on how to live.

• follow the energy instead of the form

• my main barometer for if i’m succeeding in life is how enchanted each day felt

• Imagine reading a book with no way to turn back the page. How carefully would you read it? That’s life.

• words are literally spells. Buddha said let your words pass through 3 gates:
  Is it true? is it necessary? is it kind?

• on free will: you have choice, but your choices arise from conditions you did not create. you are accountable, but you are not ultimately in charge. you co-create your life, but the deep river of reality carries all things beyond individual mastery

• there is great freedom in being an amateur. I'd like to be one for the rest of my life. the word "amateur" comes from the Latin word amator, which means: "one who loves". Or in other words one who engages in a craft, art, or discipline for the sheer joy of it~

• “Walk until your day becomes interesting—even if this means wandering out of town and strolling the countryside. Eventually you’ll see a scene or meet a person that makes your walk worthwhile." ― Rolf Potts

• I think culture needs to normalize around the idea of slow texting: If I haven’t replied to you, it means I haven’t looked at my phone. And if I’m not looking at my phone, I’m in my good place. to expect instant responses from others is to hope for them to not be fully absorbed in their own present. could any hope be less loving? what if we saw all our slow text convos as a win and stopped taking it so damn personally?

on creating our art.

• “most people think their purpose is about some external thing that they create which produces results. your purpose is more about what kind of experience you want to gain to become more whole, have a greater awareness of yourself, and expand your capabilities.” - on purpose via scott briton

• the surest indication of whether you're following your own authentic truth, is if the path before you disappears. by definition of it being *your* unique path, it is one that has not been walked before. do not fear - the path creates itself, as you keep walking~ "Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

• darlings, you think you’re simply creating a community, starting a new company, or making art. what you’re actually doing is encoding a new civilizational pattern into the morphic field. and perhaps you’re not meant to “scale” your work, but rather build one version so pure that it functions as a tuning fork, calling forth similar frequencies to replicate its harmonic through resonance in their own fields, and all fields they subsequently touch

• Your life’s purpose isn’t a singular noun (“founder,” “writer,” “healer”). It’s a frequency your body emits when in deep attunement with the Whole. That frequency channels forth certain projects, relationships, and ideas into form~ When certain decisions feel like “recognition” rather than choice, you know you’re on the right path

• Focus on your likes, not your wants. Wanting is the desire you feel before doing something. Liking is the satisfaction you feel after doing something. Let your likes guide you.

  • You may not want to exercise, but you like how it makes you feel.

  • You may not want to write, but you like the feeling of accomplishment.

  • You may not want to wake up early, but you like the calm beauty of morning.

the bigger picture.

• the universe cares more about the progression and expansion of your soul, than your individual likes and preferences. and suffering happens to be the most potent technology for learning. same with falling in love - in that it makes what was once rigid, soft again. ready to be destroyed and re-molded.

• i've found that embodying deep okayness marks the beginning of a multi-year process of feeling deep pain.. but with no/minimal suffering
  
  when we finally get a taste of true self-love & secure attachment with reality, all parts of ourselves that feel unloved scramble from the shadows to the surface in order to be met and attuned to with that love
  
  all of a sudden the universe sends you the biggest triggers, dark nights, and traumatizing circumstances to aid those parts into re-surfacing with stronger activation energy. this is by design as nature finally seizes this opportunity to heal itself
  
  all therapy, bodywork, energetics, meditation, healing containers are simply technologies that help reinforce the container in which you are ultimately holding yourself, to fully feel it all without having a change agenda. eventually you'll need those technologies less and less as You holds you.

• The real question isn’t whether life has meaning, but whether we are attuned to its inherent meaning.
  
  There is no Meaning Crisis if you have secure attachment with reality / the unfolding of the universe. If you experience yourself as part of larger patterns.
  
  One becomes a participant in the interconnected network of reality and in its inherent meaning. There is a higher-level order to it all, a mysterious directionality and emergent intelligence, in which you are deeply attuned to.

on healing & emotions

• Convinced that the majority of the worlds problems hinge on whether your parents embodied deep love and attunement to you in the first 5 years of life.

• Each time I prevent myself from feeling the deepest scariest thing, I prevent the little girl inside of me from completing her grief process.

• every shadow has a gift. trauma isn't just pain frozen in time. it is potential energy awaiting expression until the time is right (when the wielder has the maturity to wield it well)

• "When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order." - Ilya Prigogine. starting with the small islands of coherence within you~

• a powerful indicator of where you are on the journey to wholeness is how intensely you're triggered or disturbed by others. the more triggered, the more work you have. here are good qs to work with when you get triggered:

  • what are they doing that's unacceptable in my eyes?

  • what do they get to do that I don't allow myself to do? what quality allows them to do that?

  • how have those qualities been dangerous for me to fully inhabit and express? what's the risk to me?

  • why do i need that capacity now? what's the risk if I don't step into those characteristics my shadow is holding?

  • what facet of wholeness do i need to reincorporate this characteristic into my being?

  • additional tip: assume all projections being levied at you are somewhat true. try it on. what's true about it? how are you exactly like that

• "We are intelligently drawn to those who can heal us, those who will, knowingly or not, bring up the unmet, unloved, unseen parts of ourselves, inviting the darkness back into the light, calling us to evolve, to feel more fully, to speak out with greater conviction, to draw clearer boundaries, to know ourselves more deeply. To strengthen our relationship with Life."- Jeff Foster

• Gut feelings, dreams, deja-vu, and synchronicities are a kind of sacred communication technology we have with the universe~

  • A clean “yes” often signals alignment.

  • A heavy dread can be a caution: slow down, re-check the path.

  • Déjà vu is a “node” moment - pay attention; choice matters. A “node” is a moment where: a familiar pattern is active (a repeating lesson, dynamic, or archetype), and your choice here has outsized influence on what comes next.

  • A synchronicity is the universe saying: yes, you’re in dialogue with life. keep going, but don’t outsource your agency to the sign.

  • Dreams are where your consciousness loosens its grip on the day-world story and returns to a wider field. In that wider field, it does three main things:

    • Metabolizes what you couldn’t fully feel or process while awake.

    • Re-patterns you: it updates your emotional software, rehearses responses, and integrates shadow material.

    • Orients you: it shows you the shape of what’s coming, not as fixed fate, but as probable currents.

• “Being centered is a quality of your awareness arising from your center, i.e. embodied intelligence, as well as pivoting around your center. Your center is your body. So being centered is living from the way your body informs your experiences. Your body arises according to Life’s Intelligence. And the more you can heal your relationship with it and center yourself firmly in it, and live from the signals and feedback and guidance it gives you, the better. Your body is one of the primary tools through which Deeper Intelligence communicates with, and guides, you.”

• A persistent fear or pattern can have multiple roots at once: an early attachment experience and a deeper ancestral or karmic imprint. In a soul-oriented frame, incarnation may involve entering conditions that reliably activate an old theme so it can be consciously re-felt and integrated. The wound becomes a portal, allowing what was frozen in the system to metabolize into freedom. As that integration happens, the wound often ripens into a gift: a hard-won capacity for empathy and steadiness that can hold others in terrain once endured alone, turning healing into service.

on relationships.

• “There is almost a sensual longing for communion with others who have a large vision. The immense fulfilment of the friendship between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality impossible to describe.” — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

• when speaking hard truths, the mystics (jesus, buddha, etc.) often used parables and stories, inviting people to reflect and arrive at their own realizations. they knew that truth lands better when it feels discovered rather than imposed

• 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. Plot twist: the feminine is all of us regardless of gender

• the feeling of simultaneous distance and soul connection when you meet someone who's singing the same song, but on a slightly different wavelength. it's like seeing a parallel life in real-time. a nostalgic melody that sounds like home, somewhere far away.

• “Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.” - Anais Nin

• Inner union, sometimes called the sacred marriage or hieros gamos in various traditions, is the alchemical process of integrating what Jung called the anima and animus - the inner feminine and masculine principles within a single psyche. This isn’t about gender. It’s about the fundamental polarities of consciousness:

  • Inner Masculine: Direction, clarity, action, protection, structure, penetrating awareness, the capacity to hold boundaries, to choose, to move toward goals.

  • Inner Feminine: Receptivity, intuition, flow, creativity, cycles, diffuse awareness, the capacity to surrender, to allow, to trust the unfolding. Most people project one of these poles onto partners.

  • Women often project their masculine onto men, expecting them to provide direction, protection, clarity. Men often project their feminine onto women, expecting them to provide flow, intuition, emotional attunement. Inner union happens when you can access both poles within yourself - when you no longer need another person to complete you because you can hold your own masculine-feminine dance internally. This doesn’t mean you don’t desire partnership. It means partnership becomes choice and celebration rather than necessity and completion.

on spirituality.

• we are spiritual beings having a human experience, and both dimensions are equally sacred

• the “spiritual path” is the constant conscious toggle between “I figured it out!” and “I know literally nothing”. And holding the view that both are true

• what we experience as "progression" or development is actually consciousness learning to perceive more dimensions of an already-complete pattern. this is why genuine insight feels like remembering rather than discovering

• down the line, the process of awakening will take over itself. There’s an intelligence in life that, from the infinite possible pathways, gravitates toward the ones that metabolize karma fastest.

• Karma has to be felt but not acted out again - it’s more about healing how we relate to the suffering vs healing the suffering itself

• the point is not to destroy the ego. understand the ego and how it forms. be aware of it. loosen its power when lower energy states shine through it, magnify its power when higher energy states illuminate it. let it be a tool to acheive the hearts aims. let life use life. "we should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality. it cannot lead; it can only serve." - albert einstein "the most confused we ever get is when we're trying to convince our heads of something our heart knows is a lie" - karen moning

• the emotional depths plumbing workshop after workshop ppl need more emptiness. the 5th jhana spiritual meaningness bros need more form.

• a shift that has really supported me is no longer trying to find the "perfect" teacher - spiritually, intellectually, etc. which is often a misplaced desire to reunify with the "perfect parents" we never had (understandable but problematic in it of itself). I used to attend talks / retreats with the frame of trying to discern if x person is "legit". unless the second coming of the Buddha/Jesus etc. is amongst us now, all teachers have shadow / personal bias no matter how "enlightened" they portray themselves. As light is moving through a fundamentally human vessel. Instead, view teachers as having one piece of the puzzle or one angle / filter of the truth - there's always something to learn from them. The same applies towards friendships and romantic partners. We're all walking puzzle pieces. When I embody the perspective, the whole world becomes re-enchanted, my heart opens, and people become sparkly open books of mutual learning.

• “To be one with the infinite in the midst of the finite and to be eternal in a moment, that is the immortality of religion.” - Friedrich Schleiermacher

on metaphysics.

• Everything is a placebo. Astrology is one of many chosen meaning-systems: it can work like a placebo, not because it’s “fake,” but because it organizes attention and belief. The truth starts within, and we use external tools or deities to help entrain our psyche into that truth until it becomes lived reality. The problem is when we confuse the tool for the thing itself, and start worshipping the finger instead of looking at the moon.

• neither disenchantment nor re-enchantment is sufficient alone

  each illuminates a distinct dimension of human existence: disenchantment clarifies how things work (causality, mechanisms, science). while re-enchantment illuminates why things matter (meaning, ethics, transcendence). integration begins by acknowledging that these modes are complementary and incomplete without the other

• Donna Meadows argues that one of the deepest leverage points to change a system is to shift the fundamental paradigms and perspectives people hold when engaging with the world. However, she mentions an even deeper leverage point: being in the great mystery at the heart of existence. "That is to keep oneself unattached in the arena of paradigms, to stay flexible, to realize that NO paradigm is “true,” that every one, including the one that sweetly shapes your own worldview, is a tremendously limited understanding of an immense and amazing universe that is far beyond human comprehension. It is to “get” at a gut level the paradigm that there are paradigms, and to see that that itself is a paradigm, and to regard that whole realization as devastatingly funny."

• the universe teaches through contrast. that’s why duality exists.

longer format personal writing

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

• a civic hearth for dharma - many paths to self-actualization, with a center that holds

• the future will be mystical - designing the social architecture for post-religious spirituality

• thresholds of the sacred - buddhist interfaces between worlds

• containers for emergence & pluralism - holding complexity without collapse & 2 experiments

going into 2026~

beholds less definite plans or goals, but rather strong intentions, weakly held, in surrender to the universal flow:

• prototyping “sunday service” for “spiritual-but-not-religious” in SF. Sign-up.

• engaging in praxis on how to build modern wisdom institutions & stepping more fully into service

• exploring ritual arts, egyptian cosmology, and dance as prayer

• sharing my learnings as I go along on X, instagram, and rabbit holes newsletter

with love,

Patricia Mou

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.

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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 🕳🐇.

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The meaning crisis. The meta and poly crisis. The loneliness epidemic. The decline of social capital and collapse of community. The loss of unifying narratives. The kali yuga. Whatever you want to call it. When we listen to these proclamations we inherently perceive their truthfulness. That they are loosely gesturing at the same thing. That something is existentially amiss in the cultural and societal waters we’re swimming in. And although we can’t fully grok what the problem nor solution may be, we feel its repercussions through our relative experiences, reverberating across the human experience: the pervasiveness of of anxiety and depression, decline in institutional trust, increase in social disconnection, and the decay of religious, social and civic infrastructure. Overall, society increasingly feels more individualist. And in that void our surrogates for meaning become progressively derived from dogmatic ideologies, cacophonies of new-age rituals and ancient rites, consumption of brands, institutional affiliations, social media follower counts, personal wealth and vocational prestige. 

In other words, we are more materially prosperous and free to self-actualize than we’ve ever been, yet feel unhappy and lonely in that plight, grasping eagerly at proxies for meaning - those of which satiate us temporarily, yet leave an aftertaste of emptiness. I believe that what we’re experiencing is actually a crisis of individualism, in which meaninglessness and loneliness are mere byproducts. What’s needed is not more commentaries expounding on downstream side effects, but rather, clarity into the root causes of our predicament: our individualism. Though there have been many interventions proposed across economics, policy, public health, urbanism, and civil society, I believe one of the most powerful leverage points out of the machinery is back through it; and that’s through ourselves. But first, we must understand how the relationship between the individual and the collective has evolved over-time.  

Derived from the Latin word "individuus”, an individual refers to a single, distinct entity that is considered separate from others. This is the opposite of the non-dual, interconnected, and coherent essence of nature and organic systems. In mythic and archaic eras, our human social systems reflected the natural order of the universe and the harmonious interdependency we had with the transcendent and one another. Later on, our connection to the sacred and this natural order eroded but was realized through various prophets (Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, etc.), which were then codified for lay people through religion, enabling experiential access to truth via exemplar teachers, wisdom teachings, and community. In the pre-modern world of kings and queens, an “individual” was embedded within a larger chain of being, through a divine order which descended from the cosmos, mediated by the church to the state, and onwards, to the roles and purposes carried out by its citizens. Largely predetermined at birth and stable throughout life, meaning was clearly conferred to the average person. While religion provided a unifying framework for values and moral action, it was also gate kept by the clergy. Though deeply meaningful, the social order was also restrictive and dogmatic. Overtime  “Church” became increasingly usurped by “State”, leading to tyranny, bloodshed in the name of God, and social structures that repressed the natural will and expression of the individual. It was also a world without much equality, upward mobility, scientific knowledge and technological progress.

The subsequent ushering in of The Enlightenment was an over-correction that swung the pendulum towards the decline of unquestionable dogma and the rise of reason, autonomy, and individualistic freedom. Meanwhile, modern science, materialism, and rationality co-arose as the teleological end of human civilization, accelerating exponentially with the industrial age and the capitalistic doctrines that have since shaped our politics, culture, and societal norms and values. The price for pedestalling the individual was social disintegration and privatization of spiritual life, as relationships became conceived upon utility and competition, while pervasive rationalistic, technical and bureaucratic ways of being emptied life of meaning. The breakdown of social hierarchies challenged our role within society and led to a loss of shared communal goals, affecting how we conceive of ourselves, and subsequently, how we conduct ourselves ethically. In the end, the revenant pursuit of individual freedom and technological progress brought about many fruits, but also cost us a loss of ‘raison d’être’, inherent meaning, and social cohesion. 

Today, ‘the meaning crisis’ and ‘loneliness epidemic’ are in fact new terms alluding to a very old crisis of individualism that has been unfolding since the 17th century. 

In recent decades we’ve felt the crisis more acutely, as new forces have exacerbated our individualism and resulting self-reliance. Social and information technologies have intensified the disconnection we feel and infinitely increased the possible sources of truth and frames one can take on. The credibility of mainstream institutions as meditators of sense-making have been upended in the wake of multiple economic crises and the COVID epidemic. And the advent of AI not only magnifies the lack of unifying values in the current human discourse but also has the potential to automate many white and blue-collar jobs that confer meaning, begging the question: what is actually meaningful? 

It’s no wonder we are becoming increasingly individualistic, as proverbial rugs continuously get  pulled from under us. With no sense of solid ground to stand upon, we double down on a mix shift of meaning surrogates that feel safe in the relative but don’t necessarily match the dynamism of our inner-truth and authenticity.

Increasingly so, we’ve begun to realize that the answer of personal meaning can no longer be sought outside of ourselves, readily packaged for consumption. We must save ourselves. So we go on a proverbial 10-day meditation retreat, sign up for therapy, solo travel to numerous 3rd world countries, take on the countenance of a personified Walden Pond ascetic, and consider becoming an influencer in the process, mistaking views and likes as real community.

Under the capitalistic mandate of unbounded growth and progress, we become hyper-focused on my trauma, my healing, my passions, my hero’s journey, my hobbies, my tribe - purchasing our way into idealized versions of ourselves, and doing so in a vacuum navigated largely alone and cut off from a broader social fabric of pluralistic perspectives. 

Thus the quest for freedom, authenticity, and self-actualization is not only achieved by going at it by ourselves, but making it about ourselves. Propelled by an individualism that serves to reify the ego, rather than loosen its grip, so that our natural gifts may spontaneously arise in service to the larger collective.

What’s required now is not necessarily a return to ancient times but a synthesis: How can we continue the project of Modernity, with its material prosperity and arch towards individual freedom and self-actualization, while mitigating the individualistic and dualistic bugs it brings in? How can we recapture the value of meaning that we’ve lost without sacrificing the authenticity we crave?

How can we have authenticity without individualism? 

There is a deep truth and beauty in carrying on the essence of what our forefathers and mothers of The Enlightenment strove for. The process of uncovering our unique soul purpose without outside scripts, arriving at our values through first principles, and (especially pronounced in the last few decades) doing the work of psychological healing and spiritual exploration without the intermediary of religious dogma. As a human species over millennia, the arch towards self-trust, personal actualization, and a world where each individual is fully alive in their gifts is a beautiful one. However, if not careful, the subtle tendrils of the ego, its focus on “I”, and tendency to see “self” and “other” as separate, can sabotage our process. Within “individualism”, there is the term “dualism”. In the same vein, the word “Devil” comes from the Greek word diabolos, meaning to divide or throw against. The proclivity towards duality we experience toward others today, is the same proclivity that animated the turbulence of pre-modern times through its bloodshed, repression, and societal inequality. Only it’s now shining through the project of our personal actualization. It is the frame by which we see others as fundamentally different, less respectable, or separate from oneself. It is the unending prioritization of individual goals, desires, and achievements over the well-being of the collective. It is why the “outside world” becomes a reflection of the duality we feel inside: divisive neighborhoods, polarizing political parties, and a global system oriented around defensiveness over abundance, all mirroring the collective duality we internalize and project onto larger fractals. 

True actualization is about letting go of the dualistic frame entirely, going through the process of “clean up, wake up, grow up, and show up”, and operating from its antidote: self-transcendence, non-dualism, interconnectedness, and a striving towards coherence within and outside oneself. In Abraham Maslow’s unpublished notebooks before his death, he came head to head with a paradox: How could so many of the self-actualizing individuals he studied simultaneously have such a strong identity and actualization of their potential, yet also be so selfless? In a 1961 paper, Maslow observed that self-actualization seems to be a “transitional goal, a rite of passage, a step along the path to the transcendence of identity.” This is like saying its function is to erase itself.  He wrote, “The fully developed human being working under the best conditions tends to be motivated by values which transcend his self… My satisfaction with achieving or allowing justice is not within my own skin; it does not lie along my arteries. It is equally outside and inside: therefore, it has transcended the geographical limitations of the self.”

Furthermore, the journey of self-transcendence is not done in a vacuum. To pursue authenticity without individualism means seeing it as an inherently social enterprise. Charles Taylor, the late philosopher, posits that meaning-making is done through ongoing dialogues with others and within the pluralism of traditions and communities we explore. In a similar vein, John Vervaeke calls this phenomenon “Transjectivity”, whereby meaning arises in the relationship between subject and object. In other words, it’s a process that cannot be done in isolation, but in the relationship between ourselves and the environment we’re embedded in. As each of us harbors unique impulses within that guide us towards authentic meaning and actualization, we need one another to ripen those impulses dialogically. 

Ultimately, the point of self-actualization is that it’s not about the self at all.

Feel into your body right now. Somatically, we intuit a sense of deep meaning, openness, and relaxation when we imagine ourselves contributing towards the robustness and coherence of a greater whole - serving our loved ones, community, and the entirety of humanity in the unfolding of an even larger evolutionary and cosmic purpose. It is what spiritual guides like Bill Plotkins have described as “soul purpose”, an intrinsic calling and unique niche, within a larger ecological web, that an individual is meant to fulfill in their lifetime. This is actually what we’re all seeking, and the essence of what The Enlightenment was gesturing at. However this purpose often lies buried and paralyzed under the weight of the ego’s frantic efforts to obtain, acceptance, love, approval, and appreciation, as it acts through the blade of the mind in its attempts to rationalize, reduce, separate, and control. And we live in a world which is built around giving the ego what it wants, because we have created it from our own confusion. It is precisely this predicament that fuels our ongoing crisis of individualism. Like a led-astray child, the ego attempts to use the ego to heal and satiate itself - whether that’s through mechanisms of materialism, consumption, social status, or tight-fisted identifications. Little does it know, it must take the Kierkegaardian leap of faith and surrender to something beyond it - a quiet knowing or primordial awareness that is beyond time and concepts, tethered to a cosmic thrust of ever higher orders of coherence and interconnectivity. In this world, the ego is not vanquished, but rather a partner and manifester to what the soul envisions - like a wave that crests in its uniqueness for a little while, then relinquishes into the vast ocean. We are in an infinite dance with reality as it continuously rediscovers itself through us. In this dance of surrender, we keep falling - however, the good news is that there is also no ground. Collapsing inwards recursively, flow is no longer experienced in fleeting moments of transcendence and immersion. It is your whole life serving life itself. Non-duality becomes embodied. 

In Leverage Points, systems analyst Donella Meadows considers “the mindset or paradigm out of which the system — its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters — arises” as the highest leverage point for bringing about systemic change. Re-imagining our individualism and internalized duality as a society is one of the highest leverage things we can do to change all that lies downstream from it. To live in a world that is increasingly non-dual, interconnected, and coherent, means we ourselves must embody those same principles, and express that outwards through our unique gifts to the collective, in a unfolding process that’s in constant dialectic with our social contexts.

A hallmark of the Renaissance is the sudden awareness of previously neglected aspects of experience. In the same vein, we can undergo a paradigm shift at any moment. And as society is made up of a collective of individuals, when enough individuals have made a shift, society as a whole will follow. Slowly but surely, our families, communities, city councils, political arenas, and global villages will be macrocosmic reflections of the embodied non-dual realization we’ve each made individually. We must understand the simultaneous precariousness and preciousness of the “time between worlds” we’re in and embody a new paradigm of being that will serve to unify ourselves, society, and generations to come. 

Thanks for taking them time to read this essay. S/O to Kush Sharma for edits and Sam Wolf who’s been my mind-meld partner-in-crime on these topics. 

Some further provocations: 

• What needs to happen at the micro (individual), mezzo (community), and macro layers of society (economics/policy/planning) to enable an authenticity without individualism? Some angles i’ve been thinking about: 

  • Mirco: What prevents us from trusting ourselves? And what is the role of community here?  

  • Mezzo: How can fourth places for communal meaning-making play a role in our individual actualization, and also serve as the surface area by which we serve others? 

  • Macro: How can cities be built around purpose? 

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 🕳🐇 or subscribe to this newsletter.

Being agentic is trendy these days. But what if one is agentic about an agenda that is not truly theirs? 

Naturally, being authentic could be a more desirable aim. Authenticity as a central telos emerged alongside the breakdown of traditional social hierarchies and religious orders in the post Enlightenment era. The loss of a unifying ethic meant each individual was free to create their own constellation of meaning, as well as pursue projects as extensions of “who they are”. Life thus unraveled as a sweeping epic of “personal projects” born from the crucible of experience, conditioning, and most importantly, the expression of one’s innate essence.   

If authenticity is the North Star of existence in the post-modern world, what’s less clear is how to get there. There are millions of blueprints that attempt to push us outwards towards predefined ways of being which can be bought, consumed, and ritualized without question. Far fewer blueprints prioritize finding authenticity through first principles, that is, the cultivation of self-trust by going inwards. Authenticity is merely the by-product of continued discernment and actioning upon the little whisper inside our hearts that just knows. A trust in who we actually are through attuning to what feels true over decades of lived experience and making that the burgeoning corpus from which all else springs. 

Instead of being more agentic or authentic, perhaps a more worthwhile aim should be to pursue self-trust. A self-trust that filters chaos into resonance, alchemizing our unique source code into great works and personal values felt all the way through. A deep trust that settles our chattering bones. A sonic tug, pulling us limply across milky ways of kinetic potential towards personal expressions of value - emblems of the good, beautiful, and true in a Platonic cave of our own making. 

But how do we cultivate this kind of self-trust? 

Answering this question starts with investigating what prevents us from trusting ourselves to begin with, not in a “I don’t trust myself with that chocolate bar” kind of way, but rather in a primordial kind of way. An all-pervasive mistrust that saturates the water we swim in and fuels a lifetime of conscious and unconscious attempts to secure safety through external means. A kind of mistrust that’s so inherent that it almost goes unquestioned. 

A kind of mistrust that goes as far back as infancy. In a groundbreaking paper, the eminent psychoanalyst Donald Winnicot, first conceptualized the notion of “holding environments” and the crucial role our parents, especially our mothers, play in shaping our first experience of reality. When we are born, our mothers are perceived as literally extensions of ourselves. A healthy separation-individuation process is facilitated by a stable, protective, and attuned holding environment from our caretakers. When it becomes disrupted or unreliable, our trust in the fundamental safety of reality also erodes. Throughout the first 5 years of life this trust can continue to fray, and depending on what age we may have experienced a particularly potent rupture, the ego reifies and develops a variety of coping strategies. 

The message is clear: we cannot rely on the world to hold us securely, so we must take control. Even if we had a good upbringing, it’s impossible not to have encountered experiences that disrupted our sense of unconditional safety. We have all suffered, closed, and armored ourselves, by virtue of being human. In that contraction, we’ve not only dulled pain, but also the ability to trust both others and ourselves. 

If authenticity, born of self-trust, is our ultimate aim, then the path to redemption lies in taking responsibility for understanding not only how trust was broken, but how we’ve perpetuated its repercussions into the present. Like intrepid detectives, we may pursue psychoanalytic work like ACT and IFS to understand how our childhoods have informed our patterns, bring awareness to how they manifest, and find new ways to react to old triggers with the inner-resourcing we now possess as adults. We may pursue meditation to not only develop more non-reactivity, but also use emptying or inquiry practices to tenderize the illusion of a fixed “self”, with its conditioned fears and desires.

In all cases, self-trust emerges through the process of negation. By experiencing the insubstantial nature of what we once took for as solid, we begin to get in touch with the ground of being that transcends our limited narratives - a holding environment replete with wholeness, where we are fully connected to ourselves and all that is, where our hearts are open and present to the effulgence of a trust that existed before no-time. We understand that this is who we have always been. 

Another way to increase self-trust is to be better at discerning high quality holding environments. Cultivating self-trust is not a solitary pursuit: it is interwoven with the fabric of our relationships and the environments we inhabit.

Even as adults, we continue to seek out holding environments - physical and psychological spaces where we feel safe, secure, and protected, so that we can explore and expand the frontiers of our being. These may take the form of romantic relationships, friends, therapists, and spiritual guides. They may be abstracted out towards our vocation, social status, identity-based communities, or tribalistic inclinations. Or they may arise in feeling moments of collective effervescence, altered states of consciousness, and in the deep throes of sex. 

At their worst, these holding environments can literally hold us back, distort our self-image, and obfuscate our inner-knowing. At their best, they offer us a secure base from which to venture into uncharted territories to explore our shadows and our light. 

A good holding environment is a catalyst for transformation, a sacred space where old wounds can be alchemized into new sources of strength and insight. It is a partner who mirrors our shadow with compassion and skill, helping us to transmute anger into grief, and grief into self-love. It is a coach, therapist, or spiritual guide who refuses to provide easy answers, but instead shines a light on the path to our own inner wisdom. The best holding environments play a role in our healing, but never usurp our own self-trust or ability to heal ourselves. 

As the Buddha taught, "My teaching is a method to experience reality, not reality itself, just as a finger pointing at the moon is not the moon itself. A thinking person makes use of the finger to see the moon. A person who only looks at the finger and mistakes it for the moon will never see the real moon."

Like a cast that supports a healing limb, a healthy holding environment is a temporary scaffold, a crucible for the development of self-trust to ennoble one towards Kierkegaardian leaps of faith. It holds us as we learn to hold ourselves, until the day when we realize that we are, and have always been, our safest refuge. 

Unfortunately, many holding environments don’t have the orientation of leading us back to self-trust. Our vocational or spiritual communities may demand homogeneity and a narrowing of our identity in exchange for safety with the herd. We may chase fleeting unity through drugs or concerts, mistaking it for a condition that exists outside ourselves rather than within. We may surrender our power to gurus and vendors who peddle pre-packaged solutions, rather than empowering us to trust our own discernment. Even the pursuit of authenticity has been co-opted and commercialized, making it hard to discern what is real or counterfeit.

For the most part, we live in a society which functions and profits off of our lack of self-trust, as we continuously outsource it to taste-makers, celebrities, elected officials, spiritual figures, intellectuals and industry titans. 

The middle way is to neither reject nor repress these influences, but rather see them for what they are - shards of a larger truth that already resides within us. The wise among us use the world as a mirror, a catalyst for fanning the flames of personal truth within. 

As Zen Master Seung Sahn teaches, “In this life we must all kill three things: First we must kill our parents. Second, we must kill the Buddha. And lastly, we must kill the guru.” 

The journey back to self-trust is a revolutionary act. Combined with deficits in early childhood holding environments and an adult world replete with forces seeking to groom our preferences, identities, and wallets, the cards are well-stacked against us. It requires courage to consciously carve our own way back to ourselves. The good news is that we are the only thing standing in our own way. We are the ones we have been waiting for.

Use the vehicle, and then discard it. Transcend yet include. Discern and choose your holding environments carefully. And eventually, once you become a good holding environment for yourself, you’ll be able to be a good one for others. 

It is only through self-trust, that we can begin our journey to authenticity.

Some provocations: 

• What would it look like to build institutions that lead us back to self-trust?

• How can spaces, communities, cities, be healthy holding environments? 

• How could our cities optimize for the cultivation of each individual’s unique purpose? (see: cities and purpose)

• How can we, as a society, begin to value the heart just as much as the mind? (see: our hearts deepest want) 

• Vis-à-vis the decline of religion, what will take its place in helping people experience transformation vs. translation of “self”? (see: a spirituality that transforms) 

• How do we create more spaces that prioritize being > doing. Spaces for pause, meaning-making, and being in questions, with community? (see: a manifesto: the next era of third spaces as crucibles for meaning-making) 

• How can tight-knit communities be founded on plurality (celebrating our unique purpose) as a driving thread, vs. as a secondary D&I effort? (see: a new vision: finding out who we actually are, in order to express ourselves from that place)

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 🕳🐇.

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human flourishing (v): getting back to wholeness and then expressing in the world from that wholeness. 

wholeness is not prone to conceptualization. it’s an experiential way of being. the integral and embodied knowing that nothing is lacking because there exists an unbreakable trust in the unraveling of reality in the past, present, and future. a belief that reality is not unfurling nihilistically. but that effulgent in the stream of our experience is a warmth and tenderness that harmonizes all streams towards the goodness of the larger whole. if we fall back into ourselves deeply enough, we’ll find a primordial womb that exists before space, time, and concepts. a deep trust that all is. home. 

the thrust of all human existence is characterized as losing access to this ocean of spacious freedom, engaging in a myriad of attempts to re-access its trickles, and reunifying with it until it saturates our entire being. the spiritual life is the attempt at reaccessing it consciously. all else, abstractions nth times removed. we are all consciously or unconsciously seeking the security that is intrinsic in wholeness. attempting various experiences, drugs, and states, we pine to see beyond the veil of the mind and its snapshots of reality, calcified yet transparent. in an unyielding recursive loop, we learn that the mind cannot use the mind to usurp itself. content cannot expunge content. the mechanism must melt unto itself when met with deeper depths. a kierkegaardian leap of faith beyond the precarious edifices of thought. as we let go and let in more of what we are. trickles eventually turn into streams that turn into rivers, until our default state tips over to surrender as opposed to attempts. where we come from is no longer localized. an ocean emerges as duality effaces upon itself in ecstasy. the point of forgetting is the joy of remembering. until remembering becomes presence and reunion becomes eternal. 

so everyone, everywhere is somewhere along their path to union. infinite manifestations across different depths, rub against one another to create friction. kinetic energy transmutes into a scintillating corpus of cause and effect, duality and rediscovery, that lurches and sublates into greater facets of wholeness. all sacred and good. without duality and difference at all fractals, the universe would just be inert. you see, the point is play. the eroticism of ceaseless undulations between pain and elation. excuse my language but: instead of a fuck you to the universe, can you let it fuck you? 

—

the goal is to get everyone post scarcity. you don’t need to be rich, but you do need to be able to own your time. at the same time, it’s delusion to move towards more money. as it turns out, it pushes you away from doing your art. you need to find the middle way, where you are able to survive to thrive, and stop there. restraint is the most powerful action you can take.

before you can do your art. create and be from your center. metabolize your trauma & conditioning. the festering wound that continues to curdle if not aired through awareness. there is the process of looking directly at it through guidance and meditation. that often is too painful, so you are forced to look at it after days and years of subconscious decisions that congeal into bubbles of untruth. bubbles that burst and decimate the fabricated tapestry from which they spawned. that bring you back to ultimately looking directly at it. whether you can get back to the place of rawness, is grace. a stroke of benevolence ordained by the heavens. or perhaps, you’re meant to go through many more cycles - until the residue is thick enough to break through multiple lifetimes of build-up. many cycles within this life. many lives within the cycle. all good and meant to be.

once you purify the shards that refract your inner light astray. once little wafts of truth seep through the tendrils of your inner being like honey. you relinquish into its goodness. at this point it’s hard to go back, as uniting with what you are becomes the highest concentration of what you seek. the stuff you sought in external mirrors, all reflecting a diluted form of what you are. subconscious or conscious, everything you do is an effort to plug into this energetic, to let it pull you limply by the wrist. being in the present is the vehicle by which sweetness can then waft into the material. all we do on this worldly plane, an intention to create the conditions by which ourselves can pool. all ways to mute the ego complex, so delicate tendrils can arise from their core.

sometimes these tendrils become animated. the muses want to sing. god wants to express. art wants to be birthed as a material artifact by which god can know god. a beacon of recognition, for souls who have forgotten. there’s delight in forgetting and remembering in an upward helicoid towards complete union. the key is to become the apparatus by which this unfolding can germinate into its fullest vibrato. as white as a sheet of paper. as translucent as an untouched pond. from there it’s just unending surrender to however and whatever wants to take place. oscillating between be and being. your job is to stay open. that is the point of life.

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 🕳🐇.

Given that Ken is most famous for his other works like A Religion of Tomorrow and Integral Psychology, I doubt this journal entry gets much airtime. As such, i’ve decided to re-publish it below in hopes of it reaching a broader audience.

A Spirituality that Transforms

by Ken Wilber

Hal Blacker, the editor of What is enlightenment?, has described the topic of the magazine in the following way: 

“We intend to explore a sensitive question, but one which needs to be addressed—the superficiality which pervades so much of the current spiritual exploration and discourse in the West, particularly in the United States. All too often, in the translation of the mystical traditions from the East (and elsewhere) into the American idiom, their profound depth is flattened out, their radical demand is diluted, and their potential for revolutionary transformation is squelched. How this occurs often seems to be subtle, since the words of the teachings are often the same. Yet through an apparent sleight of hand involving, perhaps, their context and therefore ultimately their meaning, the message of the greatest teachings often seems to become transmuted from the roar of the fire of liberation into something more closely resembling the soothing burble of a California hot tub. While there are exceptions, the radical implications of the greatest teachings are thereby often lost. We wish to investigate this dilution of spirituality in the West, and inquire into its causes and consequences.” 

I would like to take Hal’s statement and unpack its basic points, commenting on them as best I can, because taken together, those points highlight the very heart and soul of a crisis in American spirituality.

Translations vs. Transformation

In a series of books (e.g., A Sociable God, Up from Eden, The Eye of Spirit), I have tried to show that religion itself has always performed two very important, but very different, functions. One, it acts as a way of creating meaning for the separate self: it offers myths and stories and tales and narratives and rituals and revivals that, taken together, help the separate self make sense of, and endure, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. This function of religion does not usually or necessarily change the level of consciousness in a person; it does not deliver radical transformation. Nor does it deliver a shattering liberation from the separate self altogether. Rather, it consoles the self, fortifies the self, defends the self, promotes the self. As long as the separate self believes the myths, performs the rituals, mouths the prayers, or embraces the dogma, then the self, it is fervently believed, will be “saved”—either now in the glory of being God-saved or Goddess-favored, or in an afterlife that ensures eternal wonderment.

But two, religion has also served—in a usually very, very small minority—the function of radical transformation and liberation. This function of religion does not fortify the separate self, but utterly shatters it—not consolation but devastation, not entrenchment but emptiness, not complacency but explosion, not comfort but revolution—in short, not a conventional bolstering of consciousness but a radical transmutation and transformation at the deepest seat of consciousness itself.

There are several different ways that we can state these two important functions of religion. The first function—that of creating meaning for the self—is a type of horizontal movement; the second function—that of transcending the self—is a type of vertical movement (higher or deeper, depending on your metaphor). The first I have named translation; the second, transformation.

With translation, the self is simply given a new way to think or feel about reality. The self is given a new belief—perhaps holistic instead of atomistic, perhaps forgiveness instead of blame, perhaps relational instead of analytic. “The self then learns to translate its world and its being in the terms of this new belief or new language or new paradigm, and this new and enchanting translation acts, at least temporarily, to alleviate or diminish the terror inherent in the heart of the separate self.”

But with transformation, the very process of translation itself is challenged, witnessed, undermined, and eventually dismantled. With typical translation, the self (or subject) is given a new way to think about the world (or objects); but with radical transformation, the self itself is inquired into, looked into, grabbed by its throat and literally throttled to death.

For authentic transformation is not a matter of belief but of the death of the believer; not a matter of translating the world but of transforming the world; not a matter of finding solace but of finding infinity on the other side of death. The self is not made content; the self is made toast.

Now, although I have obviously been favoring transformation and belittling translation, the fact is that, on the whole, both of these functions are incredibly important and altogether indispensable. Individuals are not, for the most part, born enlightened. They are born in a world of sin and suffering, hope and fear, desire and despair. They are born as a self ready and eager to contract; a self rife with hunger, thirst, tears, and terror. And they begin, quite early on, to learn various ways to translate their world, to make sense of it, to give meaning to it, and to defend themselves against the terror and the torture never lurking far beneath the happy surface of the separate self. 

And as much as we, as you and I, might wish to transcend mere translation and find an authentic transformation, nonetheless translation itself is an absolutely necessary and crucial function for the greater part of our lives. Those who cannot translate adequately, with a fair amount of integrity and accuracy, fall quickly into severe neurosis or even psychosis: the world ceases to make sense—the boundaries between the self and the world are not transcended but instead begin to crumble. This is not breakthrough but breakdown; not transcendence but disaster.

But at some point in our maturation process, translation itself, no matter how adequate or confident, simply ceases to console. No new beliefs, no new paradigm, no new myths, no new ideas, will staunch the encroaching anguish. Not a new belief for the self, but the transcendence of the self altogether, is the only path that avails.

Still, the number of individuals who are ready for such a path is, always has been, and likely always will be, a very small minority. For most people, any sort of religious belief will fall instead into the category of consolation: it will be a new horizontal translation that fashions some sort of meaning in the midst of the monstrous world. And religion has always served, for the most part, this first function, and served it well.

I therefore also use the word legitimacy to describe this first function (the horizontal translation and creation of meaning for the separate self). And much of religion’s important service is to provide legitimacy to the self—legitimacy to its beliefs, its paradigms, its worldviews, and its way in the world. This function of religion to provide a legitimacy for the self and its beliefs—no matter how temporary, relative, nontransformative, or illusory—has nonetheless been the single greatest and most important function of the world’s religious traditions. The capacity of a religion to provide horizontal meaning, legitimacy, and sanction for the self and its beliefs—that function of religion has historically been the single greatest “social glue” that any culture has.

And one does not tamper easily, or lightly, with the basic glue that holds societies together. Because more often than not, when that glue dissolves—when that translation dissolves—the result, as we were saying, is not breakthrough but breakdown, not liberation but social chaos. (We will return to this crucial point in a moment.)

Where translative religion offers legitimacy, transformative religion offers authenticity. For those few individuals who are ready—that is, sick with the suffering of the separate self, and no longer able to embrace the legitimate worldview—then a transformative opening to true authenticity, true enlightenment, true liberation, calls more and more insistently. And, depending upon your capacity for suffering, you will sooner or later answer the call of authenticity, of transformation, of liberation on the lost horizon of infinity.

Transformative spirituality does not seek to bolster or legitimate any present worldview at all, but rather to provide true authenticity by shattering what the world takes as legitimate. Legitimate consciousness is sanctioned by the consensus, adopted by the herd mentality, embraced by the culture and the counterculture both, promoted by the separate self as the way to make sense of this world. But authentic consciousness quickly shakes all of that off its back, and settles instead into a glance that sees only a radiant infinity in the heart of all souls, and breathes into its lungs only the atmosphere of an eternity too simple to believe.

Transformative spirituality, authentic spirituality, is therefore revolutionary. It does not legitimate the world, it breaks the world; it does not console the world, it shatters it. And it does not render the self content, it renders it undone.

And those facts lead to several conclusions.

Who actually wants to transform?

It is a fairly common belief that the East is simply awash in transformative and authentic spirituality, but that the West—both historically and in today’s “new age” “—has nothing much more than various types of horizontal, translative, merely legitimate and therefore tepid spirituality. And while there is some truth to that, the actual situation is much gloomier, for both the East and the West alike.

First, although it is generally true that the East has produced a greater number of authentic realizers, nonetheless, the actual percentage of the Eastern population that is engaged in authentic transformative spirituality is, and always has been, pitifully small. I once asked Katagiri Roshi, with whom I had my first breakthrough (hopefully, not a breakdown), how many truly great Ch’an and Zen masters there have historically been. Without hesitating, he said, “Maybe one thousand altogether.” I asked another Zen master how many truly enlightened—deeply enlightened—Japanese Zen masters there were alive today, and he said, “Not more than a dozen.”

Let us simply assume, for the sake of argument, that those are vaguely accurate answers. Run the numbers. Even if we say there were only one billion Chinese over the course of history (an extremely low estimate), that still means that only one thousand out of one billion had graduated into an authentic, transformative spirituality. For those of you without a calculator, that’s 0.0000001 of the total population. (Even if we say a million instead of a thousand, that is still only 0.001 of the population—a pitiful drop in the bucket.)

And that means, unmistakably, that the rest of the population were (and are) involved in, at best, various types of horizontal, translative, merely legitimate religion: they were involved in magical practices, mythical beliefs, egoic petitionary prayer, magical rituals, and so on—in other words, translative ways to give meaning to the separate self, a translative function that was, as we were saying, the major social glue of the Chinese (and all other) cultures to date.

Thus, without in any way belittling the truly stunning contributions of the glorious Eastern traditions, the point is fairly straightforward: radical transformative spirituality is extremely rare, anywhere in history, and anywhere in the world. (The numbers for the West are even more depressing. I rest my case.)

So, although we can very rightly lament the very small number of individuals in the West who are today involved in a truly authentic and radically transformative spiritual realization, let us not make the false argument of claiming that it has otherwise been dramatically different in earlier times or in different cultures. It has on occasion been a little better than we see here, now, in the West, but the fact remains: authentic spirituality is an incredibly rare bird, anywhere, at any time, at any place. So let us start from the unarguable fact that vertical, transformative authentic spirituality is one of the most precious jewels in the entire human tradition—precisely because, like all precious jewels, it is incredibly rare.

Second, even though you and I might deeply believe that the most important function we can perform is to offer authentic transformative spirituality, the fact is, much of what we have to do, in our capacity to bring decent spirituality into the world, is actually to offer more benign and helpful modes of translation. 

In other words, even if we ourselves are practicing, or offering, authentic transformative spirituality, nonetheless much of what we must first do is provide most people with a more adequate way to translate their condition. We must start with helpful translations, before we can effectively offer authentic transformations.

The reason is that if translation is too quickly, or too abruptly, or too ineptly taken away from an individual (or a culture), the result, once again, is not breakthrough but breakdown, not release but collapse.  Let me give two quick examples here.

When Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a great (though controversial) Tibetan master, first came to this country, he was renowned for always saying, when asked the meaning of Vajrayana, “There is only Ati.” In other words, there is only the enlightened mind wherever you look. The ego, samsara, maya, and illusion—all of them do not have to be gotten rid of, because none of them actually exist: There is only Ati, there is only Spirit, there is only God, there is only nondual Consciousness anywhere in existence.

Virtually nobody got it—nobody was ready for this radical and authentic realization of always-already truth—and so Trungpa eventually introduced a whole series of “lesser” practices leading up to this radical and ultimate “no practice.” He introduced the Nine Yanas as the foundation of practice—in other words, he introduced nine stages or levels of practice, culminating in the ultimate “no practice” of always-already Ati.

Many of these practices were simply translative, and some were what we might call “lesser transformative” practices: miniature transformations that made the bodymind more susceptible to radical, already-accomplished enlightenment. These translative and lesser practices issued forth in the “perfect practice” of no-practice—or the radical, instantaneous, authentic realization that, from the very beginning, there is only Ati. So even though ultimate transformation was the prior goal and ever-present ground, Trungpa had to introduce translative and lesser practices in order to prepare people for the obviousness of what is.

Exactly the same thing happened with Adi Da, another influential (and equally controversial) adept (although this time, American-born). He originally taught nothing but “the path of understanding”: not a way to attain enlightenment, but an inquiry into why you want to attain enlightenment in the first place. The very desire to seek spiritual enlightenment is in fact nothing but the grasping tendency of the ego itself, and thus the very search for enlightenment prevents it. The “perfect practice” is therefore not to search for enlightenment but to inquire into the motive for seeking itself. You obviously seek in order to avoid the present, and yet the present alone holds the answer: to seek forever is to miss the point forever. You always already are enlightened Spirit, and therefore to seek Spirit is simply to deny Spirit. You can no more attain Spirit than you can attain your feet or acquire your lungs.

Nobody got it. And so Adi Da, exactly like Trungpa, introduced a whole series of translative and lesser transformative practices—seven stages of practice, in fact—leading up to the point that you could dispense with seeking altogether, there to stand open to the always-already truth of your own eternal and timeless condition, which was completely and totally present from the start, but which was brutally ignored in the frenzied desire to seek.

Now, whatever you might think of those two adepts, the fact remains: they performed perhaps the first two great experiments in this country on how to introduce the notion that “There is only Spirit”—and thus seeking Spirit is exactly what prevents realization. And they both found that, however much we might be alive to Spirit, alive to the radical transformative truth of this moment, nonetheless translative and lesser transformative practices are almost always a prerequisite for that final and ultimate transformation.

My second point, then, is that in addition to offering authentic and radical transformation, we must still be sensitive to, and caring of, the numerous beneficial modes of lesser and translative practices. This more generous stance therefore calls for an “integral approach” to overall transformation, an approach that honors and incorporates many lesser transformative and translative practices—covering the physical, emotional, mental, cultural, and communal aspects of the human being—in preparation for, and as an expression of, the ultimate transformation into the always-already present state.

And so, even as we rightly criticize merely translative religion (and all the lesser forms of transformation), let us also realize that an integral approach to spirituality combines the best of horizontal and vertical, translative and transformative, legitimate and authentic—and thus let us focus our efforts on a balanced and sane overview of the human situation.

Wisdom and Compassion

But isn’t this view of mine terribly elitist? Good heavens, I hope so. When you go to a basketball game, do you want to see me or Michael Jordan play basketball? When you listen to pop music, who are you willing to pay money in order to hear? Me or Bruce Springsteen? When you read great literature, who would you rather spend an evening reading, me or Tolstoy? When you pay sixty-four million dollars for a painting, will that be a painting by me or by Van Gogh?

All excellence is elitist. And that includes spiritual excellence as well. But spiritual excellence is an elitism to which all are invited. We go first to the great masters—to Padmasambhava, to Saint Teresa of Ávila, to Gautama Buddha, to Lady Tsogyal, to Emerson, Eckhart, Maimonides, Shankara, Sri Ramana Maharshi, Bodhidharma, Garab Dorje. But their message is always the same: let this consciousness be in you which is in me. You start elitist, always; you end up egalitarian, always.

But in between, there is the angry wisdom that shouts from the heart: we must, all of us, keep our eye on the radical and ultimate transformative goal. And so any sort of integral or authentic spirituality will also involve a critical, intense, and occasionally polemical shout from the transformative camp to the merely translative camp.

If we use the percentages of Chinese Ch’an as a simple blanket example, this means that if 0.0000001 of the population is actually involved in genuine or authentic spirituality, then 0.9999999 of the population is involved in nontransformative, nonauthentic, merely translative or horizontal belief systems. And that means, yes, that the vast, vast majority of “spiritual seekers” in this country (as elsewhere) are involved in much less than authentic occasions. It has always been so; it is still so now. This country is no exception.

But in today’s America, this is much more disturbing, because this vast majority of horizontal spiritual adherents often claim to be representing the leading edge of spiritual transformation, the “new paradigm” that will change the world, the “great transformation” of which they are the vanguard. But more often than not, they are not deeply transformative at all; they are merely but aggressively translative—they do not offer effective means to utterly dismantle the self, but merely ways for the self to think differently. Not ways to transform, but merely new ways to translate. In fact, what most of them offer is not a practice or a series of practices; not sadhana or satsang or shikan-taza or yoga. What most of them offer is simply the suggestion: read my book on the new paradigm. This is deeply disturbed, and deeply disturbing.

Thus, the authentic spiritual camps have the heart and soul of the great transformative traditions, and yet they will always do two things at once: appreciate and engage the lesser and translative practices (upon which their own successes usually depend), but also issue a thundering shout from the heart that translation alone is not enough.

—- 

And therefore, all of those for whom authentic transformation has deeply unseated their souls must, I believe, wrestle with the profound moral obligation to shout from the heart—perhaps quietly and gently, with tears of reluctance; perhaps with fierce fire and angry wisdom; perhaps with slow and careful analysis; perhaps by unshakable public example—but authenticity always and absolutely carries a demand and duty: you must speak out, to the best of your ability, and shake the spiritual tree, and shine your headlights into the eyes of the complacent. You must let that radical realization rumble through your veins and rattle those around you. 

Alas, if you fail to do so, you are betraying your own authenticity. You are hiding your true estate. You don’t want to upset others because you don’t want to upset your self. You are acting in bad faith, the taste of a bad infinity.

Because, you see, the alarming fact is that any realization of depth carries a terrible burden: Those who are allowed to see are simultaneously saddled with the obligation to communicate that vision in no uncertain terms: that is the bargain. You were allowed to see the truth under the agreement that you would communicate it to others (that is the ultimate meaning of the bodhisattva vow). And therefore, if you have seen, you simply must speak out. Speak out with compassion, or speak out with angry wisdom, or speak out with skillful means, but speak out you must.

And this is truly a terrible burden, a horrible burden, because in any case there is no room for timidity. The fact that you might be wrong is simply no excuse: You might be right in your communication, and you might be wrong, but that doesn’t matter. What does matter, as Kierkegaard so rudely reminded us, is that only by investing and speaking your vision with passion, can the truth, one way or another, finally penetrate the reluctance of the world. If you are right, or if you are wrong, it is only your passion that will force either to be discovered. It is your duty to promote that discovery—either way—and therefore it is your duty to speak your truth with whatever passion and courage you can find in your heart. You must shout, in whatever way you can.

The vulgar world is already shouting, and with such a raucous rancor that truer voices can scarcely be heard at all. The materialistic world is already full of advertisements and allure, screams of enticement and cries of commerce, wails of welcome and whoops of come hither. I don’t mean to be harsh here, and we must honor all lesser engagements. Nonetheless, you must have noticed that the word “soul” is now the hottest item in the title of book sales—but all “soul” really means, in most of these books, is simply the ego in drag. “Soul” has come to denote, in this feeding frenzy of translative grasping, not that which is timeless in you but that which most loudly thrashes around in time, and thus “care of the soul” incomprehensibly means nothing much more than focusing intensely on your ardently separate self. Likewise, “spiritual” is on everybody’s lips, but usually all it really means is any intense egoic feeling, just as “heart” has come to mean any sincere sentiment of the self-contraction.

All of this, truly, is just the same ole translative game, dressed up and gone to town. And even that would be more than acceptable were it not for the alarming fact that all of that translative jockeying is aggressively called “transformation,” when all it is, of course, is a new series of frisky translations. In other words, there seems to be, alas, a deep hypocrisy hidden in the game of taking any new translation and calling it the great transformation. And the world at large—East or West, North or South—is, and always has been, for the most part, perfectly deaf to this calamity.

And so: given the measure of your own authentic realization, you were actually thinking about gently whispering into the ear of that near-deaf world? No, my friend, you must shout. Shout from the heart of what you have seen, shout however you can.

But not indiscriminately. Let us proceed carefully with this transformative shout. Let small pockets of radically transformative spirituality, authentic spirituality, focus their efforts, and transform their students. And let these pockets slowly, carefully, responsibly, humbly, begin to spread their influence, embracing an absolute tolerance for all views, but attempting nonetheless to advocate a true and authentic and integral spirituality—by example, by radiance, by obvious release, by unmistakable liberation. Let those pockets of transformation gently persuade the world and its reluctant selves, and challenge their legitimacy, and challenge their limiting translations, and offer an awakening in the face of the numbness that haunts the world at large.

Let it start right here, right now, with us—with you and with me—and with our commitment to breathe into infinity until infinity alone is the only statement that the world will recognize. Let a radical realization shine from our faces, and roar from our hearts, and thunder from our brains—this simple fact, this obvious fact: that you, in the very immediateness of your present awareness, are in fact the entire world, in all its frost and fever, in all its glories and its grace, in all its triumphs and its tears. You do not see the sun, you are the sun; you do not hear the rain, you are the rain; you do not feel the earth, you are the earth. And in that simple, clear, unmistakable regard, translation has ceased in all domains, and you have transformed into the very Heart of the Kosmos itself—and there, right there, very simply, very quietly, it is all undone.

Wonder and remorse will then be alien to you, and self and others will be alien to you, and outside and inside will have no meaning at all. And in that obvious shock of recognition—where my Master is my Self, and that Self is the Kosmos at large, and the Kosmos is my Soul—you will walk very gently into the fog of this world, and transform it entirely by doing nothing at all.

And then, and then, and only then—you will finally, clearly, carefully and with compassion, write on the tombstone of a self that never even existed: There is only Ati.

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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 🕳🐇.

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2023 has been one of the most difficult and fruitful years of my life. I’ve learned about surrender experientially in life, love, spirit, play and work. I’ve traversed to the most painful and exiled parts of my psyche, as well as the most transcendent and beautiful realms of my heart. And in that lurching and slippery unfolding, I’ve learned to trust myself, for the first time, in a way that feels unconditional. In the past it often felt like I was struggling to ascend up a flipped over bowl, before sliding down ungracefully. Now the bowl has flipped over. I may sometimes clamor to get to the edge, but eventually, I fall back into a basin of truth and goodness that cocoons me. From this place, I may stray, but its essence is eternal, a tipping point into naturalness vs. effort. Following this naturalness has materialized in ways I couldn’t have predicted (capturing beauty, spaces for meaning-making, and creating them for others), all mirrors leading me back to myself as others as myself. The journey feels primordial yet fresh. Like I have ended, and I have also begun. Here are small curdles of insight, in no particular order, that I've accumulated along the way - some from guides, some from my own experience. I hope they spark something for you as well.

1. There are only 3 ways to be truly happy: expressing awareness through your art, helping others become more aware, resting and being in awareness. You can replace awareness with words like God, the universe, source, and love. 

2. Everything we do is an attempt to go back to wholeness, no matter how ignorant or abstracted the attempt. “Man is like an infinite spring coiled up in a small box, and that spring is trying to unfold itself. All struggles, individual or social, are the result of this attempt to unfold. When the struggle becomes a conscious effort, it is spiritual”. - Vivekananda

3. Waking up is the process of not just transcending the content, but transcending the mechanism itself. Content: the shoulds and conditioning of the ego. Mechanism: the movement towards the external for wholeness. 

4. All roads ultimately lead to the same place: Reality is one of ultimate unconditional boundless unwavering love. That is what you already are. The work is in seeing through the obstructions that cloud that truth. 

5. Get to a place where you feel all emotions fully, but they have no grab. “Tears that have no roots”, “A rainbow that is insubstantial & intangible, yet still occurs with vivid colors”. - Tibetan Buddhism

6. Every emotion has a powerful intelligence when you let them metabolize without turning away. Letting them show cleanly without suffering. “What often emerges is a cleaner emotion that is trying to protect you. From there you can take skillful action to cause the least amount of suffering.” - Diperna

7. We need people and the world. You can’t just ruminate by yourself, you have to experience things, see how the world reacts around you, how you react. To sit in the rawness of that and feel into its resonance with your soul and heart, not your mind. Are you going more towards goodness, love, expansion, and truth?

8. Wrap your exiled and protector parts in a warm blanket of compassion. 

9. When you feel like you’re losing control, stay with it for a few moments longer. You’ll see there is a groundless ground of awareness always there to catch you. 

10. Awareness feels like a primordial falling back into the time before no time.  

11. Recurring trauma / "getting triggered" is actually nature's attempt to heal itself. They are precious opportunities to rewire ingrained neural pathways: 1. go back to old traumas through our younger parts and give them love and acceptance instead of exiling them (i.e. IFS). 2. live out a trauma/pattern again and have the opposite of what happened back then happen now. 3. meditate & develop self-awareness to build space around the pattern or identity, instead of merging with it. 

12. Knowing conceptually requires effort. Knowing experientially requires surrender. 

13. You can still have a compassionate heart and set boundaries. You can deliver bad news even in connection. Ethical conduct is balancing your needs with the needs of others, as we have a tendency to either leave ourselves completely or go completely into others. 

14. What’s the point of duality? The universe is inherently playful and wants to cover and uncover itself in an infinite number of ways. An unending loop of no beginning and no end. There is no point. 

15. The point of life is to stay open. Your task isn’t to seek love but to remove the barriers by which you resist it. 

16. You must work hard and apply effort in the beginning. From there momentum is created. You then use that energy to dissolve the vehicle itself. “All hands point to the moon, but are not the moon”. 

17. “The Self isn’t going to awaken. It’s Awareness recognizing itself.” “what is enlightenment?”. “Enlightenment is whoever who is trying for enlightenment, he/she must disappear. That is enlightenment.”

18. The core of spirituality is to live from the heart. To carefully wield the knife of the mind, in order to make it a servant to the soul. To claw through acquired identities and should, and arrive back to the place that existed before time, when our heart was the most brilliant.  As Albert Einstein once said: “We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality. It cannot lead; it can only serve.”

19. You don’t need to take psychedelics to wake up, you need to be taking more risks where you put everything at stake. Where you die before you die. 

20. Perhaps the reason why you have a hard time saying “no” to others, is because you don’t have a strong enough “yes” to say to yourself. 

21. Our deepest want is to have no wants.  We think we want choice, but our hearts secretly desire for absolute surrender, unraveling towards a single direction. 

22. No matter what your religion, philosophy, or theory of truth is - are you happier and more equanimous because of it? are you more loving? In other words, is it working? That’s the bottom line. 

23. The point is not to destroy the ego. Understand the ego and how it forms, be aware of it, loosen its power when it comes from lower energy states, magnify its power when higher energy states illuminate it, let it be a tool to achieve Love's aims. Let life use life. 

24. “The self is just a self-organizing principle. A rubber band ball that feels solid but made of individual rubber bands and not solid.”

25. The Four Aims of Atisha: 1) Aim your mind at the Dharma. 2) Aim your Dharma practice at simple living. 3) Aim at simple living all your life. 4) At death be in solitude. 

26. Religions, philosophies, all kinds of value systems are solid maps. However, you ultimately need to validate their veracity through the feedback loop of your own subjective experience. What feels deeply good, beautiful, and true long-term - not short-term.  

27. Intention is more important than action. You can go through the motions of being virtuous, devotional, and altruistic but it is yourself that knows your deepest intention. You cannot run away from yourself. 

28. Change yourself, and you’ll change the world as a byproduct. Therefore, to benefit the world, it is necessary to change not the world but oneself, for what one becomes is influential by virtue of its essence (nonlinear) and not its action (limited and linear). 

29. People set out to change the world, but what they actually want is to be changed by the world. The sand castles we build ultimately serve as vehicles for self-purification and transcendence at best. Changing others and the world is a by-product beyond our control. 

30. If someone annoys or hurts you, just remember this: every human being in the world just wants to feel safe and happy, in the ways they know how. Our "hows" aren't necessarily the same person to person, but we all have the same base desires. How can meet each other there and not the ways in which our "hows" manifest? This process gets easier to the extent that we ourselves recognize how everything we do is a direct or indirect way to feel safe and happy. It gets easier when we forgive ourselves for previous misguided “hows” and let go of shame. The saying goes that you must love yourself to love others. But why wait when you can reverse engineer this? By loving and forgiving others unconditionally - you show yourself that you can love and forgive yourself too.

31. People often feel that meditation will cause them to "lose their edge". However, if early deficits in love are not met, all worldly work is actually work that is for social acceptance. The pool of energy fueling this is finite & often leads to burn-out. Alternatively, when you meditate for long enough - you tap into something beyond the ego. an endless source of love without external dependencies and always accessible. from this place, deeply aligned worldly work can then flow.

32. May we all evolve towards childlike suppleness massaged by the texture of time and life.

33. Are you writing the essay, or is it writing you? are you playing the cello, or is it playing you? are you painting the canvas, or is it painting you? are you building the product, or is it building you? align your sails to the universe, & let it pull you limply by the wrist. 

34. Heal yourself then raise the ceiling. Too much inner-work and past rumination can be counter-productive. Eventually you have to expose yourself to high stakes situations: falling in love, doing risky things, manifesting brighter futures. In this way you experientially teach your “parts/stories” to trust and surrender to your “Higher Self/ a new story”. 

35. For things like love and the things they pour into (career, another person, a child, a dream) there’s no going halfway. Because love is about blind faith. You have to just send it. There’s no consolation prize for going halfway. It will not happen. You have to fully go into it. 

36. You commit to someone. Not because there’s something less better out there. But because you want them, your history together, how you are together, and your future together. That is something that can never be duplicated anywhere else. 

37. We think it is the person who is love. Actually they help us open to love that already exists within us. 

38. True love in any friendship or relationship is guarding one another’s solitude and freedom in a world that wants to take. 

39. Overcoming our fear of death is about fully going into life.  

40. Are you living in a world of abstractions? Strawberry milk vs. strawberries? Don’t you want the real thing? Do you actually love truth? Or have you created an identity of a person who strives to seek truth? 

41. The real talent of ours is to not bullshit ourselves. 

42.  “I wish that life should not be cheap, but sacred. I wish the days to be centuries, loaded, fragrant.” - Emerson 

43. I am a lover of beauty. Beauty not in the sense of pleasurable sights, though that may be a byproduct. I’m talking about beauty that is accurate. That comes as close to what seems to be real. 

44. Donohue: “Where beauty is, I think, is — beauty isn’t all about just nice loveliness, like. Beauty is about more rounded, substantial becoming. And I think when we cross a new threshold, that if we cross worthily, what we do is we heal the patterns of repetition that were in us that had us caught somewhere. And in our crossing, then, we cross onto new ground where we just don’t repeat what we’ve been through in the last place we were. So I think beauty in that sense is about an emerging fullness, a greater sense of grace and elegance, a deeper sense of depth, and also a kind of homecoming for the enriched memory of your unfolding life.”

45. Art is the experience of what you’ve felt inside. 

46. The gradual and  slow build of something beautiful and substantial interests me more than suddenly giving into what feels convenient or pleasurable in one slice of a moment in time.

47. My happiest days are always when I spend time creating in the morning, using the mind to follow the heart through intellectual explorations, consuming beauty, and spending time adventuring and truth-seeking with friends. “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

48. I used to think about life as a narrative culminating along a plot line. Now I see it as: an artwork of unraveling self-expression, that lurches forward & back, a quilt of beautifully dynamic and disjointed human experiences, an opportunity to live as many lives as possible, an unfolding process of surrender to the core.

49. “The purpose of human life is not to win or lose, but to learn who you are. To look around and say what is this about, what can I learn from this, and why have I allowed it to come into my life? Everything without exception in the human world is an educational tool to recognize that in every given moment in your life you have not only the right  but the responsibility to perceive where there is fear and when there is love. And to choose love. Until you know your own holiness you cannot love another. What is the indicator that you are truly in love with who you are? Allowing your life to be what it is without force. The moment you recognize that you are worthy of the garden of eden, you are worthy. And so is everyone else. You cannot push people into the garden of eden from the outside. You can only open the gate and invite them. So you must get there first.” - unknown

50. The purpose of my life is to stay present and alive in every moment, and then do the best I can to transmute that realization into art and acts which can then illuminate the path of others back to themselves. “I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.” - Tagore

to 2024 and onwards.

with love,

Patricia Mou

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 🕳🐇.

Our deepest want is to have no wants. We think we want choice, but our hearts secretly desire for absolute surrender, unraveling upon a single axis.

As Annie Dillard puts it, “The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse… to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.”  

We deeply want to be integral; to live in unity of heart, mind, body, and feeling. But often we are split, especially between the mind and heart. Often, we don’t even hear the subtle proclivities of the heart. You see, the mind is a loud motherfucker. How shall I illustrate the difference? 

The heart is steady, quiet, & deep in its basin of effulgent all-knowing finitude. It is timeless and thus doesn’t have a past or future. It is now. Existing in a realm beyond mind-made attributes of space and time. The curdles of its essence brew in the deepest parts of our beingness, sometimes wafting to consciousness with enough silence. Its voice is calm, changeless, eternal. 

On the other hand, the mind is sharp and airy, unstable in its most untempered forms. We cut our hands upon its divisive blades and bleed. It festers with voices outside of us - past authority figures, peers, and imagined heroes. It feeds on shoulds & desires, binding onto future outcomes with a clenched fist. Its maps are construed from the past. And thus it projects its stagnant and self-limiting model into the future. 

The core of spirituality is to live from the heart. To carefully wield the knife of the mind, in order to make it a servant to the soul. To claw through acquired identities & shoulds, and arrive back to the place that existed before time, when our heart was the most brilliant. 

When we live splintered between the mind and heart, the dissonance transmutes into fuel that fans flames of inner turmoil. That is by design. As the pain engendered by disorder, nudges us to undertake the hard work of aligning our interiority. To make a decision from our values, at the expense of certainties and outcomes. 

Slowly, as these channels align and merge, their combined energies coalesce exponentially. A portal blasts through the scintillating heart. Unable to resist, we decimate our shoulds and subsume into its infinite void.

And that is why there is freedom in surrendering our options. In making a choice. Because as the optionalities of the mind cease, the possibilities and dreams of our heart are liberated. 

This essay is inspired by my annual planning for 2023. This year I erred away from indexing too much on concrete goals, but rather focused on my ideal state of being. An excerpt:

“I want to plug into the pulse of the divine undulations that create galaxies, and be pulled limply back to source.  To, as Henry James puts it, “carry within myself a great fund of life, feeling the continuity between the movements of my heart and the agitations of the world.” I want to widen the aperture and clear the lens to the point in which there is no obfuscation between myself and the world. I want to look straight into the eyes of another, beyond projections and stories, & waltz with their souls. So that I can see things as they are. So that I can flow and  respond to the environment clearly, ferally, without hesitation. So I can be free, in the truest sense of the concept.  Removing the filters of societal scripts and mimetic pulls - all abstracted means to feel ok, to feel whole. And realize that underneath all conditioning - I am already whole. And in that knowing, carefully, violently, splinter the intricately woven tapestries of my psyche. To fall back into the nectar of effulgent truth in which my heart bathes.”

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 🕳🐇.

Subscribe now

Support this publication by joining me down the rabbit hole🕳🐇

This is a crosspost from The Commons substack 🏛️

Hello lovely humans!

It’s been 6 months since we asked ourselves why there weren’t more “community living rooms” in SF. Especially ones founded upon values of open-ended curiosity, co-created play, & collective flourishing. A place to be “fully yourself” while exploring your intellectual, emotional, artistic, & spiritual curiosities, in an earnest, welcoming community.

Our answer to that was The Commons. Since opening our doors to the public in September, we’ve run over 90+ salons and events, built a budding 180+ member community, and have had thousands of neighbors come to the space to rest, reflect, & play.

Once things settled down a bit, we took a step back to reflect. Together with our member community, we imagined moonshots we could take to achieve our vision of being a second home for the earnest, curious, & agentic souls of SF.

Over and over again, the motif of a college commons room kept emerging as a north star. The site of 2am existential conversations, bouts of deep solo contemplation, and intimate encounters with familiar and new faces.

A place for intimate, reoccurring, and serendipitous connections built upon a foundation of default trust through shared curiosities, & values. That rare and magical combination of depth and serendipity, of liveliness and familiarity. 

And this is what we believe will set The Commons apart from other third spaces, co-working spots, or cafes. The ability to build connection between people through shared curiosities and values - as opposed to their demographic, vocation, socio-economic position, or simple desire to work in a second space. For us, the thread that unites every single member at the Commons is their deep earnestness, playful curiosity, abundant kindness, authentic agency, and positive sum mindsets.

With this in mind, we’re excited to announce our next big offering:

Campus 🏛️

Campus is at the core of what it means to be part of the Commons community.

A “school” for the soul, intellect, and inner-child.

Every quarter, the community creates the “curriculum” and participates in a rotating set of circles, salons, juntos and extracurriculars on dedicated nights at the space. Each “class” – or salon, junto, circle, or extracurricular – runs for multiple weeks and at the end of the quarter, we gather and celebrate our learnings at "nerd prom".

The special thing about Campus is in its design: by having multiple juntos, salons, circles, and playful extracurriculars at the space in a given evening - we create a nexus where continuity and intentionality simultaneously alchemize a high density of serendipitous interactions.

To help paint a clearer picture:

Imagine it’s Thursday and you just got off of work.

You head over to The Commons and are greeted with hot cocoa as you briefly chat with old and new friends on what’s been feeling the most alive in you.

Afterwards, you attend the 1st out of an 8-week salon on collective flourishing, followed by a mind-opening discussion on the latest abundance agenda in SF civics, journal for a bit with a writing circle, and finally end the night playing board games with new friends.

Meanwhile, another friend is around for a physics circle, founder circle, and open mic and you both peel off late into the night for an hour long conversation.

On Campus evenings, the whole space will be alive with activities and discussions you can go in-and-out of, akin to a bustling morning market, School of Athens, town square, or yes, college campus.

Our first Campus 🏛️ will be taking place starting mid-January 2023 and we are so pumped about the 50+ classes we have on the curriculum. Below is a small sampling of them:

As we bring this alive, we will be welcoming new members to the Commons family. If you want to join our first trimester of Campus, and haven’t filled out our application yet, we’re taking submissions for the next cohort of members up through Dec 21st! 

Until our next dispatch, we just want to end with a thank you – to all our members, donors, and supporters for the energy, enthusiasm, and contributions to a new community living room in SF.

With love,

Patricia & Adi

Support this publication by joining me down the rabbit hole🕳🐇

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Hi lovely humans,

I’m writing to you from a cabin in Portland at 6am. Mellow lofi morning radio plays and my coffee cup is full. In the words of Nietzsche, “Autumn is more the season of the soul than of nature.” After a frenetic season of doing, I look forward to the upcoming months of quiet, solitude, and reflection. To go looking for myself.

As those musings brew, I wanted to use today’s issue to share a few more pragmatic updates:

1. Quickly recount the journey leading up to the opening of The Commons / what’s next

2. Compilation of over 90+ third spaces you can check-out in sf, berkeley, oakland, nyc, and la.

enjoy & happy thanksgiving ♥️

yours,

Patricia

the journey.

april 2021: came across a book Rethinking Third Places and was mesmerized by this exert:

Life without community has produced, for many, a life style consisting mainly of a home-to-work-and-back-again-shuttle. Social well-being and psychological health depend upon community.

One conceptual place where community building occurs is the third place. In a time of rapid urbanisation, with a UN projection that 75% of the population will be living in cities by 2050, there is a critical need to revisit third place as a possible contribution to easing increasing levels of anxiety and loneliness and thereby contributing to the health and well-being of individuals and communities.

may-june 2021: spawned from the book, I decided to do a deep dive investigation into third spaces and wrote about them in a 3-part essay series below:

• pt 1: the definition of third spaces today and in the past.

• pt 2: what led to the loss of third spaces in America today.

• pt 3: third spaces of the future

oct 2021: start a (short-lived) blog with friends reviewing third spaces in nyc

may 2022: meet fellow third space nerd, Adi Melamed, and co-found a third space together in San Francisco called The Commons

• essay on why i’m building The Commons

Play by play 👇

september 2022: The Commons officially opens to the public

• before and after pics of the space

🔮 january 2023: announcing a strategic shift for The Commons 🏛 Here’s a teaser:

What differs The Commons from other third spaces (WeWork, cafes, etc.) is its ability to build trust and connection between people through their curiosities, passions, and values.

Some of the most inordinate amounts of social, technological, & personal progress were alchemized through the opportune combination of values-aligned humans, and the spaces that housed them.

College was an exemplary crucible for intimate, reoccurring, and serendipitous connections built upon a foundation of default trust through institutional affliction and shared context. The culmination of these informal and formal interactions ultimately lead to meaningful, deep, or transformational experiences. Our next shift will focus on returning all the best parts of the collegiate experience to adulthood.

masterlist of third spaces.

🌉 san francisco

📍Arcana - a bar x plant shop in the mission that hosts a line-up of local musicians.

📍Page Street Writers - a 24/7 co-working space for writers. The space also hosts writing jams, pubilc readings, and classes to hone your craft.

📍SF Zen Center - it's like you're stepping into another world, right in the heart of the city. I've been occasionally going to free drop-in meditation every tue (20 min followed by a dharma talk) & meeting lots of people serendipitously

📍Black Bird Bookstore and Café - with local crafts store & a beautiful backyard terrace for reading. the spaces hosts poetry slams, reading clubs, & craft nights.

📍Red Poppy Art House - "an intercultural and multidisciplinary “space of encounter,” a hub where multiple social-cultural groups could interconnect to experience one another and therefore potentiate one another’s endeavors while weaving a more solid and tolerant social fabric."

📍The Mellow - a plant shop, coffee bar, events venue, and workshops on floral design and wreath making.

📍Archimedes Banya - a co-ed Russian bathhouse with a "mission bring the ancient culture and the health benefits of community bathing activities to the level of Hi-Tech era, as a single alternative to working out in gyms and socializing in bars."

📍The Center - A magical tea house, yoga studio, event space, and conscious community in the heart of San Francisco. The space is run by a community of "healing arts" residents in the co-living space above.

📍Noisebridge - a community run hackerspace. "Meet techie, arty, and crafty folks, take a class, teach a class, use the power tools and electronic labs, build something out of stuff on the hack shelves, use our library, surf the web, and so on."

📍The Interval - bar, cafe, museum, and the home of The Long Now Foundation. The venue has an "Atlas Shrugged" aesthetic and hosts a plethora of salon talks with a futuristic and philosophical bend.

📍Manny's - a non-profit restaurant x political bookshop x civic events and gathering space. The space was created for the public to meet & engage with civic leaders, artists, activists, changemakers, & each other.

📍The Commons - (biased here :p) A community and 3rd space dedicated to open-ended curiosity, co-created play, & collective flourishing. Ft communal library x study space x cafe x events space, we explore curiosities through discussion, art, spirituality, and tech.

📍Public Works - community-minded night club & event space dedicated to "giving the people what they want". Home to intl djs, underground artists, and myriad of arts & music communities.

📍Randall Museum - this free museum is owned by SF Parks & Recs Department. You can pop in for coffee, take in the panoramic views, and say hi to 100 animals. It has a wood shop, craft shop and science facilities that host low cost classes for youth and adults.

📍Noe Valley Town Square - 3rd space funded by neighborhood residents. Always filled w/ elderly people, caregivers w/small children, and WFH workers grabbing lunch. Farmer's market & concerts fill the space and is also used by orgs like the local Democrat club to host meetings.

📍Car-Free Valencia Street - recently returning from a 2-month hiatus. The blocks of Valencia St. from 16th to 17th streets, and between 18th and 21st streets are closed so locals can enjoy artwork, music and outdoor dining along a four-block stretch.

📍Patricia's Green - One plaza contains a children's play area, while the others offer open space, benches, and rotating public art. It is the gathering place for art fairs, outdoor movies, concerts, & community org meetings.

📍Adobe Books - "The Living Room of the Mission" was founded in 198 and a bohemian nexus for a large and rotating cast of artists, musicians, writers, readers, thinker. Today it is a gallery x independent bookstore x event space for book readings, poetry slams, & music.

📍 @theacademy_sf - a LGBTQ+ social club open to all. In addition to the social club and its associated programming, The Academy also offers a barber salon, a daytime co-working lounge called Academy Daylight, and has space available to rent for private events.

🍎 new york city.

📍Land to Sea - a brooklyn multi-use creative space & coffee shop with the goal to uplift and support local creators of color

📍Head Hi - a bookshop espresso bar dedicated to art, design, publications and coffee located in Fort Greene. It's a space for exploration and interaction that hosts talks, book launches, art shows, music performances and other events.

📍BATHHOUSE - a Williamsburg spa that has both a private relaxing component alongside public spaces to catch-up with old and new friends. “The spa is often an isolated experience,” says the founder, “but bathhouses are bustling, fun, engaging places.”

📍Usagi - Calm, Japanese-inspired cafe & exhibition space featuring an art gallery, bookstore & coffee bar. It offers the optimal environment for cross-disciplinary creativity and inspiration by integrating dining, art, and retail.

📍Brooklyn Art Library - home to the world's largest collection of artist's sketchbooks - it's an archive, library, and center for creative inspiration through the plethora of art workshops it hosts.

📍Drama Book Shop - Since 1917, The Drama Book Shop has been a mainstay of the New York theatre scene and a cultural institution for theatrical works. The space hosts in-store scene readings, writing classes, and book talks.

📍Hotel lobbies are great accidental third spaces. Some beautiful ones include The Ludlow Hotel, Bowery Hotel, Public Hotel, & Ace Hotel.

📍The Uncommons - Manhattan's first board game cafe with a vast board game library (the largest on the east coast!), WiFi, coffee & a seasonal menu of sandwiches & light eats.

📍Happy Medium - a 3rd space for casual artists. "There's a lot of stuff out there for kids and capital "A" Artists, but there isn't much for those that fall somewhere in between. We are on a mission to fill the gap."

📍Pioneer Works - a non-profit cultural center in Red Hook, New York City. The center builds community through the arts and sciences to create an open and inspired world. It has 3 floors of interconnected studio, performance, exhibition, and multipurpose spaces.

📍Bookstores are usual suspects for great 3rd spaces as well. Some notable ones in NYC are Unnameable Books, Housing Works Bookstore, Mercer Street Books, Codex Books, & Strand Bookstore.

📍Coffee shops that have a notable "3rd space vibe" are Ground Central Coffee (We are a community of dreamers, students, artists, book lovers, musicians ) and Devocion in Williamsburg.

📍Rock climbing gyms Brooklyn Boulders, The Cliffs, and Vital also have a "3rd spacey vibe". Vital in particular is beautifully situated overlooking the NYC skyline, houses a cafe/restaurant onsite, and consistently blasting popular 90s tracks.

📍Private clubs are not by definition "public 3rd spaces" but may sometimes host public events and are a gravity center to pull like-minded individuals together to collab and mingle. Eg @EmpireDao (web3), @sohohouse (creatives), @vercisocial (gen-z), @contrarycapital (tech)

📍Book Club - an independent bookstore and wine bar in the East Village of NYC, serving coffee, beer, and wine in a cozy community space.

📍Cellar Dog - 9,000-sq-ft live music and game hall. Games include pool tables, ping pong, shuffleboard, foosball, checkers and chess, as well as antique and novelty arcade games including Pac Man and many more.

📍The Hungarian Pastry Shop - on Manhattan’s Upper West Side has fed generations of authors and students. The coffee shop’s wall of book covers commemorates works written by its customers, some at the cafe’s own tables.

📍Elevated public spaces - The Elevated Acre is a one-acre meadow flanked by delightfully designed gardens and plantings elevated above the city streets. The Highline and Little Island nearby is another well-known elevated piece of public-use land.

📍The OG's of NYC public 3rd spaces include Washington Square Park, New York Public Library, Bryant Park, The Met, Prospect Park, and Central Park.

📍 @somewheregood - A Black & Queer-owned community space in Bedstuy. "It's a free space designed for to connect with yourself & local community through play, rest, joy and conversation."

📍 Molasses Books - a bookstore cafe/bar, open until 12am, 7 days a week.

📍 Cafe x Flower stores: Rosecrans & Remi.

📍 MIKA in bushwick is a sake brewery and coffee shop with a lots of space for working or hanging out.

🌿 berkeley · oakland third spaces

📍Hidden Cafe - overlooking a small park, the cafe supports local artists & culinary artisans.

📍 @BerkeleyAlembic - third space that hosts workshops & events in meditation, neuroscience, psychedelic integration, movement, & creativity.

📍Albany Bulb - home to a vast array of urban art including mural, stencil, graffiti, sculpture, and installation art. It's also home to 150 species of birds, huge trees, wildflowers, amazing views, and lots of walking trails.

📍Temescal Alley in Oakland - "Also known as hipster alley for the unusual number of pre-prohibition mustaches and fedoras, and, no kidding, an apothecary, and, wait for it, a vintage propane-powered lever machine for coffee at Cro Cafe"

📍World Folk Jam - monthly festival of folk arts in a Berkeley hills mansion. Honoring ancient traditions via music, movement, art, theater, & spoken word. Each floor of the mansion features everything from qi gong to tea pourings, salsa dancing to fortune telling.

📍4th Street in Berkeley - cozy street where I spent a majority of my time studying for SATs in its myriad of coffee shops 😆 my favs include the pottery barn outlet, CB2, & Artis Coffee. The lights during the holidays on this street are particularly charming and cozy.

📍Indian Rock & Grizzly Peak, Berkeley - the place for a lot of 1sts and existential life pondering in middle/high school :)

📍 @berkeleycityclb - (not a public space) the Berkeley City Club is a private social club, historic hotel, event venue and fine dining restaurant in the heart of Berkeley, by architect Julia Morgan.

📍myriad of buddhist/hindu/thai temples with free service / food and a culture of inclusitivity eg. Berkeley Buddhist Temple, Wat Mongkolratanaram, ISKCON Berkeley, etc.

📍Lake Merritt, Oakland - large lake dotted with public art installations, gardens, a fairy land, rec activities, bird watching, communal jogs, and live music.

📍Crescent Lawn @ UC Berkeley - lawn at the heart of campus for picnics, yoga, reading, communing with friends. Also check out Doe Library and the adjacent reading room for hogwarts vibes :)

📍Telegraph Ave, Berkeley - probably the most "berkeley" place you can go. Known for being the heart of the counter-culture movement in the 60s. Lots of thrift shops, streetwear, record stores, apothecary, bookstores, & street food.

📍The Claremont Club, Oakland - (not public) "The Local's Resort" is on 22 acres and was built in 1915. The club features spas, charity projects, social events, dining, tennis courts, childcare, sound baths, yoga, & swimming.

📍Farley's - Established in 1989 the coffee shop prides itself in being the hub of the Oakland/SF community. "From magazines, to board games to cornhole in the street, Farley's is much more than just a place to grab your morning cup, it is a place to connect"

📍Climbing Gyms: pacific pipe, berkeley ironworks, great western, touchstone climb!

📍Pacific East Mall (99 Ranch), Richmond - a 3rd space for the asian-american community ft karaoke, boba, massage, bookstore, restaurants, etc.. Spent a lot of time frolicking with friends in the parking lot here.

📍Jack London Square - Oakland’s only publicly accessible mixed-use waterfront and marina area ft outdoor movies, farmers markets, coffee shops live music & dining. Check out The Fat Lady, Yoshi's, & Timeless Coffee.

📍Music & Theater Venues: Greek Theater, Joaquin Miller Community Center, Grand Lake Theater, Landmark's Piedmont Theatre, amongst my favorite!

📍Caffe Strada - Lots of studying done here back in the day. Right next to UC Berkeley and is filled with students, professors, and locals ☕ great melting pot for serendipitous interactions

📍Brooklyn Basin - on 65 acres of formerly inaccessible industrial land, the new community hub features open-air parks, artist residences, local shops/eateries, and "Township Commons" - a space for live music and community events.

📍Blue Willow Teaspot - A 1-women labor of love - every year, Ali travels to Asia to meet with tea farmers and search for exciting new teas to bring home and share. Get their tea flight and cuddle with a book in their relaxing lounge 🍵

☕ los angeles third spaces

📍Village Well Books - a bookstore-café that explores social causes. Currently, they're focused on the criminal justice system reform as it disportionately targets people of color.

📍Navel - a "test Site for kinship" via co-created experimental spaces, performances, & resources for LA artists & cultural workers.

📍Tea at Shiloh - a late night teahouse + community. A peaceful space to connect with yourself and others through tea + conversation, music, and creative + contemplative events.

📍 Wi Spa - a 24-hour korean-style spa. They have a communal Women’s floor, Men’s floor, co-ed Family-Friendly jimjilbapng, and rooftop terrace - for many folks to overlap and meet.

📍The Beehive - is the nation’s first campus for Opportunity Zone Businesses. 92K sq ft of commercial space ft the first Black-owned craft brewery in California, art gallery for South LA emerging creatives, and a state-of-the-art Technology and Entrepreneurship Center.

📍Volunteer run bike co-ops - Bicycle Kitchen on Fountain & Bikerowave on Venice. Get an affordable used bike or hang out and learn how to fix anything. Nobody turned away for lack of funds.

📍LA Farmers' Markets - Nearly every neighborhood has one. Santa Monica Wednesday, Mar Vista Sunday, Hollywood Famer's market, Farmer’s Market at Third and Fairfax, etc.

📍First floor at The Proper hotel in Santa Monica - so beautifully designed!

📍Coffee shops as the usual suspects: Verve Coffee in Arts District

📍Sightglass in WeHo

📍Coffee MCO in Ktown (open late)

📍 @reparationsclub - a concept bookshop + creative space that is black-owned and women-owned. It's a space that transforms into whatever the community needs it to be - from protest organizing to new moon circles, to just a chill place for the community to hang out.

I’ll be continuously adding third spaces as I discover them in the following threads for each city:

• san francisco

• new york city

• los angeles

• berkeley / oakland

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 🕳🐇.

every morning at 8am, I wake up and meditate in silence. a generous scenario I share when asked about my morning routine. in truth, I go to war.  

within 10 seconds of waking, my prefrontal cortex abruptly “enters the chat”.  with self-possessed acuity, it spins its rolodex of judgments while assembling a myspace top 8 of my most pressing concerns. the endless stream of desires and to-dos comes next. I watch as they strut onto the waking stage of my minds’ eye, yelling into the void like a madman searching for the point.

I might be a mindfulness sadist, because I flame this thought symphony by reaching for my phone and opening the email app, skimming its emoji-filled subject lines. those of which I refuse to open, with whatever dignity I retain. and yet, with glee, I edge the slippery slope of self-constraint, peering over its precipice. like some kind of consciousness airbender, I eventually transmute the crescendoing wave of self-contempt into embodied kinetic motion. with a sigh of absolution, I heave my body away from the siren calls of my all-engulfing down goose comforter.

It is 8:05am. 

after staring blankly at my feet for a bit, I make my way to the altar of redemption: the coffee machine. it is there I repent and stem the spiraling spools of thought with the groundedness of a 10-step latte ritual. as the hot pungent liquid coats my insides, I can indeed confirm that yes, I have a body. that I am not just some pulsating energy cloud of thoughts and abstractions.

driving home this point, I plop my bottom onto the meditation cushion with a bit of extra gusto. aside from the cushion, it's an intentionally empty room. a complete inversion of my mental landscape from just moments before. pleased with my (lack thereof) interior design, I briefly meditate on McLuhan’s “we shape our spaces, then they shape us” adage, before recognizing that this too can become a binding desire. okay, time to start practice, partner.  

eyes closed, the burning sensation of hot ceramic activates millions of nerve endings on my hands. the somatic-neural pathways must have crossed haphazardly, because Nelly’s “hot in here” begins looping and I am transported to that one time I awkwardly twerked inside a ring of sweaty 16-yr olds at prom. poignant and riveting. so this is the kind of stuff stored in my core memory bank… bank. bank.

must channel the disposition of Buddha beneath a fig tree along the ganges river bank… awareness enters my body again, relinquished from a long voyage across space and time. suddenly I'm conscious of the unraveling narrative, the staccato of words, how they turn into fumbling sounds, and then just a cacophony of pulsating energy. as forms and sensations arise amorphously from an infinite plane. traversing from thinker to experiencer. a seam effacing onto itself, into a vast purified space... space. space. 

I circle back to my (lack of) interior design decision and decide I actually do need a nice space to meditate in, so I can become one with the universe like this all the time. that wiggly coffee table I saw on the Apartment Therapy blog is the material manifestation of my soul at its highest vibration. but why does it cost $700 for a piece of curvy wood on pegs? I could totally make this on my own. is my actual calling to sell artisanal wood furniture? how do I know what my life calling is anyways? what is a life calling? what is the nature of “I” who determines that? and why do I yearn for certainty, when self-concepts around meaning are never static - but rather patterns congregating for a while, then shifting year to year, month over month, moment to moment. if i press my existence into reality, can I navigate it truthfully? surrendering into the pushes and pulls, constantly in motion. unhooking myself from static concepts and non-negotiable ideals to plug straight into reality’s pulse… pulse. pulse. 

yes, I still have a pulse. blood pulsing into a brain reeling in its analysis. to think, is not to embody. to experience each lurch of the heart in high definition. to revel in the tingly static of blood coursing through hundreds of veins at once. to feel energy congealing and dissolving at the very core of my neck. to spill into the room, through translucent skin. to breathe into the hollowness of my thigh. inhale, gathering my senses. exhale, softening into what arises. concepts and language falling away -  tailwinds quicken, pulses harmonize, channels merge. 

With a resounding gong, 9am arrives.   

I put down my cold coffee cup, stretch my legs, and begin my day.

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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 🕳🐇.

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Hi dear readers,

Long time no talk :) I recently moved from NYC back to the Bay Area, and am currently staying at the Genesis House.

In the last 2 weeks I went from just living with 1 other person to 15+. In the multiplying of minds, the edges of my reality and imagination have been stretched accordingly. During the crevices of leisure that fill each day, spontaneous conversations pull me into new worlds; artificial wombs, books that write themselves, preserving human souls. The vibes are immaculate. My soul and mind feel nourished. And lately, I’ve been reflecting on why that is.

Part of it is because i’m making good on my goal this year to not surround myself with people who are smarter, but rather people who are free in ways that i’m not. People who are operating off of completely different scripts. In other words, I want to expand the map vs. find the local maxima of its current territory.

Another reason is good vibes. For me that means on a net basis, I feel positive and energized after an interaction vs. drained.

Today’s essay is my rabbit hole on what ~*vibes*~ actually entail.

What are vibes? What do we mean when we say “the vibes are off”? There’s something deeper here beyond just a catchy phrase.

I’ve recently been reflecting about communities i’ve been a part of. Which communities and people within these communities gave me energy? Made me feel good? Why do some stay for multiple chapters vs. just a page?

At an earlier point in time, I used to think I was intuitively drawn to people who had “gone through some shit”. There’s a certain kind of thoughtfulness and spiritually that arises when the ego is annihilated and a life is rebuilt amidst the ashes.

But then I realized that couldn’t be it. Some people rebuild their lives from a foundation of fear. Closing themselves in protection and externalizing blame. Others transcend their victim mindset and move into authorship of a more humble and love-imbued narrative. An even subtler set use their adversity to bolster the ego - whether that’s through hate against their perpetrators or savior complex towards future victims.

Basically, when people encounter difficulty, they can either choose to fall or ascend in levels of consciousness. And so I realized that I am naturally drawn to people who have both grappled with their demons and chosen humility and love in the process. When the vibes are “just right”, it’s led by that mix-shift of energy.

Which led me to this epiphany: vibes are just energy in motion.

When I use words like love and hate, what I really mean is more like attract and repel in the energetic sense. No-flow places and ego-bound people repel me, as do ego-saturated places where the greed and vanity of the people seem to permeate the air.

Whatever doesn’t repel me is either neutral or attracts me. This is true of everyone, but most people drown it out. It’s much subtler than love and hate; it’s at the level of energy, and when your energy is distorted, you’re distorted.

Jed McKenna

So what people really mean by “vibes”, is energy. Energy permeates everything in life - from the microcosm of an everyday interaction to the abstraction of a nation. Its ambient nature falls below our conscious awareness. It is intuited through the channel of the gut as opposed to the mind.

Good energy or vibes attracts what’s in its likeness, and repels what pulls it downwards. Negative energy also attracts what’s in its likeness, yet repels what pulls it upwards.

Because energy doesn’t exist concretely in the realm of language and physical form, you could go an entire lifetime without understanding how its manifestations play into seemingly self-driven decisions. Until now.

In 2020, Dr. David Hawkin’s published the book, The Map of Consciousness Explained. He was a psychiatrist, physician, and consciousness researcher in the 70’s. Towards the ends of his life, he dedicated himself to the pursuit of integrating his own sudden transformations of consciousness into “scientific” discovery, in a format that was understandable to the left brain of Western readers.

The Map of Consciousness, in brief, lays out the whole spectrum of consciousness:

• from the “lower” levels of Shame, Guilt, Apathy, Grief, Fear, Desire, Anger, Pride (that is, levels of force dominated by egotistical drives)

• to the median levels of Courage, Willingness, Acceptance, Reason (that is, levels of power dominated by personal integrity)

• to the more expanded levels of Love, Unconditional Love/Joy/Healing, Ecstasy, Peace, and Enlightenment. These “higher” energy fields are a carrier wave of immense life energy.

Here’s another version of the map based on a logarithmic scale. For example, “the energy of Mother Teresa (cal. 710) was very different from that of Adolf Hitler (cal. 40), and most people calibrate somewhere between them”.

And another view for those who like shapes:

Hawkins’ work resonates with common sense. Negativity drains, positivity uplifts. Positive energy fields (Courage, Willingness, Acceptance, Reason, Love) are more powerful than negative ones (Shame, Apathy, Fear, Anger, Pride) because they are aligned with the energy of life itself.

Love heals; Fear constricts. Courage moves us forward; Grief holds us back.

Living things all react positively to what is life-supportive and negatively to what is life-threatening; this is the fundamental mechanism of survival. Inherent in all life-forms is the capacity to detect change and react correctively—thus, trees become smaller at higher elevations as the oxygen in the atmosphere becomes scarcer.

Human protoplasm is far more sensitive than that of a tree. If you use your body as a pendulum, you will notice that you automatically fall forward when holding in mind a truth, and you fall backward when holding in mind a non-truth.

If we were to re-brand Hawkins’ map today, it would be a “vibe” map. And if we look back in time, we can see that similar maps have been suggested by philosophers, sages, and mystics throughout the centuries.

Fom Christian tradition there is The Ladder of Divine Ascent, by Eastern Orthodox desert monk John Climacus (c. 579–649) of Mount Sinai, in Egypt, and the Interior Castle (The Mansions), by Catholic mystic St. Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582 A.D.), in Spain.

In Buddhist tradition, the 10 ox-herding pictures showing the steps on the path of awakening from ignorance to Enlightenment have been a staple teaching tool since their origin in 12th-century China.

Though I question the “science” behind his numerical calibrations at each threshold of consciousness, I do believe the map helps us make the intangible a little bit more known. It also reaffirms what we intuitively already know.

If we understand the topography of the land better, we can identify our current positioning and route to higher grounds to alleviate our suffering.

The consciousness level denotes a locus on a learning curve and a stage of the evolution of consciousness. The joy of life comes from fulfilling one’s potentiality at any given level.

Each level has its rewards, and they actually feel the same to each person. A life dedicated to a higher purpose is endlessly self-fulfilling—whereas, in contrast, a life devoted to personal gain is full of pitfalls and suffering.

Or, put in other words for you tech nerds:

The individual human mind is like a computer terminal connected to a giant database. The database is human consciousness itself, of which our own consciousness is merely an individual expression but with its roots in the common consciousness of all humankind.

The database transcends time, space, and all limitations of individual consciousness. This database is the realm of genius; because to be human is to participate in the database, everyone, by virtue of their birth, has access to genius.

The unlimited information contained in the database has now been shown to be readily available to anyone in a few seconds, at any time and in any place. This is indeed an astonishing discovery, bearing the power to change lives, both individually and collectively, to a degree never yet anticipated.

According to Hawkins, the fastest way to plug into this genius or move from the bottom to the top of the map is by aligning with truth and love. We change the world not by what we say or do but as a consequence of what we have become. Even the tiniest increase in our own consciousness benefits the world at large. And that is echo’d by all the great teachers throughout the history of our species.

All have said, simply: Give up weak attractors for strong attractors.

Just as physical things you eat sustain your body, the environment, content, and people around us dictate our energy:

• News, articles, books, TV

• Internet content (why I created Rabbit Holes 🕳️ 🐇)

• Conversations

• Communities - built and virtual

• Cities we live in

• Daily rituals and activities

Throughout all the energetic corridors of life, we must make sure to always ask ourselves: does this increase or decrease my energy?

In other words, conduct a vibe check, always.

Yours,

Patricia

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

I’m Patricia and have a full-time job but curate this newsletter in my free time as a labor of love.

This newsletter is free because I believe everyone deserves to have access to wellness resources. If you want to support this publication, join me down the rabbit hole 🕳🐇.

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Hello readers!

As I was doing my new year reflections I wanted to put together a list of advice and reflections I would give to past me, a dear friend, or a future child. I hope they’re not interpreted as instructive, but rather as humble morsels of insight I’ve gathered from personal experience. Without further ado here are 30 pieces of unsolicited advice:

1. “Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are.” Are your thoughts and actions coming from a place of fear and contraction? Or a place of release and love? My best decisions in retrospect have always come from the latter. 

2. “The partial becomes complete; the crooked, straight; the empty, full; the worn out, new. He whose (desires) are few gets them; he who’s (desires) are many goes astray. “ In Chinese philosophy, the concept of Wu Wei is about “trying not to try”. It is the practice of taking no action that is not in accord with the natural course of the universe. When I go with what is vs what should, the outcome is always favorable. 

3. “Character – the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life – is the source from which self-respect springs.” - Joan Didion’s phenomenal essay on Self-Respect. I don’t think I truly became an adult until I swallowed and embodied this often “hard to swallow” pill. Taking responsibility for your life doesn’t mean resigning to the shitty things that have happened to you in the past. It means accepting their occurrence and taking responsibility of your perception of them. It’s about choosing to rub the piece of coal roughly and at all angles, until it becomes a small sparkling morsel of wisdom that you can bring into your present and future selves. The Chinese symbol for crisis (危机) is comprised of two characters: one indicating “danger,” the other, “opportunity".  Take responsiblly for making everything into an opportunity.

4. Self-esteem is really just the by-product of picking yourself up from the ground over and over again. I’m pretty sure natural-born confidence is a farce and arrogance is a house of cards. The mere act of trying to be something, means that you are not that thing. Self-esteem, on the other hand, is quiet, enduring, and needs no introduction. It is the byproduct of staring failure and self-pity straight in the face and choosing to keep going. Overtime it calcifies into resilience. As a friend once told me, “be more loyal to your dreams than to your fears.” 

5. Remind yourself that it is a privilege to simply be alive. Start your mornings by internalizing this quote: “When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive - to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.” - Marcus Aurelius. Like John Kabat-Zinn once said, as long as you are breathing, there is more right with you than wrong. And do not fret about growing older. The only difference between you and someone young, is that you have been young for longer. 

6. The soft can overcome the tough. In life there are frustrations, injustices, setback and failures. Do you meet these challenges with hardness and an unyielding attitude? Or are you soft, flexible, and yielding? The former cracks like broken jade, while the latter survives intact. “Like water, which can wear away the harder of stones, when you are flexible, patient, and open to alternatives, you can weather even the most difficult challenges.” Be like water, my friends. 

7. Doing and being are not in conflict, if you let go of the outcome. In my monk vs. capitalist post, I wrote about the concept of Karma Yoga. Karma means “action,” and Karma Yoga is performing action without attachment to the outcome. It’s a way to be in the world, without being of the world. To dutifully do your work, whilst attaining self-liberation from the ego concurrently. Do the good work, but disregard the outcome. 

8. Which leads me to the realization: the journey is the point. Cliche but true. I realized I could spend my entire life taking shots at my life mission, without any fruit, and still be happy. The point is to live a life where everyday is an expression of my authentic self. That’s the point. If I follow this philosophy, the results take care of themself. If they don’t, oh well - I’m happy living authentically anyways. 

9. When you’re in a mental rut ask yourself: Is it true? Is it actually true? How do I react when I believe that thought? Who would I be without that thought? Turn it around. What if that thought came true? Find 3 reasons life would be better if it came true. These questions are c/o of Byron Katie. 

10. Find your why. "He who knows his why can bear any hows” - Friedrich Nietzsche. I recently was able to better articulate my life’s mission and it’s been the piercing beam of clarity for what types of projects, people, and places I chose to present to. “How do I help people create a space between stimulus and response. Between thought and action. A space to nurture reflection and access ones authentic self, in order to go back out into the world to share ones gifts. Where those gifts come from a place of love and deep self-understanding vs. fear and fulfilling others’/society’s expectations. The space can take place over a couple days of meditative retreat, or over thousands of instantaneous moments that drives ones decisions everyday. How do I help people cultivate this space?”

11. Amor fati means "love of fate" or "love of one's fate". It is an attitude in which one sees everything that happens in one's life, including suffering and loss, as good or, at the very least, necessary. The culmination of your life’s experiences has always happened for you, not to you. Take heart that you are exactly where you need to be at this particular moment. 

12. The sum of people and ideas around you raise the ceiling of your self-belief. I’ve noticed that the most underrated and not talked about force that drives “successful” people is self-belief. The belief that you are not just deserving of higher goals, but capable of getting there. Ivy League institutions, prestigious fellowships, etc. are just manufacturers and self-fulfilling prophecies of self-belief. “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us.” Surrounding yourself with people and ideas that project a higher ceiling of self-belief than your current threshold, raises it through osmosis. You see that these people are self-doubting and flawed just like you, yet believe in themselves. You can too. 

13. Another note on who to surround yourself with via ribbon farm: Don’t surround yourself with smarter people. Surround yourself with people who are free in ways you’re not. People who are playing just a slightly different game than you are - awakening you from any finite game you might be already asleep in.

14. Embrace silence and solitude. (Especially in the mornings when you can do your deepest work!) When I was in my early 20s I craved going out and hearing what other people thought. Now I look forward to an entire weekend at home where I can hear myself think.  “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

15. Happiness is the automatic by-product of progression in consciousness. The endless pursuits for happiness external to yourself like possessions, approval, awards, and degrees never bring lasting happiness. When the mind is agitated, we experience sorrow. When the mind is tranquil, joy arises. Happiness is therefore, measured by the tranquility of one's own mind.

16. See relationships as wonderful assignments to help improve your level of consciousness.  "If I accept the fact that my relationships are here to make me conscious, instead of happy, then my relationships become a wonderful self mastery tool that keeps realigning me with my higher purpose for living." - Eckhart Tolle

17. “It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great (wo)man is s/he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” - Emerson. It is easy to meditate in a cave for all of eternity. It is much more difficult to maintain a rooted and peaceful mind amidst the whirlwind of society and daily vicissitudes. This year I was able to establish a (mostly) daily meditation practice, but when a string of challenges came up towards the end of the year - my mindful countenance flew out the window in a second. Luckily, my meditation practice enabled me to stabilize much quicker than before. But in this flurry of stress, I realized the point of mindfulness is for it to be constantly tested. Like muscle-building, it needs to undergo strain, tear, and repair. Remember that we take care of our mental and physical selves in order to prepare them for battle, the ultimate strength-building practice.

18. Do not turn away from the pain. When we have a unpleasant thought, it often leads to unpleasant emotions and sensations. When this happens, we tend to withdraw or avoid the discomfort. Either through switching to happier thoughts, or doing an action that can provide relief. This may ofter short-term relief, but in the long-term it reinforces the “badness” of the thought subconsciously and reduces confidence in one's coping ability. Instead of turning away from the pain, stay with it. Breathe into it and drop into where it shows up in the body. Only through metabolizing distressing thought loops, can we let trauma soften and dissipate over time. The only way out is through. Human strength isn't found in powerful miracles but in the quiet mind of one who faces situations as they are.

19. Live in day-tight compartments. “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” - Annie Dillard. In order to practically extrapolate being present into my life, I’ve strived to live one day at a time. Instead of constantly living in the realm of future goals and possibilities, I try to bring my mind back to this question: What can make today great? Today you can control. Today you can take action towards your values. Habits, of course, are a big part of book-ending days and setting yourself up for success for the meat in the middle. If I tend to my morning and evening routines the day often takes care of itself. I.e. Good sleep, a mindful practice, moving your body, nourishing it with healthy food, consuming high quality content + conversation, expressing gratitude,  and processing thoughts through journaling - all enable me to live the best day possible. 

20. The only standard you should compare yourself to, is who you were yesterday.  In striving to achieve your goals, do your best according to your own capacity. And take solace that you are on your own divine timing. As D.H. Lawrence puts it: "Some people have a lot farther to go from where they begin to get where they want to be—a long way up the mountain, and that is how it has been for me. I don’t feel I am getting older; I feel I am getting closer.”

21. It is better to be alone than to be living life at half throttle. Don’t settle. 

22. “Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought.” - Basho. Especially as organized religion is in decline, there’s lots of vulnerable souls eager to be handed meaning and an instruction manual to get there. This manifests through the rise of celebrity fandom, “cult” brands, online communities, spiritual gurus, and even crypto mania. You can now buy self-realization through meditation retreats, sound baths, and chakra crystals. People are eager to be handed a sense of meaning, without doing the hard work of self-realization and first principles questioning. These surrogates of meaning are all illuminating in that they reflect a core need for spirituality we have. Furthermore, teachers may guide us towards Truth, but they themselves are not Truth. “The great path has no gates, thousands of roads enter it. When you pass through this gateless gate you walk the universe alone.” - Mumon. Think for yourself, always. Truth has a way of recognizing the soul, regardless of its delivery medium. I wrote a bit about my unraveling journey towards finding Truth in this poem. 

23. Keep your ego in check. Knowledge can be weaponized to make the ego feel intellectually superior. Entrepreneurship can be weaponized for the ego to feel it has control in the world. Being “self-actualized” can be weaponized as being spiritually superior than others. Check your ego regularly. 

24. To mitigate suffering, understand what your values are, and then live towards them. In my post Why we Suffer, I wrote that values are splint into 2: ‘Personal value’ - what I expect from others. And ‘Obligatory value’ - what I expect from myself. When you compromise your obligatory value despite still holding the personal value, you create a conflict in yourself. As such, your quality of life always suffers when you becomes split. Once you realize this, it’s a no-brainer to always adhere to your values and never compromise them for short-term gains. In Japan, they have a word for this: 心 Kokoro - The intersection of heart, mind, & spirit that's a person’s essence, soul, or center. Instead of being treated separately, they are one. eg. "She has good kokoro" = her heart, spirit, soul & mind are aligned. 

25. Mood follows action. What we do, is what we are. Sometimes when I am feeling down or unmotivated, the best thing I can do to change my mental state is to change my physical state. If I’m down or in a rut, I force myself to move my body, even if only a little bit. This helps shift my perspective and resets my operating system—and more often than not, I’ll feel better. Furthermore, I often follow this checklist to see if any physical or mental bias’ are distorting my mood: Get out of my head & into your body, become aware of physical + mental deficiencies, and ask if my perspective changes as I time travel. 

26. Success is not being on the top of the hierarchy, it’s standing outside of all hierarchies. One of the biggest accomplishment of my 20s is realizing that most career ladders are just treadmills, most promotions already undervalue you, and all I care about is building cool shit with people who energize me. As I wrote in my definition of success piece:  What is my happiness? I’m still figuring it out. But I no longer measure it in terms of levels jumped, zeros added to my pay stub, the hype of the company/field, or the number of people I manage. I’ve begun to measure it in what my days look like and the consistency and quality of my creative expression

27. You are both everything and nothing at the same time. We should see identities as clothing we put on to navigate the world, while the soul beneath is pure and devoid of labels. Why? Because problems arise when we think we are the clothes we wear or even the bodies beneath. Like iron, our identities only become clearer once they’re put through the fire of experiences. To die, decombust, recombine, and renew upon ever-compounding plateaus of self-knowledge. As a result, they are never fixed or homogeneous in nature. Your personal identity portfolio is never locked into one final permutation. Instead, it’s an abounding and bustling sampling of what alights your soul at any one point at time, and for plethoras of “point-in-times” thereafter. And this thought, for me at least, is incredibly freeing. To continuously keep your identity flexible and open, is to be truly anti-fragile.

28. “The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.” — J.D Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

29. We don't seek world peace. We seek self-peace. We hanker after world peace because the idea gives us a sense of self-peace. The truth is that if everyone in the world found peace in themselves, the "world" would forever be at peace.

30. Measure life by moments of ambedo (n.) - a melancholic trance where one is absorbed in vivid sensory details: raindrops skittering down a window, tall trees leaning in the wind, clouds of cream swirling in coffee. A brief soak into aliveness. Done purely for its own sake. 

Happy new year <3

Yours,

Patricia

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

I’m Patricia and have a full-time job but curate this newsletter in my free time as a labor of love.

This newsletter is free because I believe everyone deserves to have access to wellness resources. If you want to support this publication, join me down the rabbit hole 🕳🐇.

Join

Subscribe now

Support this publication by joining me down the rabbit hole🕳🐇

Hi lovely humans,

Back in 2018, I started a daily gratitude journaling practice (after many failed attempts). The one twist this time was that I snapped photos throughout the day of small pockets of beauty and gratitude. I then uploaded them at night onto my journaling app.

Slowly I began to train my subconscious to automatically note beautiful moments throughout the day. Like a mental snap shot happening without even needing to think, my baseline happiness meaningfully improved. Least to say, the gratitude habit has stuck with me 3 years later.

Filming has a similar effect on me. Except instead of snapshots, it’s an animated reel that lasts 5-10 seconds. Kind of like the looping images in Harry Potter.

The added dimension of movement allows me to recall and sink into moments of gratitude a little more poignantly.

The way light dances across shadows, an eye crinkle gathering up skin, bokeh emphasizing its subject. The simple, beautiful things.

I want to collect these little reels to remind me that the bone marrow of life is not in the grandiose, expensive, or novel. Rather, it’s in the quiet and undecorated pockets of love.

Whether at the end of a tough day, or at the end of my life - I imagine these reels will flash before my eyes, as my soul melts into contentment.

After all, aren’t we all just visual vessels for the essence of life to seep though? Widening our apertures, we can allow love and light to flow in. The nuance lies in whether we choose to see it that way.

[interview] Missy Robbins on Ambition, Burnout, and Success After 40

Missy Robbins is the executive check for two well-known Brooklyn restaurants, Lilia and Misi - which I live close by to and are always packed.

I loved her perspective on starting both restaurants at the age of 44, well beyond other chefs at her caliber:

I never thought oh, you’re going to be 44 when you open this. But now I look at it, and I say, Lilia wouldn’t be Lilia and Misi wouldn’t be Misi if I hadn’t taken the time to learn all the things I learned.

And to take this very slow journey that a lot of people aren’t willing to take. They are better restaurants because I took that time, and because I spent probably an extra 10 years learning from other people or practicing without the risk.

[manifesto] The short instructional manifesto for relationship anarchy

One of the engineers I work with recently taught me recently about the concept of “customizing our commitments” via Andie Nordgren’s manifesto for relationship anarchy. Some core tenants that I loved:

• Relationship anarchy questions the idea that love is a limited resource that can only be real if restricted to a couple. You have capacity to love more than one person, and one relationship and the love felt for that person does not diminish love felt for another.

• Love and respect instead of entitlement. Staying away from entitlement and demands is the only way to be sure that you are in a relationship that is truly mutual.

• Organize based on a wish to meet and explore each other — not on duties and demands and disappointment when they are not met.

• Choosing to assume that your partner does not wish you harm leads you down a much more positive path than a distrustful approach where you need to be constantly validated by the other person to trust that they are there with you in the relationship

• Relationship anarchy is not about never committing to anything — it’s about designing your own commitments with the people around you, and freeing them from norms dictating that certain types of commitments are a requirement for love to be real, or that some commitments like raising children or moving in together have to be driven by certain kinds of feelings

Also while you’re down there 🐇🕳️, check-out the anarchist library from which I found this pamphlet and their most popular texts.

[essay] Luck and the Entrepreneur: The four kinds of luck

Re-surfacing a good ‘ol 2007 post on luck summarized by pmarca:

1. Luck that occurs is completely accidental. It is pure blind luck that comes with no effort on our part. 👉 you can’t influence it

2. Luck with motion added. A certain [basic] level of action “stirs up the pot”, brings in random ideas that will collide and stick together in fresh combinations, lets chance operate. 👉 favors those who have a persistent curiosity about many things coupled with an energetic willingness to experiment and explore.

3. (personal sensory receptivity) Luck that is discovered via a special receptivity, discernment, and intuitive grasp of significance unique to one particular recipient. Chance presents only a faint clue, the potential opportunity exists, but it will be overlooked except by that one person uniquely equipped to observe it, visualize it conceptually, and fully grasp its significance. 👉 favors those who have a sufficient background of sound knowledge plus special abilities in observing,

4. (personal motor behavior) Luck that favors the individualized action. It develops during a probing action which has a distinctive personal flavor. 👉 favors those with distinctive, if not eccentric hobbies, personal lifestyles, and motor behaviors.

So to optimize your likelihood for luck index on asking yourself these 4 questions:

• How energetic and inclined towards motion are we?

• How curious are we?

• How flexible and aggressive are we at synthesizing?

• How uniquely are we developing a personal point of view?

[essay] Autonomy The Monastery Series (Part 2)

Mark spent 2 weeks at a monastery and had some interesting insights about autonomy:

1. Autonomy in a disciplined retreat setting comes from within. Instead of “freedom from external control over my external circumstances,” it meant “freedom from external control over my state of mind.”

2. Just like you can trade money for freedom, you can trade autonomy for spirituality. “At first, I thought that the residents had given up their autonomy, but I soon realized that they had actually traded it. They had decided that spiritual progress was important to them, so they traded their autonomy for daily instruction, group accountability, and a tight-knit community of like-minded peers.”

3. True autonomy is being able to control both our circumstances and our state of mind.

[essay] The Ridiculously Obvious Meaning of Life

“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.”

— Alan Watts

With this purpose come two insights: “you must be present in your experience, and you must live your experience. Don’t be distracted, don’t avoid certain experiences or emotions, lean into them. Feel them fully. Experience life raw and direct. Don’t follow others, live your truth. Embrace your preferences, make your own choices, because these are the sacred gifts you have been given as a unique embodiment.”

[tweet] Is it true?

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

I’m Patricia and have a full-time job but curate this newsletter in my free time as a labor of love.

This newsletter is free because I believe everyone deserves to have access to wellness resources. If you want to support this publication, join me down the rabbit hole 🕳🐇.

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Hi lovely humans,

It’s been a while 👋 This is the longest time i’ve gone without writing since the start of this newsletter! I was pretty pooped after The Third Space series and shifted my focus onto getting settled in NYC, raising a puppy (it’s unsurprisingly very hard work), shifting into a new product area at Calm, and expressing myself at rabbit holes and the third space.

Longer periods of forgone writing undoubtedly give me more material to shift through and make sense of. One topic that’s been at the forefront of my mind for the past 2+ years is the tension between doing and being.

It’s a gnarly one that i’ve been putting off for the longest time. But recently, I begun to see the pieces of fragmented inquiry a bit more clearly. Newfound language drawn from reading around the topic have given me the semantics to begin a life-long conversation. The essay today is the beginning of that conversation.

I imagine that the bane of human existence is balancing the tension between doing and being. To know when to pause is to reflect on the road before you and determine whether to readjust your sails. To know when to act is to muster the activation energy to go against inertia and forge your own will. 

Act without pause, and you potentially lose your authentic self to external forces in the process, waking up one day to a stranger in the mirror. Reflect without action, and get stuck in a bubble of time, forever ruminating on prior scripts that have turned stale. 

—

As I've gotten to know myself better over the years, I’ve seen my life more as seasons as opposed to a culminating plot line of doing.

There are seasons of frenetic creation and consumption. Then there are seasons of containment and reprieve. I withdraw from all stimuli to examine the jigsaw pieces before me - discarding and merging them to create a new map. The seasons of creation and reflection oscillate cyclically like the weather - sometimes in monthly increments, other times, all within a day. 

Yet one thing I haven’t been able to quite ping down is how to balance doing and being simultaneously, or at least a little more seamlessly.

I love nothing more than being a recluse, withdrawing myself from the world of egoic striving and status games for weeks at a time. However, like a monk with commitment issues, I also am energized by the froth of knowledge and art bubbling from the cauldron of worldly self-actualizing humans.

—

On one side we have the world of work, in which we are whirled rapidly round. And on the other we have the world of calm, retiring renunciation: everything is peaceful around, only self and nature, with her animals and mountains. Between relative doing and non-doing, I whip back and forth between these polarities. 

So, to be a monk or a capitalist? 

In setting out to ask this question, I soon realized it was the wrong question.

Karma Yoga is a philosophy that claims the answer is not “either/or” but rather “yes/and”. 

Karma means “action,” and Karma Yoga is performing action without attachment to the outcome. It’s a way to be in the world, without being of the world. To dutifully do your work, whilst attaining self-liberation from the ego concurrently: 

The ideal woman is she who, in the midst of the greatest silence and solitude, finds the intensest activity, and in the midst of the intensest activity finds the silence and solitude of the desert. She has learnt the secret of restraint, she has controlled herself.

She goes through the streets of a big city with all its traffic, and her mind is as calm as if he were in a cave, where not a sound could reach her; and she is intensely working all the time. That is the ideal of Karma- Yoga, and if you have attained to that you have really learnt the secret of work.

-Swami Vivekanada

Echoed by Emerson:

It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great (wo)man is s/he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

 - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Karma Yoga originates from Vedantic philosophy. In addressing the 5 causes of suffering, Vedantic philosophy gives us 4 paths that ultimately lead to the cessation of it and thus “enlightenment”:

1. [doing work in the world] Karma Yoga - to perform action without attachment to the outcome. Following one’s true purpose and accepting whatever comes. 

2. [think] Gyana Yoga - where reality is discovered through insight, practice and knowledge

3. [love] Bhakti Yoga - love and devotion to God 

4. [path of self-discipline and practice] Raja Yoga, which consists of eight stages leading to self-realization and liberation 

In America, secularism is on the rise and becoming a monk doesn’t pay the bills, so Bhakti and Raja Yoga may not be as accessible.

Karma yoga enables us to work for survival, but also attain self-realization in the process. The middle way between monk and capitalist.

The main teaching of karma yoga is to do work without attachment. To let huge actions ripple from the muscles and the brain, but not let them make any deep impression on the soul.

How? To help others but never think that they ought to be grateful, or that it ought to bring you fame and riches. To do for doings sake, and not for its egoic fruits. This is the middle path to peace of mind, while carrying forth our will to work. Through the machinery itself is the way out.

Not letting work leave an impression on your soul means not  identifying with it.

With the sense of possession comes selfishness, and selfishness brings on misery. This flies straight into the face of everything we’ve been conditioned to believe: be the “x” guy/gal on twitter, have a 10 year plan, declare your life’s work in every admissions essay and job interview. Having an identity viscerally soothes us and tangibly opens doors.

But the nuance is seeing identities as clothing we put on to navigate the world, while the soul beneath is pure and devoid of labels. Why? Because problems arise when we think we are the clothes we wear or even the bodies beneath.

The body is neither yours, nor mine, nor anybody’s. They come and go by the laws of nature, but we are free, standing as witnesses.

When we understand this fundamental truth, we unclench the fist that wraps around our stated vocations. We work fluidly and in flow with what compels our souls from a place of love as opposed to greed. We can do without attachment. 

In the first place, a man who can work for five days, or even for five minutes, without any selfish motive whatever, without thinking of future, of heaven, of punishment, or anything of the kind, has in him the capacity to become a powerful moral giant.

It is hard to do it, but in the heart of our hearts we know its value, and the good it brings.

It is the greatest manifestation of power--this tremendous restraint; self-restraint is a manifestation of greater power than all outgoing action.

- Swami Vivekanada

Getting to this kind of soul-aligned work takes hard self-inquiry, as work in exchange for purely capital and status is abundant.

We must reflect on the type of work we do when we feel the least selfish. This could be what naturally pulled our curiosities when we were children. It could be digging into our past and present to find the unifying thread that links our most intrinsically energizing experiences.

Upon reflection, we shall find that in our first few years of life, our motives are almost always selfish and driven by the intellect. But gradually this selfishness melts away with persistence to soothe what aches the heart. 

Plunge into the world, and then, after a time, when you have suffered and enjoyed all that is in it, will renunciation come; then will calmness come.

So fulfill your desire for power and everything else, and after you have fulfilled the desire, will come the time when you will know that they are all very little things; but until you have fulfilled this desire, until you have passed through that activity, it is impossible for you to come to the state of calmness, serenity, and self-surrender.

- Swami Vivekanada

We must pass through selfish work first to understand its inability to satiate the depths of our soul.

The tricky thing is that the short-term worldly returns of fame, power, and money blind us from the fact that we’re on a local maxima. They prevents us from making this passage through the machinery to clearer pastures. 

Even helping others out of love, but with attachment to status or fame as a result, can be the most egregious - despite its unselfish angle. (“I’m helping others so it must not be selfish”). Unbeknownst to its beholder, it is simply pride insinuating itself in the form of virtue.

To avoid this trap we must realize that in helping the world, we merely help and purify ourselves. It is a privilege to help others, as not one beggar or soul depends on our charity or kindness. In doing good for others, we seek to forget ourselves. We must not expect returns for our service. 

—

So easily we maintain the charade of selfish work in order to do what best pacifies the ego or secures our place in the social hierarchy. Even when we’ve gone beyond selfish work to so-called “unselfish work”, it can still be selfish work below the surface. 

Regardless of the various formats of work we pursue, the ultimate form of work that liberates us is the one we identify in the least, thus becoming unattached to its fruits.

By doing this we fulfill Karma Yoga ideals. We achieve our freedom to follow the steps of the sage, with one foot in the world of work.

Act always as if the future of the universe depended on what you did,

while laughing at yourself for thinking that whatever you do makes any difference.

-Mihaly C.

—

Love says 'I am everything.'

Wisdom says 'I am nothing.'

Between the two, my life flows.

— Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

I’ll leave you with one last thing: the lotus flower. 

It is an aquatic plant that plays a central role in the art of all major religions such as Confucianism, Hinduism, Christianity, Jainism, and Buddhism. 

Despite growing from the mud, it is pure and unstained. Its stalks twist and turn through murky waters to find reprieve on the pond's surface. Atop of the water a flower blossoms and opens its magnificent petals. In doing so it symbolizes the realization of its inner potential and expansion of its soul.

I love the lotus because while growing from mud, it is unstained.

— Confucian scholar Zhou Dunyi 1017–1073

—

One who performs his duty without attachment, surrendering the results unto the Supreme Lord, is unaffected by sinful action, as the lotus is untouched by water.

— Bhagavad Gita 5.10

In the same way that the water cannot touch and adhere to a lotus flower; so shall we strive to be in the world.

[essay] You need a mission in life

I loved this piece so much. It’s a reminder that there’s a thousand games you can opt into playing on this planet, but the only one worth playing is your own.

[film] Human

Filmmaker Yann Arthus-Bertrand collected emotionally stirring stories from 2,000 women and men in 60 countries compiled them into this enchanting documentary. Hearing from such a collection of wide-ranging backgrounds speaks to a fundamental unity we all share in the human experience.

[artist] Yuki Kawae

The Bay Area designer records meditative footage of wide-toothed prongs and dense rakes that scrape across beds of white sand, creating intersecting loops, fractals, and other organic shapes

[ESSAY] Keeping your head down

When I scroll social, I should just hope that those individuals are living a life that is truly worth living – one that makes them proud. The good life, to me at least, is living a life that makes you proud. No one else.

That definition of success is entirely up to you. When the weight of the world feels particularly heavy, or I’ve taken on entirely too much, I remind myself that I’m spending my time exactly as I set out to. When you live a life entirely in line with your goals and values as a person, spending a single minute fantasizing about throwing in the towel feels like a poor use of time. 

[ESSAY] It’s Okay to Outgrow the Life You Thought You Wanted

What are some things you thought you wanted, but upon getting there, found it wasn’t for you and the courage to pivot?

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

I’m Patricia and have a full-time job but curate this newsletter in my free time as a labor of love.

This newsletter is free because I believe everyone deserves to have access to wellness resources. If you want to support this publication, join me down the rabbit hole 🕳🐇.

Join

Subscribe now

Support this publication by joining me down the rabbit hole🕳🐇

bit by bit, then all at once

Patricia Mou

What if finding what is true
Is just dissolving everything
that is untrue
Until all we’re left with is
a vast purified space

And so it goes
We cocoon ourselves
with all types of egoic outfits
Ideas, stories, identities, beliefs
Some our own, most of them others
Each replacing the next
In an insatiable quest around
the gaping black hole
that sits at the core

Candles we light
to ward off the ensuing darkness

Afraid of our nothingness
We grasp for anything
Naked at the bottom of the pit
we seek comfort in company
The blind lead the blind
in group transcendence, at self’s expense
Meaning over absurdity, purchased and borrowed

We substitute one untruth for another
In quicksand, we struggle
Until the burden is too immense to go on
Collapsing inwards
Bit by bit
Then all at once

Sometimes
A jolt pierces through the seams
of our carefully spun tapestry
The blackest despair
Becomes our most honest moment
A thread is unraveled
as Truth peeks in

We awake from the slumber
As it’s still ongoing
Lucid dreaming in reverse
We peer across the vast landscape
and see
for the first time
what’s been in plain sight
Talking heads and hero journeys
Realized, yet alone
We retreat to safety

But the tattered fabric can’t be mended
The struken bell can’t be unrung
When our clothes stop fitting
We realize the journey
can only be taken alone

Until finally the day comes
We quietly place our clothes by the water
And walk away from the desert mirage
Returning to our world
To be in it
But not of it

Naked yet one
The seam effacing itself
Into a vast purified space

Bit by bit

Then all at once

I was dreaming that I was a butterfly
fluttering happily.

Suddenly, I awoke—

Now, I wonder who I am—
A man who dreamed he was a butterfly,
or a butterfly dreaming it is a man.

Chuang Tzu

Too lazy to be ambitious,
I let the world take care of itself.
Ten days worth of rice in my bag;
a bundle of twigs by the fireplace.

Why chatter about delusion and enlightenment?
Listening to the night rain on my roof,
I sit comfortably, with both legs stretched out.

Ryokan

When the mind is at peace,
the world too is at peace.

Nothing real,
nothing absent.

Not holding on to reality,
not getting stuck in the void,

You are neither holy nor wise,
just an ordinary fellow
who has completed his work.

Layman P’ang

Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise.

Seek what they sought.

Basho

The great path has no gates, thousands of roads enter it.
When you pass through this gateless gate
you walk the universe alone.

Mumon

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

I’m Patricia and have a full-time job but curate this newsletter in my free time as a labor of love.

This newsletter is free because I believe everyone deserves to have access to wellness resources. If you want to support this publication, join me down the rabbit hole 🕳🐇.

Join

Subscribe now

Hello thoughtful humans! 🇹🇼 I’m writing to you from Taipei, where i’ve been quarantining for the past 2 weeks. Although initially nervous about being contained in a room for so long, i’ve really settled into the stillness. I’ve realized that I don’t need much to be happy day to day. Meditation, yoga, writing, reading, & connecting with a loved one. If I get to these 5 things, it’s a good day.

Tomorrow is my last day of quarantine - and i’m looking forward to largely doing these same 5 things. I pause and think back to a younger self who would have been antsy to explore and experience. But to be honest, i’m mostly just antsy about having less time to do the 5 things I love the most.

Am I getting “older” or just increasingly liking the company of who I always was?

food for thought 🤔

Okays, onto today’s newsletter:

• what I think the Social Dilemma misses 🌶🌶🌶

• the virtue of being basic

• types of flow

The Social Dilemma has created quite a stir recently. If you haven’t watched it, it’s a Netflix documentary that sounds the alarm on how big tech co’s are hijacking our brains and causing addiction.

The film is a bit more of an alarmist call-to-arms, as opposed to a multifaceted discussion. Nonetheless, the main message of the documentary resonates with many. It personifies the increasingly strained relationship we have with our devices and digital identities. It illuminates the shadow of growth hacking at all costs and algorithms going haywire.

Exasperated, we say it’s time to take a cold hard look at “the system”. How do we reform our companies and their entanglement with capitalism? Where are the legislative reforms? The overall tone of the documentary overwhelmingly indexes on blaming institutions for the demise of our attention spans.

And I agree. Institutions should be held responsible and enact reform. However, I also fear that such a stringent focus on external solutions is blinding us towards one right beneath our noses: Personal responsibility.

Personal responsibility as an antidote to the Attention Economy is far less discussed.

By solely placing the blame on institutions, we ultimately put the locus of control outside of ourselves - absolving us from developing anti-fragility.

Taking personal responsibility isn’t a sexy concept that invites virality. Mainly because we don’t like to feel bad about ourselves. And also because it acknowledges that we play an active hand in our own misery.

It also doesn’t help that mainstream narratives castigate technology as an “addiction”, which invites feelings of powerlessness.

If addiction is defined as “a compulsive dependency on a behavior that harms the user”, most of us aren’t actually pathologically “addicted”.

For most of us, technology is more of a strong distraction. 

Every analgesic has the potential to be addictive - a wine with dinner, a tv show in the evening. Yet we’re not suing wine companies and trying to shut down the entertainment industry. In all their potential to harm, these activities also bring joy. We are the free agents that choose to calibrate their potency. As such, technology alchemizes into a world of good or harm, depending on our handiwork.

This view is reflected in that of Chinese philosophers who are not as alarmed about AI as their Western counterparts. As social good in Asia is tied to individual self-cultivation, it’s believed that AI is just a reflection of ourselves. We’ll only be able to create morally sound AI, if we ourselves are ethically reflective and responsible.

In other words, we mustn't put all the blame on the tools, but rather take a deeper look at how we wield them. 

If technology largely mirrors who we are, the questions then become:

• How can we enable technology to amplify our best tendencies, as opposed to our worst ones?

• What are our values and how can our technology usage reflect that?

• How do we put systems in place to make it easy to live to these values?

Sophocles, the greek philosopher, once said:

“Nothing great enters the life of mortals without a curse”. 

Books, television, radio, and motor vehicles - many past innovations forced us to adjust before our institutions were able to.

Like placing our fingers on a hot stove, we’re the nerve endings that raise the alarm to the broader institutional nervous system. Yet as we wait on the prefrontal cortex to respond, wouldn’t it be wise to first pull away our hands?

Or put in another way - if we want to get healthier, our first reaction could be to lobby for the removal of fast food establishments. But wouldn’t it be more sustainable to improve the nutritional contents of our fridges?

As sovereign individuals, we have the choice to adapt and empower ourselves - auditing our digital diets, just we do with their physical analog. In the face of external progress, we can progress ourselves in response.

Because what is progress but the command of chaos by mind and purpose, of matter by form and will? We don’t lack capability, we lack resolve.

Taking personal responsibility is the uncomfortable price we pay at the swelling of every technological breakthrough. Because although something isn’t our fault, that doesn’t mean it isn’t our responsibility.

So how do we take personal responsibility? There are endless tools and approaches that have come to our aid.

However, my goal isn’t to prescribe blanket solutions. Rather, it’s to illuminate that all is not as doomed as it appears:

That mental freedom has always been the wellspring of personal responsibility - whether that’s applied to our relationships, careers, or technology habits.

Here are 4 thoughts that have guided me:

1. ☯️ To work with technology, instead of against or without it. It’s hard to completely halt usage of technology, as our livelihoods depend on it. Similarly, digital detoxes and meditation retreats aren’t sustainable, as we still need to learn to deal with the world while living in it. However, this sentiment from Ralph Waldo Emerson has greatly shaped my perspective on the qualm:

   "It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own;

   but the great (wo)man is s/he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."

   In other words, how can one strive to be a cocoon of peace, even amidst chaos? How might we develop a healthy relationship with technology, despite its addictive tendencies?

2. 😨 Realizing we reach for our devices to avoid discomfort. Research has shown that human motivation is not about reacting to pain and pleasure. Rather, it is spurred by the desire to escape discomfort.

   Boredom, uncertainty, fatigue, anxiety, loneliness - these internal triggers cause us to reach for our phones, tune out to Netflix, or quickly search for answers on Google.

   Upon coming face to face with these emotions, what if we learned to stay with them? Could we address them in a healthier way that propels us towards our values? 

3. 🌱 Be the change. How can we start with ourselves, before asking external parties to change? Confucius:

   “The illustrious ancients, when they wished to make clear and propagate the highest virtues in the world, put their states in proper order.

   Before putting their states in proper order, they regulated their families.

   Before regulating their families, the cultivated their own selves.

   Before cultivating their own selves, they perfected their souls.

   Before perfecting their souls, they tried to be sincere with their thoughts.

   Before trying to be sincere in their thoughts, they extended to the utmost their knowledge.”

4. 💪 And lastly, being optimistic about humanity’s ability to overcome challenges, including this one. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed and pessimistic about the world right now, alongside the state of our digital lives.

   It’s much harder to be the change we want to see, and work deliberately and patiently towards systemic reform.

   This passage from Will Durant has always helped me see humanity’s response to challenge as not just a worthy pursuit, but as a privilege:

   “We need not fret, then, about the future. We are weary with too much war, and in our lassitude of mind we listen readily to a Spengler announcing the downfall of the Western world.

   But this learned arrangement of the birth and death of civilizations in even cycles is a trifle too precise; we may be sure that the future will play wild pranks with this mathematical despair.

   There have been wars before, and Man and civilization survived them; within 15 years after Waterloo, defeated France was producing so many geniuses that every attic in Paris was occupied. Never was our heritage of civilization and culture so secure, and never was it half so rich.

   We may do our little share to augment it and transmit it, confident that time will wear away chiefly the dross of it, and that what is finally fair and worthy in it will be preserved, to illuminate many generations.” 

To me, finding peace in such a distracting and chaotic world is a beautiful undertaking. Paradoxically, it can awaken us. If we choose to see it that way.

Yours, 

Patricia 

ty to kunal shah for edits

🤔 Do deathbed regrets give us a special insight into what really matters in life? There are good reasons to be sceptical

I enjoy pieces that go against the grain. In this case, probing the commonly touted regrets of the dying. This piece suggests that we might do better to prefer the wisdom of 40-somethings: those who have experienced enough to have a broad perspective on life, but who still have a stake in living.

⚡️ Sovereignism Part 1: Digital Creative Destruction

A 12-part essay series exploring the digital disrup­tion of the nation-state and the subse­quent ampli­fi­ca­tion of individual sover­eignty during the digital age. Although it lays the foundational argument for bitcoin, I see this mental model as a powerful tailwind to humanity’s quest for self-actualization.

Supplement with Chris Paik’s: The American Dream is Going Digital:The Land of Opportunity is the Internet

✨ Being Basic as a Virtue

Sometimes I think about committing information suicide. Everyone’s got an escapist fantasy: mine is disappearing to Montana, or perhaps the Palm Springs desert, and living a quiet life working in a little shop, or as a florist (I like thinking in textures). A late friend and gifted programmer once told me his most creative days were spent working in a bookstore. The work wasn’t challenging, but it was meditative, and it gave him space to let his mind wander.

The rest of the 100+ links will be shared through Rabbit Holes with Patricia 🔮🐇 this week including:

• 🔗 a guide to transhumanism

• 🔗 my favorite newsletters with likely < 100 subscribers

• 🔗 100 pg guide to personal learning from Google Brain researchers

From modernist architect, to a life off-grid, a creative life well-lived

Charles Bello’s life is a testament to the fact that there’s no single way to measure success – or the sum of hard work

A travel video for Oregon that evokes the aesthetics and fantastical imagery of the iconic Japanese animation studio

Drew this to capture my current understanding of different types of flow:

• Artificial Flow: losing yourself in consumption.

• Work Flow: losing yourself in doing.

• A life of Flow: If a human is their life to something, they lose themselves in it entirely.

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

I’m Patricia and have a full-time job but curate this newsletter in my free time as a labor of love.

This newsletter is free because I believe everyone deserves to have access to wellness resources. If you want to support this publication, join me down the rabbit hole🔮🐇.

I also curate bi-weekly at AmorFati - a newsletter where I share whats been inspiring me in art, photography, architecture, and literature.

Subscribe now

Hello thoughtful humans! ❄️

Currently I’m super sore from a 5 mile hike. If you’re ever in Utah, definitely check out Fifth Water Hot Springs. The hot springs at the end warrants a high effort : reward ratio.

Nevertheless, I got up early this morning to write. With Flawed Mangos blasting on Spotify, I’m currently crowded around a large table with 6 other creators typing away.

Today’s newsletter:

• the root of human suffering

• why I like and don’t like Whoop

• Capitalism vs. Marxism for ultimate human happiness

P.S. This week I finally launched a way for readers of this newsletter to support my work in order to keep this publication free. I like to think of it as Curation-as-a-Service.

In exchange for supporting me as a creator, I curate the Internet for you 🔮🐇

If you’ve ever gotten any value from my writing, it would mean the world to me to have your support.

I’m convinced that a great deal of human suffering, shame, and guilt, stems from a simple predicament: whether or not we adhere to our values.

Value (noun) -  Values are certain universal ethical attitudes. It is the regard for a thing, situation, or attitude, which for some reason is esteemed or prized by the value holder.

We have values whether we know it or not because as humans we cannot escape from relationships.

Our inherent desire to be comfortable and secure compels us to set standards for others’ behavior. Values can be disregarded only if we have no concern for how others treat us. If I want other people to behave in a certain manner, I am caught in a value system.

Let’s take an example of a universal value: You value truth.

You expect others to be truthful to you. So you must be truthful to others.

A value is always split into 2:

• Personal value - what I expect from others

• Obligatory value - what I expect from myself

When I have a value structure that I follow and expect others to follow in the same manner, my values cause me no conflict.

However, when I want others to behave in a certain way, but for my own reasons, I am not able or willing to behave in that way, I have a problem.

While a personal value is spontaneously observed for its own sake, an obligatory value is subject to compromise when it obstructs a highly desired individual end.

Say a situation arises where if you lie, you can make more money. Someone wants to buy a car for $20K, the same amount you paid for it. You can easily say you paid $25K and make $5K more.

Though you feel an inherent tension, you decide to lie. Though your personal value of truth persists for how others treat you, your obligatory value - what you expect from yourself - has been compromised.

What follows is guilt and shame. You can ignore the guilt, but you cannot avoid it. Once you have guilt, you cannot have a fully comfortable self.

Conflicts come when you are unable to live up to a particular value which, consciously or unconsciously, you accept.

Failure to live to a value puts you in conflict with ourself and a mind in conflict is not a desirable mind. Once conflicts are there, problems of mind are unavoidable. Self-condemnation, regret, guilt, and a sense of failure are the products of a mental conflict.

When one performs an action that is a non-value, one creates a seed of guilt, which is all this is needed to product sleeplessness, fear and conflict.

As such, when we build up a series of lies such as these, we create a split. We are not integrated.

Even small lies create problems, like lying about our age. Though it may seem like a simple, unimportant thing, small lies register inside as conflicts. This is true for a saint as it is true for a murderer. No one can escape the accumulation of conflicts.

Fulfilling an immediate end at the expense of a general value may bring some passing comfort, but in the long run, it adds to your discomfort by increasing your accumulation of guilt, large and small.

We can see examples of this profoundly in the Netflix series Bridgerton - where almost all the characters go against their values to satisfy a short-term gain.

However, in the process, the accrue guilt and long-term consequences.

*SPOILER ALERT* - scroll past if you haven’t but plan on watching Bridgerton.

Whenever you ignore your values - you create a split in yourself. For instance:

• You know you should tell the truth, but you don’t in order to gain more money.

• You should get up 30 mins early to exercise. Instead you turn off the alarm and sleep 45 mins longer.

• You should go on a diet. Instead you help yourself to a 2nd donut.

Once you do this you begin to condemn yourself. You tell yourself that you’re useless, that you cannot do what you want to do, that you are not the person you want to be.

As such, the quality of life always suffers when one becomes split. To appreciate the beauty of life and to really be available to enjoy its comforts, one needs to be ‘together’.

One of the biggest traps that cause people to do things that go against their values is money. Where the individual situational value has the power to surmount the obligatory half of the value.

Why do we do this?

Money quite literally is just paper. But we value money because of the things it can buy us to wear, look at, experience, etc.

Or in other words, things that give us pleasure and comfort. We value money because we value comfort - not just physical comfort, but to be truly comfortable with ourselves.

It is always ones hope that the extra comforts that money can buy, will make me more comfortable with myself.

When I ignore my value of truthfulness, and tell a lie to gain more money, it’s because i’ve concluded that money will add to my comfort.

However this is a trap.

Because the temporary pleasure it gives you compromises your long-term mental comfort. Thus, the comfort you could buy with more money, will not be able to sustainably deliver its comfort because of the guilt and shame you accrue through its transaction.

For comforts to be enjoyed you must be there to enjoy them. When you are split with guilt, you are rarely anywhere but with your anxieties, regrets and guilt.

Not recognizing the problem for what it is, you seek more comforts to ease your uncomfortable mind.

Once you understand this truth, adhering to your values is as simple as asking yourself: “Do I want happiness or unhappiness?”

When you clearly see this fact, living in coherence with your values will be a no-brainer.

For the person with assimilated ethical values, life becomes very simple. No conflicts cloud his or her mind. This is true comfort. This is happiness.

In summary:

• Values are splint into 2: ‘Personal value’ - what I expect from others. And ‘Obligatory value’ - what I expect from myself.

• When you compromise your obligatory value despite still holding the personal value, you create a conflict in yourself.

• As such, your quality of life always suffers when you becomes split.

• Once you realize this, it’s a no-brainer to always adhere to your values and never compromise them for short-term gains.

Some questions to ask yourself:

• What are your values?

• What small “harmless” ways do you compromise those values today?

• What recent value have you compromised in order to obtain short-term comfort?

• Can you see how the compromise is harming your ability to enjoy the thing you obtained?

To our peace of mind -

Yours,

Patricia

Source: These ideas are adapted from Swarmi Saraswati in his book The Value of Values, a companion to the Bhagavad Gita. A book that a beloved mentor of mine shared with me. I highly, highly recommend.

Whoop - 6/10 - unsponsored

I’ve given quantified fitness trackers a few tries in my lifetime. 1st with FitBit, then with Apple Watch, and recently with Whoop.

The former 2 haven’t been able to stick because the quality of insight hasn’t been able to overcome the friction of charging the device + feeling like there’s another piece of ambient tech in my environment.

I wanted to give Whoop a try because of its ability to track Heart Rate Variability and more granular distributions of my sleep (light, rem, and deep). After 1 month with the tracker I think it provides 2 distinct benefits:

1. Sleep Efficiency - which tells you how tired you are and your patterns across light, rem, and deep sleep.

2. which feeds into Recovery Score - which tells you how much strain you’re going to be able to take on for the day.

The key insight is how Sleep efficiency feeds into Recovery score - and how sleep and strain are interrelated. You realize that wellness really is a holistic and delicate ecosystem that propagates itself towards positive or negative feedback loops. This insight keeps you accountable to maintain the balance through corrective actions.

The tracker has so far been the most insightful and successful in my adoption, however, I want to give it a few more months before I make a call on whether to continue wearing it.

So far the battery life has been 2~ days max, and it’s annoying to charge it all the time. Furthermore, it would be even cooler to see how what I eat impacts my sleep efficiency and recovery score. Apparently, Apple will be able to support glucose monitoring in the near future so that may be a better option.

I’ll keep you guys updated.

P.S. if you want to join Whoop, here’s my referral link for 1 month free

From today onwards, i’ll only be sharing 3 links here!

The rest of the 40-80~ links will be shared through Rabbit Holes with Patricia 🔮🐇 this week including:

• 🔗 A playbook for shipping side projects

• 🔗 Google doc of 50 mental models & 1st principles thinking

• 🔗 A deep-dive into power, justice, well-being on the web

• 🔗 Twitter productivity tips from Dan Romero

• 🔗 10 questions that changed Greg Isenberg’s life

• 🔗 A new course on Pixar’s art of storytelling

✨ Golden by Ava

Big fan of Ava’s writing. She recently wrote a beautiful piece on finding herself:

All around there were people who seemed so wholly focused and competent and desirable, so certain of themselves, and all I wanted was to absorb that certainty by osmosis. But I couldn’t. I really struggled. When I finally found certainty it was by turning away from other people and turning towards myself. I guess that’s how everyone finds confidence, in the end: through rejecting mimicry. 

🧠 Interview: Liam Kofi Bright

If you follow one philosopher on Twitter, you could do worse than to choose Dr. Liam Kofi Bright, an assistant professor at the London School of Economics. His recent interview is quite refreshing:

N.S.: OK, so, like, you're a philosopher. So, what's the meaning of life?

L.K.B.: To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

📝 The Anti-Anxiety Notebook

Designed by psychologists, therapists, and designers with decades of experience, this notebook empowers you with the tools to cope and manage your mental health. The structured journal entry is based in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, a proven technique for tracking and managing stress.

Slavoj Zizek and Jordan Peterson debate on the concept of Happiness: Capitalism vs Marxism. Basically, which economic model best supports human flourishing?

Check out some of their books:

• Peterson's: Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief

• Peterson's: 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

• Zizek's: The Sublime Object of Ideology

• Zizek's: The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto

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

I’m Patricia and have a full-time job but curate this newsletter in my free time as a labor of love.

This newsletter is free because I believe everyone deserves to have access to wellness resources.

If you want to support this publication, join me down the rabbit hole🔮🐇.

I also curate bi-weekly at AmorFati - a newsletter where I share whats been inspiring me in art, photography, architecture, and literature.

This newsletter is free because I believe everyone deserves to have access to wellness resources.

If you want to support this publication, join me down the rabbit hole🔮🐇.

Subscribe now

Hello thoughtful humans! 🍂🍃🍁

I’m currently in a small cottage in Emerald Hills for the Thanksgiving weekend. Sunlight dances through shivering leaves from a nearby maple. My lukewarm coffee cup nearby gives into the chill of the November morning as I recede into myself. Finally ample time to step away and think.

Today’s Wellness Wisdom:

• my latest rabbit hole on Marshall McLuhan - the man who predicted the internet 30 years before it was invented.

• A collection of reads on socratic questions, how to do nothing, the meaning of life, and friendship. Light stuff.

• Notes on neuroplasticity from Dr. Andrew Huberman, a Stanford neuroscientist.

"We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.” - J.Culkin

I recently went down a rabbit hole in order to find the genesis of this quote. It took me through the field of media ecology and landed me on the ideas of one man: Marshall McLuhan. A philosopher whose work formed the cornerstones of media theory and predicted the World Wide Web 30 years before it was invented.

There’s no way I could do his entire body of work justice in a blog post. For that you should check out this recent documentary and his pioneering book: Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.

However, I wanted to share a few of his ideas that stopped me in my tracks, given my ongoing machinations around the extent to which our digital tools have mentally harmed us. And furthermore, the extent by which technology should be leveraged to reverse the negative externalities of its own doing.

Here are some of McLuhan’s core ideas:

1. All technologies are extensions of our physical and nervous systems to increase power and speed. Media/technology are extensions of some physical, social, psychological, or intellectual function of humans.

   • Speech & language extends human consciousness and intellect.

   • The wheel extends our feet

   • The phone extends our voice

   • Television extends our eyes and ears

   • Computer extends our brain

   • Electronic media, in general, extend our central nervous system.

2. Any extension, whether of skin, hand, or foot, affects the whole psychic and social complex. But recent extensions via electronic technology elevate the process of technological extension to a new level of significance.

   • Whereas all previous technology (save speech, itself) had, in effect, extended some part of our bodies, electricity may be said to have outered the central nervous system itself, including the brain.

   • Thus, pre-electric extensions are explosions of physical scale outward, while electronic technology is an inward implosion toward shared consciousness, a change that has significant implications.

   • Smartphones didn’t exist 10 years ago, now 2 billion people are using them, which is about 1/3rd of the earth’s population. As a result 1 in 3 people are now hunched over their phones not present to the reality around them. When 1/3rd of the world changes their body position and the way they communicate, it’s an anthropological-level event. Those kind of global changes used to take thousands of years. Now it takes less than 10. That’s hyper-change.

     

3. What we’ve done with electrical technology is to put our nervous systems outside ourselves. Every private operator can own a hunk of your nervous system as if it were a wheel, box or piece of land. He can stand on your nerves and exploit a part of your inner being by these external means.

   • This idea engenders some of the core arguments from The Social Dilemma - that social media companies capture our data (‘owning a hunk of our nervous system”) to exploit our emotional vulnerabilities.

   • “Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extension of man—the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and nerves by the various media. Whether the extension of consciousness, so long sought by advertisers for specific products, will be 'a good thing' is a question that admits of a wide solution.”

4. What extends our physical and psychological capabilities, quickly becomes harmful in excess.

   • Kenneth Boulding calls it a ‘break boundary at which the system suddenly changes into another or passes some point of no return in its dynamic process”. The principle that at some point during their development, processes and methods go too far and reverse into their opposite.

   • McLuhan points to Hubris from classical Greek dramas - when a character’s overweening pride leads to his own fall, as well as the ancient Chinese Taoist text the Tao Te Ching, which refers to the same concept of excess leading to its opposite.

   • He points to the irony or roads and highways designed to provide freedom of movement have reversed into traffic congestion and urban sprawl. The irony that mobile, nomadic tribal societies were socially static while contemporary, sedentary, specialist societies are socially dynamic and progressive.

5. The antidote to this is not just awareness, but to adopt the stark opposite of the format. A “cure” for the effects of a dominant medium or pattern of the time can be a countervailing force in the opposite direction of the dominating force.

   • By being aware of the effects our media have on us we can be in a better position to counteract them. Things like tracking how many hours you spend on certain social media apps on your iPhone and quantifying the total time it takes you away from activities you truly value.

   • But that is only the first step. Awareness itself is not enough. One antidote to the numbing effect of a particular medium is to use another medium that has a counter-effect: “When the technology of a time is powerfully thrusting in one direction, wisdom may well call for a countervailing thrust”.

   • So turn off the TV (or the computer or the cell phone) after some time and read a book or take a walk in the woods. After enough reading, have a conversation with another human being. Instead of constant doing, do nothing.

In summary, the technology tools that we are shaping, are now starting to shape us are at the edges of our comprehension. These will happen much faster than previous medium shifts (print paper, television, etc.) and it will soon make us question the very nature of what it means to be human. We have to understand how tools are shaping us, and how to cope with that shaping in the time of hyper-change.

Next time you adopt a new tool ask yourself these questions:

1. What will this thing enhance? your feet, hearing, mind, etc.

2. As a result, what will this tool obscure away? eg. Your car lends power to your feet but numb the rest of your body.

3. How will too much of this thing, corrupt your initial aims? You start out as a consumer, and you may wind up consumed.

4. How can you adopt practices that counteract the entropy towards excess?

Questions that i’m asking myself as a builder of mindful products:

• What’s technology’s role in counteracting its own negative impact? Producing an “app for everything” vs. just going out into nature and unplugging.

• What are the ethical ramifications of a meditation app for mindfulness that utilizes gamification, thereby provoking anxiety?

• Can there be a universally agreed upon threshold of “too much” of a new medium/technology?

• Is the oneous on the individual, platform, or external regulators to track abuse and excess?

• Should product teams have an internal metric that measures abuse and build features against it? How do you even begin to agree on that metric?

• What does it mean to completely own your central nervous system and not stake it for sale? Theoretically and practically.

So much to think about it and definitely haven’t even graced the tip of the iceberg! If any, would love to hear the thoughts or questions its prompted in you as well 💌

Yours,

Patricia

Amusing Ourselves to Death ☠️

In 1985, American educator Neil Postman published his seminal work Amusing Ourselves to Death, exploring the effects that mass communication technologies have had upon American society. Postman chiefly argues that our form of communication serves as the lens through which we see the world:

Whether we are experiencing the world through the lens of speech or the printed word or the television camera, our media-metaphors classify the world for us, sequence it, frame it, enlarge it, reduce it, color it, argue a case for what the world is like.

How Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy 🌸

A collection of essays that critique the modern “attention economy,” where our time and attention is deemed useless if not spent in the pursuit of profit and “progress.” Odell deftly weaves historical, literary, and artistic references together in a fashion which feels like you’re chatting with a brilliant friend.

What I’ve Learned In My First Year as a Solopreneur 🧘🏻‍♀️

Steve Schlafman reflects on how transitioning from VC to coach and creator has forced him out of his comfort zone. I found his investment in his mental and physical health to be especially inspirational:

Beginning in early 2020, I made a serious commitment to double down on my health. I wasn’t working out consistently, getting enough sleep, and eating well. I had unconsciously picked up some bad habits. I needed to get my act together especially if I was going to build a business and perform at a high level. Since early this year, I’ve deepened my daily meditation practice, worked with a virtual trainer, adopted intermittent fasting, studied under a Buddhist teacher, slept for 7-8 hours consistently, cut down on sugar and processed foods, and achieved five years of sobriety. The results speak for themselves. I’ve lost twenty pounds and my output has dramatically increased. I’m now able to show up with more energy, intention and awareness for those I serve. I’ve never felt and performed better in my life.

What do you hate not doing? ✨

Love this simple and short blog post by Derek Sivers that poses a great question:

What do you hate not doing?

What makes you feel depressed, annoyed, or like your life has gone astray if you don’t do it enough?

Answers to this double-negative question seem to be better indicators of what’s really worth doing.

Hell Yeah or No 🤔

He also recently came out with a new book, called "Hell Yeah or No". My roommate, AJ Goldstein, recently summarized some of its core tenants:

Hunter S. Thompson’s Life Advice To A Friend on the Meaning of Life ⏳

Love re-reading this essay every once in a while to remind myself that the point is not to accomplish through a rolodex of goals, but to be ourselves in our fullest actualized forms.

The answer— and, in a sense, the tragedy of life— is that we seek to understand the goal and not the man. We set up a goal which demands of us certain things: and we do these things. We adjust to the demands of a concept which CANNOT be valid. When you were young, let us say that you wanted to be a fireman. I feel reasonably safe in saying that you no longer want to be a fireman. Why? Because your perspective has changed. It’s not the fireman who has changed, but you. Every man is the sum total of his reactions to experience. As your experiences differ and multiply, you become a different man, and hence your perspective changes. This goes on and on. Every reaction is a learning process; every significant experience alters your perspective.

As I said, to put our faith in tangible goals would seem to be, at best, unwise. So we do not strive to be firemen, we do not strive to be bankers, nor policemen, nor doctors. WE STRIVE TO BE OURSELVES.

Snap's Friendship Report 2020 👯

Thanks to K.Shah for introducing me to Dr. Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist at Stanford, through this phenomenal interview. If you listen to one thing this week, I promise this will be worth it. Here are some of my key takeaways:

• Kids are super malleable up to 25, but it can change in adulthood. Neroplasticity is triggered by intense focus through learning new and uncertain things, and cemented through intense rest.

• When something is uncertain (aka we try to learn a new habit) our brain starts trying to solve for 3 things: duration (how long will this take?), path (what course will it take to arrive at an outcome?) and outcome (what will happen at the end?).

• That increases our cognitive load which will feel tolerable or stressful depending on how uncertain we are about any one or all of those things. People tend to give-up here.

• If you can recognize that agitation is a normal process and gate you have to pass through in order to get into flow/focus and thus nueroplasticity, maybe you won’t give up.

• Furthermore, if you can break down the outcome to mini milestones, instead of a huge milestone at the end. You can cycle sustainably through smaller cadences of “duration, path, and outcome” dopamine hits to reach your goals.

• The way to get better at duration path outcome is to get good and doing things that don’t require intense duration path and outcome, aka sleep. Recovering is critical to improving ability to focus. i.e. you think you’re “relaxing” by scrolling through social media during your downtime, but it’s actually depleting your recovery time.

• People tend to wait till they’re psychologically ready to start something. i.e thoughts inform feelings informs mood informs actions. Instead it’s flipped, mood follows action. Action towards what is uncomfortable first instead of rumination.

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

I’m Patricia and have a full-time job but curate this newsletter in my free time as a labor of love.

This newsletter is free because I believe everyone deserves to have access to wellness resources.

If you want to support this publication, join me down the rabbit hole🔮🐇.

I also curate bi-weekly at AmorFati - a newsletter where I share whats been inspiring me in art, photography, architecture, and literature.

This newsletter is free because I believe everyone deserves to have access to wellness resources.

If you want to support this publication, join me down the rabbit hole🔮🐇.

Subscribe now

Hello thoughtful humans!

Some quick personal updates: I’ll be joining Calm as a Sr. Product Manager next week! I also announced the launch of Welldom Studio - a weekend Product Studio that builds experiences to help humans be more mindful & well. I’m humbled and elated to finally align my career with my passions, and will continue to share my journey through this newsletter.

Onto today’s issue —

November has finally arrived in SF. 🍃 I’m currently in my PJs, sipping hot chocolate, and inhaling the crisp air from an ajar window nearby.

Its been a mellowing week post elections. But with with hints of PTSD, for sure. Am I allowed to feel hopeful again? Do I need to continue to scan for signs of regression?

I’m beginning to understand the psychological burden that those who’ve lived in wartime or depression might have experienced. The constant humming of a subconscious scanning for threats. A mental CPU process constantly running on 10% for the past 4 years. Unnoticed, until viscerally & physiologically felt during a pinnacle moment of elation - a new projected president is elected.

Maybe like me, you thought that your immediate life and mental state would be largely unscathed from any presidency, due to the bubble of blue or red you live in. How this could be further from the truth. The values of the society we live in, personified through the president we elect, matters. Character and decency matter. Just like the inner turmoil we feel when our thoughts, words, and actions don’t align - this extends into the congruency we feel with our state, society, and country at large.

Today’s issue is dedicated to a line of thinking that been on my heart for the past few weeks..

With the recent elections, I’ve been coming back to this quote over and over again.

Adam Smith’s reputation mostly rests on his works in economics (i.e. The Wealth of Nations) and how rational self-interest in a free-market economy leads to economic well-being. However, many don’t know that his first major work actually concentrated on ethics, charity, and what it means to be virtuous.

I first read Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments when I was a senior in college, and its core arguments have guided the arc of my thinking ever since.

Within it, Smith argues a simple yet subtle tenant:

Being loved and being lovely are two completely separate concepts.

Anyone can be loved. It is bestowed upon us by the identities, possessions, and deeds we take on in order to win the affection and approval of others. The pursuits of money, fame, or power are all part of the same temptation—various paths to being loved, paths to being relevant and noticed by others.

Being lovely, however, is something quite different. We, ourselves, are the barometer by which we bestow loveliness. It is the moral code behind our intentions and what we do when no one is looking. And it’s what leads to the truest form of admiration from ourselves and others at the end of the day.

Let me explain -

Being lovely starts with that small voice in the back of our heads.

Say you’re contemplating taking credit for someone else’s work.

Even if there is 0 chance of being found out by others, you know. And as you contemplate committing the act, you imagine how an outsider, an impartial spectator of your crime, would react to your moral failure.

This impartial spectator forms the small voice that reminds us that pure self-interest is grotesque and that thinking of others is honorable and noble. That if we harm others in order to benefit ourselves, we will be resented, disliked, and unloved by anyone who is looking on impartially.

To ignore this small voice and shun your morals in the pursuit of attention, is to be loved, but not lovely.

More concretely through examples:

• Madoff was loved for his wizardry as an investor. But he knew that he was a fraud. He knew he wasn’t lovely because his returns came not from his skills as an investor but from his ability to deceive.

• Trump may be loved (by some) for his powerful position in politics, sprawling estates, and copious media empires. However, the way in which he secured these emblems - through bullying others, cutting legal corners, etc. - fails to make him a lovely person.

• By taking credit for someones work, you’ll be loved by those who think you’re smart, however you yourself know you aren’t worthy of these praises. You’re loved, but not lovely.

Smith illuminates that we may be tempted at times to be loved without actually being lovely in the quest to secure attention from others. The wise person avoids that temptation in order to secure self-respect instead.

In Joan Didion’s seminal 1961 essay “On Self-Respect”, she alludes to this same internal battle:

To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness.

However long we post- pone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously un- comfortable bed, the one we make ourselves.

Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.

..I wonder how Trump and Madoff sleep at night.

Yet despite the heinous and public nature of their crimes, the reality is that we all experience similar turmoil in our own lives. Indeed, we’re all engaged in an ongoing battle to secure our own self-respect every single day. Sometimes during large, trajectory-changing moments. Other times, in the whisper of an unconscious choice. Flashing through the vents of our daily routines. Gone in a breath.

In these moments we can choose to either take full responsibility for our faults and triumphs, or point the finger at others. We can choose to act out of malice or out of integrity, honesty, and good principles. We can decidedly short-cut our characters to acquire love or remain truly worthy of the love bestowed upon ourselves.

Deep down we know we are truly lovely when the reputation we secure, mirrors who we actually are. We are no longer an imposter. We become loved as a result of being lovely.

As Smith suggests,

To satisfy the desire we all have in us to be noticed and to be somebody, there are two ways to be loved:

The first path is to be rich, famous, powerful.

The second path is to be wise and virtuous. To earn the admiration of others honestly by being respectable, honorable, blameless, generous, and kind.

And this, I believe, is the great equalizing denominator among all humans. Because no matter if you were born into a life of riches or abject poverty, we all start at the same baseline of self-respect - every step down either Path 1 or Path 2 teeters us across the spectrum of love and loveliness. Towards a mind that is peaceful or fraught.

And so, like Smith, we ask this timeless question to ourselves at the crossroads of life’s kaleidoscope of decisions:

What can be added to the happiness of the wo(man) who is in health, who is out of debt, and has a clear conscience?

Does one choose to be loved or to be lovely?

To more of our collective loveliness ♥️,

Patricia

P.S. some of my favorite quotes on self-respect below 👇

“Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.”
― Joan Didion, On Self-Respect

“I cannot conceive of a greater loss than the loss of one's self-respect.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, Fools, Martyrs, Traitors: The Story of Martyrdom in the Western World

“I think the reward for conformity is that everyone likes you except yourself.”
― Rita Mae Brown

“When you are content to be simply yourself and don't compare or compete, everyone will respect you.”
― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

“The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

We Can Now Measure Wisdom 🧠

Wisdom is an ancient concept that has gained interest among researchers as a trait critical to well-being and healthy aging. In 2019, UC San Diego created the "Wisdom Scale" with, for the 1st time, neurobiological underpinnings.

7 “domains” to gauge one’s level of wisdom: acceptance of divergent perspectives, decisiveness, emotional regulation, prosocial behaviors (empathy, altruism, etc), self-reflection, social decision-making, and spirituality.

In Praise of Gods 🙏

The author argues that it is our empirical (of the senses)—not our rational—insights that lead us towards good intuition. “To sustain the amount of experience needed to develop intuition, you must consume stories, take in all manner of literature, myths, and fables. In earlier times, everyone had a mythological education. More visual media does not have the same effect: TV is so pernicious because unlike other storytelling mediums, it almost never asks you to think, it asks only for your attention.” Could it be that the less our media demands of us - the less we’re able to absorb their lessons into our intuition?

Hallucinatory 'voices' shaped by local culture, Stanford anthropologist says 🗣️

People suffering from schizophrenia may hear “voices” – auditory hallucinations – differently depending on their cultural context, according to new Stanford research. In the US, the voices are harsher, and in Africa and India, more benign. The striking difference was that while many of the African and Indian subjects registered predominantly positive experiences with their voices, not one American did. This is fascinating as it alludes to how culture’s perception on “hearing voices” shift our relationship to illness.

Eric Gilbert’s (assoc. professor at U of Michigan) Google Doc on doing a PhD 📚

On how you should choose a research topic (and on any endeavor in life really): What difference will this work make if you succeed? Who will care about it when you’re done? How will this change what other people (defined broadly) are doing?

On where to find ideas: A lot of the phenomena we see online and around technology are not, strictly speaking, new. Many of them have been thought about and studied in earlier forms. Read broadly (e.g., sociology, social psychology, communication, economics, STS, history, etc.)

A Beginner's Guide to becoming a First-Principles Thinker (v2 just came out !) 🧠

A first principle is a basic assumption that cannot be deduced from any other assumption. In Mathematics, these are called axioms. The goal of first principles thinking is to give you a lens of looking at the world in a way that is grounded in rigorous truth rather than ideological presuppositions and feelings. This guide is super well-researched and I hope you’ll join me in devouring it.

Kevin Love’s letter to Anybody Going Through It 💌

Appreciate Love’s letter on his continuous battle with anxiety and depression. He doesn’t prescribe any quick-fix aphorisms through his writing, but rather speaks vulnerably and starkly about his ongoing struggle.

Letter

Letter is a platform for thoughtful conversation via an exchange of written letters. Conversations are public to read, follow, and share, and anyone can sign-up and start a conversation. If Twitter is the town square where conversations start, Letter is the cafe where conversation has time and space to flourish.

hu.ma.ne

This power couple left Apple leadership to start a new IoT company. As the company explains in a video on its website, Humane wants to put control back in the user’s hands and give consumers back some of the precious time they’ve spent glued to their screens.

Endel

Endel is a technology that is built to help people focus, relax, and sleep. It does so by generating a personalized sound system.

But the ultimate vision is to move beyond sound. i.e. “You come back home, and our algorithm goes - ‘oh, you just had that meeting, you've been stuck in traffic, and your heart rate is about your testing average’ - it dims the lights, changes the temperature, creates a soundscape, and arranges the whole environment around you based on the context of your day.” Whoa.

Monet Dating

Is a fun and whimsical dating app that connects you to others through fun drawing challenges. Loving this new take on connecting with other digitally.

“The Attention Economy” short captures the modern desire to scroll endlessly and grab a device when there’s a moment of downtime. It’s based on research from James Williams, a former Google employee, who’s critical of the ways companies capitalize on distraction and have turned attention into a commodity.

Tim Ferris publishes the most important podcast he’s ever done in his life: My Healing Journey After Childhood Abuse

Some nuggets I found to be very thought-provoking:

• In Tara Brach’s book, Radical Acceptance, she states that there is only one question that really matters. And that is: what are you unwilling to feel?

• Anger, avoidance, disassociation, etc. - these are things that allowed you to survive. “Coping mechanisms that served a critical purpose at some point. If you disown/hate them, you will deal with the messy ramifications. But if you’re able to honor them and thank them for their service, and gently put them on a shelf, because you don’t need them right this minute - this can mitigate the huge overreaction, physiologically and emotionally, that you’re having to some small ripple in your life.”

• A tactic Jack Kornfield taught Tim: “go back to the terrified, unprotected younger version of yourself, and to give that younger version what he needed and craved at the time. Tell him everything’s going to be okay. Do this every day so that the long-term consequences of your trauma are dialed down.”

• How Tim views his trauma: “I’ve viewed it as work that connects me to humanity and the shared suffering that is life. And that I am training myself to be a sommelier of suffering, not to increase the intensity of suffering, but so that I can not view myself as this independent island of flaws, but rather this interconnected human who has the capacity to sympathize and empathize because no one has a monopoly on suffering.”

• On using physiology to change psychology: If you’re having a really strong bodily response to a perceived threat, and then mentally crafting a story to justify the physiology - it could be trauma hitting you before it hits the pre-frontal cortex. In that case, create space between the narrative you’re crafting (as it’s most likely overblown), and focus on calming yourself down physically.

• On the one thing he wants people to take away from the podcast: “I would like people to realize, and to believe, that no matter the trauma, they’re not alone. They’re never alone, and it is never hopeless. Because I’m speaking to you, as someone who came within a hair’s breadth of killing himself with utter conviction, no reservation, and it wasn’t necessary. There are tools.”

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I’m Patricia and have a full-time job but curate this newsletter in my free time as a labor of love.

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