mindfulness

AMA with Hannah Aline Taylor. Wednesday 2/4 at 4:00 PM CT

love, boundaries, and mistakes in relating, community, and peopling together (+ thank god love doesn’t look like you expect it to)

Productivity Systems vs Meaningful Aligned Work. This might be a false dichotomy.

But, every few months, I come across some new productivity idea and get mini obsessed by it. GTD. Anki cards. AI Assistants.

As far as I can tell, I don't have a cohesive system for work or anything. I keep all my tasks in a txt file. Most of my computer files live in my downloads folder or a dropbox sync folder. I have my own "internal" system that's taken bits and pieces from what I've learned.

Recently, I read this article, A receipt printer cured my procrastination

Basic idea is printing out your tasks with a receipt printer (very fast, very cheap, very small). Having it be physical and visible rather than stuck in a digital todo app.

Also saves the headache of manually writing these out on notecards/post-it notes.

I went ahead and bought a receipt printer off ebay. But I have a sneaky suspicion that I'll love this for a few weeks and then drop it entirely.

(also the concern that thermal receipt printers are toxic in daily frequent exposure but there's more expensive paper that's suppose to be neutral/healthy)

It feels like all these systems are modernist hacks to predict and control human behavior rather than trusting its natural eros towards what is meaningful.

On the other hand, meaningful work tied to my identity that's in direct connection to others/near environment, I don't need any system or task manager to do. It naturally flows and gets done.

Then again, there are just thigns that need to get done like paystubs and taxes that I don't have any eros towards so maybe there's a happy medium of systems for necessary but not interesting tasks and trusting natural interest for everything else?

If this platform is built on trust, then I vow to show up as I am — open, honest, and real. Will I fail this test or flourish? Let’s find out.

Can we live in the Now constantly? Integrating Martin Buber's "I and Thou" with Iain McGilchrist's "The Master and His Emissary", I come to the conclusion that we cannot constantly live in the Now. To do so would revert the insight that Iain McGilchrist has when he says that living from our left hemisphere all the time, we would be well fed but become somebody else's lunch in the meanwhile.

To constantly live in the Now, according to the differentiation of the "I-Thou" and the "I-It", would mean that we are in a constant flow state with everything, in dialogue with "You", but starving and incapable to navigate the world.

What do you think?

Martin Buber (translated from German):

It is impossible to live in the mere present; it would consume you if you did not take care to overcome it quickly and thoroughly. But it is possible to live in the mere past; indeed, it is only in the past that a life can be established. One need only fill each moment with experience and use, and it no longer burns.

And in all seriousness, truth, you: without It, man cannot live. But those who live with It alone are not human.

Can we live in the Now constantly? Integrating Martin Buber's "I and Thou" with Iain McGilchrist's "The Master and His Emissary", I come to the conclusion that we cannot constantly live in the Now. To do so would revert the insight that Iain McGilchrist has when he says that living from our left hemisphere all the time, we would be well fed but become somebody else's lunch in the meanwhile.

To constantly live in the Now, according to the differentiation of the "I-Thou" and the "I-It", would mean that we are in a constant flow state with everything, in dialogue with "You", but starving and incapable to navigate the world.

What do you think?

Martin Buber (translated from German):

It is impossible to live in the mere present; it would consume you if you did not take care to overcome it quickly and thoroughly. But it is possible to live in the mere past; indeed, it is only in the past that a life can be established. One need only fill each moment with experience and use, and it no longer burns.

And in all seriousness, truth, you: without It, man cannot live. But those who live with It alone are not human.

Relatefulness vs Circling. I've been discovering distinctions and felt-senses of Relatefulness that seem to differ from how I know Circling. My short catch phrase is: "If meditation is the art of being, and Circling is the art of being-with, then Relatefulness is the art of being-human-with."

I like this, it's short and sweet. I can't tell what Relatefulness really is vs what I'm making it and, given that I'm a founding member, it doesn't matter. I'm gonna bully these points.

Jane Goodall is in more Flows than she is in Surrendered Leadership. Helping behavior, care, needs, art, and the building of infracstructure are welcomed in Relatefulness. One thing I notice about Circling, if person A offers person B something, person A is (at least culturally) more likely to ask, "What's underneath it for you?", as if they're asking, "What's this cocaine cut with?" It's rarely believed in Circling if the underneath isn't negative. If the offering Circler says, "Care", then most Circlers assume a spiritual bypass and probably imagine being less sexually attractive (sarcasm). In Relatefulness I'm creating that, Person A offers Person B something, Person B, taking notes from Hannah Taylor, feels whether accepting feels like comfort and then accepts or declines accordingly. 

In Relatefulness we let the responsibility for shadow-hunting be with the one offering. It's a huge leap to believe that accepting something is bad because the offer had some shadow somewhere inside of it. It's actually a ridiculous leap. It's stupid. The shadow could just as easily be ameliorated by seeing its energy flow generatively or made worse by non-rational repetitive rejection.

Boom. Suck it. (I don't know who I'm angry at....myself.)

Last night as I was leading lab it felt amazing. I was watching them float in and out of chit chat. The thing that wasn't in and out was everything they were talking about was meaningful. There wasn't anyone there, besides a voice in my mind, that was tracking whether they were using speech patterns of immediacy, "Being here now, I feel like my balls haven't descended." They were just talking. I did not police it because it felt so fucking good. We're monkeys and we feel good. What I did do was use immediacy leaning language and speak it between people. I let people see the effect and never brought up them following. If it's good and it works then they'll follow at their aligned speed.

I stayed in slight vigilance as the thing in my brain that polices immediacy, or is on the lookout from being policed, slowly calmed down. It was beautiful.

In short, Relatefulness is more about being monkeys than monks, healthy than right, in alignment than understood.

Pass the bananas!

Can we live in the Now constantly? Integrating Martin Buber's "I and Thou" with Iain McGilchrist's "The Master and His Emissary", I come to the conclusion that we cannot constantly live in the Now. To do so would revert the insight that Iain McGilchrist has when he says that living from our left hemisphere all the time, we would be well fed but become somebody else's lunch in the meanwhile.

To constantly live in the Now, according to the differentiation of the "I-Thou" and the "I-It", would mean that we are in a constant flow state with everything, in dialogue with "You", but starving and incapable to navigate the world.

What do you think?

Martin Buber (translated from German):

It is impossible to live in the mere present; it would consume you if you did not take care to overcome it quickly and thoroughly. But it is possible to live in the mere past; indeed, it is only in the past that a life can be established. One need only fill each moment with experience and use, and it no longer burns.

And in all seriousness, truth, you: without It, man cannot live. But those who live with It alone are not human.

On the plethora of Therapeutic modalities.

There's a genre of book that's the therapy modality book. They're all the same. They go

I was a therapist and what I was doing wasn't working, and then I discovered <specific technique the book is advocating> and then it cured me and all my clients and now things are great and we just need to teach everybody this technique.

So many therapy books are like this. Focussing, the IFS book, the EFT book, to name a few. The various ACT books. Waking the Tiger.

And the specific technique is different from book to book. Radically different. And even contradictory.

So what's going on here? Apart from probably there's some book somewhere about how to write a therapy book, or some ghostwriter that's cranking these out?

If we take these stories as more or less true, how do we make sense of these seeming contradictions?

This is not a rhetorical question! I'm going to give you my best guess below, but please take a moment to think of your answer, and ideally post it in the comments for everyone to see. I am very much interested in other answers here.

Ok, my best guess (at least, the guess that I find most interesting):

What works is having a therapist who believes they are helping. It's like the placebo effect. If the doctor handing you a sugar pill is like "Yeah, idk, people told me this is helpful. lmk what you think", my guess is, you're not going to get much placebo effect out of that pill (actually they've done research and you do still get some but not as much iirc).

So when the therapist is out of school, they're doing what they were told works, but for a certain kind of mind, that doesn't give them confidence. So then they have to go on a big heroes journey, and come back with some technique, some approach, that for whatever reason they believe in.

Now they're back, and they believe it works, and low and behold, it does!

It's like Dumbo's magic feather.

"some technique, some approach, that for whatever reason they believe in."

So why do they believe in the technique they chose? Because they love to do it. Because, when they're doing it, they feel most like themselves, and they feel most connected with the person they're working with. Or they feel most connected with what they consider important, about a mind, about a heart, about a life.

And maybe this gives it some extra sauce too. Maybe this love of themselves, this intrinsic interest, radiates out, and reminds their clients that they too can love themselves, love life, be enthusiastic, and intrinsically interested.

Or maybe that last part is just what I have come to believe works ;)

Why I keep forgetting that exercise feels amazing. This could just as easily live in my journal, but in my favorite version of reality a lot of things get added in the comments, and this lives as a resource for everyone and for me the next time I forget that exercise feels amazing.

The culture I was aware of as a kid: 

• Athletes go to gyms. The only other people that go to gyms are vain people, and they only go because they care about having an impressive appearance.
• Exercise is hard and painful. If it's not kicking you're ass, you're lazy.
• I loved playing soccer all through childhood. When I started Junior High I tried out for the soccer team. I was the best player at tryouts- scored the most goals, saved the most goals, had the most steals. But I didn't make the team because I wasn't competitive enough. On the last day of tryouts I gave goals to girls who seemed like their self-esteem was getting battered by their failure to get a goal.

My initial influences in adulthood:

• In undergrad I was required to take dance class all 4 years. The dance teacher's job was to prepare us for Broadway dance auditions, which are usually "cattle calls" of hundreds of people auditioning for one spot. So you had to be the best, the sharpest, the fastest to learn the choreography, the fastest to get into position. These classes were the first time in my life I learned what "getting into shape" meant. He spent the entire first semester of freshman year teaching us what the names of our muscles were by spending an entire 90-minute session going ham on that muscle. Freshmen voice majors at Carnegie Mellon limped around campus and yelped trying to pick up their backpacks. I wasn't taught about warm ups, cool downs, or how to navigate muscle soreness. I was expected to be capable of at least two versions of the splits by the end of my first semester of college, so I spent hours doing homework in very uncomfortable body positions.
• In my thirties I worked with personal trainers three times. I didn't know this at the time, but I've since learned from a friend who is a health coach that most people come to a personal training session and give about 40% effort, so most trainers get in the habit of pushing and pushing them to harder things in the hopes the client gets to 75 or 80%. My trainers and I didn't know that because of my dance training I was showing up giving 110%. So they pushed me the way they pushed all of their clients. And I did everything in my power to be obedient to what they were telling me to do. It took me 8 years to realize that what I had been calling "pushing my edge" had actually been the cusp of a panic attack because my heart rate was way too high and I was pushing strength training to the point of risking injury.

New updates to my experiences and beliefs about exercise:

• Thanks largely to my health coach friend, a wise ex-boyfriend, and resources from Dr. Stacey Sims, I finally was able to believe them that not only doesn't exercise have to be painful, the cortisol, muscle soreness, etc. caused from pushing create more problems than the workouts solve. And when exercise sucks it's wildly de-motivating and unsustainable.
• I've learned through countless failed attempts and Dr. Sims that any workout plan that doesn't take my menstrual cycle into account is doomed from the start. I learned that in the days before my bleed my body takes all of the tissue-rebuilding ingredients away from things like muscle repair and diverts it all to building the uterine lining. So strength training during this time results in a week of relentless pain and soreness. I've learned that during my follicular phase I'm a literal superhero. Live it up while I can, but for god's sake do not set that as my new standard to build on top of because the cycle is going to loop back again. I've learned that women have about 30% the glycogen stores in their muscles as men, so keto and fasted workouts are a distaster. I literally need to have eaten carbs before workouts to have any legitamite fuel to work with.
• I've had fits and starts of working out, but then I'd start listening to some damn exercise podcast, fall into my old mindset of "pushing for gains," and the habit would collapse.

New intentional mindsets:

I'm a week into returning to exercise, and so far everything about it is wildly different than before. I consistently feel the tug back toward my old mindsets, but I'm practicing reminding myself of these things over and over and over.

• Do classes, but relinquish obedience. The classes are great for me because a very knowledgable person has crafted something great without my having to expend any mental energy at all. But the key is that I stay connected with my body and be always willing to disobey the instructor in favor of what my body needs.
• Start slow and easy. What I want most if for exercise to become a favorite part of my lifestyle for the rest of my life. I've been mostly going to "Restorative" classes that are passive yoga stretches in a structure designed to regulate the nervous system. Nothing's hard, nothing hurts, and I leave feeling wonderful. This is SO effective at making me look forward to getting in the car and driving to the gym the next day.
• Pride can be a great energy source. It does seem to be part of my true nature that I would like other people in the class to be impressed with me. I want to be impressed with me. I'm intentionally relinquishing the lifelong energy source of "I want to get thin and hot" and replacing it with "I wanna leave here feeling impressed with myself."
• Two mindsets I picked up from Arun, "I like being a regular" and "third place," had me choose Austin Bouldering Project as my gym. It's just fucking cool, and very attractive people are everywhere. I like the thought of becoming a regular there. A lot. People knowing my name, new friendships, maybe even finding a romantic partner who likes going to the same gym together. And third place is based on home being the first place and work being the second place. I love the midset of choosing ABP as my third place. I bring my laptop and co-work upstairs after working out. I chill in the sauna.

These are all such different mindset orientations than I've ever had before, and I hope writing this helps me remember that when I do it wisely from the right mindsets, exercise and going to the gym feels friggin amazing.

What are your secret internal moves, your cues? I'm eternally curious about how we navigate our worlds, and the tricks, jumps, hops, and skips we use.

Sports coaches have cues for all kinds of things. "Follow through" in golf, tennis, and throwing generally. "Chest up, hips back, knees out" for a back squat. "Light feet" or "quick feet" for agility training. 

These cues aren't attempting to be accurate descriptions of the world from a physics point of view. They're an attitude/orientation that helps a human do a thing a little better.

My contention: we each are an entire compendium of little skill orientations that we use all the time. But because they're second nature and interior, they're funcionally invisible and don't often get shared or talked about.

Wouldn't it be neat if we talked about them?

Some examples from me:

• "Can I do this with less effort?" Physically, this applies to anything. Sitting, pooping, walking, standing, reading. It's an immediate invitation into my body and more relaxation. There is often habitual extraneous muscular/mental/emotional tension in the system.
• If I'm feeling small, stuck, contracted, tense – it can often help to "get as big as the room". It's not something to really think about or analyze too much. Just… become as big as the room. When I do so, there's often more space for the knotted stuff to just be and/or move. This also works great even when things are good.
• I don't have a convenient handle for this one, but it's something like: "fall into wonder as you observe (from within) your body just doing simple things". Doing the dishes or making coffee could be a chore – or I can switch into looking through this lens and just be astonished at how intricate and skillful the dance of it all is. There's no way I could thinkmanage it all, and yet somehow it all happens anyway.

So what are your cues? Nothing is too simple, silly, or obvious.

How we collude with social media to hide our identity-choices. Why we let algorithms define us, and how to catch the choice before it happens

Collapsing our self-identity around our reactions

On social media I start to define myself by what I do with my attention.

I read “Elon said what about Trump’s bill?!” and I’m suddenly defining myself by a narrow ideology, what groups I belong and exclude myself from, and essentially what’s going to give me a shot of excitement—regardless of whether I endorse it as my more whole self.

I’m trying to point to the ego-collapse aspect of this well-known social media critique as a way to help us remain conscious as it happens. Essentially my self-identity wraps around the focus of awareness, rather than awareness itself. This is an analogous mistake to identifying my whole body with a single finger—my “self” includes my attention and my actions, and is indeed defined by them, but not exclusively (and not that much).

The unconscious choice of framing a self

This makes sense because this is how the platforms frame me, in order to sell me, in order to survive.

I don’t blame social media. I think framing a self is unavoidable for us mere mortals (when we’re out of flow, satori, oneness, etc). We have such an inborn sense of individual agency, we can’t help but project that onto the world, anthropomorphizing even volcanoes and tornados.

We tend not to pay attention to stuff that we take for granted, which includes these framings of a self. Most of us define the difference between “me” and “my environment” unconsciously, even though they demand each other and both arise in awareness. We don’t even realize we’re doing the framing or that its being done to us. It’s “the water we’re swimming in.” So it doesn’t feel like something we’re agreeing to, and therefore doesn’t feel like something we can change.

But we can! Doing a “subject-object move,” where we are able to see “who I am” as an “what I’m doing” in a new, more expansive subject of awareness.

Mixing up awareness and attention

I’m claiming that we humans feel our capacity to be aware as unlimited whether we know it or not; and we mistakenly extend this feeling to attention. This can account for some of why we always have more on our to-do lists than can be done; why we often feel surprised by our aging; etc. This conflation of awareness and attention means we’re often unaware of the real cost of being on these platforms and selling our attention.

I’m writing this out to try and understand how identity-formation and construct-awareness play in… here’s a construct I’m suddenly exploring: we collaborate with platforms to perpetuate the confusion we humans have between our experiential boundlessness of awareness and finite attention; the Divine and human. Platforms get to exploit this mix-up for profit and we get to remain ignorant about how much power we truly have to choose how we carve up the world with our distinction making, including our selves.

Blaming Big Tech keeps us tricarcerated

So with social media we commodified our limited attention, and then we mis-identify with that limited attention.

Yes, the economic model requires reducing consciousness to metrics and we Goodhart these.

Yes, if we blame Big Tech we never have to deal with a sense of responsibility and guilt for the self-frame choice we didn’t realize we made.

But we also don’t get a way out.

We end up “Tri-carcerated” as Bayo Akomolafe

talks about: seeking liberation through conventional frameworks (victimhood, blame, and external solutions) traps us further by obscuring our deeper complicity and relational entanglement with the issues we face.

Subject-Objecting identity as one way out

Lucky for us, we’re never actually stuck because we can’t ever commodify awareness. Something universal, infinite, and inexhaustible can’t be split into discrete units and bargained for. What’s infinity divided into smaller bits? Still infinity.

So anyway one way out for us individuals is to see the identity collapse mechanism as soon as possible, even after it happens. Usually it’s obvious in our reactions going against our preferences: “I’m so angry about this news item!” becomes “I’m treating my attention as if it were awareness. I’m probably scared of taking responsibility for this choice”

The intervention works regardless of awareness's actual nature as long as you agree that one can feel a sense of awareness being infinite, and misapply it. Which makes sense, because feeling infinite and finite at the same time can be a real 🤯 .

And luckily, every moment is fresh and offers this recognition as a possibility. Rather than identifying with whatever currently occupies the foreground, we can notice the awareness that it happens in. Not to bypass, or avoid; we are still our attention, but we are more. We take the power that was always ours to begin with.

What are your secret internal moves, your cues? I'm eternally curious about how we navigate our worlds, and the tricks, jumps, hops, and skips we use.

Sports coaches have cues for all kinds of things. "Follow through" in golf, tennis, and throwing generally. "Chest up, hips back, knees out" for a back squat. "Light feet" or "quick feet" for agility training. 

These cues aren't attempting to be accurate descriptions of the world from a physics point of view. They're an attitude/orientation that helps a human do a thing a little better.

My contention: we each are an entire compendium of little skill orientations that we use all the time. But because they're second nature and interior, they're funcionally invisible and don't often get shared or talked about.

Wouldn't it be neat if we talked about them?

Some examples from me:

• "Can I do this with less effort?" Physically, this applies to anything. Sitting, pooping, walking, standing, reading. It's an immediate invitation into my body and more relaxation. There is often habitual extraneous muscular/mental/emotional tension in the system.
• If I'm feeling small, stuck, contracted, tense – it can often help to "get as big as the room". It's not something to really think about or analyze too much. Just… become as big as the room. When I do so, there's often more space for the knotted stuff to just be and/or move. This also works great even when things are good.
• I don't have a convenient handle for this one, but it's something like: "fall into wonder as you observe (from within) your body just doing simple things". Doing the dishes or making coffee could be a chore – or I can switch into looking through this lens and just be astonished at how intricate and skillful the dance of it all is. There's no way I could thinkmanage it all, and yet somehow it all happens anyway.

So what are your cues? Nothing is too simple, silly, or obvious.