Day 185: Visiting native part of my country

Several days ago I visited part of our Slovenia country where I lived before for many years and where most of my closest relatives live. I am not sure how many years ago I was there last time but I guess it must be around 10 years. My brother lives there with his wife and two daughters that have recently completed primary education and my father lives there with my stepmother. I have not communicated with my brother and his family due to resentment from his side and his character of constantly hurrying and presenting himself as not having enough time. I did meet my father several times when he came to my current town for his work purposes and we are in touch several times per month via Skype when he wants me to do some graphic design, pre-press and photo/video editing for him. I have been wondering when and for what reason to visit that part of the country again, do I actually have any homesickness at all or am I simply able to make myself feel at home wherever I currently live.

A couple of weeks ago I started to engage in online dating again. In that process, I also connected with a 41 years old girl who has a 10 years old son. I liked the picture of her face and her description except for the fact that she was a smoker. We started to have a text chat via Facebook, then a couple of long phone calls, a Skype video call and we connected very well. She is in the process of divorcing her controlling and abusive husband and wanted to move to her own apartment that she wants to buy. She wants to move out of her current apartment, owned by her husband and to buy her own apartment. However, she wants to stay in the same area so that her son can continue visiting the same primary school. She even asked me if I want to have my own children since her desire was to in the next year or two to experience having another child. I definitely imagined myself being a father and how I would move back to my native area of the country. So we set a date when I was to visit her.

I called my father a day before the planned visit if he knows where I can spend two nights in his areas since I will be visiting a girl that works for full days and she is off every second day so that we can be together for two whole days before I return back home. I was surprised to hear from him that she is just back from the hospital where he spent 3 days in a come. I wondered why no one from my relatives calls me and informed me about that. However, my father said that it is just fine if I can spend the nights on the couch at his basement workshop. That was just fine with me and I was looking forward to meeting him and my stepmother after a very long time. I called the girl that I was dating that I will be arriving the next day however I will be firstly checking my father due to his medical emergency.

It was a Sunday morning at 5:30 a.m. when I woke up and start preparing myself for departure at 1.5 hours later. I already prepared most of the things that I expected to need in the next 3 days however I managed to actually depart only at 7:30 a.m. due to the decision to pack some more things. It was very foggy weather and it took me about 2 hours with my car to arrive at the destination. I was firstly greeted by my stepmother and then I went to spoke to my father who was still very weak and rested in his bed. I find out that he was not actually in a complete come during his stay at the hospital but just very sick so he slept most of the time. He and my stepmother got ill at the same time however she got well quite fast while his condiction became worse. So much that he collapses on the floor when he wanted to return from the bathroom and she called my brother who then called a doctor and he then ordered an ambulance. There was even a danger of my father dying if he would not be assisted in a timely manner.

After a lunch that my stepmother prepared it was time to meet with my date. She gave me the address of where to pick her up. When I met her face looked much more exhausting than I expected and her handshake was very week. She just received a period and complained about the headache. Despite this, we decided to go for a walk around the Bled lake that takes about 2 hours to complete. She started to explain the problems in the relationship with his husband and how she got addicted to smoking and pain-killers, how her eyesight deteriorated, how she has a problem with her stomach and minor problems with her lungs. She has been looking for a place to move for over 6 months with no success and she also wants to change jobs since her current boss is also very abusive. During the walk around the lake, we also had a drink at a restaurant in the middle and had a byte at a pizzeria when we completed the full circle.

Considering that she is not even divorced completely and her emotional state I suggested her to first take care of her affairs, to move to her own apartment, find a better job and to improve her emotional end physical health. I did not consider appropriate to continue dating her since also due to distance this would represent too much stress for myself. And my current situation is also such that I am developing my new business services and have to invest a lot of my time and energy in that. So I took her back to her place with my car and we decided to only be friends for now. After I arrived at my father's place I also send her a link to free online DIP Lite course so that she can assist supporting herself with the help of experienced live buddies. And I decided to not wait for one day and to meet her for another day when she will be off work since the connection was not like I wished for.

The next day I had breakfast with my stepmother. After that, I went to visit my father's colleague that he wanted to meet him since he supposedly needed my photography and graphic design services. I already called him the day before to schedule the hour of my arrival. When I got there he took me through all of his woodwork workshops and then he showed me his extensive collection of antiques since he is in a final stage to open a private museum. We then went to his kitchen and had a very long talk. He showed me the photos that he took of his collection and what for of a folded pamphlet would he like. However, it turned out that he actually did not need my services and he already talked to a nearby printer to finalize the pamphlet for him. My father also made some models of what was his suggestion for the pamphlet however he did it in his usual intrusive and his colleague did not like that at all.

After that, I also visited my brother despite the suggestion of my father to leave him alone since he is very busy with his work and is in conflict with his neighbor. When I arrived at his workshop I gave him a call and asked him if now is the appropriate time for me to meet him. He opened the door and we had a chat while he was still doing some work on his computer and digital printing machines. Very soon he started to express his resentment for me moving out of the house without consulting him about that and how he felt left behind. And then how he resented me for telling his wife that I have doubts two of them being compatible. I also shared my perspective about that which was very different from how he experience past events. During the conversation with him, I found it very odd that my body has been shivering and I was not able to stop it despite my conscious effort to have a relaxed and equal talk with my brother as equals. After about an hour of talking, he said that he must take his younger daughter to a nearby city and buy something at a mall and that he will call me when we return for us to continue the conversations.

So I went to my father's place to pack my things. He asked me if his young co-worker that purchased a Bled Castle Mediaeval Printshop from him can go with me since he has to fetch his repaired van from a mechanic near the city where I live. I agreed and was looking forward to exchanging recent experiences with him during the trip. Then my brother called me and I went back to his place to continue the chat. He expressed concerns about what my desires would be in regards to inheritance in case if our father dies and that he is interested in keeping our father's apartment for his older daughter. And it was also not clear what will happen with or father's home museum of print and paper. However, we did not have the time to come to any agreement about that since it was already time for me to depart.

During the trip back to my current home area that took two hours I had a long conversation with my father's young co-worker. What I found out was that he had no interest in taking over my father's museum and that he might only be interested to buy the handmade paper production tools from him. What he suggested was to keep the museum as it is so that groups of people can come to see it and that my father already proved that there is no interest from any individual or organization to relocate it to a more proper place. And we also talked about our private lives during the drive in the dark and foggy weather. After I have dropped him at his mechanic, we had a one-hour talk with the mechanic and his wife since they were good friends of my father and I visited them for the first time. Finally, I continued the trip to my home an hour before midnight.

What I concluded is that my brother has established his business well in these past years and he does not need to worry about the orders and negotiate the prices anymore. His daughters are becoming independent and he is looking at how to invest his profits and available time so that closest family members will have most of the future interests met. So I plan to continue the conversation with him and then see what kind of agreement we will able to establish for ourselves.

Related suggested Eqafe education audios:
Emotional Relationships
The Dependence of Independency
A Martyr for my Brother
Life Review of a Dependent Personality
When Your Old Life Holds You Back
Despite My Best Intentions

Day 138: Home remedy for cold feet

This is the first blog post related to my initial post titled The cause for cold legs. Contrary to popular home remedies for cold feet where one can assist oneself temporarily with some physical intervention, I will be talking here about psychological causes and permanent solution for cold feet that everyone can effectively apply also at home. Because it has been indicated that cold feet is usually the physically manifested consequence of events from the past when one has separated itself from self. For detailed context please read my previous blog post since here I will be focusing on the next step which is analysis and deconstruction of the first event in my past that I feel is related to the condition of me having cold feet and legs for over a decade. And the the first event that I can remember in relation to self-judgement is being physically punished by my parents in early years of my childhood.

In the initial years of my life I have been living with my parents and my younger bother in a two storey apartment building with four apartments. I have shared one medium sized room with my brother and he has was sleeping on the upper deck of our bunk bed. I do not remember much about what my brother and I were doing in the first 10 years of my life, but I do very much remember a specific punishment that my father applied when I have obviously done something wrong. The punishment was to kneel for quite a long period of time in our doorway after my father would layer some rice on the floor in order for the pain on my knee to be much grater that pressing just agains a flat ground. I would have to keep my body straight up and my hands on the back. I would stay in such position crying until my mother would be able to convince my father that I have suffered enough.

What is strange is that I do not remember details of any event that lead to consequence of me being punished in such way. I however do remember my parents telling me about two occasions where I did significant damage to the apartment. One was due to throwing some heavy objects at my brother that resulted in shattered window glass while we were chasing each other around the flat. And one was by me flooding the bathroom in order to create a sea like environment to play with my brother. However I think I was punished by kneeing for much lesser offences like doing something to my brother where he would then tell on to our father and he then decided to discipline me in described way. The bottom line is that I have been outraged at my father using such cruel punishment. And he also used to spank me very hard with his belt in other occasions. I had thoughts like: “Parents should never hurt their children!” and “How come that my father is not able to find any other way od raising me that using brute force?”. Thus I developed a resentment and anger towards my father and started to feeling sorry for myself, creating a self-victimisation character for myself and thus separating me from myself.

However any of such emotional reactions is a representations of abdicating self-responsibility for playing own part in the timeline of events. And not remembering what I have done and what I could done different in order for the consequences to be different is a convenient excuse for me not wanting to take full self-responsibility for my own life. Because every moment that we participate in becomes part of ourselves and creates a memory that we are able to access if we only decide to. This does not mean that we must now instantly recall every single moment from the start of our existence to current moment, however it is important that we make sure to remember with what kind of thoughts, emotions, words and physical actions we have participated in the most traumatic past event for which we solely blame something or someone out of ourself while claiming absolute innocence of self. Thus I will now take back my self-responsibility and pick parts of myself that I have separated myself from by analysing my past memories connected to being painfully punished by my father. I will be applying tools of self-honesty, self-forgiveness, and self-corrections as taught in the excellent free online course DIP Lite that I recommend also to everyone else:

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed to use forgetfulness as convenient excuse to abdicate my responsibility for what I have done in the past and to claim innocence for everything that I am not able to remember. I realise that I am fully responsible for every thought, emotions, word and deed that originated from myself and that if I have forgot about them in the later stage, I am still responsible for the consequences that have manifested based on my involvement in past events. Thus I commit myself to look into myself where all memories of my past are stored and to take back my power of creation to fully embrace all dimensions of the past events where I have played my role as co-creator.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to see the events in my past only through eyes of self-interest where I have believed that no matter what I do, no one has right to harm me in any way, especially my parents. I realise that I have also harmed others, especially my brother however I have abdicated responsibility for my action by claiming that I have just been playing and that any my action during the play should not be taken seriously and I should not be hold accountable for the results of the play. I commit myself to look at the memories of my actions during play time and take full responsibility for every single of my actions.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to tease my brother and seek his attention and to in a similar way also seek attention from my parents in order to experience positive feelings of being accepted. I realise that I have acted from a point of self-interest where I have just wanted to have fun while completely disregarding other individuals around me and their personal interest. I commit myself to when and as I have desire to entertain myself and have fun, not to jump carelessly on other but to also see and understand their current state of the mind, their willingness to play and to interact with them in such a way that they do not feel unpleasant or even feel pain.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself not wanting to understand that my father had used force and pain to discipline me only in occasions where I did not want to listen to his preceding verbal warnings where I had the opportunity to stop myself, however I did not. I realise that my father decided to physically hurt me only when he exhausted all other ways of trying to communicate with me in a nice and pleasant way. I commit myself to always respond to first attempt of someone trying to communicate with me and to also understand their point of view.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to label my father as violent tyrant that has without any reason decided to inflict pain on me instead of realising that he has purely responded to me behaving as careless individual where I have created damage and pain for my brother and my parents. I commit myself to fully understand and accept my father and his responses while playing a role of my parent since he has done all in his power to be the best father for me and my brother, considering all the limitations that he also accepted and allowed during his childhood and later years. I am thus greatly thankful to my father for all the care that he expressed by being more that good provider for our whole family.

In relation to this blog post, I also recommend listening to educational audio titled Growing Apart from the Parenting - Perfecting the Human Race series at Eqafe web store and engaging in DIP Lite free online course where you will learn how to become a master of self-analysis and true healing.

Day 19: Expectations breed excitement and disappoitment

Days 16 to 18 are in my Slovenian blog

Throughout my life I have been doing different things. Every time I discovered something new, I became very excited and wanted to share my findings with others. I explained to others the magnificent details of the things that I found amazing. However in a while I went to the next step by discovering something that was even more exciting than the previous thing. It was like climbing the top of the mountains. Every time I would reach a peak, I would with enthusiasm share the magnificent view from the top, however in time I would discover that there is an ever higher mountain nearby.

In time I learned that I can not possible know how many mountains are still out there in the existence and what mountain is the ultimate in height. Thus I started to share my discoveries with others with less excitement, like I would talk about any other thing. I found out also that even if I would explained my finding to others with biggest enthusiasm, some would not be able to understand the point fully and would not be able to get excited as much as I did. Some would even start to pull me down and claim that I am crazy and that what I found out must be a lie and would not believe it. In that cases I would then become very disappointed, sad and angry.

Similar point has showed up in regards to my business and sales. It is common knowledge that if you are a businessman or salesman, the success of the sales depends upon your belief or understanding about the quality of the product. You have to get excited for the product or service that you are selling. You have the understand the value and the quality of the goods and that customers would be very satisfied if they would possess it. So then you start to explain the benefits of the product to the prospects with excitement and passion with hopes that they would take it. Consequently successful presentation brings joy and happiness and if there are no sales, disappointment, anger and depression appears in ones mind.

However successful businessman and salesman have learned not to swap moods regardless of the result of the sales presentation. With practice one develops the ability of staying emotionally stable on every single occasion. This is achieved by understanding the reality of every single business which is that regardless of how valuable product you have, never will everybody want or be able to buy the product when introduced with the benefits of the product. So every time you try to sell something, there would be some that will buy it and some that would not buy it even if you present with all the glamour in the world. Always there will be acceptance and rejection.

This is so because firstly the purchase power and peoples's interest change during time. For example you might in one occasion present the product to someone and the person would absolutely like and want the product but at that time it would be broke, it would not have enough money to buy it and it would thus decline the purchase. Then in some other occasion, the person that you present the product would have more than enough money to buy your product but would not like it or need it at that time due to different desires or priorities. However the person's interest or priorities or wants and the person's purchase power or the amount of money they currently poses constantly changes.

So the main point in every sales is to be always aware that NO does not mean, NO NEVER, but just NO AT THIS TIME. The same person that currently declined the purchase due to lack of money could soon get enough money and buy the product later. Or some person who has currently no interest in the product could soon become very interested in it due to change in it's life circumstances. Thus it is important to always accept this reality and never get to excited in someone buys the product and especially never get angry and create resentment towards the person who currently does not buy the product. It is best to every single time allow the prospect to say NO without any bad feelings.

Based on this realization it is suggested to at the beginning of presentation to clearly express to the prospect that it is OK to say NO, that you really do not care if they say YES or NO and that you will be just fine and in total acceptance with any decision about the purchase that they made at the end. And this is not best only in sales but in any single situation in life. Even in personal relationships with others you experience acceptances and rejections. So it is generally in all times suggested to always be aware of the fact that sometimes the answer is YES and sometimes is NO. And in each case you are to fully accept the reality, understand that there are substantial reasons for that decision and that by not accepting the reality you just harm yourself by creating the energy of the good or bad feelings in you mind.

2012 - Facing with feelings of envy

I have been observing my subtle instant reactions through the day and there have been many. Let's begin with the first one which is the envy towards other people. So when I observe achievements of other people, the feeling of envy cames up that then manifests as irritation and itching feeling on the skin. In this way I reacted today when I observed and invitation to art exhibition of some young painter, then when I got invitation to a workshop of some of my FaceBook friend and I immediately went into feeling of envy.

My thoughts were: "I wish I would be that guy or girl that excels so perfectly". When I ask myself why have I separatem myself from what I observed, I can see that I have associated these achievements and people with my imagination that those people are praised by other people and that they are successful and wealthy, as I also want to be. But if I look to this point, I can see, that this is my own created belief and projection and not true at all. Firstly it is me, who have interpreted the information in a way that made these people something special and more than me, and it is me who projected certain social and financial status onto these people.

Next level of this self-deception is that I have defined myself as unable to achieve those results that these people displayed, which is again not true. With persistance and focus everyone can basically achieve anything. All is connected to ones family history, environment, education, so I would be able to achieve the same if born in different body and family. It is my own created perception and projection that people with smiling faces on the photos are successful and happy and it has nothing to do with reality.

And if I go even more deeper, I can become aware that those photos that I reacted on were displayed on my computer monitor, which gives another dimension to the structure of my reactions. The point is that the picture on the monitor is composed out of square pixels of different hue and luminosity. My eyes and brain then composes these pixels into picture and gives it a certain meaning. But the fact is that every pixel on digital photo can be manipulated and does no necessary represent the physical reality. This is especially true in the fashion and advertising where every detail is carefully retouched.

We are all hiding beneath the masks of personality, trying to convince others that we are worth of acceptance and competing with the rest in this system in order to accumulate enough money for our needs. Especially in politics there is a lot of deceptions and fake faces where competition is immense and lack of honesty is extensive. So even if one displays face of happiness, the starting point of this happy face can be self-interest and manipulation. Thus it is best not to automatically associate any facial expression or statement of others to anything specific, until one really gets to know the person and find out what he truly stand up for.

1. I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed to associate facial expressions of people with level of success and wealth instead of realizing that everyone can pretend thus judging one, based on the outer appearance is illusional.
   
   
2. I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed to associate digital pictures with physical reality instead of realizing that every picture can be manipulated and retouched extensively and can be very different from the state of physical reality that currently exists.
   
   
3. I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed the feeling of envy towards individuals that I defined as successful instead of realizing that succes in current system means only to be more deceptive and abusive and that true succes will only come when we implement the Equal Money System that will remove the necessity of us constantly competing and fighting each other once and for all.
   
   
4. Next time when I observe other people's facial expression or photos, I breathe, I remain here and communicate with them as one and equal with them, investigating what real experiences in their lives are and invite them to also participate in the process of self-honesty and establishment of world equality system.

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