I have a new podcast appearance on the Men on Purpose Podcast that I’m excited to share with you.
Here’s how Emerald Peaceful GreenForest the host of the show describes it:
“Speaking of BURSTING – I’m bursting with excitement to bring the Magnificent Max Marmer to you today – listen CAREFULLY to this interview – you could review it maybe several times – pause, let the words really sink in and then go listen again!
Max is THAT kind of guy – who when he opens his mouth or more accurately directs his energy and intention – amazing things happen! There is so much juice in this interview I seriously want to make the time to listen again myself.
We covered a huge range of topics from Biohacking to Startups to stock trading to confidence to dancing to what it means to be a polymath. WHEW! Please, I’m asking SERIOUSLY, listen with focused attention to today’s episode.
How do you develop the courage to jump off a ledge and ‘assemble a plan on the way down’? Max Marmer believes that confidence comes from knowing who you are and developing that. So what tools are out there to help you achieve that kind of self-understanding and clarity of purpose? And how exactly do you practice stepping into your courage, developing confidence as part of your skill set?
Today, Max sits down with Emerald to explore his early awareness of multidimensionality and how he navigates between maps and territory to further his understanding of himself and the universe. He explains the concept of biohacking, sharing how he utilizes its principles to increase his energy and mental sharpness. Max walks us through the life cycle of a successful startup, discussing how self-awareness and clarity of purpose have contributed to his confidence as an entrepreneur and the dynamic tools for self-understanding offered by his new company TrueSelf. Listen in for Max’s insight around the power of integrating across disciplines and the opportunity for men to design a new model of masculinity in the current cultural moment.
What You Will Learn
Max’s early awareness of multidimensionality
How Max navigates between maps and territory to understand himself, the universe
How Max leverages biohacking to increase energy and mental clarity
Max’s take on the crossover between the inner and outer world
How Max uses applied kinesiology to identify his body’s needs
The life cycle of a successful startup
Discovery
Validation
Efficiency
Scale
The idea of confidence as a practice and a skill
How self-understanding and purpose informs confidence
How Max employs faith to endure the darkness of the ‘crash and burn’
How Max’s new company TrueSelf offers dynamic tools for self-understanding
The definition of a polymath
How power and innovation comes from integrating across disciplines
The opportunity to develop a new model of masculinity in this cultural moment”.
I love smashing personal records. It is beautiful to see objective sign posts confirming the translation of hard work and dedication into growth and enlarged capacity.
A few weeks ago it was doing 1100 sit-ups in under 20 minutes.
Last night at the Banya I was able to generate enough heat through Tibetan inner fire practice or autonomic nervous system control, to reach full equilibrium in the cold plunge (at an advertised 45 F, but it is often a bit warmer on the weekends).
And I doubled up my personal record from 32 minutes in the cold plunge to 65 minutes.
What up, Wim Hof?
Thank you for the inspiration.
The limit to how long I could stay in the cold plunge was no longer about physical discomfort. At this temperature that was mastered. The limit was only how long I could mentally focus. I only left because it was close to 10pm and I was feeling sleep calling from my circadian rhythm.
As with most things in life, it all comes back consciousness.
“The body has limits the mind does not” – Tim Grover, Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant’s trainer.
If we want to realize our potential I believe it’s absolutely critical to be constantly pushing our comfort zones and edges, in a multidimensional cross training of body, heart, mind and soul. For if you’re not triggering an adaptation response, you’re likely atrophying, or at least not keeping up with progressive flow of the river of life and your fellow brethren immersed in it.
That being said, rest and recovery are an essential part of the growth process.
Here is more about the beginning levels for cold plunge mastery:
Level 1
Stay in the cold plunge for 30-90 seconds.
Bring awareness to the immediate fight or flight response that comes from immersion in cold water and let your body know you’re okay and not in danger.
Each time you get in the cold plunge notice the part of yourself that says, “I need to get out of here. I’m in danger or I’m going to die.”
Control the amygdala. A reduction in amygdala activation will serve you well in many aspects of your life.
Level 2
Stay in the cold plunge for 2-7 minutes.
Now that you’re able to calm the amygdala, you’ll primarily be needing to get out of the cold plunge due to physical pain.
You’ll likely feel sharp pain somewhere in the body, often the fingers and toes.
Push yourself as long as you can and then go to a hot tub to get the blood flowing.
Having stable access to the meditative state of Emptiness is very valuable here. You want to be able to identify with your awareness that rides underneath sensation (yet co-arises with it). You want to notice the stories your mind comes up with for why you should leave the cold plunge. You want to notice the apparent self that is connected to those sensations and stories. Then release those constructions of energy as you relax back into stillness of mind, awareness and all of Reality.
This level takes repetitive practice for your body to adapt to the cold. Eventually the sharp pain will stop and you’ll be confronted with a new set of challenges and fears to over come around the 5-7 minute level.
There are many health benefits to getting good at this stage.
Contrast therapy, cycling from hot to cold is great for the lymphatic system and supporting detoxification in the body. The hot and cold effectively create a pump through expansion and contraction that gets your system flowing in a way the body can’t do well on its own.
Cold stress and heat stress are also known to activate Epigenetic programs in the body that make your more able to cope with stress for up to two weeks. Our ancestors walked across ice sheets for months on end. Modern humans turn on the heat and air conditioning at the first sign of discomfort. Cold stress and heat stress activate this latent super adaptive potential within us.
Cold stress also creates more brown fat in the body. Which is a dense form of fat with larger than normal quantities of mitochondria that are able to burn fat and generate internal heat.
This is actually just a small sampling of the amazing research around the all the health benefits of high intensity cold and heat exposure. I will share more about the science in the future. In the mean time look up the leading voice of Rhonda Patrick, PHD MD.
Skills used in future levels farther down the path to be discussed some other time:
Generating inner fire at the second and third chakras. Known in Tibetan Buddhism as Tummo.
Navy SEAL style positive Incantations from master trainer Mark Divine of the Unbeatable Mind.
Overcoming fear of death, being willing to die (even though you’re not going to) and leaning into it with courage.
Working with the instinctive heat generating energy of shivering.
Archetypal Tantric Warrior invocation from a state Awakened Awareness, also known as Generation Stage Yoga.
Again this is cross-training for Life and the upper limits of any skill comes down to consciousness and mastery of our minds.
And mastering the mind is an eminently transferable skill.
“Success comes down to 80% psychology and 20% skills.” Tony Robbins.
“I want to represent possibilities. I want to represent the idea that you really can make what you want. I believe that I can create whatever I want to create. If I could put my head on it right, study it, learn the patterns… I feel very strongly that we are who we choose to be.” – Will Smith
“The mind is everything. What you think, you become.” – The Buddha
If you and your partner(s) can’t both reliably access a state of awakened awareness beyond the ordinary sense of self then any exploration of non-monogamy will inevitably lead to an increase in pain and suffering.
When you lose your cool, when you get triggered do you tell yourself to raise your game and live up to a higher standard?
Or do you justify why it was okay to lose your cool and ascribe fault to other people and external circumstances?
This is one of the key regular decisions that separates the extraordinary humans from the ordinary.
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I love my morning meditation view so much.
There is a reason yogis go to the mountaintop.
The sparkling, harmonious, blissful, spacious, luminous nature of reality is unassailably clear.
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People who don’t utilize the tool of debt and credit in their life have been afflicted by a false sense of lack.
They lack sufficient belief in themselves.
And they lack a willingness to invest in themselves for the long run and to bet on themselves.
The question for analyzing whether debt and credit is worth utilizing is very simple:
Can you create more value, faster with the money you are loaned than the interest rate you are given?
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One of the worst decisions the masculine can make is to seek comfort.
The masculine grows through setting big goals, pushing to exhaustion and then savoring accomplishment in the recovery phase before setting a new bigger goal that lies beyond the new expanded comfort zone.
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From the higher perspective there is no such thing as rejection.
There is just energy jostling around trying to find its way into proper alignment.
From the higher perspective there is no such thing as failure.
There is just feedback about what needs to be improved and recalibrated.
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Black Panther was so much better than the Last Jedi.
Plot and Story Arc.
Character Development & Consistency.
Visual Effects.
Empowering portrayal of Cultural Minorities.
…the script for Luke Skywalker was particularly terrible…acting like someone who was never a Jedi
…so many of the Star Wars characters felt like forced affirmative action plays rather than authentic casting.
…One disappointing feature of the Wakandan’s was that for being so technologically and culturally advanced in many dimensions, they still had an Ethnocentric Worldview when looking to the outside world, opining about how to help downtrodden and oppressed blacks around the world rather than how to help downtrodden and oppressed humans with their technological prowess.
All for now. No time to be a detailed movie critic.
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I am currently reading the Life Divine by Sri Aurobindo.
Who else has read it?
My personal website is titled In Quest of Super Humanity and I’m coming to see how my intuitive guidance has been (previously unbeknownst to me) plugged into the same source as Aurobindo’s, especially with respect to his articulation of the Supermind and its Divine Unfolding through Humanity’s Involutionary Process.
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Your body is an instrument that the Consciousness of your Soul learns to play.
An Evolved Soul is therefore a masterful musician.
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Back on my own again and restarting my cooking skills after 2 years of dormancy.
Immediately noticing a shift in my relationship to food preparation as I’ve deepened my relationship to the fundamentally universal nature of subtle energy in all things.
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Succinct infographic of a lot of misguided class warfare and anti-wealth sentiment from the Liberal Left.
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Always remember that how we react to every moment of our life will reinforce either our negative habits or positive habits. No matter how challenging life may be, each moment can be seen as either a problem or an opportunity. If we can understand this, we can start to bring our entire life to the path.
~ Chamtrul Rinpoche
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You might ask, ‟If I have Buddha nature, why can’t I perceive it right now?”
It is because, like gold hidden in its matrix, that nature is hidden by our habits that we have accumulated since beginningless time. These habits have been created by our disturbing emotions and then reinforced by the actions that those disturbances have produced.
~ Shechen Gyaltsab
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The ultimate nature of the mind is empty and without basis. It is intangible like empty space. But this is not a nihilistic view. Self-arisen, primordial consciousness is original, clear consciousness. Self-arisen and self-illuminating, it is like the essence of the sun.
I just worked out for 90 minutes in nothing but compression shorts in under 50-degree weather
And it was fucking great.
At the end of my workout I got inspired to add burpees to my routine, which I haven’t done in awhile. I looked up what a challenging number was, they said “do 100 burpees in under 20 minutes”.
“Okay, bring it.”
20-10-10-10-10-10-10-20.
Before I started my last set of 20 I incanted, “you’ll have to kill me before I give up. Try to make me puke. I got this.”
Boom. Done!
Everyone is talking about Wim Hof these days.
But it’s nothing new.
I’m a Tibetan Buddhist. We’ve been doing this shit for lifetimes.
It’s called inner fire. Tummo.
Look it up.
He’s not citing his sources well enough.
Tibetan monks have been meditating in icy caves for centuries.
Tibetan monks can dry a wet towel on their back.
And Wim Hof has stripped the practices of their spiritual tradition.
The spiritual tradition is a critical asset not a detriment.
My friend Farsam said we should call him Rip Hoff.
I caution you in practicing his methods.
You may accidentally turn on your Kundalini.
Pop a circuit of Ordinary Conscious.
And end up in a pseudo-psychedelic-spiritual state, unable to interpret your experience and end up in a psych ward and on meds for a few months.
A few weeks ago when the cold plunge at the Banya was extra cold in the mid 40 degrees I did two 13 min sets back to back after defrosting in the hot tub.
Last year after coming back from a meditation retreat when the cold plunge was closer to the top of its range in the low 50 degrees I set my personal record at 33 minutes.
Remember, I’m chasing greatness — I’m In Quest of Super Humanity through Consciousness, Biohacking and Entrepreneurship at http://maxmarmer.com
This is a long post I wrote this morning…so set aside 10-15 minutes to read it.
I have been sharing a lot of content that I’m sure many people feel is shamelessly self-promoting, arrogantly over-confident and an unreal farce for deep insecurity and unresolved shadow.
In this post, I will share many of the incredibly challenging experiences that enabled me to reach my current perch of unshakeable confidence.
Hopefully you will understand more about how the times of my greatest weakness, ultimately became the fuel for my greatest strength. And that my posts of strength rest on substantive foundations rather than air.
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“The strongest steel is forged by the fires of hell. It is pounded and struck repeatedly before it’s plunged back into the molten fire. The fire gives it power and flexibility, and the blows give it strength. Those two things make the metal pliable and able to withstand every battle it’s called upon to fight.”
I have been through a lot of struggle in my life to get where I am today.
• I have struggled with social alienation, with both men and women, for most of my life.
• I have dealt with the intense Autoimmune illnesses of Leaky Gut, hyper-allergic-sensitivity to foods and Multiple Chemical Sensitivity.
• I have been through 4 episodes of Major Depression.
• I have been a part of many gut wrenching business failures, co-founder divorces and legal warfare.
My strength comes from the conquest of my adversity.
A) Social Alienation:
I have felt socially alienated for most of my life.
I didn’t have a close friend who I could truly discuss my true feelings about myself and the world until I was a sophomore in high school.
Instead of relationships founded on depth and connection, I derived my confidence and social self-worth from my athletic abilities.
As an athletic kid and teenager, when I was healthy, I was in the top 1% of my age group.
When I was 13, I started experiencing chronic back and ankle injuries that kept me perpetually in athletic purgatory. I was healthy enough to play, but never healthy enough to play to my potential or my peak abilities for very long.
From this place I was no longer a leader on my sports teams and the bond of masculine brotherhood was no longer there in the same way. Competing from an often injured place, I was now more burden than value.
I couldn’t find anyone who met me intellectually and spiritually, so now with my primary modality of social-connectedness gone, I felt completely alone.
While injured, I felt my social stature amongst men decrease. So did my self-confidence and it was harder to defend myself from the typical teenage jockeying for status. My social life was full of intentional emotional bullies, unsympathetic classmates, and little camaraderie on any level.
I also felt unattractive and undesirable to women. I was rejected by women I was sexually attracted to hundreds of times. I was rejected by women I loved many times. After high school, most of these interactions were with women 5-10 years older than me. Since I dropped out of college almost immediately to enter the technology world of Silicon Valley, these were the women in my community (if women were around much at all, in the 90/10 gender ratio waters I often swam in).
I was often told implicitly or explicitly by women that our connection was real, but that they couldn’t commit to a deeper physical connection because of our age difference. I was left to dwell in the feelings of unrealized possibility and unrequited love.
I endured the societal pressure, pain and loneliness of not losing my virginity until my early 20s. I didn’t have a girlfriend until I was 25. After all of these experiences, I couldn’t help but wonder whether there was something fundamentally wrong or unloveable about me, despite a deep sense of self-worth ready to rush back to the surface at the first sign of external validation.
(An Aside: I feel so fortunate that my first imprint of committed partnership in this life has been with Tara. Where I have felt fully loved, seen, appreciated and directly experienced the power of a securely attached romantic bond. I feel so grateful for being part of an enduring relationship, that has been so transformative in how we have offered each other mutual support towards evolving into greater versions of ourselves.)
B) Entrepreneurial Hardship
When I was working on the early ideas behind the Startup Genome I was told by entrepreneurs that I respected that I was delusional and that I should give up and go back to school.
Even after my work started getting traction in the world, I was still told by some of those same people that my work on the Startup Genome was worthless, harmful to entrepreneurs, and that I should quit and go back to the safety of a conventional life path by getting an undergraduate degree at Stanford or working at a well funded tech startup.
I have been rejected by people in the business world hundreds of times.I have attempted dozens of business ideas with friends that have failed at various stages of development.I have been forced out of a company I co-founded, that I put the entire force of my being, vitality, and life mission behind.
I have had some of my closest mentors abruptly disown and abandon me, presumably because they were afraid of my fire — and have had them never truly engage with me again.I have been in legal warfare with my best friend and become good friends again years later. I have been completely broke where I also felt too ashamed to ask family for help.
I have felt incredibly excited to collaborate on a business with one of my spiritual teachers, only to find his own self-worthlessness come out in equity discussions, and when we couldn’t come to agreement, have him threaten to sue me if I worked with anyone on similar concept. At this point, I couldn’t help but wonder if I was destined to simply repeat the pattern of seeing the potential for beautiful, transformational tech companies that would continually be undermined by the lack of enduring alignment with my business partners.
C) Biological Illness
I have been diagnosed with Leaky Gut, toxic mold poisoning, heavy metal poisoning and Multiple Chemical Sensitivity.
Worse still, before I found conformational diagnoses with cutting edge autoimmune based lab testing, close people in my life believed I was a Hypochondriac or at the least, almost all my symptoms were Psychological rather than Biological.
When I first learned about Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, I read that it was a lifetime illness that could only be managed not cured. I read dozens of stories from people on forums on the internet, who validated that the lifetime incurable nature of the condition. Their lives seemed miserable and full of unfulfilling, meaningless struggle.
Initially, my family had a lot of resistance to getting me the medical support I needed to investigate this Autoimmune disorder, as the tests costed thousands of dollars, and the actions to take as a result were not necessarily going to be clear.
My condition of Multiple Chemical Sensitivity was still very much a part of my life. Even though I had a proper diagnosis, the healing road was long and uncertain.
Living with MCS, the world outside my home was always dangerous and unsafe. Everywhere I went, harmful invisible, small chemical particles lurked. I couldn’t go to any social or professional event without fear that I might have to leave. And when I would insist that I couldn’t be in a space due to MCS, many people wouldn’t understand why and also believe there was something psychologically wrong with me.
To a person without Multiple Chemical Sensitivity the effect of these particles is a minor stressor that is unnoticeable to most in their conscious awareness and is easily processed by the Liver.
To me however, small quantities of these harmful, airborne particles would trigger a debilitating Autoimmune reaction leaving me to feel inflamed, fatigued and mentally foggy like I had 3 glasses of wine.
Sometimes, when I felt comfortable enough with the people I was with and there was low grade mold or VOCs in the space I was in, I would put on one of those high tech respirators that bikers in China wear to protect themselves from air pollution.
But I still I felt like one of those strange feeble looking women you see in the airport with the medical masks over their face — instead of being the strong, masculine leader I saw myself on the trajectory of becoming.
Most old buildings have some quantity of mold and most new buildings have off-gassing Volatile Organic Chemicals (VOCs) primarily from building materials, furniture and poor air quality due to the of circulation of fresh, oxygenated outdoor air.
At times, I felt completely debilitated, cognitively incapacitated, and energetically drained from my biological and psychological illnesses.
Without my abilities, and without a prognosis that included hope for making a full recovery I often felt completely worthless and that life was not worth living.
D) Psychological Illness
I have been through 4 episodes of Major Depression.
I have experienced the Dark Night of the Soul not just once, but multiple times.
I have met with many therapists who made my depression worse, reflecting back a set of life possibilities for myself that felt like Spiritual Suicide.
I have been completely crushed by the Simultaneity of my problems:
All at the same time, I was kicked out the company I co-founded, I lost my sense of life purpose and direction, could check nearly all the boxes on the Quarter Life Crisis checklist, I had toxic mold in my living situation and experienced constant low grade inflammation, brain fog, chronic fatigue and sensorial tingling that left me with little capacity to dig myself out of the hole I was in.
I had almost no money. The rest was being drained by poor quality lawyers who failed to translate my case into a viable strategy and led me down a legal dead-end, where they were simply wasting tens of thousands of dollars my and my family’s money. I had no ability to get or work at a job. And no ability to create a new healthy living situation for myself.
I would talk with friends and family about my situation and almost always came away feeling misunderstood and more depressed due to lack of resonance and the additive feeling of a vulnerability hangover and the effect it would have on my reputation if I ever did find a way to get better again.
I thought, “who would support me in being an entrepreneur again, as a co-founder, employee or investor, if they’ve seen me like this?”
Friends and family felt helpless in knowing how to support me and I had to endure the inaccuracy of their projections.
One of the biggest areas of dissonance when I would share what I was feeling with my friends and family, is that their message would roughly be along the lines of, “it’s okay if you don’t achieve your ambitions…they were naíve or misguided ambitions in some ways, and the lesson to learn from these hard times that have sent you into depression is that you need to take less risk and be more realistic.”
I didn’t accept that, even when I was depressed.
I wanted a path to get better and to make another attempt at my life goals — from a new angle, with new learnings and new depth alive inside me.
I never wanted to give up. I merely felt lost without a viable path forward toward recovery and re-emergence.
Even when I fell low enough, for long enough, that friends finally were able to provide me with the support I needed to form a foundation for my life from which I could rebuild, my outlook was still very bleak.
How could I ever feel satisfied living such a humble life as a result of my biological and psychological illnesses when all the meaning I found in my life was from the Existential Hero’s Journey of grand contribution that I felt I was on since I was a young boy.
I felt that everything I wanted to do with my life was now longer possible.
I wanted to die and start over.
I thought either I have a soul and I will get another shot or that is it and the pain will be over.
If there’s no path out from where I am, either option is better than this debilitating purgatory. But I can endure for a long time before I’m ready to take my own life.
I felt ashamed for thinking this way. And that I couldn’t share this logic with anyone lest they try to hospitalize me or put me on medication, or some other conventional medical intervention, coming from a place of fear rather than understanding and love.
I felt ashamed that I wasn’t able to hold many of my Spiritual Realizations through experiences of Depression. But I also felt the boldness of my soul’s mission was also a Spiritual Truth that many traditions Spiritually Bypass by skipping straight from the Relative self to the Absolute God.
I had a Major Depressive Episode go from bad to worse when the 2nd night of an Ayahuasca Ceremony completely overwhelmed me with feelings that the Life Story and Hero’s Journey I worked so hard to construct for myself was a complete lie, and that I should just kill myself now.
I was left feeling utterly flattened into a pit of despair and hopelessness for nearly 7 months towards the end of 2014 into 2015.
It’s possible I shouldn’t have been doing Ayahuasca, as it can often accelerate the emotional amplitude of those who experience both intense depression and hypomania. However, I would still like to engage the medicine again when I am more in the middle of my emotional spectrum, as I have so many friends who have received so much value from this work.
I have endured the exhausting never ending background noise of Suicidal Ideation for months at a time.
I have imagined that the most my life would be worth to society would be as a “Cautionary Tale of Ambition gone Wrong”. A modern day Icarus.
I was too ashamed to see friends.
I couldn’t work. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t feel.
To beat the suicidal ideation, I resolved to simply let the world do whatever it wanted with me.
And to see how society would treat “a failed, debilitated, formerly intelligent, ambitious, middle class white male”.
Unable to see a path out of my situation, I played chess and online poker for 12 hours a day to numb the pain.
It may not always be easy to tell that I am a highly emotional person, since in any personality system I am one of the most cognitive types. But the intensity with which I feel is what drives the bipolarity of my emotions. And I see this as an immense strength and gift that I must learn to harness rather than illness.
In my most recent depression, I completely surrendered what I once believed to be my Purpose and Destiny.
I completely gave up on my dreams and my identity.
I gave up all that I am to the Sublime Powers beyond me.
And I rested in the faith of their plan for me.
I rested in the truth of Being and Becoming.
Of relative perfection and that whatever happens from here on out is perfect. Is beautiful. Is art.
I chose to source my identity not from anything I did in this world.
But from the depth of my Soul.
And the Oneness of my Spirit.
Suffice to say,
Spirit has trained me well.
And what my pain and suffering have done is burn away all that is not me,
Leaving only,
Who I Truly Am
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OFFERINGS OF WISDOM
I have been reflecting on how I’ve handled my experiences of pain, suffering and hardship in life and what lessons I would like to offer to others:
1) Feel your feelings. Do not numb yourself to your emotions. Let them move through you. Work on you. Shape you.
See depression as a cleanse. See failures as temporary mistakes on your quest in learning how to enable your Soul to Soar and your Heart to Sing.
“Pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. If I quit, however, it lasts forever.” ― Eric Thomas
2) Don’t let the pain of your disappointments lower your standards or ambitions. Your deepest desires are unshakably true. Never give up on pursuing their fulfillment.
“True desire in the heart for anything good is God’s proof to you sent beforehand to indicate that it’s yours already,” – Denzel Washington
3) Practice Self-Responsibility, Forgiveness and Compassion.
Self-Responsibility. When things go wrong in your life, start by looking at yourself and inquiring into what you could have done better. Don’t be a victim. At a fundamental level almost anyone who harmed you, you let them in your life. And if there was a fundamental misalignment between the two of you, you only chose that person because you hadn’t yet sufficiently learned that lesson.
Forgiveness. Holding onto resentment and anger is an emotional poison that only hurts yourself.
“Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned – Gautama Buddha
Compassion. Understand that people aren’t evil. They have their own traumas and deficiencies, and most people really are trying to do the best they can. Do not morally vilify people for their incapacity. But do raise your standards. And even if you are hurt by people, you can still unconditionally love them through their own growth experience. All human Souls are evolving back up towards the Divine Light of God. But sometimes some of them get stuck, and forget who they are and forget that we are all Ultimately One. Help them remember. Even when they hurt you.
4) Fear is an illusion
“There is nothing to fear but fear itself.” – Franklin Delanor Roosevelt
Fear fundamentally arises from a false illusion of separateness from the totality of being.
Death is an illusion. The personality dies but the soul lives on and is always learning, growing and progressing. Learning to rewire your identity to the whole of the cosmos and your agency to the timeless depth of your soul is one of the most powerful spiritual transformations you can have.
5) Pain is Inevitable in Life but Suffering is a Choice.
Whether life phenomena are experienced as mere pain sensation arising in the field of awareness, or instead as unbearable suffering is a matter of learnable perspective.
In essence, this is a summary of the 4 Noble Truths of Buddhism.
I’ve seen them well summarized like this:
i. Suffering, unsatisfactoriness, dissatisfaction, disappointment, illusion and confusion are an inescapable part of life.
ii. There is a root cause for these.
iii. There is a way to work with and eventually remove this cause.
iv. There is a practical method for doing so accessible to anyone willing to apply themselves.
Every human can find their own meditative path of Awakening, if they would like to be free of suffering, experience Ultimate Liberation, the flourishing of all positive states and an inextricable feeling of meaning, purpose and connectedness.
If you have had glimpses of these Higher States of Consciousness, which almost everyone has, know that they are Real. Have faith that you can access them all the time. And that if you find the right teacher and set of practices and lineages aligned for your personality and soul, you can have access to these deeper truths of Reality all the time.
The Great Spiritual Saints, Sages and Mystics of Human History are not wrong.
In fact, they are more right than the small you could ever know.
My close friend Mari Sierra is hosting a retreat next month (Jan 8 -17) for Entrepreneurs & Conscious Creatives in Bali and they have 5 spots left. (www.sierraymar.co/decelerate)
I thought some of my friends may be interested in their program.
The retreat is called Decelerate where the program is structured to support attendees in slowing down so they may find their core essence, their core purpose and energetic alignment with those currents, so that their creative gifts can be unleashed with full force throughout the year.
There will be daily yoga and meditation sessions facilitated by Erica Jago & Mari Sierra (internationally acclaimed designers / yoginis wink emoticon ), group facilitation by Michel Bachmann, and peer explorations and reflections with other like-minded souls in a beautiful setting.
I believe Energy Management is one of the most foundational skills for any Ambitious Creative in the 21st century.
One of the biggest problems I see in how many entrepreneurs and creatives live their lives, is that they believe there is linear relationship between time spent working and work produced.
The reality is that how much we accomplish is much more a function of how much energy we invest in our work and purpose rather than how much time we invest.
While Energy is a finite resource, it’s also a Renewable and Growable Resource.
To meet the demands of the incredibly stimulatory, fast paced 21st century life we must increase our Energetic Capacity.
Deliberately. Continuously. Consistently. Through Years of Practice, Refinement and Commitment to Mastery.
How do you increase Energetic Capacity?
By oscillating between cycles of stress and recovery.
That’s how strength and capacity is built.
In the fast paced, always on world of the 21st century, most people run their stress cycle but neglect the recovery cycle and consequently burn out.
I love Tony Schwartz basic framework, author of one of my favorite books, the Power of Full Engagement, where he describes our energy as coming from 4 core dimensions: Physical, Emotional, Mental and Spiritual.
Where we grow our capacity by developing stress and recovery habits rituals for each dimension.
This is why I work out so hard. This is why I biohack so much. This is why I master my mind through meditation and a myriad of other practices — so I can continue to increase my Energetic Capacity, creating and serving with greater and greater intensity.
Tony Schwartz also encourages people to see their life as a Series of Creative Sprints rather than a Marathon. Take a look at sprinters he says — they look like Lions, Kings of the Jungle…take a look at marathon runners, they look gaunt and on the edge of death.
Why is this?
One process is more aligned with Life’s Natural Cycle of Growth and Energetic Optimization.
Energetic optimization requires consistently asking yourself these two questions:
1) How is my energy?
2) Is my energy being allocated to what’s most important to me, my essence and my purpose?
Because when your energetic capacity and output is high, focused and directed towards the right things you are unstoppable.
So if you haven’t taken time for Recovery recently, I would highly recommend attending Decelerate as a potent opportunity to Realign and Restore your Being.
It may feel like there’s not time to take off for retreat, but what are you optimizing for? The short term or the long term?
From the short term perspective there is never time to Recover.
The Long Term perspective demands it.
And the Long Term process perspective is the only true path to Creative Manifest Greatness.
Eating poorly is a sign of ignorance, lack of self-respect, and/or lack of self-discipline.
It is okay if you don’t have those capacities in sufficient strength yet.
It is not okay if you’re not working on developing those capacities everyday.
Cheat days are for those who don’t have a Strong Enough Reason for WHY they are ALIVE.
Engaging in any form of damaging short term indulgence is a demonstration of your lack of COMMITMENT or SKILLFUL PURSUIT of your LIFE PURPOSE.
Mistakes are much more acceptable than cheat days. You can correct mistakes with behavioral psychology techniques like Neuro-Linguistic Programming. With mistakes, at least you’re not CONSCIOUSLY giving yourself PERMISSION to be LESS than YOU ARE.