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Ah yes, the M1 I believe?

I was surprised to see her (?) account bumped down to -ve points (<grins> evidence of my electrical engineering background) she's not written anything I'd consider offensive yet. Perhaps she's working out how to get herself back where she feels she belongs.

It's OK love, we've all done it. I know I like to keep a nameless sock puppet tucked in the back of a drawer for just such an eventuality. It's taken me 3.5 years to achieve 9 points, I'm darned if I'm going to see them flushed down the toilet by some johnny come lately with an itchy trigger finger.

I insist on being tried in court of my peers. I'll take it to the Haig if I have to.

Well it's positively encouraged if they suffer from MPD. Much less confusing.

Whoever is taking out Enigma's Karma points is certainly doing it and I think what needs to be done is that they need to ask themselves if perhaps they need to Get A Life.

Crikey this board is busy. A topic starts and before I even get up in the morning it's 10 pages long - too much to read when there's work to be done. Maybe ZenDancer could make his thread summary a regular feature.


Ouch! I'm SO glad you didn't add "hehehe" to the end of that. Perhaps you're starting to become a little more genuine in your calling of spades, spades, insults are insults and irritation is irritation.

I'm with Sharon, what you wrote did come over as extracts from a belief system. What came up for me was "how do you know?".

If it was a NDE you've been referring to, I'm sure such things are as subjective as any other experience. In my own case (and I call it a Death Experience 'cos I really thought I'd died) it did feature a tunnel, but instead of a light there was just a voice saying "breathe". Nice. And the end of time and space, yadda yadda yadda.

Also I experienced all people being one person, in a sort of overlapping simultaneous reincarnation. So at some point we all get to experience what everyone else experiences. Which really made the Golden Rule of "Do unto others as you would wish them to do unto you" solid for me - if I'm going to experience everyone's behaviour from the other side, then my Karmic debt to is automatically balanced. So Freejoy, I'd rather not have to experience your suicide if it's all the same to you. Find something to enjoy in every day, and I'll look forward to living in your shoes. And when you're living in mine, I'm really sorry about a week last Tuesday. Crappy day.

Actually Freejoy, looking at your posting time, 6:40am (my time) is pretty late for someone in the US. Are you getting enough sleep? Sleeping is so important. I went through a fairly manic phase of burning the candle at both ends writing things on the internet and it didn't end well for me. I now have rules I stick to about not getting up before 6am and switching off the computer at 9pm (so I can relax before bed). What is so important to say that it can't wait to be said the next day?

Ah, ha. Thank you, I had to look that word up. Very good.
Well although I have to appreciate the universal symmetry of Enigma having a karma score of 42, lets see what a few drops in the karmic ocean can achieve in terms of putting things back where they ought.

So I was thinking of calling this post "Still All About Me", although I'm starting to move away from that. Or so I like to think. Having children is helping me with that process. I've been following a program which suggests targetting some thing in your life that you want to change and then writing down some aspiration that you read first thing in the morning. This week I'm waking up to:

"Today I will seek out opportunities to share what I'm thinking and feeling with my wife"

We're living in this mountain village and - after some really intense stuff we've been going through in the last few months - there's a feeling of stillness starting to settle. The village is very quiet and we've got our wood stove burning. Although we only need it once the sun falls below the hills, it's blue skies most days, clean and fresh.

It's a simple place to be, good fresh food, no traffic, no sounds of people fighting or vomiting in the street, no advertising, no TV. Except, we've got hold of Downton Abbey Season 2 that we're trying to limit ourselves to 1 episode per week after binging on Season 1 - watched the whole thing in 2 days. It's good to know all the shop keepers by name, although it does take an hour to buy two baguettes and a pound of sausages. And the kids' French is pretty amazing.

We're both working from home and prioritising quality time with the children. Our youngest is just doing a half day and we get our eldest back for an hour and a half at lunchtime. Also French schools are off every Wednesday.

Something I've been working with (and touched on in a previous post today) is how I deal with negative emotions - by which I mean emotions that I'm not "enjoying". So like anger can be quite enjoyable when you've got some righteous indignation worked up and Right on your side, but guilt never is - in my experience. I think I even shut out the suffering of others to a large extent because I just "don't want to go there".

Something that really helped me - a couple of years ago now - was when I was dropping my son off at daycare and he was crying away and I felt really really low. And then I thought to myself - wait a minute, this is exactly how I want to be feeling just now! What sort of Dad would I be if my son was crying and I was feeling fine about it? So that was a painful emotion I was able to welcome.

But for the most part I've had a number of coping mechanisms I've used to avoid feeling, and because of that (and because of my cultural heritage) avoid talking about and therefore working through. Movies, Porn, Sex, Beer, Chocolate, Books, Computer Games, Facebook and then just plain old fashioned subconscious denial, just blocking out anything that didn't fit with how I wanted to see myself or experience myself to the point where I'd actually struggle to think about it - and this really came clear for me when I tried to create a lifetime timeline of people I'd hurt and I found it really really difficult. Memories just weren't coming up when I looked for them - a couple of weeks later I was still like "Oh my god, remember that girl in..." so that list didn't make for happy reading when it was done. I was thinking about contributing something to the atonement thread on that.... certainly I think "feeling bad", in my case at least, is something that's helpful to work through because I've been avoiding feeling bad about things that have hurt other people for so long, but I don't know that actually putting myself back into these people's lives would do anything for them - would it make them feel better, or would it just be an intrusion? Would it really be for their benefit or just mine? Or am I just asking that question because I don't want to do it?

You know, usually I break into more paragraphs that this. Eat your heart out Kerouac.

So NOW what I'm working with is that I've let all these coping mechanisms go and I find...tada!...I don't have any coping mechanisms. Which is a bit difficult really, hang on a minute, I needed those, that was How I Coped. I find that my wife finds it easier to move on - one minute she appears to be really upset about something, and the next she's talking about what we're having for lunch. My upset tends to stay with me for longer - an hour at least. But all things pass eventually, although it may not feel like that at the time. So what I mostly try and do is just sit with it (or stand with it, or wash the dishes with it) and Let It Be. There's a line between sitting with it and wallowing in it... and then if it gets to much then I try to breath into it, open myself up to the Universe and offer it up.

Seconded.

How are you feeling?

Have you come away from that "helium tent" thing you had going on last week? How does that seem to you now? I did - at the time - consider offering the advice of making sure you peg it down well, but decided gallows humour wasn't appropriate.

Everything changes. Eventually.

That's a lovely metaphor, thanks GW.