2008.10.20 13:00 - Barrier or Opportunity

Stim was the guardian on call that afternoon. He sent me, Pema, the chat log. I added the title and put up the log.

Adelene Dawner: We all got together Friday night for dinner, then spent the day togetehr Saturday and did breakfast and a short meeting Sunday morning. It was cool. Hi Stim!
Stim Morane: Hi Claire
Claire Beltran: Huh? Where was this?
Stim Morane: Hi Adelene
Claire Beltran: Oh, hello, Stim!
Adelene Dawner: http://playasbeing.wik.is/Information/Real_life_meetings
Adelene Dawner: Hi Wol ^.^
Wol Euler: helo claire, adelene, stim
Claire Beltran: Oh...
Claire Beltran: *hangs head*
Stim Morane: Hi Wol
Adelene Dawner chuckles "No worries, Claire."
Claire Beltran: I'm... very regretful I missed that.
Adelene Dawner: Oh, you live close?
Adelene Dawner: Corvi!
Corvuscorva Nightfire smiles!
Adelene Dawner: ^.^
Corvuscorva Nightfire: Adelene!
Corvuscorva Nightfire: Wo!
Wol Euler: hello corvi.
Corvuscorva Nightfire: Clair, sTim, Ajata!
Stim Morane: Hi Corvi
Claire Beltran: Close where? You still haven't told me where it was.
Adelene Dawner: It was in Princeton, NJ.
Claire Beltran: Oh... then I guess I couldn't have made it, after all...
Adelene Dawner: It was a great success, I think Pema's already half planning to have more in other places. ^.^
Stim Morane: I'll have to delete that from the log. Otherwise, he'll get ideas ...
Wol Euler: heheheheh
Adelene Dawner snerks.
Wol Euler wishes she could have gone...
Corvuscorva Nightfire giggles.
Wol Euler: oooh, dark.
Wol Euler: (damn, wrong window, sorry :-)
Adelene Dawner: It was really cool getting to meet everybody though. And more than a little useful, too.
Wol Euler: mm?
Adelene Dawner: In a couple different ways, that. One of the most obvious is that not everybody's personality comes through accurately in text chat.
Adelene Dawner: I know Stevenaia a lot better now than I did a few days ago.
Adelene Dawner: Also, watching my system handle overload in a truly safe environment was interesting. I'm amazed at what it's capable of and I want to know how to arrange my environment to let that happen more often.
Corvuscorva Nightfire smiles at Adelene.
Wol Euler smiles. that was surely worth learning.
Claire Beltran: What was the result of that?
Adelene Dawner: Even thinking back to when I took a trip to NYC to meet Pema a few months ago - that was one day, and it took me two days to recover- this time I was back to normal even keel before I even got home!
Stim Morane: Good
Wol Euler: very good.
Adelene Dawner: *amazing*.
Adelene Dawner: And I want to know what made that happen. Seems like a very useful thing to know.
Bell: *ding*
Stim Morane: How have the rest of you been?
Wol Euler: working flat out in RL :-(. My 9 second was "I am SOOOOOO tired."
Stim Morane: :)
Stim Morane: Oh well
Wol Euler: it'll be onver Friday, just have to hold on.
Corvuscorva Nightfire nods.
Stim Morane: Ordinary life is so full of distracting and draining circumstances, it's either a barrier to the PaB point and an opportunity to work with it more intensely.
Stim Morane: *or an opportunity
Wol Euler: mmhmm
Stim Morane: Are there other observations re the 9 secs or other PaB experiments?
Wol Euler chuckles. I finally understood APAPB talking to Storm on Saturday :-)
Adelene Dawner: oh?
Wol Euler: lemmme get the link...
Wol Euler: http://playasbeing.wik.is/index.php?title=Chat_Logs/2008/10/2008.10.18_13:00_-_Wol_Euler_finally_understands_APAPB%21
Wol Euler: Wol Euler: we - and everything else - are avatars of being. representations of it.
Wol Euler: no man is an island.
Storm Nordwind nods
Wol Euler: it all made sense, somehow
Wol Euler: and also explained the idea of extending compassion to all living things, not just people, because they too are Being.
Storm Nordwind: yes
Wol Euler: I had an image of somebody (Mr. Being) lying in the bathtub slowly raising his hand palm-up out of the bathwater.
Wol Euler: as his fingertips break surface we see them and think each one is a separate entity
Wol Euler: but it#s all Being.
WatchDog v1.4 GROUP shouts: EJECTING Nickoli Dagostino FROM PARCEL
Corvuscorva Nightfire smiles.
Adelene Dawner grins.
Wol Euler: it was a real "aha" moment, I'd been utterly unable to grasp the point of it until then
Stim Morane: Good. And now?
Wol Euler: well, it feels ... as tthough the world got a little larger, and smoother.
Adelene Dawner: ^.^
Stim Morane: Yes
Wol Euler: the effect still echoes, I got through the day without even thinking about biting anyone's head off :-)
Stim Morane: :)
Corvuscorva Nightfire laughs.
Wol Euler: which at this late stage of competition work is not at all a "given"
Adelene Dawner: ^.^
Wol Euler: so on the whole it fels qute positive.
Stim Morane: So do you find yourself trying to retrieve that?
Bell: *ding*
Wol Euler: yes, I must admit that I retained more of the feeling than of the understanding, I had to skim the log to figure out what had actually happened
Stim Morane: interesting
Wol Euler: I like the image, and the way that it ties in so many strands of things that float in my head since years.
Wol Euler: hello gaya
Corvuscorva Nightfire smiles at Gaya.
Gaya Ethaniel: _/!\_
Stim Morane: the image is no stranger or more funny than traditional ones. I've had friends compare Being to cookies emerging from cookie dough. The main thing is that it spoke to you at the moment.
Wol Euler nods and smiles
Stim Morane: Hi Gaya
Adelene Dawner: I keep wanting to compare trying to retrieve that feeling with trying to find your arm, but that only makes sense from the perspective of the type of autistic who does sometimes forget where she left her arm and which particular sequence of brain-activation is needed in order to use it for anything. It does hold true in that context though - just 'caues I've forgotten where my arm is, doesn't mean it's nto attached to my shoulder any more.
Wol Euler: :-)
Faenik is a hairy black ball with eyes and ears.
Gaya Ethaniel: sounds tiring... is it Adele? do you need to do similar things constantly?
Adelene Dawner: Um, yes and no.
Adelene Dawner: If the things I need to do are difficult for me - and my idea of 'difficult' is not the same as most peoples' - limiting the amount of variety means that I can give enough energy to those difficult things to do them anyway.
Faenik: could be
Adelene Dawner: But that's not a good situation to be in in the first place.
Adelene Dawner: If I'm in a healthier situation, I'm more able to handle and enjoy change and new things.
Adelene Dawner: And I've never lost my arm when I was in a healthy situation. That's the kind of thing that comes up when I'm in a state of chronic overload.
Adelene Dawner: Which actually makes me wonder if you guys having trouble holding onto these concepts might be related to you being overloaded in some way, too.
Gaya Ethaniel ponders
Wol Euler chuckles. THere's a sentence worthy of "overheard in new york" :-)
Bell: *ding*
Wol Euler: yse, Ade, that's very likely so.
Corvuscorva Nightfire pulls her breath in at Adelene's remark.
Adelene Dawner: It's hard to see overload when you're in it, too, if you don't already know what to look for - it doesn't look like overload. It actually looks like 'I'm doing pretty darn good, all things considered'.
Adelene Dawner: At least it does to me. It only looks like overload in hindsight.
Corvuscorva Nightfire laughs.
Corvuscorva Nightfire: yes.
Corvuscorva Nightfire: exactly.
Gaya Ethaniel giggles... yes know what you mean
Wol Euler nods.
Gaya Ethaniel: last such realisation occured at least two weeks after for me
Stim Morane: yes
Adelene Dawner: mmhmm, sounds about right.
Gaya Ethaniel: what do you do to put a brake on the overloading Adele?
Gaya Ethaniel: (if you are aware that is)
Adelene Dawner: Mostly I ride it out. There are tricks for getting through it in a moment to moment sense; I haven't found much that works as far as making it shorter in an overall sense.
Gaya Ethaniel nods
Faenik: ah :)
Corvuscorva Nightfire thinks..
Corvuscorva Nightfire: but sometimes you are able to focus on the thing that was overload
Adelene Dawner: Well, yeah. If there's a specific thing that is controlable that causes overload, avoid it.
Adelene Dawner: And when you're in an overloading situation, focusing on it in the right way can be useful.
Adelene Dawner: In fact... as I think about it, the stims that I'm talking about with 'right focus' are almost meditations...
Corvuscorva Nightfire nods, thinking.
Wol Euler: the difficulty is that we (society) think that we (indifiduals) _should_ be able to cope with whatever comes up.
Gaya Ethaniel nods... embracing not avoiding for me
Adelene Dawner: Yeah, that doesn't *work*, wol.
Wol Euler: true!
Corvuscorva Nightfire leans on Wol.
Adelene Dawner: More detail about stims: The basic pattern is to get a few different processing areas dealing with the same piece of information at once.
Adelene Dawner: In my case, i get overloaded by sensory stuff. A good example of that was when I was in NYC visiting Pema - I should *not* have taken a taxi to the restaurant, moving that fast through the city was just too much visual stuff at once.
Adelene Dawner: So I made a stim for it.
Corvuscorva Nightfire nods...how?
Faenik: ah :)
Adelene Dawner: What I did was to pick out one object, name it, and then pick out another object and name that, all the way to the restaurant.
Gaya Ethaniel: ah...
Adelene Dawner: So the simele seeing things brain-part was working, and the brain part that names things was also working on the same informetion.
Corvuscorva Nightfire: ah
Adelene Dawner: It helped.
Corvuscorva Nightfire: mm
Adelene Dawner: *simple seeing things
Wol Euler: ah.
Gaya Ethaniel ponders...
Gaya Ethaniel: perhaps that's why I feel more relaxed after playing music than drawing...
Adelene Dawner: Probably. Playing music uses more areas, I bet.
Gaya Ethaniel: interesting...
Claire Beltran: That doesn't really work for me...
Claire Beltran: If anything it makes my thoughts race harder.
Gaya Ethaniel ponders how she can apply this new technique to her daily life
Faenik: could be
Corvuscorva Nightfire: stimming doesn't work for you, Clair?
Bell: *ding*
Claire Beltran: I don't really think so... maybe the solution for me is to find some way to slow the speed, by doing less things with my mind at once.
Claire Beltran: Overall, I mean.
Adelene Dawner: It might not work for everybody, Claire, I'm not even sure it's relevant to non-autistics at all. But the real root of it is to do as much *simple* processing as possible - it's a lot of thinking but it's not the same as worrying.
Gaya Ethaniel: yes one thing at a time works for me too
Claire Beltran: I think I must go for a while...
Gaya Ethaniel: takes a special focus though
Adelene Dawner: ok, cya Claire. :)
Stim Morane: Yes, I will have to leave now too.
Corvuscorva Nightfire: Bye, Claire.
Adelene Dawner: cya Stim :)
Corvuscorva Nightfire: By Stim.
Gaya Ethaniel: see you soon again Claire
Stim Morane: THanks for the discussion.
Stim Morane: :)
Gaya Ethaniel: _/!\_
Wol Euler: bye claire, take care.
Stim Morane: Bye all!