I am experiencing an identity shatter following a medical diagnosis. I have developed a chronic visual impairment at age 35 following a pregnancy. I am struggling because I already had two children and simply wanted another baby but was operating on gut instinct. Had I really thought about it, I might have decided otherwise. Now I am contending with an open ended hellscape of suffering that is costing me and my entire family the life we wanted to live. I think the grief alone might kill me. It's been two years and I've tried extensive therapy, medication, even a very high risk surgery. I was previously in perfect health and had perfect vision. I have had my capabilities stripped and I do not know how to make peace with any of this. I am hopeless and do not know how to exist with this suffering when I'm feeling the shadow version of my former life turn to dust. Every moment I think "It could have been so beautiful if I werent suffering In this way." I try not to think that way, but the suffering is so intense and overwhelming that it's inescapable. Has anyone overcome this kind of absolute wreckage? My life was stolen from me in the most brutal way

Hi,

I’m practicing mindfulness meditation for 2 years and I still have a lot of anxiety that I don’t know from where it comes from. My question is : anyone here that meditation or anything else helped to calm anxiety or even to stop it?

Thank you!!

This is something that i need help with. Right now i’m dealing with a lot of stress and ruminating because i have undiagnosed OCD. Where my brain made a “memory” of something HORRIBLE that i did in the past. It’s just filled with “what-ifs” and what not.

I really need help with learning to accept things the way they are, any advice would be appreciated!

About 2 months ago I fell and hit my head resulting in a minor TBI. When I talked with the doctor they recommended I stay off my phone because looking at screens stimulates the brain and slows down healing.

That got me thinking about how active my brain is in general because I know I have a very overactive mind even before the concussion. It keeps me up at night racing through thoughts I don't want to be in my head. I try to relax and clear my mind which works sometimes but one little thought and my mind goes off again on a tangent.

Even while I'm awake I feel like my body holds most of my energy in my head like a buzzing. This was the way it was before the concussion which felt normal, but now I feel like it's slowing down my healing process.

I take deep breaths to send the buzzing/energy down my legs and out of my feet. Sometimes I pretend I'm a colander, which sounds funny, but it helps me drain the energy out and relax my mind. Both of these methods help but as soon as I'm not actively sending away my energy it comes back.

Any tips on how to keep the buzzing/energy out of my head?

And once I've done something to remove it from my head any tips on how to keep it away as my baseline rather than having to do breathing exercises to help?

I appreciate any and all help. Thank you!

If you are having trouble focussing on experience as it is, because there seems to be something in the way, like the self or your own concept or idea of what you are focussing on seems to be in the way of your attention to something (especially the attention to the experience of something as it is occurring in the moment):

You make an exact mental copy of what you are focussing on / being mindful of.

You make this exact copy have the exact same details as what you are focussing on, same shape, same size, same colours/sensations/sound, same location in the field of experience, changing in the same way, arising when it arises, changing when it changes, passing when it passes, everything the same.

This exact copy then becomes indistinguishable from the actual experience, it dissolves into it, and you are left with direct experience, with nothing in the way, and with a focussed attention on the target experience.

Once you get used to how it is done, you can do it in a more flowing way with whatever experience takes the attention at the time and moving from one sense object/experience to another freely in this way. It is a way of accessing and staying on direct experience as it simply is. I guess what it is doing is making the concept of something exactly match the actual experience of it, then the concept turns transparent/dissolves and is just bare attention at that point, pure receptivity.

I came across this through my own experimentation, though I would imagine it must have been discovered before and must be part of some system already as there is not much that is truly new in meditation and mindfulness given that they are thousands of years old with many different ways of doing things, so has anyone heard of anything similar and if so, which practice, tradition and or teacher?

I’m curious how people have navigated this with parents who love them deeply but are very anxious about their children’s life, career, money, etc.

My mother is somewhat narcissistic and very prone to worrying about me. I can tell her that I’m happy, calm, and have a tremendous amount of self-belief and trust in myself, but that I genuinely want to take life one day at a time and not take everything so seriously. She has a hard time accepting that as a legitimate way to live.

She comes from a fairly upper-class, status-oriented environment where the implicit definition of “doing well” is pretty conventional: stable career, good money, marriage, kids, house, etc. She’ll sometimes compare me to friends’ children or my cousins who seem to have their lives completely figured out.

The difficult part is that I don’t necessarily believe that having those things tells you whether someone is actually living a meaningful or happy life. They may be perfectly happy, of course. But they could also be struggling privately, feeling trapped, or simply following a path because it’s what was expected of them. From the outside, we really have no idea.

And I know this because I spent a long time doing exactly what I thought I was supposed to do.

I’m 35 now, and my mom knows that I have struggled with depression in essentially every corporate job I’ve had. In the past, I would sometimes tell little white lies about what I was doing with my career or life because I genuinely cared about her worry and wanted to make her feel better.

But I’m in a very different place now. I have much more trust in myself and much less desire to construct a perfect five-year plan simply to demonstrate that I’m okay. I’m happier taking things one day at a time, following what feels meaningful, and trusting that I can figure things out as life unfolds.

The irony is that I actually want the opposite of what she seems to think I want.

My parents are both retired, and I genuinely want them to enjoy the rest of their lives. I want them to worry less. I want them to feel peaceful and secure. But their worrying has become so habitual that I’m starting to realize I can’t make their peace dependent on me having the “right” career or life trajectory.

I think there’s an important distinction here: when my mother needs to know that I’m on a conventional path, that need is probably partly about her own nervous system. If she knows I have a stable job, a clear plan, and all the conventional markers of success, she can relax.

But there is also something painful underneath it for me: it can feel like a lack of trust in my ability to navigate my own life.

I don’t want to resent her for that. I understand that the worry comes from love. But I also don’t want to unconsciously make her expectations my responsibility.

Maybe part of the answer is simply learning to let her experience some uncertainty.

I can reassure her. I can listen. I can share what I’m actually doing and how I’m actually feeling. I can gently expose her to a different definition of what a good life can look like.

But ultimately, I can't live my life in a way that continually proves to her that she doesn't need to worry.

I’m also interested in whether there’s a way to gradually introduce some of the ideas that have helped me without trying to “convert” them to some spiritual philosophy they never asked for.

My dad is actually much more open-minded about this stuff and enjoys exploring these questions. I’ve thought about introducing them to someone like Tara Brach, or some of the less mystical talks from Ram Dass. Interestingly, my mom once found a lot of comfort in Joel Osteen’s messages, even though she wasn’t really approaching them from a religious standpoint. I think what resonated with her was the idea that you don't have to constantly worry about life and that there is some deeper way of relating to uncertainty.

Ultimately, I'd love for them to understand a little more about how the mind and body generate worry and that sometimes you don't have to solve every problem intellectually. You can actually turn inward, notice what is happening, and allow some of it to settle.

But I also recognize that I can't force that realization on them.

So for those of you who have gone through something similar:

How have you helped anxious parents gradually trust your path without becoming defensive or preaching at them?

And how have you maintained your own trust when their anxiety subtly starts making you question whether you're doing enough with your life?

And yes, this is a Jewish mother. 😂

This countries about freedom but we are all so divided , and we keep the division in place for absolutely, no reason

Lil baby said it best. It’s bigger than black and white, it’s a problem with the whole way of life. Both blacks and whites have done good and bad for each other, we just tend to look at the bad more than the good for some reason. Everytime another race event happens, wether black white Mexican Chinese etc etc. they divide us more. 

And we keep that division, we spread hate towards one another. And I feel like the government might have something to do with it as well (so does history). We’ll probably never know in this life time but, unity could and will save us. We should only be divided by gender, not race or sexual preference. And if we can’t unite through that, then let’s unite through peace to rid this world of evil and pain. It’s not too late to fix this before something like a race war happens in some small city, because if we don’t start now then this will start happening in small quantities, it already has.

Even in the face of hate, show love. It’s so easy to spread hate but it’s so easy to feel love.

StyTru!

Hi, I'm 23 years old and I spent most of my adolescence locked in porn procrastination. I don't know how to explain it perfectly but I feel like I'm behind me compared to others my age.

I can't live my life the way I want.

I hate myself physically (especially the face) I don't have an Instagram for this reason, because I don't have any photos of myself I hate what I see in front of the mirror. I don't know how to have this confidence of not even creating an Instagram account for example or I could post photos of myself proudly. I feel like I'm a waste and I'm very afraid of people's eyes especially. In short, all this is explained vaguely but I am desperately looking for help. How to do??? I feel like I'm missing my life and also missing my youth. Is there still hope for me or not?

Thank you for the people who will take the trouble to read and come private I can send you my face and tell me what I need to improve.

Thank you in advance ❤️

Just realized this yesterday. When I was early in my healing, it's like I jumped between extremes. Don't want thoughts or feelings. After years of practice though, I finally see it. It's just about playing a balancing act between emotion, feeling, and thought. You're supposed to be patient and give room. Rumination for example was just a way for me to not give any room to my emotions.

Now it sort of clicks.

I've struggled my whole life with maintaining and finding friendship and am now accepting that if I want to go do things and leave the house, I'm going to have to do it alone.

Which isn't that hard if I'm being honest (though still a bummer). I'm comfortable doing things alone, but the problem I keep running into is how to motivate myself to actually leave the house to do those things.

I can make a plan, buy a ticket to a show, say I'll do it, etc. but when the time comes I opt to enjoy the comforts of home which then makes me feel isolated and sad.

Anyone have any tricks or methods they use that have helped them with this?

So I am trying RAIN technique again and I always get stuck on the same step for the past decade - I can recognize emotions, not fight them, but they just stay around and intensify and won't leave. Whenever I read about this, people just kind of act like eventually it just magically goes away. What am I doing wrong? By "allowing" the emotion I'm trying my hardest not to actively engage it and just let the emotion ride its course, but it just ends with me sitting for an hour crying... are some people just unable to do this?

I keep trying to break the habit of replaying arguments and scenes in my mind, already happened or ones I am afraid will happen. And every time I catch myself and pull my attention away my mind just goes back to it minutes later. That’s a lot to do. Some days I really feel like a lost cause, that this is just how my head is now and nothing is going to change that

These thoughts used to feel almost protective when I was younger, as if they were getting me ready for something. Now they seem just futile and tiresome. I don't have a clean answer I just keep catching myself and starting over and over again.

Anyone else feeling stuck like this? Did it ever get easier for you?

Hi.

The perspective that brings me to mindfulness is, the way I see it consciousness creates physical reality, and does so through imagination, assumption, "observer effect" (observing with the mind's eye or subtle inner dialogue collapses things into existence), action, and emotional reaction (chiefs among relevant emotions desire, love, hate, fear, and relief).

What I mean is that in my framework we are all one -the Dreamer- and we are dreaming reality, which works a lot like nightdreams -where even the other characters are "you", because only one person is dreaming and it plays all the characters-.

It is possible to control this dream by imagining what you desire as present and true (imagining/feeling "having it already", and having faith that even if physical reality says otherwise, if you persist reality will bend to your imagination, following the path your assumptions/beliefs allow). My experiences really confirm this, and the same is true for all the people who are into "manifesting".

The obstacle, besides doubt and misbelief, is fear/anxiety, as when you worry you might manifest more worrying. Mindfulness takes away fear's power. If you become the one watching the worry rather than the one experiencing it then you stop manifesting more of it. If you learn to *accept* your worry then what you manifest is acceptance, because what's in your mind is acceptance, and the world reflects it like a good mirror.

So that's the first advantage of mindfulness: handling anxiety and making it consequence-free when it comes to creating reality. Being aware I create my reality has been really good for me overall as it gave me a lot of hope and sense of control and even some fun but it also made me give more power to my thoughts, which means that anxiety reduction is good for me right now.

The second advantage, in this framework, is eventually experiencing union with God: if mental activity creates reality, stopping it eventually makes reality temporarily disappear, and all that's left is consciousness itself outside of time and space -the Dreamer-, what people call "void state" or samadhi: "awakening" from the dream.

The third advantage of mindfulness is becoming so in control of your mind, through knowlege of it, that you manage to reliably manifest good things, not just avoid the bad ones.

So, I was wondering if anyone here, without sharing their specific anxieties please (which I will reciprocate of course), was looking for an accountability buddy for mindfulness meditation. The idea is to remind the other to meditate, even just through simple presence, and to report the meditations done to remain motivated and committed. I'm in Europe and would slightly prefer the buddy to be in Europe for the timezone but it can work even if our timezone is misaligned. Can I guarantee commitment? No, but I'm curious to try

My chest tightens up before I even get out of bed most mornings, and by the time I'm at my desk my brain is already spiraling through every worst case scenario for the day. I've read a bunch of articles on what to do when you feel anxious and tried the breathing exercises everyone swears by, but none of it really touches it once the anxiety has already taken over. It's exhausting waking up every day bracing for that feeling instead of just living normally. What do you all actually do in the moment that helps, not the textbook advice, but what genuinely calms you down when you're this anxious?

I was thinking if there was a way how I can relax and sit in a spiritual way since I’ve been constantly mentally standing all my life. I know some people claim that smoking the za or finding a way to put a rainbow mushroom up the forbidden door in your body relaxes you in an interesting way. Does meditation or some other thing work?

After coming out of Vipassana retreat I had a renewed sense of wonder, some insight of the workings of my experience, that I am sure will deepen and change with time ,

but I am starting to think that two hours per day might be two much.

First of all I am trying to juggle too much , working 8 hours sleeping 7-8 combined with working out 1 hour and cooking protein meals.

Furthermore sending Cvs to find a better job i find myself not having time for all of it cause you all know that transitioning from one activity to the other while also living with family creates unexpected responsibilities that also take up time as such 24 hours are not much haha [crying inside jk ]

I am making my first steps as an engineer and currently if I had to make I priority list fnding an engineering job is the top priority and meditating two hours seems too much time.

I know that it is not wasted time but I am starting to think that finding the right job while also upgrading my engineering skills via a project on the side will provide my with more contentment and progress in life.

I know that the path is of great importance and weakening the ego is helpful but I am 24 I think that using and taming the ego to be of help to achieve some peace of mind jobwise and money wise and practicing more later down the line might be the way. Also I am young I don't think I am ready to let go of ego I want to experience life though it master it and when I am older go more into practice again.

Also I plan to continue practicing 2 times per day just for less time than one hour and trying to hold an intention thoughout my day to keep a part of attention to breath and body sensations.

Finally how much of progress do you guys think are from deep meditation sessions 1 or more hours per session and how much from continuity of practice,

I feel like I want to step out of practice a little bit to grow in this capitalist world and create a strong sense of self esteem and accomplishments.

After that practice to grow as a human and help with my resources my family friends and people all around me. Right now I am just practicing to be calmer and happier and more insightfull but mostly my heart wants to play the game of life and win maybe that is ego maybe it is the right path as meditation is a way to get away from normal life and not just a pure practice ,who knows!

also maybe I will get most benefits from always being aware in daily life and keeping a constant intension to look at breath and sensation seeing as training to hold intentions and introspectively knowing when you've wondered and going back to the practice is meditation.

Why can't keeping that intention be, to do what must be done: working out, eating correctly, focusing on work and writing and producing the best cover letter for that company be a practice as you are keeping a constant intension to do what must be done and keeping the distractions at bay!

Anyway those are some thoughts on the balance of life and practice and it's use in different life stsges,

May the collective consciousness of reddit help me and others!

Sending metta and provoking thoughts to all of you!

Ive been trying to develop more presence in the now recently, been meditating for a month almost. On matters like focusing on something i'm studying, or sititng down and performing active listening, ive been doing it quite well. However, i have no idea on how to be present in the now when i'm doing other things, like cleaning the house, walking around etc. Well, i'm aware thats normal, and that it is mind wandering, but i'm unsure of where to set boundaries for it. My mind always drifts in some chain of thought and when i realize i'm not present at all anymore.

I'm trying to become less aloof and more aware of my surroundings, thats what i'm aiming for at least, less lost in my thoughts.

Do i perform something specific or do i just keep on trying?

I am a person wth deep attachment. When situations to let go arise, I undermine a person, things and relations. It is only then that I can let go of things. Is there any other way to do this?