Breath by James Nestor is one of the best books I’ve read this year, a fascinating look at something we’re doing every second of every day yet hardly ever consciously think about: breathing. It’s jam packed with interesting stories throughout history, of scientists and every day people experimenting with their breath as a way to change their own physiology and health. Many of the tips offered in this book are very simple, like this: Breathing through your nose is beneficial and healthy. Breathing your mouth is bad. Like, really bad if you do it consistently, as they showed in an experiment where they blocked their noses for 2 weeks (every significant biomarker worsened). There are tons of stories from the book I’d love to share (my highlighted notes from Kindle come out to 78 pages and are included at the end), but first I want to go over some of the basic breathing practices and then showcase two of the more out there stories. Whether complex or stupidly easy, what amazes me most about these stories and techniques are how wide ranging the positive effects of breathing properly can be, impacting nearly every area of your health, including sleep, energy, immune system, decreased anxiety and depression, improved focus and cardiovascular health, just to name a few.
Continue reading “Breath by James Nestor”Mobility Routine with Peter Attia & Jesse Schwartzman
Peter Attia is an interesting person. A doctor specializing in longevity, he is a wealth of information on health, exercise, sleep, nutrition, and much more. After a great appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, and the recent start of his own brand new podcast, I was reminded of the video series he had done with Jesse Schwartzman that focused on a mobility routine that allows you to move and feel better, whether it’s before a workout or just for life in general.
I learned about these videos last year and have worked in a lot of the movements into my own daily stretching routine, but fell off practicing the whole regimen. I recently recommended the videos to a few friends who also listened to the podcasts and got great feedback. It made them more comfortable going into a workout, freer, looser, with a better range of motion. I always feel good after doing it, whether I’m going into a workout or not. I’m jumping back into the full practice myself now, and thought I’d share it here if anyone was interested. I recommend trying it out, seeing what you like, and at least building those ones into some sort of routine. I definitely recommend learning more about Peter too; he’s a fascinating individual with a lot of valuable information on health and life.
Anthony Bourdain, Positive Affirmations, Empathy, and Going Forward
This was first posted in November of 2016
The night of the election, I watched an episode of this season’s Parts Unknown. Anthony Bourdain visits Houston to take a look at how diverse it has become from the immigrant tradition of America. It was a beautiful episode, and a nice respite before the crushing election that was to come. But I want to focus on one part of the episode and hopefully come back in a way that can provide some hope, and maybe a practical action you can integrate into your life.
During his trip, Bourdain visits an ESL class at a school where 80% of the student body’s first language is not English. The class begins with positive affirmations repeated by the class.
Today is a beautiful day.
I will work hard.
I am important.
I will succeed.
Watching it I felt profoundly moved hearing all of those kids say these things loudly and proudly. How rare it is for a kid, or an adult, to express such things to others, let alone to themselves. And how much more empowering for kids in a completely new country, in a completely different language, to express this and feel it inside themselves.
It also rang true to me. I’ve been experimenting with positive affirmations in the morning each day for about 5 months now. I simply say each morning, while I make my bed, maybe with some light stretching: I am kind. I am patient. I am curious. I am happy. I am compassionate. I am forgiving. I am open. I am here. Happy. Healthy. Strong. Love.
Saying that this has radically changed my life sounds false to me at first, until I think about it. I am still naturally impatient and selfish. But saying this every morning at least puts me in the right mindset, on the right path, to come back to it throughout my day. Sometimes it feels like I’m just going through the motions, but surprisingly often, I truly feel it, and it does radically change my day. It gives me the same feeling I felt when I watched those kids repeat their own affirmations.
I went to Austin, Texas right after the election and I had a wonderful, beautiful time. I interacted with a lot of different people. In the back of my mind I was trying to formulate some way to write about this election, this time we live in now, based on this experience. But I don’t want to write about the election. I also don’t want to preach to the choir. I’m sure if you’re reading this you may have similar beliefs, and you’re a good person who just wants what’s best for yourself, your family and friends, and the world. But in light of this episode, and in light of the hate filled speech that guy used throughout his campaign, and won the election with, I wanted to share one story from my trip that rings home with this segment of Parts Unknown.
I was getting a ride home at the end of the night from Gabriel. Gabriel ended up sharing that he was a Rwandan genocide survivor. He wasn’t much older than me, so he must’ve been really young when he escaped. After he escaped, he lived in a refugee camp for 10 years. No electricity, no running water, no toilets. 10 years. Finally he was allowed to relocate, and he narrowed the options given to him down to America, down to Texas, and finally to Austin, where he’s made a living and enjoyed life ever since. Just as powerful as his story was the genuineness he gave off in just a 15 minute car ride. He seemed like a sweet man, a happy man. And he’d gone through hell to get to this point.
As a country and as people we’re going to have to go through a lot of shit moving forward. It’s easy to focus solely on ourselves and our families, and shut everyone else out, especially if they seem very different from us. It’s easy to take what we have for granted. And it’s incredibly hard to imagine how we can make a difference in our country and community, if we’re even lucky enough to have the time and resources to do so. But one thing we can all try to do is to be kinder to each other. To be open and to listen. To recognize that everyone has their our own struggles we cannot see.
In order to be kind to one another we first have to be kind to ourselves. Positive affirmations can be one way to practice being kind to yourself. Even though it might seem silly, corny, or a waste of time, it’s one of the easiest, simplest, yet most powerful ways to be kinder to ourselves each day and to remind us how we want to live while we’re here. And it’s able to be done by every one of us.
I hope you have a great Thanksgiving and can remain sane through the wonderful political talk you’ll all endure. You’ll survive.
RIP Anthony Bourdain
I am so saddened by this news.
Sitting down to write this, I’m struck by how much Anthony Bourdain influenced my life, without me even realizing it. Anthony Bourdain is one of the reasons I started traveling after college, and fell in love with it. One of my favorite things in the world to do now is go somewhere new, eat some delicious food, and get to know the people that live there. See amazing things I’ve never experienced before. To just be in a new place, where somehow it’s easier to be yourself. I’ve been to restaurants he’s been to, seen his picture on the wall as I enjoyed, quite likely, the same meal he had eaten. He was a guide for exploration, and an inspiration to get off your ass and go do something new.
Reading his book Kitchen Confidential awoken an even greater interest in cooking and food. Seeing that he was writing novels while working the kitchen all night inspired me, showed me that I could find the time too. That book also allowed me to recognize the struggles of addiction, of self-loathing, and most importantly, to see that we can overcome those things, and come out the other side stronger, a total bad-ass world traveler with clearer eyes and a more open heart.
His show impacted me deeply. It showed me how to be curious about others, empathetic, to recognize that someone who might be from somewhere different is actually probably pretty damn similar to me. A couple years ago I wrote about an episode he did that inspired me, which I’ve reposted above. In that piece I talk about meeting and talking with a Rwandan refugee driving an Uber in Austin, about the struggle of life in a refugee camp and making it here after many years. I had the courage to talk to him and ask questions, and gain a greater empathy and perspective, and a friend in that moment, in part, because of Anthony Bourdain.
I am so saddened for this loss, for the loss his daughter now has to experience, and everyone who loved him. He seemed happy, and that’s the saddest, most dangerous part of this all, I guess. It’s easy to hide pain or struggle. Talk openly and honestly with your loved ones, and get them help if they need it. Ask the uncomfortable question. Tell the uncomfortable truth about your own self. Get help for yourself if you need it. Too many good people are dying, and we need all of them we can get in this world today.
Thoughts and Feelings, Feelings and Thoughts
For as long as I can remember, this is how I thought it went down: I think about something and then feelings form in response to those thoughts. That’s how it always seemed. Usually the thoughts were made up of worries, and then I’d feel anxious, stressed or impatient. It always seemed to be at it’s worst when I woke up in the morning. I’d immediately begin thinking of all the things I had to do, the people and problems I had to face (I didn’t actually have that many problems). I’d keep on thinking about my worries, leading to a downward spiral that could set the tone for the rest of the day. I’d wake up, worry, feel anxious about my worries, repeat. I now think I had it wrong. Despite it being not quite right, it was still a functioning, misdirected loop that ended up just making me feel worse.
After another beautiful day of vacation, I was sitting down to eat dinner and watch an episode of the Office when I was struck by a feeling of anxiousness. I began to search my mind for the reason for this feeling and before I settled on the answer, I recognized what was happening. I felt a feeling, and then I looked for a thought to attach to that feeling, a thought that would justify why I felt anxious. It could have been anxiety over the eventual job search I’ll have to do, or anxiety over my lack of clear direction for the future. No matter what was going on though, I’m sure I could’ve come up with a reason. I’ve always been able to. But this time I recognized there was no thought, no reason, preceding this feeling. The feeling arose on its own, and now I was trying to support the unpleasant feeling by coming up with a justification for it.
I’ve been meditating for a few years now. I’ve read books and listened to podcasts that deal with meditation, mindfulness, presence, compassion, and gratitude. A lot of these sources are repetitive and ultimately say the same thing, but I continue to go back to them. It helps me remain in that mindset, to be present and grateful, interested in life around me, right in this moment. It’s frustratingly easy to lose this connection if you don’t keep it up. The other reason I continue to revisit these topics is because I’ve learned that all it takes is one subtle shift, the right metaphor, or one moment of clear recognition in real time, to drastically change my understanding of how the whole thing “works”. In this case, it clicked for me in a moment of awareness and then recognition, feeling something and then catching myself reaching out for a thought. In this moment I was able to see clearly something I’d read plenty of times: feelings and thoughts, for the most part, arise randomly and constantly. And you don’t need to prop them up. Most of the time you can just feel the feeling, or recognize the thought, and let it go. Of course that’s easier said than done.
I’d heard and read this time and again, in scientific and spiritual terms, that thoughts and feelings are, for the most part, out of our control. They arise from our unconscious. But it took all that repetition, all the different ways of hearing the same thing, before I was able to fully grasp it. I read Tara Brach’s Radical Acceptance before I left, and I listened to an incredible podcast with Jack Kornfield while here, and both talk a lot about this. Strangers to Ourselves is a book all about the unconscious mind. I touched on some of these ideas in a recent piece. But even when I thought I knew it, there was a deeper moment of understanding to come (and I’m sure many more still to come).
Strangers to Ourselves really hammered home some uncomfortable but mind-blowing facts about our brains, of our lack of awareness and control. Feelings can come from our environment, or or our own thoughts, but just as easily they appear randomly. We’re just used to supplying a reason for it, something that makes sense to us, because we like to feel in control. Scientific studies show that our brain unconsciously makes a decision, and milliseconds later, our conscious self feels as if it has come up with it on it’s own, with some reason to point to, even though the decision was already made.
So I had an understanding that our feelings don’t always need to be thought more of, to be analyzed and processed. But even after all that, it took a moment of anxiety washing over me to finally catch the actual process unfolding. The process that I had become so used to that I was now blind to it. It seemed to me that constantly thinking about future events made me worry, and I’d ruminate on that worry, increasing it the more I thought about it. And that is certainly a part of it. But the more I learned and reflected, even just after this most recent realization, I recognize how I could have gotten the cause and effect wrong. I thought I woke up, thought about problems, and then felt anxious. But more likely, I woke up, felt anxious, and latched onto minor stressors or even just bits of routine life, and made them the reason I felt worried. In hindsight it makes much more sense that drinking every weekend and having a poor diet predisposed me to feeling anxious upon waking. Through that one moment of recognition the other day, I’ve been able to connect these dots, from the past, present, and hopefully future, and better understand part of the deeper processes going on inside myself.
I love when interests of mine collide from unexpected places. After beginning this piece, I watched a video of Chris Evans (aka Captain America) talking about how he deals with his own anxiety. His process rests on the same principles. When anxiety and overthinking come, he says to his mind ‘Shhhh’.
“It’s been a big thing for me, ‘Shhhh.’ It’s so funny how noisy my brain is. Everyone’s brain is noisy, it makes thoughts. The problem is, in most of our lives, the root of suffering is following that brain noise and listening to that brain noise and actually identifying with it as if it’s who you are. That’s just the noise your brain makes, and more often than not, it probably doesn’t have much to say…The moments I’ve felt my best is when I can pull that plug and say Chris, shhh. It’s rising above the thought, operating on a separate plane.”
Feelings and thoughts are fleeting; we can feel happy and then sad and we can usually point to some series of events that prompt this. Our natural inclination is to provide a thought that justifies how we feel. Finally internalizing this, and recognizing it in the moment, produced a complete paradigm shift. In that moment of recognition, I stopped myself from searching for a thought to attach to the feeling. Instead, I just felt the feeling. And then it was gone, as quickly as it came, and I got to enjoy my dinner and laugh at Michael Scott. A few days later, I woke up and felt those familiar feelings of morning anxiety. But instead of searching for a reason, I just took some deep breaths and cleared my mind before it could gain that usual momentum. And then, again, the feelings dissipated. I realized I had been the one fueling it in the first place.
It’s such a slight shift and hard to notice in the first place, but when I did, it felt like a massive change in perspective. And that’s how most of what I’ve learned from the books and podcasts and the practice itself has been: it comes slowly, subtly, and then upon realizing it, and feeling it, it’s there all at once and clicks into place, as if I solved a complex math equation (I wouldn’t know for sure, I stink at math).
It’s a small, simple yet powerful tweak in how I see things. Inherent in it is recognizing that this doesn’t banish unpleasant feelings. On the contrary, it’s accepting of them, recognizing them when they come, and feeling them fully, in part so they can go through you and out the other side that much quicker.
Part of this hard work is recognizing which thoughts have merit and should be explored, which should be outright ignored, and maybe the toughest of all, which need to be looked at as a loving witness, with compassion. Jack Kornfield explains that many of these negative thoughts, reactions or habits we seem to be plagued by once served a purpose. They were once necessary to get us through a tough experience. We needed to think or behave in this way, to escape suffering as a kid, to survive abuse, to survive the thoughts in our own head. But now, we recognize we no longer need them. Being a loving witness, we thank it for helping us get through that tough time, and then we tell it we no longer need it in our lives. That might sound simple or childish, but I think it’s supremely powerful and beneficial.
If it feels like I’m writing about the same things over and over again, it might be because I am. I feel like I’m learning the same things over and over again, except one subtle level deeper each time. That’s what the whole process of meditation and mindfulness is. It’s what learning is in general, but with even more subtlety and repetition. It is a practice, something you need to repeat and repeat, even when it doesn’t feel like you’re making any headway. Because eventually, seemingly out of nowhere, it connects and you truly feel the change.
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Here’s a list of resources that I’ve learned from:
Jack Kornfield on the Tim Ferriss Podcast
Tara Brach on the Tim Ferriss Podcast
Sharon Salzberg on the Tim Ferriss Podcast
Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach
Strangers to Ourselves by Timothy D. Wilson
Training in Compassion: Zen Teachings on the Practice of Lojong by Norman Fischer
The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle
The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkeman
Waves
I took a surf lesson at the La Jolla Shore. It was awesome. I had a great instructor and the water was perfect for practicing. Low tide with calm but steady waves. I got up on 7 or 8 waves and plenty of fun fall-off’s. It was a blast, it kicked my ass, and I want to do it again.
After finishing Conspiracy by Ryan Holiday (which was really good) I grabbed a book I had my eye on for awhile, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan. I knew little about this book other than that it was a memoir about surfing, it had won the Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography, and I’d seen it recommended a lot. The author grew up moving back and forth between California and Hawaii but surfing constantly at both. Early on I came across a passage talking about surf clubs: “I had never been in a surf club. In California you heard about Windansea, which was based in La Jolla and had some big-name members.”
This is the exact beach we’re staying four blocks from, where we’ve gone every day it was sunny, and where I I’ve walked down to in the evening and watched surfers catch waves.
The book is wonderful so far. I love coming of age stories, and this one infused in the culture of surfing and Hawaii in the 60’s is interesting and new to me, and I’m learning a lot.
Surfing was a way of life for Hawaiians. It had religious importance. When the waves were good “all thought of work is at an end, only that of sport is left”.
“The islands were blessed with a large food surplus…Their winter harvest festival lasted three months- during which the surf frequently pumped and work was officially forbidden.”
Until the Europeans came. Calvinist missionaries specifically. “They changed the Hawaiian’s way of life, changed their religion, their agriculture and industry. They banned surfing. And spread disease…between 1778 and 1893, the Hawaiian population shrank from eight hundred thousand to forty thousand”.
The survivors were “forced into a cash economy and stripped them of free time.”
We sure know how to fuck up a good time.
Luckily surfing survived “thanks to the few Hawaiians, notably Duke Kahanamoku, who kept the ancient practice alive. Kahanamoku won a gold medal for swimming at the 1912 Olympics, became an international celebrity, and started giving surfing exhibitions around the world. Surfing caught on and postwar Southern California became the capital.”
It’s interesting to think of what manages to survive and everything else that fades, either from the collective memory, or the face of the Earth.
We used to spend our summers on the Cape at Nauset Light. That beach has faded from the erosion of waves. A video shows the damage after a storm and how far the tide’s gone up. The Nauset facilities we knew have been demolished because the erosion posed a public safety risk. You can still go to other parts of Nauset, but it’s completely different from what it was even 10 years ago.
The waves were ferocious when we first got here and one day me and Sean swam out into them. Ducking under, swimming into, bobbing our heads up and under amongst some vicious waves. This is what we used to as kids with our Dad. You go under and feel it pass over you. Or you let it crash into you and you’re thrown around and lose up from down. Being in and under waves like that puts you into a special kind of flow and it puts you in your place.
Finnegan describes the allure of waves poetically: “I couldn’t get enough of their rhythmic violence. They pulled you toward them like hungry giants. They drained the water off the bar as they drew to their full, awful height, then pitched forward and exploded. From underwater, the concussion was deeply satisfying. Waves were better than anything in books, better than movies, better even than a ride at Disneyland, because with them the charge of danger was uncontrived. It was real.”
After ducking under and going over wave after wave, exhilaration becomes exhaustion. It was a real struggle to get to shore with the tide pulling you back in. For a split second you feel that real fear. And then you let the next wave push you forward, and you’re back on land.
Status Report: CHANGE
I’m entering a period rife with change and uncertainty, mostly by my own choice. I just left my wonderful job (on great terms) with no real ‘career’ plan. We recently had to put our dog, Mojo, a beloved member of our family for the last 15 years, to sleep. I’m writing this on the opposite coast from where I’ve spent most of my 27 years, and I’ll be here for the next 2 months. My change is something I’m very excited for. A vacation in San Diego for three weeks with my family. Then a month of road tripping with my brother, zig zagging up the West Coast, a dream trip of mine. I’m sure this change will get harder once the adventure is over, but right now it’s exciting and care-free.
In the past, I’d be freaking out internally about all of this, worrying what my next step was going to be. I’ve always been prone to worry. But right now I’m not that worried. Occasionally panic flares up, and I just take a deep breath, recognize it, but I don’t engage it in thought. I just feel it. And then it passes. I believe I’m better able to do this now because of changes I’ve already faced and endured.
I don’t think I fully comprehended change, or life in general, until my Dad passed away suddenly at 54. It gutted me and my family. I learned for the first time, viscerally, that change is absolute. There’s no value system to it and it can come at any time. Change is guaranteed. That has informed how I live and a lot of the decisions I’ve made since.
It prompted me to change myself. Eventually, I scaled back my drinking to now nearly non-existent levels and I quit porn. These two habits were recurring activities in my life for years as an adolescent and into early adulthood. I replaced it with meditation, writing, journaling, exercise, marijuana, great food, books, TV, movies, deep conversations, diving into interests and learning about them, and adventure. These changes and the work that went into them have allowed me to feel kinder, gentler, more vulnerable, braver, and happier than, well, maybe ever before. That took a lot of hard work, practice, struggle, and repeated failure. It took a lot of active change to eventually see fuller aspects of the change cement itself.
Change has been on my mind and I want to share some of what I’ve learned about it, and how I’m trying to experience this change now and going forward.
The Paradox
Change is the only constant in life, yet our reflex is to try our damndest to make sure things stay the same. On a basic level, change is uncomfortable. Change, even when begun in the pursuit of bettering ourselves, will bring up stressful feelings in the process like doubt, worry, anxiousness, fear and panic.
This pull to remain the same despite our constantly changing world is also an innate impulse inside of us, defined by natural laws such as homeostasis. Homeostasis is the tendency to maintain equilibrium, within ourselves and the world as a whole. It “characterizes all self-regulating systems, from a bacterium to a frog to a human individual to a family to an organization to an entire culture—and it applies to psychological states and behavior as well as to physical functioning”. Homeostasis is the reason why when we attempt to change a habit we so often backslide into our old behaviors. “Our body, brain, and behavior have a built-in tendency to stay the same within rather narrow limits, and to snap back when changed”. And for good reason: “if your body temperature moved up or down by 10 percent, you’d be in big trouble. The same thing applies to your blood-sugar level and to any number of other functions of your body.” Without homeostasis, we would die very quickly. But, homeostasis, “like natural selection and like life itself, is undirected and does not have a “value system” — it doesn’t keep what’s good and reject what’s bad.” This is a crucial distinction. Homeostasis resists all change. “After twenty years without exercise, your body regards a sedentary style of life as “normal”; the beginning of a change for the better is interpreted as a threat.”
I encountered this while cutting out alcohol and porn. Alcohol was easier because of hangovers, or the lack thereof. Porn was a lot harder. Even though you know it’s bad for you, it feels good in the moment, and being the most biologically rewarding function, the pull is much stronger. I backslid and relapsed a ton. Eventually I carved out a new normal where I wasn’t craving it.
But then came the change of living without it. And that’s where I started to recognize the underlying root addiction or tendency more clearly for what it was, and how it so easily and imperceptibly affects so many of us today. The root lies in comfort itself; or put another way, the urge to avoid or numb any and all discomfort.
When I stopped drinking and porn, I replaced it with marijuana. Habit change is also indifferent to value systems and nearly any habit can replace another if it’s strong enough, good or bad. In this case it seemed like a perfect trade off, one that I’d still make. But eventually I realized I replaced one habit of comfort with another. In my opinion, a much less harmful one, but still a pull to comfort that takes a level of control and feeling out of my life. Instead of working on something I’m passionate about, or seeing friends, or experiencing new things, or just being bored by myself, lonely or sad or worried, I was blocking all of it out by getting high, and then usually eating and watching TV. That’s not the worst thing in the world, especially compared to darker vices, but I think that’s also what makes it harder to break out of, because it seems so harmless. Life is change and this habit keeps me comfortable but stagnant. Now I know working to change this pattern will bring its own challenges and uncomfortable feelings. But awareness of the problem and the road ahead is the first step. The awareness of comfort as the root of it all will hopefully help get me through it.
The Root
We cling to what feels good and we try to avoid what feels bad. It’s our nature and just seems like common sense. We try to avoid, at all costs, a void. With smart phones, social media, entertainment, drugs, and all of the world’s knowledge at our fingertips, we no longer need to feel something as mundane and previously common as boredom, let alone deeper and scarier feelings like existential dread or our own mortality and ultimate death.
Comfort blocks these scary things out. But according to ancient wisdom and cutting edge science, the most important thing to do is to FEEL IT. The Buddha to Seneca, Marcus Aurelius to Garry Shandling, Viktor Frankl, Tara Brach, Pema Chodron and many more, all agree: Trying to avoid our feelings created by the change and reality around us only digs ourselves deeper into a hole and increases our reliance on the thing that makes us not feel discomfort, even if it ultimately makes us feel worse in the long-term.
It’s uncomfortable to realize how little power we have in the world. It’s uncomfortable to recognize how much power we have over ourselves. It’s uncomfortable to feel embarrassed or awkward, sad or lonely, stupid or angry or jealous or ashamed. But by simply paying attention to the feelings rather than reacting to them, they actually lose their control over us. As Tara Brach says, “When you see and feel the sensations your are experiencing as sensations, pure and simple, you may see that these thoughts about the sensations are useless to you at that moment and that they can actually make things worse than they need to be.”
I’m not quitting all of the things that bring me joy in life, like movies and books, great food or some marijuana. But I would like to change my relationship with them, towards a more balanced, healthier approach. I want more time to experience new things, meet new people, nourish relationships I already have, and feel what I’m feeling, whatever it is, in the moment.
But right now, in this time of change, I’m just going to plant myself in the here and now, and enjoy myself and time with my family. There are much harder places to do that than San Diego. Pema Chödron says to “relax into the groundlessness of our situation”. Any time I feel worried about the present or future, I try to remember this quote and take a breath. By embracing the fact that we are insecure and vulnerable, that we don’t know what tomorrow will bring, we are freed to truly feel and live, in this moment now.
I don’t know what my next job will be and I’m not sure where I’ll live 6 or 12 months from now. I’m not sure what my next attempted habit change will be but I have some ideas. I do know I feel best when I’m living in the present, embracing the change, learning new things, struggling, and trying to become better. I am 27. In 27 years I will be 54. I hope to make it there and live on well past it, but the evenness of it both weighs on me and propels me, to live these next 27 years to the absolute fullest.
Post-Script
Going forward, beyond personal self-improvement and this west coast adventure, I’m going to focus on writing. I’m finishing a screenplay I’ve been working on for a while and submitting it to competitions in May. I aim to be more active on this blog too. It still isn’t quite what I thought it would be. I think I had the wrong preconception. I imagined I’d post something each week with original, breathtaking thoughts. But more and more I’m thinking of this blog as an archive, and my role on it as more of a curator, for what I’m into, what I’m learning, and what I’d like to share with you. Nothing is original, and the internet and the world it’s created is so gigantic, I might as well just share what I find interesting, helpful, or joyful. More practically, it can be a personal archive untethered from the social media conglomerates that rule today and could be gone tomorrow. As Austin Kleon advocates, I’m owning my own turf with this blog. And it can be whatever the hell I want it to be.
I saw a retweet from Kleon by Paul Boag that inspires my fresh outlook on this site: “I know it sounds kind of arrogant but I am bloody proud of my blog. Everything I have learned over 13 years all nicely organised and documented. I find myself referring to it everyday. It is an invaluable tool. More people should blog.”
I think that’s a lovely idea.
What are you doing today Sam?
Loving Kindness
Struggling to come up with something to write about this week, I found some inspiration, as usual, from Sean. I recommend reading his most recent post first. It’s real and raw.
How do we deal with living in such a tough world? Our lives can feel hard and tragic, but then we look out the window, or on the internet, and realize how lucky we are. And that can make us feel even worse, for feeling bad about our “minor” problems. How can we stop that cycle of shame? And what can we do to impact the world we live in in a positive way?
I’ve been reading Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach. I keep returning to books about mindfulness, meditation, compassion and how our internal mental processes work. It’s so easy to fall out of gratitude and presence, and reading a bit on these topics each day helps keep it present in my mind.
I want to share something I’ve practiced before that Brach goes over in her book, and something I’m sure we’ve written about before: the lovingkindness meditation. It seems simple, even cheesy, but can have a noticeable effect with consistent practice.
Here’s the process.
Sit comfortably. Relax. Feel the breath going in and out.
Remember your basic goodness. Whether it was helping someone out last week, or the joy and compassion you had as a child. Remember it and feel it.
Choose four or five phrases that are meaningful to you. For example:
May I be filled with love and kindness. May I accept myself just as I am. May I be happy. May I know the natural joy of being alive.
You start with yourself, just like in an airplane when the oxygen masks drop. Repeat the words in your mind or in a whisper.
Then envision your loved ones, family, your partner, close friends. Think about them in your mind and then repeat the following:
May you be filled with love and kindness. May you accept yourself just as you are. May you be happy. May you know the natural joy of being alive.
Repeat it for a few different loved individuals.
Then bring to mind someone neutral, that you interact with but have no strong feelings for. Repeat the words again towards this person or group of people.
Then think about someone you have a difficult relationship with. Maybe you don’t like them or they don’t like you. Maybe it’s for a good reason. Even so, repeat those words again, in their direction.
Finally, try to open it up to everyone in the world. Each person is real and filled with emotions and struggle and goodness and pain. Repeat the following:
May all beings be filled with love and kindness. May all beings accept themselves just as they are. May all beings be happy. May all beings know the natural joy of being alive.
Then rest in openness and silence. Breathe in and out and recognize how you feel.
Tara Brach has guided meditations on her website, and a guided lovingkindess meditation can be found here.
This may seem too passive. You’re not directly helping anyone, you’re just thinking thoughts. But think of it as priming yourself to act in a kind and loving way. It doesn’t mean you’ll be perfectly serene and understanding. It’s just meant to open you up and create some more awareness to take with you. You’re loading up for the day ahead.
The root of the practice is in recognizing that other people are real. It’s easy to walk by a homeless person on the street or wait behind an obnoxious asshole in line and dehumanize them as other. But that person is real. All people, no matter if they’re saints or monsters, want to be happy and loved, and they want to avoid pain. This practice can at its heart open you up to recognizing the basic goodness in another person, even if they’re not showing it. Whether they’re numbing themselves with drugs, or striking out at another, they’re actions are rooted in trying to avoid pain by whatever means necessary. This doesn’t excuse a behavior. But it can open up your mind to at the very least, see them as a fellow human being, a real person, who’s suffering and doesn’t know how to deal with it.
You’re not going to change the world with this 5-10 minute practice. But you might change yourself.
SamPostJams Vol. 1
Here’s what I’ve been listening to the past couple of weeks. Some new, some old. If you ever have any music recommendations, send ’em my way, and feel free to follow me on Spotify.