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transamorousnetwork · 4 years ago

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How To Get Your Ideal Trans Partner In Bed

The easiest, most fun way to find yourself in a rewarding relationship with your ideal transgender partner is by becoming a match to your ideal. You do that by telling positive stories about life.

Speaking practically, telling positive stories creates positive life experiences. Consistent positive story telling creates momentum. Momentum held long enough, will draw your ideal partner right into your bed, guaranteed.

Simple experiments prove this. One need not understand or believe metaphysical or spiritual explanations for why this happens.

Think about it: if you want that beautiful, smart, confident, strong, capable courageous, proud and powerful transgender woman, and you are not beautiful, smart, confident, strong, capable courageous, proud and powerful, you’re not a match to what you want. You get what you think about, what you “be” about, i.e. what you tell stories about.

The stories you tell become who you are. From there, your life experience literally erupts from you, creating experience, people and events matching your stories. Everyone does this all day every day. Most don’t realize they’re doing it.

Why does life work this way?

Positive stories cause human senses to filter out anything not perceived positive. Again: our senses filter experience all day every day, allowing only experiences consistent with our persistent stories. Many transgender women, on balance, are fairly negative, so their life experiences match that.

Same with trans-attracted men’s stories about themselves, about life, probably and about transgender women. If one’s beliefs about trans women aren’t consistent with the trans woman one wants, guess what kind of trans woman one meets? If ones stories about themselves aren’t empowering, inspiring, positive and joyful, one gives off “vibes” consistent with disempowering, uninspiring, negative stories. It’s simple.

You may ask: What about people who seem positive? Why do they have seeming random negative events happen? Someone once told me a story of a trans woman they believed was always positive. She even practiced “the power of positive thinking”. Yet, someone murdered this trans woman.

The thing about creating reality is, one best knows what reality they’re creating in two ways: how they feel, and what shows up in their reality. It’s near impossible to tell what another has in their collection of stories by watching how they behave, or what they say. It’s much better watching how their life goes.

A lot of people who appear positive and happy, are not. They are insecure, lonely, they feel vulnerable, afraid and judged. Many seemingly successful and happy people exemplified this. Robin Williams, Freddie Prinze, Anthony Bourdain, Margaux Hemingway, Daniel Lee Martin, Philip Seymour Hoffman and many others struggled with pain and depression, finally taking their own lives when they appeared on the surface as “successful”.

So people usually have both positive and negative stories going on in their heads at the same time. Their lives include events exemplifying both.

Random negative experiences, such as getting robbed or raped, hit by a bus, or assaulted for being trans aren’t random. They come from long-term focus on negative stories or mixed stories with a negative ones outweighing positive ones.

The benefit of emotions

Often people can’t hear stories they’re telling. That’s why humans come equipped with emotions. Negative stories feel like “fear”, “insecurity”, “worry” or “victimhood”. Told often enough such stories become the person.

From the person then erupts experiences, people and events consistent with stories they’ve become. That’s why people get robbed, raped, hit by a bus or assaulted for being trans.

The same things happen for shame-filled trans-attracted men. Their negative stories about their attraction matches them to trans women who share similar (although not identical) stories. In other words, such men meet trans women who are not beautiful, smart, confident, strong, capable courageous, proud and powerful.

Often such feelings get past one’s perception because one focuses too much on what’s happening outside their head. Focus works best when it predominantly focuses on what’s happening inside one’s head first, since everything happening outside one’s head springs from what happens inside one’s head.

Negativity owes itself to positivity

Very few people chronically tell positive stories. There are many people, and a lot of trans women telling negative stories though. Everyone’s life matches their stories.

But even negative story tellers from time to time experience positive experiences. They do because a little positivity overwhelms tons of negativity. It does because negative “energy” isn’t an energy. Negative “energy” is what happens when positive energy gets diminished.

In other words, negative “energy” owes its existence to its relativity to positive energy. It has no substance, no independent existence of its own. It is defined by a lack of positivity.

What’s more, a chronically negative person still is, at the core, pure positive energy. That energy, no matter how obscured it may be by negative focus, still can overcome its overshadowed state when the negative-focused person drops their guard.

When he’s not paying attention, asleep or doing something “mindless” such as driving a car, taking a shower or experiencing something fun, positive focus’ power eeks through. That’s why a negative person can sometimes experience positive experiences.

Positive benefits feel fun

When I’m positive and excited by my positive stories, when I’m enthusiastic and eager about what I’m up to (or planning), I open up. I’m open to possibility, I see things consistently negative people can’t.

The world is full of delights.

Staying positive I produce results easily and fast. More important, on the way to those outcomes, I enjoy life more. That means life experience becomes more entertaining, more fun, more positive.

“Happy accidents”, what some people call “luck”, happen often for people telling positive stories. It’s not luck, but who cares what it’s called? Through such events problems solve themselves faster compared to focusing on the problem, trying to find a solution or trying to make a solution work.

When negative, one sees more negativity. Such focus turns things into “impossible problems.” When someone filters life through negative stories, the sheer enormity of bad things in the world overwhelms awareness. Every Transamorous guy becomes a “tranny chaser”. Every trans woman is a potential victim, every trans woman a guy meets ends up being a skeezer, working girl or gold digger.

A lot of people stand in such negative stories. Yet no such experiences need happen to anyone.

That’s incredibly naive

Someone reading this may not believe a bit of it. The majority of people believe negative situations described above are just natural parts of being trans-attracted, transgender or human.

I know, and my clients know, this is NOT NATURAL. Anyone well-practiced in telling positive stories discovers this.

A Positively Focused person knows her life experience springs ongoingly from her, not others. So she focuses on the one thing that really matters: her focus, not what others say, do or believe. Which is why my clients sometimes find their old friends getting on their nerves. My clients become so positive and their old friends’ chronic negativity so obvious, they become like oil and water: intolerable of each other.

Here’s the critical thing about being negative: It’s very hard to turn that train around. A life-long “realistic”, pessimistic or negative person may feel right about the world they experience. And they will be right.

They’ll be right because life experience springs from their stories. That doesn’t mean an alternative experience, one in which all desires fulfill themselves, including desire to have their ideal partner in their bed, doesn’t exist.

Momentum is momentum though. It takes a lot of work initially reversing negative-focus momentum. Since lives full of fulfilled desires are possible for everyone, that work pales in comparison to benefits derived, making the effort worth it.

Desires fulfilling themselves. It’s a life available to anyone, because everyone at their core is positively focused. It’s worth it. It’s fun and it’s everyone’s birthright. Even for trans and trans-attracted people.

Not living one’s birthright, in my opinion, is living. But just barely. Wanting that ideal woman in your bed is no fun if all you have is an empty bed.

But your bed doesn’t have to be empty.

#transgender #trans woman #Transamorous Network #transattracted #transamorous #mtf

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yobaba30 · 5 years ago

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Brace yourself, dear reader, for today’s topic is rage. Not just any garden-variety rage, but its narcissistic kind, one of the darkest and most destructive manifestations of our Shadow.

A narcissist’s rage is always there, sometimes barely under the surface, sometimes hovering above it in the form of sadistic cruelties dispensed casually without specific reason, just because (that stupid dog was in my way, you are so fat and ugly, only idiots park their cars in this spot, and no one talks to me like that — any or no reason would do). There are, however, solid enough explanations of its existence.

You may have heard of Donald Trump’s very bad day the other Tuesday — or rather what would have been a very bad day for any normal person / presidential candidate confronted with his inaccuracies and lies. For Donald, however, it was just Tuesday as usual, complete with playing the Perpetual Victim™ of the Cruel and Unforgiving Press, and humiliating people who dared to question him about these pesky things known as facts.

The sordid as usual spectacle was instructive, as is everything else coming from the man, in the dynamics of narcissistic pathology.

First, the bombast. His over-the-top pronouncements about his huuuge charitable efforts are meant to shock and awe the audience into unquestioning submission.

Second, should any audience member retain his or her bearings and still manage to persist in their questioning, next comes the unloading of the massive victimhood complex designed to cow them into silence filled, presumably, with commiseration and appreciation for the Put Upon Donny and His Unique Suffering (and, oh, how he suffers! only a narcissist can suffer so — you mere mortals / losers cannot possibly comprehend it).

Third — since, remarkably enough, the first two options did not quite work, a sign perhaps that some of the press members are growing spines — there followed a predictable, but still shocking, dose of sadism in the form of insults, direct and less so, meant to shut everyone up for good.

It is instructive to watch The Donald, who epitomizes dishonesty and sleaze, rage at the reporters for being “dishonest” and call them sleazy — for trying to extract some honesty and truth from him. He shames them — or futilely attempts to, given that his moral standing is non-existent and reality is decidedly not on his side — with the ease and force that indicates the extent of his own fear of shame.

This sequelae, seen above, in response to shame is classic for any narcissist, especially one of this extreme caliber, for very obvious reasons:

The narcissist tends to be very sensitive to shame, which he perceives as humiliation: a blow to his ego (sense of self) and/or a threat to what he sees as his important status compared to others. This sensitivity is the reason why he tends to lash out at those who shame or appear to shame him in any way. His reactions to shame are grossly disproportionate to the “offense;” he will hold grudges and seek revenge sometimes till death, his own or his “offender’s,” whichever comes first. Hell hath no fury like a narcissist scorned.

Shame is so difficult for a narcissist to tolerate because it arises from an exposure of some flaw of his to others. He has many serious shortcomings; but in his own eyes he is perfect and surpasses everyone else, as he will let you know time and again, directly and not. He must retain this grandiose delusion of superiority and perfection at all costs because this is all he has. His bigger than life persona hides an empty inner core, devoid of meaningful values and attachments. A prick of shame exposing any flaws in the narcissist’s façade has a potential of deflating it and effectively destroying him since there is nothing of substance to fall back on within his inner world.

The rage with which a narcissist reacts to shame or humiliation thus deflects attention from his inner emptiness. That rage is often a predominant emotion, particularly in a narcissist who feels chronically deprived of the admiration and perks he believes he deserves (and as his need for admiration and perks is bottomless, so then is his sense of deprivation). It does not take much to provoke it: a simple, neutral observation or a request can suddenly unleash it on an unsuspecting victim.

The vehement defense against shame is also another reason why a narcissist never takes responsibility for his behavior. Why should he anyway, when he’s perfect and does no wrong? Nothing is ever his fault, no matter how great a mess he creates. Responsibility is always projected outwards, onto others, as blame. Admitting his culpability in anything could lead to shame and cracks in the false façade that defines his character — and his ego won’t allow that. It is a matter of life and death, ‘psychically’ speaking.

The flip side of his shame intolerance is his desire to humiliate others. It comes as naturally to him as breathing. He derives pleasure from inflicting on others the kind of pain he himself wants to avoid at all costs. Humiliating other people is almost as satisfying as winning. It helps that the two often go together in the narcissist’s life. In fact, humiliating others is itself a win. And he likes to win.

What we have seen in Donald’s behavior was a relatively mild version of narcissistic aggression in response to shame, but it gives us a glimpse of what’s beneath it. We are still in the wooing phase, and Donald is, believe it or not, on his best behavior.

He is still The Charming Donald (or what passes for charming in Trumpland), trying to curry our favor and votes. If he makes it into the White House, then we will get to know his true self, unhampered by all these frivolous niceties.

We must appreciate the often sadistic and always revealing quality of insults dished out by The Donald at the people who try to confront him with reality, because, in the Freudian-slippage way, they expose his shadow — take this one, directed at ABC’s Tom Llamas on Tuesday:

You’re a sleaze because you know the facts and you know the facts well.

In this breathtaking attack, The Donald conveyed more than he wished. While his intent was to imply that he was being unfairly (but of course) criticized by the reporter who should know better, he let us know, Freudian-slippage style, what we have observed time and again: that reality as we know it with its pesky facts is optional — and threatening — for him, because he lives in his own version of it, where we all should join him (if we knew what’s good for us).

This again ties in with his pathological defense against shame. A narcissist’s facts and facts as most of us know them are distinctly incompatible, and you bring it up at your own risk.

Should the truth — those inconvenient realities of his life and his character as the rest of us see them — be revealed, he would be emotionally annihilated, so he cannot allow that. Yes, a narcissist would kill, easily, to protect his fragile ego from this unforgivable, to him, insult of the truth.

That narcissistic rage attacks can be deadly we see in, for example, the tragic and seemingly incomprehensible instances of lethal domestic violence where a narcissistically injured spouse, usually a husband, lashes out at his wife who may have offended him “for the last time” by confronting him with some imperfection of his (as in, Would you take your shoes off the table, please?). We can also see it, brazenly displayed, in the lives of genocidal tyrants. Saddam Hussein, for instance, was known to invite his advisers to give him honest feedback, and then execute those who took the honest part seriously. Ditto Stalin.

The epidemic of gun violence in the US, particularly mass shootings — a persistent clamoring of our Shadow to pay attention to its presence, something we equally persistently refuse to do — is also driven largely by narcissistic rage. During a news conference several days ago about the UCLA shooter, the chief of LAPD said the following:

Everybody tries to look for a good reason for this. There is no good reason for this. This is a mental issue, mental derangement.

He was correct that there is no good reason for this and that “mental derangement” is the cause — but we should learn to identify and name this specific mental derangement, called aggrieved entitlement, which is a form of narcissistic rage, already. Our failure to do so, repeatedly and with the kind of stubbornness that suggests willful blindness, is deadly. Whatever other difficulties the UCLA shooter may have experienced, we can assume with a fair degree of certainty that narcissistic entitlement and rage were among them, as it is nearly always the case. For it takes a grand dose of faith in one’s specialness to believe that one has a right to take another’s life — or many — in revenge for whatever slights, real or imagined, one may have experienced.

Tom Llamas’ offense, like those unlucky honest Hussein’s advisers, was, in addition to confronting Trump with cold facts about his charitable inactivities, ignoring those central facts that comprise the narcissist’s reality:

It is not, however, as though his understanding of himself and the world is entirely fact-free. There are three major facts around which his whole reality is organized:

1. I am great.

2. People unfairly malign me.

3. I will show them (they will pay).

Those are not just beliefs — they are facts etched deep in his psyche, and they evoke corresponding emotional states of 1. grandiose pride, 2. sense of victimhood and resentment, 3. desire for revenge, all of which form the core of his sense of self and motivate his actions.

“You’re a sleaze because you know the facts and you know the facts well” — the real facts, about the narcissist’s unsurpassed and unquestioned greatness — and you choose to ignore them. You will pay.

Trump’s gratuitous putdowns hint at the reservoir of narcissistic rage within. If physical violence (or a lawsuit) is not an option, sadistic insults will do. We all remember his gleeful mockery of a disabled reporter; yesterday, he gave us another example when talking about John Kerry’s accident in France last year:

He goes into a bicycle race, and he breaks his leg, and he’s incapacitated. And you know what they’re saying to each other? ‘How dumb is this guy? How dumb?’

The crowd laughed, as WaPo reports.

Narcissistic rage is easily evoked by the weakness of others, which the narcissist finds contemptible and deserving punishment, sometimes giving us hints at his own early traumas he may have experienced as a weak and helpless child at mercy of his harsh and/or cruel caretakers.

It also gives us a close look at other aspects of his shadow. Here is what Trump said about Hillary Clinton this week:

She’s a total mess, she’s unstable, and she can’t be president.

And how he responded when asked why he engaged in Twitter wars with Elizabeth Warren:

Because she is a nasty person, a terrible senator, and it drives her crazy.

These grade-school level barbs, which, like everything else that comes from the man’s mouth, are based on projection, tell us most about his shadow, facts which he does not want to — cannot, at a risk of grave injury — acknowledge of himself: that he is a nasty person, a total mess, unstable, terrible at his job (whatever it really is), and easily driven crazy by petty insults and criticisms. Oh, and that he can’t be president. If only Donald listened to his shadow…

Narcissistic rage is one of the darkest and deadliest forces known to mankind. Before it erupts, it usually simmers and percolates for a long time, fueled by resentment, envy and entitlement, the latter always aggrieved as the narcissist’s need for adulation and glory is insatiable and he can see the world populated by the undeserving, inferior people who nevertheless dare to be happier and/or more successful than he is. It thus creates enemies out of the innocent and often weak who become vessels for the narcissist’s hateful and envious projections.

These sustained projections form a basis of an attitude called the narcissism of minor differences, first described by Freud, where we exaggerate small differences in people who are our neighbors — their dress, the shape of their noses, etc. — in order to feel superior to them and exclude them from our group. This attitude, like anything else based on fear and hatred, easily infects others, already narcissistically predisposed; and the sharing makes the hateful projections grow and spread. The co-existent phenomenon of collective narcissism, which intensifies the in-group ties (and which is unsurprisingly associated with authoritarianism) at the expense of excluding and demonizing those who do not belong to our group, strengthens this pathological, but common and predictable enough process.

Once established as a more or less legitimate shared worldview, the narcissism of minor differences leads to an easy dehumanization of The Other, entrenched in racism and other forms of prejudice. It culminates in mob actions, gang violence, terrorism, and endless internal conflicts and wars, which — because of their grand scale and the magnitude of destruction — are the ultimate expressions of narcissistic rage and the deadliest manifestations of our Shadow.

And we allow this to happen.

Much cyberink has been spilled on analyzing Trump’s enduring appeal to American voters, and lauding his purported political mastery. This predictable but misguided adulation that stems from widespread narcissistic collusion and denial it creates (and the other way around) is exactly what the narcissist desires and aims at extracting from others.

It is unforgivable that our media not only legitimize this destructive individual, but imbue him with all kinds of special skills, attributing to him, with admiration and awe, political genius and media savvy.

Not coincidentally, the same happened with other leaders in human history who shared this character defect: while they were ridiculed by some, they were lauded by the press, domestic and foreign, for their “eloquence” and “brilliant political skills” as they peddled their grandiose dreams of glory alongside contempt and hatred for their “enemies,” The Others.

“This is a marvelous demagogue who can really inspire loyalty.”

“This guy is a clown. He’s like a caricature of himself.”

That’s how the media both idealized and devalued another similar character from the past who set out to show the world how great he was and how much adulation he deserved, Adolf Hitler.

This happens every time with an extreme (psychopathic) narcissistic leader / public character, because his pathology evokes just that very kind of response in people, media people included: it makes us either laugh in disbelief and contempt, or idolize his hyped-up “skills” — which are really nothing more than expressions of his pathology — often both at the same time. And while the public is both amused and mesmerized by the future tyrant’s larger-than-life persona, he ever so persistently marches toward his ultimate goal unimpeded — because the number of those who fall for his narcissistic manipulations is always too large.

The predictable and co-occurring idealization and devaluation are two emotional states that generally define a narcissist’s attitude toward himself (idealization) and others (devaluation; see the insults discussed above). He projects them, primitively — i.e., without any self-reflection or inhibitions, as there is no functioning conscience to impose such “obstacles” on his mental processes and behavior — onto the world and constructs an entire ideology from them.

When dressed up in grandiose and empty sloganeering on patriotism, faith, national purity, and other perverted “ideals,” this pathological process is mistaken for “political brilliance” and other such dangerous nonsense, as it inspires too many people to follow the leader, even if straight into an abyss. His irresistible pull lies not in any specific policies he may be promising (and being blissfully unacquainted with reality, he is always short and/or vague on those), but in the feelings his words engender in his followers, specifically a narcissistic identification with the strongman, which compensates for his followers’ inadequacies; and narcissistic rage, which the strongman embodies and already unleashes on the nation through inciting chaos and violence. The only promises that matter are those which bring in a possibility of revenge for the real and imagined hurts of his followers. That, too, is our Shadow at work.

This phenomenon, part of narcissistic collusion that develops between narcissistic leaders and their followers in any human group and organization, is as common as it is dangerous. It should be obvious that any promises and “serious” pronouncements such a leader makes are not worth the air he wastes uttering them. The only “skills” that he possesses come from his emotional primitivism combined with his grandiosity and lack of conscience, which allow him to unleash the disordered contents of his psyche on the world without any inhibition or compunction.

This appeals to and “awes” people who are psychologically similar, but frightens and repulses, correctly, the rest who are not as primitive and/or disordered and who see where this dangerous process leads. Unfortunately, too many journalists, not to mention Trump’s admirers and supporters, apparently belong in the former camp, as their shadow dangerously colludes with his.

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sagebodisattva · 6 years ago

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The Suffering of the Sacred Cow

So I was asked by a commenter if I ever really truly had deep pain and suffering in my life. I told him that we have all experienced these things to one degree or another. Then I told him that Cash Snowden recently told me something about suffering that I thought he might appreciate., which was:

“Suffering requires a narrative. Pain can be embraced, enjoyed. Suffering and pain are not the same thing. Suffering requires a story in the mind told and believed. Without that story being told and believed, there is just phenomena. The presence of phenomena doesn't have the power to make us suffer. Only our reaction to objects and circumstances can make us suffer."

And to this, the commenter replied:

“Meta Sage. I fully understand that. But it doesn't negate it all. We simply cannot suppress the mind day to day. It's just more insensitive stoicism rhetoric. It's like Rorschach who thinks he has Dr. Manhattan's perspective, haha. You told a commenter that he doesn't have empirical experience under your rock ? video. Okay, fair enough. How can you understand someone else's experience with pain and suffering? It's not all the "same same" visages that dance along. Consciousness is the same, but points of perception have no right to point to stoicism on a soap box as a remedy. Your perspective seems to blame everything on points of perception forgetting that we are a part of the whole. There's no way of wading through this contextualization's "temporary aspects of functionality" and still remain in it.”

So, what exactly is up for this proposed negation that cannot be negated? Does it have anything to do with the actual pain and suffering, or is this just referring to a victimology?

If we can fully understand that suffering is caused by a reaction to circumstances and a narrative told to oneself, then the remedy is clear, isn't it? How isn't it not the same same visages that dance along? Because the specifics of my melodrama are different then the specifics of his melodrama? I mean,... isn't it all melodrama? How is it not all the same same? To think that one's own suffering is somehow more valuable than someone else's, is opinionated and biased.

No one is saying to repress the mind. It wouldn't really be accurate to say that anyway. The mind cannot be repressed; only emotions, feelings, impulses and reactions can be either expressed or repressed. And that isn't what's being advocated around here. I say, don't express or repress. Let it flow through you; witness it, be present, be fully aware of it, but don't feel the need to interfere, with attempts at trying to block it or boost it. Our assistance isn't required. Really.

Much of life is about pain and pleasure management. These stimuli will occur again and again, but it need not cause us to suffer or to have an orgasam... Or, to be put another way: to indulge in attachments, that is, seeking to sustain certain circumstances or seeking to avoid certain circumstances. Depression or euphoria are the psychological result of the indulgence into the narratives associated with the stimuli, it's not a state of being victimizing us. It's a self imposed state, so to speak. To say that these things are insensitive stoicism really makes me wonder about the motive of those who like to wear their suffering like some kind of red badge of courage. Like assuming a victim status affords one of some special standing. It's a little bit annoying.

I find it very unbecoming for people to revel in victimhood. They think no wisdom or activism should apply to them, feel they are above any effort to overcome obstacles, and feel they have some sort of higher ground from which they can wag their fingers at everyone, this alone being the extent of their efforts, and of which they think is duefully theirs by rights, and of which is an exercise of ample action. And if you happen to disagree with them, then all you need is a hammer to the eye, or a family member to be wracked by disease, in order for you to understand their perspective, and hence agree with their narrative.

No, that's all wrong, and it's none of that which is imagined. That is playing the victim, plain and simple. It doesn't give one any special understanding, nor does it elect one to some automatic podium of spirituality.

And besides, isn't that forgetting the relativity of our pain and suffering? Just as we try and minimize others because we feel we have endured so much more suffering then them, realize that there have been, and still are, many others who have experienced pain and suffering the likes of which makes our own pain and suffering seem like tea time at the cat pajama show. So, maybe our idea of loftiness from suffering really isn't that warranted, when there have been others who really have had it much much worse then us. Is that fair? Does it make sense? Or isn't it more realistic to understand that we all know what suffering is, but some experience it more often and to a higher degree then others. But does that fact discount anyone's suffering? Or anyone's right to speak on suffering? Or their suggestions as to the remedies for suffering?

Granted, we don't know the exact configurations of each other's experience with suffering, but that isn't saying very much. Understand, no one is trying to dismiss your suffering as invalid. No one is trying to take a shit on your suffering. No one is saying you don't have a right to feel the way you do about it. In fact, I am very compassionate and empathetic towards your suffering. I wish I could take it all away and send soothing relief over you, to wash away all your pain. But just because our experiences with suffering are not identical doesn't mean we can't speak on the issue together, and explore remedies.

It's not the same as what I told the commenter in my rock video. When referring to the illusion and nature of reality, we can't just say "I understand", because we have gathered some intellectual information on the subject. When it comes to understanding the nature of reality: study, research, gathering knowledge, and building an intellect of details, emphasizes the WRONG approach. It's not a matter of learning. It's not a matter of adding. Empirical understanding is what is required, and this entails a slow gradual deconstruction process of emptying, uncovering and the removal of mental blockades. You unlearn it and realize it. It's clear seeing. If someone doesn't realize it, it's quite clear because, despite saying they understand it with words spoken, it's apparent to anyone who has already realized it, if they really do or not. Someone who understands and realizes the nature of reality doesn't point to perceivables as having responsibility for their inner condition. Someone who is constantly externalizing and referencing the outside world as the source of their problems clearly hasn't made the hurdle. There's no faking it, or any way to grasp it through knowledge. So this is why this example is not on par with the experience of suffering. We all understand pain and suffering to different degrees, so this unites us, and we can all identify with it and share different methods of managing it.

Physical pain comes and goes. If it remains constant, soon tolerance is developed. But generally, pain is not something that sustains as such. But even if such a situation cropped up, wherein non-stop constant pain continued and no tolerance was acquired, there are still different ways to quell it, even if it means taking morphine for relief. Any pain can he healed, it's just a matter of finding the right method.

As for suffering, this is within our ability to control. And I'm not sure why anyone who is suffering would resent possible ways offered to overcome it. People that enable your suffering are not really your friends. Is that what we want? Do we want to be babied? Will it make us feel better if someone diapers and burps our suffering? Ok, maybe a moment of that is nice, but after that, it's time to lift our head up high and take a walk in the sun.

Because if not, then why are you here? If you say you have chronic pain and that there is no way to reduce it, I could either just dismiss you, and say yeah your right. Nothing I am trying to show you can help you, so just ignore my videos, OR, I am gonna keep on encouraging you with my methods.

So then, who says I have no right to point to stoicism as a remedy? It's a good remedy. It's a solid remedy. I want to offer positivity and strength to people who suffer. It's not always insensitive to slap someone out of a torpor stupor. It's actually a disservice and injurious to enable someone to maintain a victim mentality. I would argue that any true stoic is only a stoic because they have had to grapple with extraordinary suffering, and have been able to transact the maneuver I am referring to. Stoics that can laugh, joke and smile, as they are being bull whipped. You know. The ones that don't bat and eye, and wink at you, as they are being crucified. If I were someone who experienced a lot of pain and suffering, I would seek to learn from the stoic, not dismiss them out of hand as insensitive.

I'm not sure what you mean when you say that I seem to want to blame everything on individuals forgetting that they are part of the whole and that there's no way of wading through this context's temporary aspects of functionality and still remain in it. So, I'll just say that nobody is a “PART” of any whole. There is only whole. Parts are apart of the delusion. You are the clear seeing, and not the seen. And what is the seen? Anything beyond the seeing, which includes, your physical body, your psychology, your ego, your environment, other people, the world, the universe and the context of all of these things. So you see, even by me pointing that out just now is insensitive to the standard world view of what a self is.

But that's one thing you should understand about the Meta Sage. I'm a Nihilist. I commit menticide on a regular basis. I am here to undermines your values, reasons, purposes and narratives. But if you watch my videos with any regularity, you should know this already. I go after everything, not just religion and dogma. I am a reality deconstructionist, and everything is on the table. Even suffering.

Yeah, maybe I'm a little insensitive, but it comes with the territory. Spirituality is not really about happy songs and gay dances. Spirituality is about going to war. It's about destroying untruths, and tearing down false foundations. So if that's the charge, then I guess I'm insensitive. But remember, I don't twist anyone's arm and force them to my channel. If you want to be jerked around, there's plenty of fluff to be found out there. There's plenty of fare that appeals to the lowest common denominator. But if you know who I am, and keep returning here, don't bring along any sacred cows.

#suffering #sacred cow

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lovehaswonangelnumbers · 6 years ago

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New Post has been published on https://lovehaswonangelnumbers.org/january-2019-energy-updateyear-of-beginnings/

January 2019 Energy Update~Year of Beginnings

By Lee Harris

Year of Beginnings, Visioning and Manifesting, “The One Relationship” Upgrade

2019 – YEAR OF BEGINNINGS

2019 is going to be a Year of Beginnings.

2012-2019, was a 7 year cycle of clearing energetically.

2019-2026 is going to be a cycle of elevation – a brand new beginning, bringing with it a lot of momentum and forward movement.

What will this look like on the ground? With the intensity of the energetics that have been going on the past few years, many of you have been coming to the end of the road in lives that you have either been struggling to maintain, or trying to make work but found that things just aren’t working or sticking. For those of you in that group, this is going to be a really good year to shift things forward. The pain or discomfort of where you have been will propel you forward to create change powerfully and purposely.

And for those of you who are already feeling clear or elevated and excited about the future, this cycle will bring the very revolution and evolution that you are wanting to see. You are primed and ready to help create and usher those changes in, and the growing support and evidence of that awakening is going to be far more apparent to us in this next seven years.

Over the last seven years (and heightened since 2012), we have seen the straps coming off on the old. The world has been undergoing a very slow, uncomfortable death of old systems, old ways of being, and this hasn’t been easy for any of us to go through. If you are a highly sensitive or empathic person and you are picking up on the energy, the ripple effect in the world may have made it feel like you have taken a beating in recent years. However, now is the time for empaths, sensitives and healers to figure out their path here, and find their way of strength.

If any of you are reading this and feeling that this is your story, and you are just an observer in the world but don’t feel part of it, remember you aren’t here to just be an observer. None of us are – we are here to perform and create as much as we are here to observe and show up in our lives and honor our path.

This kind of depressed or repressed state can happen if we don’t look at the bigger picture of our lives, and if we only focus on chaos or fear or panic going on in the outer world. In this mode only, we tend to become disempowered, lose our faith, lose our passion and our energy; the very things that the world and your life needs more of now than ever before.

So if this is you, 2019 is going to be a great year if you are willing to change things up and move forward. Ask yourself:

What do I need?

What do I want?

What do I need next to feel some connection and passion in my life?

VISIONING AND MANIFESTING

One of the great things about this month of January, is it’s a perfect month to think about intentions. Now, of course, we as a collective group share this tradition in January of making New Year’s resolutions.

This year, can you make those from an expansive place of possibility? For example, some people will make their new year’s resolutions based on what they don’t like about themselves, don’t like about their life, what they are mad at about or what they didn’t get. And of course this isn’t a strong foundation to intend from. New year’s resolutions, when made through fear and judgement, lose manifestational power because of the intent they are made from. They are built on shaky, wounded ground.

The reason we are mad or sad about things is that we are here to understand WHY we are mad about those things, so we can heal and move beyond. When we understand that this is the process of the soul’s journey as a human, rather than those things or events themselves, we can quickly move from frustration and resistance into creative manifestation from a healed and strong place. So if defeatist energy, victimhood or negative thoughts come up for you when you create your intentions (which is in and of itself, a healing process), that’s great to notice and take a moment to ask yourself some questions, such as:

What am I mad or sad about?

How far back does this go?

How can I help myself move and change this?

The other energy we may meet in January if we don’t get conscious, will be a surfacing of the oldest and heaviest blocks we have to moving forward.

So if you are sick of your money situation, a certain relationship, or if there’s a certain thing that you need to say or do, be aware that it might get chronic before it gets better in the early couple of weeks of January.

This is because the January energy is rising everything to the surface so that you can clear the way to look ahead. See January as a month of final clearing, forward visioning and the internal.

From February, the world is going to become a lot more vocal externally and the outer world, the action side of our world, is going to rise again.

So January is a quieter month to focus on what you want to manifest and how you can create. Those of you who really take time to listen, slow down, take space in January – you are going to see the best effects.

Those of you that are trying to keep up with the bus, keep up with other people’s agendas while feeling exhausted or pulled around, it’s going to get worse for you if you don’t start to take a moment to just slow down. Because you really need to take charge of your capacity, your limits and create a new blueprint for your future if I’m describing your reality. A future that includes you.

7 YEAR CYCLE

January 2019 is a time to get really clear – not just about the year ahead – but about the seven years to come. It would be powerful to write yourself a seven year plan; the things that you would like to experience, the things that you would like to bring into your life, the things that you would like to create and what you would like to see shift in the world.

These moments where we play with our future in this way, are ways to open back up to our soul. The outcome of this kind of dreaming and visioning is less important than the fact we are taking time to do it, to listen and to connect.

“THE ONE RELATIONSHIP” – RELATIONSHIP UPGRADES

Which leads me to the other key aspect of this next seven year cycle, and that is the elevation of our relationships.

Relationships have had a strong focus in recent years – a lot of people have been clearing ancestral connections, attachments, wounds with and through each other. Many have very quickly formed friendships, partnerships, business relationships in order to do this, and so many of those have sometimes quickly blown up or changed fast in the past 2-3 years. This is part of the clearing cycle around relationships, so lessons and learnings have been moving faster than before.

So as the next seven years are in an elevation cycle, many of you are going to experience what I would call “the one relationship” more. It’s when we start to no longer feel a difference between the connection we have after a two minute conversation with a stranger that we’ve never met, and one we have with a person in our life that we’ve known for maybe 10 years.

It’s not that you don’t value the 10 year history that you have with someone, because that is its own thing with its own specific value. But in terms of the ability to connect with somebody, it’s actually all the same.

We are all human hearts, human souls, human minds, human bodies, and even if we don’t fully know each other’s stories (because we haven’t shared yet or developed that intimacy), we can be compassionate and connected to one another at an all new level when we start to adopt this way of being. So the one relationship, feeling that everything is one relationship, is birthing now and will be stronger than ever in the coming 7 years. Many of you are already experiencing this, but it’s on the increase for all of you. And for those of you who don’t experience what I’m describing often, that’s going to be something that will be more at the forefront than ever before in your next few years, so enjoy it!

Alongside that, it can mean that you trusting to speak your truth at the right moment is going to go on to an all time high in January, February, March – these first few months of the year. It can mean you making subtle or dramatic changes to certain relationships is going to come to the forefront. And your relationship with yourself is paramount too, in terms of your honesty with yourself around things you wish to change. The good news is this energy of truth-telling will have a lot of grace behind it in 2019, so for most, it will become a more normal and rewarding experience than ever before.

INTENSITY IS UNIVERSAL AND TRUE

The feeling of intensity that we have gone through the last few years is universal and it is true. So, if you are somebody who is feeling knocked by the ripple effects of change around you, make sure you carve out time for yourself from now on, otherwise it can be overwhelming. If you are somebody who feels you have been dragged under the wave, really get creational in the next couple of months and give yourself time to plan a very different future for yourself. Bring in new activities and a new way of dealing with your time and your choices.

Ask yourself:

What do I need?

How do I stay balanced?

Am I looking after myself?

We never know how many days we have left on Earth. It’s always a stark reminder to me whenever I have death close to me that it’s very easy for us in our minds to put certain things off in life.

Don’t put yourself off this year – trust that whatever it is that you are trying to drive toward in yourself, for your life, will actually also be for everyone else, because that’s often the excuse that sensitives and healers will make, “Well, I don’t know if this is really serving anybody else.”

Well, do it, try it and then see.

Because the dream energy that we have in our hearts is actually a dream for the whole planet, and is the healing key we all need at this time. When we activate our personal dreams, we become more connected to life. And that connection energy is then rocket fuel to others, as it ripples out from you, to everybody else.

I wish you a wonderful new 2019, take care of yourselves, and remember, we are all in this together.

Big Love

Lee x

*****

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atechnicolortomorrow-blog · 6 years ago

Text

Some Perspective.

by: Allan Victor

“Chronic means it’s with you for life.”

I was not exactly sure how to process those words. There I was half asleep in a recovery room, sitting in a hospital gown with my sobbing mother. I had been displaying an array of uncommon symptoms, mainly bloody stools. Prior to my first colonoscopy, I had been frequenting emergency rooms unsure of what to make of anything. Fun fact, I was almost put into quarantine once after the E.R. nurses thought I had potentially contracted something from out of the country. This was after telling them at least a dozen times that I had not traveled internationally for nearly a decade. What started as a concerning emergency room visit, soon turned into a J.J. Abrams-style film. Jokes asides, my health was not playing around.

Things were about to get serious.

Let us begin in 2014, I was eager to make that transition from community college to a more traditional university. Ironic since everything the future had in store for me was anything but “traditional.” After receiving acceptance letters to all the schools I had been eyeing, it seemed nothing could stop me at this point. Years of crippling anxiety were finally going to pay off. For once, I had something to show for myself.

I was unbreakable, or so I thought.

I had befriended a fellow student at my community college, Quinn. She could drink practically anyone under a table. I would be lying if I said that I did not often engage in these alcohol-driven outings. Admittedly, I hadn’t been much of a drinker up until this point. Yet this substance seemed to serve as a much-needed crutch for a lacking social life. This was an ideal opportunity for me to start networking and meeting people. Who knew such a bitter tasting substance could provide such fun? Quinn worked as a receptionist in at a medical facility, which granted her a decent amount of secondhand medical knowledge. I could not help but wonder what her bosses would think of her recreational habits, but only god can judge us, right?

It was at our favorite dive bar where I decided to mention some of the symptoms I had been experiencing, mainly blood in my stool. My initial demeanor was flippant, as I thought this issue would eventually resolve on its own. Quinn’s facial expression personified a certain fear I had been repressing. After a series of questions beyond my knowledge, the consensus became me needing to see a doctor as soon as possible. We said our goodbyes and I made my way home. It was not too far into my journey when I began feeling the same urgency I had grown accustomed to. However, this time things were different. I was in pain. After tailing it home, my next trip to the bathroom became my most violent one yet. Soon came my first emergency room visit.

This evening would become the first night of the rest of my life.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, emergency rooms can actually do very little for cases pertaining to gastroenterology. However, this did not stop me from making another couple of visits. I could tell the nurses were getting tired of me. In hindsight, I knew deep down my visits were doing essentially nothing for me. I knew that taking that next step of seeing an actual specialist would mean I would receive results I was not ready to hear.

It was a sad day for me, but a good one for my health.

The time came for my first ever colonoscopy. I will never be able to shake off the events leading up to the actual procedure. Firstly, I was unaware this facility was actually a teaching hospital. In other words, college-aged students often come to observe anything ranging from checkups to full blown procedures. As the anesthesiologist was prepping me, there was a knock at the door. Mind you, the door was glass and see-through. The visitors? Oh, just a group of well-dressed 20 something year olds not too far from my own age. And there I was in my surgical gown, which exposed my entire backside. Again, this see-through door was doing me absolutely no favors.

Right as they were hooking me up to the oxygen mask which administered the anesthesia, the doctor taps me on the shoulder. He proceeds to ask me if it was okay if these students could watch. His tone? Nonchalant. His reaction to my disapproval? Disappointment. I truly choked up in that moment. I was already mortified about this entire situation. Now I had to accept how I had let the entire room down... Yahtzee!

I soon awoke in a twilight-like state of both radiance and grandeur.

Actually, I woke up to a nurse kneeing me in the chest to help me pass gas. One of the most awkward moments of this day came when they wheeled my bed through a packed hallway of onlookers. I was still half-asleep though, questioning my reality. My mother was waiting for me in this next room. Her facial expression sufficed for my googly-eyed state of confusion.

She was scared, and quite frankly, so was I.

After a good 20 minutes, the doctor joins us. I could not exactly get a good read of his facial expression, he looked like he meant business. Now here’s where the story gets a tad anticlimactic, being that I do not exactly remember what he said to me. However, I do remember the pictures they took of my colon, and they weren’t looking good. The only part of the conversation I do recall is my mother asking him if it was chronic. Due to my current state, I was unable to register what chronic actually entailed. The answer to her next question held an answer that would soon change my entire life. “Does that mean he has it for good?” Asked my mother in the most defeated tone. “Yes” He replied. “Chronic means it’s with you for life.”

Ulcerative Colitis is no joke.

The following months were nothing I could have prepared myself for. I was just about to start life at my new college. Yet instead of being able focus on making new friends or establishing a promising major, I was being pumped with copious amounts of prednisone. Mind you, prednisone equals weight gain, mood swings, and anxiety. Just a few of my favorite things... Facial bloating is also a huge side effect or “Moon Face” as us patients like to call it. On top of my new appearance, I now had to accept the fact that I could very well experience urgency in the middle of class. Granted, the first few months were tough. I was not really making friends as the constant paranoia of needing the bathroom consumed every last breath of mine. It was a bit of a blessing that I was a commuter and did not have to worry about dorm life.

Everything and everyone felt a good arm’s length away.

Thankfully, life started turning around some, in a good way. I ended up reaching such a steady place with my health that I joined the school’s improv troupe. This was something I had always wanted to do, but assumed would never be due to my health. I was having fun. I was enjoying myself.

Life was starting to make sense again.

As much as I wanted to stay aboard this happy train, reality had other plans for me. It was New Year’s Eve. The stress of the holidays was doing me very few favors. The following morning, New Year’s Day, I woke in my most painful state yet. Getting out of bed felt like I was skydiving onto a pile of flaming rocks. Dramatic? Yes. A bit much? Probably. I was in a lot of pain though.

It was in this moment I realized how life was likely never going to be the same again.

Time went on, and I had no choice but to do the same. Accepting the trials and tribulations accompanying my condition cost me nearly everything. My friends, my education, my sanity. I was in that same dark place again. I felt as though life had very little meaning to it. Accomplishments meant essentially nothing, since I knew my condition would always be just waiting in the wings for me.

Isolation became my happy place.

Somewhere down the line, a blessing presented itself in the form of a new treatment team. This time, it was not just a physical transformation, but a spiritual one as well. Learning to not feel sorry for myself was step one. Since victimhood had become my comfort zone, I had to fight off that jaded part of myself. Mind you, none of this was an overnight process, and even while typing this I still have to counter the negativity which accompanies reliving this. However, with the help of humor, hope, and a lot of autoimmune suppressants... Life isn’t nearly as spooky anymore.

Invisible illnesses are tricky topics.

Just because you do not “look sick” in society’s eyes does not mean your troubles are invalid. This is a lesson I still struggle conveying to others. Whether your condition is physical or mental, there is a community of people out there who want to help you. Most importantly though, you must help yourself. Do not be afraid of putting yourself first. Be selfish, be stern,

be something better than yesterday.

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onthehill · 6 years ago

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putting the text here because I don’t trust Medium won’t die and I want to keep this text.

Member Feature Story How London Became a Playground for the Rich London is often hailed as globalism’s great success story. So why does it feel like it’s falling apart?

Henry Wismayer

Nov 28

When I think about that morning last summer, when London awoke to television images of a West Kensington tower-block engulfed in flames, there’s one interview I can’t get out of my mind. A young man told the BBC that the fire felt like a predictable moment: the culmination of years of being made to feel like the city wanted them gone.

“[They] put them shoddy plastic things on there that set alight because they want more reasons to knock these blocks down… I’m not even so sure that was totally an accident,” he raged, as if some cabal of corrupt councillors and property developers had thrown a lit rag through the letter box. It was a crazy notion, issued in the heat of fury and grief. However, in the days that followed, as we began to learn about the truth of the fire last June — about the inferno that fed on cheap flammable cladding and about the confluence of municipal neglect, outsourcing, and value-engineering that permitted 72 people to die in their homes — it was easy to feel sympathy for the man’s sense of victimhood. For the outside world, the Grenfell Tower fire was a horrifying tragedy and a blight on the conscience of those who let it happen. But for many Londoners, it exposed something rotten in the marrow of London itself. For us, the fire was an instant and terrible symbol of a city in a tight spiral of dysfunction, where the ideas that once sustained it are breaking down beyond repair. It is no longer possible for a lifelong London resident like me to pretend that the city is a united, happy, and enviable place. In the 18 months since disaster befell the Lancaster West Estate, the condition of the British capital has seldom been out of the national conversation.

As with most topics of commentary in deeply divided post-Brexit Britain, London tends to be presented in binary terms — either paradise or hellhole, depending on your point of view. To idealistic liberals, it remains a cradle of tolerant coexistence, the place where multiculturalism works. The rainbow city that would have given Donald Trump hell had he dared to show his face here. To hysterical conservatives, by contrast, the city is “Londonistan” with a Muslim mayor, benighted by terror-attacks, no-go zones, and spiralling crime. In April, when the press marked 50 years since the Tory firebrand Enoch Powell made his infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech on the apocalyptic dangers of multiculturalism, there were many who pointed to this year’s escalating murder-rate as evidence of Powell’s prophecy come to pass. The truth, of course, is somewhere in between. London is not a Powellian Gomorrah. But it is no longer possible for a lifelong London resident like me to pretend that the city is a united, happy, and enviable place, either. The questions that surfaced in the aftermath of Grenfell haven’t gone away: Why did this tragedy hold such terrible resonance? Why, for millions of us, did anger about the circumstances surrounding the fire transcend its immediate context, feeding a growing sense that London no longer functions for the good of the people who live here due to forces far beyond its citizens’ ken and control? The young man’s rage was for the victims still burning behind him, but it was a rage of which many of us shared a fragment.

For decades, London’s rare achievement was its mixed-income communities. These came into being thanks to a post-war history of town planning, which set out to ensure that no area of affluence could become an island, aloof from the hoi polloi. Some of the resulting mix was deliberately engineered, and some of it was accidental. In recent years, however, it has been plain to see that this covenant — which envisioned people of different means and walks of life living in the same communities as neighbors — has started to crumble. In my other life, I do occasional work as a landscape gardener, tending the lawns and flower beds of south London’s more affluent inner suburbs. Last month, a neighbor wandered up to me to bitch about the homogenization of her neighborhood. Next door to where I was working, a newcomer to the street had commissioned an overhaul of their recently acquired semi, and the excavation conveyors were churning all day long, puking up London clay to make space for a new basement. “When we moved here 40 years ago, I was a junior legal researcher, my husband was an assistant lecturer,” the neighbour said, over the din of the machinery. “This road was all teachers and police officers. Public servants. Now it’s just bankers, bankers, bankers. What the hell’s happened?”

Ask any cynical long-term Londoner, and they’ll likely offer up any number of answers to this question. The erosion of London’s social-housing stock, which once inoculated the city against the creation of rich and poor ghettoes, is certainly one. The increasingly globe-trotting tendencies of the super-rich is another. Disproportionate city incomes have furnished a portion of residents with the financial leverage to re-fashion an area overnight if a neighbourhood happens to become popular with a certain well-monied milieu. Meanwhile, the suburban dream, which only 20 years ago still lured people out of the inner city, has long since expired. Together, these processes have combined with London’s chronic housing shortage to transform vast swathes of the inner city over the past decade.

To walk through certain parts of London today is to enter an eerie dystopia of late capitalism run amok. All over town, from Battersea to Stratford, vast welters of towers are in the throes of construction, invariably encircled by billboards depicting attractive white people at rest and play. But longtime Londoners know from experience that these towers are not really homes to be lived in but bricks-and-mortar commodities, investment opportunities that until recently were seen as safer than any government bond. If you ever find yourself walking through developments that have been recently finished and sold, you’ll discover street-level plazas devoid of people or even much evidence that many people are ever here. Meanwhile, in the golden postcodes of Westminster, Chelsea, and Kensington, the streets of old money have become a magnet for global capital of dubious origins. A government report published in May said the city was awash with “dirty money.”

In her 2017 book Big Capital, Anna Minton described this scramble for prime London real estate as the catalyst of a “domino effect,” whose effects ripple outwards across the capital and beyond. “The super-prime market displaces established communities to new areas, driving up property and rental prices elsewhere,” she writes. “And as current policies are geared to attracting foreign investment and building luxurious apartments rather than affordable homes, there is nothing to act as a counterweight.”

When a city changes this fast and on such an inhuman scale, it is impossible to live here without feeling unmoored. The sense of apartness precipitated by these developments is in large part architectural. London used to be a low-slung city, but many of these luxury towers are vertiginous and imposing, dwarfing the besieged remnants of what came before. But arguably more significant than this aesthetic discordance is the social upheaval it augurs. As more and more towers have gone up, so too have socio-demographic lines that once felt blurred become abrupt and partite, as the runaway cost of housing manoeuvres people into economic enclaves, and poverty is pushed outwards into peripheries and ghettoes of disadvantage. Traditional places of commonality, where shoulders rubbed, have been replaced by pockets of consumption. High-streets that once displayed a multifarious range of shopfronts and establishments have evolved to reflect more stratified times: the poorer areas with their betting shops and pawnsters, the wealthier ones lined with estate agents, restaurants, and prim cafes. Our civic spaces and landmarks have been commodified as cash-strapped councils look to make up budget shortfalls by monetizing their assets or repurposing public libraries into private gyms.

Boundaries, both physical and social, have started to rise across the city. Now, the streets feel more fractious as established communities dissipate. People in their 30s, unable to afford the cost of raising a family here, are starting to leave in droves. And we who remain are left with a curious sense that we are an inconvenient vestige of a city that no longer exists, like obdurate stone buildings amidst gleaming pavilions of glass and steel. Today’s London remains successful in many ways: as a summer playground for the super-rich; as a giant laundromat for the global kleptocracy; as an iconographic background for tourist photos and the glossy pages of a Hong Kong realtor’s brochure. But as a constellation of neighborhoods? No longer. Certainly not so much as before. Quickly — almost too quickly to track — London’s covenant is coming undone.

The trauma this has imposed in the places where the last dominoes tumble is all too easy to ignore. The most obvious victims of rising housing costs and hollowed-out communities — the minimum-wage workers trundling in from distant outskirts to service the offices, the growing number of homeless in doorways, the social-housing tenants relocated into cramped temporary accommodation when the bulldozers move in — remain largely voiceless. Their abasement, like so much of that which afflicts the London underclass, is hidden away in the backwaters, in food banks concealed behind council estates or displaced out of town. But to focus exclusively on these ostensive miseries is to miss a wider, more inchoate, malaise — a sense of a city adrift, changing in ways its residents don’t condone and feel powerless to prevent. We have become a paradox: the progressive city nostalgic for the past. This more universal condition can be best described not as displacement but dislocation. It’s the feeling of being abruptly estranged, be it emotionally or physically, from your existing state or place. Cities are always transitory, prone to endless flux, but when a city changes this fast and on such an inhuman scale, it is impossible to live here without feeling unmoored.

Yet for all that the anger that this transformation of London has surely engendered, protest remains in short supply. For the majority, it seems, vast, anonymous cities can seem governed by an irresistible determinism, as though their evolution were ordained by Newtonian law. This sense of fatalism does not tend to energize vigorous resistance. In addition, so much of our yearning for the London we’ve lost seems ostensibly counterintuitive. The city I grew up in was hardly an urban paradise. Many of my most vivid memories are recalled with a maternal hand at my back, ushering me past scenes of a recessional metropolis, rendered in grey. London then was a place where cardboard shanties still proliferated beneath the Southbank undercrofts, and grifters peddled ersatz perfume from splayed suitcases in the West End. The air was tubercular, the Thames flowed an effluent brown, and every road seemed strewn with litter, chewing-gum, and dog shit in varying stages of putrefaction. But still I yearn for that time before the city was cleaned-up and prettified, before the pigeon-feed sellers had been turfed from Trafalgar Square. The other day I saw a car with a bumper sticker that read “Make Peckham Shit Again,” and I couldn’t help but smile. We have become a paradox: the progressive city nostalgic for the past.

Meanwhile, apologists for the turbo-charged gentrification of inner London exonerate its degradations with mealy mouthed bromides about “market forces” — just another ineluctable reality of late capitalism, like sweatshop labour and high-street homogenisation. Things we grumble about on social media but, for the most part, can’t bring ourselves to protest over because to protest would be like screaming at the tide. Our sense of disquiet at the changing cityscape fades imperceptibly into London’s background ennui, lumped in with tube strikes and traffic jams and all the other unavoidable exigencies of urban life. However, when you consider that millions of Londoners have profited from those “market forces,” what is happening in London start to feel less like a cosmic inevitability and more like a deliberate and concerted human effort. As the tsunami of foreign property investment has increased demand for a stagnating supply, those of us who own homes have seen their value rocket. In recent decades, owning a London home has become the U.K.’s easiest path to fast cash. This is London’s guilty secret: that so many of us have suckled on this indemnity that we cannot admit its inherent madness, that it is a time-bomb that must explode, taking with it a million shattered dreams.

The 2016 Brexit vote has exposed the intractability of these hypocrisies, as the predominantly left-leaning city finds itself in a Faustian pact, at once lamenting the financial sector’s malign influence but terrified at the implications of its potential evacuation. As Britain’s appeal to investors continues to be undermined by a lack of post-Brexit certainty, recent reports indicate that luxury properties are struggling to sell. Suddenly, an economy predicated on casino banking and rentier capitalism feels frail and dysfunctional, one fiscal paroxysm from catastrophe. “It is strange, the bustle,” wrote Sarah Lyall in a New York Times article on post-Brexit London last April. “Construction crews are still putting up buildings, monuments to London’s future, as if nothing has changed. But you can hear faint footsteps, too. Banks, investment firms and other companies are making contingency plans to move elsewhere, if necessary. What then?”

Against the backdrop of atomisation and uncertainty, it’s perhaps little wonder that these anxieties have begun to manifest in the city’s darkening mood. Londoners used to laugh about the inaccuracy of our irascible reputation — of London as a snarky town where dour commuters wouldn’t stop to help a lost tourist. This wasn’t true, not really. But now the streets feel angrier, more riven. A city of blithe coexistence has become a city of sneers. Are we really surprised? Looking on, as your home gets taken away from you by forces you don’t really understand and that you feel powerless to resist, there is a point at which dislocation transmutes into nihilism and rage. Suddenly, each new skyscraper feels like an act of violence; each house renovation in the stomping-grounds of our youth becomes a desecration. Wealthy newcomers appear not as new neighbors, but as colonizers; hipster beards and vintage shops become hallmarks of an enemy within. Each appropriative bar or café, simulacrums of the melting pots they supplanted, becomes a reminder that London’s hallowed diversity, to many of the city’s residents, is merely ornamental — a desirable backdrop so long as it doesn’t press too close.

Often, when I feel this resentment brewing, I remind myself that I am getting older, and that chagrin over rapid change is perhaps as much a product of sentimentalism as it is legitimate dismay at social dysfunction. Until an inferno in a north London tower-block shakes you from the stupor, reminding you that the cost, for some, is all too real.

On the road in south London where I grew up, from the top of its steepening hill, you can see one of the broadest views of the British capital for miles around. On clear days, it presents a crenelated horizon of the whole city: from Wembley’s arch in the far northwest, past the stretched pyramid of The Shard and the jumbled towers of the Square Mile, to the more angular ones of Canary Wharf, looming over the estuarial Thames. London looks extraordinary from up here, immortal in its way, a proving-ground for the western dream of unending growth. Every time I look at the view from the upstairs window of my mum’s hillside house, I spot some unforeseen concrete core, the spinal column of a future tower, inching into the sky horizon. Yet this scene that once evoked wonder now elicits bitterness and foreboding about the future. If I pick up some binoculars, I can see Grenfell Tower far to the north: that burnt-out sepulchre where so many died in their homes, gasping for air. And when people ask me why their pyre became such an emblem of modern London, I just say, “Look around.”

We live in a place that knows only the price of bricks and has forgotten the people who give them value. This fucking city has betrayed us all.

written by Henry Wismayer Essays, features and assorted ramblings for over 70 publications, inc. NYT, WSJ, WaPo, Nat Geo, Vice, Vox and TIME: www.henry-wismayer.com.

#london #my places #words

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recordingtheyear · 6 years ago

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Damned Nations by Samantha Nutt, M.D.

As part of the Humanities Research Group I heard Samantha Nutt speak this past semester. One of the things I liked most about her lecture was the ending - she included practical ways that the audience could more actively prevent world conflict. These included supporting newspapers and journalism, buying products consciously, and paying attention to news events in developing countries - it was a lot like Chapter 6 of the book which I recapped here. Often speakers and authors engage the audience and make them passionate about a cause and then leave them without a way to challenge their energy. I think Sam Nutt is great at connecting people to conflict which can seem so far away. These are the pieces from the book which connected with me:

- Westerners benefit from war. Ex. Canada Pension Plan and teachers pensions are invested in arms companies. The mineral coltan is used in electronic devices, 60-80% of which is mined from the Congo, and results in violence and fights to control resources; most violent rapes occur in mining areas.

- The 5 permanent Security Council members of the UN are also the top arms exporters.

- ‘Militarized humanitarian intervention force continuum’ refers to the increasing combination of humanitarianism and military intervention (p. 85). They are combined because public support is needed for military missions to succeed and humanitarian aid increases public opinion. However, it is less cost-effective and successful at development than aid agencies alone. Military interventions should be limited to securing room for independent aid (p. 90).

- Nutt does not refute the shortfalls of aid – she accepts that it is flawed and adds to its criticisms. However, she does contest that aid is the primary problem and that we would be better off with free markets (p. 109). Further she argues aid does not create dependency drones as health and education empower citizens, strengthen government, etc.

- Most donor aid goes to emergency relief – one time events like tsunamis or hurricanes – rather than long-term problems with advance warnings calling for help but that are overlooked or judged. Natural disasters are seen as simple tragedies while manmade disasters are complicated and looked down on. There is money and competition between aid agencies for donors, grants, local agency partners, physical land area to operate in, and this effects to whom, when, and how aid is distributed (p. 114). The transition between short-term relief led by expats to tackling chronic problems is tricky (p. 124). Needs more longevity and for donors to understand long-term development donations – to move pressure from relief to development.

- “Every major study on this issue has found that institutionalizing children is harmful to their physical, emotional, and psychological development. That’s why orphanages no longer exist in North America” (p. 118). “Visitors to these programs often come away with a sense of how friendly and happy the children were… but what creates an extraordinary experience for the visitors – hyper-friendly preschoolers who make them feel immediately wanted – is a symptom of the children’s repeated psychological trauma. It is normal for young children to be cautious, even mistrustful of strangers. That children in these programs are so emotionally indiscriminate should be heeded as a warning that voluntour programs are failing children, rather than lauded as evidence of how much the foreigners were appreciated.” (p. 140).

- P. 116-117: Nutt recounts the damage done by well-meaning short-term volunteers, specifically in Haiti after the earthquake. Ex. donating formula facilitates spread of cholera and dysentery in babies who would otherwise be successfully breastfed. Aid is most effective when led by knowledgeable insiders (p. 124).

- There is no “simple linear relationship between good intentions and improved lives” (p. 118). Aid ads and voluntourism capitalize on good intentions, guilt, and ignorance (p. 135).

- Aid spending is more necessary in corrupt circumstances (rather than cutting back) because it protects human rights and strengthens civil society, and a reliable flow of money is needed for the success of ongoing development programs (p. 144-145).

Chapter 6: A Just Cause

- Injustices of war, human suffering, are sustained by "forces often well within our control, but which we recklessly choose to ignore." (p. 161).

Nutt highlights which aid initiatives are worth supporting:

- Eliminating the gender divide: education consistently correlates to better health outcomes and economic outcomes for women and children. "Based on a landmark study of demographic data from 1970-2009, for every additional year of education women of reproductive age in developing countries obtained, the death rate among children under five dropped by 10 percent. (p. 164)." "This is not to suggest that men don't matter (they do), but the cycle of violence and despair that plagues beleaguered nations will not end so long as women remain marginalized by illiteracy and are catastrophically poor." (p. 164).

- Poverty and unemployment: "One of the most significant and ongoing threats to peace globally is the demographic swell of unemployed, unskilled, and uneducation young men in unstable environments... collective discontent and social disengagement, combined with the easy availability of small arms, virtually guarantee catastrophe" (p. 173-4). "The recruitment tools used by the Taliban, Al-Qaeda,and Al-Shabab are no different from those used by warlords the world over: money, a sense of belonging, and an alternative to victimhood... [they] will never be won militarily... These are pseudo-populist movements, however perverse, which are strengthened by fear, poverty, and anger... The only way to abort such movements... is to strangle them with arms-control measures and thwart them through youth education, skills training, and employment" (p. 175). "The young men and women maturing in the midst of such violence and hardship can, in less than a generation, become a resource for their communities through education and skills training for a fraction of the cost of our ongoing militarization." (p. 177-8).

- Legal aid: a factor in ongoing violence and human rights violations is a lack of rule of law. "without a functioning system of law and order... there is a deficit of sticks with which to prevent ongoing violations." (p. 178).

What you can do:

- Donations to charities/aid providers: invest in small/medium sized long-term development programming through regular contributions, not just big, one-time disaster relief donations

- Lobby for divestment of public sector worker funds from the sale of small arms and other military munitions. Lobby for greater funding for Official Development Assistance - greater than 0.7% GDP.

- Support fair trade

- Advance a more inclusive respectful and considered world view.

- Education is key - "Our collective ability to reject misinformation, challenge assumptions and explore alternatives is enhanced by reading and engaging in civic action - whether by voting in elections, participating in thoughtful protest, wiring a blog, joining an NGO, running for public office, or attending an open lecture" (p. 183).

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singloveandsage · 7 years ago

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I’m an empath

Something I don’t talk about to everyone is the fact I’m an empath.

An empath is: a person with the ability to feel the emotional or physical state of another individual.

I was born this way and up until my mid twenties I didn’t have a word for the sensations or experiences that kept happening to me.

Empaths are sensitive, energetically open and highly attuned. Strangers will often tell them their deepest darkest secrets upon meeting them for the first time. A lot of counselors, healers and artists are empaths.

When I was sixteen and learning to drive, my male, fifty year old driving instructor told me during my first lesson about his marriage breakdown, and the pain he still felt about his divorce and how much he still loved his ex-wife. He went on to say he’d never told anyone about the things he was sharing with me. Of course he was also telling me when to turn, reminding me to use the hand break and to check my blind spots, so I nodded along and hoped not to crash.

A woman on the bus to school once told me everything about her ongoing physical pain. She shared news of her recent operation, chronic symptoms and struggles. It was major personal content and I had no idea what she expected from me as a naive teenager, probably off to P.E class in first period. I offered her my attention and hoped for her full recovery.

I’ve had female customers at work tell me about their menstrual cycles, male customers talk to me about their sex lives, I’ve been at parties where everyone has avoided me, almost as if they know that if they stop and engage the truth will come pouring out of them! I’ve had to leave events early because the pressure on my head feels like I’m going to explode from all the emotional and physical pain in the room and I’ve experienced symptoms of morning sickness around pregnant women and can guess the sex of babies in the womb.

Whatever someone is feeling, it may take a moment, up to a day, but it will pass through me and I will experience it as if it’s my own emotional or physical state. The trouble I’ve faced without the vocabulary, awareness, guidance or wisdom of being an empath is - fear and shame.

The world is scary when you can feel what other people are feeling, especially when you’re a kid. It’s overwhelming and lonely. It’s also shameful when everyone else is walking around unaffected and you are always struggling with simple things like a total weirdo.

I discovered the term “empath” through my interest in healing. I heard a healer use the word in an interview and then I googled it and some articles came up written by other empaths. There is very little written on the matter and it’s still talked about as a “burden that needs to be managed”.

So once I discovered the term, I went on managing the “burden” the best I could.

It’s been a burden to get a sore throat when someone else next to me is fuming with anger, it’s been a burden to get neck and shoulder pain when someone close by is rigid in their beliefs and it’s been a burden to feel crippling grief over someone else’s loss. How ridiculous when something suddenly becomes about you and not the person it’s actually happening to.

It’s been a burden to not be able to go into a crowd, especially living in Melbourne. Going to Adele nearly killed me. I called Andrew to come save me from a planter box in the middle of the city, surrounded by thousands of Adele fans in varied emotional states.

It’s been an ongoing burden to be social in general. So many people are high functioning depressives or suffering anxiety and doing a great job of hiding it. The ones that don’t start pouring out their woes to me are the ones I can actually feel the most. But, it’s confusing because everyone is talking on the surface about the weather, what they did on the weekend and the holidays they’re planning. The masks, role playing and facades are taking up so much energy to keep things appearing “fine” and “happy” that all I end up processing is other people’s exhaustion. So I go home and never want to leave the house because it’s so tiring to simply exist, let alone, truly live.

I’ve tried everything to manage the burden of being an empath so I can still go out and be a person. I’ve attempted multiple ways of protecting my sensitive nature. After going to psychologists and coaches I’ve tried clearing my chakras, wearing crystals, meditating morning, noon and night, salt baths, energetic shields, being a recluse, no coffee, no alcohol, yoga, reiki, bush walks, essential oils - you name it! It’s all fun and games until nothing actually works.

It’s all wacky and quirky until you lose all hope.

The major thing I’ve kept forgetting is that more often than not - it’s not actually MY pain. It’s the collective’s pain.

The thing that has made things WORSE is making my empathic nature into a burden in the first place!

IT’S NOT A BURDEN IT’S A GIFT.

Here’s how my default empath process has gone in the past:

1. Ow! I feel pain!

2. It must be something I did wrong?

3. I need to think about this for a very long time and solve it like a puzzle!

4. Shit, I don’t have time to do a puzzle because I have to go to work!

5. I’ll put the pain in a box for now and I’ll solve it later.

6. Now the pain is worse! There must be something really wrong with me!

7. I’m so ashamed that I can’t just be happy and live a normal life.

8. Let’s think about all the reasons it’s shit to be me!

9. Now I feel really bad and I’m never going outside again.

10. Wait, it’s really boring being scared all the time and staying inside, I’m going out to try and be a person.

11. Ow! I feel pain!

And repeat.

How a slightly more aware empath process should go:

1. Ow I feel pain!

2. Don’t worry, pain is just passing through you, it’s not permanent, you don’t have to do anything because it’s already done.

3. Let’s love what ever is arising whether it’s your pain or not

4. I love you

5. I love you

6. I love you

7. Is it your pain?

8. If yes, then continue to love it for as long as it is present

9. If no, bless all humans with more love. They need it! And know you are experiencing their pain as a sign that the world still needs your gift

10. I feel like me again

Being an empath does not mean you are living with a burden that needs you to put all of your energy into managing it. It means you have a gift that needs you to take responsibility for it. Your responsibility is to be devoted to love and not succumb to victimhood.

(Please note! This does not mean engaging with narcissists and indulging in toxic relationships. That's for another post.)

The world does not need more successful people, it needs more love and it’s hard to not be terrified of being a failure in the eyes of others by being the one who’s true power is to love in the face of pain.

All my life I have believed my gift is shameful, and in turn that’s made me fearful of who I am, how I was born and what I will always be. Now, the only way forward from here is by owning my truth. I am not weak. Who would of thought! Not me for the past twenty years.

Believing it’s “my pain” every time has been what’s kept the pain from passing through. The pain hasn’t actually had the opportunity to pass through the way it naturally wants to. Pain is a messenger and teacher, not a permanent resident. It is so often lodged deep in the energetic field with thought processes gripping the pain like industrial prongs, not letting the pain go because of the fear of it and shame in it.

Pain represents the innocent parts of us that we make wrong, evil, unworthy and useless, and they will stay dark, scary and confronting in hope of getting our loving attention some day. It’s time to stop seeing pain as a dark ghoul to run from and suppress because of fear, it’s time to look pain in the eye with our gentle hearts leading the way.

The only way out is through and the only way through is love. And I mean love like a warrior who wakes up with the sunrise and has a sense of duty and purpose until death. You can either lie down and let life steam roll you or you can stand on your own two feet with an inner flame so bright that all darkness is illuminated into blinding light.

I speak as someone who has continually shut down in all her pain, fear and exhaustion having felt the collective devastation all her life with no sign post, “how to” or guide book in sight.

I write this for all empaths out there who may not identify as an empath right now but may be confused, restless and defeated by their ongoing heavy and dense emotional state.

Don’t shield, hide, falsely protect and blame. Life will only get heavier. Acknowledge your sensitivity and empathy as absolute power and majority of your suffering will end in an instant.

Then focus your attention on love. That’s your job, to focus! Without focusing on love you’ll be a tiny ship in an unending ocean of everybody else’s pain. It’s your duty and calling to focus on love as your power and not pain as a burden. And I’m not talking about the fluffy, pale pink, bunny tale wagging love, I mean the roar of a fierce creature of the deep, wing span of a dragon, volcanic, gospel, mount everest climbing will power love! One step at a time, daily devotion to the sole answer to all of the mayhem - love.

Remember pain is no place to reside, it's a messenger of what needs your deepest love.

Let us love this earth back to light one person in pain at a time.

What a gift to be given.

🌿

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