a TL;DR to everything I write
i. Reading this probably won’t change your life. As Lao Tzu says, “The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao.” As Tenacious D says, “This is not the greatest song in the world. This is just a tribute.” This is a description of an experience; this article is not the experience itself. Still, I am writing it. Everything I write comes from, and comes back to, understanding this and this understanding. I am practicing.
ii. The nature of existence is towards expansion and complexity. The nature of each living thing in existence is towards healthy equilibrium. …
Pro tip: You only assess your own experience.
We’re told again and again that thinking positively is super good for us. Keeping a positive outlook on life and the future reduces stress and makes us happier, healthier, more loving people. If we stay positive, we raise our vibration, and then, through the magic of… crystals or something, good things will come our way. Think positive! #GoodVibesOnly
So, what do we do with this whole thing where the world is crappy and horrible a lot of the time?
I’d wager that most of you, like me, would love to always be happy and live lives completely filled with sources of positivity. I’d guess that most of you, like me, live in a world that seems to be absolutely bursting with situations that don’t inspire much positivity. In some cases, trying to “Just be positive!” …
How to turn everything that happens to you into an asset
What if only good things happened to you, and every event in your life just made it better? That’s not as impossible as you might think.
From spiritual teachings to productivity hacks, from organization strategies to relationship advice, we are inundated with tips, tricks and practices aimed at making our lives better. At the end of the day, we all want to live well. We may each have wildly different ideas of what a good life looks like, but we share the common goal of wanting one.
What makes a life good or bad? More to the point, what makes anything good or bad? Think back to that age-old saying, “Is the glass half empty, or half full?” The wisdom of the saying has less to do with optimism or pessimism, and more to do with the power our minds have to shape how the world affects us. All that’s actually there is a glass with some water in it. What you say about it does not change what it is, but it can entirely change how it impacts you, and what living feels like as a result. …
The practices we use for emotional awareness are meant for connection, not for protection.
Level One
I’m just gonna say it: your emotions are the single most important thing in your life.
Our feelings are how we interface with the world around us. They are what ultimately determine our experience on this planet, the core of how we take in what happens to us, and determine what it is we do in response, the link between the internal and the collective. As our society slowly emerges from what Teal Swan dubbed “The Emotional Dark Ages,” we find ourselves reckoning with emotional awareness in confusing and conflicting ways.
When it comes to our emotions, we’re like an entire society of teenagers right now. We’re going through massive changes and a deep collective self-discovery, testing these new methods of being in the world. It’s a process. …
Let’s get to the next level of emotional relationships in 2021
A while back, I wrote this article that then became this zine about understanding emotional responsibility, beyond the concepts of fault and duty. “Emotional responsibility” is the term given to the practice of believing that only the experiencer of an emotion can really change that emotion. It is both true, and complete and utter bullshit, for a variety of reasons:
- First of all, no one can force you to feel anything, and you cannot force anyone to feel anything. This is true.
- Beyond that, emotional responsibility is an utter and complete cop-out from accountability and understanding the impact of one’s actions. …
On the wisdom of viewing yourself as a mobile tiny house
This isn’t an article about my experiences as a #vanlifer. If you haven’t lived in a van, here’s the gist: it’s great in all the ways you think it would be great. You blast old rock n’ roll and drive into sunsets and spend the night in the forest and wake up to sweeping vistas and open roads. You feel free. It sucks in all the ways you think it would suck. Cooking is more difficult and showering is ad-hoc and sometimes you can’t find a spot to sleep in and if your car breaks down, well, there goes your house with it. …
As our belief in objectivity erodes, what can we create from the surreality of 2020?
Somewhere in the dissonance between the lull of quarantine and the hyperactive news cycle, the sheer farce of vitriolic politics set against the serenity of so many neighbors planting gardens and engaging in mutual aid, the smoke from the fires, the rain from the storms, dates and times meaning less, the hologram of digital communication, and the chronic nausea of watching our governing institutions corrode, this year has been feeling pretty damn surreal.
I say surreal not only in the sense of weird or dreamlike, but in the rising feeling that I’m walking through a Salvador Dali painting: dripping clocks as time and reality melt around me, and less and less ability to take “reality” at face-value. …
Step One: Focus on manifesting
Many of us on spiritual paths have had that moment when we bury our heads in our hands and just wish our damn Egos away. All that tension and anxiety, pain and control, disconnection and isolation, resistance and resentment, we want it gone. We believe, or have faith, that an existence of radiant love, happiness, abundance and connection is possible, if only we could do away with this pesky little Ego and its inalienable thirst for its desires.
Like so many spiritual lessons teach us, we cannot begin from resistance. We can’t dissolve resistance by resisting it, and we can’t dissolve desire by desiring to do so. …
To the Universe, the “what” of your experience doesn’t matter.
When we find ourselves getting repeatedly frustrated by the lack in our lives, feeling trapped by seeing none of our manifestations come to fruition, none of our desires satisfied, none of our wishes granted, it may be helpful to take a big step back out of the mind and remember: Source does not speak in form.
By form, I mean the way things appear in this material plane of existence. Individuals, locations, events, actions — these are forms. They are how energies (read: relationships) appear on the material plane. To Source (/the Universe/God/what have you), the forms are meaningless. …
12 ways my life has transformed as I feel myself detaching from Ego-identification
First, this has been a process. Four years ago, I had one of those Big Spiritual Awakening kinda moments. I’m always quick to talk about it with a degree of flippancy, but it was genuinely deep. I could tell you How the moment happened, but not Why, and I don’t think the How would work as any kind of recipe for concocting such a moment of your own. Across the spiritual seekers and teachers I’ve encountered, there seems to be but one common thread tying together each individual’s lightbulb-awakening moment: they’re always pretty damn random.
What happened in that moment was subtle and powerful. I can’t tell you how long it lasted, if it was only an instant or a gradual rise and fall. I can’t be specific about where and when it started and if it ever stopped. What I can say as an attempt to describe it is this: what before I’d tried to grasp intellectually as a concept, I suddenly just knew. I got it. I groked it. It (Life, the Universe and Everything) made sense in a visceral, intuitive kind of way, like a new lens through which to look at the world and watch what had before seemed chaotic realign into cohesive and recognizable patterns. For more on what that all looked like to me, you can read just about anything else I’ve written on this Medium account. …
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