More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
April 1 - April 9, 2022
do Inquiry, Deepest Fear Inventory, and Existential Kink practices on any issues that may be coming up in your love life. I also want to invite you to take full, unflinching, complete and total responsibility for how not just you, but for how your partner shows up in relationship.
Exercise To do
all other people are our mirrors. They reflect to us qualities in our selves that we love or loathe.
when we perceive ourselves in an unhappy fashion, it is a guarantee that we will eventually unconsciously project that same perception of “badness” or “wrongness” onto our loved ones and (again, unconsciously) invite them to project that same “badness” or “wrongness” onto us. This is what one might call a vicious circle. The unconscious creative power of our perception and belief generates a seamless feedback loop that appears to be “objective reality” when actually it's an appearance called forth by our level of consciousness. The way to interrupt this feedback loop is to take total
...more
Breakthrough Experience process is very thorough. You take an influential person in your life (say, your mom or your husband) and make lists of every quality you enjoy and don't enjoy about them, then make a list of at least a handful of other people who would say that you have the exact same quality to the exact same degree. Then, you write about how the other person having the not-enjoyed qualities has actually benefitted you, and about how you having the same not-enjoyed qualities have benefitted others, then write about how the other person's enjoyed qualities have actually harmed you, and
...more
Exercise To do
sometimes we struggle to see their thirst-slaking wonders because we're too stuck in our habitual grooves of perception.
Do you see yourself as depriving or diminishing yourself somehow? Do you believe your past actions or the condition of your body or the quality of your work or anything else about you limits you and leaves you hungry for fulfillment?
long as you believe that only the deprivation of rich fulfillment that you perceive in your love life is real, you will continue to perceive only deprivation.
The desire to make others wait is a desire for power. Similarly (to mention some other common patterns you may have), the desire to pick fights with your partner to get attention, the desire to troll people on social media, the desire to bad-mouth colleagues as a way of gaining leverage at work, are all sideways manifestations of a desire for power. This desire for power, this desire to have an impact on the world around you and to be significant, is an immensely normal, lovely, garden-variety human desire.
their lust for power is both completely wonderful and utterly, unremarkably ordinary
consider all the ways that you hold yourself back from giving others the exact sensations that it would truly please you to give them.
Find a way to give sensation to others in exactly the way that you really want to give it to them. Let them feel your importance and significance in a manner that delights both you and them.
“Oh no, if only there was something I could do to stop the inevitable arrival of this magnificent new partner in my life. This is so awful. Now I have someone sane and healthy and hot who adores me. It's utterly disgusting. I'm really grieving that my singlehood is coming to this tragic and decisive end. It's just that I'm powerless over this new romance thing; I just know it's unavoidably going to happen—ugh. I really wish it was somehow possible for me to escape this relentless, terrifying fate of being completely fulfilled in love.”
our standards may well need resetting, but so do the stories we tell ourselves. And there simply comes a point where you need to change your record.
I feel important and valued and also overcrowded and put upon and smothered, which, I came to realize, turns out not only to be a MASSIVE sexual turn-on, but also a) enables me to avoid putting a lot of time and effort into my creative projects (in case I fail, I am therefore not perfect)
As we bring conscious awareness and massive joyful embrace (rather than blaming or shaming ourselves) to that previously unconscious process of creation, we stop identifying with the sucky conditions; we stop feeling like they define us. And this is crucial, because what humans defend more fiercely than anything else is their sense of identity.
when we suffer from our problems, what we're usually suffering from, much more so than from the direct pain of the problem itself, is the story in our heads that “I'm so awful, I've failed so much, I deserve this, that's why I'm not earning more/happy in love/content in my body/thriving in my creativity.”
you just sneakily generated the scene as a form of dark entertainment, and you are actually free to let yourself be fully, consciously satisfied by your artful tragedy. . . and then move on to turning your life into a sweet comedy.
we have an attraction to the nail-biting intensity of it?
Hell yeah, I generated this! Hell yeah, a part of me fucking loves it and that part of me deserves to enjoy itself too, because every part of me is worthy and awesome, including the perverse shadowy parts!
don't ignore or deny those stark realities, go right into ‘em with tons of shameless sadomasochistic glee, enjoy the fuck out of ‘em, and be honestly happy instead of weird-denial-fake-happy.
Deepest Fear Inventory and Inquiry are very excellent solve practices that can help you remove layers of bullshit and raise your spirits, and they work great while depressed.
sending well-wishes may not sound like that dramatically transformative of a meditation (and it doesn't have the sexy swagger of EK, alas), but in my experience and the experience of thousands of my course participants, it is indeed a rapid way of shifting one's emotional energy, clearing out resentment and cynicism, and getting in touch with the giant power of your heart.
