After Eight Years With Facebook

I joined Facebook reluctantly in 2006. Mostly because it became a nessary communication tool while in film school. I pretty much fell in love with the platform. Pushing the limits of what could be done with social media, even got videos to go viral.  I had a Facebook and social media business where I helped small businesses use these tools to their advantage.

On October 5th I posted an offering in a group on Facebook. I offered to plant a food forest for folks at no cost, in the Vancouver area Free Market. The morning after I woke up to this:

I changed my name a few weeks ago in solidarity with the drag queens who were being targeted on facebook. There was someone going around and reporting all the drag queens as “fake.”

Facebook has a “real name” policy. This policy is in place to make sure people aren’t bullying one another. What’s stopping someone from making a Facebook account with a “real name” and bullying? I really don’t understand the mindset. All rhe while native peoples, trans folks and abuse survivors have their accounts suspended for “not using their real name.”

I will not be reentering Facebook. There are better ways out there. As technology goes, facebook is old news. In the mean time I’ll be putting my energy in to establishing food forests and working towards being free of capitalism in five years time.

Four Signs of Emotional Addiction

 

Emotional addiction is like having raw emotional wounds all over your body. For most people these wounds stay raw until the addiction is looked at head on and is addressed, just as a tender nurse cares for wounds. This is not to say that people’s emotions are invalid, they are very real and very valid. When you notice these tendencies in yourself or others don’t try to correct the behavior, that is like pouring salt on a wound, rather when you notice these things allow it to be a reminder to embody more compassion and love. As if you are a gentle nurse. You can not heal the wounds you can create an environment for healing though.

Here are some ways to notice emotional addiction in yourself or someone you know.

 

Broken Record – Often someone who’s addicted to their emotions will sound as if they are a broken record about their feelings. Sounds something like: I feel so mad, that person is a jerk, I can’t believe this happened to me AGAIN, I don’t care if they apologized I will never forgive them, etc. Being on broken record mode is like being stuck in an emotional rut.

Victimization – This goes hand in hand with the broken record. “Why me?” is a common statement of victimization. Feeling sorry for ones self, feeling as if there is nothing they can do right – dammed if ya do dammed if ya don’t – are all ways the victim shows up. When someone is feeling victimized they are often also feeling inferior.

Judgment/blame/shame – Finger pointing is one way people deal with emotional pain. “It’s your fault that things didn’t work out, if only you would have listened.” – who didn’t hear that as a kid?

Head over heart – When someone uses their head, their antithetical thinking mind over what their heart says time after time, it’s likely they don’t trust their emotions. Not trusting your emotions can led to avoidance or pushing away – which may show up as pushing experiences or people away as well. This can be highly addictive as this experience can offer a false sense of control over ones life.
Every person is different and this article is not intended to diagnose any kind of mental illness or addiction. It’s meant to be a reminder that when you or someone else is in pain – that is the opportunity to pay attention. If you cut yourself while making dinner and conversing with friends you’d excuse yourself and go take care of your wound, and your friends would (most likely) understand. We can do the same with emotional woulds with honest, open communication with ourselves and with others.

For more information on how to heal from emotional wounds I recommend: This Video

Old wounds opened up so they can heal

A post I recently made on my Facebook Timeline:

Making a commitment to love myself is easily one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life. Old wounds have burst open and in many ways I feel like a child trying to find my place in the world. Like a person caught in the rapids of life. And then experiencing stillness in-between the rapids that I approach. If I can’t love me through all my emotional, physiological and spiritual turmoil I certainly won’t be able to love anyone else going through it.

And so this is a part of my journey to love myself even as I experience great pain and feel as though I am less than, that I am a burden and that I am not worthy – that feeling comes from a false perception I have. When I embody the awareness that the perspective is false and it’s my choice to keep thinking it’s real, that it’s my identity – I’ll be on my way to deeper experiences of self-love. I’ll be more in love with life. And transformation can only happen in the present moment, it can not happen in the future. The future is the concept that now will happen later – hahaha

So I ask myself, can I do it, can I love myself?

My mantra has recently been: I am open and receptive to Love.
Another mantra I’m choosing to work on is: I am peace

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Wounds can be torn open and you can ignore them and they become infected – I would call that default. Or when those wounds are town open again you can apply medicine, wrap it up and keep tending to it until it’s healed. And that’s what I am putting my focus on right now. I’m cleaning out that long held emotional poison from my now raw and exposed wounds and making a better life for myself. I’m starting to see through the “eyes of Love.”

Some ways I clean my wounds is through meditation, contemplation and self-inquiry as offered by my friend and spiritual mentor Leeza Edwards Director of Universality of Transformation. What are some ways you clean out emotional poison from your wounds?

What’s the meaning of this?

As human beings meaning is very significant to us. Ancient humans assigned meaning to weather phenomenon such as lightning and thunder, it was thought that the god/s were at war. When there was drought or famine the meaning was: the god/s were angry/displeased with the people for being wicked or impure in some way. Many people lost their lives over this perceived meaning through human sacrifice and war.

Science now sheds some light on the mechanisms for drought and famine, thunder and they’re still working on “figuring out” lightning. Now when there’s drought in the western world people say things like “that means we need to use less water”, “that means no long showers or car washes”. Often when “meaning” is expressed it’s done so in a away that speaks in absolutes “She smiled at me, that must mean she likes me.”

There’s a popular cable TV ad going around right now that goes something like this: “You can find anything good on TV? that means you will be alone and a looser at life and your kinds will too”. We make up these outlandish stories about how things will turn out for ourselves and really we have no idea how things will turn out. The story of how one persons so-called curse is his and his nations blessing is beautifully expressed in a film I recently watched called Emmanuel’s Gift.

Just like a movie we’ve never seen before we too can be more in the mystery of life by letting go of the need for meaning. That’s not to say that meaning will not be experienced, rather this notion that we know meaning before it’s experienced can be let go. And with it goes much weight and anxiety.

When worlds collide

Recently I came to the awareness that I have built much of my world view around something my grandpa taught me when I was little. Basically that women are here on this earth to be men’s  play things and give them children. If you’re reading this blog you may not already know that I am transgendered, born female and now live my life totally embraced as male (since I first wrote this I’ve become more open about expressing the blend of genders that I am).

I happen to live with profound opportunity at my finger tips. On a daily basses I am loved and encouraged, I help to create a nonprofit that is starting to get off the ground and I have a spiritual teacher who guides me every day. One would think that success would come easily with all this opportunity and love.

This is where my worlds or at least my world perspectives collide. In this realization of founding my world view upon something I would not choose for myself, how do I reconcile this with my new world view and the opportunity at hand? This is the question I’m asking myself. Perhaps you find yourself in a similar place, with two world views coming crashing in to each-other.

It’s funny how questions often lead to deeper questions. The question I am finding myself asking myself now is “what are you available for?” I went and stood in the mirror and asked myself about the choices I’m making and where I was taking myself. I said out loud “you can make a new choice”.

When I feel defeated and unworthy I go back to that default mode that I am nothing more than a plaything for men. And when I am engaging in life to my maximum capacity in any given moment I feel excited about the opportunity at my finger tips.  The image of the Cherokee story of Two-Wolves comes to mind (watch the video below).

And the questions deepen “what am I feeding, what I am keeping alive?” With that I also know that I can only change what I am aware of. Addiction can be looked at in the same light. What choices are feeding the addiction and what choices are aiding in the healing process? Do you notice the choices you, yourself are making? What wolf are you feeding?

Awakening to Addiction

This week I had a lot of time to myself. I stayed home from a conference my housemates were attending because I was not feeling well. And while I was home alone I started to take notice of how I was feeling. I noticed my long held patterns.

I started to become aware of addictions that I had been experiencing. Addiction to attention, fear, failure, sex, victimization, etc. As the awareness of addiction grew I started doing Google searches for help with addiction. What I was looking for was something in the way of “A Course in Miracles addresses addiction”. And when I went looking for groups that offer such a thing there were none in my area to be found.

What I did find though was a conversation about addiction, one rooted in what Caroline Myss would no doubt refer to as woundolgy. The conversation sounds something like this “I’m an addict and I’ll always be an addict no matter how long I’m in recovery” another bit of the conversation that stands out to me is “I am powerless over my addiction”. I found people coming together in groups to share their addictions and to talk about what the nature of their addiction is and to talk about everything they have lost through their addiction.

My mind went to the cancer patient, if they had the mentality of an addict about their cancer they would surely be consumed with cancer and die. There is a line in A Course In Miracles that says “There is no order of difficulty in miracles.” and a question that comes to my mind is if addiction is a disease than what makes it impossible to cure when cancer can be cured?

I began to look at what my addictions were and the list kept growing. An “ah-ha” moment came in looking at the root of all of the addictions I was looking at in my list. All of my addictions reinforce that I am separate from my Source (God, The Universe, All That Is). Then it came to me, all that need be healed is my connection to Source and all else will be taken care of “for me”. I can let healing be.

This blog is birthed from this awareness that I have experienced life for many years addicted to default.