The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Two questions that I hope can inspire some wellness discussion.
Have you ever had a "feeling for the divine" without being a believer? The sensation that reality is essentially numinous and you are missing out some fundamental experience and you cannot go on until you develop some kind of wisdom? I'm stuck in a place where I cannot reconciliate my feeling that there must be a higher purpose and my thinking that the law of Physics are all there is. The excess of modern life seem to keep on corroding my "soul" (for some vague definition of soul). Should I explore religion, philosophy, meditation or... something else? Readings or other media suggestions are welcome.
My father, given the nature of his work, has been basically absent from my life. In the last few years I've made the conscious effort to get to know him better and I can bitterly say that he is not a person that I esteem particularly high: if I were not his son I would probably never want to talk to such a person. On the other hand I've always had an excellent relationship with my mother and she basically grew me all by herself without being a single mother... and that's the problem since I've never had a male role model: both my grandfathers died when I was five and I have no uncles, school teacher have a vanishingly small male representation. I feel I lack a "male archetype", a guide, a mentor, and I'm just going adrift without a map, without principles, not only that: I've never learned to interact with other males and I found friendship with women nice but unsatisfying on a visceral level, the only time where I approximated a male "friendship" was during Physics Labs in University and it was deeply refreshing. This ended up more of a rant that a wellness question that is basically the same as the first point: resources to bring new perspective on my problem are welcome.
Thanks for reading.
I suggest doing guided meditation for 20-30min a day, first thing in the morning. The main upside is that if it doesn't do anything for you, you won't have lost much time or money. I like Tara Brach personally: https://www.tarabrach.com/guided-meditations/.
Here's the best forum regarding meditation I've come across: https://old.reddit.com/r/streamentry/
You could also listen to Alan Watts, he has a ton of free lectures on youtube. Example: https://youtube.com/watch?v=d9x-XVbsoDA
Probably won't magically give your life the meaning you're looking for but he has a delightful diction and attitude towards things.
You could talk to the people on the ssc discord channel about random things until you find someone you can relate to. Here's a link: https://discord.gg/pfTYphx
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