they are and are not in alignment with your own interests. - Many people will tell you they know what is best for you ("Advice Is One Size Fits All" supremacists), but these people will evaporate as soon as you are faced with the consequences of following their advice. It is good to listen to and consider the wisdom of others, especially people older than you, but tempered with the reality that the modern world is a rapidly changing environment. At the end of the day, nobody is responsible for the decisions you make in life besides you. You are the person who will live with them. Many people expect you to dance or perform for their own moral approval or sense of importance; most of that kind of person would not ever, in a million billion years, extend recipricocity towards you. To dance for joy is to be human, to dance for approval is to be puppet.