The journey to myself

And, I've decided to do a vipassana retreat this summer. (That's the basic Buddhist meditation technique.)
I need some quiet withdrawal from the world (and the internet), so meditation should be perfect; could be perfect to understand some of the problems too (including why I resist changing my self-care habits so much).
I don't have a stable meditation practice right now, so maybe it's a bit daring to just go off to a meditation center for a week. But it's my goal to know at least one technique properly, and they seem beginner friendly. I think I'm at a place to jump in with both feet.
I met the teachers today, they are great indeed, and will be teaching everyone very individually. So ... looking forward to it :)
 
I spent two days not understanding a definition... while the trick was that I overlooked a condition on the ordering of indexes. Yai! :cool:
(I got it now... so I feel a sense of "great, finally!" and "oh my goodness, what took me so long").

Relationships ... I don't know. Not sure. Not that great.
We had a bad fight over nothing at the therapy session.
That "nothing" was, I guess, fear of change. Or commitment. Or negotiation. Not sure, but I'm pretty positive there was a fear component in both of us.
We made up, but some uncertainty, or even bitterness remains. Not sure if we should be building anything when communication can get this tough.

My move is going on, slowly. I've got a washing machine already.
 
I had an insane work week with a difficult exam on Wednesday and doing some calculations. I'm supposed to have next week off and I feel it's really well earned. I was headed for a convention tomorrow, but guess what, I'm catching a cold. Crap. I still naively hope it will dissolve itself overnight.

"Pressure is released, switch off," effect maybe. Or my body protesting again. I almost let myself believe that health is getting ok, so it must remind me that no, really, I haven't taken by far enough action to take care of it or time to let it heal.

Hey you, body. Realize that this is not gonna help in the slightest? Realize that I was going to take my bike to the convention and add some exercise... which is not gonna happen now?
I'll promise that I'll refrain from festival junkfood like french fries if that really helps!
 
Good morning, pain

In my depressed years, there has been one feeling present throughout most of my waking moments, very sharp and almost unbearable some days, hidden behind a thin curtain of other emotions other times, not hard to find upon closer look. It was/is the feeling of pain, located clearly in my chest right behind my breastbone.
Sometimes it's sharp pressure. Sometimes it's an empty hole. Sometimes it takes on the shape of a coconut - as if something is hidden inside a hard shell. In one therapy session I even connected it with a living form - a moaning ghost from kids' fairy tales, a spectre who's desperately searching for something.
It is probably connected with loss. Death even (although astoundingly I didn't have anyone close to me die yet). Yet the years of talking therapy still left me pretty clueless as to where the feeling has come from or how to work with it.

The feeling has dissipated more or less over the last three years. First, I got my mood stabilizing medication. It worked surprisingly well for this chronic pain. My psychiatrist told me that's placebo, but I don't think it was.
And second, I met Idealist, and discovered the DS dynamics. He was and is the only person who managed to somehow touch this pain inside me directly with his attention (or maybe the only one who was ever really interested in doing so). And some aspect of the bdsm experience obviously helps replace the pain and emptiness by an inner glow and fullness, for a few moments at least. Maybe it's surrender. Or the attention received. Or the trust required.

I am off my medication now. I had some free time, yet I have sinusitis and had to leave the convention earlier. I am still not sure how to go on (or not) with Idealist.
So I am not surprised to meet this pain today. Hello. Long time no see. Yes I know you show up periodically - and I try to speak to you yet hardly ever succeed in hearing your message. I'm really trying to treat you as a welcome guest - but please don't make your presence permanent again, ok?

If I decide to leave Idealist, I may as well make my peace with this emptiness being here possibly forever. I know the causality is not so easy, but emotionally, this is probably exactly what I need to do, because this is a pretty emotionally ingrained belief. If I leave Idealist, I will have to deal with this pain alone. Forever.
 
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With no medical knowledge whatsoever, Tinwen, could the pain you're describing be linked to anxiety? Grief is the wrong word, but anxiety can sometimes be overwhelming to the point of similarity with grief. Don't know if you can relate.

Hope you get better soon.
Shaya
 
Thanks, Shaya.
Anxiety can be manifesting in very sneaky ways, but I don't see the link here. I don't know how anxiety resembles grief.
The feeling is really closer to sadness, a longing for something unattainable, a gap that can't be filled.

It was an exhausting day.
Isn't it great that I nearly forgot, how exhausting this is?
 
I worry for my relationship to the point where i sometimes think I'm grieving it's potential loss.

The emotion can be labelled as anxiety I guess.

Sounds like it's different for you though.
 
Shaya said:
I worry for my relationship to the point where i sometimes think I'm grieving it's potential loss.
Click to expand...
Ah, I see. Yes, I know that process. I wouldn't label it all anxiety though - I don't necessarily get there through worrying only, grieving of potential loss is certainly part of decision-making for me.
 
Shaya said:
I worry for my relationship to the point where i sometimes think I'm grieving it's potential loss.
Click to expand...
Actually, Shaya, it's a great suggestion... the feeling being triggered by potential losses. I'm used to think of it as the near-constant it was, but I wonder if even then there were always thought-triggers bringing it up again and again. This time, it was thinking about the relationship in a negative way, which paved the path clearly, so exactly what you describe; other times, it may be a little harder to catch the trigger.
 
The pain is now gone, sad feelings aren't, and neither is fatigue. I spend two days at work this week (after last weeks vacation ruined by the cold) and I seem to be getting another sore throat.
I'm so glad my advisor needs a finished grad student for his carrier and so hopefully isn't going to fire me. This sucks.

Relationship front is a little better. We had a happy Monday evening, we talked some things out and managed a short scene, and we had therapy session on Wednesday which didn't bring much new per se but allowed us to discuss the fight from before. I'm not sure we've learned, but we gave it a fair shot.

There is still this crossroads. All in, or all out?
I know what I can expect is "more of the same", including nice daily communication, oftentimes passion, but seeing him 2-3 times a week and a nasty fight now and then.
The therapist said that he thinks we can sort out the practical stuff, but our communication is fragile. I think he may be underestimating the practical stuff. But I'm glad someone else has an eye on our communication too.
I'm not doing the decision now.
 
Kinda long and kinda good...
1,500 People Give All the Relationship Advice You’ll Ever Need
Maybe I'll give it a separate post in some other part of the forum, but there have been some voices about how this poly forum should not become a "general" relationship forum, so I hesitate to post general advice in the main (General Poly Discussions) area.

Btw. I have a question about decision making for you all who follow along. People sometimes say that emotions come and go, so you should not base your decision on your emotions. Figure out what you want and stick to it, they say.
I get confused by this topic, because I always thought that what tells me what I want and motivates me to action are emotions. But then, how can you do something that is 'right' when you really don't feel like it? Is that like different competing levels of deep vs. surface emotions, or is there something distinct within my psyche apart from thoughts and emotions?
So, is wanting something an emotion? And how about willpower, what is that and where does it come from? Is that a separate cathegory, or something emerging from complex thoughts and emotions?
Anyway, that's what I have been trying to wrap my brain around lately :eek:
 
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Hey Tinwen, I'll see if I can answer this part of your question. I find myself unable to relate to most of what you were trying to get at above, so I'm not sure if what I say is useful. I wasn't going to respond initially since I don't think I really get what you're trying to describe, but given that no one else has tried to answer you, maybe I'll give it a shot.

Tinwen said:
People sometimes say that emotions come and go, so you should not base your decision on your emotions
Click to expand...

I think you're right that we're made up of emotions. More so than logic, we operate emotionally. Maybe you get that. I mean, you're smart, pHD (<--- shaya can't spell phd) and yet you have this (emotional) submissive streak that contrasts against your (intellectual) independence. You may sometimes feel (emotionally) confused and yet would be amongst the most (intellectually) intelligent people that most lay-people would have met. My point being that emotions do define us, to a large extent.

Intellect doesn't vary greatly over time, but emotions do vary considerably more. When people say to me not to base my decision on emotions, I interpret that as meaning that emotions will vary greatly - a decision based on emotion today may be the wrong decision tomorrow. One way I find around this during an emotionally tumultuous time would be to keep a calendar or diary and take the average of my decisions over a duration of weeks. I feel like making a major life change today? I dont' do it. I mark it on a calendar and ask myself the same question 3 days later and 3 days later and 3 days later and so on. Then take a sample size of 10 or 20 and come to a decision a few months down the track.

Of course I could attack the question intellectually since intellect doesn't really vary over time. But I think by now we have established that we're first and foremost, emotional creatures and intellect comes second when strong emotions are at play.

Anyway, the calendar method works for me. May not be what you were asking, though.

Best wishes, Shaya.
 
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Thanks, Shaya :) Maybe I can try the calendar method and track my inclinations - I do try to average over time, observe the trends and the outside causes that make me feel a certain way. (My rule of thumb in relationships is to wait out a whole period, I'm sure girls can relate ;)) But I don't write any of it down regularly, so maybe in some cases, that could help. Do you use some simple metric for the evaluation, like "if I'm feeling like it more than 50% of the time I check, I'll do it"?

I realized from the lack of answers that I probably lost people. It happens to me sometimes - the source of the confusion is so clear to me, that I don't realise that much more background would be needed to understand it from the outside. Or maybe the topic is just too subtle. I guess it's a topic for my meditation practice (I'm starting and dropping that over and over again in the last year). Maybe I'll ask that buddhist teacher when I meet him again, but I'm sure figuring it out myself will be much more beneficial :eek:
 
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I'm done with exams! :)
Well, actually, there's still one piece of homework left that I should've done, and then there's stuff I haven't been able to learn for today's exam which I'd like to return to. But hey. Now, I've got vacation!
It feels unusual to have any unstructured and unplaned time at all. I still have some rather urgent stuff on my to do list (like buying shoes and getting packed), but hey, technically there's no need for a plan ;). I hope my body isn't going to collapse this time. If not, I'm gonna start getting it into basic shape with some cycling next week.
 
Greetings from a conference on low-temperature physics in Gothenburg, Sweden.
We heard the repeated Nobel talk from last years Nobel prize winner, Kosterlitz. I was pretty excited :)
Anyway, that poor guy's research is so theoretical it's almost impossible to say within reasonable time what the Nobel prize was actually about. To be honest, I'm still figuring it out.
Every other talk on this conference has the word "topological" (insulator, superconductor, phase transition) in it's title, and that's apparently these guys' fault. So they must have reformed the field of science. Except ... I haven't seen much superfluid He4 thin films undergo a topological phase transition in real life :D

I think I'll give it some more effort to figure out the potential applications and maybe prepare a presentation for some sci-fi convention. We do have science lectures there often, this could be interesting to some people, and it's much less painful to practice public speaking in front of sci-fi fans than at an actual conference.
 
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Regarding decisions and emotions...

I think that it is valuable to bring the time vector into play. The wise thing is to avoid making major decisions while under the influence of strong emotional duress. I would class major depression, or major life changes, NRE, hormonal states, or lack of physical care (enough food/sleep) or intensely stressful times, as those times that if you can set aside pulling the trigger on a big decision and give it time, to make sure it is TRULY what you want, and not the result of a fleeting emotional state, that's probably for the best.

I went to a sci-fi convention (one of the smaller ones here) early this year, and there were some scientists there speaking, and that was really interesting. Zen usually goes for the big name actors and actresses, and I'm new to going to these things at all really, so I didn't think there was a lot going on with this convention. I went because there was an art show and I'd hoped to market a piece there. But between the scientists, and the space stuff, and the guy who worked behind the scenes on the puppets for a bunch of Henson productions including The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth (!!) I had a pretty awesome time. :)
 
My vipassana "retreat"

LOL, guys and girls, you're officially welcome to laugh at me. I quit my meditation endeavour after exactly two days.

I did expect hardship. If you go somewhere to isolate yourself from people, get up at 4am and only eat two vegetarian meals a day, you're gonna face all your addiction. That was the plan. I also expected to meet some of my inner trouble, but I wasn't afraid of that, since, you know, that's why I do it, because I want to confront my trouble.
But I was still extraordinarily naive (and that's where I laugh out loud). I did expect the meditation and the structure to actually help me with that stuff. I did expect the practice to be pleasant at times. And, I did expect some tolerance for newcomers.

I bumped into a "teacher" who was very rigid in his application of rules - some of them pretty ridiculous. I've met no other meditator who's gonna tell you how exactly you should position your hands while sitting, regardless of your body's constitution, insisting that he knows from his years of experience what's best for the practice. How you place your hands is just not the important stuff. I had met him before and he didn't seem so strict.

So, of course, I almost immediately ran into the inner conflict of trusting the teacher or not, following rules or bending rules, setting up expectations for myself and my practice which do not match expectations set from outside. And, back to my naiveness, 6 hours of meditation on Saturday got all the attached feeling out into their full overwhelming beauty. It was hell. (That's where the teacher actually proved to be quite a good therapist, in talking me through that - otherwise I wouldn't be able to articulate the conflict so fully. So I must give him some credit.)

Anyway, this particular interpretation of Buddhism for sure doesn't sit well with me. (Not sure if other groups are better and less dogmatic. I indeed think they're even doing the technique wrong, or rather with the wrong emphasis.) So I reevaluated my goals and left. I wouldn't be able to stand more internal turmoil anyway.

I'm laughing pretty hard when I look at my blind trust that basically all meditation teachers will teach beginners well. I'm seeing now that there are sects within Buddhism which are far off in the left field. It's so fucking easy for me to trust that I should really be careful.
I'm also laughing at the idea that I can just do the retreat, like that, without real preparation.

I'm not bummed out about it. I lost some money in booking the place on the retreat, hey, worse things happen. The minute I walked out of that place I was fine. I'll enjoy the rest of my vacation.
I'm not even giving up on vipassana. Actually it must be really hard to do mindfulness practice really wrong, because I felt quite an increase in my awareness and willpower for about a day. I'm just totally putting on a blacklist this particular buddhist group :D
 
On poly news, we've actually had a vacation, the three of us. And we didn't bite each others' heads off.

Originally, when I was searching for my vacation with Idealist, I came across this package tour, cycling around the seashore. In the end we went elsewhere, I decided to do the meditation retreat these dates, and Idealist convinced Meta to go for this one. But as I quit the vipassana retreat two days in, Meta agreed to invite me along, which was incredibly nice of her.

We still haven't had the hard conversations suggested in this thread. It's incredibly challenging for me. I was glad to be able to call her personally and ask if she's really ok inviting me (she's just had the condition that she's the one to sleep in the tent with Idealist). I didn't initiate any hard topics on the vacation.

It was as nice as it could possibly be. We did basically 4 days of cycling, I enjoyed the opportunity to get in shape (and speak a bit about the vipassana experience with Idealist, as it was very much alive for me). It gave me plenty of possibilities to practice being considerate with Meta (when she was the last one climbing the hill), and I'm sure she took similar opportunities with me. I did have some undertones of irritation with her, especially towards the end, but there were possibilities to withdraw to solitude. So overall it went really well and things are ... kind of ...working :confused:

I still don't feel up to having conversations about the future. Sigh.
 
Second day at work after vacation.

Oops.

I have a lot of stuff to look forward in the following few months like
- I'm supposed to write the text of another shared publication ... and I'm not getting the stuff inside yet
- My experienced collegue who has been doing most of the numerics is leaving at the end of the year, and I should learn his stuff so that someone is confident doing the simulations. Involves a lot of computer stuff. Ooops.
- There's another idea that I have been working on which is now asking for non routine numerical treatment. The expectation is we'll do that stuff in the following months and than I take another trip abroad to include it into a draft with a professor in Poland.
- And that's only stuff already in progress. I haven't yet started on the other grant project I should be working on.
- State examination - probably beginning next year.

It's great that stuff is moving and others see me as an integral part of the group, but just looking at the amount of work to be done I'm anxious as hell.
 
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A reflection on travelling

So I spent another week abroad on a physics school. That makes in total 6 abroad stays since I started my phd, 4 work-wise and 2 for vacation, + 1 huge international conference held in my city. Since I haven't travelled like at all (through all of high school and university) this is a huge change. My trips were admittedly all across Europe, no exotic stuff - but what stands out the most is the sameness.

You take your flight, get off at basically the same airport, take almost the same bus to the same hotel and get food in the same supermarket. Granted, the food is somewhat different (depending on whether you are by the seashore or not you can get fish or not ;)), and the languages are different.

Even more importantly the people I meet are so very much the same. I've expected some ... national differences I guess? And yeah, Swedish people are more disciplined and less open than Spanish people. But it's much less pronounced than I thought. Basically everyone I spoke to was kind of ... normal? :D

People in tourist info offices doing their job.
The girl from Slovenia I got as the roommate for last week had exactly the same kind of insecurities.
The waitresses who didn't speak a word English were equally disappointed that they couldn't help me in Italy, Spain or Sweden. (In contrast to them, English of the cleaning lady in Belgium was perfect.)
The French guy played a word game with us very similar to what we used to play in high school.
Everyone in the school being equally upset that other people can't pronounce their names.
The Colombian girl I met on the plane who was to Europe for her first time, looking forward to it but counting every Euro.
And even the Chinese guy who was picking out fish bones from his plate and putting them next to it ... showed a bit of wonder and embarrassment when I pointed out this would be considered bad manners in Europe :)

I remembered from the time I lived abroad as a child people to be just ... different (and making fun of me for my differences). But they are really not. Not even the Asians, or anyone else. The differences fade so easily in face of the similarities, of the same emotional reactions, aspirations and kindness found all over the world.

It's trivial - but I didn't know, not really.
 
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