Friends With Inadequacy
Dear friends,
I hope you had a great weekend. :)
Two new events added to the wisdom gym:
Stoic Breath: Sunrise Edition w/ Steve Beattie.Every Monday @ 5:45 AM ET. RSVP here. 60 mins.
Dialogos w/ John Vervaeke, Guy Sengstock, and Christopher Mastropietro. Every Other Tuesday @ 6:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Events for this coming week:
Stoic Blues w/ Greg Thomas. June 29th @ 7:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Raw Sexuality: Dark Eyes w/ Leslie Rogers. June 30th @ 8:30 PM ET. RSVP here.
Social Design Club w/ Freyja and Joe Edelman. July 1st @ 1:30 PM. RSVP here. Join the club here.
How to Win Friends and Influence People During the Meta-Crisis w/ Kevin Crone. July 2nd @ 10:00 AM. RSVP here.
Vajrayana Now: Sutra to Tantra w/ Charlie Awbery & Jared Janes. July 5th @ 12:00PM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
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June 28th, 2020
We are settling in our temporary home, and I just took a cold shower, like a good Stoic. We have not brought our espresso machine yet, so I am drinking drip coffee right now, and my journal-to-myself game might not be that tight. That’s cool though, because the summer doldrums are no longer here, and I got that precarious hope back, and I got that go go go energy back.
I processed that sticky sense of inadequacy I experienced yesterday. I could easily delineate between my feeling of inadequacy and my thoughts of inadequacy. I do not think I am inherently inadequate, but sometimes I feel that way.
I opted not to enact the tired pattern: feeling inherently inadequate, and then react by trying to escape it through some bad habits, or set some goals to try to fix myself. This time I did something different. I imagined living with this feeling of inadequacy for the rest of my life, and never again try to ignore, escape, or remove it.
I’ll treat it like an annoying friend that is overstaying his welcome, and who cannot take a hint that it is time for him to leave. As a patient and welcoming host I am going to allow him to stay for as long as he wants. I do not know how to get him to leave even if I wanted to. Exposure to his pestering, and his negativity, will be my spiritual practice. It will be my opportunity to practice my Stoicism.
This frame ameliorated some of the intensity, and he does not feel like he is here right now, but I am sure he’ll be back again. I intend to be more inviting, and more playful, when he does return. I want to learn to love him, because I think he deserves love too, despite his super poopy energy.
Now I feel like I am ready to start “phase 2” of this Stoa project. Yeah, I still have that limerence, and I still have that incredible horniness, those have not left me, but I do not desire to indulge in them during this phase. I want to see if I can transmute them, because I want to create. I have such a burning desire to create right now.
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