⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

✍🏼 Devote Yourself to the Cause of Your Life: What if your daily grind is destroying your soul? This writer shares his journey from meaningless corporate work to finding purpose as a writer, and challenges you to re-examine how you spend your time. Read it here.​

🧠 Change Your Brain w/ Neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Huberman: This mind-expanding conversation provides powerful tools anyone can use to transform their mindset and take charge of their mental fitness. Watch it here.​

🧘 Experience Deep Relaxation with NSDR (Yoga Nidra): This site provides a cool collection of free yoga nidra tracks to fall asleep faster, feel more energized and increase focus. Listen here.​

🎇 Image of The Week

Dive beneath the ocean's surface, and you might stumble upon nature's own mysterious art galleries: underwater crop circles. These intricate, geometric sand patterns, discovered off the coast of Japan, aren't the work of extraterrestrials but of small, industrious male pufferfish. Crafted meticulously using their fins, these marine masterpieces serve as both courtship displays to woo potential mates and as protective nurseries for their future offspring, showcasing nature's blend of beauty and function.

⭐️ Faded Gold Stars

As time unfolds and we mature into adulthood, it's easy to feel our efforts go unnoticed. The gold stars of childhood fade. Our gaze turns outward - toward distant goals, unfinished work.

Let's pause here. Just for a moment.

Your path is your own. Its twists and turns, known only to you. But you tread it with courage. You stumble, then rise again. You question, and learn.

Each day, you choose compassion. Each time you extend a hand. Each moment you try your best...

These simple acts of love uplift our weary world.

So take heart. Know you are seen. Keep going.

"You think you are alone, and as the years go by, if the stars are on your side, you may discover that you are at the center of a vast circle of invisible friends whom you will never get to know but who love you. And that is an immense reward."

🃏 The Sacred Fool

Enjoy this wisdom from the mind & heart of Bill Plotkin:

"Arrested personal growth serves industrial "growth". By suppressing the nature dimension of human development (through educational systems, social values, advertising, nature-eclipsing vocations and pastimes, city and suburb design, denatured medical and psychological practices, and other means), industrial growth society engenders an immature citizenry unable to imagine a life beyond consumerism and soul-suppressing jobs."

"Soul has been demoted to a new-age spiritual fantasy or a missionary's booty, and nature has been treated , at best, as a postcard or a vacation backdrop or, more commonly, as a hardware store or refuse heap. Too many of us lack intimacy with the natural world and with our souls, and consequently we are doing untold damage to both."

"In common parlance, “fool” and “sage” appear to be opposites, one connoting ignorance and the other wisdom. At their depths, however, both exhibit a non-attachment to form or outcome. The Sacred Fool acts from what often seems to be innocence, insanity, or lampoonery but is no less wise for it. We think of a Sage, in contrast, as strictly sober; but because she doesn’t strive and doesn’t seek positions of elected or hired leadership, the true Sage has neither investment in sobriety nor compulsion to comply with rules. The Sacred Fool dimension of our own psyches merges the innocence of the child and the wisdom of the elder. Both draw on the capacity to perceive simply and purely, to be fully present to the moment and to all things existing and happening within it. The Sacred Fool — in others or in ourselves — helps us grasp the big picture by poking fun at himself (and, in so doing, at all of us) or by making fun of us directly. He also might respond to our solemn questions and conceptions with perspectives that reject or reframe our most cherished assumptions."

❤️‍🔥 The Path To Self Respect

By Eric Brown

Here’s a not-so-secret secret: there is only one way to cultivate self-respect.

The deep respect that lets you smile at yourself in the mirror and feel it. The respect that protects your boundaries when they’re violated. The respect that lets you lie peacefully on your deathbed, in alignment with yourself.

It’s a respect that can’t be shaken, one that doesn’t crumble after a single shitty Instagram comment or backhanded compliment.

There is only one way to get there: self-respect is developed when your thoughts, words, and actions are consistent.

In other words: unshakeable self-respect comes from uncompromising integrity.

To say what you mean and mean what you say. To embody your ideals and be able to take your own advice. And just like focus or strength, you can train integrity.

This integrity training—the foundation of enduring self-respect—is just one of the 4 daily disciplines included in the Warrior100 – alongside physical fitness, meditation practice, and contemplative study.

It is the foundation that deep self-respect, core confidence, and personal power are built upon. We begin September 1st. Join us for 100 days of beautiful, powerful, life-changing practice.

🤓 Learn This Word

Praestigium: that latin word that our english word "prestige" comes from that describes a delusion or illusion. Worth keeping in mind if you're compelled to pursue the adornments of status.

⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked classic HighExistence article.

​2 Worlds, 1 Brain: The Work of Iain McGilchrist​

The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist is a magnificent book. In it, he explores the differences between the left and right hemispheres of the brain in unprecedented depth, gradually revealing the pitfalls of a predominantly rational, linear approach to understanding the world.

Many people have heard the idea that the left hemisphere is logical and the right hemisphere is creative. This is a myth. You actually need both hemispheres to reason. You need both hemispheres to imagine.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t very real differences.

In a lecture delivered to the Royal Society of Arts, McGilchrist offers a more nuanced description of their respective functions:

“The world of the left hemisphere is dependent on denotative language and abstraction. It yields clarity and power to manipulate things that are known, fixed static, isolated, decontextualized, explicit, and general in nature but ultimately lifeless.
​
The right hemisphere, by contrast, yields a world of individual, changing, evolving, interconnected, implicit, incarnate, living beings within the context of the lived world but in the nature of things never fully graspable, never perfectly known.”

​[Continue Reading]​

🎬 Endnote

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Mike Slavin