What Do You Mean; To Be Human

     Be where you are. Pay attention the space around you, and then to your physical self. Take a second for each sensation, what can you hear? What is the lighting in your environment like? Where are you? Can you smell anything? What was the last thing you ate, or have you brushed your teeth today? What do your clothes feel like on your skin? What position are you sitting in, if you're sitting?      Now take it a little bit deeper: What do your muscles feel like? Are you hungry, or will you need a bathroom sometime soon? Are you tense anywhere? Any aches or pains? Are you relaxed, or trembling? Think about your bones, and the way they rest against each other at the joints. Can you feel what your hair is doing? Is there an emotion or any kind of feeling in an expression on your face?      If you're having a feeling, what is it telling you? Does it beg a question? Is it making a demand, or a proclamation? Does it beg for action? Express...

     This past Tuesday, I attended an AA meeting with a friend, partially for support, but mostly out of curiosity about my own position in regards to addiction. While sitting in this meeting, I felt a desire to go up and share, although it's generally outside the tradition for newcomers to share, but sitting in that chair, listening to these people talk about what their lives had become before they chose to get sober resonated with me. I've never had any kind of a problem with drinking, but I had a couple of small realizations while I was there.      One: I do have an addiction to marijuana. It is an addiction . I've been excusing myself for months after the thought occurred to me that I should probably slow down, telling myself that it's just self-medicating, that it's treating my anxiety, my chronic pain, that it helps me to socialize with others who have the same habits--i.e. pretty much everyone I hang out with. I've always seen these as excuses, but ...

     I've always been significantly interested in magic and metaphysics. I've posted about what Authentic Magic is on this blog before, but after a recent trip on psychedelics with my primary, I found a phrase that helped even myself understand magic just a little better: My sensory experience has an atmosphere.      This is something I believe can be made true of anyone, and I should be clear and say that this isn't necessarily always true of myself. Whether or not I can sense the atmosphere of my being depends largely on how in tune with myself I am on any given day. Just in the same sense that the human state of consciousness is ever changing, between being alert or tired, happy or sad, sober or intoxicated, the extent of ones sensory atmosphere changes, and it's comparable to the atmosphere of the Earth: if the bit of atmosphere surrounding you is still, if there's no wind, odds are, if you make note of the weather at all it might simply be a comment o...

     Lately I've been sensing a deep and subtle commotion in the world around me. People seem to be waking up, asking questions, finding answers, and dealing with their crises in new and unprecedented ways. I myself have been working on and watching the balance of my chakras, trying to open the ones that are under active. It's been a relief, and a bit of an emotional adventure, and I am sensing active progress in myself. I feel different--and better. Previously, according to this little test I took on a website called Eclectic Energies, where you can be placed on the Enneagram, my first three and my sixth chakras were under active, and that's the root, under yourself; sacral (sex) chakra; the navel or solar plexus; and the third eye. I've read that you should generally work your way up from the bottom when working with chakras, which makes a lot of sense to me. I was thinking about it this morning, and I remember hearing in a particular video that depicts a global consp...

     People touch each other all the time. When we're born, the "touching" an unborn infant does with it's mother is less like touching and more like integration, until the umbilical cord is cut and an infant is laid on it's mother's chest. From there, we're touched by our parents often by being held, helped, and guided, and then later, whether it's with siblings or peers in a class, we learn about physical boundaries and the way touch can influence a person. Some are much more sensitive to touch than others, and in the case of those like myself, much more sensitive.      When I'm at work, anytime someone bumps into me or touches me by accident, they apologize. I realize that in a workplace environment, physical touch between individuals is typically frowned upon, but every time I hear the word, "sorry," when someone gets close to me or touches me, I feel the urge to challenge it. I took the love languages test not too long ago and found...

     Today I took a small (or big, depending on how you see it) risk.      I opened at work, and just before I left, someone I met on tinder and slept with came in, and I was so embarrassed and twitterpated, but I made a decision today too: I'm gonna talk to the people who are on my mind. I couldn't stop thinking about this tinder hookup guy as I was working and he was there with all his gorgeous study buddies, and I knew he was on my mind because I pretty pointedly ghosted him. He reached out to me on multiple occasions after we slept together, and at first I was just a little anxious, but then I got a little annoyed, and then after a while I became apathetic towards him. I stopped caring altogether about this person I'd so recently been so intimate with. We did things he said he'd never done before, that he said felt amazing, and I then promptly disappeared, and in retrospect, like how they say hindsight is 20/20, I realize how shitty that can be depend...