Charity I just made my largest ever charitable donation to: Heroic Hearts Project
Notes:
- If you want to help veterans, and to help reduce the multigenerational downstream effects of the trauma they have suffered, I’d highly recommend donating to this organization.
Excerpt from Breath: The New Science Of A Lost Art, by James Nestor
“”We took in psychotic people, people no one else wanted to deal with, people for whom many medicines weren’t working,” said Dr. James Eyerman, a psychiatrist who has used this therapy in his practice for the past 30 years.
From 1989 to 2001, Eyerman led more than 11,000 patients at Saint Anthony’s Medical Center in Saint Louis through Holotropic Breathwork. He documented the experiences of 482 manic depressives, schizophrenics, and others, and found that the therapy had significant and lasting benefits. A 14 year old who tried to slit his own throat breathed a few Holotropic breaths and sailed off into an altered state of “pure consciousness.” A 31 year old woman addicted to several drugs had an out of body experience and, afterward, sobered up and went on to lead a 12 step program. Eyerman saw thousands of similar transformations and reported no adverse reactions or side effects.
“These patients would get pretty wild, but it worked for them,” he told me. “It worked incredibly well, and the hospital staff just couldn’t figure out why.”
Notes:
- Recently, a friend and I were discussing our experiences with both ayahuasca and Holotropic Breathwork. He mentioned that he had tried Holotropic Breathwork several years prior to working with ayahuasca and it had no noticeable effects. (I’ve also noticed this to be the case with about 1 out of 10 people who I’ve breathed with in group HB sessions.) However, after working with the ayahuasca, he was consistently able to enter into an altered state within minutes of beginning this form of breathing. Food for thought.
Recommended Reading: The Two Types of Knowledge: The Max Planck/Chauffeur Test
Excerpts:
- “Charlie Munger, the billionaire business partner of Warren Buffett, frequently tells the story below to illustrate how to distinguish between the two types of knowledge: real knowledge and pretend knowledge.”
- “I frequently tell the apocryphal story about how Max Planck, after he won the Nobel Prize, went around Germany giving the same standard lecture on the new quantum mechanics. Over time, his chauffeur memorized the lecture and said, “Would you mind, Professor Planck, because it’s so boring to stay in our routine. [What if] I gave the lecture in Munich and you just sat in front wearing my chauffeur’s hat?” Planck said, “Why not?” And the chauffeur got up and gave this long lecture on quantum mechanics. After which a physics professor stood up and asked a perfectly ghastly question. The speaker said, “Well I’m surprised that in an advanced city like Munich I get such an elementary question. I’m going to ask my chauffeur to reply.””
- “In this world we have two kinds of knowledge. One is Planck knowledge, the people who really know. They’ve paid the dues, they have the aptitude. And then we’ve got chauffeur knowledge. They’ve learned the talk. They may have a big head of hair, they may have fine temper in the voice, they’ll make a hell of an impression. But in the end, all they have is chauffeur knowledge. I think I’ve just described practically every politician in the United States.”
Excerpts From My Journal
As far as I can tell, letting go of your attachment to a given outcome can actually increase the likelihood of its coming to pass.
The more you learn about what a person has been through, the easier you will find it to forgive them, and to love them.
You don’t need to read a Buddhist text to realize the transient nature of reality. If you simply engage with life, it will become blindingly obvious.
The way you feel about someone is largely a function of the degree to which you like the person you become when you’re around them. In other words, how you feel about the aspects of yourself that they amplify.
Music Recommendation