โก๏ธ Enlightening Bolts
Can't miss gems of the weird and wonderful
๐ PrinciplesYou: A free 10-Minute Assessment to gain self-awareness and make better decisions. Take it here.โ
๐ช Adult Development: An illuminating illustrated slideshow about adult human stages of growth. See it here.โ
๐ Explore.org: Tune in to live streams of animals from all over the world. Watch here.โ
๐ Psychedelic Support Line: The Fireside Project provides free peer support to help people process difficult psychedelic experiences. Learn more here.โ
๐ง Atlas: Enneagram: An album by Sleeping At Last with a song for each of the enneagram personality types. Listen here.โ
๐ Image of The Week
Christopher Matthews captured this stunning moment with both the eruption of the Geldingadalur volcano and the Aurora Borealis in view. The skies cleared just before midnight allowing him to snap this shot on his birthday.
โ ๏ธ Watch The Clouds
Carve out some time to find a patch of grass and lean up against a tree.
Leave your phone behind. All the messages and notifications will be there when you return.
Let your mind wander as you immerse yourself in the original screensaver: the sky.
Watch the clouds pass on by.
Notice the different shapes they can take.
Notice the various meanings you can derive from these temporary forms.
A dragon. A flower. An elephant.
Notice the moments where the clouds look just like balls of cotton and nothing more.
Our lives can sometimes feel like this.
We see crystalized meaning. Things make sense.
Other times we see pure potential or nothing at all. Something that has yet to take a discernable form.
Sometimes events in our lives won't make sense until some time has passed.
It's okay to be a in state of not-knowing.
Even if things seem ominous, the dark storm clouds eventually pass on through.
All of life moves in seasons and cycles.
There is so much wisdom in the phrase "This too shall pass."
It's a reminder to appreciate our blessings while we have them.
It's a flame of hope that all suffering is temporary.
And sometimes watching the clouds is enough to gain a seed of this perspective.
To put down our chronic worries and petty grievances.
To discover the beauty that is here and now.
๐ Beyond Ourselves
Oliver Sacks on finding meaning and rising above our circumstances:
โTo live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or, at least, the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology, or in states of mind that allow us to travel to other worlds, to rise above our immediate surroundings.
We may seek, too, a relaxing of inhibitions that makes it easier to bond with each other, or transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear. We seek a holiday from our inner and outer restrictions, a more intense sense of the here and now, the beauty and value of the world we live in.โ
๐ค Learn This Word
Keyframe: From the dictionary of obscure sorrows "a moment that seemed innocuous at the time but ended up marking a diversion into a strange new era of your lifeโset in motion not by a series of jolting epiphanies but by tiny imperceptible differences between one ordinary day and the next, until entire years of your memory can be compressed into a handful of indelible imagesโwhich prevents you from rewinding the past, but allows you to move forward without endless buffering."
๐ฉ Inbox Inspiration
(We tried sharing this a couple of weeks ago but the link was broken so we wanted to make sure you saw it today!)
Enjoying our newsletter and want more goodness in your inbox? Check out our friends at The Daily Coach. They offer powerful insights to help you tackle life's challenges and become a better leader. It will serve as inspiration in your inbox every day. To see recent issues and sign up, click here.โ
โณ From The Archives
A hand-picked classic HighExistence article
โHow to Change Your Life: An Epic, 5,000-Word Guide to Getting What You Wantโ
Everybody talks about it. Nobody does it.
If Iโve learned anything by my age, itโs that most of the world, myself included, is composed of talkers, not doers.
There are very few exceptions to this rule. The good news is, you can be a doer if you want.
The ability to act is not something youโre born with. Change is a skill you can learnโas long as you have the guts to actually do it.
Iโve changed myself a lot, but itโs not because Iโm special. I just created special circumstances. Whatever you want is usually easier to get than you think, as long as you are willing to adapt and do what is necessary.
Now, most posts of this nature will give you little tips, maybe even 100 tips, in the hope that youโll be impressed by how large the list is and just tweet the hell out of it. They do this because it works (my last one is currently getting 40,000 visits a day from Stumbleupon actually), but writing of that type also usually appeals to those who want simple answers, and thatโs not what Iโm interested in right now.
So Iโve decided to make this post ridiculously long instead. It weighs in at almost 5,000 words. You may want to go make some coffee.
โ[Keep Reading]โ
๐ฌ Endnote
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