The hard choices

I'm too easily caught up in thinking about things.  It's a lot harder to implement and make a change on the deeper emotional level.  I have been thinking about this stuff for a long time and I'm fairly certain that I have found a root cause and I feel like if I can learn to relax then everything will be "fixed."  My mind will relax and I will have perfect vision, I won't be worried about what other people think about me so I will be socially relaxed and I won't close up and create a shell but my "self" will grow, and I won't be overly focused on external commandments but I will experience true spiritual growth.  That sounds very succinct and simple, however it's much easier said than done.  Learning to relax that part of me is very very difficult.   There is a game that I learned in elementary school that makes for a good analogy.  Turn your elbows up so both palms are facing outwards then clasp your hands palms together with your fingers intertwined.  Rotate your hands in towards your body and up until they are in front of your face.  Your arms are pretty tangled up now.  Then ask somebody to point at a finger and ask you to move it.  They cannot touch the finger, only point.  Because your arms are so twisted your mind has a hard time distinguishing what muscles move which finger.  It usually takes a couple of tries to move the correct finger.  That is kind of how I feel, I can see the finger that I need to move but knowing what muscles affect that finger is tough.

I have to admit, I haven't been able to give a full 100% effort like I would like to.  I am busy with school, work and family at home that makes time to practice meditation and self exploration difficult to find.  Am I afraid to spend time working on it because it might not work, then I am wrong and I don't know the solution?  Maybe i'm just so used to living like I am that I am afraid of my new self emerging?  I am slightly afraid that my wife won't accept the "unrestrained" me, drastic lifestyle changes would be difficult for her because she isn't trying to change.  I also feel like it's difficult to explore while I am a member of the church.  There are rules to follow, a set path and if you leave it your sinning and evil.  I feel like I want to leave the church while I do this exploration.  That's a big step though and affects more than just me.  It does affect my family.  I need to clarify again, I'm not against the church, but I want an open sandbox to work in.  I want to do away with all constraints so that I am free to grow how I want.  That's not to say that I will go out and break all the rules, just that I won't feel controlled to do something but that I will do what I feel I need to do.

So while writing this I clarified in my mind where I'm getting held up.  I feel like I need to leave the church for the freedom to grow but i'm afraid of the impact that would have on my family.  That is what's paralyzing me.  So, ... do I leave the church or do I find another way to experience the freedom.  A good question.

Natural Living

I'm going to try and lay out what I have been developing for my "Natural Religion." 

I believe the world is designed for us, and is full of symbolism to guide and teach us.  The physical world is a reflection of the spiritual world.  Thoughts can and do change things in the physical realm.  Our own body is the most direct connection we have to understanding the physical world.  By learning to interpret physical elements one can be lead to understand spiritual meanings.  More simply, physical reflects spirit, so understanding physical can be understanding spiritual.  There are other ways to understand things of the spirit, but I feel drawn to this understanding. 

The main way I see to understanding the physical realm on a spiritual level is to learn to understand my own body.  My body will tell me everything it needs.  It will tell me when I am lacking a certain nutrient, if I need sunlight, if I need sleep, if I need excercise, what type of excercise etc.  The tricky part about understanding the body is that it can give two different types of signals, it might say for example "I want candy" and at the same time it will say "I'm feeling sick and it would be better if you fasted to give me time to recover."  Learning to understand what signal is a need and what is a want is where the understanding will come from.  In order to do that it is necessary to do my best to live healthy and follow the feelings I get from my body.  I'm not a fan of pain medicatio because it numbs the body and turns off the signal.  I want to study natural remedies that allow my body to stay in full communication with me. 

This all seems vague as I try and write it down, so i'll try and solidify it a little bit more for another post.

So it begins

About two years ago I started on a journey that has left me feeling very much without a base, but at the same time I feel like I have found a direction to look.  I have always known that I have had a few "blocks" that have impeded my growth, I tend to be a social phobic, and I've noticed that I can really close up tight when I put myself in uncomfortable social situations.  I have found ways to get around it, for years I have had to deal with it.  I spent two years of my life trying to talk to strangers while on a mission.  But I always eventually had a resurgence of my social phobia and I would pull into my shell for a while.  I realized that I was always putting up a facade, whenever I would be social I would hide myself behind a mask.  Eventually I would try and put away the mask and I would feel like as soon as I did I got the impression that people didn't really want to be with me anymore.  I believe that this is the root cause of all my troubles, and I am now looking for ways to help myself step out from behind the mask and present my true self.  That's actually part of the reason for this blog.  Being afraid to discuss my thoughts leads to them staying inside and sometimes I feel like I might be leaning towards extremes in some opinions that I am developing, so this blog will help get my thoughts out as well as making them available for others to see so i'm not hiding them anymore.  Some of these thoughts might be a little jumbled as they have been bouncing around in my head for a long time, I expect that the first few posts might hard to follow.  Hopefully things will straighten out and become more logical.

I'm going to try and give a little bit more detail on my journey.  In all honesty my journey is really the journey of life and it has been going on for more than the last two years, it's just in the last two years that I have started want to make major changes.  The first step on my path was starting to doubt my religion.  Unfortunately for me, this was a step that I couldn't take until after I had been married.  Really this is something that should have happened in high school I think, but I am a good boy and very good at doing what is "right," so there was never a need to doubt.  If I wasn't getting the results I wanted, I just needed to travel further on the path of life to be more mature to understand it, thus getting married finally put me in the drivers seat, I followed all of the steps and reached a certain point and I wasn't perfect like I thought I should be.  It's funny how it always comes back to this, but after working on it and praying and living righteously I was still an introvert and still closed in on myself.  Somehow that got me to realized that I was to busy following, superficially doing what is right.  My mask was doing what it was supposed to and I really didn't exist away from it.  I felt like the church couldn't be true because I had followed the steps I was supposed to, and it was taking me in the wrong direction.  My "self" was disappearing.  I spent a lot of time researching church history and looking for discrepancies.  I read two different books that made me realize that my problem was not with the church, but it was with me.  The first book was the first book in the series "A Blessing Hitherto Unknown" by Max Skousen.  The book is called "Looking beyond the mark" and it compares the tree of knowledge to the tree of life, the one leading to death and the other to life.  Focusing on knowledge and right and wrong leads to death, but focusing on the love of christ leads to life.  That fit in perfectly with how I was feeling, I had been diligently trying to do what was right, but that's where my focus was and rules can only get you so far.  I feel like true spiritual growth will pull my "self" out rather than let it hide.  The second book that I read is called "Take Off Your Glasses And See."  It's a book that talks about using the Bates method to improve your eyesight.  The main idea behind the Bates method is that you have accustomed yourself to tensing your eyes and you just need to relax them.  Bad eyesight is really just a symptom of another problem, some examples were given of bad social situations at a young age and the person didn't want to see it so they skewed their vision.  I felt like that fit in perfectly with me, as I have very bad eyes and I thought it reasonable that that could be a symptom of my social ineptitude.  Both books combined to tell me that I was focusing to hard on the wrong things and that I needed to relax and let myself out.  Now I am not against the church, but I am still trying to figure out how to live in it without falling back into my previous habits.  That's why I feel like I am missing a base.  But I feel like I can look for ways to help my "self" come out and grow, and that will be "pure religion."  

It might be in part due to my reading about the Bates method-- I have always been a physical person anyway-- But I find myself wanting to look for understanding in the physical realm.  I want to use my body as an indicator, as a guide to show me where I need to improve.  For example, my eyes are bad, which is a symptom of a deeper problem in social insecurity.  Other things are that I tend to store stress in my lower back, which I don't quite know what that could be caused by yet.  I want to spend time learning to interpret my body signals so that I can act and live in a more spiritual plane.  I guess the theory behind that is that the physical body should be perfect, but only if the spirit is perfect.  It has a direct link on a level that is not the conscious level, so if I learn to understand it I can gain a better understanding of spirit.  Running is one of my great de-stressers as well as a time that I can open my mind--  I'll probably be writing about minimalist running a little bit later on.  As i'm not quite sure how to approach religion right now, this has kind of reached a level of being a religion for me, but mostly in theory because I've been a full time college student working full time with a wife and daughter at home, so I haven't had much time to really focus on it, just the idea of it.  I am just about to start my last semester and I suspect it won't keep me quite as busy as I have been, so I'll have more time to put my thoughts into action.  This physical body to spirit is one thing that I feel very awkward discussing with anybody; I get one of two responses (which have passed through my minds filter to give me these interpretations) 1: you're a looney, they are completely separate and I don't think I want to be associated with somebody who could believe that, and 2: obviously, you must be an idiot if you didn't realize that, it's so simple that it doesn't even justify giving it any thought.

I've rambled on enough I think.  This has been my last two year journey to get to this point.  Hopefully I will be able to make progress this year and grow the way I want to.