Nudges from Nature

Boy, have I been struggling lately. The world seems dark. Again. Loved ones are sick. Loved ones have died. Loved ones are anxious and depressed. Shit, I'm anxious and depressed. It's not like before though. It's nothing like before. Well, it's a little bit like before. Okay, maybe a lot like before. Almost the same as before, actually. What's different are two things: Tools, and Faith. Ah, man the tools. Phil Stutz (recently profiled in Jonah Hill's Stutz)  has some great ones. His book The Tools  covers them in greater detail than the movie, and his website describes them in practical detail. Sam Harris's Waking Up app is a direct, no-nonsense approach to meditation that is in some ways so bland and other ways so rich that it's suitable for just about anybody.  Headspace , of course, I owe to getting me started in meditation, largely due to it's capability to set up a 2-minute meditation -- about all I could handle when I first sought relief. I o

Meeting the twins is one of my earliest memories. I must have been five or six. It was at the Christmas Party my parents threw each year at our ranch style home in the Santa Clara Valley as the first layer of silicon was covering its orchards. The twins were fantastic. They were happy, smiling, and full of energy. They had curly heads of hair cropped to the length of their jawbones and they looked absolutely identical. I had never seen twins before and I was mesmerized. They were cute. Like, super attractive cute. As a child with excessive amounts of energy myself, these two were tailor made for me. I couldn't keep up. We'd run from one length of the house to the other. Again and again. Weaving between the cocktail- and hors d'oeuvres-carrying adults at dangerous speeds. They were like Thing 1 and Thing 2. Ripping around the house together, we ended up under the telephone desk which was like a little fort. Suddenly we were in another world. Our own, beautiful place away fro

I delivered some work recently, with ambitious objectives, and under tight deadline. I've been in the high tech industry for 25 years. I think it was some of the best, smartest, and insightful work I've ever done. Additionally, it was one of the most rewarding high pressure projects I've ever been on, and I've been on a lot. What made it so rewarding is how calm and composed I was compared to high-pressure instances of my past. While several factors contributed to this, I give the vast majority of credit to my meditation practice and the ability to acknowledge the intensity of emotions, yet not get caught up in them. The feedback I received, however, was not great. "A base hit, but not a home run" was the crux of it. Not terrible. Not even that bad. Maybe even acceptable or good.  But not at all the same self-assessment I concluded on my own. But I took it hard. I've been ruminating on it. Something I thought I'd been able to get past. But it's sti

One of the more surprising aspects to come from my meditation practice is the occasional insight into Bible verses. Like many observations during meditation, these insights seem to come out of nowhere. They rise up with the clarity of direct experience and often seem just as real and tangible as the apple falling from the tree that gave Newton the Law of Gravity. Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? When we shift our awareness to the body, peace can descend upon us. When we drop our consciousness from the mind to the body, there is a relief to be found from the tenacity of rumination. And the better we treat our bodies with fresh air, moderate exercise, and nutritional foods, the more it becomes apparent that by treating our bodies as sacred, as temples worthy of great respect, the more divine they become, and the more powerful and direct is our connection to a higher power.

No one? Not true. Find and acknowledge those that care for you. 

Writers write. If you want to be a writer, you must write. To become creative, you must ship the work ( thank you Seth ). Yes, quality matters. Absolutely. And I want to produce the best work I can. But I don't ever let my concerns about quality prevent me from posting my work. If I did, I might endlessly ruminate in hours of edits trying to achieve a state of quality that is at least elusive and perhaps non-existent. I've written hundreds of thousands of words the no one has ever read. I only recently started sharing my work publicly on a regular basis, and it has changed and only improved my capacity to think. Getting feedback on a written piece is very different than producing it and leaving it to collect virtual dust on a Google drive. Whether it's simply a view or a click-and-leave, whether it's a full-read or generates a follower, (or low-and-behold the Holy Grail of blogging, a feedback comment!), doesn't really matter in the big picture.  All tell me somethi

One of the suggested methods of meditation that I came across that felt the most strange when I tried it was what I call Laughing Meditation. The technique is super simple: laugh on purpose for one minute. Early in the beginnings of my entry into daily meditation, I would only meditate for two minutes. Like most drawn to meditation, I wasn't exactly in the best emotional or mental state when I began. Two minutes was about all I could muster, but even that short amount of time provided me with some relief. I often say my brain was a muscle that hadn't been un-flexed for seemingly forever. Two minutes was enough to give me a glimpse of what it might be like to relax that muscle. But it was deeper than that and I was struggling with some heavy and negative emotional states. Just laugh for one minute. It was the most awkward thing to try. Especially considering one minute was already fifty percent of my total capacity to formally practice at the time. It was awkward. It felt fake.