⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

📙 A Classic Alan Watts Book Summary: The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. Read it here.

🚪The Middle Passage: A Jungian Field Guide to Finding Meaning and Transformation in Midlife. Read it here.

🚫 Negative Capability: How To Embrace Intellectual Uncertainty. Read it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

“For the creatively minded, snow represents a giant blank canvas for art. But often, it's limited to snowmen or other snow sculptures. Outdoor enthusiast and cartographer Simon Beck had a different idea, and over the course of a decade he has carved a path for himself (literally) in the snow art world. He creates massive land art by walking across soccer ball-sized fields covered in untouched snow. Combined with light and shadow, his geometric designs can only be fully appreciated when viewed from above.” Read more here.

👁 The Sage and The Child

We live in a world that constantly bombards us with messages about how we're not enough.

It's easy to fall into constant comparison and feel bad about ourselves.

We're drowning in social media posts with people showing off to gain "clout" and heighten their status.

There's an inspirational quote that floats around the internet that I quite like:

"Don't compare your behind-the-scenes to someone else's highlight reel."

There is so much that goes unsaid online, so much hidden behind the curtain.

So it's important to clarify: your struggles and challenges don't make you unworthy.

You are enough as you are.

That does not mean you can't become better.

And it does not mean that becoming better isn't worthwhile.

It simply reframes how you fuel the pursuit of your betterment.

I think about it like a relationship between two parts within you.

The inner child and the wise sage.

The innocence of the inner child is susceptible to the venomous messages from mass media and surrounding culture.

The wise sage protects and fortifies the child against these influences.

A lost job, failed relationship, or other crash-and-burn event can send a person spiraling into shame and self-criticism.

These are moments where the child is most vulnerable and where a well-developed wise sage is most beneficial.

By recognizing an unshakeable core worthiness, the child can find an inner stability that transcends circumstance and thus navigate through the chaos.

The sage can be viewed as an ideal parental figure that has perfected the art of nurturing guidance.

The keyword is ideal.

A mother and father looking to their newborn experience a profound love.

Of course, over time, our parents' issues can distort the purity of that love.

They are only human after all.

But many people have internalized looking inward through their parents eyes.

This comes with a lot of baggage that the parents unconsciously implanted.

It can come with a long accounting of wrongs and insufficiencies.

Many of these things are a reflection of their own under-developed inner sage. It communicates that the child within them is under attack.

It can lead people to develop a drill sergeant to relate to their inner child replacing the wisdom of the sage with control and coercion.

Even though it might be effective fuel for accomplishment, this sort of internal tyranny inevitably breeds resentment, bitterness, and burnout.

This is true both in your relationship with yourself and with others.

The sage sees the drill sergeant as an outgrowth of the child's fear.

It's a strategy to find that feeling of "enoughness."

Instead of attacking the drill sergeant, the sage sees its childish nature and helps iron out the flaws in its perception.

This is because the sage is the embodiment of the highest representation of love you can imagine.

So rather than loving yourself as your parents did, you love yourself as they would if they were capable of loving without distortion.

We'll often fail to love ourselves this deeply.

But making the effort affords us an abundance of sustainable fuel.

It endows us with a degree of "soul force" that we can bring to the world to make it a more beautiful place.

The relationship we have to ourselves is crucial.

The wise sage and the inner child are just colorful ways of illustrating this dynamic.

It's a reminder that we don't have to relate to ourselves as others have.

We can strive toward new heights of internal encouragement and kindness.

So much that it spills out over our edges, flooding the world around us.

From one sage to another...

From one child to another...

You're precious. You're unique. You're capable.

You have something significant to offer this world.

Don't give up.

🍂 Rediscovering Enchantment

Enjoy these poignant words from author Katherine May:

“Enchantment came so easily to me as a child, but I wrongly thought it was small, parochial, a shameful thing to be put away in the rush towards adulthood.

Now I wonder how I can find it again. It turns out that it had nothing to do with beauty after all-not in any grand objective sense. I think instead that when I was young, it came from a deep engagement with the world around me, the particular quality of experience that accompanies close attention, the sense of contact that emerges from noticing. I worked hard to suppress all those things. I thought it was what I had to do in order to grow up. It took years of work, years of careful forgetting. I never realised what I was losing.

But enchantment cannot be destroyed.

It waits patiently for us to remember that we need it. And now when I start to look for it, there it is: pale, intermittent, waiting patiently for my return. The sudden catch of sunlight behind stained glass. The glint of gold in the silt of a stream.The words that whisper through the leaves.”

🤓 Learn This Word

Nemawashi refers to an informal Japanese business process of laying the foundation for some proposed change or project by talking to the people concerned and gathering support and feedback before a formal announcement. It is considered an important element in any major change in the Japanese business environment before any formal steps are taken. Successful nemawashi enables changes to be carried out with the consent of all sides, avoiding embarrassment.

Nemawashi literally translates as "turning the roots", from ne (根, "root") and mawasu (回す, "to turn something, to put something around something else"). Its original meaning was literal: in preparation for transplanting a tree, one would carefully dig around a tree some time before transplanting, and trim the roots to encourage the growth of smaller roots that will help the tree become established in its new location.

⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked classic HighExistence article.

Conquer FOMO Forever: Embracing the Joy of Missing Out

It’s Friday night. You’re at a friends house, doing nothing in particular. It’s enjoyable, but standard. Routine. Maybe it was getting cut off while driving on the way here that put a damper on your mood.

Either way, it’s a solid 6.

Taking a break from Mario Party, you take a longer-than-socially-acceptable cruise through Instagram — and notice a post shared by one of your other friends. They’re out at a club. Seems like a great atmosphere. That song sounded awesome. She was hot.

They’re probably having a better time than I am. You think.

Did I make the right decision? I really wanted to see my friend. I only have 2 nights a week to really have fun, I have to work the others. That’s not a lot of time, my time needs to be spent well. Was this a good idea? I should’ve gone with them…

FOMO.

We’ve all had some experience like the above.

Stuck in a pity-party or relentless indecision because we have a deep-seated fear of missing out. This gnawing, empty feeling in our stomachs causes us to second-guess every decision, and commit to nothing until the last minute — to make sure that nothing better pops up.

FOMO drives a large part of our social lives. It causes us mild, persistent anxiety, and it can detrimentally impact the quality of your daily experience and social relationships.

Does it have to be this way?

Do we have to live with this low-level anxiety that follows us around like our shadow?

What would the opposite of this look like?

JOMO. The Joy Of Missing Out.

It might seem counter-intuitive at first. How can you be happy to be missing out? Is that possible? Are you somehow wrong or flawed to feel this way?

​[Continue Reading]

🎬 Endnote

I hope you enjoyed this issue of Down The Rabbit Hole. Feel free to reply and tell me what you think.

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With Wonder,

Mike Slavin