Reddit reviews The Presence Process: A Journey Into Present Moment Awareness

My first suggestion is to recognize that you are holding onto a belief that a relationship is to some degree necessary for your happiness or contentment. The next step is to question this belief. Try this thought experiment: Imagine that you can be perfectly content in your life without a relationship. You go through your days fulfilled, wanting for nothing. You enjoy whatever activities you choose to engage in fully. You have all you need. Now a relationship becomes available. Do you take it? Maybe yes, maybe no. If the benefits outweigh the costs, perhaps it's a "yes." If not, you walk away, because after all why pay the cost if it's not worth it? You certainly don't need it.

I would like to suggest that this is completely possible. The first step here is to stop holding onto the belief that you can't be happy without that. As long as you believe that, you make it true. Any such fixation becomes self-fulfilling. You obsess over the thing you don't have and make yourself miserable.

You say you have a history of mental health problems. Well let me tell you, a relationship won't fix them. It's common for people to believe that the solution to their problems is something external to themselves, but in situations like yours it is never true. Until you address your problems internally a team of supermodels taking turns riding your dick wouldn't help you. It'd be fun, sure, but once the initial thrill wore off you'd find yourself back in the same emotional space with the same problems.

How to get there? I'm not aware of any single one-size-fits-all solution, but it would be worth considering therapy if that appeals to you. To me meditation is a must. If you're not doing that I'd say make it a priority to develop a practice with the intention of making it lifelong. The best book of which I am aware and the one I'd recommend for this is The Mind Illuminated.

Beyond that try to work on your emotional health. A book I highly recommend for this is The Presence Process. Another good one is The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion.

Read these books, apply them, and live them diligently and consistently, and I predict that in a year or two your outlook on life will be completely transformed. Once you get to that point, maybe a relationship will happen, or maybe it won't. You'll be fine either way, and that's more valuable than any pickup technique.

Uranus is transiting your 8th house and Pluto is transiting your 4th. Sign on your 8th house cusp is Aries, ruled by Mars, which is in the 4th conjunct your Part of Fortune, squaring Pluto and Saturn, and trining Uranus.

Chiron is in the 8th, representing your deepest wound and source of your deepest healing.

You're gonna want to do shadow work to clean out your psychological closet to end the attraction to/from people you don't want to deal with. This is written largely from the standpoint of romantic relationships but 8th house deals with attraction period, including from/to those you have less than zero interest in: https://sasstrology.com/2011/08/magnetic-attraction-the-eighth-house-and-its-ruler.html

Pluto has been grinding its way through your 4th house, which is why you've experienced this destructive energy at home. It's time to take charge of the destructiveness of Pluto and make it transformative in your life, once and for all. Be prepared to change.

There's a book I recommend, it's called The Presence Process: https://www.amazon.com/Presence-Process-Journey-Present-Awareness/dp/1897238460/

Don't try to rationalize your emotions.

What happens when we are younger is that we are unable to understand our emotions because our mind isn't up to the task yet. If our emotions are too "big", and it's too much for us to handle we're going to repress them and usually create a thought pattern behind it.

This thought pattern will come up everytime a situation or something makes these old emotions come back. Inner talk will be there for you to not experience fully these emotions.

But we have multiple bodies. Those that you need to be aware of in your case is your mental body and your emotional body.

When you are thinking it creates an emotion and in turn an emotion can often lead to a thought being created. A healthy cycle can become a viscious cycle.

If you want to be healthy and manifest consciously what you want, you need to have a healthy emotional body, it means you need to let go of emotions within you that have been surpressed.

Realize that thinking protected you in a period where emotions were just too much for you, but now you have the maturity to let them go through you and that it's actually healthy for you to do so.

The mind wants to protect you. If you feel bad and negative it will create a barrier for you to stop suffering. The mind does not understand that negative emotions are good for you.

It's the same in general. People generally welcome happy situations but whenever something terrible happens they start getting angry and refuse the situation without acknowledging that this negative situation is actually the best thing that they need in order to grow.

Your emotional body does not think. Being happy and feeling peaceful is your natural state of being. When you sense negative emotions within you, understand that they're here to pass through you so you can heal and become happy again.

People fall into depression after repressing negative emotions over and over again. And our society condemns negative emotions. If only someone told them that they have the right to feel bad, sad and angry... they wouldn't be depressed.

You need to shift your habit from thinking to feeling. You cannot get your way through thinking and this is really difficult for people who are used to mentalize everything that happens in their reality.

I'd recommend that you meditate regularly remembering everytime that uncomfort shows up as soon as you start getting in touch with your feelings. Don't listen to your mind which will want to stop or find something to get you away from it. Thanks your mind and show him love knowing that it protected you all this time, but now you need to experience something that exists out of thoughts in order to feel better.

There is even this video which helps letting go : https://youtu.be/MU1Rp184IT4

I highly recommend it.

If you're even more interested about your emotional "baggages" there is this book which shows you how to successfully become present and happy by learning how to let go of these blocks. https://www.amazon.fr/Presence-Process-Journey-Present-Awareness/dp/1897238460

If you let go of the emotion, you let go of your fear and you let go of your self sabotage which prevents you from attracting what you want.

Thanks! I will look them up,! I read that if you do the exorcises, self help books have as good a track record of healing as seeing a therapist, so I'm avoiding talk therapy for a while. It just always sends me the wrong direction. I think it is because I people-please the therapist and they don't ever see through it. I'm looking at stuff like EMDR, TRE and maybe nerofeedback kind of approaches, so your Dr. Porges looks especially good. I just ordered this book which supposedly has a doable 10-week program to get one back in touch with their body, even starting at zero. https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/1897238460/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1. Any recommendations for after that, I'm all ears! We should start INFJ Book Reports.

> I've read endless books, I've seen a psychotherapist, I've read loads into the workings of the mind, psychology, positivity, habits etc but nothing changes. I have fleeting states, periods where I'll get into a better rhythm in life and feel okay (but still not great and feel very lacking etc) and then I return to baseline, where I feel lost, helpless, lacking direction etc.

Hi, just a thought -- you mention you've done a lot of reading, but let me ask, what have you been doing?

I'm curious if you've read -- and actually done -- [The Presence Process: A Journey Into Present Moment Awareness: Michael Brown](https://www.amazon.com/Presence-Process-Journey-Present-Awareness/dp/1897238460 "The Presence Process: A Journey Into Present Moment Awareness: Michael Brown")?

My recommendation is complete The Presence Process (or any other mindfulness practice that speaks to you) and then go do an ayahuasca retreat. Also focus on your physical health, exercise, diet, sleep. Starting a mindfulness and health routine will make you more fertile ground for ayahuasca to treat.

I do believe that ayahuasca can be good for you. I've described ayahuasca as Drano for a clogged psyche that you can't see to clear out by gentler means. (FYI Drano is a chemical product in the US that you can pour into a clogged sink or bath tub drain.)

It was for me. So many psyche issues I had, for literally decades, that I couldn't seem to move on my own, despite doing many of the things you mention, ayahuasca just flushed out in one night.

So I think you should go. Good luck, and I hope you'll write back before, after, and then a few months later to share your progress.

Oh my goodness thank you for taking the time to share all of that!

I am very interested in this. Often when we are working with affirmations or new beliefs it is like forcing the new positive belief over the old negative one. And people can have a very hard time with that, not believing the new chosen belief/affirmation because the old one "competes" in a way.

What you are describing sounds a lot like some of the therapy techniques of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Psychodynamic Therapy, and Inner Child Work.

CBT: states we have a hierarchy of types of thoughts and beliefs, ranging from shallower/more on the surface, "automatic thoughts" which are based on more deeply held "core beliefs" - "I'm not good enough" or similar, and they are all interconnected, and the automatic thoughts we have fleetingly throughout the day, or our inner monologue, represents these more deeply held (and often flawed/dysfunctional) beliefs about ourselves (ex "I'm unlovable"), others (ex. "Others will hurt me, so respect the worst"), the world (ex. "things always go badly for me"). CBT just works on fixing the thoughts, not with figuring out where they came from. I personally find this approach lacking. I needed to understand why I had negative thoughts and beliefs, not just try to change them.

Psychodynamic therapy involves going backward to identify where in childhood our beliefs and coping mechanisms and ways of relating to ourselves, the world and others came from, to gain understanding of the source and then modify as needed.

Inner Child Work is very similar to what you are talking about and its about relating to that hurt "child" part of us that didn't get what they needed in childhood and now feels hurt and scared (etc) and how to step in as our own "loving parent" and to reframe these experience and provide to ourselves through compassionate inner dialogue and self care what we needed then and now.

Pete Walker has a good website on this and what he refers to as "emotional flashbacks"
http://pete-walker.com/pdf/emotionalFlashbackManagement.pdf

Also coming to mind is a book called "The Presence Process" by Brown who gives a detailed program for "integrating" old stuff by going backwards and identifying where our negative beliefs come from.
https://www.amazon.com/Presence-Process-Journey-Present-Awareness/dp/1897238460/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1520080673&sr=8-1&keywords=the+presence+process

In my experience you don't have to be overly particular about how far you can go back and how precise you can be. Even if you can identify a general theme or feeling, and track back to when you recall that feeling in your childhood to identify where the belief might have come from: ex,: "My mother always checked my homework, and that made me think I must be stupid or untrustworthy" - then that's enough to realize where something came from and start to undo it, saying to yourself, "No, I was fine and smart. I got all As and some Bs. My mother was just overly concerned with how our family appeared to others due to her own insecurities. That had nothing to do with me. I am smart and I am trustworthy."

Again, thanks for sharing all you took the time to write, and I think if you are interested in this sort of thing there are others resources that cost less than $5000 you can look into do do similar work.

"Healing your aloneness" by Chopich and "Inner Bonding" by the same authors are also good books with a similar theme.
https://www.amazon.com/Healing-Your-Aloneness-Finding-Wholeness/dp/0062501496/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1520080700&sr=1-1&keywords=healing+your+aloneness

https://www.amazon.com/Inner-Bonding-Becoming-Loving-Adult/dp/0062507109/ref=pd_bxgy_14_img_3?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0062507109&pd_rd_r=AACBA3RGXQS6G568WF8W&pd_rd_w=WEflm&pd_rd_wg=99z8l&psc=1&refRID=AACBA3RGXQS6G568WF8W

My therapist taught me a 4 step process to do this when something happens that triggers me feeling those old negative beliefs:

1. How do I feel?
   
   
2. What does this remind me of?
   
   
3. What decision did I make then?
   
   
4. What decision can I make now?
   
   
   That process was immensely helpful to me to journal on events to rewire my negative beliefs that were based in old experiences.
   
   Namaste!
   
   (edited to add links)
   
   
   
   

32 years, 109 days, so it's real.
Hardest part for me was to accept that my main trigger is watching porn.

Got spiritual, meditation, some exercises and no drama.

Tools in this book helps me quite a lot:
https://www.amazon.com/Presence-Process-Journey-Present-Awareness/dp/1897238460

And psychotherapy gives me support.