⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

⏰ Why We Must Seize Leisurely Interludes From Work's Confines: Escape the unyielding grip of the 9-to-5 and discover the transformative power of leisurely interludes in a world obsessed with ceaseless productivity. Dive into this riveting exploration of how stepping back can propel us forward, redefining the contours of work, solitude, and life's little pauses. Read it here.

🎩 The Bridge Back To Magic: Embark on a thought-provoking expedition that challenges conventional wisdom and beckons a shift towards a more enlightened worldview. Through personal narratives and a blend of scientific and philosophical insights, this piece offers a riveting exploration of how embracing a leap of faith could be the bridge back to magic in our lives. Read it here.

🙌 The Practice of Friendship: Uncover a heartfelt exploration on forging genuine friendships and enriching existing ones, shared through personal experiences and reflections. This piece offers a gentle nudge towards cultivating a life filled with deeper connections and shared growth. Read it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

Daniel Biber, a photographer from Hilzingen, Germany, captured a mesmerizing photograph of a murmuration of starlings forming the shape of a giant bird. This remarkable moment was captured near Sant Pere Pescador in Catalonia, Spain on December 31, 2016, during a 10-second window. Biber had spent four days trying to capture the murmuration of starlings, observing the huge flocks on the Costa Brava, before he finally succeeded in capturing this one-in-a-million photograph. Interestingly, he didn't realize the unique formation he had captured until he later reviewed the photographs on his computer. He mentioned that while taking the pictures, he was intensely focused and only recognized the distinctive bird formation upon later inspection.

🦋 Wandering Into Wonders

"Orderly travel now means going at the maximum speed for safety from point to point, but most reachable points are increasingly cluttered with people and parked cars, and so less worth going to see, and for similar reasons it is ever more inconvenient to do business in the centers of our great cities. Real travel requires a maximum of unscheduled wandering, for there is no other way of discovering surprises and marvels, which, as I see it, is the only good reason for not staying at home. As already suggested, fast intercommunication between points is making all points the same point." 

This quote from Alan Watts reveals how our prioritization of speed and efficiency can strip the world of its magic. If we overvalue expediency, we might accidentally extinguish all opportunities for serendipity. 

Intentionally wandering can reignite our appetite for unlikely discovery and increase the likelihood we encounter synchronicity. You can do this using Randonautica, an app that will provide random coordinates for you to navigate towards depending on your location, or just do it the old-fashioned way: unplug from the screen and mosey around the hidden pockets of your neighborhood.

🙌Try It: Take yourself on a self-directed spontaneous walk or download Randonautica and see where it takes you.

🌎 Sacred Depth of Nature

Enjoy these words from biology professor Ursula Goodenough about the Sacred Depth of Nature:

“I have come to understand that the self, my self, is inherently sacred. By virtue of its own improbability, its own miracle, its own emergence. And so I lift up my head, and I bear my own witness, with affection and tenderness and respect and compassion. And in so doing, I sanctify myself with my own grace.”

“Perhaps we should all settle down and think about what’s good in the world and what we want to do here. If we find this planet and its history and its story to be sacred, let’s preserve and nourish it, and then we can go home at night and say whatever prayers we choose.”

“We nurture our children selflessly. But we also recognize them as our most tangible sources of renewal — for a child, the world is always new. Renewal has been a religious theme throughout the ages … All of us see in children — our own and all children — the hope and promise of what we humans can become. As the forbears of our children we are called to transmit to them a joyous and sustainable vision of their future — meaning that we are each called to develop such a vision.”

🤓 Learn This Word

Werifesteria: To wander longingly through the forest in search of mystery

⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked classic HighExistence article.

Spiritual Bypassing: How Spirituality Sabotaged My Growth

I first heard about spiritual bypassing on one of my favorite podcasts, The Duncan Trussell Family Hour.

For those of you that haven’t had the privilege of hearing Duncan orate, it’s kind of like listening to a raspy hybrid of Alan Watts and Jim Breuer — wise enough to capture your attention, with a certain stoned goofiness that keeps it all playful.

Duncan talks about spirituality in nearly all of his interviews — most guests will happily indulge him in doing so. Naturally, spirituality is a big reason why people tune in to the podcast. So it took me by surprise when he mentioned that spirituality, as a set of ideas and practices, could actually be self–sabotaging.

Spiritual bypassing, a term coined in the early 1980s by psychologist John Welwood, refers to the use of spiritual practices and beliefs to avoid dealing
 with uncomfortable feelings, unresolved wounds, and fundamental emotional and psychological needs. The concept was developed in the spirit of Chögyam Trungpa’s Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, which was one of the first attempts to name this spiritual distortion.

According to teacher and author Robert Augustus Masters, spiritual bypassing causes us to withdraw from ourselves and others, hiding behind a kind of spiritual veil of metaphysical beliefs and practices. He says it “not only distances us from our pain and difficult personal issues, but also from our own
 authentic spirituality, stranding us in a metaphysical limbo, a zone of
 exaggerated gentleness, niceness, and superficiality.”

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With Wonder,

Mike Slavin