Advice for the desperate

[mzrowan]

This is the third in what is rapidly becoming a daisy chain of posts about "hungry eyes", using non-verbal signals, and desperation. As someone mentioned in comments on the last post, sometimes the people guilty of "hungry eyes" are the ones who are in the catch-22 of desperation*: being without the attention and affection they need makes them

Comments

[persephoneplace]

i would definately concur. Hm... wonder how often i can get away with meditating in the bathroom at work....

[horsetraveller]

On the commute to and from work?

[plumtreeblossom]

I can second this. I took an excellent meditation class during one of the loneliest stretches of my life, about 7 years ago. Having that meditation class to go to every Sunday evening was a great comfort. It wasn't directly responsible for my eventual finding of love, but it took some of the bitterness out of the isolation.

[lightcastle]

Was it the meditation or the social interaction of the class?

[plumtreeblossom]

I think both of those factored in. The class was very a very intense 2 hours, guided by a teachers who really knew his stuff. I was able to get out of my own head during that time and forget about the loneliness. After classes, members of the class would sometimes go out for Indian food. It felt really good, sort of like church and then a social.

In any case, it was helpful during a very sad stretch of my life.

[lightcastle]

Regardless of my thoughts on "meditation as a resolution for everything", I give full props to, "Neuroplasticity! It works, bitches," because now everyone in the room is wondering why I just burst out laughing. ^_^

[horsetraveller]

What are your thoughts about meditation as a resolution for everything?

[cos]

Huh. As far as I know, I've never tried anything I'd think of as "meditation". However, as a teenager I used to spend significantly more than 5-10 min a day reflecting on my emotions, imagining situations, thinking about I'd observed other people react to things, and deciding how I wanted to respond to various emotions, and what emotional reactions I wanted to have to various things. I continued to do a little of this through my 20s, though not as much. I wonder if this is similar to what you're talking about. I know I was able to very significantly reshape my mental landscape, in ways that make me generally happy, and better able to deal with lots of situations.

[fennel]

To me that sounds very different-- in general, with mindfulness meditation, you're NOT imagining other situations or running any specific line of thought through your mind.

That said, if you're capable of making advance decisions about how to respond to a given emotion, even a stormy or painful emotion, then you may not be as much in need of the kind of thing Rowan's talking about.

[soong]

I'll second this with the testimonial that one recent spectacularly successful act of wooing happened while in my mind I thought I was particularly feeling the Buddha nature.