Apotheosis

Send us Fan Mail How do you summon your courage when everything seems hopeless? How do you gain the strength to keep fighting when all your efforts seem to be in vain? Learn from Harriet. Around 120 years ago, a young woman freed herself from slavery. However, when Harriet Tubman crossed into the free lands of Pennsylvania, she knew her own freedom wasn’t enough — she was compelled to help others...

Send us Fan Mail Few activities create more anxiety than thinking about the future. However, when we let go of the need for certainty, we prepare our minds for clarity and creativity to bloom.  Whenever we’re faced with a hard problem or a major decision, we often find ourselves gripped with anxiety. Our minds churn with visions of the many ways things might go wrong. However, we can take comfort...

Send us Fan Mail We fill our homes with too much stuff, our calendars with too many activities, and our minds with too much mental chatter. When we practice saying no and letting go, we make more space for the things that truly deliver value in our lives.   If you’ve ever been in the home of an extreme hoarder, you will recognize how useless a room becomes from an excess of stuff. With junk piled...

Send us Fan Mail We have greater access to information than ever, but not all is reliable. Who should we trust? The Buddha’s ten criteria for countering misinformation can help. We live in an age in which actual misinformation farms exist. However, the problem of untrustworthy information is not new. The difficulty of sorting out signal from noise goes back at least 2,500 years to the Buddha’s tim...

Send us Fan Mail We make hundreds of decisions each day. Making the right decision depends on the possible outcomes. One helpful approach is to ask ourselves, “Will this action create more suffering or less ?” Some of the decisions we make every day are easy enough: what to eat, what free-time activities to pursue, or when to make a dentist appointment. Other decisions have a bigger impact and req...

Send us Fan Mail We humans are far less rational than we’d like to believe. Even very smart people make all kinds of bad decisions. Aristotle’s rules for deliberation still serve as a practical method to slow down, clarify thinking, and improve decision-making. Aesop’s classic fable of the Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs conveys an issue at the heart of human society: we can be really bad at decis...

Send us Fan Mail No doubt this is unwelcome news, but your brain is riddled with biases that can lead to unclear thinking and poor decisions. Intentional, systematic decision-making processes can reduce their influence. We are faced with countless decisions every day. To help us make sense of the world and make rapid decisions, our brains evolved a wide range of biases and mental shortcuts called...

Send us Fan Mail The human capacity for reason sets us apart on the evolutionary stage. But our intuition also played a crucial role in our rise to the top. We can cultivate greater intuition through systematic learning and persistent exposure to high-quality information. Hundreds of millions of years of animal evolution forged a crucial tool for survival — animal instinct. The power of instinct a...

Send us Fan Mail Even if the destination is clear, there are many roads to get there. Nobody knows the “perfect” path. We must decide the route based on our unique conditions and companions on the journey. Every year, thousands of people from around the world travel to Spain to take the Camino de Santiago — the Way of St. James. While the destination is the same, the cathedral of Santiago de Compo...

Send us Fan Mail Our childhood fear of the dark never went away; it merely changed forms. Our irrational fear of the dark blinds us to the vital power of darkness.  As children, we fear the dark because of what we think we see lurking in the shadows. This fear is perfectly reasonable and rational, since recognizing dangerous creatures can keep us alive. As adults, culture and language embed an irr...

Send us Fan Mail Unlike your eye color or your height, your brain can change over your lifetime. Through intentional effort, you can enhance our mental capacities – while inattention can cause your skills to wither. Up until a few decades ago, science generally believed that the brain you were born with was the brain you’re stuck with. It was believed that once you hit adulthood, your brain stoppe...

Send us Fan Mail Can you rise up to meet the challenge in front of you? If you feel “in over your head,” consider that a call to action. You have an opportunity to grow.  From the moment we’re born, we’re thrust into a path of non-stop growth. Every moment of our childhood is marked by major milestones: crawling, walking, speaking our first words… in a blink, we’re all grown up. As adults, we reac...

Send us Fan Mail A diamond covered in mud doesn’t lose any value. Wash off the layers of mud, and you easily recognize it as a treasure. Likewise, if we purify our mind of delusions, we can see our innate wisdom. One of the fundamental teachings of Buddhism is that all beings possess innate wisdom and purity – we all have the seeds of enlightenment. Yeah, this concept is a tough one to wrap our he...

Send us Fan Mail “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.”  ~ Probably not Carl Jung Jung most likely never said this, despite the frequent attribution for this quote. Nonetheless, it’s a good tagline for his insights. Deep in the hidden corners of our minds lies a part of ourselves we’d prefer not to acknowledge – what Jung called the shadow....

Send us Fan Mail We sat in darkness. Inky black, question-your-existence darkness. Our panicked voices echoed off the walls of the cavern. If we were bats, those echoes might have given some comfort. Alas, we lacked the capacity for echolocation, so we were, quite literally, lost in the dark.  Two hours later, we emerged from the cave.  From time to time, we’re presented with an opportunity to bre...

Send us Fan Mail Haste makes waste, as the cliche goes. The Stoic concept of festina lente suggests we will achieve better results by taking our time and doing things right.  Especially in our hyper-busy world, we can be really impatient for results. We want something, and we want it now. But sometimes, we need to suppress this urge for immediate action. When we rush, we’re more likely to make mis...

Send us Fan Mail Nothing exists in isolation. Parts form groups, which then form systems. The health of the system relies on effective integration between all of its components. This is as true in organisms as in families, organizations, or societies. We often take the health of our bodies for granted. Until we’re struck with illness or injury, we don’t appreciate the flawless symphony of cells, t...

Send us Fan Mail Over 2000 years ago, sages around the world arrived at a similar conclusion: we should treat everyone with kindness and concern. Cultivating compassion for all beings, friend and enemy alike, is foundational to spiritual growth. Here's an unfortunate reality: we will have enemies in this life, or at the very least, people we really don’t like. Despite the obvious difficulties...

Send us Fan Mail “Life is long if you know how to use it,” declared Seneca 2000 years ago. The years can pass in a blink if you squander your days on pointless pursuits. Find your sine qua non and focus on that above all else. Each of us can easily identify activities that take up a lot of time but that contribute very little to our success, mission, or wellbeing. The days can fly past, caught up...

Send us Fan Mail Change is coming for you. No matter how skilled you were in the past, what worked yesterday might be irrelevant tomorrow. We’ll never have everything figured out. In the latest episode of Apotheosis, I look at the art of kaizen and how it promotes continuous improvement — helping us rise to each moment. Imagine the best 15th century army in the world squaring off against any moder...

Send us Fan Mail A societal or organizational vision based on harnessing fear and anger will typically fail over the long term. Basing a vision on shared values stands a much greater chance of solving real problems and creating something people want. The recent failures of the MAGA movement in the U.S. elections offer a case study of uninspiring visions. Turns out that blind obedience to one man a...

Send us Fan Mail American culture bombards men with images of who they’re meant to be. Often these images portray men as tough guys who value winning at all costs, playing by their own set of rules. The problem is that this image of masculinity is a fabrication – a marketing campaign dreamed up in a Madison Avenue conference room to sell more products to men. Being a “real man” doesn’t mean being...

Send us Fan Mail Every organism occupies its own unique sensory world, arising from the combination of sensory apparatuses it possesses. We can never truly know what it’s like to perceive the world through the “eyes” of another being. Imagine being in the depths of a cave. You can hear the water dripping, feel slippery rock under your feet, and smell the guano. But you can’t see a thing. Your eyes...

Send us Fan Mail The fight-or-flight response can keep us alive when faced with a threat. But our brains often prepare us for battle even when the threats are just words or thoughts. Pausing before responding to perceived threats helps expand our options. When we’re under attack, we don’t always have time to think. When perceiving a threat, the body responds automatically, increasing blood flow, d...

Send us Fan Mail Reality dictates that we will face difficulties ahead. As the pandemic showed us, it’s easy to succumb to panic, anxiety, and any number of largely unproductive coping mechanisms like hoarding toilet paper. Calmly facing down difficulty requires intentional effort.  Barbara Frederickson’s Broaden-and-Build theory offers one helpful perspective for cultivating calm and clarity. Neg...