Conversation

Cinder
@Triquetrea
So, one thing you'll come across a lot with long-term meditation is personality shifts, where your interface with the world changes. Mostly these are tiny shifts, the kind you see in mindfulness brochures. A bit of gentleness, a dash of courage. Some are monumental.
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Cinder
@Triquetrea
You end up living with a very fluid relationship with the world. One week to the next may look subtly different, a year to the next utterly alien. You do enough of the state-shifting and you start hitting big stuff. Things explode, or collapse. New things suddenly appear.
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Cinder
@Triquetrea
It's best to be careful around this stuff. Recklessly pursue altered states and changes, and you may end up some strange places. It becomes like that scene in a fantasy or sci-fi movie where the hero discovers a new power. "Oh, I can punch through walls now."
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Cinder
@Triquetrea
Except that the metaphorical wall is, say, a stuck part of your personality that held a lot of things in your life attached to it. And now they're spinning away in freefall.
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Cinder
@Triquetrea
If your practice, like mine, is mainly about liberation, it's great when you discover you're free to choose about what seemed mandatory before. But you want to find this out in a controlled way, because messing with the internal dynamics of your life can be irreversible.
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Cinder
@Triquetrea
Remove a person from your life, they may just be gone forever. Sometimes this is good. The person was predatory and they were exploiting you. Other times, it was just that something workable was configured wrong and the spokes could be turned differently.
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Cinder
@Triquetrea
"Oh, finally I've let go of this pent-up sexual trauma and whoops, wasn't supposed to fuck that person." "I've been holding back my Anger for decades and I'll have you know, this minor inconvenience will. not. stand."
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Cinder
@Triquetrea
Good practice looks like letting those conditionings go, but without being completely wrecked by the accompanying release of emotional energy.
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Cinder
@Triquetrea
The best way to do that is to cultivate the ability to remain calm even when deeply emotional. By all means cry, quake or ball your fists. Just remain centered. With it. Present. Not engaging in flights of fancy or anxious behaviours. Mantras and vipassana help w/this.
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Cinder
@Triquetrea
I'm still finding that I occasionally shift without noticing, leading to some kind of mess in my life. It's difficult working out how to live when your fixed personality is no longer quite so fixed, but you have to get comfortable with that ambiguity.
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