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@carmenleelau

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6,925
Following
497
Media
343
Statuses
3,356

ibuprofen enjoyer, receipt destroyer, previously psychedelic researcher, currently fixing pms

Joined July 2019
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
4 months
at a certain point you have to choose
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
1 year
I have a theory that you can only therapize/meditate/work on yourself full-time for about 1-2 years after which you have to re-enter the world or you get stuck there unable to take any real action
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
3 months
if you don’t learn to enjoy the maintenance of life you’ll learn to maintain a life you don’t enjoy
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
10 months
ah, I understand now. prayer is not a genie wish, it's a way of clarifying intentions such that they can unfold in your life, in that way it is a powerful psychotechnology and whether a god answers is not important
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
6 months
asian parents don't believe in mental health because they come from a culture that doesn't actually regard the mind as separate from the body. many mental issues are caused by low level deficiencies (common one is magnesium -> depression). food is medicine
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
5 months
asian girls are obsessed with cute things because it’s a surrogate for the maternal impulse, not a coincidence japan has one of the lowest birth rates and has mascots for every city, cottagecore dessert shops, and catgirls. cambrian explosion of cute superstimuli to cope
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
4 months
some people may not know this but the US quietly banned the sale of incandescent lights nationwide in august 2023, yes THE light bulb exuding warm light with the filament inside that you think of as the prototypical light bulb, the one every clip art drawing is based off of.
@notcomplex_
Alex
4 months
People differ in their ability to perceive flickering light. Some can discern most individual flashes at above 60 Hz while others score below 40 Hz. The mean is 49.3 Hz.
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
3 years
someone put up a Thich Nhat Hanh quote in front of their home and my heart melted
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
1 month
kinda funny how when you first get into meditation the people around you are into the aesthetics, "zen", and want to be a bit more calm and happy and then you keep going until the casuals drop off and it's 99% people who were at one point like 1 step from offing themselves
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
1 year
I basically think you become an embodied expression of the states of consciousness you spend the most time in, so you should choose them wisely, and that this is a much more effective way of guiding yourself to grow than considering your strengths/charms/weaknesses/flaws
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
10 months
don't know how to explain this but objects in your internal landscape have distances between/around them and depending on what those distances are, life can feel very different, and you can play with this
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
7 months
unless you’ve been dysthymic your whole life, depression is a SIGNAL that something in your surroundings needs to change, stop treating it like a dragon that needs to be slain IT’S TRYING TO HELP YOU
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
1 year
You can spend more time trying to get to the bottom of all your trauma (80% -> 100%) or take what you have done so far (0% -> 80% assuming you've put in considerable effort for some time already) and go bump around in the world. Basically you need more information, diff inputs
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
10 months
conversations about addiction overlook how drugs, by nature of how they work in our bodies, do not defect. if you drink alcohol you will experience the effects of alcohol. this predictable feedback provides comfort and that’s why people say stuff like “whisky’s my friend”
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
1 year
If you went on the focused self-improvement arc you're probably already a diff person from when you first started, this is severely overlooked as a strength in that it puts you in a position where you can learn *new information*
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
1 year
part of growing up is making your childhood dreams come true, no matter how simple. maybe you always wanted to buy a fuck ton of strawberry pop tarts or travel to austria or sell hand drawn stickers for 50 cents (whatever your kid self thought was a lot of money). DO IT, TRUST ME
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
10 months
meditators stumbling upon bliss states and getting a taste of freedom: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!! also meditators when they develop mysterious chronic conditions, alcohol feels like poison, and they can't eat their favorite foods anymore: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
3 years
y-you mean I have a poor mental model of the ways I bring joy to people’s lives? and the reasons people like me are rarely the reasons I *think* they like me for? and as a result I should stop trying to predict and just vibe as hard as I can? incredible. put that on the fridge
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
1 year
ok ok hear me out: you should all be making your own personal sigils to defend against your worst fears. it’s simple to do and works well because they’re made by *you*. here’s how
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
2 years
Make stuff only you can make. Stuff that makes you sigh in resignation after waiting for someone else to make happen so you can enjoy it, and realizing that’s never going to happen so you have to get off the couch and do it yourself
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
2 years
When you realize there are folks out there full-time honing skills for psychological control, akin to parasites looking for hosts, your strategy changes. You need a really good memetic (and emotional) immune system, similar to the one we already have for fighting off disease.
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
2 years
I tried using DALL-E to recreate one of my own digital illustrations by inputting a verbal description of it. Left is my original, painted in Photoshop with a Wacom tablet. Right is the generated one. I actually think I like it more, esp. colors! But it does worse on fine details
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
1 year
There are things people Want but are embarrassed to admit it, as if desire is impure, as if we are supposed to want nothing, ask nothing, be nothing, and quietly evaporate into sheepishness, lugging around shells of our lives
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
2 years
I remember this @paulg essay that said that “young people care about prestige because the people they’re trying to impress aren’t very discerning” and it just makes me reflect hard on who in this world I’d actually care about the opinions of in regards to my creative work
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
2 months
@the_wilderless Does this mean she failed to befriend those who stayed relevant? As much as she was choosing them, they were choosing her. I think the one diligently putting their heads down, playing the long game for their work to matter in decades, were not interested in social climbers
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
2 years
I don’t use much willpower anymore, I think the more unintegrated your parts are (how much you fight with yourself internally) the more willpower or self-coercion is necessary to get yourself to act
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
2 months
Every object in your environment is a vibe talisman. Clothing, furniture, home goods, tools, decorative items, walls, floors, everything. The instantaneous impression you get from it is the unique sensorial/attentional imprint it leaves on you, that's what's being transmitted!
@carmenleelau
Carmen
5 months
how design feels in the body. how objects can bring you back to certain emotional contexts. how the creation process is mediated by somatics and emotions. we are antennae, receiving and transmitting
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
2 years
I think if something resonates with you, and you feel strangely drawn to it even if you can't explain why, it's probably pointing to a seed in you that hasn't germinated yet. When you lean into it a whole world opens up to you and you start enjoying it for its own sake
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
2 years
uh oh...are you falling into the trap called "I meditate to reinforce my desire for control and sense of agency because if I just meditate hard enough all my problems will go away and I'll have exactly the life I want"
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
2 years
Your dreams aren’t random, neither are the thoughts that come up when you’re meditating, or the feelings and memories that come up when you massage and stretch certain parts of your body: there is a knowing beyond words
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
2 years
Are you in love with the abstract idea of community (top-down) or do you just want a couple close friends across different interests to reliably show up and remind you the world is vaster than you can imagine (bottom-up)?
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
1 month
Just realized I don't really talk about psychedelics anymore because I learned to meditate (and I use that term loosely—what I'm referring to is actually more like a cluster of skills that can be summed up as "sink into and trust my felt senses, which when listened to carefully,
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
2 years
DALL-E's art is incredible. Here we have "illustration of independent researchers walking above ground out of mycelium" and "pastel hopeful and dreamy illustration of a girl blooming out of a lotus flower"
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
1 month
"oh, you too were right on the end of life and death, desperate running out of options, and discovered a way to radically change how reality looks such that you reversed the dark hole you were digging yourself into? cool cool me too. anyways, what do you want for lunch–" GUYS
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
6 months
you can only get so far with talk therapy that only dwells on one level of abstraction. if you're ready to dive 80 layers deep into deconstructing narratives, you'll probably have better luck shoving some leafy greens or tcm herbs down your throat first
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
5 months
“When you do something, you should do it with your whole body and mind; you should be concentrated on what you do. You should do it completely, like a good bonfire. You should not be a smoky fire. You should burn yourself completely. If you do not burn yourself completely, a
@anuatluru
anu
5 months
pride in your work gives you peace
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
1 year
You can keep mining to get every piece of diamond ore or you can just leave the mine and go make a beautiful necklace with what you've already found or something
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
4 months
I wish this was a conspiracy but unfortunately endocrine disruptors are EVERYWHERE. BPS/BPA can cause diabetes, infertility, obesity, cancer, birth defects, and more. They're on receipts, in water bottles, plastic takeout containers, coffee cup and food can linings 😭
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
7 months
the internet used to be fun. we'd log on to aim and whoever was online was actually there, live, on the other side of the screen. we'd burn and rip cd's. we'd convert youtube to mp3 to listen to later on our ipods. now we scroll and scroll, looking for a glimpse of what once was
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
2 years
A lot of bad habits are due to faulty sensors. This happens when you’re cut off from your own body’s sensations, and over time you don’t even know how to look for them, they’re just not there. e.g. if you don’t feel thirsty you stop drinking water
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
1 year
Someone asked me once if I think it's possible to heal all your trauma and I said idk but I don't think that's the right question to be asking, instead you should figure out what the life you want is and maybe the right amount of trauma is non-zero bc you hit diminishing returns
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
6 months
trauma and emotions are def real though, and I think asian cultures are naive to this, so they err on the side of overly dismissing mental afflictions in favor of natural remedies. and in the west we're way too comfy learning we have a Diagnosis and doing therapy/drugs to fix it
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
10 months
simply verbalizing your desire to a presumed entity is like rubberducking, the process helps you see your own knots and realize what must be done. these are sometimes not external at all, but rather internal changes to *the place you come from* when approaching the world
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
5 months
we’re so lucky the stuff that makes us live longer also feels good to do now?? exercising improves sleep and energy? veggies clear up my skin and give me essential nutrients? meditating makes me calm and happy? don’t even get me started on spending time with loved ones
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
2 years
can't believe dreams give me personalized custom stable diffusion videos for 8hrs a night for free in my head
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
6 months
the west resorts to embarking on a dramatic hero's journey and attaching to new identities formed around having certain conditions when a good ole diet adjustment and grass touching may have done the trick
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
1 year
Problems/inputs/most salient things you had at the time you started on the journey informed what you then focused on. If you had PTSD/trauma stuff maybe you took time off to focus on emotional healing, if you felt socially isolated maybe you went nomadic and met bunch of ppl
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
7 months
all the magic happens in the state of being relaxed, but not sleepy. the refactoring of the inner workings of your psychology, the spontaneous arising of joy, the brilliant idea that doesn’t feel like yours to begin with
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
1 month
only the truly down bad get into meditation seriously guys. it's nothing to be proud of we're in this ex-asylum together 😭 love u though
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
2 years
The thing about realizing you can produce bliss and love from within on demand is you start to see how everything is a scam
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
1 year
But if you're finding your problems changing, but you're continuing to do the same stuff bc at one past point you decided that was needed and never revisited if that was still the most exciting or necessary thing, you can get stuck
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
1 year
High agency self blame is accountability, low agency self blame is shame. Accountability doesn’t challenge worth, it challenges tactics in play. Shame doesn’t improve tactics, it attacks worth because certainty in badness feels good. Freedom inside the cage vs outside the cage.
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
2 months
Self-induced shame is an interesting emotion. Because you can’t feel it unless you have some sort of inner evaluator, right? I’ve found that one reason I keep such evaluators around is because it’s comforting—being watched all the time by someone who at least loves/rewards me
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
3 years
Healing your trauma is the highest value-add thing you could be working on right now, because it leads to such deep paradigm shifts that affect every part of your life. Giving them more levity, breathing room, joy
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
2 months
Update: I fixed my PMS. Gave myself 3 months to do it, took me only a little over 1.5 months. I tried multiple things so obviously need to tease out effects and streamline, but functionally I have a solution. Also experienced ~80% reduction in period cramp pain, which is a huge
@carmenleelau
Carmen
4 months
I’m going to fix my PMS
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
2 years
Actually really relieved when people say no to me because it means 1) I’m someone they feel safe communicating real preferences to, and/or 2) they are someone who can tune into their own wants/needs and communicate them, so we have trust and don’t have to walk on eggshells
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
7 months
to improve your taste in anything, move away from wanting to be seen as the KIND of person who does/likes X and towards “I really like this, I don’t know why, it just really resonates” and watch the most beautiful shit unfold. so many of us deaf to the cries of our own intuition
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
2 years
I never had a morning or daily routine, so I wanted to explore making one since I don't work currently (nor am I looking for a job). Turns out the way is to ask my body what it wants at any given time, which I was never taught to do
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
2 years
I wish school had taught concepts by leading me through the thought process of the person who discovered them, asking the same questions and letting us get stumped. I wish they had taught us the feeling of curiosity instead of facts to memorize and discard
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
2 years
Kind of messed up how being hardwired for survival makes you really good at surviving (via scarcity mindset) but not at most things that bring the highest valence states. Abundance mindset doesn't come naturally, yet is super helpful in finding friends/partners/jobs you love
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
10 months
all i can say is christianity started making a whole lot more sense when i started meditating, i came from a whole different direction but ended up at the same place
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
2 years
You can keep working on yourself but there was nothing wrong with you in the first place. Without this realization, and the self-compassion that brought you to it, you’re just inventing novel and more complicated games of self-flagellation
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
6 months
I've been thinking about this tweet for days now because I feel like it's easy to talk about the highs of practice, the mindblowing ecstasy and bliss, but harder to talk about the dark stuff because it's often so personal. But if you keep going you're kinda forced to confront a
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
1 year
btw not saying you should stop doing any practices when you re-enter society, you should still keep these up if they are helpful, but only if they are still helpful and worth the energy you give them
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
2 years
welcome new friends
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
3 months
cooking, showering, laundry, dishes, sweeping—you do them just to have your efforts undone again, they’re always asking for attention. there’s no escaping them, so why run?
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
2 years
Once in a while I get in touch with a feeling, a moment, a hope or dream, and I think to myself: “Yes, THIS is what life is worth living for.” But what percentage of our lives are moments like these, how many years of autopilot for these rare moments of clarity?
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
6 months
in some ways TCM (traditional chinese medicine) is way more advanced than western medicine. I remember watching historical dramas as a kid and the court physician would be able to tell a woman is pregnant by her pulse and later I learned oh wait this is actually factually true
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
5 months
not unlike people using their pets as surrogate children, writing them in their wills, spending nurturing energy they would otherwise have offered to other humans to animals bred specifically to hack our cuteness sensors (floppy dog ears exist bc we thought they were cute)
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
3 years
Pretty wild as humans also do this, developing psychological defense mechanisms in response to trauma. So we get triggered when people run up against our prickly leaves
@LeifBersweden
Leif Bersweden
3 years
If Holly (Ilex aquifolium) finds its leaves are being nibbled by deer, it switches genes on to make them spiky when they regrow. So on taller Holly trees, the upper leaves (which are out of reach) have smooth edges, while the lower leaves are prickly 🤙
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
3 years
Realizing a lot of fashion is pairing stuff together to make a generally cohesive outfit/vibe. Every piece or accessory that looks ugly stand-alone may look amazing when paired with other pieces that make it shine. What if it’s the same for people?
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
1 year
Sometimes the most compassionate thing you can do is free yourself from all the roles you feel you have to play, which also frees other people from roles you made them play
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
1 year
"Healing is also an overused term. It's more about "having the courage to look, feel, and let go" from my experience." long tweet but a good perspective from the meditation side of things
@RaniBaghezza
Rani
1 year
@carmenleelau I resonated a lot with Frank Yang's video saying that "there is nothing to heal" It's like you can: -Spend years spinning in your trauma/bad experiences without ever healing. Talking to 5 therapists but never following the mental, emotional and physical
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
3 years
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
10 months
People who have accidental careers are always the most down-to-earth
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
3 years
I used to meet people and all I could see was my relationship with them: what they seemed like in my eyes, what judgements could be formed and held. Now when I meet people I see their relationship with themselves. You can clearly tell when someone is at peace
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
3 years
all food retrieved by bf is taxed at 20%. I open the bag it always looks like this smh
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
3 months
Something I've always wondered: *so* many everyday spices and herbs are documented as having medicinal properties. In fact it's hard to find anything edible grown naturally that doesn't have identifiable effects (i.e. passed down through oral/written tradition) in the body.
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
7 months
Seeing that everything you were searching for in others is already accessible from within you gets rid of the desperation in your relationships, which can feel lighter and more pleasant as a result. Where there is no desperation, there is no place for resentment to grow.
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
2 months
Some reflections on journaling by hand every day for 8.5 years (and counting), and on writing in general There aren't that many things I've done that consistently for that long. It's probably tied with brushing my teeth or something else equally mundane, but unlike a hygienic
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
6 months
I feel like depending on what culture you grew up in you kind of automatically assume the frame through which you understand health, and for asian americans usually they take on western and reject eastern because of invalidating experiences growing up, but there's so much to
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
2 years
I go back to the parable of the Chinese farmer almost every day. You don't know what's good or bad. Cheering every time something good happens, despairing at every obstacle, getting swept along the current circumstances. Maybe that's why the mountains are silent, they know this.
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
10 months
for example take an object of your anxiety, when it feels close it's like looming over you, suffocating you, subsuming your body, actively triggering you. but if you expand your awareness so it's just you and the object in a room but the room is infinitely wide in every direction
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
6 months
I seem to have experienced some sort of horseshoe theory of pain tolerance as I've progressed in meditation: started high tolerance bc I was so miserable I was just dissociating, then started to feel things and got very sensitive, then equanimity caught up and high tol again
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
1 year
it’s a disservice to the world to inhibit your self-expression. it’s all hands on deck here. we need you.
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
3 months
why not learn to make each chore a bit more fun in little ways? a mug you like using. a detergent that smells nice. a broom that’s both beautiful and functional.
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
2 years
Good way to get out a slump is to find the most weird things about you (personality, upbringing, crazy stories, the way your brain works, etc.) and dial them up like 20 notches. My favorite creators all learned how to clearly express their eccentricities through their work
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
4 months
On receipts specifically, it can be absorbed just by touching with the skin briefly because the BPA/BPS isn't *bound to anything* like it is in hard plastics. It's just chilling on top of thermal paper, waiting for heat from the printer so it can react with the dye and print
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
3 months
why not wash the dishes with the same level of care as in a tea ceremony? there is dignity in the small and insignificant—no, especially there, because little is expected and little is seen
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
3 years
I wish we knew more about the brain so that instead of being diagnosed with a “disorder” you’d be able to see a fuller picture of where you fall on various spectrums + your genetic profile/dispositions. It’s pretty arbitrary where you draw the line for depression, ADHD, etc.
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
8 months
you don’t need to know how to do anything you just need to care and have the courage to try
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
3 years
Woke up this morning with no thoughts, I just stared closely at my hands and all its lines in the morning light. In that moment I had no awareness of who I was, no sense of time. I felt like what Alan Watts would say, like I was the universe experiencing itself
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
10 months
drink the hemlock like socrates. get in the robot like shinji. burn yourself completely like a zen monk. find the dark and travel through it. look for the field, the redemption, the roaring laughter at the end that shakes the earth and tickles your beating heart. do it again.
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
3 years
Psychedelics are tools to re-arrange your mental furniture
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
2 years
for those unfamiliar with the parable
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
10 months
it can suddenly feel more spacious, and the object feels much smaller. and this perception of the object seeming smaller correlates with the feelings getting smaller too. can give a different perspective and make worries seem more trivial
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
5 months
pets can be great if you lack companionship but after a certain point if it’s taking away from building relationships with other people and completely replacing human connection for you (crazy old cat lady) something is going on
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
6 months
and the west understands trauma pretty well, like how memories are formed and how to reconsolidate them, how psychedelics (which are totally rejected in asian culture) can induce neuroplasticity and lasting personality changes...it still feels like we're in the dark but compared
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
2 years
I used to look up to CEOs and founders. Now I look up to mystics, craftsmen, artists. Not overnight successes, but rather those who have found joy in lifelong devotion and commitment
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@carmenleelau
Carmen
1 year
too many of y’all shaming yourselves for not following some spiritual guidebook diligently enough, not enough of you picking a la carte and making up your own practices on the fly with the attitude of “idk what this is but it works for me”
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143