⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🌊 Robin Wall Kimmerer on the Language of Animacy: A reflection on how language can either deepen our relationship with nature or distance us from it. Read it here.

🧠 How To Take Back Control Of Your Mind In 1 Day: This video covers how to replace consumption habits with meaningful practice and how to rewrite limiting beliefs so you can navigate through the difficult process of starting. Watch it here.

🧘 What We Think We Are Is Mostly Just Tension: Reflections on a recent Jhana retreat. Read it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

This photo was taken by Nathan Myhrvold. There is something deeply disorienting about seeing a snowflake this clearly. Not because it becomes unfamiliar, but because it reveals how little we ever really see of what surrounds us. Here, a passing fragment of winter appears almost monumental, full of structure, balance, and impossibly fine detail. The image makes visible a kind of hidden extravagance in the world, the lavishness with which reality is made even at its smallest scales. What usually registers as atmosphere becomes, for a moment, a singular and astonishing thing.

📝 Notes From The Road

Some of my scattered notes you might find meaningful:

Seeking a grand purpose can sometimes block you from experiencing the small purpose in front of you already inviting you to act. An accumulation of small purposes leads to grand purpose. Sometimes people wait to find grand purpose but never do because they never sowed the seeds of small purpose that allow it to bloom.

The recognition of innocence is the antidote to dehumanization. Remember your enemy was born a baby.

Misfortune that cultivates character becomes good fortune.

People tend to blindspot their brilliance. We’re so close to our gifts that they can be difficult to see. This causes people to discount their value as they focus too much on their shortcomings.

Today is tomorrow's nostalgia. Can you find fondness for this moment before it has passed?

🕊️ The Peace of Wild Things

Savors these words from Wendell Berry:

🤓 Learn This Word

Waldeinsamkeit: A German word that refers to the feeling one has while being alone in the woods, usually a sublime or spiritual one.

🕸️ From Around The Web

Polyvagal Theory is Dead. Now What?

“Polyvagal Theory has been the darling of body-mind practitioners in recent years, being taught in everything from yoga teacher trainings to psychology graduate programs—especially those focused on trauma informed care.

However, a recent paper authored by thirty-nine of the world’s leading experts on autonomic nervous system control, physiology, anatomy and evolution of the vagus nerve just dropped a nuclear bomb into the middle of this theory.

Their assessment?

It’s not ambiguous. These experts aren’t debating controversial details or offering suggestions for nitpicky refinement. The conclusion was unanimous.

Polyvagal Theory is untenable.

Meaning: it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny—and that’s important. (More on why below.)

If you’re a practitioner who has built any part of your work around PVT, this probably lands somewhere between disorienting and devastating.

I know, because I’m one of you.”

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