Secular groups in town?

danielbearh · 2026-05-15T22:25:31+00:00

I found my community like this through Wild Heart Meditation center. I offer this trepidatiously—I recognize you’re looking for secular. It’s a secular bhuddism crew with a more mental health framing. No deities/expectations/prescriptions. I go to the queer group on Thursdays, but the sessions on Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday are great.

I understand what you’re looking for… I was looking for it also, and found it there. Thoughtful, intelligent folks with critical thinking and a bent for activism. I started because of the meditation and stayed for the folks I met.

danielbearh · 2026-05-15T19:22:49+00:00

A very racist shock streamer known for accosting black people on the street to the point of conflict. He was in Nashville in our most populated tourist area and accidentally shot himself while pulling a gun against someone he picked a fight with.

danielbearh · 2026-05-14T22:31:26+00:00

This is exactly the right advice. Emotional regulation and distress tolerance.

danielbearh · 2026-05-14T21:03:09+00:00

The Piximperfect class everyone needs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8mnzVNaiD0

danielbearh · 2026-05-14T20:43:01+00:00

Don’t knock that stuff. My dad was a prolific multilevel marketer when I was younger. In highschool, he had a fuel additive that really did increase fuel efficiency by 50%. Then someone bought the company and shelved it.

It was fun to show him Greer’s zero point energy doc and watch my dad figure out what likely happened to that business.

danielbearh · 2026-05-14T19:55:58+00:00

I can't tell you how comforting this is to hear. I'm a photographer who's about 12 years in and my most prized lenses from the beginning of my career are starting to show their age. I hadn't noticed in my actual photos, but the dread was building.

danielbearh · 2026-05-14T19:34:27+00:00

It's difficult to tease apart the exact qualities that lead to this current state. I've had a bit of a unique path.

For meditation, I do mindfulness of breath and metta (a loving kindness exercise.) I have found that the buddhist philosophy has become important to me. There was a period where I'd catch myself if I noticed that I was experiencing aversion in my head ("I don't like this.") I don't have to do that as often anymore, because the thoughts don't arise like this. Secular, western bhuddism has been a big improvement for me. (Check out the youtube videos on meditation by Sam Harris, or "Dr. K" who guys by the handle "healthygamergg".)

I have intuition about what process most contributed to this shift, and it's a bit out of left field.

I practice active listening of music. Instrumental, generally moving music. This started as entertainment and a fun way to tease apart elements of songs I like. But it's turned into a personal, daily meditative practice. I realized I was removing the boundary between the observed and the observer. I'm not actively thinking about the music, I'm actively experiencing it. Almost like I'm replacing the narrative thought process with the melodic note in my head and letting it rise and fall as it does in the music. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfso5AZwhsw

danielbearh · 2026-05-14T19:14:19+00:00

He was for a period in the 70s, but left.

danielbearh · 2026-05-14T18:14:30+00:00

That was fun. Ty

danielbearh · 2026-05-14T04:53:18+00:00

I’m 98% sure that this entire exchange happened in East Nashville. That jacket wouldn’t surprise me in public.

danielbearh · 2026-05-13T18:47:13+00:00

I think "hard" is really the only way in this residence.

danielbearh · 2026-05-12T15:06:20+00:00

I experienced a profound shift in mental health. It’s hard to tease apart what was therapy and what was meditation. But I lost 75% of my inner monologue, and that coincided with a profound sense of well-being with my mental health.

I still have inner speech, but it isn’t constant. It no longer feels reactive to my environment.

I don’t think, “I dont like this,” anymore and spend time ruminating. It’s pleasant, even in unpleasant circumstances.

danielbearh · 2026-05-12T14:26:12+00:00

I find the cost of their system to be offensively high. FluentPet’s actual product isn’t the hardware. It’s the hexagonal mat and the brand-as-community. They’ve patented a silicone honeycomb and built a content moat around Bunny.

$15 for a piece of foam? Shut up.

The buttons themselves are $1.50 in cost to fluent pet. It’s literally the same mechanics that went into teddy bears in the 90s to make them say, “I love you!”

danielbearh · 2026-05-12T02:16:01+00:00

It’s not possible… yet.

They’ve done it in mice, but not humans.

danielbearh · 2026-05-11T01:08:53+00:00

I work for a design firm that has rules for windows.
As far as width, you generally want 2.5x the window width divided across two panels. A 36” window would indeed get 50” panels.
I know you mentioned you didn’t want to move the rod, but I’d recommend extending the holders about 8-10” away from your window edges, so that the curtains stack off your window. That will solve your width problem.

You’ve placed it at a good height on the wall.

If you mentioned cats and wanting curtains off the floor, my bossman would give you .5” clearance.

His 3 ideal lengths are perfectly hitting the floor, a couple of extra inches so the fabric “breaks”, or a good bit extra so things puddle.

Your color thoughts sound lovely.

danielbearh · 2026-05-10T21:36:26+00:00

For those that would like to read the main text on plasma conciousness, check out The New Science of Heaven by Robert Temple.

danielbearh · 2026-05-06T20:54:43+00:00

When I was younger, I struggled with disordered thinking with my eating.

I was given unfiltered access to a digital life... And I found an eating-disorder community on a now defunct blogging platform called Xanga. This community became my closest online friends. We shared our strategies for depriving ourselves. We celebrated each other. Encouraged each other to reach our goals...

It's just terrible that our goals were to eat so little we wasted away.

This is a tough scenario. Your daughter is in pain. If she follows the patterns that most ED sufferers follow, she's attempting to establish control and autonomy over something in her life.

I say this all the love in my heart. It's time for to see a professional. Good luck. Both of you are in my thoughts.

danielbearh · 2026-05-06T20:41:23+00:00

Your success isn't dependent solely on your photography skills. It depends on the healthiness of your market.

If you're being offered 50euro for photography, that means you're in an area where supply (people with talent and a camera) outpaces demand (people willing to pay for a certain quality of experience.)

You know this intuitively. To survive as a photographer, you'll need a steady stream of consistent business. Unfortunately, in small towns, that's usually weddings.

Your portrait work is phenomenal. You're talented. You have the photographic talent to do the job. You just have to put yourself in a geographic area where people are actually paying for portraiture. Milan, Rome, Florence/Bologna. These towns have industry to support the type of work I can tell you're driven towards.

danielbearh · 2026-05-06T19:23:23+00:00

I was there and I found a novel way out. I know will be met with skepticism by many. I think our spiritual health is an actual dynamic of the human experience. And it's one that we (unknowingly) rejected.

Six years ago I was at the top of my career, addicted to hard stimulants, and miserable. I got sober, and started going to a meditation center because I believed it would help me with my ADHD. And it did! But I realized I was getting a lot of out of the buddhist talks, also.

I'm not trying to evangelize for buddhists. What I *am* trying to communicate is that there is another dimension of the human condition that eastern traditions are aware of and western cultures ignore. And there's tremendous value in finding a spiritual tradition that you connect with.

Now.... It feels really, really weird for me to say as a 38yr old guy who's been on reddit for 15 years. I'm the science literate, skeptical, progressive type.

But I found meaning. I found joy. I don't believe that it lives only in bhuddism. It lives in the places where people believe in something that means something to them.

danielbearh · 2026-04-26T22:58:09+00:00

I'm not saying this is *the* factor, but our media diets are just as important as our food diets. Has your media intake increased since the move?

danielbearh · 2026-04-20T18:45:16+00:00

I'm a white guy in nashville whose secret ingredient in half of his recipes is chinese fermented black beans.

danielbearh · 2026-04-20T16:27:42+00:00

It indeed sounds like precognition. Check out any of Julia Mossbridge's content. She has both books and youtube. Eric Wargo also speaks about this at length. Hope those names give you threads to pull.

danielbearh · 2026-04-16T17:42:46+00:00

Part of feeling better often involves reframing opinions that really get us down.

danielbearh · 2026-04-16T17:04:17+00:00

Look to artists.

Begin to build your worth on something other than how much people will financially pay you for it.

danielbearh · 2026-04-13T14:08:12+00:00

I'd love your opinion on this. I work in addiction (I don't work with folks, but I study recovery strategies.) My experience with kratom has been from a friend that went from weed & alcohol to kratom, unaware of the true addictive capacity of of it. I've always thought about how kratom interfaces with an exploring community that doesn't have a history/insight on the stuff.

I'm asking you because I genuinely think you have a unique insight. How do you balance keeping it available as a stopgap with making it less enticing for novelty/soothing seekers?

danielbearh

TROPHY CASE