Reflections #05: If.

The Power of an Examined Life.

This is a recording from Just Be Like This Today!

This is a daily invitation to grant yourself permission to drop all your other nagging ‘Musts’ and ‘Shoulds’ about self-improvement, personal development and living a virtuous life. Just enjoy this one cup of Living Wisdom, just choose this one thing and sit with it today.

It helps to think of your life in packets. There was the packet you spent in the womb. There was the packet of your infancy, then the toddler packet, and so on. In a way, this last cycle you have been through was a packet. And if you are open to the idea of renewal, it means you will be getting ready to pick yourself up and face a new cycle, a new packet. To live an examined life then, implies that you have to look back, and examine the packets of your life. How far back, is up to you. Your heart will tell you what magnitude of death and rebirth you are facing right now.

If you want to move forward you have to plan forward. If you want what you have never had, you must do what you have never done. You need to look back to see forward more clearly.

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On Being okay with Not Knowing...

This is a recording from Just Be Like This Today!

This is a daily invitation to grant yourself permission to drop all your other nagging ‘Musts’ and ‘Shoulds’ about self-improvement, personal development and living a virtuous life. Just enjoy this one cup of Living Wisdom, just choose this one thing and sit with it today.

Trying to figure life out is like rummaging in a sack trying to pull a mystery object out, that you are looking for, without knowing what it is. Having a phone in your pocket means you never get to sit with a question and let it nag at you. You have become used to having instant answers on tap. You have normalised the abnormal.

The recording is a short guided reflection on the necessity and power of Sitting with Questions, even ones that do not have ready answers.

—there is a way that you can shape the hand of your grasping mind as if it knows what it is trying to grab and draw out. Sometimes the way you are holding a question is exactly what will make the answer evade your grasp. This is what the Zen Koan means: Not Knowing is Most Intimate. A Koan is in fact a tool used in the Zen tradition that poses a riddle or question, that is not meant to be solved. The work, if it can be called that, is done in the interstitial space of uncertainty.

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Forgiveness is both the province of the well and the door to wellness. You will notice those who struggle to forgive, struggle also to be well.

This a recording from Just Be Like This Today!

This is a daily invitation to grant yourself permission to drop all your other nagging ‘Musts’ and ‘Shoulds’ about self-improvement, personal development and living a virtuous life. Just enjoy this one cup of Living Wisdom, just choose this one thing and sit with it today.

Forgiveness is always so much less about someone else than it is about you. And yet paradoxically, only when you hold the same wish for the other person to also be made again both whole and free, do you find a way for yourself to be both whole and free.

If the wound is great, we will have to let it go many times.

The recording is a short guided reflection on the necessity and power of Forgiveness. 

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In this episode I discuss Actualization, unpacking what I mean by this, and the Power of Permission, which we need to give ourselves, to pursue our intents, to take mastery of our life and our choices, to enter courageously into a conversation with the Universe and with the reality of our lives, where it becomes okay to 'fail', so that we can learn, grow and develop.

Indirectly I also discuss in some detail what the entire project of the Eyes Wide Open Life podcast is about, what my motivations and intentions are, and what my main thesis in all of my work is, which is found throughout the @rocco.jarman humanitarian art project on Instagram and the Courses and Coaching I deliver via Eyes Wide Open Life.
 
I also cover:

• feedback loops
• self-measurement and reflection
• radical honesty and vulnerability
• peerlessness
• the false attraction and pursuit of wisdom vs the more authentic project of actualization and discovery of self

If you take nothing else away from this episode, this is the part i hope truly lands:

I believe, and in many ways, Iam living proof, that the pursuit and attainment and the successful negotiation of all the obstacles that stand in the way of self-mastery and self-liberation, is at bottom, psychological.  

That is, our pursuit or failure to achieve connection, is as a result of the ideas we carry, ideas we have been infected with through conditioning, the ideas we have failed to challenge and correct in ourselves.  

Ideas about love, acceptance, forgiveness, worthiness, power, belonging, divinity, and consciousness, are the ideas we need to get straight, and redundant impediments like shame, guilt and the confusion between Fear and Danger, between Pain and Injury, between Discomfort an unbearability, that discernment, is KEY.

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Looking with genuine care at the source and nature of conflict in Palestine.

"It is entirely possible for two sides in a conflict to both be guilty of separate and irreconcilable transgressions that do not justify either nor balance each other out."

This episode is an invitation to pause, reflect, and resist the urge to form quick opinions. With the understanding that conflict cannot be resolved through one side being right, we aim for a transcendent perspective through which everything can be held and reconciled. Our focus is not just on the conflict between Israel and Palestine, but on conflicts that manifest in various forms—be it emotional, political, or otherwise.

Most of all, it is part of a mandate we each need to consider and own to be open to this necessary form of generosity and courage, in a word Leadership, whereby can live up to the claim that we care more about a path to peace, than we do about retribution and vindication.

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In this episode, my guest Rowan shares his insights on an much needed culture shift and prevailing leadership paradigm in business. His views and wisdom are visionary, pragmatic and quite overdue and we take a thoughtful and immersive dive into the nature and culture of corporate business, covering both strident critique as well as what better might look like.

Rowan is a specialized consultant for CEOs. With formal education from Berkeley University and Harvard Business School, Rowan has honed a unique set of methodologies aimed specifically at enhancing CEO and Leadership performance in Business.

Aside from his extensive experience and impressive professional resumé, Rowan holds an unflaggingly positive perspective on the potential of business, viewing it as an evolving masterpiece.

Rowan's LinkedIn Newletter
LockStep Global

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In Conversation with Daniele Bolelli. 

Danielle is the host of the incredible History on Fire Podcast. We get together from time to time and discuss the state of the world, our moment in history through the lenses of our individual and shared philosophies.

Daniele is wonderful conversationalist with a discerning eye on both our complicated human history and our troubling present moment.

We discuss

• the uniqueness of our shared moment in history,
• the general state of apathy that we find in company and conversation,
• dogmatic ideology,
• ideological capture,
• identity politics,
• our default psychological models of adapting to social challenge, and
• the disturbing trend of mass appeal of content and opinion on streaming services and the internet in general.

 Daniele's links: https://linktr.ee/danielebolelli

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In conversation with Agatha Nowicki, Hollywood actor, writer and soulful human caught at the very edge of the war for the human soul, playing out in the current battle of the writers' strike, sparked by the motions of the streaming platforms and the power brokers in Hollywood and Silicon Valley as they move to further disenfranchise artists and creatives in their ongoing quest for 'more'.

We discuss the strike, Agatha's own calling to vulnerability and expression through art and what the toll the unfolding madness is having not just on her own life, but on humanity.

We share our shared and private experiences from our recent walking tour in Ireland where we met as well as the rude return to 'normal' as we both struggled to integrate that powerful and transformative experience.

We also discuss the Murmuration project.

To Follow Agatha's work:

Instagram: @agaloves, @asilentkind 

Substack: A Silent Kind of Light 

IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2063520/

Credit for the photography goes to Bodi Hallett, pictured at the end of that pier reaching out into Lough Inagh, is Agatha, contemplating the vastness.

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The episode brings to light the hidden struggle faced by creatives, thought-leaders -anyone who is looking to share their gifts with the world, who are increasingly outpaced by the algorithmic machinery and soul-dead formula of online engagement and marketing.

With my wonderful guest, Karna, we reflect on the startling reality of the tech industry's escalating race to maximize engagement at the expense of soul, in the arms race of human attention we encounter in online marketing today.

My guest is a talented and powerfully aligned human being who is challenging and re-engineering everything we think about marketing, how to approach it, how to execute and how to operate from a place of unwavering integrity and alignment where real creativity can blossom, where sincere connection can flourish, where it is fun, and where everyone wins, without compromise to their soul.

Karna is the champion and midwife of engagement ecosystems based on sincere connection.  This long form conversation and what Karna has to share, is well overdue in the world right now.

Please follow Karna: karnalivnau.com
Karna's substack: karnalivnau.substack.com
Karna's Instagram: instagram.com/_alignmentmarketing_

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As a society, we faced and struggled with the reality of mental illness long before it dawned on us, the crucial necessity for practicing Mental Health. 

In the same way, we have been living with the reality of spiritual illness long before it dawned on us as a species, the crucial and long overdue necessity to prioritise and practice Spiritual Health.

The project of mental health is necessary, but comparatively small. The invitation via Spiritual Wellness is so much deeper and vaster. We are so much deeper and vaster than we imagine. We are so incredibly empowered right now. We are standing on the threshold of Tomorrow.

This podcast episode is about the advocacy for the necessity and relevance of Spiritual Health and wellness, and how it is at the heart of all our Crisis of Meaning.

The message is: Take care of your spiritual health and your mental health will take care of itself. Recconnect with your sense of 'Soul' and your sense of meaning, of vitality and belonging will be found.

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