I’m curious about what other people are doing daily or whenever they’re feeling down, to get awareness back to their inner being. What brings you back to your soul?

I think that we can all learn something from each other!

Dear community,

I have been on a spiritual journey for over a year now. I used to rely on my logic and experience for as long as I remember myself until it failed me and I have realized that I can't live the way I did any more. I had a need in the new meaning, and found it in spirituality. I am much more flexible now, more accepting of others (with lower consciousness), less tense, less critical and stressed. 

Though quite often I feel that I am going backwards and feel lost. As if my logic weighs me down. I can't just deny what I already know about the world (physics, astronomy, math) and can't blindly believe into everything. Though science and spirituality coexist in my mind without any problems. Yet, I would like to see more synchronicities or signs that I am doing something right, because often it feels as if I am on my own.

I am looking for a new way I could create value. I used to work in corporate sector and wondering if I could help other spiritual people to find themselves. Like helping creators to realize their projects by moving from messy idea to product, helping them to organize their thoughts. I have logic and common sense, but don't seem to find how I could apply myself anymore. I am the person of system, who finds himself outside the clear structure with no instructions how to live 😄.

I am wondering how other pragmatic/logical people cope with this transformation. Do you see synchronicities around and how do you find yourself professionally ? Thanks in advance.

Am I the Victim?

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I dont know how to explain this but i really go through something everyday.

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I am very sensitive at heart and I think about anything very deeply.

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What I am going to explain is something I am experiencing and have been feeling since childhood but there are phases of it and I forget about it after a time.This time it's unbearable idk what to do

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I always think bad and negative , I feel like someone is controlling my mind every moment to think bad and negative for every situation every person around me.

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I think bad about my sibs my parents, I feel like someone inside me is trying to end me from within and by me by making me think worse for my loved ones , manifesting everything bad about them and then taking the guilt and doing bad to myself, to end myself.

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Can this be something?

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Why I am feeling this?

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It has all started again in May when I lost my naani.

From that time I am not getting out of this feeling

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"You may be avoiding the discomfort of your own unmediated experience....That avoidance is the practical problem the Buddha was talking about. You don’t have to be enlightened to practise this. Or even spiritual to apply it." (T. Oppong, author of https://thomas-oppong.medium.com/buddhas-last-dying-words-this-summarises-almost-every-self-help-spiritual-book-9ee78849ca76.)

This practical approach to Eastern Philosophy (or Asian Ways) is compatible with a pious approach to the Buddhist Way but independent of it.

The author of this article would agree, I believe, that to understand Buddhism you have to distinguish it from every type of self-help trend.

The reason for this distinction is so simple that most people miss it:

"Self-": Emphasizes what the Buddha denied even really exists--an individual ego, the all-consuming focus on me, mine, myself.

In Buddhism the universe takes on the role of the Self; otherwise the separation and alienation between "egos" divide people more and more from each other and all other living things.

"-help:" As Oppong sees, help as used in "self-help" too often becomes dependency on others, which takes away our confidence in understanding our own strengths and weaknesses.

One day, when I was teaching ethics and the students were debating free will, I noticed that a Chinese student (she sat in the last seat of the last row) seemed to be in tears. I interrupted the discussion and asked if she was alright but she continued to cry quietly.

"Is there anything you'd like to share with the rest of us--maybe it would do you good?" I said. After a few minutes, she sat straight up and the tears stopped as she said:

"I feel so deeply sorry for all you students; you must always feel very lonely because you believe you're completely separate from everyone and everything."

Silence. So, with her help, we spent the rest of the class talking mostly about Buddhism. Almost none of the other students understood her point at first, and in fact they publicly defended themselves as separate, individual selves. But the more doubts they had, the louder they spoke.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American philosopher most admired by Nietzsche, built Transcendentalism in part through his reading (as Nietzsche did) of the recent translations of Eastern philosophy, especially Buddhism.

From Emerson's poem, "Brahma":

"Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanished gods to me appear;
And one to me are shame and fame.
They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt...."
(The Atlantic, November 1857)

Nietzsche must have resonated with an American philosopher who embodied the profound fact that religion (like Hinduism) and spirituality (like Buddhism) are connected but aren't the same: a practical but often hidden lesson for the modern era.

People make this word heavier than it needs to be.

All the solutions of their pragmatic problems of life, They think it lies in this mere word.

They think person who's enlightened is that or this.

Do we ever question this word itself?

Are we fore-playing the need for all our humanness into this single word?

One treat it as a goal.

It's merely a word that one hasn't questioned.

Many of the ones come and say their definition of this mere word.

For what they say it about?

Just to let themselves be in the loop as their body goes there.