[The Cloud]

You don't have to maintain being you. You are you every moment. Let me ask you this question that really bowled me over the first time I heard it in "Anger Management"; who are you? Not what's your name, not what do you do for a living, not where do you live or who are you related to, not what is your personality like. Who are you?

You can't say. You are who you are, but you don't know it. You can't know it. Who you are changes every moment, so how can you maintain being who you are if it is not something that is maintained. You aren't a stable thing, a noun. You are a dynamic action, a verb. You happen every moment. It's not so much "I am" as it is "am-ing is here." The English language mistakenly makes things out to be stable and continuous, when nothing is really stable and continuous even if it looks like it. For example, the Earth is spinning, and revolving around the sun, which revolves around a galaxy, which revolves around god knows what. So every moment everything is in a completely different place relative to the rest of the universe. How much more difference could you ask for from moment to moment?

Now, for number 2, my main assertion is that emotional pain and physical pain are the same thing. They are just there to tell us when something is wrong. Physical pain tells us that something may be wrong with our body. Emotional pain tells us that something may be wrong with our perspective or our actions. You are not the things you feel. If you physically feel something bad, you don't think that you are a bad person for that. Yet if you feel emotionally bad, like angry, then you feel that you are your emotion and therefore you are bad. This is just another falsehood. Being angry doesn't make you a bad person. Being angry just tells you one thing; you need to change your perspective to feel differently. The anger tells you that you're looking at things in a way that contradicts the reality of your situation, that there is a metaphysical nail in your foot. Alter your perception, and you no longer have to be angry.

You said you liked hands-on things. When you're feeling angry or scared or otherwise emotionally problematic, look around you. Experience everything that is happening right at the moment, and ask yourself what is wrong with it. Notice how nothing is really wrong with right now, and that all your problems are somewhere else that you have invented in your mind. In the future, in the past, in your head. That is where your problems are. But you are in the now, and you always will be, so you are always where your problems aren't.