Day 420 - Ode to Pot

For some odd years of my life, I have smoked the marijuana.

For many of those years, I thought I liked the experience more than I disliked the side effects.

Within this last year, I've made the decision to cut it out of my life.

It's taken me many years, to figure out how to stand by this decision.


So many years, I've intimately identified myself within and through the experience of weed.

It had become a best friend, a security blanket, and a tool to keep feeling good.

Served to helped me procrastinate my homework, and focus on the fun stuff.

Made my sense of epiphany stronger, which many times led me into some eccentric ideas.


For better or for worse.

The sticky stuff, I found, is very accurately that: Sticky

I got stuck in the self-aggrandizement, thinking so highly of my thinking.

I deviated further from the bigger picture, while feeling I had a higher perspective.


Getting high helped me mask the reality of getting high.

Consequences happen, sooner or later, so why not come to grips with reality sooner?

I do not regret my path, nor think my dance with MJ was bad or good.

I know that who I am today, is One man ready to take the step.



For additional support, I highly recommend this link: http://wiki.destonians.com/Drugs#Marijuana

Day 245 - Coffee & Attention

cc: pixabay

I've accidentally exposed myself to my relationship to coffee today. At 8:30PM, I decided to brew a pot. I wanted to get my head into that space of mental focus. I wanted that drive to perform at my peak. I wanted to find an easy way around resistance. K, haha, just going to hop into forgiveness for this one.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to utilize coffee as a crutch to find a level of willpower that I had believed myself to not have.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to create a relationship of dependency to coffee.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to believe that I can focus better and maintain my attention for longer when I consume coffee, not realizing that I can just as easily waste my time while hyped up on caffeine.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to abuse coffee and drink it just to feel the high of it.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing my attention to wander, and with coffee, just wander faster :)

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to not realize that coffee is not to blame or credit for my work ethic.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to create a relationship to coffee such that I am less able to complete work and stay focused without it.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to expect that coffee will solve my problems for me.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to tell others, in relation to my schoolwork, that "It wasn't me. The coffee got me A's," and within these the mental backchat justification was that I wouldn't have been able to stay focused and productive without coffee.  Call it ADD or whatever, it's time for me to start taking responsibility for my work ethic, and how and why I drink coffee.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to feel more in control when I drink coffee.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to feel less in control when I do not have coffee, such that I allow the resistance and grogginess experience to shut down my work efforts.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to act within an energetic relationship of belief in my productive ability that "I cannot do it" without external motivation such as coffee and time pressure.

--

There is probably more dimensions to my coffee drinking character that I've created through separation, and I will face these points as it comes up. I really like coffee, so I will continue with my correction and realignment of who I am in relation to coffee/caffeine/stimulants in posts to come. For now,

I commit myself to experiment with my sober self and write about what is going on in my head when I am desiring coffee to expand my understanding of the relationship I have created there.

When and as I see myself wanting to drink coffee for the purpose of getting things done without having to push through resistance, I stop I breathe. I realize that I am slowly embedding a program of dependency into myself, essentially stating "I am weak and unable to overcome resistance (of hard work) unless I drink coffee." I commit myself to showing myself that I can still work strong, fast and effectively without the use of stimulants as an external motivation to stay focused and attentive.

I commit myself to practicing my self-application without coffee, to stabilize my productivity and work ethic while sober, and end the abuse of drinking too much coffee.

When and as I see myself drinking lots of coffee (3+ cups) so that I can get lots of work done, I stop I breathe. I realize that I actually do not need this much coffee ever. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to abuse coffee in this way. I commit myself to toning down my coffee consumption until I have cleared my unfettered relationship to it, so that I may once more enjoy coffee for it's basic expression of itself. I am the coffee. I am me. I am with coffee, most simply.

A moment of my past:

I had developed a strong affinity toward this segment of a Futurama television episode:

Day 243 - The Responsibility of Self-Attention

"The solution of attention I present to you is the focused specificity application of yourself as who you are in every moment as every breath. "

While I was walking through my DIP lesson this month, there was a section on attention that I found to be very relevant to what I'm walking through right now. It's so simple and yet so profound.

It's all too often that I allow attention diversions to take me away from my breath, my being here, my presence of and within the moment. Silly distractions even. One my guilty indulgences is this game called Subway Surfers. One of it's main features is that it's "highly addictive." It's also a time sink that I don't really want anyone to know about. Hidden and shameful....nice. SO, I blog about it because it's what has come up.

source

I could go into excuses and justifications why I continually allow myself to play this game, but the key point is that it's one of the major attention diversions in my life. I probably won't even be writing about it if I had somehow decided to open the app while I was watching the Solution of Attention video interview. It was much like a window of opportunity to see myself and finally take responsibility for what I am accepting and allowing in this context. There is one other video game app that I like to play, but I'll address that in another post.

Which leads me to a noteworthy side point: selective self-responsibility. Oh, how I react to that concept! Like what the hell am I doing. Okay, breathe.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to to become frustrated with myself for what I have been allowing myself to exist as and participate in.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to get angry that I do not act within the common sense of what is best for all.

I compromise myself through repetitive allowance of attention diversion. It's bullshit. It's shameful. And this is where SF come in. Breathe..

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to, for a long time, continue to participate in the video game because I want to have lots of virtual coins. Why? I want the purchasing power, even if it is only within the game. Oh man, there is something else going on here.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to be greedy and filled with desire to have lots of (virtual/not real) money.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to believe that I will have real satisfaction from unlocking something new. This is a primary additive point for most video games.

Now, why is this (guilty) indulgence something that I must stop? It's who I am within it. I reduced myself to a simplified, zombie state. Motivated by a transient/null reward, I play it every day so I can get the "super mystery box" each time I play. The consequence of letting this play out, unchecked, unmoderated, unfettered, automatically, is an accumulation of lost time, time that I will never get back. And this is vital time. I am walking my process. Don't I want to be as effective as I can be? YES! I do.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to become angry with myself for relinquishing my attention.

I commit myself to to patiently and consistently work myself back to here by investigating these long running patterns of lost time where I have allowed an attention diversion and deliberately not investigate it.

I'll continue tomorrow with more detailed SF on Self-Attention. For now, If you are curious about the video interview I was watching, I am happy to inform you that it's publicly available here: The Solution of Attention

:)

Day 143 - Behavior Perpetuating Behavior

I'm noticing a general energetic pattern. The primary behavior I'm looking at is delay, where I allow delay to move me into more delay. It propagates, begets, brings about more of the same behavior. This running streak is obviously of a mental energy cycle because it doesn't consider everything. It narrows and refines the behavior, but nowhere is there awareness of breath, and common sense can be hidden from self.

I'm also writing this pattern with the energy of biting my nails in mind. Today, I did another number on my nails, which is intertwined with delay because the starting point is often within a thought not relevant to the task at hand...ha, and because the nail biting process occupies my hands, it often directly takes me away from any physical work process like typing. There's some kind of residual, perpetuating qualities of nail biting especially, and I've yet been able to decode it and so have since shied away from writing about it in fear of failure.

Delay has also been scary to tackle because there is this momentum or inertia quality to the behavior in the short term and long term perspective. So, you could say I've defined myself as a procrastinator over the years, and what I want to address thoroughly today is how a single moment of delay can fester and turn into all day delay. The first reason that comes to mind is the allowance. Once, I allow myself to give into the energy as my directive, it's very hard to pull out because "why would I? I already gave into it." Solid.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to give my directive control to the energy of delay and perpetuate the behavior with the thought "I've already done it, might has well do it more."

I forgive myself for not accepting and allowing myself to see that I've been allowing the continuance of energy infused behaviors because it's easier to stay consistent with my choices / past behavior.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to get angry with myself when the energy cycle ends and I've realized what I've been doing.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to not realize that the anger is part of the system, where as I allow the outflow of anger in relation to what I've accepted and allowed, I charge my attachment to the habit.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not realize that I've been simply choosing the consistent behavior, utilizing it as my stability in not having to face the scary unknowns of directing myself without residual, behavioral energy.

When and as I see myself within the comforts of allowing energy to continually direct me within the same behavior, be it delay, nail biting, or whatever self-compromising behavior it may be, I stop I breathe. I realize that I am not the directive force when life is easy and I'm not supporting what's best for all. I commit myself to push myself through any and all resistance I have in facing myself within self-honesty. I commit myself to finding each and every point where I have simply allowed a self-compromising behavior to ensue because it is consistent with past behavior (immediate or long term).

I commit myself to stopping the perpetual behavior cycles from within them, not judging myself and missing the point of responsibility to self to stand up from within the behavior cycle and direct self into a more supportive use of time.

I commit myself to showing others that I can produce real change within me through writing about my systems, releasing them, and standing true to self within these commitment statements.

Related articles

• Day 140 - Delay Point Expounded
• Day 142 - '"I got time to delay"

photo from

Day 97 - Swirling in my head

When I don't write, I allow thoughts to swirl around in my head.

I smoked, right before doing this blog. It is a suppression. I didn't want to face the negative emotional conflict outflow of my own thoughts. So I leave here to go off into my own world of self insightfulness of thought. I like it. I enjoy how I get high, the feeling of it,, and I notice how there is a balancing thing going on here. I have a (will be) said amount of +'s for getting high and the -'s, well probably a fair share. I'll map this out now that I'm feeling ready to let go. One of the fears that was keeping me from wanting to expose this side of myself to the net, was how the opinions of me from 'others in my mind' might be that I must walk through what I state and be effective on the first try. Day 14-16, my little nail trio. I didn't hesitate with that because the negatives far out weighed the positives of the nail biting experience...unless the feeling is equal to the physical...shit.

I forigve myself for accepting and allowing myself to separate the positive feeling of chewing my nails by placing it in my mind as inferior to the superior physical damage going on, and so forget to consider the oneness and equality equation.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to judge myself with the reaction "shit," because behind that negative view of my self 'why didn't I see this earlier' popped into my mind and quickly translated into this programmed shit response.

^ It's with this level of specificity I work towards. When I write, I catch myself. I see where and how my mind goes. Not in a sense that I am separate or in observer mode, but I can go back to kind of jog the experience again, and keep the writing flow going through the self-forgiveness. Many of my entries thus far were written sober, while many were not. It's funny (in the worst way possible) how some fears seem like a bigger deal than others, and so they just EAT away at us. I'm really done with allowing fears to ruin my life, this life, our life. As I continue to walk and build momentum within the courage to keep facing my fears, I realize that I can't hide anything. Haha! Nothing. So it all comes out. My super secret journal, published for all who care to see. haha, this is going to be fun...and I can already tell that there is going to be polar consequence for that :)

So, for now I will patiently walk myself through this design and addiction. I'm not looking forward to it. There are a lot of positive experiences in my past that have been associated with smoking the green smelly tree. Much in how I relate to others and much in how I relate to me....Woo, I shiver at the thought of how much I've been creating my self concept in relation to weed. It's doable. And I'm not going to give up. I will walk out of this addiction with the patience, honesty, and writing.

Sincerely thanks for reading.

Breaking this down and more self-forgiveness to come!

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