⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

⏳ Why You Are Not Living in the Present: Are you unknowingly stuck in your head and missing out on life? Discover the subtle forces pulling you away from the now and how to reclaim your presence. Read it here.

🪦 The Life of Death: A 2D animation by Martha Onderstijn about how Death fell in love with Life. Watch it here.

🎅 Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy Exist: Jonathan Pageau explains how beings that are not concrete and measurable, can nonetheless exist. Watch it here.

📩 Like newsletters? Down The Rabbit Hole readers also enjoy these awesome (and completely free!) newsletters. Explore

🎇 Image of The Week

“A Brocken spectre is the magnified (and apparently enormous) shadow of an observer cast in mid air upon any type of cloud opposite a strong light source. The figure's head can be surrounded by a bright area called Heiligenschein, or halo-like rings of rainbow-coloured light forming a glory, which appear opposite the Sun's direction when uniformly sized water droplets in clouds refract and backscatter sunlight. The phenomenon can appear on any misty mountainside, cloud bank, or be seen from an aircraft, but the frequent fogs and low-altitude accessibility of the Brocken, the highest peak of the Harz Mountains in Germany, have created a local legend from which the phenomenon draws its name. The Brocken spectre was observed and described by Johann Silberschlag in 1780, and has often been recorded in literature about the region.” Learn more.

 🦸 Beyond Heroic

The hero’s journey is not the only way to look at the unfolding story of your life.

Yes, it's useful to view yourself as the main character in a story to experience a greater depth of meaning. I describe this in my article on why your life matters. But this is clearly not the only vantage point from which to view the multidimensional experience of life. Becoming overly attached to viewing yourself as the center of the show is a recipe for narcissistic preoccupation and self-absorption.

Yes you ARE a main character but everyone else is too. Everyone is living out their own journeys. So just as they play a supporting role in your life, you do the same for them. And these roles are just as significant as the center of the story because without a supporting cast there is little room for movement and growth. Interactions advance the plot. Otherwise, there is no force sculpting the character into transformation.

So here is where we meet our first juncture in expanding beyond the hero's perspective. Viewed from inside the Hero's journey, you can investigate how you might serve the role of mentor for another budding hero. This can occur later in life as a wise sage or for someone who is treading similar territory where you have already traveled. You can use your experience from your own hero's journey to impart wisdom to someone else who is moving through an initiatory process. Here you serve as a catalyst and a step along the road. You may never know how their story ends and the significance of the role you played but that does not diminish the value of serving this role of stewardship. Seeds planted do not need to be seen as a mature tree by the one who sowed it to offer shade and sustenance to future generations.

And although Joseph Campbell called the hero's journey the monomyth, there are other structures that can offer us different roles that exist beyond the interactions of heroes, mentors, and villains.

It's important to highlight that no matter the lens from which you are viewing life, that it is just that: a lens. No story structure is vast enough to contain the complexity of being. The map is not the territory. Living life isn't the same as telling a story. If you're chronically reflecting on your life to measure your level of heroism it can diminish your quality of life by ripping you out of the present due to your preoccupation with some yet unfinished story.

The truth is we are all living through an amalgamation of different plots all unfolding in this interwoven tapestry called life. And they end when they are ready and sometimes they don't ever reach a satisfying conclusion. But that's okay. The value of stories isn't to form fit our lives into some predefined structure but to use their characters as inspiration to embody certain qualities during opportune moments. By allowing tales where heroes overcome adversity and defy impossible odds to become ingrained into our psyche, we can use their journeys as a template for behaviors and choices we wouldn't otherwise make.

With that said, heroic moments are not all that make up life. If you describe the heroic arcs from your own life you'll notice you must leave out an enormous amount of details. So much is left on the cutting room floor. You can live out the hero's journey step-by-step but every stage is interspersed with ordinary moments that would never make it into a feature film production. If we worship peak intensity and high drama at the expense of the moments that wouldn't make it in the script, we can start to disregard the mundane moments that fill so many of our days. These moments are not be discarded but cherished.

🙏 Admiration For My Species

An email Steve Jobs sent himself 13 months before he died:

“I grow little of the food I eat, and of the little I do grow I did not breed or perfect the seeds.

I do not make any of my own clothing.

I speak a language I did not invent or refine.

I did not discover the mathematics I use.

I am protected by freedoms and laws I did not conceive of or legislate, and do not enforce or adjudicate.

I am moved by music I did not create myself.

When I needed medical attention, I was helpless to help myself survive.

I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor, object oriented programming, or most of the technology I work with.

I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well being.

Sent from my iPad”

🤓 Learn This Word

Énouement: The bittersweetness of having arrived in the future, seeing how things turn out, but not being able to tell your past self.

⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked classic HighExistence article.

How I Stopped Feeling Inadequate by Comparing Myself to Others

By Vironika Tugaleva

I used to feel like I’d never be successful, like I’d never measure up to the accomplishments of the people around me.

Right after I first began coaching and speaking, I spent much of my daily life comparing myself to people I considered successful. And I never measured up.

I would go on website after website, feeling my heart sink as I wondered:

The shame was overwhelming, and so was the anxiety. After I had quit my day job, it became even worse. I had left my career of study – a field I had excelled in academically and professionally – to pursue a passion that left me feeling inadequate and insignificant.

I was too young, too inexperienced, too unguarded, too unqualified. I wasn’t slick enough, sexy enough, or well-dressed enough. I was just me. And, for a while there, that was a painful reality.

I fought these demons in my head secretly, as I tried to share a message of love. I fought with my constant sense of inadequacy as a coach, as an author, as a people helper.

Back then, I didn’t see that I was judging my work the same way I once judged my body. I thought I’d made huge leaps in my self-love journey. And I had. But I wasn’t done learning yet.

Close to a year ago, I had an epiphany. I was invited to come on television, my first ever appearance on TV, to talk about my story and The Love Mindset.  I wrote about my experiences, and you can read about them here.

For now, I will just summarize the story for you very simply: I was terrified, then I had an epiphany.

It was the kind of epiphany that felt good, but it didn’t hit me hard. Some epiphanies make your eyes light up, and you know that they’re changing your entire life. No, this wasn’t like that. This was the kind of epiphany that feels nice, but you don’t realize it’s life-changing until you look back and see that everything is different.

That epiphany was this:

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