Is anyone here interested in reality/shifting or manifestation? I was rlly into manifestation before but I kept obsessing over is it working or not and I tried to shift a couple times but I never could

What are your thoughts on shadow work, the shadow self, and so on? I've been on a bit of a spiritual journey lately. If this concept offends your beliefs, please disregard. I've long heard of shadow work but today I really became curious about it. How does one even approach shadow work if they have OCD? If your brain is constantly trying to find ways to make you feel like you're secretly a bad or evil person, you naturally deny it. We spend hours doing this with OCD, unless we are doing ERP and then we try and accept it. On some level, we know it's not true. Shadow work seems tricky because OCD could easily say "you are a horrible person, and do you remember all the times you deny that when you're having a spike?" What are your thoughts or experiences with this shadow work business?

I recently posted somewhere in response to manifesting that it does work, but doesn't work for people with ocd due to their mindset. I think they referenced the book The Secret. I'm currently reading it and can quite safely confirm it's 95% bs 🙄 only reason I'm reading it is because it makes me feel less delusional than the author. I've manifested before when I was symptom free, but not like they say in this book. It's dumb. Just wanted to put this disclaimer out there for those with magical thinking themes 😬

I got interested in lucid dreaming several decades ago. I'd often had lucid dreams going back to childhood, long before I even knew the term, but it was in my early 20s that I learned about it as something some people actively pursued as a hobby, with a range of techniques to help make themselves aware of their dreaming while they were dreaming. Among those techniques is to look at a piece of writing, look away, then look back at it. As writing rarely remains stable in dreams, the writing will usually have changed if a person is dreaming, and if it stays the same, the person is probably awake. (The technique is usually described in terms of looking at a watch or clock, but it really can be used for any writing--in fact it's better if it's writing that normally wouldn't change, as clocks and watches do.) This is not the only method of reality-testing, but in my experience it's the one I've found easiest and most reliable. My full-time interest in lucid dreaming only lasted about 6 months. But thereafter I continued to use the looking-at-writing technique whenever the topic of lucid dreaming entered my mind. I began doing this practically everywhere, using whatever writing I found around me: books, food packages, devices, street signs, license plates, storefronts, and more. I even unwisely did it on occasion while driving. I did it so much it made my eyes sore and bloodshot. I even paused to do it while writing this post. Naturally, it looks strange if other people see me doing it, though it's something I try not to do around other people. My mom once saw me doing it, and she told me I had a tic. I don't think it's a tic, but it is a compulsion. My understanding of the difference is that compulsions are always a choice: I can choose to ignore the compulsion. But I guess the back-and-forth motion with my eyes and/or head may resemble a stereotypical tic to outside observers. I'm still unwilling to totally give up the habit. Part of the reason is that it still is effective at helping me become aware of my dream state while I'm dreaming, which is a positive when I'm having an unpleasant dream. But I definitely do it excessively, to a point that's probably unhealthy for my eyes, and it seems like a lot of effort for very little. I have diagnosed OCD as well as autism, but I'm not sure what particular subtype this would fall into--it's hardly the only compulsion I have, but it may be the most unusual one--as I've never heard of this happening to anyone else, not even other people who are interested in lucid dreaming. I guess it derives from a sense of anxiety connected to being uncertain about the reality around me, as well as a sense of loss of control when it comes to sleeping--which relates to my general difficulties in falling and staying asleep (which I'm currently being treated for). I also have chronic sleep paralysis going back to early childhood, and while this has provided me with yet another stepping stone to lucid dreaming, probably the fear of entering this state has further reinforced my sense of anxiety around sleeping and dreaming, and feeling a need to take control of it to the best of my ability. At least that's how I've been able to explain it. I'm open to other suggestions, or any advice others may have.