Initial effects
After I recapitulate I feel heavy and important. It’s disheartening because I’ve worked hard to cultivate my mood. This importance carries over into my daily interactions and the shift is dramatic. Upon seeing glimpses of my true self, I don’t feel so confident. Upon realizing that I still have loads of self-importance it causes me to doubt my judgment. Please help with your experences and advice. :blink:
D5 Creation
I haven’t really done serious recapitulation (lately I tried and got my neck hurting and had an awfull headache for days…) but I had an idea that what if you should focus in recapitulation more into other people and less into yourself? Listen what people say, see what they do. Don’t get much into “how do/did I feel, what did/do I think”.
Just an idea…
Recapitulation has never made me feel heavy and important. I would assume that it might be causing this feeling in you either because you aren’t breathing in (calling back) the energy that you left behind, and breathing out (releasing) the energy that others have left in you… or because the feeling of “confidence” that you have cultivated in yourself before the recapitulation may be flawed in some way. It may in fact just be another level of self importance that the recapitulation is helping you to dissolve. But these are just my assumptions, I could be way off.
When I do the recapitulation, I tend to see it as a very fulfilling experience. I see and feel the light, colors, sounds and smells of the room or area that I’m recapitulating, and I breath in the energy of things that I didn’t really pay attention to when I previously lived the experience. And it is like the energy of sun filling my entire body. Then I breathe out the feelings that I recieved from whoever I was with at the time. I try not to judge the situation, I just breathe out every part of them. Each of these interactions have in some way created the person that I’ve become, and I am grateful that I was able to share moments with these people and then I let them go. Regardless if I let them go in the recapitulation or at the moment of death, I will without question, have to let them go.
I intend it to be a positive experience. I intend it to be fullfilling. And it is. But it takes practice.
It’s funny, I so wanted people to “tell me like it is” because I thought I could apply it immediatly, (and that’s a big I). I was procrastinating on the recapitulation and I thought it was because I wanted to be “authentic” in doing it. I know now the real reason was I didn’t want to look inside. Thanks ensonar. I wasn’t trying to be a warrior I was a wanna be sorcerer. I didn’t want to face the fact the I’m probably not another Don Juan, and for all I know maybe I’m a crappy warrior. This has made me re-think everything because I realized that my main modivation for beginning this path was self-importance. Is that what DonJuan meant when he said that there was no volunteers allowed?That teaches me a few things. I used my progress in dreaming and my ability to anaylze social interactions as validation on my progress in warring against self-importance, but I was just nibbling around the edges of the Gigantic idea of myself as the smartest, most wisest, channel of the spirit. And it was hard to let go!! You’d think something so obviously wrong and irrelevant would be easy. Now everything feels different, but at the same time it feels like having to start over again. The quote by “someone rather”; “Everone is ambitious, either to be or to do”, makes since. I’m going to try to do my best, for a chance, instead of trying to be the best.
Wow, I’ve never heard from a man, not in the Net nor in the real life anything like that. Not a single man to my ears nor eyes EVER has realized or admidded that he has been thinking too much of himself. Every man always takes it for granted that he is the king of kings, semigod…
The arrogance of men is unbeatable.
😆
The weakness of women, on the other hand, is a lack of sense of humour.
Women are arrogant just as much. Self-importance is the only thing that drives action. Every thought, every word.
What makes one act if s/he has no more self importance? The Spirit.
No wonder that many of us feel so empty inside. We have lost the contact to the Spirit.
I reconcidered my posts and realized that maby I should had mentioned that the arrogance of men and the lack of sense of humour of women are both ways to be self important. Thinking about nagualism I believe we can see differences in sexes, though it’s fashionable in the Net to pretend we have no sex at all and are just talking heads…
Where did self importance come from? If we believe there was once cavemen and -women, then one should think about this:
If a cavewoman had children, she would had been very stupid if she would had been just laughing her ass off when her children did something dangerous. If a caveman had to defend his family, he had to feel himself that much important that he trusted himself in battle and he was able to attack beasts and enemies.
The problems arise from that that we don’t remember what is the difference between abstract and concrete things. It’s ok to defend yourself or your companions when there is a real thread that threatens your life! But when it’s all about just communicating, expressing one’s ideas, acting with people in non-lifethreatening situations – then the self importance IS just self importance, empty fantasies and energy aimed into wrong situation.
Don Juan mentioned something almost identical: Protect yourself, but don’t defend yourself… or in other words, Protect your body, not your self-image.
And as far as men and women. I think stereo-typing rarely works. I’ve known some extremely funny women, and some truly humble men. I can’t say I’ve met a person without a trace of self-importance, but that of course, goes for both men and women.
Do u rememeber where say that ? I agree completly, but want can show the source.
Well… it’s been a while since I read it. Maybe The Power of Silence, but I’m can’t say for sure.
Never heard of such a stereotype:
Some of stereotypes probably depend on where you live.
Anyways, imho some women think that they’re less self-important than men due to the fact of covering it very well, including from themselves. Women almost always pretend, mostly unconsiously, to seem very soft and sweet 🙂 There’s usually more room for self-humiliation than for self-importance, but it’s two sides of the same coin, you’re still caring for your image-for-others.
Historical reasons.. Who knows. I think that they’re natural, not historical. Nature originally made it so that women were beautiful and physically weak and men were obsessed with sex and strong (so that they could capture as many women as they wanted), in order to produce more people 🙂 Women’s insightfulness and unconsious pretending has something to do with it, too. They need to fool men in order to keep them around while they’re pregnant. And men were made dense in that field, in order to never know that they’re being manipulated for the sake of kids. And whatever men like to do, be it hunting or science, all of that they do for kids’ comfort…
Such a universal stereotype that it seems offensive. But I think that nature ‘planned’ it to be so and never ‘cared’ for things like Spirit, only for reproduction.
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Speaking of self-importance, it can be a useful tool sometimes, imho 🙂 I used to deny to myself things that it urged me to do, until there was almost nothing I wanted to do anymore. It made me very unhappy and uncaring. Now it turns out that you can give yourself an impulse to do something if you intentionally let a self-important thought in your head. It works so well, even when you know why you’re doing it 🙂 To stick to the topic, that trick helps me to recapitulate when I don’t want to.
As a general rule it makes sense that the more you recapitulate and self-stalk the more you are able to deal with people in general. One of our greatest challenges is to navigate thru the social order without becoming a part of it, my question is this; in the first 5 years of warriorship what do you think is the optimum attitude to get the most out of our dealings with people without becoming so gregarious you self sabatoge? How have you dealt with this seeming paradox?
I oscillate between being withdrawn from interactions, and judging people, and being this high energy, gregarious, motor mouth, who is pretty good at getting what he wants . Finding a balance between the two has proved most challanging. On the one hand I hate the feeling of judging and the way it constricts my perception ,and on the other I like the feeling of (percieved?)notoriety which works against my aims too. When I choose to do neither I end just feel sorry for myself. I don’t know the answer to the above question I posed, I don’t even have an opinion at this point. But am eager to develope one.
I’m not sure how to answer that either. But I think as with most things, it’s going to depend on each of us individually.
For example, I was always very shy, and so for me, being gregarious can be a not-doing if approached properly. For someone who is very outgoing and talkative, perhaps it would be good to spend some time being quiet and listening.
And I would imagine that as with everything else it will come down to balance, and becoming more and more aware of our self-imporance, so we are no longer uncertain of our own motives.
But most importantly, we must recapitulate! Without that we’ll just be trying to reason things out, which is basically what we’re doing here.