🔥Welcome to volume #00029!🔥
I’m Christian Champ. This is ☯️The Middle Way Newsletter ☯️. It is a place where I write, explore, share, and invite you along for the journey.
🚣Being a Verb 🚣
The sun came up at the same moment the Koan made me squirm. Thank you Sam Harris’ meditation app. The Koan seemed simple yet made me feel obtuse. It was an easy hard question.
The Koan stated, “Who am I”?
The narrator said, ask yourself… Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?
What comes up for you? What words come to mind? Are the words who you see yourself as or who you believe you are?
Our answer changes depending on the day, the year, the season, the environment, or the moment.
We want to use our list of labels to answer that question. We might use family labels, career labels, or activity labels. We love naming things and we love naming ourselves things. The names can help us or they can trap us.
What if we take the Buckminster Fuller route and see ourselves as a verb?
We find ourselves parenting, studying, working, reading, eating, and relaxing. We don’t get as caught up in the labels that we, culture, and society paint on us.
Naming it as a verb takes away our judgment. Naming it as a verb gives us agency and allows us to see us as the changing being we are. Verbs create action and nouns create stasis. Nouns we use are shortcuts, assuming we are complete, while verbs describe what we are becoming.
It is like when you ask someone what they do and they give you a title. That tells us nothing. The verbs are what we do.
My favorite verb is practicing. When you practice you are trying to ingrain something. You try changing in a subtle controlled fashion. We allow for mistakes and we work to fix them.
We are verbs.
We are becoming.
We are living, doing, and changing.
📓Articles to Read📓
On Losing Everything to the Climate Crisis but Hope by Diego Saz-Gil (hat tip to Shanu for sending my way)
After watching his home burn down from the Cali forest fires, Diego leads with gratitude. A lesson for all of us to start with what we have versus what we think is missing
Hopefully we can have a similar outlook when things fall apart in our lives like it inevitably will
I’m so grateful for all the incredible life moments that I got to live in that house with loved ones. I loved, learned, worked, read, laughed and so much more among those trees. I’m grateful to everyone who shared all these unforgettable moments with me. I’m grateful to the forest itself that allowed me to dwell there for three joyous years. I’m grateful to the firefighters and my neighbors who put their life in the line to try to save the houses from the fires. I’m grateful to everyone who is showing their support today; I feel your love and it touches me deeply. I’m grateful to all the teachers that I came across in my life, whose teachings allow me to be today, in the face of this adversity with calm, equanimity, and gratefulness. I’m grateful for everything that I will learn from this experience.
I plan to revisit the book “When things fall apart” by Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron. From the Stoics, I learned to be prepared for the worst-case scenarios by doing negative visualization, to find happiness in simplicity and virtue, and to accept the fatalism of the past. I plan to revisit the book “A guide to the good life” by philosophy professor Will Irvine. From my brothers, I learned to be grateful to everything, even to adversities, and that everything in life is part of a sacred journey of spiritual development. From my indigenous plant medicine teachers, I learned that Nature/Life knows better than our little selves and all we have to do is to be at its service. From my family, I learned that all that matters is love, relationships, and what we do in life to help others. From my life experiences, I learned that you can always rise up from the ashes, strengthened and transformed. Today I’m reminding myself of all these teachings and is helping me a lot.
Actions not Words Reveal Our Real Values by Derek Sivers
No matter what you tell the world or tell yourself, your actions reveal your real values. Your actions show you what you actually want.
There are two smart reactions to this:
Stop lying to yourself, and admit your real priorities.
Start doing what you say you want to do, and see if it’s really true.
The Banquet of Whiteness by Charles Eisenstein
Like sciencism, when we think we are being open but we are just telling others why we are right and they are wrong
We forget the magic and think we are being rationale. This goes for all of Western culture
People in those cultures (non-Western) widely consider such methods to be effective. Why do they believe in them? Here are two possibilities:
(1) Mired in ignorance and superstition, they have yet to emerge into the light of modern science, which would lay bare the absurdity of their primitive beliefs and usher them into the enlightened world of evidence, reason, and truth. They are less advanced than we are, and their progress is a matter of adopting our, superior, way of engaging the world.
(2) They believe in them because they work. Which means, these people are no less intelligent, no less empirical, no less rational, and no less astute than we are.
Would you ridicule a Hindu villager for saying that the earth rests on the back of a turtle? Would you ridicule a Hopi or Diné for saying that Spider Grandmother weaves the world? Most of us know better, yet a shade of that ridicule colors the ready dismissal of other culture’s ideas of health and disease.
“What applies to science and medicine extends into the rest of life. As our political systems purify, will we continue to try to impose them on the rest of the world? As our chemical- and machine-intensive agricultural system founders, do we continue to push it on Africa? Instead, we might acknowledge the crying need for all those things I listed a few paragraphs ago as absent, let go of the superiority complex, and adopt the humility necessary to relearn about folk medicine, local food systems, gift economics, experiential education, ways of ceremony and prayer, and the mindset and perceptions necessary to live in harmony with each other and the earth.”
When the Magic Happens by Morgan Housel
We are all ready for some magic to happen and when there is challenges, is when the magic happens.
Militaries are an extreme example of panic-induced innovation.
A broader point that applies to everyone is that the biggest innovations rarely occur when everyone’s happy and safe, or when the future looks bright. They happen when people are a little panicked, worried, and when the consequences of not acting quickly are too painful to bear.
That’s when the magic happens.
🎙️ Listen / Watch 📺
Pete Holmes Making it Weird with Byron Katie (Spotify)
Byron Katie had a break down and was institutionalized noting that it is all part of the human condition
She shifted into a life of inquiry, realizing we are all in the state of ok at all times
Our true nature is love and kindness
Ego is a teacher. It is not a villian. It fights for identity and to be heard, we can listen to the ego
Questions to ask: How can I help? Is that true? Are you sure it is true? Listen
Life is all a dream. Thoughts are laughable. If someone upsets you, it’s a gift.
Life is what we believe it to be
Heaven is being home in oneself and hell is the opposite
Pain is remembered or anticipated
Bow to the perfection of a grain of sand. Sand is the love of love. Sand is the Buddha
Surrender is trust, curiosity and wisdom
Instead of [BLANK] to be happy. Ask is that true?
The I complain about [XXX] because [XXX] exercise from her website
📚 Books to Read or Listen to📚
Second Mountain by David Brooks (Goodreads)
TLDR: Life gives us many chances to be part of something bigger than ourselves, when it shows up we need to answer the call.
Character formation matters but it isn't a single player endeavour that is like going to the gym to improve your honesty, courage, integrity and grit. It's about giving yourself away to something bigger than you
We've normalized self-interest and the desire for money, power and status
Never underestimate the power of your environment to mold you and gradually transform you -> Use this and don’t let it use you!
By asking deep questions we switch from "How do I succeed?" to "Why am I doing this?"
Workaholism is an effective distraction from spiritual and emotional problems/questions
Telos Crisis -- people don't know what their purpose is
Nietzsche - any one with a "why" can endure any "how"
Suffering -- Age of Anxiety by WH Auden -- "We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread. Than climb the cross of the moment. And let our illusions die."
Paul Tillich - suffering upsets the normal path of life and we realize we are not who we thought we were. It smashes through the basement of our soul and reveals the cavity below. Then smashes through that caviet and reveals the cavity below.
Suffering calls for a response. None of us can ignore suffering, but we can choose how we respond to it.
Poet Ted Hughes observed that the things that are the worst to undergo are often the best to remember, because at the low moments the protective shells are taken off, humility is achieved, a problem is clearly presented, and a call to service is clearly received.
James Hollis "Your ego prefers certainty to uncertainty, predictability over surprise, clarity over ambiguity. Your ego always wants to shroud over the barely audible murmurings of the heart."
CS Lewis "the scent of the flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited."
First stage of renunciation --> shedding the old self so the new self can emerge -> when we discover our heart and soul
Struggle and challenges make us who we are ... the valley is where we transform
Commitment is made up of heart and soul gives us --> identity, sense of purpose, higher level of freedom, build our moral character...
Practices become habits
Founder of communities in schools --> "I've never seen a program turn around a life. Only relationships turn around lives." Bill Millikan
Frankl --> What do I want from life? What can I do to make myself happy? --NOT THE PROPER QUESTIONS --> The real question is What is life asking of me?
"The greatest thing in education is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy." - William James
You shouldn't fool yourself, most times, you have no idea what you are getting into! Many decisions aren't choices, they are quicksand and we sink into places we have been standing
Amos Trversky "most big choices we make are practically random" -- Most people can't tell you about the Why on the big decisions they made!
Hatred towards anyone is emotional suicide (especially relevant during political seasons)
Broken by Don Winslow (Goodreads)
Winslow is one of the best fiction authors working today
In Broken he weaves characters through a couple short stories
Perfect beach reading or anytime you want to get engrossed in some great characters and story telling
“Every word you say after ‘but’ means every word you said before it is bullshit,”
“father” and “mother” are verbs before they’re nouns.”
💣Words of Wisdom💣
The Book of Five Rings - Miyamoto Musashi
The Way of the warrior does not include other Ways, such as Confucianism, Buddhism, certain traditions, artistic accomplishments and dancing. But even though these are not part of the Way, if you know the Way broadly you will see it in everything. Men must polish their particular Way.
Becoming Wise - Krista Tippett
We create transformative, resilient new realities by becoming transformed, resilient people.
Difficult Conversations - Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, Sheila Heen
By identifying what you are doing to perpetuate a situation, you learn where you have leverage to affect the system. Simply by changing your own behavior, you gain at least some influence over the problem.
Respiration and Posture Training for Better Sprinting and Lifting With Zac Cupples - SimpliFaster - Zac Cupples
Our goal, by improving the qualities an athlete needs to succeed in a given task, would be to get breathing and movement strategies to look as similar as possible across multiple environments. The reason why the best athletes make their craft look effortless is because it probably does take their body less effort, from a motor, respiratory, and physiological standpoint.
Don’t Ask Google’s Eric Schmidt How to Achieve “Work-Life Balance” | MIT Technology Review technologyreview.com
Schmidt: Both of us have always been annoyed by the term. A successful life is not completely balanced. The great people push hard, they do interesting and unusual things. They follow their passion, they get excited. The term “balance” seems to me to be an industrial era term. And in that sense, I think we’re going against the political correctness of that term. But the fact of the matter is that when we studied the successful people, they managed to have a good life and they managed to have good work, and they get them integrated
Small Arcs of Larger Circles - Nora Bateson
Mutual learning is only possible when all participants are willing to be wrong… willing to learn, to explore new ideas, to go off the map, out of the known, and together grope in the shadowy corners of new ideas, new plans, new territories
A Fighter's Heart - Sam Sheridan
It captured the idea that life is born of struggle and striving, that true joy and understanding do not come from comfort and safety; they come from epiphany born in exhaustion (and not exhaustion for its own sake). Safety and comfort are mortal danger to the soul.
Emergent Strategy - adrienne maree brown
Transformation doesn’t happen in a linear way, at least not one we can always track. It happens in cycles, convergences, explosions. If we release the framework of failure, we can realize that we are in iterative cycles, and we can keep asking ourselves—how do I learn from this?
🙏Thanks for reading🙏
Who am I?
What verbs are you? What verbs define what you are becoming?
Any thoughts or comments, please share!
Namaste,
Christian
