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.