OTROVERT YOU ASK?
By
Otroverts are not natural born joiners. Unlike introverts, they are not shy or quiet, and do not quickly tire from one-on-one socializing. Yet in large groups they feel uncomfortable, alienated, and alone.
Unlike those who have been excluded or marginalized, otroverts are embraced and often quite popular. Yet they never feel like they truly belong.
In a culture that puts a premium on joining, many otroverts have gone through life feeling misunderstood.
But, contrary to what we have been taught, argues psychiatrist Rami Kaminski, belonging is not a requirement for living a rich, rewarding life. Quite the opposite. 
“Usefulness – Surfing the River of Time
I prefer the present to the future: the current moment offers a possibility for course correction, just before it slips back into the immutable past.
Surfing on the river of time, requires an appreciation of immediacy; a perpetual closeness to your own self. Conversely, distant aims provide no quarter – your life – inexorably drifting off course.
Inattention to the present robs you of the only slice of time where you truly exist.
Focusing on the past or the future gets you to bypass your actual life, miss instant opportunities, and slowly relegate your life into forgettable smokescreens.
It is very hard to focus on the train of todays, made blurry by the rush of all tomorrows into the waiting yesterday. An eye blink, yet another present is forever lost in the black hole of yore.
Start by paying attention to what is happening now, together with you. I like to think about it as collecting sunsets (which I do) – sunset, spring, a good cup of coffee, all volunteer their beauty slowly and presently.
You and the sunset are here and now: The sun sets leisurely into your past and you continue forward as the last drops of light give way to the evening.
Picture yourself sitting by the river of your life, fascinated by the minute representations of your now.
Imagination allows our attention to constantly dart between the past, the present and the future. It instigates us to perceive ourselves as moving back and forth along a static time. We zigzag above our time like a bee’s dance over a flowering bush.
This innate inattention to the present is complicated by the numbing sensory onslaught of the 21st century.
Our swelling virtual world competes with what we actually experience. Drowned by the digital deluge, our introspective antenna fails to register our humble, unadorned present.
TV, social media, YouTube, video games, you pause for nothing short of sensory explosions. The fabricated reality, glimpsed through various media portals, has long taken over your true self.
You happily entrust your ideas to information illusionists and artificial intelligence. You care more about the ones you will never meet, and covet places you would never be invited to.
Life by the shock value is a choice like any other; you need no one’s permission. You live a distracted, fractured, un integrated life through reels and screens and vacuous “content” creation. ADHD is your constant companion. Routine Drug and alcohol consumption are your constant balms to alleviate these mind attached stress fractures and to further prevent you from feeling life fully.
However, any virtual or real life escapist addictions come at a price.
Your real life, cast like hollowed husks, get only cursory attention. Your delight is vicarious; you no longer own your pleasures.
Your fantasies are generated elsewhere, on line. Fake books, intantgram, rammed into a fractious craving brain.
These trivial screen sirens allure you to the external, to the irrelevant, to a false social media life not actually lived by you.
I often exhort my patients to live their own life.
This simple advice is to dismiss redundant mind attachments, stop following the pack and just be yourself. This true natured authenticity to simply be your self is often absolutely the most difficult one to observe.
And it is ever so easy: after all you already are yourself! Nowhere to be. Nothing to prove.
Why do we struggle so hard to become what we already are?
There is NO journey, we all already are, once we dismiss all that we are not.
In a half lived life you have an amorphous sense of self. Ambivalent, indecisive, wishy washy, you alternate between competing “selves”, swept passively in your lifetime, a billiard ball knocked into this and that tributary. Stand for something or you will fall for anything, know who you are. Know what you don’t want. Know what you deserve. And do NOT settle for less.
Undoubtedly the attached mind randomness guiding your conditional trajectory has little in common with the real you.
Staying connected to the time of true existence, your now, is the only way to live your own life.
Whether you recognize it or not, in reality you only live at this moment.
The rest, the entire perceived arc of your life is in your imagination. So paying attention to where you are now guarantees that you are mostly alive.
The more minutes you experience in your true natured real life the longer and richer your life becomes.
Emotional substance is not an external nutrient.
Emotional substance gets generated from the inside, from your own experiences from your memories and your feeling and the entire edifice of the years having passed since your birth.
Emotional substance is not a shared experience; it hails from the most private, intimate recesses of your inner world. This is where your pure gold is hidden. Within.
It is here, inside you, waiting patiently to be noticed. Come back, don’t linger outside of your life, in strange fields of other people’s realities. Or screens and artificial addictions or artificial intelligence's. Like the adolescent bong or the baby alcohol bottle.
Don’t let the external herds distract you from your own translucent priority.
Do not be Hesitant or reluctant to detach yourself from external seduction and start noticing (and fully living) your own reality.
Life may not be as wonder full as the screen fantasy, no artificial filmed content ever is, but it is really your life.
And it is totally yours. And you can choose to do something about it right now in this one very moment.
Obviously, having spent all this time lost, drunk, stoned, escaping and away from your real self, becoming introspective would take some time and practice. It will challenge you. Your own reality will do that. If you surrender to you and stop hiding or running by getting high or drunk or quitting relationships or jobs when things get challenging.
Like a novice acrobat, you need to be tethered for safety at first. This is where usefulness comes in handy.
Being useful anchors you to the recipient of your kindness. Get a job. Get grounded. Volunteer. Make your self use full.
Consumerism or alcohol or drugs can be passively useful, you THINK you get a cheap and nasty dopamine hit, but humans have to do something both substantially active and totally present. Not just run and escape by attaching to artificial props and adolescent crutches and artificial screens of artificial intelligences.
Strive to be REALLY useful to someone or something that is here with you. In the flesh. Now. You cannot be useful in retrospect. And since the anxious future happens only in your attached mind, prospective usefulness, doing something for the future benefit, amounts to no more than a content influencers attached mind and marketed fantasy. Anxiety is trying to control the future and is next to useless as it does NOT ever exist.
It is the tangible grounded effect of usefulness, the active conscious engagement with the present that can stimulate the “muscle memory” so to speak, necessary to develop a deeper, more spontaneous, more authentic, grounded usefulness. Be unique. Be you. Enough is enough. Right Now. There is no healing journey, once you realise there is nothing to realise.
Try to be useful to someone or something everyday.
It can be anyone but firstly including yourself. It can be an animal, a plant, or even an inanimate object.
So long as you do something useful that is happening now it satisfies the practice criteria. Do not falsely design or drain your self by people pleasing. Or perfectionism. Serve other’s only from a place of fresh flowing fullness. Not attached mind obligation or rapacious profiteering or rampant sales, greed and overt McMansion consumerism.
When you get to know the pleasure of being grounded through usefulness, it will become a reflex, an automatic daily event, much like putting first your feet on the floor when getting out of bed.
What is considered useful?
It is for you to decide. It is for you to wonder. It is for you to remain curious. You are unique and you already know how to learn, lead and grow. Not meekly follow the bully boss or silly none sensical systems.
ðĨðĨðĨðĨðĨðĨðĨððĨðĨðĨðĨðĨðĨðĨ
Pay Attention Be Astonished Tell About It”
BY Mary Oliver POET
#PABATAI
by Tony Searl
Pay attention to the possibility of contentment and well being that follows being useful. It is there, waiting for you to discover.
You will feel anchored to yourself, to your life and to your own presence here and now. No more passive stumble down the river of your life. You can stand tall, taking in where you are, when you are, able to maneuver, to dodge obstacles, to be in charge of the only thing that you truly have, yourself and your life.“
THIS IS VEDANTA IN REAL LIFE
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH
WE ALL ALREADY ARE,
once we realise there is NOTHING to realise.
So dismiss the mind attachments. Live fully now.
So ditch any escapist mind addling addictions. Live totally connected to the real you. No masks, no charades, no escaping with artificial by pass drugs, alcohol or spiritual woo woo.
So drop the pretence of who you are not.
Get clear and precise on the fact there is no healing. There is no journey, there is nothing you need be except to fully accept yourself. Surrender only to your own true nature. No one else’s. You are enough. Already whole and complete, once you feel life fully. Integrated. Grace full, respect full, wonder full. Use full. To who? To share to your own true nature firstly, then discerningly share any remaining energetic overflow without people pleasing or perfectionism.
Drop all attached mind conditioning.
Live absolutely only now.
Dismiss all that insults your wide open yet discerningly protected heart.
Live totally, simply, consistently in this one moment, please.
Discard any remaining un Integrated mind attached inter generational “trauma”, “wounds”, or inherited conditioning. Once you own your full story, you simply
Live fully, totally, absolutely, live only right now in this one bare moment.
No more anxiety, mind attached trying to control a never to arrive future, how exhausting?
No more depression, stuck to repeating patterns of the past, living only attached to Memories or routines of ruts of hamster wheels and ground hog daze that perpetuate and manifest in mundane, repetitive, cognitive stagnation. Like trying hard to be someone you are not.
A mind attached anxious people pleaser.
A mind attached over thinking perfectionist.
A mind attached worrier, stressor or addictive life by passer, checking out of reality artificial intelligence, still attached to the baby alcoholic bottle or drug addled fear full bong. Unable to face reality of this one bare moment due to addictive, attached mind conditioning and/or a lack or feeling and facing reality without courage and fortitude and inner resilience?
Once we get real.
Once we drop the none sense.
Once we actually slow down, pause and wonder WTF and who the fuck am I ?
Without the attached masks?
Without the rubbish attached mind?
Without the attached titles and qualified roles and societal performative expectations?
Once we actually face our fully raw and unadulterated self.
Once we actually choose unwavering foundational core values.
And live by them.
Not preach them. Live them.
Not teach them. Embody them.
Not try and advise or sell or tell anyone else what to do.
Stop being such a people pleasing insecure control freak.
Once we ditch, drop and dismiss all that we are not.
And what then remains?
You do. Consciousness.
You do! Simple. Direct. Kind. Unwavering. Not mind attached thinking you know someone else better than they already know them self.
You now are EXPRESSED totally. Fully. Humbly.
Core values unwavering.
SIMPLY KINDLY FIERCELY WILDLY
FULLY TOTALLY LOYALLY ABSOLUTELY
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH
AND YOU ALREADY ARE
Stay curious.
Ask better questions.
Relax, nothing is under control.
Listen and observe 4 times more than you speak.
Creators golden ratio.
I’m always learning as I go.
PABATAI.
Thank you Mary Oliver.
Life Poet.
