self improvement

Hell is Praying and Heaven is Bullshitting. Every now and then, one finds oneself in a cosmic struggle between two truths that have a hard time being seen at once.  I've been in one of those for a few years, and thought I would try to describe what I see from my current position.

A story to help illustrate it: I was talking with a good friend of mine a few years ago, and he described a feeling that he was stuck in a pit, trying to get out, and asking others for help, and kept getting back this message to the effect of "you're doing this to yourself.  we can't help you until you decide to stop doing it to yourself." There was a sense that he was unworthy of even being considered for help without somehow changing first.

And I said: yeah.  I see you in the pit.  And on behalf of the universe, *we are doing what we can* to help you out of the pit, without you needing to fix yourself first. You are not unworthy.  And also, our capacity is very limited right now—including that some people themselves are still confused about all this.  And so to the extent that you CAN help yourself out of your pits, even a little, that helps bridge the gap and helps us help you.  But if we knew how, we would meet you fully, exactly where you are, without demanding anything.

This view of mine was hard-won, having spent years struggling with a similar issue only to suddenly have this insight where I GOT that the kosmos contained a force that fully wanted to meet me where I was at, and I could tell that it did because *I was a participant in that force*—I could feel its will flow through me, in my desire to meet others where they were at. (And sometimes parts of me are others to other parts of me.). 

And yet, over the years, both before and after this insight, I have tasted the other side of it.  I've gotten glimmers of the truth in C.S. Lewis's “the doors of hell are locked on the inside.” I've felt strain and struggle suddenly shift into eternal boundless perfection—perfection that, when I look in the rearview mirror, was there the whole time, through the struggle. I've lost count of how many times I've arrived in such a place.  And there was truth to “nobody else could do it for me”, truth that it involved letting go of my grievances without trying to sort them all out first, and truth that that loving presence was always there holding me and supporting me and rooting for me.

There's truth to this, but when we go back and connect it to my friends’ story: what the fuck?  Something has gotten confused.  You can *obviously* be helped, in many ways, some of which have never been conceived of by anybody ever. Even if you only think that conveying the message of the need for someone to choose their way out can help, and nothing material can...  if the message is not getting through clearly, there are literally infinite possible ways to rephrase it or to convey it through not just word but example or gesture. I have definitely been helped, and I have no reason to think that the amount that I've been helped is somehow the perfect maximum theoretically possible (even if it was as much as was possible at the time).

A stance that says "there is nothing I can do to help you with your suffering", no matter how noble and righteous and  it presents itself, is its own hell.  It’s a stance of victimhood.  And it’s bullshit.  It’s failing to own your own limitations: *I* have run out of ideas, or patience to keep talking with you.  *I* cannot maintain my own groundedness while meeting you in your pit.  *I* do not have a rope long enough to reach you, but I would if I could.  And I can’t promise I’ll be back with a longer rope, but I sure hope someone can.

And I feel like many times I have been offered the choice to step out of the hell of overt grievance and into this other more subtle hell, that leaves me feeling forever alienated in relation to people I see as choosing to recreate their grievance hells.  Hell, sometimes I’ve even tried to take the option, but it didn’t stick for me.

Hell’s Prayer—“help me, show me I am worthy without me having to change”—kept coming back and demanding an answer.  “It always does, and is never satisfied,” Heaven’s Bullshit will warn you. And there’s wisdom there. And yet.  There’s also a skill issue.  I can tell that there is a more satisfying answer to Hell’s Prayer than that, and I am not giving up on finding it.  One that still doesn't require letting Hell hold you hostage.  There is a better Heaven, without this bullshit.  

As you can see: I have found my way to a stance that can at least hold that there is wisdom in both of these views, even if I can’t integrate them.  The tension exists internally to me.  As you can also see: I tend to find myself playing out the pole of Hell’s Prayer, in thinking about the topic or in relating to others.

This sucks!  It sucks to find myself bound to taking a stand for “no, I will not let go of this, I will simply complain until the day I die or the day someone says ‘yes, your complaint is valid’ and manages to say it so clearly and fully and honestly and tangibly... that I can put that complaint to rest.”  But the only other option I see from here is to adopt Heaven’s Bullshit, and…  well, for me that isn’t even really an option at this point.

It would be nice to integrate this tension internally, to sort it all out in myself and be able to meet the Bright People of Heaven and rather than complain and demand they change in order to drag me out of my pit, to calmly and patiently offer “it seems like you’re confused here, and you’re suffering unnecessarily because of it”.  But I fear that if I did, they would say “see, you sorted this out yourself, as I always told you you had to” and would only get the message to persist in their confusion.

And yet.  Their pits may be comfier than mine, but I will not give up in my search for suitable ladders.  I will rest though, on the path.

#DeepTake #DeepTakes

Wisdom Is Taboo — And Why That Matters Now. https://livingartswisdom.substack.com/p/wisdom-is-taboo-and-why-that-matters

I don't feel very creative or safe lately. Lately, so much of what I write or create feels meaningless with the current state of affairs in the background, humming like a constant threat.

I have scrapped so much content, and I usually tend to create for the practice of creating.

Then my older son asked me, “Uhma are you writing about what you are feeling + dealing with?”

That’s when I realized I have been busy numbing myself -a type of disassociation or distracting myself to avoid the overwhelm.

Some thoughts:

1) A level of safety if necessary to create

2) Safety can also be found within through practice + discernment

3) Sometimes, we must not run from the fear we feel but toward it to understand

3) Sometimes, because we don’t feel safe, we need speak on that.

Confession: I don’t feel safe lately.

In process: I am building an inner sanctuary of safety to face my fears.

Does Pursuing Our Passions Mean We Are in Crisis? It seems in life whenever we decide to actively pursue our dreams or child-like passions, we are labeled as having a crisis.

A mid-life crisis, an existential crisis, a post divorce crisis, postpartum crisis.

Why is this? Is it because going for what we love threatens other people?

Or is it because it takes a crisis to wake us up to how we are living in complacency. From there, we can begin to move forward and live authentically?

I would love to know your thoughts as I ponder a newsletter post on this topic.

authentic expression. hello, i'm glad to be here. i'd like to know what is important and meaningful to the people reading this, and so that would start with me going first.

i did an exercise to uncover my authentic code, four words that capture my core values and soul essence: creativity, connection, freedom, growth.

my theme for this year is sovereignty, which to me is about self-authorship and responsibility and empowerment. i feel like a deeply rooted tree at times. there's a certainty that no matter what is happening externally, i am okay. "the world can do what it want, whenever it want, i don't mind." during a call with a friend today about sovereignty, a desire for ease came up. ease is present when i can flow along with whatever life is asking of me.

i've been devouring books by wayne dyer. his ideas are profound and simple. while listening to one of his books i understood how much authority i have over all of my habits, actions, words, and even my thoughts. i can give more attention to whatever serves me and discard whatever does not. i can change the action or let the thought pass.

i'm currently reading the untethered soul by michael singer. from this book i love the idea of the witness, an aware presence underneath all of my other human stuff, all of my experiences and emotions and thoughts. the idea of two or more witnesses all seeing each other and connecting on that level is deeply moving to me.

health and fitness are important to me. last fall i did a program with a lot of intense yang energy called 75 hard, and i've incorporated many of its lessons and habits into more relaxed and sustainable rhythms that work for me. i jokingly call it 75% hard :^)

i'm very online. i love to make things and share them with whoever will lend me their attention. i tend to be scattered creatively so i've chosen to focus on making a word puzzle game called word sleuth - i finished the prototype this week. many of the other things i've made are available via my website.

Trust involves curiosity more than certainty: . This kind of related to my post about the cosmos being more a communion of subjects than a collection of objects.

I mentioned in another post that I’m working with the Art of Alignment (AoA) team in Boulder. This morning it occurred to me just how vital curiosity is to authentic TRUST in all caps, and almost completely missing from the outrage fueled simulacra of trust that is driving almost all media these days, social, mainstream, etc.

I was also reflecting on a business coach who was sick and tired of hearing: Let’s just get aligned everyone! And I agree, just as TRUST isn’t just a decision or a feeling (more like an embodied engagement), ALIGNMENT isn’t just about agreeing to agree.

Ultimately, it’s not really the people who are getting aligned. It is the contextual frames that align, allowing individuals to cohere into a more viable and complexly alive we-self.

There is a weird social geometry or topology that has us basically sweep our concerns and criticisms under the rug if we desire to be aligned with someone, and only bring these concerns out when they are so strong that they can’t be suppressed, and then they come out with a conflictual energy that can trigger a defensive reaction.

In the AoA process, after hearing a proposal (soft, like clay that hasn’t been glazed and fired yet), before we take a hammer to it, we are invited to bring our curiosity in the form of clarifying questions. Get to know what this proposal entails. With curiosity established in a group setting, appreciative inquiry can proceed with complimenting the things I hadn’t seen from my previous fixed viewpoint. Now when I bring my concerns, they aren’t so sharp (don’t feel like criticisms), and can be included in the mix. Next, changes are proposed and considered from a space of openness and cooperative synergy. Finally, from this place of deep collaboration, with all hands having input, there is a request for soft commitment: We’re going to take all of the interaction today into consideration and rework the proposal, and share our update in a similar open form. If we address found issues to your satisfaction when we come back, how committed are you to working on the implementation of this proposal.

"You know, there are 13 ways of doing anything. 11 of them will work. Just pick one and do it.”. Dennis Hightower, who at the time was head of Disney International.

He asked me why I wasn’t doing something, and I responded by explaining the pros and cons of two different ways of doing it. Thoughtfully, he replied “You know, there are 13 ways of doing anything. 11 of them will work. Just pick one and do it.”

The best Founders avoid over-analyzing. At a startup, you don’t have time — and the result will most likely be marginal. Pick a way and do it. Be consistently decisive.

Neurodivergent Genius. When we talk about genius, most people picture lone prodigies, dazzling intellects who stand apart. But what if genius isn’t about individual brilliance at all? What if it’s something that emerges from difference—especially the kinds of difference our society often misunderstands or sidelines?

In Neurodivergent Genius, I suggest that autism, ADHD, aphantasia, and other divergent ways of thinking are not deficits but hidden engines of human evolution. These minds notice what others miss, question what others assume, and imagine what others cannot see. They destabilize old patterns and open new pathways, not by fitting in but by disrupting.

This raises an uncomfortable but exciting possibility: perhaps our future depends less on conformity and more on cultivating spaces where difference is allowed to flourish. Instead of asking how neurodivergent people can adapt to “normal,” maybe the real question is how our cultures can adapt to the gifts of divergence.

So here’s what I’d love to ask you: when you look at your own circles—family, workplace, community—what would change if we treated neurodivergence as an evolutionary advantage rather than a problem to be fixed?

(To make this a little less political, let me add this: While Intersectionality and DEI frameworks focus primarily on how overlapping social identities (race, gender, class, sexuality, disability, etc.) generate structural inequalities and call for inclusive power shifts, the concept of “Neurodivergent Genius” aims at something more: not merely inclusion, but rethinking the very terms of value, competence, and evolution.)

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.

When you take one path. When you take one path, all other paths die and are left behind.

Such is the weight of all our choices.

But I'm not good at letting things die. I keep going back and dragging half-alive corpses around. Abomination!

You stink of the dead. Mark your endings and grieve them, foul beast!

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.

My vision of a better future is simple: we've learned to see how much energy we spend maintaining rather than living. Maintaining our anger. Maintaining our fears. Maintaining our stories about why we can't be happy right now.

We discover we are the ones keeping our emotional states alive through constant effort. Like tightening a fist so long we forgot we were doing it.

We can see the holding mechanism itself. 

We catch ourselves ruminating over old grievances to keep anger alive, scanning for threats to maintain anxiety, repeating limiting stories to preserve familiar identities, even grasping at pleasant feelings which paradoxically pushes away natural joy.

In this future, everyone knows - even kids are taught from a small age - that any feeling beyond 90 seconds is a state of our own holding onto (credit to Jill Bolte Taylor). 

When everyone knows this, we can have a different kind of inquiry.

We see that emotions aren't lingering on their own. Instead, they're house guests we kept inviting back by setting a place at the table.  

#FutureYouLove

 There are extra line breaks in this post for some reason. It's either one blig block of text or this. IDK how to remove them. 

On Aspiration. In a recent Relateful Flow session, I said that I was aspiring toward something and that, to me, aspiration is an active principle.  My comment was met with strong disagreement from a person who said that aspiration is passive and only concrete action of a physical kind, actually "doing" something, is active.  I was a bit shocked and then realized that I might be in the minority on this subject.  To me, "aspiring" is actively signaling Life/God that I am now ready and willing to receive the thing I have been saying I wanted.  It is an energetic "yes"!  Other more physically tangible actions may follow, but aspiration is first , especially in things which have always seemed to be beyond my grasp. 

However, I understand what the person was pointing to.  There is a world where action is physical; aspiring may be useful in some way, but it is a passive practice.  

Would love others' thoughts and experience with this.

We're bad at receiving love. We dart and weave and avoid letting love really smack us in the soul. The only love that gets in is like a stray bullet that caught us from behind.

If you want to try the bravest, most counter-cultural thing possible, just soak in it. Every kind act, every hug, every "love you, bye!" Drink it like warm soup, and feel it trickle into you.