(no subject)

In many cases, I know I'm just preaching to the choir here but I found something on a forum that I found worth copying over here and commenting on. For the sake of your eyes, I've copied and pasted the text upon which I am commenting but if you want to see the original site, go here:

http://www.deardiary.net/show/diaries/721/1131235200

This is just an example of what I find particularly disturbing about some of the more extreme anything goes "new age" beliefs/philosophies/whatever you want to call it. In a nutshell, it says "Do whatever you want! If it feels right to you it must be right!" I'm going to cut this one because it's really long, but if you read it, this particular one isn't just saying you can believe whatever you want, or other ideas that might be ridiculous but relatively harmless. This one actually lists signs of potential health problems and says "Oh, don't worry, this is perfectly normal". This person does not specify where they got the information they posted.

( Without fursther ado...like I said, it's long. )

I know, and I know that there are plenty of other people reading this that know that all kinds of wacky things happen as a result of intense spiritual/religious experience, but to look at many of the things on this list and just chalk them up to signs of "evolving to a higher dimension" or...whatever... without consideration to other possible causes is stupid at best.

Thee may be some folks reading this who have been following my LJ for a while and wondering about me and my own advice. Yes, I can pull a small list of issues from this that were the exact issues that prompted me to start seeing a therapist myself...and alarger list of issues appearing on the list that have been discussed thus far.

There are also a couple of physical issues that I have experienced listed here which I have discussed with doctors in the past and determined that nothing is particularly wrong with me. For example, I know when my blood sugar drops...it's usually a result of me not eating for 8, 12 hours or more...if I'm not hungry, I just don't eat. Simple equation.

So no, I'm not just being a woo-woo floof bat and not taking my own advice.

(no subject)

Had an appointment with the therapist tonight and it just started out all weird. I got there early, first of all- I usually get there right at 615 for my appointment, but I've been leaving the house by five or just after lately, so I got there almost half an hour early. I got up to the floor where his office is, and got off the elevator. I was listening to my ipod and thinking about a number of things, the most immediate being Alex and how I don't know what date she actually died. After her funeral, with the occasional very rare moment of exception, I never thought about the date. It's in the last few days of January, or the first few days of February. I know that the funeral was within the first few days of February. I dropped the thought, I had no real strong reason to dell on it, then the thought popped into my head that I could remember the date if I could remember the date of the walkouts in my high school over the principal's resignation.

Just as I was thinking this, I turned the corner into the hall down to his office. It's a long narrow hall. And I stopped thinking about Alex and high school altogether, and suddenly it dawned on me that the hall looked a LOT longer than I remembered. For some reason, this was really disturbing to me and I started feeling a little panicky. As I made my way down the hall, I started questioning wanting to be there, and started feeling like I needed to turn and run away. I also started to feel very outside of my mind, and at that point, put my hand up to the wall, and ran my fingers along it as I walked. I noticed that one door was removed and plastered over, and another one a bit farther down was as well. I can't for the life of me figure out why, but this was really...there was something extremely wrong about it for some reason and as I got closer to the office, i kept getting more and more panicky until I was at the door and nearly hyperventilating....and I suddenly didn't know why I was hyperventilating, it occurred to me that I had forgotten everything I had thought about since I turned the corner to that hallway.

At this point, it was still 545, I had half an hour til I was supposed to be there so I decided to walk back up the hall and try to remember. As I walked back up the hall, the panicky feeling went away and by the time I got back to the corner, I felt normal and remembered everything that had passed through my mind a few minutes before. I turned to walk down the hall again, and the exact same thing happened, I became more and more panicky, and eventually forgot what I had just been thinking. I walked up the hall again, and again I felt calm when I got to the far end, I turned around, walked down it one more time, felt more and more panicky, but when I realized I was forgetting what I was thinking, I caught myself and started repeating the chain of thought in my mind so that I wouldn't lose it again.

When I was back at the office door, it took me a minute to convince myself that I really should turn the knob...when I did, it was locked. I tried the second door (it's one of those setups where there are two doors side by side, one of them leads right into the office, one leads into a little waiting room with another door into the office.) It was locked also. I was continuing to feel panicky. Knocked on the door, no response.

I remembered getting a phone call earlier today that I didn't answer right away. It was from an unfamiliar Baltimore number. I didn't get to it before it went to voice mail. when I checked it, it turned out to be one of the cops from the other week when I was robbed with a few more questions for me. but when I first saw the number, for some reason, the first thought that jumped into my head was that Michael had to cancel tonight's appointment due to an emergency or something. So, with the locked door, this leaped to mind again. At the same time, i was thinking other things...for some reason, I thought it was the wrong day, or I was in the wrong place. I checked the date on my phone and compared it to the appointment card...same day, same time. I looked at the card for an office number or address...no address on the card, but it was absolutely absurd, I've been here a number of times before. while thinking all this ridiculousness, I was also thinking "It's not even 6pm yet. I'm early." and trying to calm myself down.

I convinced myself to wait, and still half-hyperventilating, leaned against the wall opposite the door and slid down until I was sitting, and then thought about running to find some coffee. My breathing started to calm down and just as I was considering my possible coffee options in the building, Michael came walking down the hall and asked how I was doing. My response was "Well, I was fine.

All this took place in the space of....ten, maybe 12 minutes.

Got in and started talking and found out, first of all that I'm not the only person whose ever been freaked out by this hallway, for some reason other people find it creepy too (I never really thought anything of it before. It's a hallway in an office building. Reasonably nondescript.)

After describing what had gone through my head and the walking up and down the hall to remember, I remembered also the song I had been listening to on my ipod at the time- Breaking Point by the Moody Blues (lyrics were posted a few entries back. Entirely coincidental, as my ipod was set to random shuffle on a playlist of about 100 songs, I didn't even realize that song was on the list til it started playing.) So I mentioned this, he knew what song I was talking about and agreed that it could definitely elicit some disturbing feelings and probably wasn't helping any.

That aside it was a good appointment. Between talking and later thinking about things on the way to work, I suddenly put a bunch of things together regarding...well, a whole bunch of things having to do with myself, the gods, religion in general and WTF I find so blasted fascinating about opening the gates in ADF rituals. I'm trying to figure out how to organize my thoughts on that one and write it out because it would make one hell of a personal essay.

Oh, there was one extremely amusing moment...at one point, he had me shuffle some cards with keywords on them and pick three and see if those words brought to mind anything regarding some things I was talking about. One of the words I picked from this shuffled deck was....dun-dunnnnnn "ascension". This was very funny and of course, I had to explain why. After looking at these cards, and considering the words, and it being pointed to me how exactly I had placed them on the table- which I never even thought about- this was when a lot of the thoughts started to gel in my mind. I was very clear that the word "ascension" meant nothing to me in this particular context...however it did make me think of some other things....more on all that, hopefully soon. The other two were "protection" and "breakthrough" placed in the order ascension, protection, breakthrough...which definitely meant something to me once I saw it. Once again, I will attempt to explain this later.