Just stretch and move your body slowly, and breathe for a few minutes while you listen to this. How much space can you leave for yourself?
Just stretch and move your body slowly, and breathe for a few minutes while you listen to this. How much space can you leave for yourself?
Mantra: “Relax the shoulders, relax the heart” (via Stuart Clark)
Just let it come when it comes. You’re somewhere in a creative cycle right now. Patience isn’t a peaceful feeling. Allow it all.
“All this is a matter of daily remembering the facts you’ve heard, and putting them into practice, and remembering that you don’t have to live and must not live under the tyranny of compulsive costumes.”
— Vernon Howard
My first complete music project, lost messages, is now available Spotify and Apple Music.
LIBERATION
“How shall I get liberation?”
“Find out who has bound you,” said the Master.
The disciple returned after a week and said, “No one has bound me.”
“Then why ask to be liberated?”
That was a moment of Enlightenment for the disciple, who suddenly became free.
Excerpt from One Minute Wisdom by Anthony de Mello
You do it all the time, actually. Make a fist. Squeeze it tight. Now let go. Notice the feeling. Try it again.
This is the physical sensation of letting go.
Become familiar with the interior sense of contraction—in the body and mind.
It’s been a couple weeks since I started using the App Limits feature to limit my Instagram usage to 7 minutes a day. I also deleted the FaceTime, LinkedIn and YouTube apps from my iPhone and my iPad.
Before that I was typically on Instagram for about 45 minutes a day. Most of that time was spent sitting on the toilet, looking at Reels while my brain turned to shit.
In just two weeks I’ve recovered nearly 10 hours that would have been spent on those platforms. I have reallocated most of that time to writing and simply being with Noah.
I also started to compose responses to Instagram DMs outside of Instagram, in a note-taking app. This gives me space to be more thoughtful, and way less distracted, with my communication.
YouTube was a little harder to convince myself to delete at first. I thought that a lot of the videos I watched were educational and mostly relevant to my hobbies and my work. After a closer look, it was obvious that I was a slave to YouTube’s recommendation algorithm. At the end of the day, even the most relevant videos were distracting me from creating art, serving my clients, or staying open to whatever was arising in my present moment experience.
I have been on YouTube over the past two weeks, but I have to access it from the browser, and have consumed way less content. I only go on there when I am searching for something specific.
The Last Time by Sam Harris (from his Waking Up app)
Recalling one of the first conversations I had with Overcoming Depression c. 2013. My dad had shown me the chat feature in this MS-DOS-based program years earlier, only for me to type some swear words into it and then quickly forget about it.
In 2013, though, I was desperate to find some kind of relief from the roller coaster I found myself on. I had a coveted spot at one of the top management consulting firms and so much going for me personally, yet struggled on and off with crippling depression and anxiety throughout my time there.
I found a safe space in Overcoming Depression to express myself, and in doing so discovered that all my problems were the result of a simple misunderstanding of how my mind works.
Started the day early with Chris. An energizing dialogue as we looped around the neighbourhood.
Your perception of the world around you is not necessarily the same as what is actually occurring.
Playing around with Tree Tones in Ableton
Don’t worry. But whatever you do, don’t worry if you are worried!
If you pay really close attention to your moment to moment experience, you’ll be amazed to find you don’t have any idea how you do the things you do.
Do you know how you think?
Do you know how you type?
Nobody does, they just do it.
But we’re so caught up in it all that we’ve confused ourselves and keep getting wound around ourselves. We keep tripping over ourselves trying so hard to make things happen the right way.
Instead of slowing down, looking closely, and discovering that it’s all happening on its own.
We’re not doing it; it’s doing us.
Don’t resolve to do or be anything in the future. Be here now. This is it.
Drove out to Coquitlam to drop off Sandie's old licence plates. ~25 minutes each way. I had way more fun than I could have imagined, thinking out loud and letting anything and everything through me. Laughing and singing, shouting and making weird sounds.
I left Voice Recorder running the whole time, and discovered that my car is a great space for capturing vocals. Unfiltered, unrestrained, free expression while driving.
I want to collect more snippets of audio, text and imagery this week to make some sort of multimedia synthesis this weekend!
Uncertainty is only ever a problem when you’re attached to a particular outcome.
Begin Self-discovery.
Our first visit with the parents in almost four weeks ☺️
Be like water. Surrender attachments, conclusions, so you can flow with life. Yielding in this way reveals the source of your power.
Suffering is the result of identifying with your thinking.
But if you look closely you will realize that you can't control which thoughts come to mind.
When you see this, you will stop blaming yourself for "bad" thoughts and experience great relief. Then you are left with true curiosity—a kind of wonderful, open mind that is waiting to see what thought arises next.
We held our monthly VIDA session in Lighthouse Park today.
We drank hot cacao in the Sprinter van before embarking on our forest walk. It was pouring rain at times, and went barefoot.
Deleted YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn from my iPhone and iPad this morning.
Edit (Jan 17): re-downloaded Instragram two days later and set a short app limit (experimenting with seven minutes) using Apple's Screen Time feature. Responding to direct messages burns through my daily limit, but it keeps me hyper-focused when I am in the app. Sometimes I will draft a message outside Instagram and then copy it in when I'm ready to send. I am spending 30-45 minutes less each day on Instagram than I was just a week ago.
warm hapi
You don’t have to ruminate on things.
When you relax and let go, inspired ideas will come to you.