⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🔥 Stoking The Fire of Aliveness: A 37-Second Visual Meditation featuring the words of Ram Dass. Watch it here.

🤫 The Silent Mind: This 1959 Video Lecture from Alan Watts explores the differences between effortless perception and habitual thinking. Watch it here.

💼 What to do with your life: Identifying personal values in pursuit of career that will fulfill you. Read it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

Residents of coastal areas in Japan were recently treated to a breathtaking natural light show. The prospect of alien activity was raised when vertical pillars of bluish-white light appeared to be beaming down from the night sky. But there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for these mysterious light beams: they were "light pillars," also known as "Isaribi Kochu," an atmospheric optical phenomenon brought on by light from sources such as fishing boats refracting through suspended ice crystals in the chilly air. Strong light sources close to the ground, extremely cold air temperatures that cause ice crystals to develop and stay suspended, and flat, horizontally oriented ice crystals that refract light into vertical pillars are the three conditions that lead to the formation of light pillars.

🧂Shake It Up

This is an invitation to inject a bit of novelty into your life.

Shake things up.

I'm not suggesting you make sweeping changes.

(Although maybe that is on the menu, as well).

I'm offering a nudge to give yourself a venue to explore something new and unusual.

It's incredibly easy to get into grooves and very often these patterns aren't the most beneficial for us.

They are just our default mode we've become accustomed to.

So pick a little adventure for yourself and just go for it.

Go for a run. Just put on your shoes and run out the door.

Go to a restaurant you've never been to before and tell them to give you the best items on the menu.

Dance in the rain.

SOMETHING.

Make it weird and unpredictable.

And then notice how it makes you feel.

There are tons of opportunities every single day to immerse ourselves in something new and unique. Something that makes us feel more alive and engaged.

We just don't act on them.

Choose one.

Then do it.

🖼️ You Never Left The Frame

Ponder this passage from the anonymous writer Missing Vibrance:

“One of the greatest tragedies in life is that you will always be loved more than you will ever know. Someone in class finds your presence inviting and warm, even if you’ve only ever exchanged a few words with them—maybe none at all. Someone on the street loves your smile and it gets them down the next few streets. Someone you used to be friends with still wishes to fondly call your name. Someone you used to be friends with five years ago would give anything to be in the same room as you today. Someone who regularly comes into work is disappointed when you aren’t there to brighten their day. Someone missed you today. Someone noticed you were gone. Someone loves you when you’re there; someone loves you when you’re nowhere to be found at all. You think you have always disappeared when you’re no longer in the picture, but you’ve never left the frame.”

🤓 Learn This Word

Seatherny: The serenity one feels when listening to the chirping of birds.

⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked classic HighExistence article.

10 Healing and Empowering Spiritual Practices Learned on a Pilgrimage Through Spain

By Eric Brown

In the Beginning…

Early human life was difficult. Treacherous. We didn’t have germ theory, didn’t understand proper sanitation, and couldn’t combat the darkness when night fell.

For thousands of years, this state of existence continued in the dark, until the invention of fire. Once we controlled fire, we could cook, coordinate, and converse after dark. Our control of fire led to the creation of candles, and humans could now control when their surroundings were dark.

The problem of the dark plagued humanity for ages. However, much like the dark and shadows when a beam of light falls on them, the problem of darkness disappeared with the invention of flame and candles.

Oftentimes it is not the problem that gets in your way, but the lack of the appropriate tool to address the problem.

Read that again. The problem is not the real problem, the problem is that you do not have the right tools to address the problem.

[Continue Reading]

🎬 Endnote

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With Wonder,

Mike Slavin