⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

👀 The Problem of What Others Think: Why our obsession with others' opinions holds us back from living fully. Read it here.

🙂 The Depth of a Moment: A beautiful reminder on the source of happiness from Ram Dass. Watch it here.

🎯 Attention is an Art Form: On cultivating silence for a specific kind of receptivity. Read it here.

💌 Want More? Down The Rabbit Hole readers also enjoy these awesome (and completely free!) newsletters. Explore

🎇 Image of The Week

Lake Leitisvatn, also called Sørvágsvatn, is a stunning lake on Vágar Island in the Faroe Islands. Known as the "Floating Lake" or "Lake Above the Ocean", it creates an optical illusion when viewed from the Trælanípa Cliff, appearing to hover above the sea. The hike to the lake from the nearby village of Miðvágur takes about an hour on a mostly easy trail, leading to the spectacular Bøsdalafossur waterfall, which flows into the Atlantic Ocean. This unique landscape offers an unforgettable experience year-round, making it a top attraction for visitors to the Faroe Islands.

📏 You Are Immeasurable

The tendency to compare is a common one.

We examine our ability in a particular arena and see how we measure up against the competition.

We then do that across a variety of domains.

How do my looks measure up? How does my athleticism measure up? How does my health measure up? How does my weight measure up? How does my bank account measure up? How does my intelligence measure up?

I could go on and on but you get the point.

We often run these calculations unconsciously.

And it adds up to a negative number because we fixate on the ways we don't measure up.

Rather than the progress we've made and the capacity we've built, we see the ways we're still deficient. The ways others are ahead.

But this isn't even about viewing your measurements more positively.

It's about realizing that, in your totality, you are immeasurable.

That's because you can't measure something that is completely unique.

In your totality, you are a category of one.

A category of one, by definition, cannot be compared.

So don't be fooled into measuring a bundle of thin slices of your being, assigning value to those dimensions, and adding them up into your worth.

Your worth is incalculable.

You are immeasurable.

You are unique.

💌 Want More Reads Like This?

Down The Rabbit Hole readers also enjoy these awesome (and completely free!) newsletters like:

• 1-Minute Power Moves: Go from distracted to focused in a minute.

• Sol: Boost your emotional well-being

• Movie Brief: A weekly deep dive into the world's best films.

Just by picking a couple that aligns with your interests, you help me cover costs and keep this newsletter free. Thank you for the support!

🤫 The Secret & Sacred are Sisters

Enjoy this sentiment from John O’Donohue:

“One of the lovely things about human solitude is that it's so unsolitary - if you like - that deep human solitude is a place of great affinity and a place of great kinship. So when you come into your solitude you're actually coming in to your secret belonging with yourself and with everything that is. The irony is that sometimes when you go frenetically outside yourself you're actually going into exile. But when you come patiently and silently back home to yourself then you're coming into unity and you're coming into belonging. No one can give you that sense of the eternity and depth that hides in your solitude but yourself. 

This is one of the lonely things about individuality - that no one can get in to your inner world. That you alone are the custodian of the world that you carry around within yourself. That no one else can see the world the way that you see it and no one else can feel your life the way that you actually feel it. So on a deep way it's impossible always to compare two people with each other because they stand on such different ground. In a way when you compare yourself to others you're always in falsity. That's why one of the great tensions in any life that is awakened or spiritual is to find the rhythm of its own language and perception and belonging. Because sometimes if you try to view yourself through the lenses that others offer you all you will see are great distortions and your own light and beauty will become terribly blurred and awkward and ugly. 

Your sense of your own inner beauty has to be a very private kind of thing. I feel that the secret and the sacred are sisters and that one of the reasons why there's such a loss of the sacred in our times is that our respect for the secret has completely vanished. Our modern technology of information, computers, and all the rest of that world is one of the greatest destroyers of privacy. We need to protect that which is reserved and deep within us - that's why there's such a hunger in modern life for the language of the soul.”

🤓 Learn This Word

Offing: The deep, distant stretch of the ocean that is still visible from the land; the foreseeable future

⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked link from a previous edition of 🌀🐇

20 Beginner Meditation Tips to Deepen Your Practice and Calm the Waters of Your Mind

The most important habit I’ve formed in the last 10 years of forming habits is meditation. Hands down, bar none.

Meditation has helped me to form all my other habits. It’s helped me to become more peaceful, more focused, less worried about discomfort, more appreciative and attentive to everything in my life. I’m far from perfect, but it has helped me come a long way.

Probably most importantly, it has helped me understand my own mind. Before I started meditating, I never thought about what was going on inside my head — it would just happen, and I would follow its commands like an automaton. These days, all of that still happens, but more and more, I am aware of what’s going on. I can make a choice about whether to follow the commands. I understand myself better (not completely, but better), and that has given me increased flexibility and freedom.

Amazingly, it’s also one of the most simple habits to do — you can do it anywhere, any time, and it will always have immediate benefits.

So Why Meditate?

Why create a small daily meditation practice? There are countless reasons, but here are some of my favorites:

• It relieves stress and helps you to relax.

• When you practice mindfulness, you can carry it out to everyday life.

• Mindfulness helps you to savor life, change habits, live simply and slowly, be present in everything you do.

• Meditation has been shown to have mental benefits, such as improved focus, happiness, memory, self-control, academic performance and more.

• Some research on meditation has indicated that it may have other health benefits, including improved metabolism, heart rate, respiration, blood pressure and more.

So … I highly recommend this habit. And while I’m not saying it’s easy, you can start small and get better and better as you practice. Don’t expect to be good at first — that’s why it’s called “practice”!

20 Meditation Tips

These tips aren’t aimed at helping you to become an expert … they should help you get started and keep going. You don’t have to implement them all at once — try a few, come back to this article, try one or two more.

[Continue Reading]