I'm going to illustrate my point by telling an allegorical story from my experience in a 10 day Vipassana meditation course which I did in Malaysia back in 2019.
During Vipassana you have to meditate all day since early morning until evening (with breaks). Every day you're instructed on a very specific meditation technique so it's not just sitting and relaxing - it's actually a hard self-development work. At the end of 2nd day, during a break, while walking outside in the garden I had a realization that the flow of my thoughts has finally finished (there was nothing to think about anymore) and I experienced the true feeling of being here and now, and that our whole continuum is happening eternally with no beginning nor end. I know it doesn't sound exciting because we've all heard about this and understand this concept more or less. But understanding is not the same as realization - the actual sensation and experience of that. Understanding is limited, while realization is life-changing. So it was a life changing experience for me, but it didn't end there.
On the 5th day during meditation in the hall I received a sudden sensation of expanding consciousness. It felt like I am expanding like a balloon into the dark ambient space and a few seconds later I received an overwhelmingly strong feeling of vibrant energy flowing from above to the top of my head and then down to my spine, it was such an incredible and rejuvenating experience, it felt like orgasm but 1000 times stronger and it lasted for about 15 seconds. But after it ended I felt tremendously exhausted, full of sweat, breathing deeply trying to catch some air for the next 5 minutes. I was so happy about what has happened to me, I thought "I did it! It's only the 5th day and I already achieved what I had to achieve, now I can pack my things and go home, woohoo!".
So that evening I went for a meeting with the Teacher, who was a very serious Chinese man. I told him what I've experienced. He wasn't excited by a tiny inch. With the most serious face and with the least words possible he said: "I told you to focus on your breathing! All else is illusion!" So he totally neglected my "Divine" experiences and made me understand that those experiences were not important and not related to what we're supposed to achieve here. So I got back to meditation for the next 5 days...
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Getting back from my tangent... Trading is a wonderful thing. Whenever I truly connected my consciousness to the charts, I received powerful subliminal messages, it felt like the market is speaking to me. Observing the live chart movements day by day, minute by minute also gave me some deeper understandings of how things work in the world. Those were truly incredible experiences. But the problem is that they're not necessary at all. It's easy to fall into the trap of seeing trading as something "sacred" and to feel powerful as a trader because "you've finally understood how the market works". But it's all infatuation, which means it's a mind-made illusion. If Rob, my trading mentor, was still alive and I'd go and tell him those subliminal stories that I received from trading, he'd actually tell me the same thing: just focus on executing the strategy and thinking logically, all else is not important.
The biggest issue with infatuation about trading (or thinking that trading is the most important thing in your life) is that it calls for Universe's balancing force to come into play. It simply has to, because it's the law of the Universe. Imagine that when you're infatuated, you're standing at the edge of falling down the cliff. The balancing force has two choices - to let you fall into death or to push you back from the edge. Of course it wants to save you so it pushes you back by creating an experience in trading that brings you back to balance, back too seeing things as they are. Usually it means taking a loss from a trade you know you should have avoided.
How to avoid infatuation with trading? What works for me now is simply not emphasizing trading too much. When I started trading, this problem was naturally solved for me because I was doing something on the side, usually programming work. Later I stopped and focused solely on trading - because I thought that's the right thing to do. But that brought me very emotional experiences that had a toll on my health as well. I started emphasizing trading too much - as if all of my life depended on that - simply because I didn't have other meaningful work to do. Now I'm leaning back to working on the side while trading to avoid over-emphasis. It doesn't necessarily have to be paid work, it can be simply creating some art, writing an article, reading a self-development book which gives some exercises and food for thought, basically anything that keeps you moving and shaking. This allows to see trading as something "extra", something that just flows on its own and gives you money whenever it wants. I think that's a healthy attitude because that's what market essentially is. You just think logically, know what you're looking for, and when it happens, you take the trade. It's a thing that I do full time, but I don't want to see it as a full time job, because that would be over-emphasis, and it creates problems.
