⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

📈 Tracking your mental well-being: Sensive uses psychologically backed profiling techniques to help you gain insights into your mood over time and how to improve it.  Try it here. 

🛏 Non Sleep Deep Rest Protocol: Emerging data shows this practice can restore mental & physical vigor, dopamine levels & offset missed hours of sleep.  Listen here. 

💪 If Self-Discipline Feels Difficult, Then You’re Doing It Wrong: Why Pure Willpower Doesn't Work.  Read it here. 

🎇 Image of The Week

This is a work-in-progress  AI Poetry  Polaroid. Take a picture and it prints a poem instead of a photo. I love this idea and I'm excited to see what other new forms of creativity emerge through artificial intelligence tools.

❤️‍🔥 Shedding Shame

One of the greatest gifts someone can give another is loving them where they feel unlovable.

This liberates them from the burden of their shame and brings them into greater wholeness.

It takes a risk of revealing these parts of ourselves and they are easy to keep locked away. We should only do so to the people we trust.

When we take the leap and a loving "other" witnesses us where we feel undeserving and unworthy (without affirming it) we can begin to shed layers of self-judgment.

Then moving forward we can love ourselves in much the same way they modeled that love toward us.

🌻 Make The Ordinary Come Alive

I love this passageIt’s from William Martin's  The Parent’s Tao Te Ching. 

“Do not ask your children

to strive for extraordinary lives.

Such striving may seem admirable,

but it is a way of foolishness.

Help them instead to find the wonder

and the marvel of an ordinary life.

Show them the joy of tasting

tomatoes, apples and pears.

Show them how to cry

when pets and people die.

Show them the infinite pleasure

in the touch of a hand.

And make the ordinary come alive for them.

The extraordinary will take care of itself.”

🤓 Learn This Word

Cynefin: A welsh word that describes a place where a person or an animal feels it ought to live and belong; it is where nature around you feels right and welcoming.

⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked classic HighExistence article.

 The Paradox of Grief: 8 Gifts We Gain From Loss 

Heartbreak is how we mature; yet we use the word heartbreak as if it only occurs when things have gone wrong: an unrequited love, a shattered dream, a child lost before their time. Heartbreak, we hope, is something we hope we can avoid; something to guard against, a chasm to be carefully looked for and then walked around; the hope is to find a way to place our feet where the elemental forces of life will keep us in the manner to which we want to be accustomed and which will keep us from the losses that all other human beings have experienced without exception since the beginning of conscious time. But heartbreak may be the very essence of being human, of being on the journey from here to there, and of coming to care deeply for what we find along the way.” David Whyte

Loss and heartbreak are inexorable challenges that we all must face in our lives.

We all are eventually forced to let go, often before we’re ready to say goodbye.

This is commonly accompanied by excruciating pain and utter devastation. The loss causes us to lose our compass. Our sense of direction is compromised as our imagined future has dissolved before our eyes.

We’re all awaiting this kind of grief-stricken destruction. But this is not a case for despair.

For as challenging as loss and heartbreak can be, the grieving process can be the birthplace of profound gifts.

The paradox of grief is that it is simultaneously world-ending and life-enchanting.

We might not know it at the time, but our letting go is not just that.

Letting go is also grabbing on.

Grabbing on to an opportunity.

An opportunity to discover the gifts previously hidden from view by the world that had come before.

Our plans go up in smoke as the rug gets pulled out from under us.

We fall. But into what?

 [Continue Reading] 

🎬 Endnote

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