Disregard Everything But These 3 Things
Thank you for being here.
This newsletter is best enjoyed with a few deep breaths, and a nice cup of something.
Here's what we'll cover today:
Part 1: Body guidance - to help you with moving, feeling and healing better.
Part 2: A life insight - to enrich your inner world and work more harmoniously with your outer world.
Part 3: An update, highlight or candid share from my life, often with a cheeky plug at the end.
Part 1: Body Guidance
Let's explore how you're sitting, to bring more ease, stability and energy.
This is a guided practice. Take your time to feel into this, slowly and sequentially.
Can you feel your sit bones? I want you to adjust your pelvis (explore slowly rolling/rocking forward and back) so that the pointier parts of your sit bones are lengthening down from the space just behind your solar plexus. Relax your lower back, sides and belly; do this with as little effort as possible.
Keep that. Now, can you feel the point one inch below where your collarbones meet? Let it rise skyward as you take a deep "good morning" inhale. Then keep a hint of that sense of lift as you breathe out, letting your sternum sink towards your lower back. Were you able to keep the sit bones pointy and the collarbones open?
Now, soften your face and feel the backs of your ears. Can you gently lengthen towards the sky, floating them away from the base of your lower back? Keep that subtle feeling and listen to the space around you. If you notice you're holding your breath, let it flow.
Lastly, adjust the position of your shoulders to give your heart more space. Then draw in the smell of a huge inhale towards the middle of your back. Can you feel this?
Now, feel into time... Can you remember when your heart first started beating? Let your mind fall into that space, as you breathe in your aliveness and soften your tissues.
Welcome to a more embodied state of being. The cues are subtle, but consider the time you spend sitting, and the compounding effect that your posture and muscle tone has on your life. Small things, repeated all day for years, shape you.
Do it for 2 minutes, 20 minutes or 2 hours, or until you become it.
Part 2: A Life Insight
These three things are all that matter and you should disregard everything else.
YOUR PRACTICE ↓
This is the ever-unfolding present-moment process of sincerely cultivating yourself. People can watch this, but nobody can truly see it unless they are equally invested in their own process. You can bullshit others and rest on your past accomplishments, but this is performative. You will never, ever, get away with bullshitting yourself.
It all comes down to integrity, so ask yourself: Am I walking my talk, in this moment?
“Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be.
Be one."
- Marcus Aurelius
YOUR BODY OF WORK ↓
This is the fruit of your labours. It is the unique blend of skill, knowledge and insight from your process of struggling and overcoming - which has nothing to do with what others are saying or teaching. If your process has come from integrity, your body of work will grow valuable, quickly, because integrity is rare and always in high demand.
Your body of work is the only qualification that matters. When you share your work with honesty, humility and transparent intentions, it becomes a living thing, that animates and inspires those who receive it.
"You work that you may keep pace with the earth and the soul of the earth. For to be idle is to become a stranger unto the seasons, and to step out of life’s procession, that marches in majesty and proud submission towards the infinite."
- Kahlil Gibran
YOUR RELATIONSHIPS ↓
Relationships are life's blood and electricity. The primary, living currency. Everything is born through relationships; is shared through relationships; and is lost through changing relationships. There is precisely nothing in existence that is not *in relationship* with everything else. So, if you devote yourself to the study of relationships, anything is possible in time.
Every now and then, I get lost in the sauce (I'm sure you do too), searching for new tactics or sexy secret knowledge. But I am doing my best to remind myself that the only essential in life is to be as skilled as possible in relating to the most impactful things.
Change, and the seasonality of nature / the kosmos
Human beings, and their creative / destructive tendencies
Myself, and the unfathomable mystery of what exactly that is
Sorry Descartes... I'm about to do some surgery on your famous statement.
"I think relate therefore I am".
Part 3: An Update
A turn towards deeper, longer-term work, shared in-the-flesh.
These days, I am much better at taking my own advice.
But only because I've noticed an interesting and at times frustrating pattern...
↓ invest in myself (deep work)
↓ realise I'm running low on money
↓ share online (seek exposure)
↓ generate new relationships / share the work / earn money
↓ neglect the deep work and get lost in the business side of things
↓ get frustrated that my days do not reflect my priorities (screen time vs enriched movement + connection)
... Repeat
Welcome to the interesting challenge of digital creation in the health and embodiment space, haha.
The solution is pretty simple. Keep doing the online stuff, but prioritise in-person work, which means coming to see you guys, or you coming to see me!
2 day immersions and multi-day retreats internationally
classes locally within the Northern Rivers community
Teaching online groups has been absolutely epic, so in-person work is going to be very, very transformative.
We can talk about movement, health, connection and so on... but when that predominantly exists within the constraints of a small, square device and not in the immediate space around us, we have a bit of an issue. This becomes more and more evident to me as I dive into neurology and the role of eye movement and sensory input on regulation of the nervous system.
We simply need the right inputs to thrive. A lot of sincere people are doing their best with shitty inputs, and it's like pissing into the wind. No matter how much you learn through books or courses, if your environment is not conducive to health, you will not be healthy. When we are highly equipped, we have deep capacity to change, but our system is meant to work with the environment, not against it - and therein lies the conflict of interest. Conflicting inputs.
We need to invert this process and reinvest in the bodies, spaces and communities around us as often as humanly possible, because otherwise it will only grow more inconvenient to do so. Let's all step up in initiating this.
There is immense value in our online connection, when combined with offline walking-the-walk.
I'm seriously looking forward to meeting you guys. Looking forward to diving deep, in person, and building offline connections with more of you.
If you'd love to attend or host one of these events, let me know where you're based land we will organise it based on interest.
- Jack