⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🚶🏻 A Method of Walking Meditation: Detailed instructions on a walking meditation practice you can use to can reconnect you with the present moment and cultivate mindfulness in your daily routine. Read it here.

🪦 Always Go To The Funeral: A powerful reflection on the importance of showing up for others during life’s hardest moments and how small gestures of support can create lasting meaning. Read it here.

📚 Vibes-Based Book Recommendations: Enter the style of book you’d like or a book you’ve already read and get a list of new ones to read. Try it here.

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🎇 Image of The Week

“Why is there a huge eye in the sky? Diamond dust. That is an informal term for small ice crystals that form in the air and flitter to the ground. Because these crystals are geometrically shaped, they can together reflect light from the Sun or Moon to your eyes in a systematic way, causing huge halos and unusual arcs to appear. And sometimes, together the result can seem like a giant eye looking right back at you. In the featured image taken in the Ore Mountains of the Czech Republic last week, a bright Moon rising through ice fog-filled air resulted in many of these magnificent sky illusions to be visible simultaneously. Besides Moon dogs, tangent arcs, halos, and a parselenic circle, light pillars above distant lights are visible on the far left, while Jupiter and Mars can be found just inside the bottom of the 22-degree halo.” Photo taken by Jaroslav Fous.

🔎🏆 Don't Shame Yourself Into Victory

I heard this quote from an interview recently and really resonated with the message. I've found this true in my own life.

Years ago when I became entrenched in the world of "personal growth" there was an undercurrent of shame and a lack of self-acceptance driving my desire to change.

This resulted in a very start-and-stop kind of dynamic. Progress was never maintained because I would eventually resent that judgmental part of me and rebel.

Now my growth feels like tending to a garden and planting seeds into fertile soil. In due time, they blossom.

But in the meantime, I'm not racing away from myself today to be that man of tomorrow. The garden is already rich in splendor. I can sit and watch the sunrise as the dew drops dance upon the leaves.

It is not a day demanding escape.

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👑 Fear of One’s Own Greatness

Heed these words from Abraham Maslow:

"We fear our highest possibilities...We are generally afraid to become that which we glimpse in our most perfect moments, under the most perfect conditions, under the conditions of greatest courage...In my own notes I had at first labeled this the "fear of one's own greatness", or the "evasion of one's destiny" or the "running away from one's own best talents" ...It is certainly true that many of us evade our constitutionally suggested vocations (call, destiny, task in life, mission)...If you deliberately plan to be less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you'll be deeply unhappy for the rest of your life. You will be evading your own capacities, your own possibilities.”

🤓 Learn This Word

Débrouillardise: Quality of someone who is resourceful and lives with the ability to creatively improvise; someone who can make do and solve problems without much

⏳ From The Archives

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

Acceptance is the Key That Unlocks Human Flourishing

By Steve Taylor

“One morning in August 2000, I was sitting in my flat in Singapore, meditating, enjoying a state of inner calm. But suddenly, for no apparent reason, a loud, high-pitched ringing noise started up in my ear. It was as if someone had pressed a button inside my head. Everyone gets ringing in their ears sometimes, of course, so at first, I wasn’t concerned.

But this ringing didn’t go away.

And it seemed to get worse — after a few days, it got louder and developed an awful screeching overtone. I found it impossible to meditate, and difficult to sleep.

In fact, I was disturbed by the noise almost all the time. It was so loud that I was always conscious of it unless there was very loud background noise.

I gradually realized that the noise wasn’t going to leave me.

I realized that I had tinnitus.

Perhaps it was the result of playing loud music in rock bands for several years when I was younger, or perhaps it was related to an episode of bronchitis I’d had shortly before. The worst thing was that I could never escape the noise — it was always with me, 24 hours a day. I used to love silence, to just sit or lie down and listen to the stillness, so it was depressing to think that for me silence was gone forever. I went to see a specialist, who told me that I was partially deaf in my ear due to the tinnitus and that there was no chance of a cure — it was something I’d just have to get used to.

I tried to mask the noise — the specialist gave me a ‘white noise’ generating device to put in my ear, and at night I went to sleep with the radio tuned between stations. But that wasn’t fair on my wife – the noise of the radio made it difficult for her to sleep. Eventually, I said to myself, ‘This is ridiculous — the noise isn’t going to go away, so I’ll have to try to accept it.’

One night I decided to face up to the noise, and not switch the radio on. And to my surprise, it wasn’t so difficult. Imagine there’s a person who you think of as an enemy and are afraid to face — but once you do face them, you find that they’re not so objectionable after all. I managed to get to sleep quite easily, and the next night it was even easier. I found that I was less affected by the noise during the day as well. I even found I could meditate without background noise.

I still hear the tinnitus now — it’s screeching in my ear as I write this, but it doesn’t affect me. It’s just there, in a neutral, non-bothering way.”

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