“It is not our souls that are broken but, as neuroscience teaches us, it is our minds, These minds, the faulty walnuts we interpret reality through, did not evolve in ways that render them easy companions in the harried conditions of modern life. And it’s not just we who are broken. We live in societies…
Where do you go for information? … internet? Where do you go for knowledge? … university? science? history?Where do you go for wisdom? John Vervaeke “We long for beauty, wisdom, and purpose. We want to live for something more than just ourselves.” Alain de Botton WHY — is modern life so vexing? In 2022, the…
Psychedelics – now a potential miracle cure, after decades of warnings and illegality. How absurd? Most likely the truth lives somewhere in the middle of sensational claims and criticism – still in the fog. Legalization for the average citizen may take some time. Even then, the experience might be hard to access or understand. Yet…
“We are touchingly prone to mistaking our models of reality for reality itself, mistaking the strength of our certainty for the strength of the evidence, thus moving through a dream of our own making that we call life.” Maria Popova “The very same machinery that makes you so adaptively intelligent is the same machinery that…
Look in the mirror. Better yet, close your eyes. Look inside. Whether or not you care for Harry Potter – there is one scene absolutely burned into my memory. Harry has a premonition. He observes himself, looking across a lake, and his deceased father appears as a deer and saves everyone from some catastrophic dementor…
The implicit or explicit TLDR of spirituality is Let Go. Let go of what? Everything. And, OK, fine, but does that mean, give up on life? No! It means moving artfully, skillfully. In alignment with the flow of things. Not forcing it. This is beautifully captured in the concept of Wu Wei, as articulated here…
Not me. Often when we encounter mental health labels, or labels in general, our mind plays a little “not me” game. It’s almost imperceptible. We view a person’s circumstances sympathetically – like an alien experience we may never know – as opposed to empathetically – literally feeling what the person feels as they describe it,…
Jonah: If I just do that pyramid, everything else will fall into place?Stutz: It will. Everything else will fall into place. Stutz’s Life Force I created the wellness stack in early 2022 as a way to help people. I started with three essential topics: sleep, nutrition, and mind/self (followed by others, but these three are…
My younger self had this recurring intuition that any human mind, given enough experience and space, invariably finds optimism. It will see that it’s own wellbeing relies on the wellbeing of others. Others who are fundamentally the same- conscious creatures each making sense of their own pyrotechnics show: the emotions, the urges, the ever-accumulating stories,…
[Note to a friend] Never let the wrong things influence your sense of worth, either as an artist or a person. Unfortunately… perception is part of life, and perception is way more often wrong than it is right, including our own perception of ourselves. Your worth is a pearl to be protected – make sure…
“Is the truth depressing? Some may find it so. But I find it liberating, and consoling.”– Derek Parfit Santa, Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny — all shams. As kids this is our first lesson in sugarcoating — of being misled with good intentions. More surprise awaits us a few decades later… but honestly… life feels much…
My favorite example of one human being discovering peace. What Merle Antoinette Roberson, (Gangaji) describes here, I had tasted myself, months prior. Seeing this experience in another person changed me. After listening, I vividly remember walking to work that morning in an altered reality, which has only deepened with time. Her and I traveled different paths,…
20 unfinished essays – some will be published – others will never escape the Darwinian gravity of “draft”. 50 books I’d love to read, which will invariably lead to 100 more. Podcasts that need a second listen. Places I want to travel. Photos I need to edit. People I need to have long conversations with.…
“Who wants to be wise anymore? People want to be right, rich, popular and in control. But wise?” Heidi Husted The date is January 1, 2024. One year ago, two people, Sarah and Tom, stumbled upon a helpful resource while searching for help. Sarah Sarah has since quit the job she didn’t like, left a…
What does it mean to be Buddhist? All I’ve ever done is study it casually – no monkhood, no monastery, no meditation retreats. At the very least, I AM a sincere admirer and explorer of its ideas. And if Buddhism were somehow wiped from the human record tonight, I am convinced something like it would…
My father would love nothing more than to finish one last half-marathon. Last year at 70, shortly after our last run together, his hip started bothering him. Was he running too much? Was it simply old age? Either way, after taking four months off to give himself a rest, and testing the water again, it seems…
This will change your life. Whoever steps away from this without grasping that – I have failed you. But, I hope I budge some part of you, even an inch. Whether it’s this, a Kandinsky painting, a time of crisis, a walk in nature, a monastery in Tibet, or staring into your oatmeal tomorrow morning,…
This is not a “life hack”. This is a SHORT/SIMPLE lesson about optimal eating, based on years of playing around. Optimal both physically and mentally. I will summarize my N-of-1 results at the end. I will also cite independent scientific sources that inspired this. The intention is not to prescribe a rigid diet, rather, it’s to teach…
“Loneliness is the doorway to unspecified desire. Loneliness can be a prison, a place from which we look out at a world we cannot inhabit; but loneliness fully inhabited also becomes the voice that asks and calls for that great, unknown someone or something else we want to call our own.”– David Whyte I. Consider…
Good news, bad news. On a personal level – everything is definitely OK. If you are ever so lucky to feel this in your bones, and lose it, don’t worry, you’ll find it again and again. If you’ve never felt this, you most certainly can. The sun exists no matter how many clouds in the…
100 something essays later… My aim with this blog: to “know myself” and “help people suffer less”. I feel good about the first part – the journey to “know myself” is now quite alive, and will carry on as long as I do. As for “help people suffer less”, I never really knew what to…
“Wisdom is one of the grandest and oddest words out there, so lofty it doesn’t sound like something one could ever consciously strive to be. Nevertheless, it deserves to be an aspiration.” Alain de Botton “Wisdom is one of those qualities that is difficult to define—because it encompasses so much—but which people generally recognize when…
“A crisis of wisdom as the defining crisis of our time? This diagnosis, and from a scientist and scholar at that, is unusual. Science, psychology and even the multitude of modern and postmodern therapies and social practices, have not been able to fill the vacuum.” Thomas Steininger “Who wants to be wise anymore? People want…
“There’s a deep continuity between the way biological life self-organizes and the way cognition self-organizes, which means there is a deep interconnection and interdependence between the functioning of your brain and the functioning of your body.” John Vervaeke Does the world need another fitness essay or influencer? Nah. I will merely share as evidence -…
For certain, we can each know personal peace and freedom. Even so, it would be naive to ignore the greatest challenges in our global society. By acknowledging them, we can conduct and shape our lives in a way that doesn’t exacerbate them, either for us, or other people. These topics will be tracked and expanded…
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