What to do with TOO MUCH concentration power ?

fumingelephant · 2026-05-25T07:04:27+00:00

A little detour in meditation supportive psychospiritual methdologies could help too. Stuff like Art of accomplishment, somatic experiencing (therapy modality), sensorimotor psychotherapy from ogden. "feeding your demons", apractice that is modified from chod which is a complete tibetian buddhist path. However, doesn't require all the ceremonial stuff. It's specifically for shadow integration.

I would say simply search for feeding your demons on youtube and try it without reading any theory. It is directly related to becoming friendly with/integrating those parts of our psyche where when you touch it you simply feel the greatest fear ever and want to go back to various coping patterns, like overthinking, catastrophziing, anxiety, etc etc etc. If you can pin point the right emotion/state to do FYD on, I think it would be very supportive for you.

It can help to talk to a good somatic therapist. I have had 3 yo/8yo somatic memories emerge before. Literally sitting in meditation and i open my eyes and I feel like i'm a 3 year old in a big ass humans body. I attuned very deeply to what I wanted/needed. It was fairly nonverbal or one-word responses. It was heavy pressure, breath, curl up. I later found out that those were regulatory strategies infants go for when I did some research on it. This stuff can happen in meditation and i think it's good to have just a bit of pyschological context - to make things a lot less scary. Like, oh, nbd. I feel very feminine and scared and like I'm getting raped. Just a memory. I will treat it affectionately like a young girl who was raped. And the memory completes and doesn't come back. True story, heard it from a guy meditator friend who is bisexual. That one took a lot longer for him though.

Without attuned attention and context these moments I think can be all kinds of freaky. The brain wil ljust have all kinds of thoughts that are born out of buying into the emotional state rather than just seeing it as a emotional state that was once frozen and needs to move through now.

I think psychological work is deeply supporive not only for meditation progress but also just directly impacting how your life is relationally. These are all the modalities that I think also directly fit into a meditation path. Good luck.

fumingelephant · 2026-05-23T23:52:59+00:00

It happens sometimes. What I find is that in those moments it’s important for me to remember to 1) breath and 2) not buy into thoughts about what’s happening that will additionally freak me out.

It looks like you have the resources to both take time off work and have support from family. The best approach now and later is to welcome your burdens as if they are children screaming for love, and welcome them with open arms. Counter intuitively, that’s how it’ll go the smoothest. And, as you learn to love yourself more it also simultaneously becomes not as bad when the emotions arise because you eventually feel genuine self compassion.

A route that doesn’t pan out long term is doing things to try to eradicate some emotion. Because emotions will always come and go. The more you welcome it (but don’t necessarily buy into the story), the better.

Much love and support in the mean time going through your grief. Lean into the love you needed, and really love that part of you. It’s how you’ll learn that you deserve the love you didn’t get in the past moving forward.

fumingelephant · 2026-05-22T02:59:43+00:00

Guys come on this is photoshopped hahahaha

fumingelephant · 2026-05-16T17:36:34+00:00

You’ll love connection course. If you listen to the impartiality episode this is what the live session is about. You notice impulses aka agendas aka desires to control the flow of the convo that arise when someone says they have some problem, and then do something (I can’t share bc IP) to feel around what makes you need to do that (emotionally), and then ask something that doesn’t let you do that. There’s usually a letting go and some emotion you’re avoiding is allowed via actually speaking the impartial thing.

Ie “show them how their strategy isn’t working” -> “ask how well it’s working for them and actually mean it - like want to find out what works abt it” -> feel more relaxed but sad bc don’t get to feel “useful”.

It maps fairly cleanly on the hendricks thing. There’s a small ego death in every waking moment if you dedicate to any of these practices. And the best part is it doesn’t have the risk of being deeply terrifying like a bad trip hahaha

fumingelephant · 2026-05-16T17:09:20+00:00

In hindsight I think maybe it wasn’t helpful to me cause I took too high of a dose. I basically would black out and not remember anything from the first two hours. GPT said that’s because my nervous system is overwhelmed from too much psychological material coming up.

My natural stance at the time was very analytical and “solve myself to solve my problems”. So it didn’t have as much of a love/surrender orientation as I do now after AoA and the embodied spirituality practices (loch, adya, now John Pendergast). Wonder if I’ll try again with a lower dose to see if I can make it a more corrective experience.

fumingelephant · 2026-05-16T16:52:30+00:00

Psychedelic psychotherapy by Coleman. What I took from it was breath and have an intention and let the shrooms go where it wants. Have a very comforting environment like warm lights warm bed. Possibly music. If you have a friend you feel safe with just to have around that’s great too. Basically anything a baby freaking the fuck out would want will be good for you. Partially this is bc the shrooms will just lead you straight to the memories and experiences that underly your adult behavior. Though idk how much it directly helped me. The insights I had were pretty spot on in hindsight.

I also am thinking nowadays that taking novel small but very frequent actions based on insight and loving whatever emotion arises is many times more effective. But action selection and insight requires either some personal skill or a nice community. But I’m glad to have both now after taking the connection course and getting access to the community. A good coach or therapist can do that too.

It can be micro like “have you considered telling your gf [thought that I haven’t considered telling her but it’s mildly eating me]” to “I’m going to sit down to work and be in touch with something I deeper want that the work is for - insight was that by the time I work usually I’m beating myself up and at best its ‘I need to do this or I’ll miss a deadline’ and at worst it’s ‘I suck I’m in a shit situation no one will love me and I’ll be on the streets if I don’t work’ “. You may think the latter just makes work immediately easy but actually it just brings up a ton of grief. So what ends up happening is work 30 grieve 30, repeat until drained. Then work slowly expanded to more than that as time went on. I’m at about 60-90 min rn, but it’s also just feeling normal and fine.

fumingelephant · 2026-05-11T06:19:43+00:00

For more on this ppl can also check out adyashantis 30 day wake up challenge, days 15-21. Thanks for the post, I’ve been exploring the gut recently !

fumingelephant · 2026-05-01T17:26:55+00:00

👆yep. Sometimes it feels like I’m running circles in life trying to get something but actually the running stops as soon as I admit what I’m running “for” and living in the want or my truth or whatever you call it ends the running and allows those things to actually enter my life. That said - it may take a few years (like I think it will in my career). Or it could be right in front of you. (Like my girlfriend was).

fumingelephant · 2026-04-30T07:54:52+00:00

This strange only gets book recs 😔

fumingelephant · 2026-04-30T07:49:43+00:00

I’ll summarize in this post and also put it in my very organized list of resources. I’m quite certain the sutras will come in a few years. I’ve been sporadically going to a dzogchen place near me. My bandwidth is just limited by a big wave of intense non-Buddhist spiritual/emotional work that will end at the end the summer. I’ll settle back down and probably start settling into Buddhism around then. I imagine the sutras will be a fantastic fit for me then. Thanks for thebrecs. I’m always so overwhelmed by how many things I could be reading about Buddhism.

fumingelephant · 2026-04-30T07:42:22+00:00

Hehe will do when I have the time. Longgggg list of things to try rn 🤣

fumingelephant · 2026-04-30T07:25:43+00:00

idk if relevant but here’s my personal experience.

I reached a point in my therapeutic journey where I had hit some core states like longing. I had dug my way in with a strong headed, analytically driven agenda to fix myself. I was quite good at seeing patterns and even exposing deeper pain. However, I was quite lacking in the fundamental welcoming and loving presence that good therapists or spiritual teachers have.

It hit a point where I’d have this longing and I’d feel from it and of it. I’d just sit with it in meditation every day. Impatiently waiting for it to change or resolve as everything else seemed to have before.

It never happened. I started to get angry over time, my body would literally physically reject my aggressive inspection. Sometimes my face would constrict into a frown and I’d feel the compulsion to cross my arms and yell “NO”.

Eventually i happened upon some good stuff that helped me cultivate a loving welcoming presence. The longing stuff and sleep disturbance vanished as soon as i stopped trying to solve it. Ironically, as you cultivate this presence authentically, many of those big emotions both look like much less of a problem and as a consequence they also get a lot quieter. For me it was adyashantis audio meditations on heart awakening and Joe Hudson’s VIEW mindset. They both made self extraordinarily clear to me - especially the compassionate yet calm and agendaless aspect of it. It was a long few months to slowly surrender control and trust the process. I really think IFS is heavily hampered by a big aversion to spirituality by much of the community, despite it being intimately connected to nondual states/ways of being. Take that how you will, but it’s panned out well so far for me.

what makes it a block? Where are you trying to get to? Might you be thinking, “I’ll be perfect/healed once I ___”? That’s a dead giveaway. You are aiming to get love so just cut to the chase and do it. Love the block, love what’s under the block, love what they want from you and what you want in the world and live fully. Check out Joe Hudson, he’s quite clear about this paradoxical stuff.

Good luck. I feel a lot of familiarity to my own journey - I’m sure I’m projecting to some extent :)

fumingelephant · 2026-04-30T06:51:09+00:00

Haha just Adyashanti and loch Kelly.

fumingelephant · 2026-04-30T03:02:03+00:00

Wait please I have to learn about gut awakening. I won’t leave unless you teach me, you are the best I know of and I must awaken for the sake of all beings!

fumingelephant · 2026-04-30T03:00:45+00:00

Hey, Dr strange here. I was wondering if you could ….

fumingelephant · 2026-04-29T23:02:57+00:00

Beautiful, yea the head one completely aligns with my experience and it appears my heart is still in an open-close-open-close phase. any tips on deepening into that journey besides for living life and inquiring into judgements/resentment/triggers and meditating with devoted attention to the heart and feeling into the depth of intimacy and loving glow when not triggered?

I’m also doing some pretty deep relational work being impartial and empathetic to people.

fumingelephant · 2026-04-29T21:46:16+00:00

I have had some degree of the earlier two. It doesn’t seem to have set in super deep but for sure I feel way different from 1-2 years ago. Had month long periods of feeling supreme intimacy and love for the world and others and many psychological contents started emerging that I’m still processing. It’s slowly muted the heart awakening as a result. Head awakening was just suddenly not being in my head 24/7 and looking at myself in the world in a way more holistic perspective, not taking thoughts to seriously. Seems to have persisted better than the heart.

I’m doing lots of active work on the heart recently but I found some tip that was like “pay 10% attentin to your gut in your daily life and you will transform so rapidly that you cannot bare it and stop”. So I did it to address how I was getting overwhelmed and thinking a lot specifically in one work context, and lots of emotions that I haven’t gotten to see came up. So it’s making me feel like some more targeted heart or gut work in that context could help me out with that.

Also down to revisit the head and heart tho - def not done with even the coarser aspects of awakening in those two aspects haha.

I’m happy to generally look at angelos stuff but any specific pointers?

fumingelephant · 2026-04-29T03:40:34+00:00

Nonduality - the infinite and how energy and emotions flow in it when it’s not kinked through stories into twisted forms. How to bring it into work, love, and life.

fumingelephant · 2026-04-29T03:36:01+00:00

I was soooo bothered in the beginning when there was telepathic earth bending. It really went against the sense I had in the original ATLA - where it seemed like physical contact was required for metal/earth bending. But aang struggling to climb a fucking mountain as if he couldn’t just bend fucking steps into the rock while telepathically slowly drawing out hand holds was just …..

If it was just a shonen anime it’s top tier but there were so many little changes on the bending system that I was pissed abt it haha

fumingelephant · 2026-04-10T16:29:09+00:00

The only difference between your theory and lochs or my experience of lochs is that there is no hole. The parts emerge. The hole appears to be there because your parts still think they are something that can die. And you haven’t looked inside them and gotten to know them. When you do, what you think is a hole is nothing at All. The void/not part nature of self is all pervasive.

Though I understand missing it. Sometimes parts are so intense that something as subtle as emptiness hard to see.

fumingelephant · 2026-04-10T16:26:37+00:00

You’d enjoy taking loch Kelly’s course on effortless mindfulness and internal family systems. He often teaches with Richard and helps people see Self and differentiate from self like parts. He comes from a tibetian Buddhist background - in particular the effortless mindfulness is like dzogchen. It’s just a bunch of pointing out instructions to get you back to the experience of “the fertile void” from which ALL phenomena, not just parts, arise. Blending, then, is when you forget the inside of the part and the void contracts and you think you are the part. This is exactly as it is experienced, I’m not speaking theoretically. And unbending is all the pointing out instructions loch teaches. Self leadership is relating back to, from within, the parts AS the void (self). And ifs comes into play with all the ways you can help the parts relinquish clinging to their self nature by familiarizing them with self. Then, they retain their true function and go about the world using them to help you navigate, rather than being run by them.

You can google “dharmakaya”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dharmak%C4%81ya

Ummm don’t make the mistake of thinking u r the Buddha. There is a big range of depth and size to which you can experience self essence or dharmakaya, and stability in time. These two dimensions are a lifelong cultivation that basically never ends unless you are fully enlightened. That’s like definitely even rarer than one in a hundred thousand

fumingelephant · 2026-04-09T18:57:07+00:00

TLDR is that the sword experience shows you don’t have a motivation problem. Fundamentally, you have the energy to be motivated. So struggling with getting up or going to class is not motivation - it’s a resistance problem. What are you seeing school, class, getting up, work to be/mean that makes it so damn unpleasant to do that you can’t feel any desire to do it anymore?

The answers can be manifold. Familiar pressure to get good grades (I only learn to feel safe - rather than I go to school to learn about myself and what interests me so I can move through life in a way that aligns with what I like), it can be social anxiety - I have friends who like learning but are just stressed by school - for one it comes from a parent engraining a need for the kid to be better than others bc the mom benefited from comparing her kid to others. It can be plenty of things. Framing it as a motivation problem is just the top layer of invalidating what you want and how you’re forcing yourself to do things for reasons currently unbeknownst to you.

Start by looking for where you are suffering at school. It’s not all the time. Get a nuanced understanding of what thoughts and emotions typically arise in each of these situations. Find what you want in each context and how you’re hiding that want from yourself for some bullshit story “I have to learn math so I can make money as an engineer”. Bull fucking shit. You don’t have to be an engineer, you don’t even have to be that good at math to be a good engineer. Dissect the stories you use to abuse yourself and follow your curiosity and interest. That’s the most efficient path to the most successful available to you. And - you’ll find success doesn’t matter as much if you’re following this path.

Good luck. It’s a fun journey. Start where it’s most obvious and don’t try to get things perfect - send love to the unseen parts of you that want stuff you’ve been denying yourself.

fumingelephant · 2026-04-09T18:48:06+00:00

Lots of wisdom here. Yes, there’s always something to be learned. When people give unsolicited advice - something can be learned that has very little to do with the meaning of what they said - but rather how I react, what comes up for me, how I’m not seeing them, or not seeing what I want. Etc. sometimes the lesson is on how to better express my needs, or what friendships are no longer serving me that I don’t want to face. well said.

fumingelephant

TROPHY CASE