The Round Year

Every time you put effort and energy into an task, ask yourself: ‘What will this accomplish?’ It doesn’t make much difference whether your endeavor was useful, financially rewarding or simply meant to entertain: whenever you engage in an activity that requires work, there should be an expectation of results. People who are familiar with sorting their tasks by importance and urgency know that activ...

We waste untold amounts of time and energy on things of no consequence. We don’t see that in the present, as the situations always present themselves as urgent, critical, and dire. Very few tasks are truly urgent and most things are fixable; those that are not are often outside our control. All of them take up real estate in your mind and emotions, however, wearing you down while yielding no benef...

Who are we, without even knowing it? How many people speak with our voices, think with our minds, quietly guide our beliefs and our actions? If we dig a little deeper into our identity, we’re likely to find our parents’ convictions, our friends’ preferences, our mentors’ codes of conduct, the faith of our spiritual role models. We are all aware of this, of course, maybe take it for granted, and do...

In physics, every action has an equal and opposite reaction; the same applies to the realm of the mind. Every thought you nurture, especially profound beliefs and openly expressed convictions, will create both its intended result and its conceptual opposite , and will somehow manage to attract both of them into your reality. You can think of this as reality testing you to see if you meant it, and...

Focus is the ability to ignore all signals save one. Your mental capacity stays unchanged, but it’s solely focused on one objective. Focus runs on emotions and excitement , not willpower . If you need to force yourself to pay attention, your subconscious is telling you the task doesn’t interest you enough. That’s why people often struggle to focus on their tasks while unrelated trivia lingers in t...

Those born with exceptional traits often remain unaware of them until adulthood, as we tend to take our own mental and physical capabilities for granted and assume everyone else is the same. What is a gift? It is an innate skill, sense, or ability that is so second nature to you that you’re oblivious to others not having it. Do you possess a heightened sensitivity to your surroundings, easily dete...

Intent is not precise, nor is it linear, it loosely aims for the direction you plan while bringing about many echoes , counterpoints , and unintended results . Their effects continue long after the flame of their original intent has died out, often surprising the author, who has already moved on to something else and forgotten the purpose of the initial action. Every project comes with child theme...

Maintaining control over your mind when the latter is challenged in the battle of influences, inducements and restrictions we call daily life is a critical survival skill . People fight to win this battle because they don’t understand eliminating mental spam shouldn’t take any willpower at all. Just because someone makes a conjecture, that doesn’t mean you have to entertain it. We flitter away a l...

Where are you right now? You may think you are at home, tending to mundane activities, but part of you is still at work, unable to let go of the problem you’re trying to solve, at the beach, dreaming of that tropical vacation, across the street, unable to extricate yourself from the rumble of a passing motorcycle, at the restaurant, choosing what to order for dinner. Our minds are in the future, c...

Understanding is a tough mistress who makes you deserve her favor: it demands focus, effort , humility, time and patience. Whether gained through years of painstaking trial and error or learned from other people’s experiences, there is no shortcut to knowledge . Life always makes you earn it . The discernment that makes a fundamental difference in one’s life can not be faked, purchased, transferre...

We call them omens , signs , kismet , synchronicities , and they simultaneously hearten and distress us, because they dismantle our illusion reality is random. We call it God’s will and surrender to it, or fate, and fight it at every turn, proud to withstand its unfair grip. We never think to just sit and listen to what reality has to say. She is not your enemy. It’s a partner who enjoys offering...

Remember the old maps with boundaries beyond which anything could happen? They always said here be dragons , even in the middle of the ocean. When we try to think past the limits of our understanding, we always assume we would envision a blank space, a vast emptiness, but that’s not what actually happens. We fill every gap in knowledge with weird versions of our familiar models. It works for every...

Life works in probabilities . Everything is a gradient of maybe between yes and no . Since nothing is impossible, and nothing is absolute, life plans only make sense in broad strokes, and obsessing over their specific details is frequently doomed to failure. Events tend to cluster around coherent outcomes and we get drawn towards those clusters without even realizing. Between intent and outcome an...

What is a ritual ? Any activity which carries or can carry symbolic meaning . Rituals appeal to our desire for recognizable patterns, our need to place ourselves into a familiar frame of reference that connects past, present and future and inside which we can anticipate and plan. They reinforce the knowledge shortcuts we create for ourselves to make sense of the world. A ritual never changes , and...

The inability to share ineffable experiences is a limitation of our human condition, which makes us feel helpless and sublime at the same time. These moments are by definition impossible to put into words, but their characteristics and circumstances are broadly recognizable. They often attempt to find expression in metaphor – an open sky, an endless void, a pregnant silence, an all-encompassing pr...

The round year is an ideal that got lost in our modern experience of time, but which is so deeply embedded in old spiritual systems, it often goes unquestioned. It is a simple concept, really. We don’t live years ; we live the Year in perpetuity. When the Year ends, the Year begins again. The concept of round time. People attuned to the cycles of nature, who spend a lot of their life outdoors, hav...

People picture their memory as a large body of water in which they’re immersed, one which challenges their sense of control, as they struggle to swim against its currents, or allows them the enjoyment of floating, relaxed, on its calm surface when the influx is pleasant. Frequently, its driving currents drag the unfortunate mind into a whirlpool it can’t control, and drown it in weakening and defe...

Whose thoughts run your head? That is a strange question. We take for granted we are the ones who think our thoughts, when in fact they are only in part our production, if at all. This article is a perfect example of that. We act like resonators for other people’s minds, contemporary intellectual currents , commonly held unquestioned beliefs , willful influences , and overpowering models . Our tho...

There are truly powerful forces at work in our universe, forces so awe-inspiring our minds can’t comprehend them: giant black holes of near infinite gravity, invisible waves that propagate through vast expanses at speeds that bend space and time, energy rays which permeate all the matter in their path, enormous forces in something as small as a neutron, patterns that organize entire galaxies with...

Once upon a time, emotions were the key to our survival. They are fast, much faster than thoughts, and can assess a situation at lightning speed, before our rational analysis, before our senses even; they are a lost superpower we forgot how to wield. Unlike instincts, which are devoid of information, emotions are pre-analyzed: they’re shortcuts to things we already know, they make connections betw...

Email Share A breeze quickens in the middle of the forest, and all the tree branches turn in unison, revealing the undersides of the leaves and changing the color of the canopy.  The birds startle and take flight together, suddenly, and your heart gets startled with them, surprised by their sudden motion. You look up at the sky through the branches, taken by their beauty, feeling the light dim as...

We live in our own perception of reality , where our level of knowledge is the real constraint on what we can see.  This is the kind of knowledge that makes us understand the sun, moon and stars are not really in the sky, but very far away, that roads don’t taper off to a fine point on the horizon, and what we think we see is not necessarily what’s actually there. We run on assumptions, because we...

A symbol is a stand-in for something else. What? Anything you wish and anything your mind can conjure: ideas, feelings, objects, events, shorthands, messages, memory aids. We use symbols to condense meaning into its smallest form, for immediate reference, portability, and emotional impact. The main purpose of a symbol is to evoke and reinforce memories and feelings at lightning speed . Even a casu...

There is an old Navajo blessing that starts with ‘ may you walk in beauty ’, a reminder to appreciate what a gift it is to belong in the world.  The beauty of existence runs deep beneath its surface, into its structure and even into our perception of it.   Things aren’t beautiful because we perceive them as such. We perceive them as beautiful because they align with the way reality , and our own b...

We’re all many people, spun together in a bundle of threads we call the self, a constantly changing  manifold  that gains and loses components like a branching river with tributaries and deltas. We don’t think about how much we change throughout our life as these pieces of ourselves get  swapped  and  replaced . We never analyze their mix, which we unconsciously accept as our  self . Every morning...