Hello everybody.

Since about half a year, i am recovering from a set of psychological problems (self worth problems, porn addiction, lonelyness, etc) - and i have made great success by repeatedly listening to affirmations, meditation and hypnotherapy. I specifically want to highlight one professional clinical hypnotherapist whose work i enjoy a lot. The link is from their blog, where you can buy a few things to listen to.

But they also have a youtube channel, which i recommend. Some files i enjoyed a lot:

• 10 Minute Guided Meditation - I love My Body https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJZHi0aTWfM
• Train Your Brain To Focused On The Long Term Goal Hypnosis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jl_6CUOATlg
• Freedom From Perfectionism Hypnotherapy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52N-DBA2FCo

how and why does it work?

(i am not a professional, my explanation might be slightly wrong)

when you have psychological problems like bad self worth, then this is also implemented in a set of thoughts in your brain. So your brain believes deeply that it makes sense to have a bad self worth. When you listen to positive suggestions that say otherwise, the brain thinks this is not true and rejects that. However, this control mechanism by the brain can be reduced/turned off when you are deeply relaxing.

Like: while sleeping, your brain is sometimes very active. This is the subconscious, that tries to process things in dreams for instance. There, the control mechanism are obviously shut down. When you are deeply relaxed, this state is not similar to sleep, but similar to a state right before sleeping.

And hypnotherapy first have a deep relaxation part to reduce the brains control mechanism where the suggestions are more effective. However, the subconciousness also has some protections, which means listening to bad things will still be rejected by the brain. so you are safe.

And secondly: the brain learns through repetition, so thats why repeatedly listening to the affirmations (even while doing sports or hanging up washed clothes!) makes your brain believe things over time. The resistance protecting the bad self worth will be reduced over time, making it easier to overwrite it with something healthy.

In general, it works a lot with your imagination. So for instance, the link about perfectionism is about you writing examples of perfectionism on some board and then you imagine to clean the board again and feel relief. Then you start write new things you want to learn instead.

how has it helped me?

• my addiction kicks in when i feel especially bad about myself. for instance when i feel not beautiful and attractive. The "i love my body" affirmations are great for remembering to care about myself. This worked wonders.

bad things?

yes! hypnotherapy is not magical and you have to be careful. For instance, i have once listened to a hypnotherapy file from this person where you would try to feel strongly about the bad things you want to cut ties with (in my case, my porn addiction), and then stuffing everything into a backpack and boxing it and walking away from it (i think). While great in theory, it didn't work for me and i was left with the strong imagination on my porn addiction, leading to a relapse.

Basically, it strongly depends on your specific situation. These files are not specifically for your triggers, for your situation and therefore some might not work.

Therefore, i made more success with the positive hypnotherapy/meditation/affirmations stuff.

So be careful. I recommend to first listen to things while having full attention and looking inside your heart, how you feel what the person says. When it feels great, you can do it while relaxing.

Mōrena buzzy bees!

I've been off hunting beach treasures on some more remote beaches in the area. The amount of fishing and building waste is unreal! , buoys, treated timber posts and framing. A lot of plastic crab pot pieces and rope ends. We even found a piece of a pontoon which I'll be making into a new garden bed! We also saw a dead albatross, which was fascinating, but with the birdflu, we decided it was best to keep our distance.

Fellow dumpster divers and rubbish gremlins, what has been your favourite find?

A helpful guide on how to be less frustrating towards people of color.

This is the original source for the link I posted in !science@beehaw.org. I hope it can help someone in our community.

This is depression, alcoholism; it's getting pretty late-stage. All of this is wrong, and everything I've gone through insists they're fucking Reifenstahl.

Yes, I have mentioned her twice this week. It's because it's germane. I'm using that word a lot more, too. It holds a certain connotation.

But that aside, I do not want 988. I want a solution, not some attempt to make me believe rich people shall be my saviors.

On a summer afternoon in 2019, nurse Charlotte Lay got ready for her night shift as normal but "wasn't feeling quite right".

Within a short space of time she had decided to end her own life close to a West Yorkshire railway station.

...

I found this interesting and relevant. Nothing actionable, but oddly comforting.

Covers way more than just the title, but an interesting experiential take.

Pretty cool guide.

The guy says that he only recently realized that cleaning isn't intuitive so people need to be taught. This is for people who maybe haven't been taught how to clean or want to freshen up on their skills :)

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how, with things exactly as they are (so, without the community resources, policy changes, and ideas that would ideally exist in the future) I might want to respond to a situation in which I feel threatened. There is not a particularly strong sense of community in my geographic area, and I cannot think of any ‘people i know’ who I would feel comfortable calling for help were I to need it. I’m thinking primarily of abusive people, threats to my safety, dangerous behavior, and the like - I think drugs are a medical issue and being robbed would suck but that’s also not necessarily going to become personal if it’s just about money. Has anyone here read about, or practiced, any methods for deescalating, defending against, or getting out of such situations without having to ask the police? I would like have some of these ideas thought through and waiting in the back of my mind before I actually need them.

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/8863969

Folks who know me closely know that I'm kind of a geek for patterns - I see them in behavior, in housing, in gardens and natural structures, everywhere. They are at play all around us at varying levels of scale, and anyone who's ever said "oh this again" can hopefully relate.

Christopher Alexander (author along with others of A Pattern Language, The Nature of Order, Notes on the Synthesis of Form), the speaker in this video, has been formative in my understanding of patterns in a way few others have. His approach to design as a conduit for improving the lives of people and the world writ large have been an inspiration.

I want you to forget that he's talking to a room full of programmers. Some of it is abstract, and heady, but think about the patterns in your lives and how even slight alterations to them can influence the course of things. I'm coming to this talk from the aspect of a gardener, of a nursery owner interested in restoration ecology, of someone who wants each of us to have a closer connection to the natural systems at play. Bring who you are to this, and (hopefully) let it inspire you. I'll leave you with this quote from the talk (punctuation mine):

"I want you to help me. I want you to realize that the problem of generating living structure is not being handled by architects or planners or developers or construction people now; there is no way that they're ever going to be able to do that because the methods they use are not capable of it.

The methods that you have at your fingertips and deal with every day in the normal course of events are perfectly designed to do this ... if you have the interest, you have the capacity, you have the means.... And what I'm proposing here is something a little bit different from that which is a view of ~~programming~~ as the natural genetic infrastructure of a living world which you are capable of creating, managing, making available - and which could then have the result that a living structure - in our towns, houses, workplaces, cities - is an attainable thing. Which it has not been for the last 50 to 100 years.

That is an incredible thing! I realize that you probably think I'm nuts because this is not what I'm supposed to be talking about to you. And you may say, 'gosh great idea but we're not interested' but I do think you are capable of that and I don't think anybody else is going to do this job.

Here's a Ted-talk from 12 years back on the topic of vulnerability as a method of reconnecting with self. Just a refresher for anyone who hasn't seen it yet. Highly recommended!

… ask yourself these three questions:

Is it kind?

Is it true?

Is it necessary?

Granted we’ve all heard this before, but sometimes we need reminding.

I try to do what I can to make my local community better. I research and vote in every election, donate money to local nonprofits and also volunteer there when I can (heading to the food bank in a bit, yay!), and try to speak out and offer words of encouragement when I can.

But I live in a very socially, politically, and religiously conservative community. And I…am not. It constantly feels like any effort amounts to pissing in the wind, and yet also like I am not doing nearly enough at all. It makes me anxious a lot.

The latest iteration of this is local people trying to get “obscene” children’s and YA books in the public library moved to the adult section. And to be clear most of these books are not obscene they just acknowledge that, hey people who are LGBTQ+ (sorry if I got that initialization wrong!) exist and that racism is a real thing. I went to the public meeting and was mostly ineffective except I got to thank the library director for her work pushing back against this. I would love to write a Letter to the Editor of the local paper to speak out, but there is a risk of retaliation against my family members and their local businesses. And most of the community seems to be behind this which is absolutely bonkers to me. I don’t know what to do.

I don’t even know where I’m going with this. I think I just needed to say it. Anyone else deal with something similar- feeling like you need to do more but also feeling completely defeated about actually getting anything to change?

from the intro:

Clothing repair and mending can cover a rather wide range of activities varying from those requiring very little skill to those demanding a great deal of sewing skill and expertise. The rewards of mending vary from the self-satisfaction for a job well done to a substantial monetary savings by prolonging the life of a garment.

The need for clothing repair comes from various sources. Poor initial garment workmanship or construction can be a problem with ready-to-wear as well as handmade items.

Everyday wear and tear will also take its toll. Poor garment fit can cause a seam to split or a fastener to break. Still other repairs become part of preventive mending, permitting the garment to be worn longer without the need of major repair or recycling.

Garment repair and mending can require a bit of creativity. Don't be guilty of rushing into a repair job without giving the situation some careful thought and having the necessary tools to see the job through.

Hey everyone. I'm curious what books you've found to be useful in your own lives and if you have any reccomendations for us.

Mine would be the Compound Effect by Darren Hardy which talks about consistent small actions leading to momentum/habit and driving massive amounts of change.

My past couple of posts have been very specific in application, but now that events are set in motion to regain agency, it seems a good time to try to pay forward the lessons I've gained from at this point 14 months.

• If your career is part of your identity, cool. But don't bullshit yourself about where you fall, and keep a critical eye on your industry if you're heavily invested. If it's not, don't make life about adapting for a paycheck.

• Trying to think about the future while in active addiction is pointless. Job searches necessarily were limited to things I knew I could do and still get shitfaced every night, and my perception thereof dropped precipitously past my mid-20s.

• Philosophy is there for when you get stuck, and it's not nearly as dry as in school. I found myself far more forgiving of blurred lines into religion with especially Buddhism than expected. I'd known since my divorce that I wasn't able to start asking the right questions, but philosophy wasn't speaking to me yet.

• You are a reflection of the people you surround yourself with. Any self-improvement in negative behaviours can easily lead to resentment from people who still exhibit them, and it is necessary to on a case-by-case basis decide what to do about this friction. One option that must remain on the table is severe curtailment or outright rejection of further communication. Regardless of perceived positives, there is no amount of negativity that underperforms on balance. Your sanity and outlook depend on positive reinforcement.

• As a quick add-on, this also applies in parasocial settings. So, if Reddit is your baseline for forum interaction, regardless of how reasonable of a person you are, it's going to feel more appropriate to bring your snark from being online for 30 years ... as a default for every interaction. That mindset doesn't switch on and off and thus spills out into other interaction both online and off.

• You are under no obligation to be reachable by anyone during all waking hours. Sure, there are legitimate work reasons, but those are self-evident. I'm talking about rejecting the notion that your phone means you're awaiting contact as a default state.

• Shrooms can be a viable method for quieting rumination (allowing new thoughts and ideas to fill that space), putting a lid on addiction and facing very deep assumptions that were never yours. The visuals are fun, too.

• Draw boundaries and stick to them. There's no point in wasting energy trying to keep a disrespectful person in your life.

• Assess risks and costs accurately when considering actions. Inertia can be really fucking expensive.

• Consider where others are on their journeys and always keep Hanlon on hand for the closest shave. Accept that your paths are not intertwined forever. And consider you're the one who's fallen behind.

After actually enumerating these, I wouldn't have expected half of self-improvement to be about interaction, but it's not really as surprising in the rear view. You can practice mantras and draw up budgets and all that good stuff, but building a better bubble is not building a better life.

Even relatives and close friends can do a lot of damage to confidence that inhibits options. When you're cutting someone off, if doesn't have to be forever (we'll always have email), but it could well be what's stopping you from getting to a place where you can accept them back (or they you).

But overall, regaining agency is is about being open to new paths. If the one you have isn't working, you can embark upon an expansive but ultimately futile excursion trying to graft ac-hoc solutions onto it or really get into the weeds about what a reasonable path looks like and start from there. The latter approach seems to be far more useful.