I have something to share regarding this topic, but I am not sure what it is or how to say it. This reflects an ongoing issue with brainfog, that while I can mitigate and ameliorate some, it still compounds over time and makes my expression feel messy.
Someone gave me advice to "soften" around my medicine sessions and experience. This stands out to me because "hardness" and/or "toughness" and important qualities for me to hold onto. Bearing in mind my mental health struggles, I see the world in a hostile way generally and fundamentally at the unconscious and subconscious levels (abusive childhood, bullied, and my general wide awareness of the world inform this sense and view). I work with my conscious mind to shift the status quo of these lower levels that inform the upper level of my conscious mind. That said, and as many of you are aware, I am a very anxious person.
Softening around myself and my experiences is foreign to me because I feel that that's not allowed for me (though it is). More specifically, it's not allowed from me to me... It's an overpreparation for what I fear and expect from the world predicated on past experience and circumstance.
This mandate for hardness and toughness has been a limiting factor of my progress and journey. It plainly reflects and perpetuates an affect and stance that leads me to continue to be hard on myself. I often have higher expectations on myself relative to what I feel, how intensely I feel it, and how I operate relative to it. With DMT, my anxiety spikes hard, and I already have anxiety disorders, but because it's that much harder to do things in spite of my anxiety, there is some judgment placed upon me. That judgment is unreasonable and unnecessary.
Where is the grace? Where is the understanding for myself? I have tried so hard to provide it to others... what about me...?
What happens to also be on my mind, linked to all of this is:
Like WTF, Void?!?! You want long experiences like this... so why don't you? Why have intimately long sessions with yourself not been more of a priority? Habits of conditioning and worry, worries that make no sense, but are created and gripped by my anxiety. While I feel I have a lot to do (which is also just anxiety) and feel I have to be responsible, those aren't reasons anymore, but instead excuses. I let the my judgment of my natural response to the consideration of partaking in this medicine curb my approach and attempt and duration.
My question to myself is how do I shift this?
Regarding my flagellating "hardness" (we have to bear in mind, while these traits are preferred, I don't feel "tough" or "hard" and don't see myself in these ways, but quite the contrary), it's not that reflections of such can't be seen. I am scared of this medicine and keep doing it afterall. But softening has proved to be beneficial. I take my time with intaking the medicine, going as far as I feel comfortable in the moment, and have withdrawn the need to finish every dose. Paradoxically, I have been finishing most of the doses. There are hypothetical conversations in my mind where I feel I have to explain and justify why it's hard for me to someone else who it isn't hard for. "What's wrong with you?" "It's not that hard." "Stop being a baby and just do it." I really don't know how to engage people that think it such simple Simon ways (without becoming indignant and pointed...maybe I should let this out...), but I feel like it's out there in the world and I have to engage it. Deeper, I need to give a shit more what my well-honed, incisive, and discerning mind feels and thinks, and not the simple Simons that I mention (through awareness, I concede in so many instances that I might be wrong or limited). Obviously, I have been negatively impacted in a way that makes this a algorithm and parameter of my mind. The DMT and changa vapors help me to cleanse it away.
One love