kind of important - issue regarding shared living

[DarkChylde]

*Background - I'm at my mom's place and living right next to her tenants , I'm lately (for the span of say previous 2/3 months) picking up what I can best describe as uncomfortable vibes , particularly auditory ones.I try to aim for a polite invisibility , that lets everyone get done what is it they want done in the place they are in , but garnering the sensation the gesture isn't being returned.

*Our Shared living is such that we have wall where my wardrobe is and a door separating us , in summers with the fan and the air conditioning on there's a natural white noise kind of thing , that blurs out , the noise you are making in your ambient place of whatever sort of your room.Summers aren't truly here yet and I play music , sometimes with headphones or sometimes with low volume or like today put just white noise on.
I feel like as if being monitored by the amount of light or sound in my current place of living by the people living next to me.People use the "term cramp my style" , what the term means is that your ability to work by being alone doing your own thing by yourself is being impinged upon by someone else's presence or oversight.

*An honest reality check : I take a lot of coffee (makes me paranoid) and sometimes a stimulant medication for study (again makes me paranoid) , sometimes to wind down my wired up system I toke up , (again mj makes me paranoid) ;but then's there's also the reality that I've done of all of this before but didn't the uncomfortable sensation of being "thought" about before.

*I know there's a distinct possibility there's could be a cumulative paranoia at play with the concoction I'm , but I'm also distinctly aware of the fact that a).I can pick vibes pretty well b).I'm razor-sharp at reading people by demeanor , voice or gesture (I have seen only two of the tenants living next) others I haven't or met even once.


*I'm going up into the hills by myself for a a couple of days (forcing myself , to travel independently is a definite wanting of mine, also the isolation there I'm sure will cease paranoia and the sense of picking up things that are reacting to my cues , like , lights , sounds , people who come in or my friends or what we talk about .
But I much rather do whatever I do and be hated for it than do something I hate and being loved for it.and all this isn't making that easier.

*I used to be very very good at putting out the vibe "leave me be" or "this unit prefers self company" , I guess my ability to make an impenetrable cube around has me has waned and things are just creeping in.
I'm so tired with everything going on (not a sob morsel to gain sympathy) that to meditate on making isolation cubes , cutting ties and all the energy and meditation work of doing that will leave me drained and I won't make an effective cube ( or give up half way).


Any suggestions will be very helpful.

[broken]

I just typed out a response on my phone which may have been lost -- if anyone sees a double-post please let me know.

I live through this very situation every day. To be honest, practically all of the "affordible" buildings in this area have absimal insulation -- both in terms of sound and in terms of air temp. Every multi-tenant building I have been in has sound issues, and I've noticed a few similiarites between them all:

A) No one is neighborly. People avoid contact with neighbors in these buildings like they are jehovas witnesses or homeless people. As someone who grew up in an environment where your neighbors were like family, this was incredibly odd, but it quickly made sense to me when on one of the first nights in my first aparatment, I heard the upstairs neighbors' (all 12 of them) trips to the bathroom. I noticed inside that I was starting to hate them -- I mean like really despise these people that I had yet to meet. Then it kinda clicked, I was like how insane is this -- I'm allowing this feeling to stick around, and grow, over something that is completely human and unavoidable (even if you are the ruler of north korea) -- going to the restroom. They didn't build such a shoddy building, and what are they supposed to do -- only pee between 9am and 9pm? It was then that I came to my next realization.

B) In places with poor sound isolation, the most polite thing to do (ironically) is play music or have white noise. It is in fact courteous when it comes to things like hearing neighrbors fighting, making love, or having a very personal conversation. I had one roommate that insisted that the only polite thing is headphones, to which I respectfully disagreed. I think my point was made shortly after that conversation when I got food posioning, and in attempt to not block the bathroom spent the night puking my brains out in my room (it was real food poisoning, not overdoing it with alcohol, so it lasted for hours). I think she realized then that headphones for hours just doesn't work at all.

C) Walking on eggshells and limiting yourself unduly, in my experience, doesn't make neighbors friendlier. They still hear the other neighbor watching TV, and might just not be that nice of people. In my experience, being the perfect neighbor goes unnoticed. And it creates an environment, internally, where you are putting yourself down and regarding yourself as a nuisance, a problem, something that is unwanted, and would be better off gone.

Also, herb and pharms make all of this way worse. For one, it makes you paranoid and overly self critical. It also makes it harder to just be at peace with the reality of your building. And if those neighbors smell it they will have another reason to hate you.

And fwiw, although we have a few valid excuses for self-medicating, in my experience there are far more valid reasons that it doesn't help. It reminds me of an epihany I had at a fair as a seven year old. It was probably noon and I was in line for a corndog(or something like that), being alone I was intensely observing the people around me and I came to a realization -- the people who were drinking were all either : not particularly attractive, grungy, or loud / overcompensating by being in 'party mode'. It was literally from that point on that i saw booze and drugs to be, for the most part, a way to distract socially rejected people from their own isolation, lonliness, and depression. I know that is my insight, and I do not mean to label or frame you, but given that this is a forum for spiritual development, meditation, dreaming, and projection it seems very relevant. Substances make inner work very difficult at deeper levels. They are fantastic distractions from how ♥♥♥♥ty our existence may be, but ultimately they even only do that temporarily.

To sum up my suggestions, soft music or white noise pretty much all the time, direct honesty with your neighbors about your buildings sound isolation, as regular of a schedule as you can manage, and curb the substances as much as you can.

Best of luck!

[DarkChylde]

I just typed out a response on my phone which may have been lost -- if anyone sees a double-post please let me know.

No double posting but a huge thank you for the effort of writing this all out on your cellular phone.



Walking on eggshells and limiting yourself unduly, in my experience, doesn't make neighbors friendlier. They still hear the other neighbor watching TV, and might just not be that nice of people.
:arrow: In my experience, being the perfect neighbor goes unnoticed. And it creates an environment, internally, where you are putting yourself down and regarding yourself as a nuisance, a problem, something that is unwanted, and would be better off gone.

Thank you ; this was truly insightful



Also, herb and pharms make all of this way worse. For one, it makes you paranoid and overly self critical. It also makes it harder to just be at peace with the reality of your building. And if those neighbors smell it they will have another reason to hate you.
Agreed



To sum up my suggestions, soft music or white noise pretty much all the time, direct honesty with your neighbors about your buildings sound isolation, as regular of a schedule as you can manage, and curb the substances as much as you can.

Thankyou , there was a lot of reassurance in this thread I needed/

[Sinera]

don't have much of an additional input or advice, just saying that I live in a very similar situation with my parents, living in a narrow quarter next to the living room (loud talk, TV ...) and not even a real door for sound isolation...

have white noise on all day long almost, also in the room on my computer additionally (bubbling creeks, sea waves, storm, rain), I love it

I also pick up negative energy fields but grew used to it and still try to shield myself, with varying success rates, the most important is really headphones with white noise

on long term I know I need to find a way out, so far my financials do not yet allow it

before that I was also 'escaping' from a noisy neighbour situation, upstairs above my appartment a (divorced) woman and two kids visiting her often moved in. They were making lots of unbearable trampling noises, this is the worst I've ever been through, people almost "literally" have been trampling on me - it is also humiliating

I took it as a sign that I now HAVE TO move out. My situation now is bad but it is still better than it was than, cold comfort, I know...

good luck

[DarkChylde]

don't have much of an additional input or advice, just saying that I live in a very similar situation with my parents, living in a narrow quarter next to the living room (loud talk, TV ...) and not even a real door for sound isolation...

have white noise on all day long almost, also in the room on my computer additionally (bubbling creeks, sea waves, storm, rain), I love it

I also pick up negative energy fields but grew used to it and still try to shield myself, with varying success rates, the most important is really headphones with white noise

on long term I know I need to find a way out, so far my financials do not yet allow it

before that I was also 'escaping' from a noisy neighbour situation, upstairs above my appartment a (divorced) woman and two kids visiting her often moved in. They were making lots of unbearable trampling noises, this is the worst I've ever been through, people almost "literally" have been trampling on me - it is also humiliating

I took it as a sign that I now HAVE TO move out. My situation now is bad but it is still better than it was than, cold comfort, I know...

good luck

isn't it weird that if someone has constant white noise or music on play , it means : tone down your damn noise (but people never get it do they?) , very odd.


I'm proud to say that I can withstand most of the annoyance of people living right next , but what really gets to me is them talking about me.

I spend a lot of time in the bathroom , I have a facial routine that takes a long time , and I use a clairsonic a mechanical cleaning facial brush.

The other day I heard something like "Damn I don't even think I know a girl who works that much on her face" - that just set me off :mad:

Just what the heck is it with people and talking about me ? - One of these fine days my finely taut of a rubber mind will snap and it won't be pretty for anyone.

My boyfriend is the process of shifting places himself so all this muck is hurling in my face.

Sometimes being polite is the hardest form of self-restraint.

[DarkChylde]

i re-read this whole thread and understood that to live in fear or judgement or intrusion of others thinking stuff about you , is not the right way to live .

My father expired this past september and I moved in with my mother to be closer to her , now with her having renovations underway , instead of living down stairs , where I pad at usually , I'm upstairs sharing the whole of the upper house with her tenants , she owns the house so she's technically bound to amicable check-ins for "alls good"? (she's friendly with them , played match maker even). That's the couple I know , I didn't attend their wedding so as people I hardly know them.Strangers more or less.
Recently more people moved in and that's even all this activity agitated.

I think spiritual isolation and spiritual awareness have distinct polarity.

When introversion is called for spiritual isolation "zones you out" , reality has a surreal ineffectual effect , it's not really getting to you.Had that been happening this would have been small potatoes .


On the contrary with spiritual awareness all manner of sensation amplifies , you are "over-tuned" to what's going on around you , and maybe that's the part that teaches you there's no real privacy , or conversely impresses more of its appreciation on you.

My mom insists of footing my rent , at a place almost near where I go to work , I didn't take her up on it.
In between moving hospitals and the irregularity of a consistent pay check , here I am in this situation.


Also I practice ritual majick and this ongoing thing is totally cramping the style :mad:
.Majick has to be practiced with absolute concrete will and that's going to take a hit while you perform the back of your brain says "damn he does satanic stuff too?" (I have to burn paper with sijils on them as a part of the ritual).
Some kid goes sick , some money goes missing , some rash doesn't disappear , there's one person the people next door will have an image pop up in their head of and reputations are not fun , specially fallacious ones.

this has been "one of those days" too a many.

[dontco]

Hey :-) just wanted to write this phrase I remember an actress once said- It goes something like this:
"my mother always tells me it's none of my business to think of what other people think of me".
I really like this sentence. Words to live by (maybe there are better words to live by but these words are nice, too :-)).

[DarkChylde]

easier said than done.

[Sinera]

someone said sth similar to: "what they think of you tells all about them but nothing about you"

[DarkChylde]

someone said sth similar to: "what they think of you tells all about them but nothing about you"

Hi Sinera , thank you so much for saying that , first it made me happy to know sometimes I'm not just babbling and people actually are getting me :D

second it really did make me appreciate that highly personalized individuals not just house bound nobodies (a huge assumption for people to say that) have actually evolved to a point where there own internal spiritual life is so absorbing , so fascinating , that it really makes up for you being you (i.e having a good time) and it doesn't even have to be spiritual , you play loud music or be yourself (rid your self of assumptions of being judged)

sometimes I take the liberty of taking what people write here and etch it into the quotes place , with this I just might do that , so I'm going put in here a ty.

[DarkChylde]

for an update , but a very tepidly boring one , I played white noise without headphones all day

I intend to slowly accustom everyone to it , in ambient space, I re-read this thread and saw that was also a definitive major advice all of the commentators had put in.

I'm also feeling that another thing , that I need tone down the animosity and when I meditate include everyone on a wavelength of peace.

there was a thread ButterflyWoman had written about "casting love" , somehow I feel that this is relevant here.
what I liked reading in it was the mention something on the lines of "why even bother wasting time disliking or cursing people in your mind, peace them out with love and be done with it" , sounds , simple effective and the aspect of expanding your comfort zone that way really appealed me to me too.I'm not being selfish here for being self concerned about my own comfort only but lately I've started understanding that love is essential part of spirituality

[CFTraveler]

:thumbsup: