zoo -- yeah, it is like that. Jaw-dropping. But really. Like, really! Yesterday I walked outside and looked up at the sky and said out loud, "No locks!" And the world seemed beautiful and huge and open.

Suratji -- there aren't doors either. What we think are prison walls could just drop away if you, as Steve Hayes said, take your life back from the organ between your ears. Our "verbal pathways" are our belief systems; they feel like railroad tracks to those of us who feel stuck. But if you get back into your body and feel how you feel and get back to now and watch your experience, those railroad tracks don't even exist. But they DO exist, I mean really they do, but they exist in the world of the mind, which has evolved to keep you alive, but your mind is just an organ of your body like your lungs, your mind is not you, and the doors your mind is looking for don't really exist. Just like the locks your mind tells you about.

I am not saying this like I am actually "there," you know, because I know I'm not really "with" my experience, and I forget all the time that all of it's just a freaking game, and I take things way too seriously, and I keep believing in the doors, and the reason for that is partially that emotions still freak me out and feel really dangerous.

googley, when I first read this post of yours I got pretty upset because my first thought was, "There is no way I could love that hateful little monster." My mind practically screamed it at me.

I don't want to lie to her and tell her I can provide her unconditional love. It would be like my parents trying to tell me that they love me no matter what I do when I know it's not true. Their love is conditional. And so is my love for myself. And like I said, love can't be forced, you know, you can't just will it to happen and then you really feel love for someone. I can't have that little girl dealing with another broken promise, especially coming from me. If I promised her I would never leave her, and that I would always love her, I would be lying. I want to put her in a cage.

Sannah, fear of intimacy because I am starving for it. The starvation is so desperate. Desperation can't lead to true intimacy. I act rashly, urgently, and think I am feeling intimate when in fact I am so starving that I am just eating up the first closeness that comes my way. It terrifies people. They back off. I stay starving.

So yeah I want to be able to control it. I don't know how else to get the need met. I don't want a relationship to control so that I will feel safe. I mean, I can go without a relationship, I am not dependent. What happens is that when I get into a relationship, when that first spark hits me, my desperation gets triggered and then I feel like I have to get back in control.

I am in my head all of the time because it's how I was raised, it's because I am a student, it's because I was taught that to solve problems you should think through them rationally, and my entire childhood was all about escaping to the world of literature. I live in my head because that's where I got comfortable.

I don't think healing is just being with my feelings. I think healing is about learning to inhabit myself. Not just feeling the feelings, saying bring on the pain or the joy or whatever, but actually like, living in the world inside the skin and realizing that my brain is just one little part of me, and if I am my observing self, it is just a tool, and that my body is me, too, and I have every right not to see myself as this faraway strange organism that is always against "me." I AM my organism. My organism is not against me, it is me, my mind is not the real me trying to get the rest of me to cooperate, it is all me, it is ALL me, and what my mind says it wants is based only on what it's learned and there is a whole world that is open without any doors or locks or walls or fences.

I just wish I could internalize all of this that I have come to understand. I suppose it is just a practice of many moments of feeling enlightened and then lost once more. I wonder what it takes for these moments to string together until I finally get what it means to let go when my whole self screams, NEED.