Needy
Tomorrow’s events:
Embodied Book Club: Collective Presencing w/ Ria Baeck. Every Saturday from October 3rd to November 7th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins. Review the information sheet here.
Willow Monastic Academy Launch Party! w/ Jasna Seishin Todorović. November 7th @ 1:30 PM ET. RSVP here.
The Glass Bead Game w/ Laurence Currie-Clark and The Arch. Every Saturday @ 6:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 120 mins.
An event to (maybe) get excited by:
Getting Senseful With the Steward w/ Peter Limberg. November 8th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
You asked for it, you got it. Let’s get senseful this Sunday about what the heck this thing called The Stoa is, and what it wants to be.
***
November 6, 2020
Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose.
Yoda said that. It was a quote I came across recently, and it could have been easily said by Epictetus or Seneca. There is a lot of Stoic wisdom packed in that line. The Stoics often engaged in negative visualizations, such as losing loved ones and other intense things like that.
Here is Marcus Aurelius on getting in the right relationship with the possibility of losing the ones you love: In all your actions, words, and thoughts, be aware that it is possible that you—and by extension the ones you love most dearly—may depart from life at any time.
Negative visualizations are a powerful and freeing tool. I do them often. Sometimes to extreme extents. I recall in early March when COVID came online, I talked to Jordan Hall, and he was giving me a situational assessment about all the bad shit that could happen with COVID. If you recall, a collective panic set in during that time, and everybody was frantically buying toilet paper.
I asked Jordan what he thought the worst case scenario was, and he gave a small percentage that this could be a human extinction event, if supply chains get completely disrupted, and mass riots happen on the streets, and a cascading series of second-order effects start to emerge from the virus. I recall feeling a lot of anxiety during that time, and I recall thinking: aw fuck, my prepper game is so weak.
So I did my negative visualizations, which is what I usually do in situations when anxiety emerges. I visualized all sorts of SHTF scenarios. Now this is not for everyone, so stop reading here if you get triggered easily, as one visualization was particularly gruesome: a food shortage occurred, and I was starving, and I slit my wrists to avoid the temptation of cannibalism.
I really felt into that visualization, as if it was really happening. Once you face the emotional intensity of such visualizations, a wise zero fucks given approach occurs, and prudence comes to you in a clear way. I have not only visualized losing my life before, in many different ways, but I have also visualized losing my wife, my parents, my friends, and more recently The Stoa, and all the awesome people who visit it.
The key to these visualizations is to visualize in such a way that will provide what I’ll call the “acceptance click,” it is like something internal clicks, and a wave of acceptance occurs. Once the worst case scenario has been accepted, the scenario which is right in front of you is not so bad, and you can start to operate with a clear head, without anxiety fogging things up.
All of this helps with not being needy. We are reading Ria’s Collective Presencing book at the “Embodied Book Club” sessions on Saturday, and at a previous session people were talking about the daemon, and the sense of aliveness it brings. I was feeling a needy energy in the air, and I called it out, which felt a little edgy to do.
There were a lot of women in that Zoom room, and I found that the word needy, like the word bossy, is pretty triggering to women, and I sensed some triggering did occur. In sessions like these I try to find the balance between forthrightly speaking what I believe to be true, and being sensitive to all of the reality tunnels existing in the room, in order to authentically code-switch in the most compassionate way. When in doubt though, I risk being forthright.
I do think it is true that there was needy energy in the air, and I also think being needy with the daemon does not make it attracted to you. I think this neediness is prevalent in both men and women. The pick-up artists had terms like “outcome independence” and mottos like “indifference makes the difference.”
The idea here is that if a man is needy for attention and is seeking validation from a woman he is attracted to, then that is an unattractive behaviour. The pick-up artists engage in their own negative visualizations in order to become indifferent to rejection. I think similar attraction techniques work with the daemon as well.
The daemon comes and goes, and it feels like a creative force channeling through you, and makes you feel truly alive, but it will only come back if you are prepared for the possibility that it will never come back.
***
patreon.com/the_stoa