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:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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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.
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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.
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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 -
Sitting on a park bench and taking everything in is not meditation. There may be meditative properties to it, but probably less than going on a run or taking a hot shower, or heck trying to fall asleep. The point isn't to empty your mind, or be more conscious of your own thoughts, it's just to experience life and physical sensation without worrying about higher-level things like goals and regrets.
The way to do this--to forget worries, expectations, and ideally your own self-conception--is not to remove them or push them out per se, it's to replace them and focus your attention on other things. Preoccupy yourself with more immediate things like the way the light filters through the trees, and other things will naturally take a back seat. You can't successfully order yourself not to think about pink elephants, but you can make your mind busy enough with other things to accomplish something similar.
There were a few months in college when I had just been broken up with by the only girlfriend I thought I'd ever have, I had bad grades, I was taking steroids that made me extremely anxious around everyone and about everything, and I had severe ulcerative colitis, which sent me to the bathroom every thirty minutes or so to experience waves of searing-hot pain and crap out a few ounces of blood. The physical experience was by far the most painful thing I've ever felt, and if anything the surrounding life circumstances were even worse.
Still, I found that taking it moment by moment--ignoring the higher-level stuff my brain was telling me and focusing on reality itself--even the worst moments of pain were not just endurable, but downright pleasant. David Foster Wallace puts it better than I can.
I'm not telling you to give up on your ego entirely. For that matter, I'm not convinced the many people who say that they have are being honest. But there are stories we tell about our own lives that do more harm than good. We all need stories to get by, goals and dreams and aspirations and regrets and self-conceptions, but it's valuable to be consciously aware that this story-level reality is not base-level reality, that there exists a level of experience beneath and supporting all of that. It is possible for your stories to be wrong. They do not define you, they just preoccupy you and disappoint you. You can find better replacements, stories that inspire you.
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