On Male Loneliness
Am I the only one that came to adulthood having accumulated a slew of experiences that shamed me into a particular kind of emotional range? Not explicitly “big boys don’t cry”, but pretty obvious that there are ways of behaving that are cool (stoic, disciplined, organised) and ways that are pretty uncool (expressing distress, being uncertain, not having a plan). Gradually without even realising it many people from masculine cultures can find themselves cut-off from their own emotions.
Not Forgotten
Pay Attention to Why You Hate Mindfulness
Detox for Hustle-Drunks
Not Without II
Work That Sits Behind The Work
Tough + Loving
Ego Grieving & Spirituality
If spirituality is anything it is surely a response to this human condition. To escape; to transcend; to rise above, out of it, beyond; the limited, finite, discrete conditional programming of the ego and it’s mindless drive for more; comfort, getting, satisfying, meaning-making, more, want, don’t-want.
Sabbatical Lessons: What Truth Lies in the Understory
I've wanted-to-needed-to go on sabbatical for years. To integrate some stuff. To shed some skins and layers. To allow a settling-of-sediment you just will-not-get-can't-get after two week’s Christmas leave. No. This is something different. This is making room for a signal so weak beneath the undergrowth, faint but relentless.
Sabbatical Lessons: The Virtues of Riding Off and Staying Still
In the Company of Warriors
All the things I could do
Stay, Go, or Get on the Bus of Opportunity
You don’t always know where the next change agent will come from. Sometimes for me it’s been a slow burn dawning realization, or a building itch, that’s coalesced into me one time up-ending the entire table of my former career in favor of a motorbike and the wide open highway. Other times a new piece of information is the agent, like when I put down the phone after a recent conversation with my boss, and in the wake felt like my head was bursting and struggling to decide what to do next.
The Self-Care Chronicles
I've been going through a bit of a face-to-face re-examination of my priorities lately, you could call it a bit of cognitive housekeeping. Which is a polite way to say I recently got slapped upside the head again because I still haven't learned how to set proper boundaries for myself. But let's not rush the joke, follow-along as we take a look at how this all came about.
Modern Warriorship
Warriorship has far more in common I think with what we would these days bestow on our coolest friends, and not the try-hard cool ones either, the really genuine cool ones you want to grow up to be like. The ones you catch yourself reflecting on secretly, all the while wondering how they pull it off. The ones you’d wistfully call a renaissance man. That’s warriorship.
Therapeutic Silence & Catching The Good
Through Those Dark Days: The curve of despair and other friends
I ended up living with my 12-man patrol for six and a half months in a dusty little village called Nayak, at an intersection between trade routes in the Bamiyan Province, right in the centre of the country. Apart from the newest buildings since the reconstruction effort had started only a few years earlier, everything was brown mud-brick construction, with one long main street bazaar selling bottled water, naan bread, and blacksmithing services. One of the guys on my patrol called it biblical.
Where There’s Smoke There’s Fire
The workshop I run is time spent together in conversation. The purpose of the conversation is to transform people from being uninterested or uninformed about how to build habits for high performance, to people who are interested and motivated towards building habits for high performance. It is to take people from there’s not much I can do to there’s so much I could be doing right now, and actually, I know how to start. It’s to light a fire, get people out of ruts, and to inspire change.
Why Joe and Sam Should Not Meditate
The point of mindfulness isn’t to get good at sitting on the cushion with your eyes closed. It’s what happens after you get up from the cushion or the chair that matters. So if while you’re running, you’re paying attention to the body and the breathing, focusing, bringing your attention back to the stride when your mind wanders, you are practicing mindfulness. Straight up.
Am I the only one that came to adulthood having accumulated a slew of experiences that shamed me into a particular kind of emotional range? Not explicitly “big boys don’t cry”, but pretty obvious that there are ways of behaving that are cool (stoic, disciplined, organised) and ways that are pretty uncool (expressing distress, being uncertain, not having a plan). Gradually without even realising it many people from masculine cultures can find themselves cut-off from their own emotions.