Day 4 - Pore Me

This is a continuation of my blog from Day 3, where I started the list of the physical attributes of myself that I judge as negative and which I build up in my imagination as separate from myself -- cutting off this piece of my physical body to over-analyze and fantasize about it.

The first thing on this list is my Pores - this is the first thing that my eyes will lock onto when I look at myself in the mirror.  So this morning I stood in front of the mirror and scanned my pores and wrote down the thoughts/feelings/pictures that came up.

1. A physical "sinking" feeling in my stomach.
2. Thought: "My pores are so huge and filled with dirt, it is disgusting"
3. Thought: "Everyone will look at me and think that I am not clean"
4. Picture: A nerdy teenager in a movie who has acne and everyone makes fun of him.
5. Thought: "People who are beautiful don't have acne"
6. Picture: up-close shot of Supermodel from makeup commercial, her skin is perfect
7. Thought: "No one will like me if I am not good looking"
8. Thought: "I must clean out my pores, so no one will know"
9. Picture: Ad for acne face cleaner, where kids are happy after washing their face
10. Thought: "All I have to do is squeeze the dirt out, then I will feel better"
11. Picture: Ad for acne cleaner, picture of the pore where the dirt comes out, and nothing is left"

When I was a teenager, and even up until recently, I have done this ritual pore scanning in the morning (and sometimes throughout the day) and I started picking my face until I had gotten a lot of dirt out of the larger pores.  Sometimes, this picking would become a trance-like state and last a long time, like 15-20 minutes, and I would feel really good while I was doing it, like it was satisfying to clean my face, but I was so focused on each small pore, I wasn't seeing the consequences of what I was doing to my entire face.  Afterwards, my face would be all red and puffy, and I would be so embarrassed, especially if I my roommates saw me come out of the bathroom.

I will continue with my self forgiveness on each of these points in the next blog.

Day 3 - The Hu-Man in the Mirror

As I was saying in my Day 2 blog, I drive a lot for my job, so I spend a lot of time alone.  Most of the time I've listened to music, which is like a soundtrack for the thoughts and pictures that run through my head.    Lately, I realized that all this time I'm spending alone in my car - in my head - is full of moments where I am choosing not to support myself -- I've actually convinced myself that this "car time" is really "fuck off" time - "cause I can't do process while I'm focused on driving" - LOL.

So, for the past week, instead of listening to music, I've been listening to and studying the interviews from Eqafe about Imagination.  Wow - what a cool point to hear how we use and abuse our imagination, and this is exactly what I've been doing for the past year while driving alone in my car, imagining my Self in comparison to everyone and everything I see.

I realize now what I'm doing when I'm driving throughout my world.  I am constantly comparing myself as who I believe or desire myself to be with other people I see on the street.  My eyes will latch onto someone and I will either have a conscious thought like "Wow, what are they wearing?" or I will have a weird physical reaction - especially when I see someone who I judge as better looking than me - and I feel like I can't tear my eyes away.  What a great way to get into a car accident huh?!  I really never though twice about these little "micro-judgements" I was participating in - they're harmless, right?... WRONG.  It's pretty obvious that I am constantly trying to define myself in my imagination by making these comparisons - I'm trying to figure out "who I am" - cutting out the features I don't like about myself, bolster the features that I like about myself -- and do this by tearing down other people in my mind.

Now, this all starts with the moment in the morning where I'm looking at myself in the mirror and making these small judgments about myself as my appearance.  Obviously, I've compounded these "morning mirror moments" over the many years of my life, but I reinforce this pattern every single morning.  The exercise discussed in the interviews is so cool - and I've had a major resistance to starting this exercise here on this blog over the past few days - but I realize now that I can't support myself to stop judging other people in this world until I stop judging and separating myself.

So here we go...

When I look at myself in the morning, there are many features that I don't like - that my eyes will immediately go to and focus on, and the entire rest of my face and body will fade away, and I will only see this "horrible" attribute.  Sometimes, I will go into a sort of trance, staring at these features for a long time, building up thoughts in my head of what is wrong with them.  For example;

• Pores on my Face - they are "too large", they are filled with dirt, I have scars where I have picked them clean, they make me look like a young teenager.
• Right Eye - droops lower than the other eye, makes me look asymmetrical, looks like a lazy eye in pictures.
• Chin - doesn't look defined enough, has too much fat.
• Hair - stringy, wavy, poofy, unruly, will not stay the way I want it
• Fat Rolls - Looks disgusting, like a tire I am carrying around, Embarrassing
• Fat on Sides and Legs - pocketed, looks like swiss cheese, ugly

In the next few days, I'm going to focus on each of these points and go deeper into what thoughts and pictures come up when I'm looking and judging each of these physical parts of my Self, so I can apply effective self-forgiveness and self-corrective statements -- assisting myself to stop separating myself as "body parts" and walk with my entire physical body.

Day 2 - Addiction and Self Image

If I were to map my self-image as I have perceived myself throughout my life, it would look like a roller coaster -- with periods of very high, positive peaks of loving myself and feeling happy followed by very low, negative self-hatred and depression.  This is clinically diagnosed as "bipolar disorder", but it is becoming more and more obvious to me that I create this disorder every time I try to analyze myself  in order to gauge "how should I be feeling right now?".  

There are days, when I look in the mirror in the morning, and I am happy with what I see, and then my day is filled with happy thoughts - I don't get angry or frustrated with anyone, I don't feel the need to abuse myself with drugs or alcohol, and I am overall a happy person.  But the next day, and sometimes even during the same day, a shift occurs -- I will see myself in a mirror or a window's reflection, and be completely disgusted with myself, and then in a single moment, my perception of my life becomes a pit of despair, and I am desperate to try anything to help me escape my life.

It's in these moments that I realize that what I'm really addicted to is energy.

I'm addicted to feeling good about myself.  I'm addicted to the high of having a positive self-image.  I'm addicted to being desired, to being loved, to the electricity that runs throughout my body when I feel like I look good.  But the thing is, that energy never lasts.  It's a fantasy that I create in my mind - when I walk down the street in reality, no one is looking at me and having the thoughts and feeling that I am projecting onto them -- they are just thinking about themselves and their own fantasies - in the same way that I am only thinking and caring about myself.  And I when I come down off my energetic high, and realize the reality of what is here, instead of stabilizing myself, I immediately go into the opposite polarity - I get depressed - I have thoughts of "nobody loves me", "I am worthless".

What is fascinating, is that this negative energy goes hand-in-hand with the positive energy.  One cannot be had without the other.  As much as I would like to believe that I can exist only within the Light and Love as propagated by the New Age Gurus, I have seen and walked through the reality of playing this energy game.  I know the Rules -- you can only feel like you're a Winner if you also have been a Loser - and thus it's a vicious cycle.

I recently listened to a really cool interview from someone who talked about how every day, they would take long drives in their car alone, and during that time they would play out all of these fantasies of how they would like their life to be - and how these fantasies would never actually come to fruition, instead the opposite would usually occur.  I was listening to this interview while I was in the shower, and I realized that I participate in this exact same point every time I'm alone with myself.  I never realized that this was ME - I always figured it was my "mind wandering" - I was letting "my mind" take over and RUN, and then not taking responsibility for the consequences.  

I never considered that I am actively reinforcing my cycle of Energetic Disorder by participating in these "fantasies" - that I am creating Who I Am and what I exist as in my life by fantasizing about what I would like my life to be like, feeding off the positive energy of those fantasies - and then fearing facing the reality of what I've allowed myself to become.  

This is why I know that I cannot continue to participate in doing drugs or drinking alcohol - because these substances only support me to suppress the reality of myself -- to go deep into energetic fantasy -- and when they wear off, I have been so far gone from reality that I start to believe that my only purpose for living is to get my next fix.  However, I also realize that just stopping drugs and alcohol is not a solution -- because I still have the energy addiction -- and if I allow myself to hold onto this addiction without truly investigating how I created it -- I will just find another method to escape reality, and I will be on this Energetic Roller coaster until the day I die.

Day 1 - Starting the Journey to Life

I am starting here on my Journey to Life and the process of Rebirthing my Self Here as an effective
and stable Human being, realizing and living my Equality with all Life.  I have been walking and reading the journeys of life from other people on the internet and have tried to start the journey for myself several times.  I have always come up with a million excuses as to why I should be allowed to be inconsistent - and I now see that these excuses are my attempts to self-sabotage my process and my Self - which I have done so many times throughout my life.

So I begin again here.  Thank you to everyone who has walked this journey for the past year - it has been so supportive to walk with you and read your daily process.  I am looking forward to the next 7 years.