40 pieces of "advice"

a smattering of insights, provocations, and downloads from 2024

In no particular order, here’s a smattering of insights, provocations, and downloads from 2024:

Longer format personal writing

• why everything feels off - evolving past individualism

• reclaiming the utopian vision - where i grapple with the middle path between utopia and emergence in urban design

• publics for being - spaces to just be

• what is a fourth place? - neither 3rd space nor social club but another secret third thing

• choosing self-trust over authenticity - what hinders us & re-thinking our institutions

• musings on the point of life - in two ways

• cities and purpose - building cities around purpose not ambition

• The Rabbit Holes Coffee table book - channeled this baby

• 12 issues of rabbit holes - every month I ask: What does it mean to live a life of meaning and beauty?

How to live

• Surrendering as a life orientation:

  • the bad news: you'll just keep falling

  • the good news: there’s also no ground beneath you

• Every year i have the same new year resolution: “An old friend of mine, a journalist, once said that paradise on earth was to work all day alone in anticipation of an evening in interesting company.” ― Ian McEwan

• to those on the path of awakening, truth-seeking, and healing: the world needs the depth of your heart, not just the depth of your insight

• funny enough, a book i'm reading called "Preparing to Die" by Andrew Holecek has really good instructions on how to go about life: “The best approach is that of the middle way. Learn as much as you can. Study, practice, and prepare. Then drop everything and let this natural process occur naturally. Throw away the map and fearlessly enter the territory. It’s like preparing for a big trip. We want to pack properly, review our checklists, and ensure we have enough money and gas. But when the trip starts we just enjoy it. We don’t worry about doing it perfectly. Some of our greatest travel adventures happen when we take a wrong turn or get lost”

• Advice on receiving advice: neither reject nor integrate when receiving advice, treat it as a mirror rather than a directive. observe how you respond internally—what feelings contract or expand within you. follow where the expansions take you rather than accepting the advice at face value. That includes this advice.

• “There are only two feelings, Love and Fear. There are only two languages, Love and Fear. There are only two activities, Love and Fear. There are only two motives, two procedures, two frameworks, two results: Love and Fear, Love and Fear.” – Michael Leunig

• I've noticed that whenever people unfold into their purpose they become an activated part of a lattice. A nexus point where energy starts congealing and flowing. Other people gravitate towards this nexus because it activates something that lives within them & slowly they become nexus points for others too. If you make it about yourself, you've lost the plot and energy stops flowing. The point was always to be part of a larger interconnected tapestry. To let life cohere life.

• The energy you can hold for others is correlated with how much energy you can hold for yourself - pain, joy, & everything in between. Can you feel it all without suffering or desire? Can you be the watcher, feeler, content, & the infinite backdrop from which everything is arising all at once? It starts with you, before you can hold others or “change the world”

The bigger picture

• If the point of life is to let the universe collect more information about itself, resting in that which you are / enlightenment is great, but incomplete - we are here incarnated into this unique human form and personality construct to experience more to add to the great library of information the universe has. If we are just “enlightened” we wouldn’t be adding more to this library because the universe already knows itself. We incarnated here for a reason. That means experiencing enlightenment and then letting that source then move back through our human incarnation in the way it wants. We do the work to realize non-duality experientially, and then let source move back through our human matrix. Purification will happen on its own and we can ultimately aid this process by not getting in our own way or adding more duality to the natural unfolding. We can create scaffolding like therapy and containers that allow ourselves to feel the depths of our pain, knowing we are ultimately supported by a larger infinite container, and then we let the infinite move through and transmute that pain. The pain/”trauma” - and the conditioning/relationships/soul contracts that created it was also one our soul chose before it incarnated here - because through its unique amalgamation, the universe can move back through itself via “our purpose”/works/creations to gather more information about itself, and create containers/acts of service for others (aka itself) to know itself, heal itself, let more of itself unravel through new apparatuses. It’s an infinite recursiveness of playfulness that self-balances. That’s why our pain is not something to be avoided or unfelt, it is the answer. The essential point. And this is true across all fractals - individual trauma, cultural trauma, global trauma. Duality is the price of human incarnation and it is the prize. Back through it the way out, and then back through duality/”the world” we dive into, but in a way that is now beyond our individualized mind-body complex. We become non-duality embodied in an infinite dance with the universe: the dancer, dance partner, dance floor, music, and one watching the dance are all one.

• As a society we tend to valorize status and money over character and virtue. The former are by-products of virtue, but we seemed to have lost the plot and are now just going for the shiny object at the expense of its origination. A short-termed strategy for sure. In the same vein, men tend to value beauty - forgetting that deep radiance and beauty is a by-product of coming into coherence, truth, and integrality with who one is. So massive amounts of money gets spent on clothes, make-up, & goddess retreats to look and perform radiant, at the expense of the longer process of inner-work, healing, and embodied actualization ones goes through to evolve from wounded maiden to goddess/matriarch. We are deeply, understandably, confused~

“The Work”

• Reminder to self: Pain x resistance = suffering. Pain x non-interference = purification

• On why we are already complete and whole, but still have to practice: You have to try, in order not to try. Yes You Are That in the absolute, but you forget in the relative. You can obtain the Jhanas and awaken on a mushroom trip, but you cannot spiritually bypass your conditioning.

• Paradoxically, so much suffering is created as an inclination to not feel suffering itself - the emptiness, the void. staying with our primary negative emotion, and not avoiding it or trying to change it, reveals a softer emotion underneath. staying with that further actually releases into softness, then the essence of emptiness, and then compassion. from there the right next step unveils itself

• Spiritual progress is about reducing the latency between 1st thought and 3rd thought (“heaven”) or emptiness and then love. Eventually they co-arise spontaneously in a non-doing way. Until then, we intend with non-attachment and work on the blocks that create latency. This is why every person we meet, trigger we feel, and difficult / positive situation is a chance to practice. The world is the path.

On relationships

• In a 50/50 relationship society, what does the feminine bring to the table you ask? why no other than music, dance, laughter, the divine, creation, generation of energy, a lifeforce multiplier, enchantment, the being and becoming~ when you provide a safe container and she creates the space for you to do so, watch her unfold

• we're wired as humans to flatten people into 2D projections through quick judgments (and often projections). I've been practicing proactively resisting that tendency in the past couple of months with these 2 exercises which instantly move me into an expanded and open state:

  • 1) imagine the person before you as a scared and innocent child. vividly morph their adult face into that of a child's in your minds eye. then send love and protection from your heart field. know that whatever negative behavior is happening, it came from a place of needing to protect a vulnerable child version of themselves well before this moment

  • 2) observe the people on the train/public transport/grocery store/workspace and remember that each person carries a whole world within their mind that you could not possibly know the enormity of—feel the sense of connection that naturally arises from this awareness.

• I've always wondered why I leave some exchanges drained and others energized. why I can instantly sense whether someone is a soul friend or not. the best way i've been able to comprehend this is that conversations are the medium by which energy is exchanged. they are composed of:

  • 1. questions asked for the own persons benefit

  • 2. questions asked for your benefit

  • 3. questions asked for the benefit of both parties

  • 4. questions asked with no motive, just emergent playfulness and inquiry towards the 'the thing' together

  • When conversations overly skew towards 1, things feel transactional, draining, and there is an asymmetry in the dynamic. when there is more balance between 1-3, you move towards net neutral or positive energy created and into a dynamic of being peers. when it skews towards 3-4, you find soul friendship and lots of net new energy generated.

  • Living in this world means all exchanges are beautiful and have their place, but if you're feeling drained and don't know why - being honest with yourself about the type of exchanges and people you're surrounding yourself with is worth interrogating. it's why just having a couple soul friends (and hopefully also your partner/spouse) makes up for an infinite number of friends that loom around 1 and 2.

• Something that's not talked about enough: when you take on any leadership role and especially community leader ones, you are subject to being a huge surface area by which people project their disowned parts & mom-dad issues. I know because i've done and still do this unconsciously. Good leaders spend a significant time clearing their energetic field, managing their own projections, & holding but not taking in the projections of others. the best leaders, love unconditionally and raise the consciousness of others while staying grounded in their energetic core.

• Imo in order to attract a mate, more people would be better off cultivating their lifeforce vs. improving their physical appearance, status, and finances with diminishing returns. healing men "doing the work" is the most attractive thing to 100% of my girlfriends. we've mistaken the forest from the trees in our society - as conventional indicators of success is correlative but not causal with life force. they are byproducts of someone who is in full alignment with their truth, a function of unfolding ones life force. A force that already exists within us but is blocked by trauma, repression, and unfelt emotions. sure one can be "successful" without healing work, but it's a local minima, not a maximum one.

• I believe our life-long quest to find a romantic partner, is not only to evolutionarily reproduce, but also a subconscious urge to heal. Finding a partner that triggers your trauma, but creates a different outcome, is one of the most efficient ways to re-pattern trauma. "He is angry like my dad, but he quickly realizes it and metabolizes his anger into love." The best partners play a role in your healing, but never usurp your own ability to heal yourself. They hold you, while you hold yourself. Based people will recognize potential partners who not only trigger them in good and bad ways (chemistry), but also have the emotional and spiritual maturity to create a different outcome. If you only have the former, but not the latter - you'll get a toxic relationship and recapitulate family dynamics (same triggers and outcomes) without much consciousness. Stay conscious and don't settle.

• Having met hundreds of people in the past year, I’ve noticed that self-esteem has a way of showing through the eyes. It’s a look of containment as opposed to leakiness. The gaze is whole onto itself, steady, warm, deeply aware, heartfelt, and here. It reflects an embodied sense of alignment. The system generates and feeds on its own energy. A leaky gaze is characterized by energy pouring into different directions. There’s a desire for exchange, a feeding, or a forcefulness to convey a certain idea rooted in the future or past. It doesn’t feel fully here. The machinery underneath is not integral and thus requires energy from external sources as it sputters to survive. Next time you really want to know someone, look into their eyes and no matter what you see - send love and compassion.

• Hot take: is it harder to make friends these days because we have actually become more shallow? In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle characterizes three types of friendships: friendships of utility (based on mutual usefulness), friendships of pleasure (based on shared hobbies and activities both enjoy), and soul friendships (based on helping each other strive towards moral goodness and virtue). While the former type of friendships fade with circumstance, soul friendships are deeply fulfilling & often last a lifetime. We meet others as deeply as we meet ourselves - so making soul friendships is contingent on our own personal commitment to virtue and having that aim saturate our being. Through being who we are, we thereby attract others on the same plane of consciousness. Food for thought: before blaming our current predicament on external factors, perhaps we should take an honest look at ourselves. What do we really want out of friendships? What do we truly value in life?

• The issue with a majority of San Francisco's culture of authentic relating, circling, cuddle parties, "deep convo" events, is that it’s intimacy without relationship. Closeness without friendship. In other words, porn. It may feel good when you’re doing it, but empty afterwards. Friendship is cultivated over many interactions light and deep. Intimacy is earned through trust. And community design should be oriented around creating many surface areas to acquaint with the same people consistently. Not just going super deep in 1 instance. (pun intended)

Creativity and Creation

• Writing is not just writing. It is an act of agency, an exploration of one's values, and the riding of one's emergent edges. The word "essay" began its life as a verb—"to ascertain the weight of a thing". To take stock of an object from multiple angles, always accounting for the author's own subjectivity. Neither strictly "criticism" nor "research," though they draw on both, essays are testing grounds for an author's intellectual commitments refracted through the work and ideas of others.

• Companies aren’t meant to last forever. They’re transient containers by which people self-actualize for a little via alchemy with other souls. Joining a company is a statement about how you want to grow. Starting a company is a statement about how you want others to grow.

• Woman is at the mercy of nature, but man is at the mercy of mother. “Women are emotional in order to feel the divine energy at the highest levels and be supreme healers and lovers and mothers. Not to drive men insane. Her deepest spiritual connection to feelings is to inspire a man to his spiritual heights as well. She is an oracle” - Raja Khan

• Consumerist society and blueprint bros would never tell you this but the best sleep optimization protocols are:

  • 1) Peace of mind. it's living a life of virtue and forgiving yourself when you fall short. one thing that has helped me is journaling every evening before bed and harvesting all the high / lows of the day as learnings. my soul is here on this earth to do its curriculum - what did it learn today?

  • 2) Not caring if i get good sleep. the act of optimization itself creates an anxious resistant to what is vs. just surrendering to whatever happens. if i don't get great sleep, I use it as an excuse to do admin things / things that don't require deep thought that i've been putting off. I also enjoy the feeling of loopy-ness sleep deprivation brings and observe the interesting thoughts / perceptions that come up throughout the day, which often are more creative than my "well-rested" mind

  • 3) Being part of something greater than oneself. when I engage in work that serves a collective purpose, sleep becomes more restful, as if my mind aligns with a broader rhythm. that rhythm rests when it needs to, and exerts when it needs to.

• It was philosopher Roberto Unger who helped me understand how to reconcile my lofty vision/dreams of tomorrow with "taking out the trash" today: “You can imagine things very far from the status quo. And they're called interesting, but impossible. Or you can imagine things close to the status quo, and they're called possible, but trivial." The answer, Unger says, is you need to have a “programmatic politics” based in “revolutionary reform.” It’s a two-part process:

  • 1. imagine where you want to go

  • 2. do the first steps in the direction of that vision.

  • "That vision may seem naive, but you can start taking steps in the direction of it. Those first steps might seem trivial, but a first step can lead to a second step and a third step. You have to be switching back and forth between a dreamy vision and practical work. If you keep that back and forth going, you'll be surprised by what you can accomplish in a generation."

On space, place, & community

• I believe that the alcohol-driven culture of nightlife is going to go though a huge upending. Now is a good time to open that late night decaf tea house, evening bathhouse, game board parlor, or cozy cafe that closes at 2am.

• After studying in basically every library / study spot in Cambridge, I've found that the best study spots are still mom & pop cafes where there is a sense of *life* vs. institutional heaviness. In these life-filled places, I've found that insights come through more easily, esp when I "borrow" from the auric field of PhD students doing psets and writing dissertations.

• After seeing some 800~ events take place at The Commons i've learned 3 things:

  • 1) plausible deniability: if you say we're here to make friends, friendship doesn't happen. if you say we're here to research or talk about niche topic x and y, friendships always form. same applies to dating.

  • 2) communities are built from strong 1-1 relationships. as an event host, optimize for as much 1-1 time before, during, and after events. if ppl see 2 or 3 people they know deeply at the space on any given day, that's what keeps them coming back.

  • 2) events are just the filters. the point of events is not the event itself, but what happens after the event ends. people lingering around to connect is where actual friendships form. by keeping the space open for that vs. asking people to leave, you enable these connections to happen.

• We need to reinvent the mall. Malls took off in the 1950s as an attempt to create community vibrancy amidst the influx of suburbs. Unsurprisingly, capitalism and "buying things" became the focus. What if we replaced "stores" in malls with just third spaces? A high density area with conversation pits, bookstores, coffee shops, playgrounds, and places to dance, debate, and hang.

• Manifesting my dream “third place” which will contain:

  • a library with free books for loan from every school of philosophy, religious sect, and type of fiction that seeks to answer what is good, beautiful, & true.

  • a beautiful space for silence, contemplation, & meditation that is open to anyone who walks in

  • a hall for open debate, meaning-making in community, and impassioned speeches. Alive with a rotating cast of spiritual leaders, philosophers, builders, intellectuals, & citizens

  • late-night zen tea house for 1-1 conversations & connections

  • all in service to supporting a human in the ground of being - being in the perennial questions, essence, transition, complexity and the space between stimulus and response

• I would be so productive and well-read if cafe's of the future could reproduce a rainy and misty biosphere 24/7

• The daoists believed that outside of regulating energy through qi gong and meditation, the most powerful thing that influenced qi was our physical environment. In the new year ask yourself - does every object in your home feel like art? Art defined as the material manifestation of what you feel to be good, beautiful, and true deep down. If it gives you neutral or negative energy, throw it away. You may not notice, but the presence of those objects compounded over months and years is creating a energy deficit that could be utilized for your creative projects. You could be shaving time off your self-care routine just to get to a good state, if you woke up to a beautiful room filled with objects that automatically energized you. This is not to say our internal state and practices are secondary. They are primary. Our outer should reflect our inner to create a sense of continued wholeness with our environment. Bc every misalignment in our lives splinters off energy that could otherwise be subsuming into the whole. Into our hearts. Outside of your environment, what others areas of your life could be misaligned in the same way?

Provocations

• (question that keeps me up at night) what would it take to bring virtue / a spirit of philosopher kings & queens back into the training of our politicians?

• we talk too much about near-death experiences, not enough about near-life experiences

• we must look so weird to aliens: spending 8 hrs tapping on little boxes, then more hours tapping small rectangles, then off to a gym full of others picking boxes of diff sizes up and down.

• Arabelle Sicardi, from “The Year in Ugliness”; “What part of yourself did you have to destroy in order to survive in the world this year? But most importantly: what have you found to be unkillable?

• Source? I felt it in my heart.

Thank you for being part of The Wellness Wisdom newsletter today.

I’m Patricia and I write this newsletter in my free time every time an insight needs to be grappled with and birthed. If you want to support my writing, you can join me down the rabbit hole 🕳🐇.