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Mewing and Tongue Position

Byjack

I’ve always had trouble finding a relaxed position for my tongue at the roof of the mouth. I always felt that I was forcing it and in the past when I tried to “mew” I got terrible headaches.

However, I noticed I spend a lot of time breathing from my mouth and I wanted to fix things so I used a bit of connection theory to come up with an idea on how to hold my tongue and I came up with this simple technique:

  • Imagine your spine ending at your tailbone and reaching up all the way and ending at your tongue
  • Imagine keeping your spine open at extended

This imagery has a couple of benefits:

  • Most importantly for me, this allows me to move my body and my tongue without feeling like I cannot maintain tongue posture (mewing always felt static and forced to me)
  • Simple and seems quite relaxing to me

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The Attractiveness Challenge

Byjack

I’m working on discovering and developing my own attractiveness. Just to clarify:

  • Attractiveness is not about finding faults, it’s about understanding your most beautiful self and letting yourself grow into that version of yourself. It’s not about imagining other people and wishing you were like them.
  • Attractiveness is very personal. It should be how you want to look to feel like yourself and feel confident. It can match societal versions of beauty but does not have to.

I discovered an exercise that can help:

  1. Stand in front of a full-length mirror
  2. Remove as much clothing as possible, naked if possible
  3. Stand straight and adjust your body to find the most attractive posture
  4. Note any other areas that need adjusting, skin, hair etc. in order to reach peak attractiveness
  5. Once you find your baseline (just standing straight), try different poses
  6. This is PARTICULARLY good at detecting problems with posture
  7. You can take this practice into ordinary life by imagining you are naked, it’s a more natural mentality for intuitively good posture and can make you feel more open and confident

This is an interesting idea, to be naked first because I think it follows the idea that I have with learning in general. You should always start with the basics and move upward. In attractiveness, you must first find your attractive yourself naked before finding your attractive self with clothes on. Just like with any other learning technique, clothes and other accessories (like makeup) actually distract from you seeing the lowest most basic level of yourself. You are the MOST natural and yourself when naked, so it makes sense to start there.

My initial thoughts:

  • The MAIN area that is keeping me from being my most attractive self is the posture of my neck and shoulders. My head is jutted forward making my chin weak and shoulders rounded forward, making my stomach stick out.
  • I may need to cut my hair since it is too much for the features of my face and makes my features look duller.
  • I have other minor areas of posture that need to be adjusted and other grooming things I may want to do.
  • This exercise is GREAT for feeling confident in your own skin, I noticed when I focus on improving my own posture, I open up my body instead of hunching and feel more confident.
  • I don’t actually need to get more fit and muscular like I always think I do. I just need to strengthen my back and core so I can naturally maintain a better posture.

This seems to work mostly for your body though, and not with your face. My intuition tells me that the biggest tool for facial symmetry is just finding ways to relax your face but I’m pretty lost in that area.

Onwards to a better-looking future!

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Knee Strength 7: Walking

Byjack

Yesterday I was walking around a lot when I felt a lot of pain on the interior side of the meniscus of my right knee.

I was really concerned, but this experience helped me get back into the knee challenge to focus on my knee and how it is moving.

When I used connection theory, I noticed that I was using my legs too much (specifically calves) when walking.

The steps for proper walking:

  1. Use hips to step out
  2. Flex and stretch out leg fully
  3. Only use calf muscles at the end of a stride

Also, stretching the calves helps.

It is actually incredible, I went from pain in every step to no pain at all even though I walked for a long time.

Also, I tried connection theory on walking on uneven ground and some tips for that:

  • Keep the ankles active
  • Relax the hips
  • Bend the knees slightly

When this is done properly it should feel like walking talks no effort.

I also did a big on climbing stairs:

  • Center the weight on the leg stepping up
  • Keep everything controlled and centered while stepping up

Finally, in terms of relief, the only exercise that really helped when my menicus was hurting was the Gentle Knee Spacer exercise in this post.

Nothing else really helps, what surprised me is that the foot scrape actually caused pain.

I still haven’t figured out how to sleep on my side safely, but my intuition tells me that I need to build up more muscles in the legs.

Failure & David Goggins

Byjack

I’ve been thinking so long about the fear of failure and embracing pain since the fear of failure holds me back in almost every area of life.

David Goggins is famous for being someone who has made his thing embracing pain.

It’s interesting because I always wrote people like Goggins off, and I still feel like he is missing the subtle touch, the emotional and artistic, but I actually think he is onto something,

Some of the main takeaways:

  • Embracing showing how messed up you are don’t care what anyone thinks
  • Everyone is messed up, if they are judging you, they are just better at hiding it than you
  • Use every naysayer as motivation
  • When you embrace your faults, you will find the who you really are and pursue that
  • Self discipline is creating self respect

This self discipline thing has always been interesting to me because I’ve heard this before. But I don’t really understand it. Isn’t discipline yelling at yourself?

The embracing failures and not hiding your failures to see what you really want to be is really telling to me as well. I always wonder what I should do, but I can wonder what I could do. And being willing to show everything wrong with me just will get me closer to clarity on who I am.

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Bedtime Challenge 3: The End

Byjack

I realized something. It is the end of my bedtime challenge! I have only three days in which I actually violated the boundaries of the challenge:

  1. First time was for work, when troubleshooting an issue took me until 11:30 PM, I went to bed at 12
  2. Second time was for my girlfriend, helping her with a school project until 12
  3. The third time was when the challenge officially ended already, on the 17th (challenge ended on the 12th) when I was feeling too overwhelmed to pack for my trip back to my parent’s house for the holidays.

Although the challenge is over, the work continues.

It is even more critical now because I have a lot of issues with keeping control of my life while at my parent’s house and the bedtime routine isn’t as nice as I would like to have it. I will keep this challenge going for a few more days to solidify some of the more important aspects of the challenge such as the morning routine, and nighttime routine, and fulfilling some of the things I need from the nighttime (alone time, creativity, productivity, fun, and space).

Instead, I am feeling pretty much that my space and time are particularly intruded on in recent times and I need to find ways to meet those needs.

Overall, I am extremely proud of myself and look forward to all the health benefits this will afford me.

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Fitness Challenge 1: Initial Thoughts

Byjack

Today I had a couple observations after feeling very depleted and inflamed with allergies:

  • Breathing fully and deeply while feeling the sensations helped move the chi
  • Clockwise massage on my stomach really helped the chi flow a lot
  • Same direction with palms facing back on the lower spine to tailbone also very helpful
  • Clockwise rubbing of the solar plexus also really helpful
  • Hanging was a nice resting position
  • Eating slow wasn’t the best method
  • Prefer to eat moderate speed for a small amount at a time, chewing in a bigger motion and smelling and tasting the food with small breaks in between bites and some stomach massage

I want to continue to push myself and work on finding good resting positions and strategies to recover.

I also need to work on setting a baseline and measurements to track progress.

  • Get a scale to weigh myself
  • Get a heart rate monitor, smartwatch or fitness band to monitor vitals
  • Need to come up with a standard lighting to take a photo

UNIT ONE, Week 1: Regen from tiring out (no matter how tired, wired or drained) lasts 7 days

Today is day 1, end of Week 1 is May 18th.