Losing my way

I lost my way with playing the role of my own therapist two weeks ago. I haven't exercised, meditated, or continued with the self improvement skills I was trying to learn. I am mildly or moderately depressed. I am not sure if it's because of letting go (or trying to let go) of my fantasies and projections of her or what. I feel a sense of loss and disconnectness. I've had thoughts of wanting to die, and they've been kind of repetitive. I just let them be. I try not to become fused with that mind train.

I do want to let go of the fantasies. But my mind resists. It's use to coping with anxiety and loss by falling into fantasy. My mind wants to resist the reality. It feels like I am going to lose her for good. I don't know if that's true or not, but there's nothing I can do about it, anyway.

I don't really want to write to her anymore. It's lost its sense of place. I know it's just not productive.

I don't know where I'm going with my paper. I've seem to have lost all the focus on the actual literature and moved into feminist theorizing territory...Motherhood and patriarchy--what can feminism do about it, really? Women want to be mothers. And motherhood is both enslavement and transformative. A stinking binary we've got to zen through. Yeah, I just used zen as a verb there. I mean by saying "to zen" that we've got to see through the dualistic thought. And this is very tricky. Let me find a koan.

"the river does not flow, but the bridge does."

passing out... I'll be back.

I'm back today

I got an hour and a half of sleep. I am still tired and I have to read _Music for Torching_. I read the first few pages. Oh my, it's dramatic. Do I really need more drama in my life right now?

I need to come back to the questions of who I am and where I belong, but I don't think I have a clear answer to them right now. Does anyone? Are we not limiting ourselves when we chose to define ourselves and where we belong?

The Buddha didn't believe in a essential self of substance. If we define ourselves, then we become things. No, the Buddha thought we were "no-things." The second we define ourselves as things is the second we suffer. Getting identified and fused with a conceptual idea of whom you are limits you and causes you suffering.

I like the way that self-help book I got on Acceptance and Commitment therapy put it. Be the chessboard, not the pawns. The thoughts one thinks and feelings one feels are the pawns--One needs to become defused with them. See them as just thoughts and feeling--not reality. Identifying with the chessboard makes one feel better because she is no longer in the battlefield with the pawns.

Becoming the chessboard is tricky. One needs to practice a lot of mindfulness skills to really get the hang of it. I hope I do. It just takes time.

Another thing I've learning about myself is that I can regulate my emotions by learning and doing various skills. I got this book on expressive art therapy, and it has a lot of exercise one can do to learn how to express one's emotions in a positive and healthy way. One thing that was interesting in the book is that the author asks you to do some written and drawing excercises with your non-dominant hand. When I wrote my name and some other sentences with my left hand, I learned about emotional regulation. My handwriting looked like a 3 or 4 year child's. It made me angry and frustrated but I began to accept it. It was neat. So, I bought a pack of thick-bodied markers, so I can just scribble with my left hand. I need to learn distress and frustration tolerance very much. This is like the EQ test where they a child a marshmallow and go out of the room saying if you don't eat it until I come back then I'll give you another one. I probably couldn't do this as a child. If I did, it probably only to please the tester. I wouldn't discipline myself in a real life setting like that. I believe they say if one can pass the marshmallow test as a child, then they have good distress and frustration tolerance skills.

Oh, I'm so hungry or something. That's another thing. I use food to calm my emotions. I need to look into this when I get more basic frustration tolerance skills achieved. I can't eat away my pains.

All right, hopefully DBT (dialectical behavioral therapy) and expressive arts therapy will help me learn to regulate my emotions better, have been control over my life, and become happier.

my space, my self

Here we go for round two. I haven't blogged in almost a year.

There's questions in my mind that I cannot seem to make sense of. Two questions I have today are what and where is my space and who is my self?

It's difficult for me to answer these questions. I've struggled for the last 23 years of my life to make sense of who I am and where I belong. These two questions, I think, I will never be able to answer completely because I don't think the self is a static entity nor is a place of belonging. When I think about the dynamic flow of life--that life changes always--I think that maybe an essential quality of the multiverse is chaos. And somehow, through chaos, the human mind designs order.

I didn't sleep much last night. I don't feel the passion to write right now. But, I want to put into words some answers to my two questions.

Is it not that a place of belonging and a sense of one's self ar interdependent on each other? Isn't a sense of one's self needed to know where one belongs, and a sense of belonging needed for a sense of one's self? That may be the problem here. You can't really separate the two concepts in reality. For rhetorical purposes, maybe I should just try to see what I come up by separating the two ideas.

First, I'll start with the places I belong. I don't exactly know the places I belong. For a general answer, I know I must belong somewhere, as I was born here on this earth. I wouldn't be here if I didn't belong here. I think that this sense of belonging on this earth reflects a sense of accepting what is. I am here on this earth--a basic conclusion I accept. If I didn't accept it, I'd probably have bigger psychological problems than I already do. I used to wish some aliens like E.T. would come and take me away to their planet. I liked the earth as it is, but I didn't like how humanity behaved on the planet. I thought there were wiser, more spiritually-developed aliens out there who'd somehow come and get me and teach me to live and be peaceful on their planets. I didn't think my human kind could live in peace.

I will comeback to this. I need to get some sleep...