Hey guys, I’m here day 17. No More Rocking Back and Forth . I thought I’d talk about several things. The first thing is the art of play. Now, there are therapies on Play therapy, because it’s crucial to learn how to laugh again. And it might seem very, you know, common sense or what’s the point you know what’s so big about laughing and here’s the thing is, if you’re an addict or if you have Asperger’s or autism, you could go years without laughing, especially with the current political events right now.
You know everyone’s wound up really tight. And so, I made a snowman today. It was pathetic I rolled it down this hill, and it kept breaking up.
But I started kicking it like a soccer ball, and I just started running, and I was kicking it and it was exploding all over the place. And I just started to laugh a little. I was like, wow, this is really cool this is a good feeling. You know, and I was tapping into my inner child. And it’s all for free.
They see that joy is actually a higher vibration than love, joy is the highest vibration you can go before hitting the higher realms of, you know, Nirvana and whatnot but that takes years of meditation and fasting joy we can get to any time.
And so, I’m 48 years old. Last fall, no last year has been just crazy. You know why I mean with all the, all the crazy stuff going on, people losing their businesses, and it’s really hard to laugh, especially when there’s all this fear mongering going on.
It’s just not a good time for many, especially people with autism Asperger’s, and people with addictions are running into their addictions, more than ever, you know suicide rate is like up 600%, you know, and what’s crazy is during all of this, they were like, Oh yeah, we’re gonna keep CBD stores open during all of this craziness and the reason why they did that is because they want you to numb out, they don’t want you to know what’s going on.
No More Rocking Back and Forth
So anyways, I’m out here the last two weeks in North Carolina, and got blessed with four inches of snow. And I’m just tapping into my inner child so I’ve been sitting still a lot. I used to rock back and forth 14 hours a day. And I was really scared to quit that January 1 because, how am I going to replace 14 hours of rocking with something else.
And you know we’re addicted to dopamine and we want a little reward or a treat. And we want to look forward to something, usually throughout the day. We want to get little reward. It could be a candy bar or a cigarette or your special TV show or something. We look forward to something all the time.
And what I really like about monks and nuns, is that they just worship God, they gave their whole life to worship God. And I find that fascinating that’s why one of my favorite documentaries is called into great silence. And it’s about a monastery in the French Alps. And there’s, you know like 50 or 100, monks, and they just devote their whole life to, you know, chanting and praying. And I’ve always admired them. I’m like, how can you live life without looking for something.
And they call it pleasures of the flesh, so you’re either. You’re either in pleasures of the flesh you’re seeking rewards and treats, or you’re in pure devotion to God. And we usually fall in the middle somewhere where you know sometimes we diet.
And we do get and we quit addictions and, you know, that’s probably in the middle of the spectrum, then you got the people that just party hard. You know the whole, the whole YOLO movement, you only live once, those guys are just killing themselves by partying. They’re usually in their 20s.
And then you got the other extreme, with the monks. So, I know I’m rambling I’m trying to get this all organized for this video but I really just want to talk spontaneously, and talk to you guys like you’re my friends, because I don’t have any friends in real life, and not many people knew that I had Asperger’s when I was growing up, they used to make fun of me.
Even my dad laughed at me. But I think he laughed at me because he thought what I was doing was cute, or unique, you know like I used to line up all my fireworks on Fourth of July. I didn’t even want to light them off. I just wanted to organize them on my bedroom floor and take pictures of them, because I liked all their bright colors and labels, I loved the labeling.
You know, and I love stamps. I love little designs and I love little lights, you know like, train sets, you know, you get the little green and red lights on the track. And then you can even get a train that emits real, real smoke, you can smell the smoke.
And so yeah I like those little things, and a lot of guys with Asperger’s like those little things and they’re really good at attention to detail and numbers, and they have a great grasp of their vocabulary. You know I hate it when I mess up words. I used to write a lot. I used to journal three to five pages a day. So words are my friends.
Music is my friend. And, but things are changing I want to sit still and I want to turn off the music and I want to stop running and see who I truly am, and maybe even take off the label of Asperger’s, you know, try not having any label to see where that takes you.
And, and the other thing that my music catches me doing all the time is planning. I’m constantly planning. I always have to have a plan in place, because we’re moving into Texas I’m like okay, when I get there, I want to pay down my credit cards. I want to lose 20 pounds. And we’ll live there for a year and then we’ll move on.
And she’s like, why, you know, it could be a lot better than that. Why plan that, you could lose more, you could, we could wind up somewhere totally different. And I’m like, I know I just, you know, what am I going to talk about if I’m not planning.
And so, that right there is a sneaky segue to avoid the present moment. You know since I’ve been stimming for 40 years, I’ve been rocking and listening to music for 40 years. And for me, just sitting in the present, sitting in the present in silence is completely scary, Because I’m like oh I should be doing something.
What can I do, what can I do, I gotta do something, maybe I’ll clean the kitchen. It’s like I rather clean the kitchen and sit still, it’s crazy. And so it’s unraveling. I’m sitting still, and I’m unraveling. And I’m having, but here’s the thing is that back to the inner child.
You know, kicking that snowball around, and the art of play, makes everything open up. You stop that you stop that incessant tunnel vision obsessing about the future or the past, and you get in the present. You lock in the present by kicking that snowball around. It’s really exciting.
Because, you know, my childhood was great. I was, I was a little entertainer. I laughed. I made my, my family laugh and I used to, you know, sing and play, you know, dance and play invisible guitar and whatever, just to make them laugh. And I was a little showman.
And then reality started to attack me, and I’m a cancer so what that means is that I’m like a crab. I have a hard shell. If you come near me. If you try to get through my shell I attack. So you know if you corner me. I use all I got to get rid of you to get push you away. You know I could be extremely nasty with words.
And, ex girlfriends, know that I could hit below the belt verbally, and it’s just because I had such a soft shell. And I didn’t want to be hurt. And they hurt me I mean i’m not saying I just went around and terrorized people. I got hurt. And instead of going into forgiveness and amends, I would harbor that stuff. I would hold grudges for years.
I also used to tease myself, because I have a lot of Russian heritage. And I used to say that I hold I held Russian grudges like like the great Russian writers Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and, the Russian misery, where hey just talked of gloom and endless winters. And in my 20s when I was drinking.
I really liked that stuff I was like, yeah, I’m a tortured artist. I just live off of one slice of bread a day and some tea. And I write, because I wanted to be a great artist and at that point in life I was like, you gotta be really messed up to be a good writer, or a good artist.
I’m like, look at Van Gogh, he went crazy and shot his ear. You know, there’s tons of artists, Hemingway committed suicide. JACK Kerouac drank himself to death, the list goes on and on and on.
And in my 20s, being an addict, not wanting to face present reality. I justified that I was like, Okay, I’m gonna drink two bottles of wine tonight. And we’re gonna write poetry under the stars. And it was a very fun romantic time.
But in my 30s, alcohol turned against me and then I was just a pathetic guy in the corner puking or passed out or pissing my bed, and all that romanticism that went out the window, 32 years old I had a heart attack got flown to the state hospital had a stent put in my left artery. The Widowmaker.
You know, the doctors were like, we don’t know why you had a heart attack. You’re awfully young, it’s like well I was really drinking hard. I was dehydrated. Drink a fifth of tequila the night before. And I think I was just having withdrawals, and I was starting a new job and stress hot kitchen dehydrated.
And so yeah the romanticism turned into a real tragedy that I didn’t want to live. It wasn’t fun, and I didn’t even want to write about it so there was no brilliant work that came out of that misery or that, you know, something I thought in my 20s would happen if I just abused myself and created a tragic life I would create some brilliant, brilliant work but I didn’t.
Because eventually the alcohol took the took over. Completely. I mean, might as well I’ve just hooked up a IV to my arm with alcohol and just keep me loaded. I’m so hungover, or weak from alcohol and malnutrition. I didn’t even want to lift a beer up to my face and I wanted my girlfriend at the time to go on a beer run twice a day.
I needed beer stocked, you know, and I got nervous when there’s only two beers left, I was like, Oh no, let’s scrape up some money. Let’s go on a beer run. And that was my life 12 years ago.
And then I was done, killing myself. There’s a little seed of of light inside of me. And it was like come on, Erik. Come on, you’re here for a reason and it’s not this. Come on, just stop and you feel it in your gut when it’s time to really stop.
So, how are you guys doing? Are you, are you still using, are you rocking. Are you stimming, are you avoiding reality. What’s going on with you leave a comment. But look at the mountaintops. You can really see the houses when it’s snowing. As you can see the snow on their roof, it’s really windy in this corner, I’ll try to get over here.
So yeah, it’s day 17. And I guess what I do notice is that when I’m happy. It’s very genuine, and it feels really good. And I’ve actually been looking forward to meditating, which is a first. And there’s a fine line there with meditation because you don’t want to look forward to it, where you’re avoiding life, like, Oh, I can go upstairs and just hang out in the dark room and meditate for an hour, and nothing will bug me.
You don’t want to think that way. Because I think that’s avoiding reality. Using meditation. And a lot of people do it. A lot of people get really tricky with how they do their spirituality. You know, Misha was actually. She. She spent 10 years in a monastery type environment. And she saw a lot of people come in that were really happy to be there.
They were so happy to meditate and do the spiritual monk vows and all this stuff. And then a couple people got really clever at avoiding their issues. The deep stuff coming up. One guy. One guy started just gardening, like mad he, he just gardened all day. And then he’d come in and eat dinner and, you know, he would meditate.
But he wasn’t going deep into his inner core, because he was gardening so much. And he was happy he was like, Oh yeah, I’m fine. But he was spiritually bypassing, that’s what it’s called spiritually bypassing and turning around. It’s getting a little cold. And you can spiritual bypass really easily with meditation and stuff so watch how you do it.
You know, set your intention to go deep and to uncover truths about yourself or emotions that you’ve been blocking or suppressing with stemming and addictions and whatnot. And so it’s been a wild ride.
And I’d be pretty happy right now, except for I’m really nervous about moving and hanging out with me says family. Because we’re gonna be living in their house, and I haven’t had roommates for 20 years. It’s just been me and a girlfriend. For the last 20 years. So it’s gonna be hard to have, you know, her sister and her husband in the same house. And you’d be, you know, you might be like a big deal man. It’s just a house of people that you don’t get cuz I’ve been rocking 14 hours a day in silence.
You know, just some extra noise in my life, some extra people some, some more stimulus can really take me over the edge and, hopefully I’m wrong. Hopefully this spiritual work. This month will make me a new person, so hang in there guys leave a comment, hit that subscribe button. And we’ll talk to you tomorrow.
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