personal development
Daily Alchemy: Can we make this controversy good?
11d ago“Where is the line between mentorship and indoctrination in Ray Hendricks's Men of Tempered Strength?”
Self-reliance
Self-reliance isn’t about being alone. It’s about not waiting for permission. I’ve learned to forage my own food, dig my own bait, grow things, fix things, figure things out — not because I had to, but because depending on yourself builds a kind of quiet confidence that nobody... The Open Question May 6: What keeps you sane? Hey y'all,
The week alone: Iran "ceasefire"? (and gas at $4.46), Pope and Trump at odds, AI doomers and accelerationists, is equity racism?... sometimes it feels like the the heartache is too great. What I want to explore together is what keeps you sane in the midst of all this upheaval? (assuming you are 😅)
So this week, "what keeps you sane?"
variations:- What "sanity" habits do you suspect aren't actually working, but you keep doing anyway? (btw, what's it actually giving you that you can't get any other way? And what's the thing underneath that you're not looking at?)
- How do you recover when you find yourself despairing?
- What's the gap between what you tell people you do for sanity and what you actually do?
What's yours? Personal, specific, better than 'profound'. Beyond "self-care" or "stress management" or answers we give in job interviews. My family does three things we're grateful at dinner.
Lots of love, and see (some of) you at 5p central today.
Jordan Myska Allen,
UpTrust CEOYour Map of Me Is Out of Date
On the quiet failure of fixed people-maps -- and whose job it is to fix them ---- Ken Wilber, whose maps of human development have shaped a generation of facilitators, coaches, and practitioners, is emphatic about one thing: the map is not the territory.... Introduce yourself (and say hi to others). What are you passionate about? Who do you love? What fires you up? What are some questions you don't know how to answer? What projects are you working on?
And if you like sharing the stuff like where are you from, and what do you do, and how many kids you have, we'd love to know that too!Hey, beautiful people! My name is Lee, and I'm from Seattle, WA... for now. I tend to move around here and there. I love deep conversations, and I'm passionate about helping people remember who they were before the world told them who to be.... Relational Healthcare and the Re-Emergence of Wholeness-Based Medicine by Dr. Brian Plante, N.D. .
- Abstract
- Western healthcare currently faces a crisis of worldview and delivery. Naturopathic medicine and Relatefulness both advance a wholeness-first paradigm, which addresses critical needs at the root-cause level of human suffering and disease. The synthesis of naturopathic medicine and Relatefulness practice (i.e., Relational Healthcare) represents a novel solution to the increasing fragmentation within the Western healthcare system and doctor-patient relationship. The return to health depends on remembering wholeness, and the wisdom and tools of naturopathic medicine support this best when they are coupled with the radical co-presencing of Relatefulness. As a clinical approach, this synthesis addresses patients’ need to see and know themselves, feel deeply connected to their doctor, and understand the homeodynamic processes of their bodies and how to work with them.
- Author info
- Brian Plante, N.D. (licensed naturopathic physician), on track for Relatefulness facilitation certification
- Originality
- I confirm that this work is original and has not previously been published elsewhere
- Conflicts of interest
- Dr. Plante is a licensed naturopathic physician at the Amen Clinics in Orange County, CA, and is the founder of Relational Healthcare LLC
- References
Pizzorno JE, Murray MT, eds. Textbook of Natural Medicine. 5th ed. Elsevier; 2020.
Lindlahr H. Nature Cure: Philosophy and Practice Based on the Unity of Disease and Cure. Nature Cure Publishing Co; 1913. Reprinted by Health Research Books; 1975.
Snider P, Zeff J. The hierarchy of healing: the therapeutic order. In: Pizzorno JE, Murray MT, eds. Textbook of Natural Medicine. 5th ed. Elsevier; 2020:36–45.
Kirchfeld F, Boyle W. Nature Doctors: Pioneers in Naturopathic Medicine. Medicina Biologica; 1994.
Flexner A. Medical Education in the United States and Canada: A Report to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching; 1910.
Stahnisch FW, Verhoef M. The Flexner Report of 1910 and its impact on complementary and alternative medicine and psychiatry in North America in the 20th century. Evid Based Complement Alternat Med. 2012;2012:647896. doi:10.1155/2012/647896
Cannon WB. The Wisdom of the Body. WW Norton; 1932.
Pizzorno J. The Toxin Solution: How Hidden Poisons in the Air, Water, Food, and Products We Use Are Destroying Our Health. HarperOne; 2017.
Alqahtani S, Alqahtani S, Saquib Q, Mohiddin F. Toxicological impact of microplastics and nanoplastics on humans: understanding the mechanistic aspect of the interaction. Front Toxicol. 2023;5:1193386. doi:10.3389/ftox.2023.1193386
Rogers CR. On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy. Houghton Mifflin; 1961.
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Relational Healthcare and the Re-Emergence of Wholeness-Based Medicine
by Dr. Brian Plante, N.D.
Introduction: The Western Healthcare Experience
You walk into a doctor’s office, sick, looking for answers. Most of us living in the Western world know the experience well; you’re handed a clipboard of intake forms, asked to wait nervously in a stiff, fluorescently-lit waiting room. A medical assistant brusquely calls your name. You are ushered down a hallway into a sterile exam room, where you eagerly await your moment with your doctor.
Predictably late, the doctor comes in hurriedly, repeating the same questions you answered both on your intake forms and verbally to the medical assistant, barely making eye contact as they nod and chart the encounter on an electronic health record device. Perhaps a brief physical exam, referral for additional testing, and a new prescription or two. All in about 15 minutes or less.
Patients I’ve spoken to often describe these experiences as unsatisfying, underwhelming, or outright traumatic. My primary care doctor doesn’t listen to me, I hear frequently. They told me it was all in my head, and referred me to a psychiatrist. I’m still looking for answers.
On the doctors’ end, it’s often not much better. Rushed visits, 20-25 patients per day, lab orders, prior authorizations, prescription refills, charting patient visits on weekends, holidays, and during continuing medical education conferences. Many doctors say they went into healthcare because they wanted to help people get well. This is not what I signed up for, they say, on the edge of burnout. Not to mention the severe stress of medical school, residency, and fellowship.
Naturopathic physicians are spared some of this. Our schooling emphasizes prevention, identifying and treating the root causes of disease, treating the whole person, and doctor as teacher. We are steeped in both evidence-based medicine and traditional systems of healing that see human beings as inseparable from nature and each other.
Trained as a holistic primary care physician, I saw everything from diabetes to depression, cancer to cardiovascular disease. My residency specialized further in complex, chronic illness, including Lyme disease, POTS, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, and the earliest cases of long COVID. We ordered blood tests, imaging, gut microbiome tests, urine toxin tests, and took the time to listen to our patients. A physician of both past and future, I thought I was ready.
A Growing Need in Healthcare
There was something missing, however. Despite our philosophy and heritage, modern naturopathic doctors are often still burdened by similar stressors as our conventional colleagues. The administrative load is extensive, our testing and treatment plans are complex, and patients come to us desperately seeking answers that conventional specialists haven’t been able to provide. There is so much need, and seemingly not enough of us to address it. Joined by a growing force of fed-up conventional MDs and DOs, the emerging fields of functional medicine and integrative medicine are asking similar questions.
What is really making us sick?
Is it our food, environmental toxins, artificial environments with increasing screen use, poor sleep, stress, or mineral deficiencies?
What can we change about our lifestyles, while navigating a culture that seems to continue demanding more of us?
What is truly needed to be well?
What many people are not consciously aware of is that what they want most deeply is an embodied remembering of their wholeness. They want to know themselves, understand their bodies, and vividly re-discover how they fit into the larger fabric of our world.
Functional and Integrative Medicine: Improvements, but Incomplete
Functional and integrative medicine is a response to the limiting reductionist paradigm in conventional medicine. It posits that disease begins at the level of function (or, more appropriately, cellular dysfunction), before structural changes can be observed at the organ level. Conventional imaging or lab testing may fail to show dysfunctional changes before they become obvious and severe. Minor disruptions in function can point to much deeper imbalances within the human body, and these can be supported through individualized nutrition, hormone balance and optimization, gut microbiome balancing, detoxification support, immune support, and addressing chronic bacterial, viral, or parasitic infections.
The goal of functional and integrative medicine is to treat each human being as a unique individual who may have imbalances in one or more of these domains, which are contributing to or causing the patient's symptoms. Correcting these imbalances is believed to bring the body back into a state of balance and organized cellular and organ function, resulting in improved health, quality of life, longevity, and long-term disease risk reduction.
A bias that can occur in a functional and integrative medicine approach is to overfocus on manufacturing health through supplementation and clinical intervention, leading to an ongoing pattern of trying to fix oneself – to optimize one's body endlessly. This is a slippery slope that can cause someone to experience ongoing fragmentation within themselves rather than an embodied, fluid, felt sense of their wholeness.
American culture capitalizes on this by advocating for new cutting-edge wellness trends and therapies that promise longevity, symptom eradication, and age reversal. While some of these therapies may help, the paradigm underlying them keeps many people stuck – dissatisfied, impatient, frustrated, and unable to be with themselves as they are.
Naturopathic Medicine: A Brief History
Naturopathic medicine is a contemporary medical approach that synthesizes the best of conventional Western medicine with evidence-informed natural medicine. It utilizes conventional lab testing and imaging, specialty functional tests including but not limited to comprehensive stool analyses, urine toxin tests, and saliva hormone tests, and employs any of the following treatments based on the root-cause needs of each individual patient: therapeutic nutrition, exercise, lifestyle, specific nutrient or herbal supplements, homeopathy, bodywork, light, sound, and frequency therapies, injection therapies, and individualized prescription medications when needed.
Naturopathic medicine was born from a lineage of Western traditional healing based in the European (primarily German) practice of “Nature Cure” – a combination of nature-based therapeutics that emphasized physical activity, nutrition, clean air, sunlight, and clean water (aka, “hygienics”). Nature Cure included the application of hot and cold water, known as hydrotherapy, and the use of homeopathic medicines, along with hygienics, to facilitate healing by way of the body’s innate processes.
In the late 1800s and early 20th century, these modalities were popularized due to their ability to restore health in cases of chronic disease caused by modern urban environments, when conventional doctors at the time were unable to achieve such results. Patients would often leave the cities they lived in and travel to nature-based retreat centers where they would invest several months or even years in dedicated healing lifestyle practices such as these. Many found that they could reverse chronic diseases that their conventional doctors believed were incurable and terminal.
Due to the standardization of medical education following the Flexner Report in 1910, funding for medical education was directed away from nature-based therapies and toward the development of pharmaceutical and surgical approaches to medicine, causing the natural health profession to lose scientific credibility and merit.
Nevertheless, the naturopathic medical profession persisted as an ‘alternative’ medicine. It advanced by bridging Nature Cure therapeutics with herbal medicines, specific nutrients like vitamins and minerals, chiropractic manipulation, and other forms of bodywork and massage. Contemporary naturopathic physicians are also trained to understand and prescribe pharmaceutical medications when necessary, which is often appropriate as part of a whole-person treatment plan, especially for genetic conditions or short-term stabilization of severe disease states.
The underlying assumptions and clinical philosophy guiding naturopathic practice advocate for ‘the healing power of nature’ – the idea that when the conditions are right, health is the natural state of being. Health, therefore, in most cases does not need to be manufactured de novo through external intervention. Rather, the causes of disease must be identified and addressed, and obstacles to health must be removed. When the obstacles are removed and the healing power – the vital force of the patient – is gently stimulated, a return to health is the inevitable result.
In modern biochemistry and physiology terms, we would say that the body has self-regulating mechanisms of homeostasis and homeodynamics that, when allowed to run their course, will keep the body healthy. When obstructed, the body will make its best attempt to maintain survival, and this is the process that creates disease.
The goal of the naturopathic physician is to identify and remove obstacles to health, whenever possible to work with rather than against the healing power of nature and the patient's own vital force, to educate the patient in what is necessary for health, to treat the whole person, and to emphasize prevention.
Naturopathic Medicine and Relatefulness: Towards A Synthesis
These principles distinguish the naturopathic medical approach from functional and integrative medicine, although the tools used may overlap. Naturopathic medicine functions under a wholeness paradigm, though the modern naturopathic physician may struggle at times to uphold it within our culture, with selective economic pressures and prevailing wellness trends.
Naturopathic medicine follows a wholeness paradigm because it looks to nature as the guide. Although at times random and chaotic, natural systems tend toward homeodynamic coherence. Ecosystems that cannot return to coherence after allostatic stress usually decay – food chains get disrupted, biomes are altered, and the environment cannot sustain itself.
When allowed to operate without substantial external disruption, these systems are self-regulating. The human body functions according to the same mechanistic processes. It cannot be divorced from its natural environment, and when it is, disease is the result (which, paradoxically, is the body’s best attempt to return to health).
Relatefulness, with its emphasis on innate wholeness and its deep trust in the solidity and coherence of the human person in relationship, no matter what arises, is deeply compatible with a naturopathic clinical philosophy. Relatefulness is also complementary to naturopathic medicine's clinical tools. Together, they promote and protect wholeness – not just as an idea, but as an embodied, lived, remembered reality. The combination of naturopathic medicine and Relatefulness represents a necessary and critical emergence in supporting the health of the whole human person at a time when we need it most.
Due to the cumulative impacts of environmental toxicants, synthetic environments with artificial lighting, unnatural electromagnetic fields, and polluted air, sleep and circadian rhythm disruptions, and persistent activation of stress physiology, we need whole-person approaches to health now more than ever. Nature Cure therapeutics that worked 100 years ago are no longer sufficient to restore health due to the ubiquitousness of these insults. Our vital force is weakened.
The emerging paradigm of healthcare requires all tools – from lifestyle, diet, and foundations for health, nutritional and herbal supplementation, to advanced clinical interventions such as medications and surgery – alongside psychological and relational practices that support wholeness. To regulate our physiology, live in harmony with nature’s homeodynamic processes, and know ourselves as whole human beings, we need naturopathic medicine, and we need Relatefulness.
Relatefulness and the Processes of Healing
Relatefulness supports a person’s rediscovery of wholeness by centering awareness-in-connection. This differs from a doctor-patient or psychotherapist-client relationship because the relationship is bi-directional (and multi-directional when practicing in a group). In a therapeutic relationship, despite two human beings being present, the doctor or therapist generally does not share their experience as it is unfolding. Yet bi-directional and multi-directional relational practices encourage a person to develop greater awareness and greater capacity for true-to-life relationships, where exploration, creativity, play, co-discovery, and co-experimentation are included as part of co-presencing. This shifts the aim away from therapeutic insight or change being the primary goal. Nevertheless, this practice’s way of being does often result in change.
Many of my patients find that Relatefulness provides a mode of seeing and being that they are not getting anywhere else in their integrative healthcare treatment. In other words, their other treatments are all interventional and change-oriented. This is not a bad thing; intervention and change are often needed to facilitate a return to health and interrupt dysfunction. But overemphasizing these at the expense of radical awareness and ‘being-with’ often unconsciously keeps people in never-ending cycles of trying to fix themselves and obtain wholeness as some kind of object or destination, rather than the embodied knowledge of wholeness as a starting point.
In my clinical experience, the shift from deficiency toward wholeness as the backdrop dramatically changes measurable clinical outcomes: patients get better faster, behavioral change is less difficult, and their bodies are more receptive and less reactive to interventional support, whether that is nutritional supplementation or structural bodywork such as massage.
I refer to this as “the yin and yang of healing.” The yin aspect of healing is the acceptance, surrender, non-doing, receptive, and bottom-up (emergent) processing style, while the yang aspect is the directive, interventional, and targeted approach to treatment. A comprehensive treatment plan and health-promoting lifestyle requires elements of both.
Although there may be yang ‘moves’ within Relatefulness, the overall practice tends toward yin – much like meditation and other mindful practices such as yoga or tai chi. For many Americans, rest and other solitary, yin health practices are difficult to consistently incorporate (I have such a hard time resting is a phrase I hear from my patients often).
By centering awareness in bi-directional and multi-directional containers, the yin aspects of health can often be re-integrated more fluidly and directly because of the attentional infrastructure that human-to-human relationship provides. Relatefulness can serve as a developmental catalyst that balances the yin and yang of self-integration and healing. As the late humanistic psychologist, Carl Rogers, famously said, “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.” (in On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy).
Relational Healthcare: Clinical Applications
Relatefulness also supports the doctor-patient relationship. In my practice, I employ a variety of Relateful tools with my patients as part of their medical assessment and delivery of lab results and treatment. Contexting becomes an important aspect of setting expectations around the visit, so that we know how we are relationally orienting. Impact statements become invaluable when it comes to understanding a patient's goals, how they are feeling in response to reviewing lab or imaging findings, how their suggested course of treatment is landing for them, and how we might make it more collaborative. For example:
What is it like for you to hear these results?
How is it for you, in this moment, as we're talking about this?
It sounds like this is really important to you; hearing you say that, here is what it brings up in me…
I’m imagining you’re feeling overwhelmed (or hopeful) with all this new information. Is that true?
Here’s some of what you can expect as we work together…
Contexting is one of the most powerful skills for being an embodied physician. Continually naming what I see as potential choices – for what we talk about, how we continue to explore a line of questioning or a suggested treatment strategy – is so indispensible because it keeps the interaction fluid and relational without losing the structure necessary to achieve our clinical goals, i.e., to identify and treat the causes of disease. By re-contexting, I am leading both myself and the patient back to the present moment, orienting to Why are we talking about this? What is our intention? And how is that for you?
Structuring my visits in a way that allows sufficient time to truly be present with each other and include Relateful elements provides a missing experience that many people have never had with their doctor before. While the goal of Relateful practice outside of medicine does not necessitate that a person feels seen, heard, or understood, in a healthcare setting that is the priority. I am more able to offer this as a whole human being when I, the physician, have done and continue to do Relatefulness practice. I am able to be here for my patients while also being here for and with myself, and when relevant, I can choose to share how that is impacting me in ways that invite the relationship into a deeper sense of allyship and co-creation.
This pairs exceptionally well with a naturopathic medical approach. Naturopathic medicine not only prioritizes nature-based therapies, diet, lifestyle, and medications when appropriate, but, like Relatefulness, stands on a foundation of assumed wholeness and assumed intelligence – of the body, the person, and the natural world that is inseparable from us. To bring relational practices into this deep medical holism provides not only the framing, co-presencing, and specific guideposts for how to relate more fully, but it supports patients’ rediscovery of wholeness in their bodies, relationships, and lives.
NEW VERSION: Beyond Inner Work: Relational Awareness and the Practice of Relateful
Beyond Inner Work: Relational Awareness and the Practice of Relateful -Personal development trains inner awareness. Relatefulness trains relational awareness.... The Open Question April 8: How do you determine what something's worth? Hey y'all!
This week's open question: How do you determine what something's worth?
SpaceX is targeting a valuation of $1.75 trillion. Bhutan measures success by happiness instead of GDP. Close friends of mine are weighing career ambitions against time with their kids... all of this has me want to think more deeply about how we determine value, and how we as individual people relate to the increasingly diverse and surprising answers to these questions.
- Is it purely subjective? cultural? objective? Something else?
- How much of your psychological need to feel worthwhile do you project out onto the world in the form of desire or judgement of valuations?
- How do you choose how to spend your free time? (and what does this reveal about what you determine is worthy?)
- Are markets intelligent? There's that famous line "In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine."
- What's the most important thing in your life that you'd have a hard time putting a price on? (Are you offended if others put a price on it?)
- What does a great society look like that can hold different definitions to this together, while still being coherent?
Love to hear y'all's thoughts
#openquestion
From my perspective, worth isn't an inherent property of a thing. It is a relationship between three elements: reality, capacity, and direction. Something is worth what it enables in the direction you have chosen, relative to the reality you are actually in. Start with reality.... The Open Question April 8: How do you determine what something's worth? Hey y'all!
This week's open question: How do you determine what something's worth?
SpaceX is targeting a valuation of $1.75 trillion. Bhutan measures success by happiness instead of GDP. Close friends of mine are weighing career ambitions against time with their kids... all of this has me want to think more deeply about how we determine value, and how we as individual people relate to the increasingly diverse and surprising answers to these questions.
- Is it purely subjective? cultural? objective? Something else?
- How much of your psychological need to feel worthwhile do you project out onto the world in the form of desire or judgement of valuations?
- How do you choose how to spend your free time? (and what does this reveal about what you determine is worthy?)
- Are markets intelligent? There's that famous line "In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine."
- What's the most important thing in your life that you'd have a hard time putting a price on? (Are you offended if others put a price on it?)
- What does a great society look like that can hold different definitions to this together, while still being coherent?
Love to hear y'all's thoughts
#openquestion
It's very interesting, every time I try to write a response, I delete it. Here are a few riffs: here are some things I value: gratitude time with my family & kids meaningful work friendship my obligations, service, and commitments to others integrity, love play, fun,... What outcome do you hope for? I was on a call for the last hour talking with a friend about supporting a vision he has.
At the end of the call, he asked "what are you hoping to get out of this?"
I found the question really hard to answer in a way that makes any sense at all.
My answer to the questions comes in feelings, images, and body sensations. I see a bowl overflowing, I feel a magnetic pull, I experience a sense of duty, I follow synchronicities, I release and this is what came to me. One of my purposes in this life is to bring people together, especially really smart people. I don't have a goal, and if I did, I am sure it would change. I want to be of service to a vision of the best future possible.
I'm after the experience. My vision will fill out along the way.When I can't frame the answer in an intelligible way, it causes doubt- maybe this isn't right? Maybe my intuition would have a clearer answer if this were the right path. Maybe I'm cutoff from what outcomes I hope for and need to work on getting more in touch with my desires. Am I too scared to name a desired outcome for fear of being letdown if it doesn't come true?
But I want to try on that the question may just be the wrong question for me. Or that my answer to the question isn't going to sound like what I've heard from other people.Sharing here, and open to others experience of answering this question. How do you know what you want?
And if you know me, happy to hear your perspective on my specific psychology or what you think is going on 🤔
I want to be of service to a vision of the best future possible. This is one answer to your friend's question I think. But also, I resonate with the vibe you're naming.... What outcome do you hope for? I was on a call for the last hour talking with a friend about supporting a vision he has.
At the end of the call, he asked "what are you hoping to get out of this?"
I found the question really hard to answer in a way that makes any sense at all.
My answer to the questions comes in feelings, images, and body sensations. I see a bowl overflowing, I feel a magnetic pull, I experience a sense of duty, I follow synchronicities, I release and this is what came to me. One of my purposes in this life is to bring people together, especially really smart people. I don't have a goal, and if I did, I am sure it would change. I want to be of service to a vision of the best future possible.
I'm after the experience. My vision will fill out along the way.When I can't frame the answer in an intelligible way, it causes doubt- maybe this isn't right? Maybe my intuition would have a clearer answer if this were the right path. Maybe I'm cutoff from what outcomes I hope for and need to work on getting more in touch with my desires. Am I too scared to name a desired outcome for fear of being letdown if it doesn't come true?
But I want to try on that the question may just be the wrong question for me. Or that my answer to the question isn't going to sound like what I've heard from other people.Sharing here, and open to others experience of answering this question. How do you know what you want?
And if you know me, happy to hear your perspective on my specific psychology or what you think is going on 🤔
As far as the second question: I know what I want when I can't stop thinking about it. Unfortunately for a long time I knew more about what I didn't want. When I learned about the law of attraction I started to state & focus on what I DO want. Honestly sometimes I don't know.... What outcome do you hope for?
I was on a call for the last hour talking with a friend about supporting a vision he has. At the end of the call, he asked "what are you hoping to get out of this?" I found the question really hard to answer in a way that makes any sense at all.... Jeffry Martin, Jeffrey Epstein, and high decoupling. some messy thoughts, would love y'all's takes
I. Jeffrey Martin tried to sell “enlightenment” to Jeffrey Epstein for $10 million USD.
More importantly: In the DOJ emails, he asks for “..a few (legal age) slave girls of my own choosing, in the event that at least some of your press coverage is accurate... ; )
But how can we trust Epstein? There's not enough evidence in there in this case... to quote Marco Beneteau “most people who know [Martin] think that the "slave-girl" quote was fabricated / injected by Epstein as it's out of character for Martin. This is possible and even likely given that Epstein was positioning himself as a professional blackmailer. There is also no reason for Martin, a serious businessman, to compromise himself in this way with a known criminal.”Martin’s emails are shady AF, but to me (and most) Martin always seemed shady. That doesn’t discredit the genuine contributions he’s made; it does point to us being incredibly discerning about what he says and where it comes from.
It also points to whatever Martin is teaching being pretty weird; the concept of enlightenment is weird and sketch, so it asks us to be more discerning still.
II. High decoupling is an idea that you can separate the pieces from the whole.
Eg: MLK can be a womanizer yet still a civil rights role model. It’s super necessary for science to figure out causality by separating variables, and it’s helpful for the pursuit of truth since the key evolution into 3rd person objective, rational thinking is that stuff exists outside of its context. Newton had to actually prove this about physics—before him people genuinely didn’t know if gravity operated differently in America v Europe v the moon.
A person could be enlightened and charge $10 Million for it. A person could have useful tips and not be "enlightened" whatever that means. A bunch of other decouples...
III. Wholeness must include fragmentation to be whole
I talk a lot about seeing wholes, interconnectivity, and relationships, which one might think of as low-decoupling, or re-coupling, or something. But just like surrender includes your desire, the world being neutral means you get to fully engage in it, true wholeness includes parts and division. Your limited self-concept can’t threaten how much people love you, and decoupling can’t threaten the universe’s inherent interconnectivity. High decoupling and low decoupling are like directions on a circle -if you take either far enough the meet on the other side. eg:
- decoupling for love: consider a toddler behaving like a little dictator. Decoupling rather than seeing them as one thing might increase the love
- decoupling for truth: eg pulling what's good and useful from Martin's "research" and throwing out the rest
Not the same for me, I'm totally unblemished 🤣 . I wholeheartedly agree that even the best spaces have lots of glaring errors, shadows, problems, and even the best teachers show up in bodies that have problems, and impact other bodies.... The Open Question March 18: How do we reason about the future given AI? I find this topic extremely perplexing, and endlessly fascinating.
- What are we raising our kids to be ready for? What skills don't matter anymore that we used to hold sacred, and what do we need to emphasize?
- Will we have universities?
- Where to invest time/energy?
- Where to invest money? Will money even matter?
- Purpose and meaning, etc...
especially when I factor in stuff like Nate Soares talking about If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies, Rob Miles and Jeffrey Ladish communicating the wild risks involved in AI acceleration, there's almost too much to contemplate at once, and I'd love y'all's help.
Some convos already on UpTrust that might be relevant:
- Blake on AI collaboration
- Tommy on TikTok brain with AI
- Renee on Older people adopting AI
- Leif on Digital Mystics
- Alex on AI & the Second Coming of Christ
- Dave on an AI Safety introduction he likes
#openquestion
Being able to think and plan is a key differentiator of being human, and more mature people tend to think further and wider into the future than others.... Beyond Inner Work: Relational Awareness and the Practice of Relateful Personal development trains inner awareness. Relateful trains relational awareness.
Beyond Inner Work: Relational Awareness and the Practice of Relateful Personal development trains inner awareness. Relateful trains relational awareness.... The Music Never Stops. GOTTA MAKE IT SOMEHOW ON THE DREAMS WE STILL BELIEVE.
That line pretty much sums up the human condition if you strip away all the noise. Most people act like success is some clean, predictable formula. It isn’t.... Journal Submission: How to Change Oneself
How To Change Oneself: Why Rational Control Fails and Emotional Understanding Works Abstract At first glance, personal change appears straightforward: identify an unwanted behavior, decide to act differently, and implement the new behavior.... AMA with John Mackey. Wednesday, 2/11 at 2:00 PM CT
We’re here to talk about A Course in Miracles, and The Disappearance of the Universe, and how we can help each other home with the practices of true forgiveness.
John Mackey is well known as the co-founder of Whole Foods (and CEO for 44 years), innovator in Conscious Capitalism (including creating billion dollar company while changing food systems for the better, implementing executive salary caps, radical health care and employee wellness programs, etc,) and most recently founder of Love.life - a cutting edge medicine, nutrition, fitness, center w/ pickleball, cafe.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=5GVmvrPQgD4