April 2019

No major baseline shifts happened in April.  The process for quite awhile now has continued at a steady pace - refining behavioral discipline, defining my ‘good enough’ with that discipline, reducing resistance/inner critic, increasing mindfulness throughout.  Specifically, I have stayed off of alcohol & coffee, for the most part. I continued with acupuncture & cupping + most of the other modifications from prior months. I’ve achieved my health goals at this point & it feels good to walk around in a relaxed body with a fairly open & flowing energy system.  I spent a lot of time on refining a set of communication/relational capacities that are outside the scope of this log, but deserve mentioning due to the bandwidth they take up & their intersection with general self improvement.

I notice much less insecurity now in interacting with all ranges of people, including those spiritually & materially accomplished in various ways.  Little pockets of resistance & distance in conversing with others have gone away, replaced with a sense of connection & enjoyment. I suspect this is because I have done a fair amount of contemplation of material success & mature functioning, seeing that I am somewhat close to meeting my own bar.  Also, I sometimes talk to people about practice & they share that my training in conventional life actually surpasses theirs in certain areas. This is a new experience for me, as in the past these people would have praised me for my improvements to bipolar symptoms, but not said that my own habits were actually more cleaned up than theirs.  This comparison is useful not as a value judgement, but instead as a temper to perfectionism & an encouragement of self-compassion.

As perfectionism reduces, many ‘hard edges’ are becoming shaved off & this is manifesting materially.  Physical reflexes/reactivity, obsessive thinking & voluminous speech are patterns that have partially deleted.  I’m actually getting worse at my job because some of that ‘edge’ was fueling my prior success. I also listened to a few soul-retrieval recordings, which seemed to do useful things for this healing axis, in a indirect & surrendered way.

As a replacement to some of that tension-fuel, I’ve done a bit of theorizing on how manifestation occurs.  My spiritual friend has frequently said that ideas manifest through the head’s awareness, are concretized in the throat & expressed from the heart.  While this idea had previously not made sense directly, I did begin to experience it. Specifically, I’ve started to ‘transmit’ loving-awareness to others/the general atmosphere as an off-cushion practice, while in public.  A friend in SPUDS mentioned that since everyone is always transmitting anyway, one might as well do it positively. This creative, head-throat-heart process also helps tie up the ‘good enough’ point I’ve been seeking by allowing that vision of my ‘good enough’ self to naturally emerge through surrender, rather than manipulation.  That same self is also the one that wishes to be of service, but in a balanced that way that is congruent with awakening-ease, which may mean being of less objective help as some of the tension-fuel has been exhausted.

I went to a couple public talks with Garchen Rinpoche & felt a very powerful energetic transmission occur.  He has a very heroic story, seems very awake & is worthy of googling for any readers of this entry. My sense was that other members of the crowd experienced something similar.  The results of this energetic alchemy was some personality purification stuff, integrations of sensory clarity magickal & tantric theory, letting go of certain ‘advanced practices’ as outside of my experience & further refining my sense of the centrality of service.