In this conversation, you can expect to learn:

• How 703,000+ ketamine sessions revealed what actually drives healing — their data on why music selection, journaling timing, and the 2-5 minute onset of injectable ketamine dramatically impact outcomes versus clinical IV settings

• The hidden war between Big Pharma and psychedelic medicine — how Johnson & Johnson created an 88x more expensive version of ketamine, and why Mindbloom is suing the Wall Street Journal for defamation

• Why "super well-being", not just "not sick" should be medicine's goal — the shift from disease management to human flourishing, and how psychedelics can unlock 100x improvements in life quality most people don't realize are possible

• The real reason IV ketamine is considered "gold standard" (and why it shouldn't be) — how anesthesiologists accidentally created inferior protocols, why injectable beats IV for therapeutic use

His philosophies and ideas have been highly influential in my life and the work I do in the world.

We sat down in Northern California to discuss some of the first principles of inner work as well as common pitfalls that many folks will fall into along the way. Here are some of the specific topics that we explored:

• Why does my wife trust Joe more after seeing how little tension he has in his belly?

• How 7 years of breathwork rewired his capacity for authenticity + emotional expression

• The reason self-trust + trust in life are actually the same skill

• Why is enjoyment the most efficient way to work?

• How true safety (ironically) requires acknowledging that we're never truly safe

• The common trap that stagnates the personal growth of so many teachers (and how to avoid it)

• The hilarious story behind Joe's secret nickname 'Burt McCracken' (and the trap of taking yourself too seriously)

• One definition of narcissism is the inability to feel emotions

• The reason that relational work accelerates personal transformation (compared to solo efforts)

I hope you enjoy watching this conversation as much as I appreciated having it!

7 years ago, I hit publish on the first Curious Humans Newsletter, and today — hundreds of issues and 72 podcast episodes later — the project comes to a close.

The Curious Humans project was born from my obsession with the question of why, as kids, most of us were immensely curious, what was it that suppressed this as we grew older, and how might we go about reclaiming this as adults.

It's hard to overstate how much I learnt and grew from the decision to write and podcast in public, but recently, I've realised that I'm in a very different period of life and that it’s time to close this chapter.

There's a flavor of grateful heartbreak that's present — my life has shifted as a direct result of the conversations that it led to and the lens it gave me to view the world (fun fact: I met my now-pregnant wife, Kelly, because I asked her to be a guest on the podcast!)

It’s time to refresh the vibe. Here's what's on the horizon.

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with National Geographic and spent my days spinning a globe and aching to go out on my own adventures in far-flung lands. I was fortunate to experience some of these — travelling to 70+ countries, a few multi-week expeditions, and once crossing the English Channel on a paddleboard!

This era of my life was abruptly ended by a personal loss that turned my life upside down. I realised that I’d been historically out of touch with my emotions, and the thought of becoming a bitter old man with unprocessed grief scared me. So I left the old life behind and went all in.

I have fond memories from the years that followed. I signed up for extended meditation retreats, spent 10 full days in total darkness, participated in psychedelic ceremonies, trained in a life-changing breathwork modality called Facilitated Breath Repatterning, and married the love of my life. I found myself drawn to interviewing world-famous poets, executive coaches, wise elders, pathless path friends, brave monastics, and renegade neuroscientists.

At this point, it seems clear to me that just as centuries ago, when our ancestors wrote ‘Terra Incognita’ or ‘Here be Dragons’ scribbled on their mappa mundi (world maps), in today’s world, the most exciting frontier is unquestionably the territory of our own consciousness.

So that’s what I intend to spend the next decade of my life exploring under the new banner of ‘The Inner Frontier’. I intend for it to be a hand-crafted, high signal newsletter and creative container for all kinds of experimental projects.

Here are some of the alive explorations that I intend to write about in the weeks and months to come:

1. Practical philosophy for exploring the nervous system: exploring the biological mechanism for how trauma is stored in the body, to the radical new role of bio-electricity in our physical wellbeing.

2. Exploring the first principles for inner work. How do we create the conditions for embodied safety and productive self-exploration?

3. Tools for safely engineering altered states of consciousness, moving away from anxiety towards experiences of foundational wellbeing.

4. Playful experiments with using AI as a thinking partner and intimate mirror to accelerate the journey of self-reflection.

5. Sharing novel theories at the edges of neuroscience: from vasocomputation (the biological mechanism for how trauma is stored in the body) to emerging research on bio-electricity from Dr Michael Levin.

6. And much, much more…

Okay, thanks for being a part of this journey so far. If you’re along for the ride, stay subscribed.

And if you have suggestions for topics you think would be interesting to write about or potential future podcast guests, please do let me know.

Onwards!

Jonny

Techniques for tactical mindfulness—using mind-based or “top-down” tools to influence our thoughts and feelings—have exploded in popularity.

But when our nervous systems are hijacked and adrenaline is coursing through our veins, unless we have thousands of hours of mindfulness training, it can be hard to avoid panic mode, let alone drop into meditation.

Fortunately, it is possible (and, as I will argue, far more efficient) to leverage your physiology—known as “bottom-up” practices—by using breathwork to self-regulate and positively impact your internal state in real-time.

The cultivation of calm

The human nervous system is one of the most technologically advanced operating systems in the known universe. It is not only responsible for our energy levels (aka productivity) and capacity for relaxation, but it is also the filter through which we experience the world and people around us.

You would think this remarkable network of neurological hardware would have a complex instruction manual. Fortunately, it is more simple to learn than you might think.

Many of us find it challenging to think clearly when our nervous system has been hijacked by a trigger or an intense situation. Perhaps you experienced nervous energy, even anxiety, before an important conversation or presentation, which hindered your capacity to give it your best or be fully present. Or maybe you felt lethargy creep in when you sat down for a deep workflow session.

Making matters worse is that unproductive thought loops and feelings exacerbate the issue. These reactive states are the underlying cause of ineffectiveness, reactivity, conflict, and regrettable decision-making.

Luckily, there is a zero-cost solution to this quandary—an always-accessible operating manual for your nervous system that is more effective than any prescription drug, with no unwanted side effects. In fact, it has been under your nose since you were born: your breath.

I’m going to explain the science of how breathwork functions, and then I’ll give you some actionable exercises so that you can do it yourself. Drawing from recent discoveries in neurobiology, there are two concepts that will empower you to be more effective in aligning the state of your nervous system with your desired state of grounded calm or clear focus.

1. The nervous system remote: using the bottom-up method of our breath to impact blood chemistry, which shifts the thoughts and feelings that arise

2. If [this] then [breathe]: two protocols you can use to effectively leverage your biology to up- or down-regulate your state, accessing either focus or calm as required

The nervous system operating manual

How is your breath right now? Take a moment to tune in. There’s a reasonable chance (especially if you are reading this on your phone) that your breath is shallow, in the upper chest and possibly through the mouth. 

Our breath is perhaps the only activity in our body that happens on its own that can also be consciously controlled. Yet it is rare for most of us to inquire how our breath is or consciously control it. Why does this matter? 

Because how we breathe impacts how we feel, how we show up in the world, and even the types of thoughts that arise. (Tip: As you read the following paragraphs, explore deliberately breathing faster than usual through your mouth and into your upper chest.)

Deep inside your brain lies a piece of biological hardware known as your insula cortex. It interprets signals from your breathing rhythms, serving as a central hub for somatic (bodily) and interoceptive—or internal—signals. 

Image credit: BMJ

When you breathe through the mouth and into the upper lungs, signals are relayed to activate the sympathetic or activating part of your nervous system, creating a cascade effect that communicates to your endocrine system to secrete adrenaline and cortisol—which, in turn, generate measurable shifts in your blood chemistry. 

These shifts in blood chemistry impact the emotions you feel and even the tone of thoughts that will arise—like impulsive actions, anxious thoughts, and feelings of frustration. We can fall into a trap as these unproductive thoughts and feelings reinforce or even exacerbate the breath pattern that activates the sympathetic response in the nervous system.

(If you haven’t already, you can let your breathing return to normal. Notice how you feel internally.) 

Here, the common strategy is to attempt to think our way out of the stress. You may be familiar with tactical mindfulness, cognitive reframes, or thoughts of loving-kindness to change your state of mind. These act as top-down interventions for throwing a wrench into the negative thought spiral. However, it’s possible—and more effective—to shift your breathing pattern to generate calmer thoughts and feelings.

There are important neurological reasons why. Our nervous system consists of 80% of afferent neurons, which move from the body to the brain—in contrast to roughly 20% of efferent neurons, which run in the opposite direction, from the brain to the body. 

As a result, so-called bottom-up interventions—or practices that leverage our physiology by consciously shifting our respiratory or visual systems—are 4x more effective at altering our blood chemistry and, therefore, shifting our state.

Embrace state over story

Working with clients, I will often talk about “state before story”—the idea that the stories we tell ourselves and the perspectives we inhabit are a function of our nervous system state. 

If our system is overwhelmed or dysregulated, the mind will find reasons to explain why. At times, we might even invent false reasons to justify the internal anxious state.

By intervening at the level of our biology, leveraging our physiology to shift blood chemistry and regulate the nervous system, new stories arise, and in many cases, the insurmountable challenges seem to solve themselves.

Once this idea clicks, the impact is profound. The CEO of a rocket ship company told me that he now felt able to “regulate [his] energy through the ups and downs of running a startup.” A senior product manager at Amazon similarly shared, “I have lost the fear of stress activation since I can now interpret it and also regulate it.”

If we deliberately change the way that we breathe, for example, using exhales that are twice the length of the inhale, we consciously send different signals to the medulla oblongata (the brain’s control center), just as we might change the input channel on a television remote. This part of our brain responds with instructions to the endocrine system to produce a neurotransmitter that slows down our heart rate, regulates blood pressure, and returns our body to homeostasis.

It’s a profound insight from the neuroscience literature—that our seemingly objective experience of reality is, in fact, entirely mediated through neurotransmitters. Furthermore, because shifts in breathing patterns create reliable and consistent shifts in blood chemistry, we can learn how to alter our moment-to-moment lived experiences.

No matter how intense an external situation might be, whether it’s dealing with screaming children or a boardroom confrontation, there is always a grounded center of calm available to you through consciously shifting your breathing rhythm.

Now that we’ve talked about the science of how this works, I’ll walk you through the exercises to put it into practice.

If [this] then [breathe]

You’ve probably come across iPhone shortcuts or automation tools that allow you to write something along the lines of: If [tweet] then [save to Evernote] or If [time = 7 p.m.] then [dim lights]. 

Here are two automation recipes you can use to up or down-regulate—i.e., activate or calm—your nervous system in real-time. These exercises take advantage of the changes in blood chemistry shared above.

1. If [lethargic or sleepy] then [espresso breath]

2. If [anxious or overwhelmed] then [breath of calm]

Let’s start with espresso breath.

Espresso breath

Sit up with a straight lower spine, tuck your chin slightly, and begin rapid exhales through your nose, at the rate of roughly two per second. The inhale happens naturally. You should feel your belly contracting like a pump with each exhale. Continue for 30 exhales. Once you’ve completed this, exhale completely to the end of your breath, holding until you feel mild breath-hunger (the desire to inhale). 

Then inhale deeply and hold at the top for 20-30 seconds. Release the breath completely, keeping your body as motionless as possible for 30 seconds afterward to allow the effects to settle.

Repeat this 2-3 times as desired. You may also experiment with noticing how this short practice creates a shift in your internal state.

The author practicing "breath of calm."(Credit: Kelly Miller)

Breath of calm

This practice uses the technique of alternate nostril breathing that has been shown in studies to effectively reduce anxiety, combined with an exhale that is twice the length of the inhale. Longer exhales are key for the down-regulation of the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the branch that enables us to recover and rejuvenate following a stressor and also creates the conditions for sleep in the evening.

Ensure you’re sitting comfortably, ideally with a straight lower spine. Bring your right hand up to your face, using your ring finger to close the left nostril and your thumb to close the right nostril.

Begin by closing the right nostril and inhaling through the left side for a count of three. Then hold at the top for three. Exhale through the right side for a count of six. Now inhale right-side for three, hold for three, and exhale left for six. This is one full round. If you find a count of three and six challenging, start with inhaling for two, holding two, and exhaling for four. Over time your carbon dioxide tolerance will increase, and you can extend to counts of 10 in and 20 out.

Repeat for 3-5 rounds or until you feel sufficiently calm. It’s beneficial to end the practice with a full inhale and an audible relaxed sigh, which deepens the relaxation response.

There are various cues to watch for to see if your body is downshifting gears into parasympathetic. The most obvious is a spontaneous sigh response, but you also may be aware of a softening in muscular tension in the shoulders and belly or a more relaxed gaze.

Flipping your internal switch

In my experience, breathwork practices are the most efficient protocols for shifting my state in real-time. I’ve seen first-hand how these zero-cost tools have empowered clients to navigate intensely stressful situations—from calming pre-interview nerves to stepping into the public speaking arena with far greater conviction and composure.

The next time you notice a negative thought loop arises or sense the tentacles of overwhelm take hold, remember “state over story”: Find a quiet place where you can practice for two minutes, give this breath of calm a try, and notice what a radical difference it makes.

Jonny Miller hosts the Curious Humans podcast and Nervous System Mastery, an upcoming cohort-based boot camp that shares evidence-based protocols for cultivating calm and resilience. Learn more.

Gratitude to Kate Lee, Dan Shipper, Stephanie Freed, Colin Brauns, Alison Zamora, and Valeria Zhang for providing feedback.

I just contributed an essay to the writing collective Every that I'm proud of. It's titled 'The Art and Science of Interoception' and explores the lesser-known but vitally important skill of exploring our inner landscape.

Please enjoy!

🙋‍♂️ The Art and Science of Interoception

What if I told you that you could turn up the dial of your everyday experience? With sufficient practice, you could enhance your capacity to sense and track your internal state, as if you were upgrading from a 1960s television to experiencing the movie of your life at an IMAX in 4K.

This is the power of interoception––yet most people have never heard of it.

A personal or health crisis often facilitates radical shifts in perspective, and my own journey was no exception.

Five years ago, I was living with my fiancé in the English coastal town of Brighton, where she worked as a doctor. She had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder before we met, yet for the most part, she was bursting at the seams with life, with a mischievous grin and luminous presence.

One morning, while I was traveling, she suffered from an anxiety attack at work. In the intensity of that moment and without friends or family present to intervene, she rode home and overdosed on her own medication — taking her own life.

As I embarked on the long process of dealing with the pain of this loss, I began to explore parts of myself –– the repressed emotions and authentic expressions –– that had lain beneath my conscious awareness. I was afraid that if I didn’t learn how to metabolize my grief, it would lead me to become bitter and perhaps unable to love fully again.

One of my more profound realizations –– and gifts of grief –– was that I had unknowingly spent the vast majority of my life living in my head and emotionally numb from the neck down.

Growing up in the British education system, Somatic Literacy 101 –– aka learning how to listen to your internal physical and biological feedback –– was, unsurprisingly, not part of the core curriculum. So over the past five years, I dedicated myself to exploring the psychological and emotional terrain of my inner landscape. This path has included hundreds of breathwork journeys, guided psychedelic experiences, a vision quest, and 10 days of meditating inside a dark room. The most unexpectedly potent experience was learning how to freedive down to 120 feet underwater with a single breath. To equalize — aka relieve the pressure that builds in the inner ear and sinuses as a result of increasing one’s depth below the surface — requires a refined, subtle awareness of physical tension, which I came to understand as a form of high-stakes interoception training.

I now feel like an entirely different person. I notice myself making more intuitive decisions, with less emotional reactivity and a sense of greater aliveness in my day-to-day experience.

​

We have more than just five senses

As Michael Ashcroft pointed out, the idea that we humans have five senses — sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste — is a belief that dates back 2,000 years to Aristotle.

Back then, it was a decent guess, but neuroscience has advanced significantly since the days of ancient Greece. It turns out that we have at least four additional senses—and the most underrated and practical of them is known as interoception.

The word has two parts: “intero–” refers to “internal” and “–ception” to “awareness.” In essence, it means awareness of our internal state, which includes learned associations, memories, emotions, and all the data running through the interconnected pipelines of the 100 billion neurons in your body.2

Intero-ception can be contrasted with “extero-ception,” which involves receiving data through the external senses. Most of us tend to prioritize external sense data –– like endlessly refreshing a newsfeed after dinner when internally, our body is sending signals to recover and begin winding down.

In the center of the brain lies a remarkably sophisticated piece of biological machinery called the insula. This spongy core is the headquarters for cortical representation, which refers to how your brain processes all the information about your internal state.

Imagine that this area of your brain is like one of those gorgeous 16th-century maps that had “here be dragons” scribbled over the yet-to-be-explored areas. In much the same way, you might think of these cortical maps in our brainstems as having smudges all over them that can only be restored and brought into higher definition through interoceptive exploration.

​

Three reasons to flex your interoceptive muscles

1 // Make more informed decisions

By learning to cultivate internal receptivity, we can listen to the treasure trove of data coming from the activation shifts of neurotransmitters –– like adenosine cueing a need for sleep, a change in our breathing mechanics signaling a shift in our arousal response, or just being aware of how rested we feel upon waking and making choices about our day accordingly.

2 // Avoid the burnout dump truck

In the past decade, there has been a hockey stick-shaped increase in research interest in interoception within the scientific community. In my own research on emotional resilience, in which my co-author and I surveyed over 250 leaders worldwide — we observed how a lack of interoceptive capacity tends to be associated with prolonged maladaptive stress responses –– research-speak for the highway to burnout.

Prolonged periods of high-stress cause allostatic overload, or accumulated wear and tear on the body, leading to increased fragility in the nervous system. In addition, the stress hormone cortisol numbs us and reduces our ability to interocept, which creates a vicious cycle of diminishing receptivity to our body’s messages.

We call this the “feather, brick, dump truck” phenomenon. Often, these high achievers would push through initial fatigue or poor sleep (feather) and again through a minor health crisis (brick) until it took the giant dump truck of complete burnout to convince them to begin listening to their body.

Multiple studies also tie interoceptive abilities with the ability to feel and coregulate with the emotions of others –– in other words, the capacity for empathy.

3 // Enhanced emotional regulation

​
​

​
As Dan Shipper has been sharing on Twitter, productivity boils down to emotional regulation, and intentional emotional regulation requires the ability to sense, track, and feel the sensations that get interpreted into emotions — the capacity to interocept.

When there is a lack of interoception, we’re unable to fully feel the sensations associated with emotions. Unfortunately, this means they remain beneath our conscious awareness and instead are projected onto others — or we find ourselves emotionally overreacting in ways that are rarely conducive to our long-term goals.
​

Read the Essay on Every

​🎙️ Healing & Thriving Through Radical Curiosity

Goosebump-inducing Waves of Knowingness - on grief, friendship, living abroad, founding a company, remote work, Rolf Potts, David Whyte, poetry, and finding work that matters.

Paul Millerd is one of my oldest and closest friends — we've lived in Japan, Indonesia, and Mexico together — so it was such a joy to sit down with him on his Pathless Path podcast and record this conversation to reflect on nomadic life & navigating the path of unconventional work together.

When we met five years ago — we were both single but now are both married in cross-country relationships and have navigated finding work that matters, getting married, and living in foreign countries together.

Watch us on Youtube or listen in podcast-format here.

​

​

🔗 Et Cetera

🤯 Write: Lex is a new GTP-3 writing assistant that I have had early access to and frankly has blown me away. The implications of a tool this powerful are fascinating to consider. Join the waitlist.

🎧 Listen: 'Productivity as emotional regulation' – a conversation between Dan Shipper & Sam Sager diving into Dan's journey with anxiety, selling his first company and what he's learned from neuroscience and psychology. Listen.

👨‍🎓 Learn: how you can change your face, jawline, posture, & reclaim your health by nose-breathing Read.

👀 Read: Alex Olshonski writes eloquently about 'a vine for troubled times' — it's one of the most in-depth and well researched pieces on plant medicine that I've come across. A must read for anyone interested in overcoming addiction or considering an ayahuasca journey. Read.

📚 Book Recommendation: 'A Return to Eros: The Radical Experience of Being Fully Alive' by Dr. Marc Gafni + Kristina Kincaid. This radical book is about how understanding the sexual and how to re-eroticize all areas of your life. Read.

​

📝 Parting Quote

"I’ve never seen any life transformation that didn’t begin with the person in question finally getting tired of their own bullshit."

— Elizabeth Gilbert

As I tap on this keyboard, there are gigantic tropical raindrops plopping on the wooden roof, the stormy beats are punctuated by a droning daredevil mosquito as he circles above—waiting for the perfect moment to dive-bomb my fleshy arm.

Strangely I feel a modicum of respect for his uncompromising blitzkrieg and wonder if I might be able to learn a thing or two about relentless consistency and pursuit of my mission from this airborne blood-sucking gnat 🦟

🌴 Returning to Bali // after more than a year of bouncing around the Americas it feels restorative to have something akin to a home base again—especially one with such a vibrant community. I can already feel stiff creativity muscles aching to be stretched.

🎙️ Podcast News // the recent conversation with neuro-anthropologist + flow genius Jamie Wheal seems to have really resonated (listen here) plus there two juicy new episodes that just dropped (more below).

🫁 Nervous System Mastery // I’ve been quietly tinkering away on a curriculum that builds on my resilience research & breathwork protocols—designed to share a comprehensive, evidence-backed and highly practical program that I believe has the potential to be genuinely transformative for both leaders & coaches.

👑 Exploring Myth + Archetypes // I’ve become somewhat (very) obsessed with the rambunctious mythic writing of Martin Shaw, learning about the sacred and the profane as well as diving into the men’s mythopoetic movement initially founded by Robert Bly. These thoughts haven’t yet coalesced into coherence but I can feel a deep dive essay brewing in the coming weeks.

Alright, that’s all for now folks—if you feel drawn to reply with a sentence or two, please do so and either way, I hope that you are thriving and living from a place of aliveness.

Stay Curious Out There!

~ JM

📸 Sunrise over Mt. Agung, Bali, Indonesia 🌋

🎙️ Ep #28 // Overcoming Imposter Syndrome & Re-Claiming Your Attention with Award-Winning Poet Max Stossel (link)

Max Stossel is an award-winning poet (whose short films have been seen over 40 million times) advisor to Tech for Humanity, successful filmmaker and all-around wise human who I'm grateful to call a brother.

In this poetic + lyrical conversation we explore:

🖋️ The journey that led him from designing notification systems at a social media company to exploring the art and science of attention.

📱 The dangers of smartphone addiction + practical questions as users that we can be asking ourselves.

📝 How he describes his work as a blend of poetry, standup comedy and storytelling.

💔 How he's found the courage to lean into painful experiences and get curious about heartbreak.

🦅 How his writing workshop on avoidance and imposter syndrome led to my publishing a short poetry book.

🙋‍♂️ His experience and insights from leading men's groups and how this work has changed his life for the better.

Listen here

🎙️ Ep #29 Effing the Ineffable, Re-Imagining Love & Relieving Reality of Its Seriousness with Alice Frank (link)

In one of the longest and most wide-ranging episodes to date, this conversation is with filmmaker, poet, relationship coach and utterly unique human being Alice Frank—who is here as she says to proudly "eff the ineffable".

Her book 'My Real Name Is You' has been loved by Eckhart Tolle said 'My favourite poem I ever heard' and Jason Mraz who shared: 'Her words are alive the same way notation can fly off a page and become sweet music.'

I'm slightly at a loss for words attempting to describe the ground that we covered but I will add that she is one of the most present people I've ever met and has a truly astounding capacity to articulate the great mysteries of life.

Here's a sampling of where our conversation led:

✨ Her spiritual awakening that lasted for a decade and what her experience was of being no-one (and the challenges of living so deeply in the present)... followed by what she described as her 'breakup with god'.

😆 Why we lose touch with our sense of play and why we should strive to 'relieve reality of its seriousness'. I loved that one of her favourite mantras is 'Can you imagine if it mattered? Can you imagine if it mattered?'

❤️ Her journey from the depths of polyamory to more recently getting married, reframing un-conditional love to 'all-conditional' love & how she now coaches couples to remember what this even means.

🎴 Her current meditation practice and why she created a 'silent retreat in a box' — a beautiful series of mantra cards to create your own home meditation retreat (definitely check this out!)

Listen here

🔗 Et Cetera

❓ How to ask useful questions

🌎 How to think beyond ourselves

🧊 Antarctica now has a ‘true south’ flag

👀 In praise of looking closely via Craig Mod

🎙️ Superb podcast exploring Mythic Masculinity

❤️ Love in a time between worlds (journal paper)

💡 Tips for how to prioritise project ideas (deep dive)

📹 The wisdom of trauma (must-watch documentary)

🧠 Scientists dig into the brain’s curiosity mechanism

👨‍🎓 Why cohort-based courses are the future for online learning

📝 Parting Poem

物の哀れ, もののあはれ (the pathos of things)

What if I were to love the wild,

The way that I adore my lover

When liberated from perspectives

That anaesthetise a capacity

To live in that fierce heat

Of inevitable disappearance.

//

What if I could love the humpbacks,

the hawks and the brown bears?

As if they too were drenched

In a fertile impermanence,

That is both a blessing

And a heartfelt reckoning.

Would tears of grief erupt from the skies?

Would an infinite ribbon of colour flood the horizon?

Jonny here—I’ve just landed back from an interesting trip to Colombia & absurdly excited to share this firecracker of an episode with one of the most interesting and radical thinkers of our generation (listen to the full conversation on Spotify / Apple / Other).

Jamie Wheal is a genuine 21st Century Renaissance Man. He's world-renowned for his work writing Stealing Fire and creating the Flow Genome Project—and as you'll hear in our conversation, the book he has just published is unlike anything else you'll ever read.

I see him as being a bridge between the spiritual + the scientific (bringing a much-needed lightness to both) with a deep commitment to his craft.

He is pioneering studies with Johns Hopkins and MAPS whilst wading deep into questions of how do we evolve and mature as humans or in his words:

How do we “Stay awake. Build stuff. And help out."

In this conversation which felt more like a science-fiction rhapsody we bounce around between:

☄️  Why we're facing a new Meaning Crisis and the looming pitfalls of the rise of 'Rapture Ideologies'

🧘‍♂️  The Hedonic Yoga of Becoming experiment he dreamt up and ran with after a conversation with Roland Griffiths at MAPS.

💔  We talk about what it means to ‘Grieve Globally + Thrive Locally’—to move from tragic to post-tragic worldviews and the real need for cultivating a culture of post-traumatic growth.

🤯  Finally, something I don’t believe he has yet shared elsewhere—how he's planning on launching a post-modern religion in hyperspace taking the form of an alternate reality game called Y-ANON (not kidding).

🎧 Truly this has been one of my favourite & mind-bending conversations to date. If some of the ideas resonate, I’d absolutely recommend buying his book and would also love to hear any reflections that arise.

ENJOY!

Listen to the Episode

p.s. if you know any fellow humans who might appreciate this podcast episode please forward this email on or share the link on Twitter—I believe these ideas need to be out in the world!  

Greetings from a yard sale in Boulder, Colorado. It’s chilly this morning. I’m wrapped up in a puffy jacket whilst Kelly is selling 90% of her belongings to passing strangers. We’ve been reflecting on the meaning and nostalgia associated with these possessions that we feel oddly compelled to hold onto for so many years.

🎙️ Bill Plotkin Interview // This one is a must-listen episode for anyone interested in how to become a more mature human and find their purpose in life. To me, Bill is a genuine elder and visionary with a very unique perspective on these timeless questions.

🏫 Future of Learning // I joined the inaugural cohort of the Be On Deck Course Creators and have been extremely impressed. The quality of the curriculum design and community-first learning experience is potent (I wouldn’t be surprised if they end up disrupting Ivy League MBA programs)

🙏 Dancing with Grief // One of the most listened to episodes of my podcast was with Jungian psychologist, word-weaver + soul seeker Erick Godsey (listen here). Erick turned the tables and interviewed me on his ‘Myths That Make Us’ podcast and we dove into my journey through grief and explored what emerged on the other side.

🇲🇽 Farewell Mexico // After nearly a year in Central America, Kelly and I have decided to end the Central American chapter & will be relocating to Bali for the foreseeable future (to explore joining a co-living community there amongst other things—please do come visit!)

Wherever in the world you are reading this from, I hope you’re finding joy and magic in life’s little moments & pursuing the questions that matter most to you.

Stay Curious!

~JM

p.s. you can support Curious Humans by sharing this newsletter with friends, becoming a subscriber or even buying my episode with the poet David Whyte as an NFT

🎙️ Soul Initiation, Mythopoetic Identity & The Spiritual Adventure with Dr. Bill Plotkin (listen)

Dr. Bill Plotkin is a depth psychologist, wilderness guide and visionary ecopsychologist—his work might well be the map that you didn't know you were looking for. It has been for me an immense treasure trove of practical wisdom and guidance for thinking about my own growth and maturity.

In this conversation we talk about,

• The definition of what it means to be a genuine adult (and why he believes 80% of humanity are currently stuck in early-stage adolescence)

• His map of the five stages of the descent to soul and the path to becoming a true elder, what he calls 'sacred wound work' a story of the weavings of the Native American Diné people,

• The 'four facets of mind' as a unique framework for personal development a and cultivating human wholeness,

• An ambitious vision for this work to be put into practice by a global network of 'mystery schools' and so much more…
  

"True Adults and Elders are people who know why they were born, who know who they are as unique individual participants in the web of life, and who, in most everything they do, creatively occupy their distinctive ecological niche as a life-enhancing gift to their people and to the greater Earth community."

– Dr Bill Ploktin

Listen to the Episode

🔍 On Collecting Life’s Big Questions

I’ve been thinking about questions and how in some ways they are like the lenses through which we experience life.

Asking a beautiful question allows you to listen in a different way and can compel you to walk towards the unknown (Here are 53 beautiful questions inspired by poetry).

Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison has an excellent ‘Canon for Life's Important Questions’ which I believe is an exercise that everyone should attempt.

Examples of his big questions are ‘What's the successor to the book? And how could books be improved?’ and ‘Why is there no canon for life's most important questions?’

We are rarely taught the art of how to ask better questions—instead, we have a tendency to grasp hold of easy answers because frankly, it’s uncomfortable to sit with the uncertainty of not knowing.

At the end of each month in my monthly review, I include a section for ‘beautiful questions’ that I’m sitting with and feeling my way into.

❓related: Judson Brewer sharing the two flavours of curiosity and how they can help overcome feelings of overwhelm + anxiety.

🔗 Et Cetera

🌹 AI-generated pick-up lines

🦖 T-rex likely hunted in packs

🙏 Make generous assumptions

🌱 Live music generated by plants

👋 30 alternatives to ‘how are you’?

☄️ The Barnum effect via NessLabs

💌 Newsletter love: Soul Art Sundays

🧘 Meditation + profanity = mindf***

💸 A newsletter that pays you in bitcoin

🛌 The seven types of rest via TED Ideas

🎳 Drone-pilot wizardry in a bowling alley

🧱 Roman concrete gets stronger over time

💀 The dangers of being too attached to life

🃏 Learning to play the fool via Austin Kleon

👐 How to lend support without burning out

🤖 Robots can officially dance better than you

🌳 Stunning streaks of light falling from trees

🎙️ The 4-hour podcast episode via Tim Ferriss

🪙 Thoughtful incubator for social token design

🐒 Monkey playing mental pong through neuralink

🔬 The ‘moun’ particle is disobeying laws of physics

✨ Deep wisdom from the spiritual side of wolverine

😵 Why we stare at our own faces on zoom via WIRED

🕍 Economic principles for a Great Resetvia C. Eisenstein

🪶 Understanding brick, feather + dump-truck moments via Olo

📝 Parting Poem

By David Whyte

Start Close In Start close in, don’t take the second step or the third, start with the first thing close in, the step you don’t want to take. 

Start with the ground you know, the pale ground beneath your feet, your own way to begin the conversation. 

Start with your own question, give up on other people’s questions, don’t let them smother something simple. 

To hear another’s voice, follow your own voice, wait until that voice becomes an intimate private ear that can really listen to another. 

Start right now take a small step you can call your own don’t follow someone else’s heroics, be humble and focused, start close in, don’t mistake that other for your own. 

Start close in, don’t take the second step, or the third, start with the first thing close in, the step you don’t want to take.

📚 Why I Self-Published a Poetry Book // Last week I published a short collection of poetry under the title of ‘Remember, Forget, Remember’. It feels good to have it out in the wild!

🌋 Reflections on 30 Days of Co-Living // Our month-long adventure in Guatemala has just ended. I plan to write more about this but for now—without exaggeration—I can say that it has been one of the most meaningful and impactful months of my life.

🌳 Emotional Resilience Retreat // I’m excited to announce a 2021 Resilience retreat that I will be co-hosting with Jan Chipchase—taking place in the highlands of Oaxaca, Mexico (more info below).

👋 Question for you // What is a question that you’re exploring in your life and work? I’d love to hear from you and what is alive in your world right now?

Stay Curious Out There.

~JM

p.s. greetings to you 37 new readers! If you know any humans who are also curious, please forward this on.

🌋 Photos from hiking up the volcano Acatenango where Kelly and I played handpan above the world.

📚 Why I Self-Published a Poetry Book

The idea of self-publishing a small collection of poems came last year, and yet I procrastinated for months… that was until attending a writing workshop with my friend Max and I realised why this really mattered to me.

Below is an extract from the book’s forward which I wrote during Max’s workshop.

***

Why Remember, Forget, Remember?

On some days when I attempt to write, it’s like there is a bad tune stuck in my head. The lyrics to this painfully catchy song go something like:

“You think this is any good? Worthy of another human’s time when they could read Rilke or Rumi? Could you be any more self-absorbed? Honestly a handful of twelve-line poems doesn’t make you worthy of being a poet?” 

I call this the mother-f*cking song of forgetting.

Yet, in other rare moments, often in the presence of mountains, oceans or perhaps someone that I love—I hear a quieter melody, almost like being aware of an ever-present choir singing in the distance.

This is more of an instrumental soundtrack that feels like a heartfelt smile—a sense of raw aliveness that knows these questions are based on a false premise that our existence needs to be justified. That we somehow need to earn our worthiness.

I call this the mother-f*cking song of remembrance.

***

Why Publish this At All?

Great question. Besides the glib answer of ‘why not?’ I view this human existence as an infinitely unfolding process of remembering, forgetting and remembering again.

I am blessed and cursed with the human tendency of often taking myself and my drama all too seriously, and in so doing, forget the breath-taking beauty of the world in which I am immersed.

My real answer—this book is for me.

I am sharing these words with the world, yet this book is for me. It comes in a bundle package with a hope and a prayer that in those inevitable moments when I am caught in my own capital R ‘Resistance’, when I’ve lost touch with the joy that doesn’t depend on what happens and when my umbilical cord to the realm of the poetic imagination is severed—in those moments I will remember this book.

This book is a gift and an infinitely unfolding invitation to my future self, saying:

”Look buddy, you’ve done this before. You ARE capable of channelling beauty and articulating the splendour of this human existence in a way that no-one else ever has. You are capable of surprising yourself mid-sentence and of overhearing yourself say something you didn’t realise that you already knew.”

If any of the poems contained within this book speak to you—or manage to mirror back a felt experience that you had previously been unable to articulate or felt alone in experiencing—then I am thrilled.

For I have been the recipient of many words that have seized me and pointed to a more beautiful way of seeing the world that I previously knew was possible.

Finally, I invite you to create your own artefact of remembrance. Like a golden thread that you can carry into the dark forest of your life, something to hold onto when you find yourself wandering down the path less path of your own creative journey.

Buy the Kindle Book

🏔️ Resilient Leadership Training

📆 2021 Virtual Masterclass Dates

I’m running another Emotional Resilience Online Masterclass (May 4-6) designed for leaders who require the perspective, scientific evidence, tools and mindset, to build resilience in themselves and their teams. If you or someone you know might be interested in attending please get in touch.

In the words of a past attendee:

“The emotional resilience class with Jonny included opportunities for deep personal reflection and was full of great nuggets that could be implemented right away, The experiential approach kept it engaging, while still covering a ton of content. Jonny didn’t just educate us about what works, he also backed it up with the research anddata on why it works.”

—Steve Messinetti President & CEO Habitat for Humanity Portland/Metro East

🌳 Developing an Organisational Resilience Toolkit, Resilience / Oaxaca

As part of the multi-year research into Emotional Resilience, Jan Chipchase and I will be co-hosting a November retreat in Oaxaca Mexico (to which you are invited), with the aim of exploring daily practices that cultivate a sense of grounding in a time of groundlessness.

We will also be collaborating with attendees to develop an organisational resilience toolkit for assessing wellbeing in organisations.

The retreat’s aims include:

• To ensure a baseline understanding of how to achieve and maintain personal and team wellbeing for all attendees—from the science of well-being to tool and the optimal mindset.

• To align on approaches, processes and tools for supporting resilience in our organisations. This is the thorny stuff that makes or breaks adoption.

• To build a support network of resilience aware leaders, to share best practices and amplify resilience initiatives that you are looking to put in place.

Above // view of the Oaxaca highlands from Refugio, our 2021 retreat venue

The retreat format—sixteen interesting people hosted in a gorgeous refuge for three nights, with good food, drink and situated in nature is highly conducive to making meaningful connections, sharing and iterating on ideas.

We recognise that planning overseas travel remains challenging, so to make it easier we’ll be using a waitlist, and will make the decision whether to go-live in early August. Want to join? Sign-up to waitlist.

🔗 Et Cetera

🤔 This word doesn’t exist

👊 Al’s ‘Suck Less’ challenge

🍌 How to monetise a banana

💰 NFTs!? explained for creators

⚖️ The myth of work/life balance

😷 Unexpected positives of Covid

🎙️ What exactly is a 'podcast voice'?

🛌 Communicating to lucid dreamers

📸 Stunning underwater photography

🎮 Hack your DSLR to play minecraft

🏆 Why you should stop keeping score

🤖 Clever AI-based movie scene search

💚 Finally, the meaning of every heart emoji

🍄 Concerning psychedelic patent land-grabs

✉️ Kids on how to make requests of busy people

🎵 Removing Society's soundtrack from your ears

Yesterday we crossed the Guatemalan border in our ‘91 VW Kombi bus, which thankfully has proven very reliable despite the roads (or lack thereof) on this side of the border.

At this moment, I’m typing these words a lava laden ash cloud spewing from ‘Chi Q'aq’ or ‘Volcán de Fuego’—an active fire-spewing giant, whose earth-shaking belly rumbles will be a soundtrack for our foreseeable future.

The intention behind this road trip was following an invitation to spend the next month amidst a co-living community—a small gathering of worldly poets, artists, photographers and other creative souls.

I’m deeply intrigued to see what emerges from this gathering as we explore the question of what it means to create meaningful community in a post-covid world.

🙏 30 Days of Breathwork Challenge // It turns out that a lot of you are curious about breathing! So far 80+ folks have signed up for the upcoming breathwork challenge that Conni and I are running. We begin on Feb 20 so if you’re tempted at all—don’t dilly dally ⇾ Join us here!

😿 Luna’s Adventures // Our arrival in Guatemala was deeply bittersweet as our kitten Luna found a way to escape our van en-route to Antigua. We’ve spent days searching for her + handing out flyers but now can only remain hopeful that she is both alive and somehow finds her way to humans who can return her to us.

🛸 Handpan Magic // You might not have heard of a ‘handpan’ before, it is one of the few instruments that is both joyful + socially acceptable to play (without any musical aptitude). They’re still relatively hard to obtain, but we found a local Mexico maker who forged one for us… so we took it busking in the streets of San Cristobal.

⚡ Twitter Question // If you were giving advice to someone in their early 20’s, what are some ways they could invest in serendipity (smart luck)–share your thoughts.

That’s all for now folks + as always please feel free to hit reply if anything resonates or there is something you wish to share.

Stay Curious Out There!

–JM

Left: The view from my desk this morning // Right: Kelly posing with our new handpan at a lake close to the Guatemalan border

🌬️ Why Invest in Your Breath?

As a kid I was addicted to playing Donkey Kong Country on the Super Nintendo. Fellow 80’s children may remember that pressing DOWN, Y, DOWN, DOWN, Y during those intro credits sends you to a magical realm of power-ups and bananas that were otherwise hidden from the rest of the regular gameplay.

Why on earth am I talking about Donkey Kong?? Well…

There are breathing patterns which are like secret cheat codes for living. In particular, learning to down-regulate from a state of anxious energy into deep calm and relaxation.

In less than a couple of minutes, these breathing techniques allow me to freedive 90ft underwater or meditate in the mornings even when there’s an active volcano rumbling nearby.

Meditation might not be right for everyone, but I believe that breathing really is. It’s the energetic superpower that was just under your nose all along!

And there are other breathing patterns which re-invigorate our life force, boost our immune systems, enhance our focus and bring back that zest for life.

With a little bit of dedicated practice, anyone can increase their daily breath awareness and rewire a lifetime of poor breathing habits.

Intrigued?? Consider joining us and 80+ humans for the 30daysofbreathwork challenge that kicks off next week!

Join the Challenge

🤓 Breath Factoid: The optimum breath for human nervous system regulation lasts for 5.5 seconds in and 5.5 seconds out–breathing 5.5 times per minute taking in 5.5L per breath!

📚 Soulful Book Recommendations

Books! Remember those? They may now have to compete with Clubhouse and Tiktok for our attention, but boy are these to worth setting aside time to digest.

Below are two complementary soulful books that have arrested my imagination in recent months and at the risk of sounding grandiose, feel somewhat important to the flourishing future of humanity.

#1 // ‘Re-imagining Adulthood And The Descent of Soul’ by Bill Plotkin (link)

Bill Plotkin Ph.D, is a depth psychologist, wilderness guide and intellectual radical. His work first captured my attention several years back when I heard a trip report from a close friend who attended one of his nature-based vision quests.

In a nutshell, this book is a field guide to genuine human maturity—laden with poetry, mythology and refreshingly practical wisdom for cultivating a meaningful life and healing our planet.

Bill believes is essential to reclaim, redesign, and revitalize practices for what he terms the journey of soul initiation.

“I am not hawking a new self-help fad, and the Descent to Soul is not therapy or a rite of passage. Rather, this book is something like a psychospiritual bomb placed as carefully as I’m able at the very heart of the techno-industrial civilization currently ruining our world.“

This book feels to me a timely roadmap for the terrifing metamorphosis that humanity is in the midst of descending into—like the caterpillar dissolving into goop, silently praying that it will emerge as a winged beauty on the other side.

#2 // ‘Courting the Wild Twin’ by Martin Shaw (link)

Martin Shaw may be one of the most interesting humans you’ve likely never heard of (watch this trailer for his storytelling masterclass and you’ll see what I mean)

It might seem bizarre to choose to listen to fairy tales in 2021, but as Shaw describes: without a deeper mythical perspective, what we’re seeing in the world right now is just bad news.’

Myths are our secret weapon. The have a radical agency of beauty in our age of amnesia, an agency far beyond concept and polemic.

He believes that ‘myth is our wild way of sharing deep truth’ and the stories he tells have a living quality to them.

I’ve listened to this audiobook three times through now – and it honestly becomes more potent with each round. I could not recommend his work highly enough!

🔗 Et Cetera

⏳ Is time a god?

🍪 No-one cares about cookies

🪄 Remote experience generator

⏰ Why didn't the alarm go off?

👨‍💻 Re-imagine work/play boundaries

💌 How to ever get an email response

🐴 Delivering the internet via a donkey

🌳 Winning carbon capture X-prize entry?

💡 Neuroscience insights delivered via IGTV

🌎 Change the word—a unique poetry collective

🐼 This Panda is Dancing—a spoken word masterpiece

How are you doing out there? It seems the hardship of 2020 also brought many ‘strange gifts’ (h/t @jkglei) & stark reminders perhaps of what matters most in this human existence.

Hopefully, wherever in the world you are reading these words, that you too have been able to mine a few unexpected nuggets from these bizarre times.

Personal Update.

❤️ We Got Married // On Dec 27th, Kelly and I held a quiet beach ceremony (planned in 12 days, with the help of a few amazing friends), committing to a life of loving partnership. We realise that in many ways love’s grand adventure is just getting started, yet we feel blessed + immensely excited for the journey ahead.

🚙 Embracing #Vanlife // Post honeymoon in the mountains we bought a pre-loved ‘91 VW camper van that we’re in the process of servicing and hope to be road-tripping through Mexico (with our kitten) and into Guatemala where we’ll be based for a couple of months.

Ready. Steady. Breathe.

👨‍🎓 The Art + Science of Breathwork // Next weekend, I’m joining forces with my talented friend Conni Biesalski, this time to host a free introductory workshop on all things Breathwork—if you feel inspired to join us on Jan 30th ⇾ signup here.

🏔️ 30 Days of Breathwork Challenge // Conni and I will also be running a ‘30 Day Breathwork Challenge’ in mid-February. There will be community accountability, themed sessions, shared resources and live q&as ⇾ learn more + get the early-bird discount.

Publishing Poetry.

📚 Stepping into the identity of ‘poet’ // One of my intentions for 2021 is to take my identity as a poet more seriously. So as an experiment, I’m going to self-publish a modest anthology of poems under the title ‘Remember, Forget, Remember’. If you’d like to support this poetic project, as of today you can pre-order the kindle book.

Alright, that’s all from my side, but I would love to hear from you dear reader—what is a question that you’re committed to explore in 2021 and what (if anything), could the Curious Humans community do to support you?

Stay Curious Out There!

~JM

p.s. a huge thank you to the 97 of you who purchased the Annual Review (the $1325 pretty much covered our wedding costs!)

🚙 Left // ‘Big Blue’ our four wheeled home for the next 3 weeks

📚 Middle // The cover for my upcoming kindle book ‘Remember, Forget, Remember’

❤️ Right // A birds-eye-view of our wedding ceremony on Aragon beach

Et Cetera

💰 Kevin Kelly’s curious bet

👨‍🎨 AI generated illustrations

🌬️ Ripple effects of breathing

🤖 Using AI to visualise poetry

🎮 Quirky NES-inspired sparklines

👀 Almanack of Naval Ravikant visualised

😴 How breathing relieves stress via HBR

✨ You already have all the answers you seek

💸 Marketplace for pre-owned tech subscriptions

🎨 The 8th annual 100dayproject begins on Jan 31

💌 Beautifully woven exploration of the newsletter

✊ Rebel Wisdom are hosting a Sensemaking course (I’m signed up)

🕯️ Dark Room Debrief // The last few weeks have shifted my life in some profound ways. I feel a more in-depth essay brewing but have done my best to share some of the insights + moments from the 10-day darkroom experience (read on below).

📆 Annual Review Template // I’m genuinely stoked at how much interest there was in the Annual Review template—so thanks in part to this wave of enthusiasm it now exists. You can duplicate the Notion template here (pay what you wish) and register for the Annual Review Workshop on Dec 26th.

🌹 Exciting News // By far the most joyful personal news is that Kelly and I are engaged! She has shared a heartfelt story of how it unfolded from her perspective (it involves a death meditation, time miscalculations and a cameo from our confused kitten) on Medium here: ‘A Curious Engagement Story’.

So that’s all for now folks. Please feel free to reply to this email with thoughts + reflections—otherwise, I hope that you have a heartfelt and joyous end to this rollercoaster of a year.

Stay Curious!

JM

p.s. this newsletter marks the Curious Humans 3-year anniversary! If you feel inspired to support the ongoing creative adventure please do consider becoming a subscriber or forwarding to a fellow human who is also curious.

📆 ‘Reflecting Forwards’

The Annual Review Template in Notion

I've been writing annual reviews for 7 years now, and it has honestly been one of the most rewarding exercises of my life. Here are some of the benefits I gain from the process:

Clarity on next year's intentions—forming clear 'creative constraints'—refreshing + re-aligning my values—mining the previous year's challenges for insights—become aware of broader themes and patterns as well as allowing myself to celebrate the highlights.

Upon completing this seemingly self-indulgent exercise, I feel a greater sense of coherence and a deeper meaning for the projects I commit to—they feel more connected to my underlying values that drive the creative desire. And crucially, for those of you who experienced some struggles in 2020 (i.e. most of humanity), this is a chance to mine those challenges for insights and lessons.

The questions + prompts in this template have been organised using the framework of mature human archetypes. I’ve previously written about the potency of archetypes previously—they are essentially universal genetic human patterns that impact various aspects of our personality and shape how we show up in the world. I find them to be extremely useful lenses through which we can view all aspects of our lives.

If you do decide to use the template, above all I encourage you to use it as a starting point for yourself. Steal what's useful + discard what isn't. Add your own questions, remix it any way you want and really make it feel like your own. This template is designed to be more provocative than prescriptive.

Check out the Notion template here (Pay What You Wish)

🕯️Insights from 10 Days in Darkness

Picture this moment—you’re sitting upright on a meditation cushion in the centre of a small square room, the air is thick with humidity (there are tiny sweat-balls rolling down your cheek) you hear the sounds of crickets outside announcing the sunset—directly in front of you is the flame of a candle—alongside a single incense stick.

Taking one final look around the room (to memorise the placement of the bed + fan) you take a deep breath, lean forward and blow out the candle. The room fades into total darkness, except for the lone incense stick. Your eyes fixate on this glowing ember, knowing it will be the last glimmer of light that you see for the next 10 days.

…

My intentions going into this retreat were a combination of looking to find a sense of happiness that wasn’t contingent on the outside world, finding my edge (could I even make it?!) and leaning a little more deeply into the mysterious states of consciousness that I believed were possible as a result of prolonged periods of intensive meditation practice.

…

🙈 Logistics of Living in the Dark? // within the first 24 hrs you quickly adapt to the daily routines without light. I would use yoga mats on the floor to slide my feet along and orient where I was in the room. Essentials such as water bottles + earplugs were placed by the wall so they could be easily located. I also discovered that it’s far easier to squeeze toothpaste directly into my mouth when brushing my teeth ;)

…

😋 And Eating in the Dark!? // Food was delivered twice a day through a light-sealed box in bento-style tupperware. The sound of the knock and the removing of the velcro signalled a Pavlovian response in my nervous system. I would open the lid, smell and prod the food in an attempt to guess what it was, and then use my hands to eat—which resulted in a delightfully tactile and sense-rich dining experience. Devouring a fresh coconut and spooning guacamole into my mouth when anticipation, taste, texture & smell are so heightened—it was a culinary delight!

…

🧘 What about the Meditation? // Lacking the structure of the previous 10 days in silent retreat, prolonged seated meditations were more challenging than I’d imagined. That said I managed 6-10 hours a day, some days flowed easefully, others (especially towards the end) I would lose myself in elaborate fantasies of creative projects, plans for the upcoming year or even writing this post! However, there were also some beautiful moments—on the morning of day 6 for no apparent reason the line ‘Joy is the happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens’ came to mind and I felt a surge of wellbeing resonate through my body and this sensation of joy (for no reason whatsoever) lasted for the next 2 days.

💡 How to Human—from First Principles // just as chess grandmaster Josh Waitzkin will train for months with only three pieces on the board or the world’s greatest sushi chefs will spend the first decade of their career only cooking rice—I believe that spending highly focused time with only our minds provides an opportunity to discover how we operate from first principles. With no eternal visual stimulus at all, there is a rare opportunity to inquire into the very nature of our minds—for example, have you considered whereabouts your thoughts and emotions arise from? Or where they live in the body (for me I noticed subtle sensations and niggling tensions in my lower belly especially).

…

✊ Remembering True Freedom // I would hear dogs barking or the sound of trucks in the distance and notice my mind leaning into judgement or frustration before gently bringing it back to the felt sensations in my body. There is a remarkable liberation that comes from remembering that you ultimately are able to choose how you respond to that which is out of your control. Or as Viktor Frankl wrote whilst imprisoned in a Holocaust camp: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing -- the last of the human freedoms: to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.”

…

✨ Taking the ‘Great Backwards Step’ // In Zen they talk about taking ‘the great backwards step’—surrendering your ego into the witness of all sensations. Or to cite a recent Spielberg film ‘Ready Player One' the final race upon which the great game depends is won not by going faster than the other racers, but by reversing over the start line and discovering the shortcut that takes them all the way to the source. Amidst a lot of sweaty frustration and monkey-mind, there were pinpricks of moments where I abandoned even ‘trying’ to meditate & dropped into states of deep stillness and a felt sense of connection to my heart that I hope will have a lasting impact.

…

🌅 Re-emerging into the World // On Day 10 at 6 am, Kelly knocked on my dark-room door. I pulled away the velcro and opened it, still wearing my eye-mask. Taking in a deep breath of the cool ocean breeze, I stepped outside. Instantly the combination of intense anticipation + sheer relief brought a tear to my eyes. Holding my hand, Kelly walked me step by step to the balcony above the darkroom. My legs were shaky having barely been used for the last 10 days. Sitting down on a bench, tea in hand, she removed my eye-mask. As the light reached my retinas I felt an overwhelming rush of awe + wonderment. The horizon appeared soaked in orange hues—the colours looked almost psychedelic—as if the saturation had been dialled up to the max. It was difficult to focus on anything so I just sat there, shedding tears of joy and feeling a renewed appreciation for just being able to witness a simple yet awe-inspiring sunrise.

🔗 Et Cetera

📸 The year in pictures

❤️ When an AI falls in love

😴 An ode to tactical laziness

🤯 52 intriguing tidbits from 2020

🖋️ David Whyte’s ‘Letter from the House’

👨‍🎓 Build a creativity inbox via Anne-Laure

⚙️ Mechanical gears discovered in nature

🥢 Beautiful slice of Japanese craft culture

🤓 Mathematically modelling perfectionism

💸 Insightful connection between love and money

💻 Analysing the impact of going remote via Packy M

🌎 Apply to be a citizen of the internet’s first country

🎙️ I was interviewed about Resilience on ‘All Things Risk’

📝 Parting Poem

Mysterium Tremendum

–

Yesterday–

I was a samurai sword in the forge

Glowing, scorching, becoming.

Sharpening edges—ready for battle.

–

Today–

I'm spirit, dust in a sunbeam

Floating, noticing, dancing.

Paying attention—arising & passing.

–

Tomorrow–

I will be reborn anew.

Unfolding, transforming, returning.

Into whom? Ah the great mystery!

🧘 Into the Dark // as of a few hours time, I’ll be unplugging for the next 30 days. Beginning with a 10-day silent meditation retreat—followed by a further 10 days sitting in a Dark Room—followed by a final 10 days of silent integration for journaling and breathwork. More on this introspective adventure below.

📆 Reflecting Forwards // For the last seven years I’ve written an annual review and it has become one of the more rewarding rituals of my life. I use this process as an opportunity to notice broader themes, re-align values, surface insights and find clarity on future intentions. This year, I’ve decided to share my annual review template (in Notion) and will host a virtual Curious Humans gathering for mutual guided reflection towards the end of December. If you’d like to join us—either comment on this tweet or reply to this email with a suitable emoji in the subject line.

🎙️ New Podcast Episodes // The podcast has continued to act as a lightning rod for my curiosity and I thoroughly enjoyed these two latest episodes with my good friends Cris Beasley & Arthur Worsley. More details on these below as well. Tune in to both episodes on Spotify here.

💃 Movement Meditation // My talented partner has recorded a series of guided free-flow movement meditations for connecting with the wisdom of the heart. I may be biased but I think they’re really quite wonderful. Listen to them here.

And with that, I wish you a joyous, insight-laden & curiosity-saturated final 43 days of 2020! And as always, if you have any thoughts or reflections from this newsie please don’t hesitate to hit reply and reach out.

See you on the other side!

Stay Curious,

–JM

p.s. welcome to the 100+ new readers! If you happen to know of any fellow humans who are also curious—please forward this email or consider becoming a monthly subscriber to support the ongoing creative adventures.

👀 Going Into the Dark

Traditionally, Darkness Retreats were carried out by old school ‘Dzogchen’ Tibetan Buddhists—from a few casual hours in a cave to several decades spent in the dark.

Earlier this year, I discovered that one of the world’s few dark rooms not far from my nomad-home in Mezunte, Oaxaca. I had heard stories of people spending extended times in these rooms—which are not entirely different from high-security solitary confinement prisons only the door is unlocked—and the more I read + researched the process, the more intrigued I became.

The first nugget that I stumbled on was a PDF written by Mantak Chia called ‘Darkness Technology’—his research showed that our pineal gland sends out a veritable cocktail of state-altering neurotransmitters when deprived of light for long periods.

During days 1-3, melatonin (a regulatory hormone) quiets down the body and mind. Gradually this is converted into ‘pinoline’ which permits ‘visions & dream-states’ to emerge. Then eventually from roughly 6 days onwards of light deprivation, our brains will synthesise ‘5-methoxy-dimethyltryptamine’ (5-MeO-DMT) and ‘dimethyltryptamine’ (DMT) which is commonly taken exogenously (for example by smoking Amazonian toad venom) to facilitate transcendental experiences.

The ancient mystics and modern physicists agree on one thing—the world we think we live in is an illusion. Along with that, our selves and especially our identities are also an illusion. What exists on the other side of that veil… well isn’t that the great mystery! ✨

🎻 Tuning Up My Human Instrument

Besides the possibility of DMT-induced mystical experiences. The seed for this retreat was in some ways planted when I interviewed Joel Levey who spent a full year in silence with his wife Michelle. I was struck by his perspective on this being a relatively short commitment to ‘tune-up your human instrument’.

Just as thoughtful chefs will take time to sharpen our kitchen knives before cooking. This time seems to me to be very well spent.

"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."—Blaise Pascal.

I’ve noticed myself increasingly pulled into the vortex of social media in recent months (I’m sure plenty of you can relate) seeking subtle dopamine-inducing hits in all manner of ways that don’t feel entirely conducive to long term mental wellbeing, let alone creative output.

Left: Dark Room entrance // Right: the double-sided window for morning and evening meals

🤷‍♂️ In Search of My Edge

This year is asking us to shed much of who we thought we were. Exposing cracks in narratives of certainty that we cling to. I'm at the point where I'm saying: I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. I've spent plenty of time looking outside for answers so I'm going inwards for an extended period to see what emerges.

Can I survive a full 10 days without light, sound or human connection? Will I be able to find internal peace without any external stimulus? Can I sit with the emotions and memories that will likely surface from my subconscious? Honestly, I don’t know, but I sure as hell am curious to find out where that edge lies.

🎙️Two New Podcast Episodes

🎴 Designing a GPS for Navigating Challenging Emotions with Cris Beasley (listen here)

This seeds for this conversation were planted at the end of last year when I was listening to a podcast called ‘Hack Reality’ and Cris shared her phone number at the end of the episode—I sent her a voice memo about the Poet David Whyte—we since became good friends and when lockdown begun in the US she followed an intuitive hit to reach out and ended up living with us here in Oaxaca Mexico for a month.

Cris went from founding a venture-backed AI fashion company, to hosting a podcast about the future of technology, and more recently has taken a left turn into the world of trauma healing—and spent the better part of the last three years designing a card deck for exploring shadow emotions.

Our conversation explores: Insights from exploring the money stories, the rock bottom moment of having to shut down her company on short notice, learning how to connect with her intuition following an assignment to follow her curiosity walking barefoot around San Francisco, her experiences working with MDMA and LSD-assisted therapy, and then things frankly go off the deep end and she talks about a kundalini awakening experience she had in an ancient Mayan Ruin, and about 52 minutes in Cris shares her roadmap and toolkit for people to begin with shadow work, navigate existential crises and exploring the roots of their repressed emotions and the vision she has for her card deck being used as an ‘Emotional Guidance System’.

🐉 I thoroughly encourage you to check-out the card deck for alchemising challenging emotions that Cris spent the last three years designing—it’s about to go live on Kickstarter.

👨‍🎓 Mindfulness, Language Learning & The Four Causes of Procrastination with Arthur Worsley (listen here)

Arthur Worsley is a close friend of mine that I met in Bali where over many dinners together he educated me in the tactics for learning Bhasa, memorising my TEDx talk and really opened my eyes to the world of meta-learning that he has specialised in. 

Back in the day, he studied neurophysiology at Oxford in the UK and since became conversationally fluent in 8 languages and also applies his learning superpowers to things like ultra-marathon running & distilling wisdom from a wide range of topics.

In this free-flow conversation, we dive into the simultaneous devastating personal loss and financial gain he received nearly a decade ago and how that was a catalyst for reinventing himself. Arthur also walks me through how he thinks about procrastination and the four main causes of it, his approach for cultivating and tracking mindful metta moments and some thoughts on how his life may be altered by the child that he and his fiancé are expecting.

📚 Read Arthur's book reviews, ongoing meta-learning insights, his habit tracker and recent book about working less hard here: theartofliving.com

🔗 Et Cetera

🍃 24-hour plant-lapse

❤️ We love because we care

🌱 Move quietly + plant things

💚 There must be a higher love

🎙️ Brene Brown unpacks burnout

🤷‍♂️ Forget mindfulness, try uselessness

🤯 Tim Urban on parsing complex ideas

🌬️ The life-changing magic of breathwork

🇫🇷 14 rejected designs for the Eiffel Tower

🎵 Inside the Jon Hopkins psilocybin playlist

🏙️ Why we’re moving mostly away from big cities

💌 Another delightful newsie for curious humans

📝 Parting Poem

Sweet Darkness

by David Whyte

Listen to my conversation with David here

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone
No part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
Where the night has eyes
To recognize its own.

There you can be sure
You are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb
Tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
Further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
Except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
Confinement of your aloneness

To learn
Anything or anyone
That does not bring you alive

Is too small for you.

I’m typing these words from a corner of the Yucatán Peninsula—had I been around 66 million years ago, a 7.5-mile wide asteroid might have landed squarely on my head ☄️

In addition to wiping out the stegosaurus (& his 🦖 friends) the impact of this space rock contributed to an enormous network of underground water-filled caves known as ‘cenotes’.

Fast-forward to 2020 and I’ve joined an adventurous crew of freedivers where we have been attempting to take gulps of air and fall to the bottom of them without passing out 😵.

🤿 Cenote Freediving // I think of this art of ‘apnea’ as high-stakes meditation with the benefits of getting a giant watery hug. I’ve been reaching 35m deep—at which point I’m learning to relax into the accumulated tension. This humbling process feels relevant to much of life, where we naturally tense and must learn to soften into.

🥳 Turning 32 // I celebrated another lap around the sun in October. As part of the celebrations my partner Kelly secretly crowdsourced 52x thoughtful questions from friends + family (questions are my love language!) which I’m making my way through as morning journal prompts.

❤️ Farewell Grandpa // My Grandpa passed recently at the impressive age of 97. His Guardian obituary thanked him for his contribution to making transport better—but I’m grateful to him for passing on his genes, Irish humour and for taking such great care of my mum and I!

👨‍🎓 Integrated Self-Leadership // I’m mapping out an Integrated Self-Leadership (ISL) curriculum that seeks to bring awareness to our inner-archetypes + engineer insight using breathwork (not for the faint of heart!) My intention is for this program to be a distillation of emotional resilience research, meditation training and years of self-exploration. If you’re intrigued to learn more just reply here and say hi.

Three more podcast episodes + life updates to come soon, but for now—take care out there and as always, I love hearing what you’re all up to and creating in the world.

Stay Curious,

JM

🔍

Left // Operation human seal in the cenote called ‘Tonkas’ — Right // the tree above that I nicknamed ‘Jung’ as its roots appeared to reach all the way down into hell. Appropriately the ancient Mayans believed these cenotes to be sacred sites and used them for sacrificial offerings 💀

🧠 Three Nuggets of Brainfood

👨‍🎓 1 | Towards Educational Abundance

A Curious Humans reader passed on a copy of Zak Stein’s ‘Education in a Time Between Worlds’ which I believe is one of the more important and hope-inducing books of our time. Zak describes the intention of his work to act as a psychoactive agent—a learning catalyst to inspire new ways of thinking.

In this masterpiece of a book, he builds on Ken Wilbur’s ‘Integral Theory’ frameworks and makes the case that that our current meta-crises are essentially encapsulated in the problem of education:

“…the years between 2000 and 2050 represent a critical turning point in the history of humanity and the planet…I argue that fundamental transformations of our social structures (economies and institutions), ecosystems (biosphere and agriculture), and consciousness (culture and identity) are upon us. These require a fundamentally new approach to education that entails the end of what we have known as schooling.”

One of the most interesting chapters I found was the ‘13 Social Miracles’ where he bravely outlines 13 tangible approaches that he believes would guide us safely to the other side of this great transition that we’re moving into.

It was truly refreshing to read what felt like a genuinely feasible approach to navigating the multiple unfolding crises we’re starting to see—and to join Zak in imagining what this ‘global society of educational abundance’ might look like and how we might collectively nudge humanity in that hopeful direction. For a primer to his work listen to this conversation with Zak on the Coaches Rising podcast.

👣 2 // Finding Freedom in Oblique Strategies

Freedom. This emotionally charged word defines what I spent the majority of my 20’s searching for. Financial Freedom. Creative Freedom. Geographical Freedom. But lately I’ve been looking at freedom from the inside out.

I’m realising there are invisible constraints in the ‘anything is possible’ blank canvas approach to life and creative acts—since without limitations, ironcially nothing is possible. Contrary to our intuition, I believe remarkable creative output begins with designing uncomfortably specific 'creative constraints'.

What do I mean by this? Well to illustrate with real humans: Taylor Pearson asks himself these nine questions before starting a new project. Craig Mod does something similar with the criteria for his latest (stunning) photo-book. Randall Munroe’s latest book only used the 1000 most common words in the English language. In all cases these are highly limiting + personalised sets of intentional constraints.

My favourite example—when working with blocked musicians, the legendary Brian Eno used his 'Oblique Strategy' card deck to introduce deliberately frustrating and disruptive creative constraints. One well-known card read: "All musicians swap instruments." I’d love to create a similar card deck that compiled Oblique Strategies for Life—give yourself only a month to write a novel, reply to text messages in Haikus, write a blackout poem, go on a date without speaking… what else might you include here? And how do you approach the inherent tension between freedom and constraint?

🐍 3 // Rebranding Trauma + The Myth of Medusa

I think trauma needs a rebrand. Most of us tense up slightly when they even hear the word (you might even be tempted to skim past this section). But what I’ve been discovering is that we all carry trauma. Every single one of us. Of course it might not be on the scale of a post-Vietnam war-vet, but we’ve all had experiences that we have not ‘completed’ in our nervous systems.

What does this mean? Well, it really clicked for me after watching this video of an impala shaking after being chased by a lion and realising that we humans also have to learn how to discharge these uncompleted cycles—which is, in simplistic terms part of what breathwork enables within a safe setting.

I’m going to be writing a lot more about this in the coming months as I believe this deeply held unconscious trauma (which again, we all carry) is the root cause of not only the majority of chronic mental & physical health conditions (I know this is a strong statement) but also the deep lack of connection that so many of us feel to ourselves and the world.

For now, I’d invite you to listen to this brave podcast from Tim Ferriss on his journey healing his profound journey of healing and a recent deep dive blog post from Erick Godsey (who I’ve interviewed previously for my podcast) who has done a stellar job of summarising much of the existing trauma literature.

I particularly enjoyed his retelling and interpretation of the Myth of Medusa and how we are all capable of summoning the courage to face the reflections of our own inner Medusas to find liberation.

🔗 Et Cetera

🎙️ Ask Jerry

🌎 Earthshot prize

👣 Out of Eden Walk

🤠 The six hats of resilience

🐠 An underwater restaurant

👴 How to be a good ancestor

📚 The Human Library Project

📖 Membership Guide Handbook

🌬️ Vagus nerve exercises via Conni

🏊‍♂️ Fear looks like a 10-meter tower

🏫 How to build an interdisciplinary school

😬 What would burnout insurance look like?

👑 What stage of the hero’s journey are you at?

🤦‍♂️ Yes, unfortunately, you too might be a ding-dong

📝 Parting Poem

An Invitation from the Deep 👇

Release the thought.

Exhale that feeling.

Inhale this moment.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

Heart slows

Head flops

Mind retreats

World fades;

Now it’s time.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

Air flows,

Chest fills

Chin tucks

Body dives;

Kick kick kick.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

Downwards, onwards, inwards.

Dancing shadows beckon.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

Depth is no measure

Of lung capacity

Or inner resolve.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

Depth is the reward,

For intimacy with surrender.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

One last kick!

Gravity takes over.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

Mind, body, soul.

Soaring through

Shimmering twilight.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

Mind, body, soul.

Falling home,

Into the Great Unknown.

Today, I emerged from a two-month-long 🕳️

Not a depressive hole, quite to the contrary—it was a psychic freedive into a writing project that I found deeply nourishing—and I’m thrilled to share that the fruits of this labour are out in the wild in the form of this Emotional Resilience Report.

I feel fortunate to have had an experienced diving partner, Jan Chipchase who acted as both a mentor and co-author of the project. It was quite a journey for both of us and feels like the end of the beginning of a larger body of work.

Personally, I learnt about the superpower of working with a proof-reader who ruthlessly cull words not doing any heavy lifting as well as a more nuanced understanding of the human nervous system and how to self-regulate it.

But above all, I learnt why I was drawn to this project in the first place. I didn’t quite connect the dots at first, but exploring resilience has been a continuation of the story that I shared last year on the TEDx stage last year which spoke to the gifts that come from navigating hardship and loss.

The revelation for me has been one of redefining resilience. Many of us conflate resilience with robustness, yet they are profoundly different. Robustness, whilst necessary at times, involves sucking it up, putting your head down and in my experience is a precursor to ‘foolish grit’ and ultimately burnout.

When we experience inevitable heartbreak, stress or suffering, the task is not to fortify ourselves and tense against it—but rather to soften, bring awareness to our physical sensations and enquire with a sense of courageous curiosity. On the other side of this beautiful process is greater wholeness and self-awareness. This is the path of true resilience, but to get there requires unlearning decades of cultural conditioning.

📝 READ // Dive into the report! If you’re short on time, we’ve also created a visual PDF summary of the findings. We designed this to provoke more questions than answers so it’s published as a Google Doc and open for public comments.

👐 CONTRIBUTE // We’ve also begun to crowdsource this Notion Wiki for compiling practical suggestions, resources and tools for emotional regulation.

Read it here

🤔 Three Reflection Questions

Inspired by my all-time favourite comic strip ‘A Day in the Park’, my friend Malcolm Ocean wrote: “first you need to know how to comfortably hold a question without immediately asking it. Questions are a kind of creature that is easily startled.”

As bizarre as it seems, we must re-learn how to sit with and nurture our relationship to the questions that matter—stewing in ambiguity, without grasping—but instead fiercely living our way into the answers. Here are three lines of inquiry that I’m leaning into in my own life:

👪 1 // Who are my internal characters?

I’ve mentioned Erick Godsey’s journaling course and the idea of using the concept of ‘Internal Family Systems’ previously and it continues to fascinate me.

For starters, it’s quite a relief to understand that we contain multitudes. When we feel conflicted about a decision, it’s quite literally because there are different parts of our psyche in conflict about the best way to keep us safe + loved.

My own fellowship of inner-guardians ranges from Ged (Wizard of Earthsea) and Aragorn (LOTR) to Hiccup (How to Train Your Dragon) and Alfred (Batman’s British caretaker). I’m sure they will change but it’s a fun and creative process giving life to my internal characters.

🤷‍♂️ 2 // Am I being ‘nice’ vs. ‘kind’?

It came to me as quite a painful and profound realisation that I’ve spent the vast majority of my life in the mode of being ‘nice’ rather than being ‘kind’. Being British and growing up in an overly polite (sometimes pretentious) culture it seeped into my conditioning.

What’s the difference you ask? In short, nice aims to act in a way that never rocks the boat, even if that means repressing what feels true in order to say what you think will cause the least harm or fit in.

It is a form of sacrificing your own authenticity to protect others. Kindness is direct. It's real. It might be painful or uncomfortable at the time, but it comes from a loving place and it allows others to really feel like they can trust you.

🏔️ 3 // Where might I choose greater depth?

A gift of covid-19 for me has been the opportunity to view my life through the lens of depth—even if that means sacrificing optionality in the short-term.

Recently this has looked like investing in the community and relationships here in Puerto Escondido, committing to depth in work (see the report above) and in love. My partner and I are experimenting with a Celtic-inspired alternative to engagement—called ‘handfasting’.

This essentially means we’ve committed to each other and our partnership for a full 365 days (kinda like marriage with a built-in deadline) with the intention of crafting a container to go deeper in life + love.

🍑 Bonus: Explore the Psychology of Pleasure

My dear friend Haneen recently quit her corporate job and has put herself out there in a big way launching a brilliant online course designed to explore erotic self-care and rewire your relationship with receiving… and lots more! (If you’re intrigued write "Curiosity is Sexy" in her application form for 10% off before 30 Aug)

🔗 Et Cetera

💡 Proof-of-X

🌎 Window swaps

🏠 Reimagining home

🖌️ Gorgeous kintsugi repair kit

🦈 The eagle that caught a shark

🦑 World’s first transparent squid

🦍 Curiosity isn’t only for humans

💡 Ideas that might change your life

🔑 Duplicating keys with their sounds

🎵 What silence teaches us about sound

📖 The World’s First Craigstarter Project

⛰️ Three decades married with a mountain

🚀 The magic of doing $10,000 per hour work

🎧 Disconnection is rare + valuable these days

📚 Hell Yeah—Derek Sivers wrote a new book!

🎴 Kickstarter card deck for communal grieving

🔥 A brave friend’s house just burnt to the ground

👨‍🎨 On the relationship between originality + self-doubt

📝 Parting Poem

You are not the author
Of this life.

But a willing scribe,
Taking grateful dictation.

You must learn to pay attention 
as each word emerges.

Like a stepping stone,
Into the great mystery.

Look up and 
Gaze in rapture
As the story
Unfolds before you

Mid-way through writing these words—the ground started shaking. Literally. Here in sleepy Puerto Escondido, we felt an earthquake registering 7.7 on the richter scale.

It felt appropriate for these groundless times we’re living through—where the structural integrity of our certainty + beliefs are being shaken to the core.

Perhaps the invitation is to find that solid ground deep within ourselves. A reminder to practice courageous curiosity + lean into those edges of our human-ness.

For me writing these newsletters feels like that sturdy ground—a place to re-centre my own monkey mind and introduce you to others living at their own curious edge.

Onwards!

👀 How to Read This // Welcome new readers! I don’t know about you, but I rarely read every newsletter word for word. So this has been designed to be skimmed in a non-linear manner. I strongly encourage you to scroll first and then use curiosity as your guide.

📚 How to Human User Manual // This life-force in this book idea from last year has been reignited—I’m drafting a proposal for an ‘audio-first’ book which I intend to open-source in the coming weeks for feedback, critique and ideas.

🤜 Can I Help You? // I’ve begun opening up space for 1-1 coaching clients, specifically helping startup founders process unaddressed emotional debt. If you might also be interested in having me in your corner then let’s chat!

🧘 Breathe. Meditate. Journal // My creative amigo Conni and I are back in action with these free weekly live zoom gatherings. Join the conversation in our FB group with 574 others embarking on inner adventures.

👨‍🏫 New Resilience Masterclass // I’m thrilled to announce dates for the final Emotional Resilience Masterclass of the year—specifically for startup founders and team leaders. Previous attendees have hailed from Slack, Google, Salesforce, Harvard Business School and other rad organisations—find more details here.

Without further ado, I give you this long-overdue buffet of interestingness to feast your precious attention upon.

Pura Vida,

~JM

p.s. if we haven’t been in touch before, hit reply to this and let me know where you’re reading from and one thing that you’re excited to learn more about.

Left: Flying into Puerto Escondido 🇲🇽 // Right: Attempting to ride a scooter with too much stuff 🛵

🎙️ Allow Me To Introduce You To Three Awesome Humans

1 // 🕵️‍♂️ The Myth Maker: Erick Godsey

I’ve had more emails and messages from people regarding this conversation with Erick than perhaps any other episode—you're in for a treat! He uses cognitive, evolutionary, and Jungian psychology to help people discover, articulate, and change the stories that rule their lives. Listen here: ‘Make Your Myth, Face Your Shadow & Own Your Truth’

2 // 🧙‍♂️ The Ritual Crafter: Casper Ter Kuile

Casper is one of the most genuinely joy-filled humans that I have had the pleasure of knowing. In this conversation, we do a deep dive into his new book 'The Power of Ritual'—which I found to be a perspective-shifting and heart-warmingly beautiful book on discovering the sacred amidst everyday life and seeing the world through the eyes of ritual—his description of why the sabbath is the antithesis to a tech break was also fascinating to me. Listen here: ‘The Everyday Wizardry of Ritual’

3 // 👨‍🚀 The Experience Designer: Andi Cuddington

Andi is an old friend—I think of her as a modern-day renaissance woman and I’ll typically turn to her for advice if I’m going through something challenging.  Andi is endlessly curious and has a totally unique lens on the world. She found her calling designing + facilitating workshops and has mastered the art + science of ‘unlocking the genius in the room’. Listen here: ‘The Subtle Art of Facilitation’

🧠 Four Mind-Expanding Ideas

1 // Getting Curious About Masculine Archetypes

As mentioned above, I believe the invitation of these times is to look both inwards and outwards with a lens of Radical Enquiry at the emerging weltschmerz (world-pain), individual challenges and insecure canyons that we find ourselves in. One such canyon I found myself in was in the realm of masculinity—specifically the disconnection and lostness I felt in this area. The specific book that pulled me from the brink is titled: “King, Warrior, Magician, Lover” and it has given me a whole new lens to view my own masculinity through. Erick Godsey goes into more detail on this topic in our conversation above, but there’s also a powerful youtube series that outlines the four archetypes of King—Warrior—Magician—Lover.

2 // Reviving the Lost Art of Crying

I challenge you to read this in full and not resonate on some deep level. In Nibras’ words she: “…grew up learning not to cry. Only young children were allowed to cry and once I neared 10 years of age, I was encouraged to stop. Crying wasn’t something I saw adults do freely; it was taboo, a sign of weakness and a public loss of control.” Does anyone else relate to this? Tears—whether from joy or sorrow— connect us to the rawness of being alive, so let’s not only normalise crying but celebrate it. Read in full here.

3 // Conjuring Scenius

Every so often I find an intimidatingly long essay that feels worth reading in full, and this is such an essay. He’s pulled together a toolkit for creating modern scenia—or gatherings of brilliant humans—that reshape the world: “Looking backwards, it’s striking how unevenly distributed progress has been in the past...the discoveries that came to elevate standards of living for everyone arose in comparatively tiny geographic pockets of innovative effort.” I thoroughly recommend bookmarking this to read in full and complementing with the book ‘Geography of Genius’. Read Packy’s essay here.

4 // Sketch of the “Amateur's Map”

Curious Humans reader + podcast guest Buster Benson created this fascinating personal website—written using Dropbox paper with the intention of ‘looking for a new, untethered way to organize thoughts in some spatial dimensions that aren’t by chronology or topic, but more around how to function in terms of connecting me to my own intuitions, the world, and to communities’. I guarantee you will enjoy diving into this rabbit hole.

💌 Five Free Newsletters I Subscribe To

Long ago I lost my faith in social media algorithms to surface meaningful things online. I increasingly find the most interesting and human-feeling reflections come from newsletters—so I wanted to share these five that continuously bring joy and thoughtful wisdom to my inbox:

1 // Not Boring from Packy M.

2 // The Institute of Belonging by Victoria S.

3 // The Flow + Wonder Letters by Conni B.

4 // Poetic Reflections by Casper TK

5 // The Museletter by Jason F.

🔗 Et Cetera

🤓 Operating systems for life

🧙‍♂️ Passive income for the soul

🤔 Auto-correct for negativity

🐦 Nature’s incredible gyroscope

💰 9 ways to smoke test new ideas

👐 Navigating this human moment

🗺️ From mental map to mental atlas

🔍 17 superb questions to negotiate reality

🐈 Every type of zoom call illustrated by cats

📱 My new favourite IG account: visualizevalue

🇸🇪 One solid reason to consider moving to Sweden

🧠 Why our moods are extrapolation engines (superb read)

🤜 Don’t question your purpose. Make your purpose a question.

📹 Thought-provoking perspective on wokeness + shaming in light of #BLM

❤️ Interested in forging a conscious partnership? Check out Carmen’s coaching

📝 Parting Poem

This one is called ‘How to Human’

If you can listen deeply, 

without merely waiting for your turn to speak.

If you can sit with the dying, 

holding space for their grief.

If you can sit and observe the nature of your thoughts, 

without needing to change them.

If you can hold a question loosely,

Not grasping for the easy answers.

If you can fall in love with a sandcastle,

Knowing that the tide is coming in.

If you can let go of everything you think you know, 

to make space for something new.

Then you'll be a human, my son.

How are you feeling at this moment? What have you been creating lately? What has sparked joy? What or who is on the edge of your heart right now?

Amongst you curious readers, there are doctors working on the front lines, families and couples forced to be part and founders whose livelihoods have been devastated. At the same time, I’ve witnessed how this crisis has brought out unfathomable levels of curiosity + creativity—finding collective meaning amidst the unknown.

In fact, as I’m typing these words, one reader + dear friend, Scott Drummond is running 2,813 laps around his Brighton garden patio for a #lockdownmarathon to raise money for those battling cancer. What we need now is more of this human connection + creative expression. What ways are you answering this question for yourself? And how might we craft more imaginative rituals and communities during these interesting times?

👨‍🎓 NEW: Remote Resilience Masterclasses

Alongside Jan Chipchase + the Studio D team we have revamped the resilience masterclasses to be delivered via remotely via Zoom. A lot of work has been poured into designing the content—it is a subject that feels close to my heart and needed in the world right now.

I’m excited to see who joins us and for the emergent conversations that I sense will arise during the sessions. The masterclasses will be run in these three hour modules:

Module 1: Building Your Resilience Toolkit | May 8
Module 2: Energy Management Rituals | May 15
Module 3: Support Structure For Remote Leaders | May 22

If any of the above topics resonate with where you are at right now or might be relevant for your teams—you can find more details here.

🧘 UPDATE: 30 Day Meditation Challenge

We’re entering Week 4 of the meditation challenge and it has hands down been one of the most rewarding projects that I’ve been a part of. Close to a thousand people have participated and both feel called to continue to support the community.

All are welcome to watch the session replays + our list of meditation resources here.

🎧 FREE: Resilience Meditation

After many months of resisting, I’ve begun recording and uploading some of my own guided meditations. The purpose of this particular practice is to guide you through the process of enquiring into these triggering experiences (not that any of you would have experienced these of late) and mining them for deeper insight and wisdom.

You can listen to the full meditation for free over on Insight Timer.

I learnt yesterday that the word 'Apocalypse' in Greek originally referred to "revelation" or a great unfolding of things not previously known.

So with that in mind, I wish you both creative insights + personal revelations in the coming weeks… and as always if you have any thoughts, stories or reflections for me I would love to hear from you.

In the meantime—wishing you oodles of courage, curiosity & heart-felt joy.

–JM

p.s. an enormous thank you Mike, Haneen, Marie (and my mum!) who have been participating in the meditation group and sent generous contributions + notes via paypal—these notes and delightfully unexpected gifts really do fuel my creative confidence.

Above // Reflecting on my Meditation Retreat at Spirit Rock in 2018—now feels like a suitable time to return inwards + remember how to practise loving-kindness meditation.

🙏 How to Human in a Pandemic

🗺️ 1 // We’re Entering Uncharted Territory…

I’ve previously shared about the experience of navigating grief as if trapped in a great storm—one that strips away everything that isn’t important. The same feels true of this global pandemic.

The way it is rippling throughout all corners of the globe—devastating businesses, pension funds, working identities so much of what we counted on for safety and security—the empty calendars—the palpable uncertainty.

So much of what we relied upon for our identities and sense of self-worth crumbles away—underneath that lies an opportunity for a deeper connection.

A connection to what capital ‘M’ Matters—our innate human-ness.

👌 2 // It’s OKAY to Feel Overwhelmed

In all honesty, if you haven’t experienced some turbulent thoughts or challenging emotions during the past few weeks then you might want to check your pulse.

The felt sensation of groundlessness can be terrifying, but as Liz Gilbert wisely says ‘resilience is our shared genetic inheritance’ (I thoroughly recommend listening to the full episode).

We have an innate capacity for post-traumatic growth if we are willing to walk towards and get curious about that which we’re afraid of—as opposed to numbing out or distracting ourselves from emotions that are arising.

🔭 3 // Zoom the Lens Out

Perhaps this is another reminder that despite our self-assured dominance of the animal kingdom—we homo sapiens are a miraculous + fragile species living in a temporarily hospitable corner of the (known) universe.

We have and always will be at the mercy of grandmother earth and her vast uncontrollable forces to which the only conceivable response is humility + grace.

So perhaps this is a delicious opportunity to remember our inherent fragility, the temporary nature of our meat suits and that all existence operates in a seasonal great unravelling and magnificent creation.

📆 Four Delightfully Free Virtual Events

🦋 1 // Metamorphosis—a 3-day stay-at-home retreat for empowerment, resilience and meaning via High Existence on April 24-26.

🌬️ 2 // Neurodynamic Breathwork with Michael Stone—this is one of the best virtual breathwork experiences out there (there is a lot of diversity in quality) and the first session is free.

💃 3 // The Stoa—virtual gatherings are hosted by Peter Limberg who is on a mission to rekindle the art of practical philosophy at the razor’s edge of this pandemic. The conversations are participatory and go deep (also be sure to check-out the existential dance parties with Collin Morris)

👨‍🎨 4 // Creative Mornings Field Trips—offering events from calming calligraphy and mindful improv to podcast production and human design sessions

🤯 Five Articles Worth Your Time

🌎 1 // The Corona-nation (audio / read)

Charles Eisenstein is one of the most interesting thinkers of our generation. He is the author of ‘Sacred Economics’, ‘A More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible’, and most recently ‘Climate: A New Story’. It’s not a stretch to say that his writing and courses have influenced my thinking + worldview more than perhaps any other human.

In this essay which opens with—’I write these words with the aim of standing here with you – bewildered, scared maybe, yet also with a sense of new possibility – at this point of diverging paths'—he zooms the lens out to inquire into how covid-19 is revealing our relationship to death, asking what kind of world do we actually want to live in.

Yes, we can proceed as before down the path toward greater insulation, isolation, domination, and separation. We can normalize heightened levels of separation and control, believe that they are necessary to keep us safe, and accept a world in which we are afraid to be near each other. Or we can take advantage of this pause, this break in normal, to turn onto a path of reunion, of holism, of the restoring of lost connections, of the repair of community and the rejoining of the web of life.

I consider this essential reading for anyone seeking to find meaning and ask the right questions amidst the unfolding global events.

📝 2 // The Lifechanging Magic of Journaling (read)

I’ve been a long-time fan of Julia Cameron’s ‘The Artist’s Way’, but I love Erick’s Jungian approach to journaling—bringing in his wisdom from ‘Internal Family Systems’ and trauma awareness to create one heck of a compelling case to pick up that unloved Moleskine and get curious about the daimons, magicians and guardians living within your psyche.

“The fundamental idea [of internal family systems'] is that each of us has an inner ‘wounded child’ who created ‘guardians’ to protect itself as a result of traumatic experiences… when we were children, inevitably we experienced our needs not being met by our caretakers or by the world… and in response to these events, we create unconscious stories that seek to reduce the chance of the negative feeling happening again.”

🤔 3 // Rhythm, Ritual + Boundaries (read)

Reading this post I felt very ‘seen’ by the way Sonja described the paradoxical emotions arising in this confusing liminal space we are living into—feeling both overwhelmed + underinformed, flip-flopping between gratitude, guilt and frustration all in the space of a few hours.

Her post is structured into these three areas for exploration and experimentation:

1. Cadence and structure: the importance of Rhythm and Routine

2. Ritual: The importance of ritual and role transitions

3. Constraints: Or my new favourite word, Boundaries

The section on boundaries resonated especially with me—as someone who has a history of saying yes to all the things and only relatively recently learning how to voice my own needs:

“I’ve also realised that I allow myself to get pulled into unnecessary conversations way too often. Usually, it is to be a kind of security blanket, to make decisions that others have been empowered to make, but don’t feel safe for fear of getting it wrong.”

🗺️ 4 // The Geography of Genius (book)

The word “genius” does not necessarily evoke images of cliffs and lakes, sands and hills. But in his book ‘Consolations’, the poet David Whyte recasts genius as the specificity of how we’re each shaped by our geographies and histories:

“To live one’s genius is to dwell easily at the crossing point where all the elements of our life and our inheritance join and make a meeting… we might think of ourselves as each like a creative geography, a confluence of inherited flows. Each one of us has a unique signature, inherited from our ancestors, our landscape, our language, and beneath it a half-hidden geology of existence: memories, hurts, triumphs, and stories in our lineage that have not yet been fully told.”

I love this idea that our genius isn’t some internal fixed amount of inspiration, but more of a lived conversation between our inherited make-up & the people + environments we place ourselves within—or as David Whyte poetically puts it:

“Our genius is to understand and stand beneath the set of stars present at our birth, and from that place, to seek the hidden, single star, over the night horizon, we did not know we were following.”

👨‍🎓 5 // A War Broke Out in Heaven (read / watch)

Zach Stein is another post-modern thinker whose perspective has kicked up a lot of dust in the sense-making community. I love the unapologetically epic + mythical use of language:

There is a war taking place in heaven concerning the soul of humanity, and it will be fought in each person’s heart, every day, without rest, and into the foreseeable future. 

And the way he makes a rallying call to name the present what it is: ‘History unfolding in real-time’

This is it: we have arrived at the end of the world. Finally. Now we can start to build a new one. This is our chance to reshape ourselves as spiritual, scientific, and ethical beings.

Perhaps this invitation of finding meaning in tragedy is the one that we must each step into in our own unique ways:

As is the task of remaking of the self. We must learn to do both while creating a new world. Grief is warranted. Fear is warranted. Pain is inevitable. But in so far as the future matters, learning must become our primary process.

🔗 Et Cetera

🖋️ How to write a poem

🙏 Stay home + take care

🌪️ Honing emotional agility

⛈️ Thoughts amidst a storm

💡 Excellent quarantine ideas

🚀 In depth guide to deep work

👨‍🌾 The healing power of gardens

😨 Don’t day trade your emotions

😷 Make bespoke masks from scratch

🤔 How to scientifically spark curiosity

🚢 Relationships move fast on a slow ship

💰 Understanding the impending recession

👨‍🎓 Practical advice for aspiring virtual facilitators

🏡 Home alone together—33 wonderful ways to pass the time

🏫 Hundreds of epic online courses from Harvard, MIT & Stanford

👨‍🏭 Life hacks are a 200-year-old movement to destroy your humanity

Parting Poem 📝

THE SHADOW

What is the question—you are scared to ask?

Tell me of the shape—that your shadow casts.

You must turn around—seek your seeker.

Find the courage—to meet its gaze,

And speak—its true name.

Right now, it’s early morning here in Lake Tahoe. Whilst typing these words, I briefly look up to see an expansive blanket of powder snow through the window—pine trees standing motionless + regal—draped in magnificent robes of white.

The contrast is striking. On my laptop screen, I see the turbulent social media streams, the relentless firehose of uncertainty + updates—whilst barely a few feet away there is stillness, calm and exquisite natural beauty on our doorstep.

Personally, this has been a month of juxtapositions. Holding both concern + compassion for loved ones facing a real risk of losing their health, savings, businesses or dreams for the future, whilst at the same time acknowledging my own feelings of creative fire—a deep excitement + desire to create amidst the joy of a new relationship coming to life.

🚗 Life Update // Early tomorrow morning, my partner and I will be hopping in her 1991 Toyota pick-up truck and moving to Boulder, Colorado. It’s approximately a 16-hour road trip through the snow. Along with the rest of the world, we’re not sure how long the self-quarantine will continue, but we’re determined to make the most of this opportunity.

🧘 30 Day Meditation Challenge // I’m thrilled to share that I’m teaming up with my good friend, creative genius and fellow meditation teacher Conni Biesalski to run a 30-day meditation challenge together. The full details are below, but right now all you need to know is that it’s free + this an official invitation! If you’re up for the challenge, join us here at meditate.group.

🎙️ Embracing Opportunity & Loss // I took part in a moving three-way conversation with dear friends Tim Adlin + Mike Slavin. We drop in and share heartfelt reflections on unfolding global events—asking what questions are alive for us most right now: what is ours to give? How can we best serve in this time? Watch here or listen over on Tim’s thoughtful Voicecraft podcast.

🤔 We can’t be sure of much right now but these three things feel certain:

• We are witnessing the full spectrum of the human experience.

• This is a time to pause, to listen, to be the mountain amidst the hurricane.

• What we need now, more than ever, is deep curiosity—a willingness to lean into the questions that are surfacing for us collectively.

Sending love + toilet roll,

–JM

p.s. feel free to invite a friend to join the 30-day meditation challenge (the more the merrier!) Either forward them this email or share the invitation link meditate.group. We’re anticipating a group of several hundred aspiring + experienced meditators, so it should be a ton of fun!

🧘 Join Our 30 Day Meditation Challenge

Right now, I know many of you have been asking yourself how you might best take care of yourself so that you’re fully resourced to support others during this emotional turbulence? How best to navigate waves of anxiety, exhaustion and uncertainty—seeking safety and respite amidst this sense of groundlessness?

My answer to all of the above is meditation. This is a time to resource yourself. To recenter and find that stillness amidst the unfolding chaos from which you can act and give. Let’s rebrand self-quarantine as a worldwide extended meditation retreat 🙏🧘

I spent nine months of last year training as a meditation teacher and am excited to share as much of what I learned as I can—along with habit formation tactics to help you commit to a consistent practice.

Conni and I will be incorporating breathwork practices for calming your nervous system (which feels like a missing piece from many mainstream apps). I’ve written about this before in terms of ‘Sharpening the Axe’, the idea being that instead of attempting a distracted 15-minute meditation—consider spending 10 of those on breathing to activate your parasympathetic nervous system and effectively calming the monkey mind 🐒

📆 Kickoff: Wednesday, April 1st 2020

This is what we’ll cover over the 30 days:

• Week 1 // COMMITMENT: How to Build a Sustainable Daily Meditation Habit

• Week 2 // CALM: How to Regulate Your Nervous System + Cultivate Inner Peace

• Week 3 // RESILIENCE:​ Transform Your Fears + Anxiety Into Personal Growth

• Week 4 // FOCUS:​ Cultivating Deep Work Rituals + Fall Into Flow

🤙🏼 Here’s the Lowdown

1. We meet for weekly online live calls, guided meditations & Q+A

2. You receive daily journaling & meditation prompts

3. You get our epic resource list + FAQ to double down on your meditation practice (no more excuses!)

4. We connect for daily check-ins in our Facebook Group, where you can also connect to other meditators and fellow curious humans.

5. Also… it’s totally free, and you’re invited 👇

Join the Meditation Challenge

🔗 Et Cetera

💯 Unrelated little ideas

📚 Join a remote rebel book club

🙌 Quarantine + creativity = quantivity

👐 How can I help (this could be replicated)

🎧 Listening package for uncertain times

👨‍🎨 Global artistic social distancing festival

🤓 Superbly helpful corona tech handbook

🎙️ The unfolding meta-crisis via Rebel Wisdom

😨 Helpful toolkit for anxiety-related resources

👪 How to create community in a time of corona

😴 Free binaural beats for stillness via Cory Allen

📝 How-to Guide for creating neighbourhood pods

🌎 Gorgeous + comprehensive guide to remote work

⛪ Virtual family chapel facilitator's guide via Casper

🎙️ The case for meditation in an emergency via Sam Harris

🧘 How to create a home meditation retreat via Tara Brach

🤔 Join the stoa (collective sensemaking with smart + brave humans)

🗺️ A dashboard of how the world is attempting to #flattenthecurve

📝 Parting Poem

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone,
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your home
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

– David Whyte

📆 What Are You *Most* Excited for in 2020? // The theme of the year seems to be one of embracing transition. I’m reminded of the Anais Nin line that ‘Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage’—so with that in mind, I’m asking what expansive intentions I might set for the year (and decade) that awaits.

🌎 How to ‘Exploratorium’ // Last week I embarked on a creative pilgrimage. Tucked away in the northern corner of San Francisco there is a sacred temple to curiosity known as the ‘Exploratorium’. As I wandered through their wonder-inducing ‘explore-for-yourself’ exhibits—what resonated most was their idea of the ‘exploratorium-as-a-verb’—and how this lens of fascination served as an invitation to see the world through perpetually curious eyes.

📝 Resilience Survey // Sincere thanks to those of you who took the time to complete the emotional resilience typeform survey in January. The response has honestly felt a little heart-wrenching—we’ve received over 230 stories of burnout (more coming through every day)—which has left me feeling responsible and fired up to create something genuinely helpful.

🧘‍♂️ Download a Resilience Meditation // one of the most underrated uses of meditation is as a tool for processing challenging emotions. I’ve recorded a (15 min) emotional resilience meditation—designed to guide you through the process of integrating + extracting insights from triggering experiences. You can listen or download free here (offered as a gift, but feedback is always appreciated).

As always, please do reply or share any reflections in the comments. I’ll leave you with a prompt question that has been on my own mind lately:

Who will you be, when you finish being who you think you are?

Stay Curious Out There!

Jonny

p.s. what is the weirdest job you've ever had? A good friend is crowdsourcing fun ideas for a ‘reckless resumes’ project—celebrating your odd jobs, semi-illegal income streams, and the quirky stuff you'd never actually put on your resume—share yours over at recklessresume.com.

📸 Left: sunrise above San Francisco // Right: San Francisco sunset at sea level

On Becoming a Resilient Leader 📝

This felt like one of those posts that I wrestled with & felt rather nervous to eventually hit publish, but I’m proud that it’s now out in the world (below is an extract).

It’s common to hear that we should learn to be resilient, yet far from being an innate character trait, resilience is a skill that must be practiced — which requires permission to invest time & resources into cultivating it, which for most people is a financial constraint.

I was fortunate to spend a week wandering the west coast of Ireland with the poet David Whyte in 2018 and he shared something that has stuck with me:

“Work is where we can make ourselves; work is where we can break ourselves.”

Many of us find purpose through our work, and push ourselves hard, but this has lead to significant burnout especially with those in positions of responsibility, both publicly and behind the scenes.

Whilst certainly not limited to the financial costs: founder and leader burnout severely impacts the bottom line of companies — yet it’s still not taken seriously at work.

Given sufficient time for recovery and processing, these ‘stressful obstacles’ forge resilient leaders. It is the alchemy of turning challenging setbacks into fuel for both personal & professional growth and ultimately into wisdom.

In fact, being in a position of leadership is one of the most efficient vehicles of personal growth imaginable. The level emotional intensity (eustress) will serve to surface your previously unexamined fears, insecurities and limiting beliefs.

So the question becomes, how do we train our resilience to stress as the path to growth?

Read Full Post

Emotional Resilience World Tour 2020 🌎

The four locations and dates for the 2020 Emotional Resilience Masterclasses are set and places are filling up fast (limited to 24 per location).

I’ll be facilitating these day long experiential workshops—designed to expand your capacity for confronting fears, and identify avoidance strategies—attendees will leave knowing how to remain centred in challenging environments, hold space for their teams and embrace their leadership potential.

If you know of any founders + leaders who may be a suitable fit, I would be grateful if you could forward this newsletter to them or put us in touch.

🌉 San Francisco // March 27
🇸🇬 Singapore // April 22
🇬🇧 London // September 25
🌴 Bali retreat // October 26-29

View Masterclasses

📸 Captured in South Ubud // above the rice paddies (close to our retreat location)

📆 What Events Are You Excited For in 2020?

The calendar is quickly filling up with exciting events! Here are three that I’m especially looking forward to (and would love to see fellow Curious Humans at):

🇲🇽 Founder Summit // Mexico City, March 13-15—curated by Curious Humans reader and Earnest Capital founder Tyler Tringas—I’ll be running a workshop with Anne-Laure on Mind-framing + Resilience for founders.

🚢 Entrepreneur-SHIP // Departing from Rome, June 7-11—stopping off in St Tropez, Tuscany + Monte Carlo… but luxurious locations aside, the attendee line-up is shaping up to be rather exceptional (I’m an ambassador and it’s invite only so let me know if you’re curious to jump on board).

🌎 World Domination Summit // June 23–29 in Portland—Already sold out! But spare tickets are available via their FB group. It’ll be the 10th and final WDS, having attended the previous two I’m excited to see what they team have in store!

Two Ideas Worth Sharing… 📝

1 // Why You Should Create A Personal Mythology 🐉

I spent a couple of days last week with previous podcast guest and thoughtful human Buster Benson and our conversations took an unexpected deep dive into the world of tarot and mythology.

Mythic mode is a way of looking at the world through a story-like lens. When you enter mythic mode, you recognize that you’re a character in Omega’s story, as is everyone else.

Embracing mythic mode feels like a medicine for our times. We crave story a+nd archetypes—they give us relief from the the anxiety of our perennial problems by creating spaces for shared meaning-making.

The realm of myths, the archetypal lens, and mythic mode are different ways of seeing this way of connecting our reality to the universal story directly.

He acknowledges that this post is just a working ‘scratch pad’ and that the real work is to internalize the mythologies in order to better participate in the world’s problems and opportunities. Read Buster’s full post here.

2 // Embracing Embarrassment + The Power of Not Knowing 🤔

I have been following the executive coach Ed Batista on Twitter for some time (he lectures at Stanford on the ‘Art of Self-Coaching’) and this piece of his on the power of not knowing really resonated (extract below, bolding mine)

“Life is full of potentially embarrassing moments, and we have to learn to navigate them without undue distress--but at times our efforts to avoid embarrassment come with a cost. A common scenario in which this occurs is when we realize that we're expected to know something we don't, and we seek to cover up our ignorance.”

He goes onto share how we often feel obligated to have the correct answers (in my view this is a hangover from our archaic schooling system). It’s funny how afraid we are to simply admit when there’s something that we don’t know, and forget that this comes with a cost:

“It's easy to bluff our way through these situations, but this comes at a cost: When we prioritize our desire to avoid embarrassment, we relinquish the power of not knowing.”

🔗 Et Cetera

🚶‍♂️ How to walk + talk

☄️ Per aspera ad astra

✏️ Why writing matters

🧚‍♂️ The spell of total work

💯 1,000 true fans? Try 100

😃 Join the not-boring club

👪 How to build a micro-tribe

🥣 When in doubt, make soup

🌴 Do you fear taking time off?

⏳ How much work is ‘enough’?

📝 Beautiful app for self-reflection

🤔 How to choose what to work on next

🙏 How mindfulness helps solve problems

🙌 Make 2020 the year of maximum enthusiasm

😨 Healing Trauma & Awakening the Vagus Nerve

📝 Parting Poem

This isn’t one of mine, but written by Guillaume Apollinaire, I’ve revisited it many times recently and it feels like a prayer to courage (which we could all use an extra dose of every now and then!)

“Come to the edge," he said.

"We can't, we're afraid!" they responded.

"Come to the edge," he said.

"We can't, We will fall!" they responded.

"Come to the edge," he said.

And so they came.

And he pushed them.

And they flew.

📸 Left: Sunset at Lake Tahoe // Right: Sunrise through the trees in Nederland

I’m typing this miles above a baron Arctic ice-shelf // I've always loved flying since I was young, and somehow those sensations of childlike exhilaration have stayed with me to this day.

But what struck me today // seated by the window close to the wing—was the moment just before the aircraft wheels leave the runway and that invisible slipstream appears, shaping itself around the wing.

Those misty threads // only materialised once the plane had totally committed itself to the take-off and they continue to keep us all soaring above glacial rivers as I’m typing these words.

So my invitation to you is this // as you prepare to take off and propel yourself into the open skies of a new decade, take a moment to consider where those intangible currents appear in your life, and how you might orient your wings towards their flow.

Maybe those intangible currents // are the friends who are there for you when times get tough, the unexpected opportunities that appear when you are brave enough to commit to that take-off or simply the moments of inspiration that flow from a dedicated creative practice.

My experience has been // that staying alert to these slipstreams, pulls me towards a life that has the potential to be infinitely more wondrous than the limited horizons of pre-conceived goals I’ve spent so many of my days chasing.

I wish to extend a deep thank you // to those of you who have read and supported me from afar over the past 18 months. The conversations, support and companionship that have emerged from this space truly means the world to me.

Here's a question to ponder as you embark on this joy-filled lap around the sun:

'Who will you be, when you're finished being who you think you are?'

Stay Curious Out There,

Jonny

p.s. if you appreciate these updates, the best way you can support these Curious Human Creations is to contribute to, or share the Emotional Resilience survey mentioned below 🙏

Above: taken on Jan 1st whilst at Bali Silent Retreat

🏔️ Embracing Emotional Resilience

A few months back (it almost feels like another decade), I wrote about my ‘Makers Dilemma’—the decision to turn down a very tempting job offer, pledging instead to continue hacking my way through the thickets of the entrepreneurial pathless path.

Since writing those words and following my intuition (+ generous invitations) to various far-flung corners of the world, it seems that a way forward has emerged in the form of a mission that scares + excites me in equal measure.

Those of you who have been listening to the recent podcast episodes (or watched the TEDx talk) will have noticed a theme that emerged around what I’ve been calling ‘radical curiosity’—the capacity to courageously enquire into our inner challenges and embrace life’s obstacles as a source of growth.

So I’m now in the process of investigating, designing and facilitating workshops and retreats to build Emotional Resilience for startup founders & leaders.

One of my insights from last year was that I thrive when collaborating with others (and frankly it’s more fun)—so with this in mind I’m excited to be teaming up with the talented humans over at Studio D.

Although he describes himself as a ‘failed academic’, the founder—Jan Chipchase—has crafted himself a career that enables him to plot expeditions, decode culture and essentially get paid to be professionally curious (Jan has also distilled his life’s work and philosophies into this thoughtful ‘Field Study Handbook’ and runs a high-signal + satisfyingly minimal newsletter called RADAR).

Above: credit Jan Chipchase / Studio D.

Together, we’ve crafted a survey with the intention of learning and developing resources centred around emotional resilience, based on a shared mutual belief in the deep importance of this work.

We have received some extraordinarily moving and heartfelt responses so far. It’s becoming clear just how many in leadership positions feel isolated, overwhelmed and verging towards a state of burnout.

If you fit the description of a founder, leader or investor—please take some time to share your thoughts with us (it won’t take more than 6-7 minutes unless you find it therapeutic to spend longer) and if you know any communities for whom this might resonate, please do hit reply or forward this newsletter on to them.

Contribute to the survey ➾ ➾ resilience.study

I will also be sending a curious humans care package from Bali as a thank you gesture to someone at random who fills this out 🙏

🔥 Breathwork, The Cure for Anxiety?

“How We Breathe is How We Think” – Ed Dangerfield

This might be the most powerful podcast conversation that I've recorded to date. If you haven't already heard of Breathwork, I think it's fair to say that you that you likely will have by the end of the year. It's exploding in popularity, in the same way that yoga and meditation has over the last decade, and I think for good reason.

On a basic level, breathwork is the practice of changing your breathing pattern to shift your mental, emotional and physical state... but what I deeply appreciate about Edward is his clinical approach that is backed by years of training, endocrinology research and self-experimentation mapping out the human nervous system.

The aim of this conversation was to create something of a comprehensive beginners guide to breathwork and some of the areas we dive into are:

🏂 Ed's personal journey from being trapped in an avalanche and nearly dying, which led him to being a highly functioning alcoholic and depressive.

🗺️ How he has been able to map certain emotions onto specific breathing patterns. 

🧙‍♂️ Insights gathered from living with the Canadian Tribal Elders 

😲 Some of the healing that he has witnessed in his time guiding sessions: from a man who re-lived and processed a near-drowning experience to powerful stories of women who have been able to process experiences of sexual abuse.

Listen to the Episode

🤔 Three Reflections for the Decade Ahead

📆 Give Yourself Away // the first week of January is usually my time for future planning: who is the me that I want to become this year? What traits do I hope to cultivate, what experiences do I desire to feel, what creative aspirations do I dream of fulfilling. Instead I took a strategic silent retreat and spent the first few days in stillness, learning to give myself away.

❤️ An Ode to Friendship // Anais Nin once remarked that each friend ‘represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive.’ We see ourselves more clearly reflected in the eyes of another, the mark of friendship might be someone who lovingly reflects both your highest creative potential and your blind spots.

🙏 Reverse Gratitude // I believe most of us have the idea of 'gratitude' backwards. We’re told that we ought to be grateful ‘for’ something (bonus points if you complete your 5 minute journal)—which is wonderful, but in my experience gratitude is more of an orientation—a flavour of awareness and a way of being. You might say gratitude is the happiness that doesn't depend on what happens.

🎙️ New Guest Episodes

One of the joys of hosting a podcast is that every so often, someone invites you to appear on theirs. It’ fun surrendering to the mercy of someone else’s questions, sometimes you overhear yourself saying things you didn’t realise you knew. Here are a few that went live recently:

🔥 1 // I enjoyed a wide-ranging mind-meld with prolific creative Conni Biesalski which she appropriately title how to be a curious + whole human on her CREATE podcast.

🧠 2 // Shared thoughts on mental health with Taryn Raine on her ‘Embracing Human’ podcast.

🤔 3 // I talked about embracing radical curiosity on Matt Bowles’s Maverick Show.

✊ 4 // Dropping in with Celine from the Sattva Soul podcast on the topic of emotional resilience and what this means to us both.

🔗 Et Cetera

✈️ Buy or wait?

🍌 Duct taped banana

👊 Quality & effort (via Seth)

🎺 Very unlikely instruments

🧘‍♂️ Top notch meditation tips

👩‍🚀 MIT built an empathy suit

🐦 Gorgeous guide to Twitter

🔍 In-depth guide to deep work

😲 52 fascinating factoids from 2019

🐶 Dog playing jenga (you’re welcome)

🙈 Embarrassment leads to creativity

🍕 34,000 words on pizza toast (via Craig)

📆 2019 told six-word stories (via Twitter)

😋 Story of an automated food influencer

👊 Ewoks have the best fighting strategies

🐶 My Balinese friend Mr. Ketut goes viral

📆 Antifragile new year planning (via Taylor)

🗣️ The language you speak influences your attention

🙏 Advocating for buoyancy over burnout (via OnBeing)

🌘 Parting Poem

Lying under lunar limelight

Notice the jubilant firefly

Carving her signature

Into the thick of night.

–

Follow her phosphorescent line,

Up to a numinous thumbnail,

Cradling an Earth Shadow

Caught in a cobweb of stars.

–

Think of the ways in which

Your own shadow is revealed

By those, spinning in your orbit.

–

And how the world you inhabit is

Eclipsed by a thousand fragments

of projected, disowned Darkness.

–

–

Be still now.

Put down the weight

Of all that you know.

Recall your true nature.

As Sun. As Firefly.

Illuminate the cosmos.

Write your radiant love note

To the skies.