❤️🔥Finding Our Sanctuaries ❤️🔥
🔥Welcome to volume #00053!🔥
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.
❤️🔥Finding Our Sanctuaries ❤️🔥
Falling in love always feels strange.
It's like the build-up in the song to our favorite chorus. We notice this ever-present energy increase. There is an extra bounce in our step, and we feel everything moving towards the drop. It's excitement mixed with fear.
In the middle of my first year in college, I started to fall deeply in love.
We spent time together for many months, generally for an hour four times a week. When we took days off, I found myself thinking about her—wanting to go to her. She became something that I needed in my life and something that nourished me.
She changed me, but she stayed the same, steady and consistent, a refuge to escape from any problems and to lose myself deep in her web. When we found each other, she always caused me pain, but the pain that helps you grow—always bringing the eustress unless I pushed things too hard or too fast.
Once you fall in love with the gym, you realize you found a sanctuary.
This sanctuary provides you support and a place to retreat from the world. When you visit, the focus shifts to our inner world. The rest of life fades into the background.
All we have to do is show up, and we can retreat from the world and lose ourselves in deep embodiment and the slipstream of the challenge of feeling our body struggle and groove to a new beat. It becomes a language that you speak with your fellow gym-goers.
The gym that kicked it off wasn't the friendliest place. It was dark and dreary with old equipment, an old gray floor, and a basement location. After winding down a staircase just past the food court, you entered the Wake Forest student gym. The gym brought straight blue-collar Pittsburgh, just like where I grew up. The beauty of the gym was on the inside.
Our sanctuaries offer more than just a reprieve from the world; they introduce us to other folks following similar paths. They open new worlds within worlds. Many of my closest friends in life come from finding them in the sanctuaries called gyms. There is nothing better than going to the gym with my wife.
When we find our sanctuaries, we need to hold on to them and remember to show up. They provide the escape valves to let us refresh, replenish and recharge. They bring the drop that keeps our heads bobbing and keep us going.
📓Articles to Read📓
I wrote a piece about Leveling Up with Our Little Ones tracking the journey of learning and training with our kids.
Ed Batista on The Traps We Set for Ourselves
Ed writes about how we trap ourselves in our mental models by being too optimistic and failing to adjust to reality. We fight this by checking our mental models, double-loop learning, and emotional resilience.
There's a positive correlation between optimism and effective leadership, in part because the optimistic leader has a contagious effect on others, rendering success more likely. [2] And yet there's a point at which unbridled confidence is merely a wish, and optimism becomes magical thinking, which can be particularly dangerous for a leader. Neuroscientist Richard Davidson notes that the risks of excessive optimism include resistance to negative data and failure to learn from experience.
Ed also adds a great quote from the Wire
You want it to be one way, but it’s the other way.
~Marlo Stanfield
Kevin Kelly writes about the Communal Genius Scenius
This article gets at the beauty of being groups or parts of subcultures aka Scenes. The group and the culture add energy and propel us to a level beyond our capabilities.
Many of our sanctuaries show up inside of the various subcultures
Scenius is like genius, only embedded in a scene rather than in genes. Brian Eno suggested the word to convey the extreme creativity that groups, places or “scenes” can occasionally generate. His actual definition is: “Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.”
Individuals immersed in a productive scenius will blossom and produce their best work. When buoyed by scenius, you act like genius. Your like-minded peers, and the entire environment inspire you.
Burning Man Theme for 2021 - The Great Unknown
A perfectly chosen title for an event that may or may not take place in 2021. Unknowns continue to grow as we try to get to the other side of the pandemic and increase our knowns.
The embarkation point of our journey is a place of sadness and separation, with millions gone forever and empty places in our lives where loved ones used to be. It’s a time of great loss, but also of rare opportunity: a chance to reevaluate, reconnect, and return to our roots, to the values that brought us together in the first place. After thirty years of growth and expansion, can anyone say that we are closer to embodying our 10 Principles? That we are demonstrably more inclusive, or leaving less of a trace? Or has our year of pause instead made it easier to pinpoint ways to get better at what we do, just as it has revealed so many structural cracks in our off-playa institutions, both public and private? Now more than ever, the work ahead is about more than Black Rock City. The qualities that we have practiced in ourselves, while far from perfected, are some of the same qualities the world needs most to reinvent itself. The generosity of Gifting, and the creativity of Radical Self-expression. The compassion of Radical Inclusion, and the proactive spirit of Participation.
“Whether we know it or not, our lives are acts of imagination and the world is constantly re-imagined through us.” –Michael Meade
🎙️ Ideas from Podcasts/Videos 📺
Christine Runyan joins Krista Tippet’s OnBeing Podcast to Talk about Our Nervous Systems (Spotify / Transcript)
Christine is a professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.
Species-level trauma that we are experiencing right now
Nervous system affected by the virus for all of us —We need community and connection
Disrupts our nervous system —> disembodied, lack of hugs/closeness and the loss and grief
Terrible effects of social isolation and belonging leading to more in-group/out-group with nervous system effects leading to less empathy and more loss. Suicidal thoughts up huge for the young
Need more self-awareness and curiosity, whose neurotransmitter is dopamine. Need more compassion. Using long exhales of the breath to calm the sympathetic nervous system
Our senses greatly affect the nervous system and can use scents to improve mood and feel the floor with our feet
Make intentional choices toward our values
Immense gratitude to our health care workers dealing with this challenge and dealing with their own challenges like the rest of us
Hold space, bear witness and turn toward the grief vs. pushing it away. Have compassion for your self and everyone else going through this
76ers GM Daryl Morey on Sean Carroll’s Mindscape Podcast (Spotify / Transcript)
Being an NBA GM is like mos things “as you move higher up, you just become more of a tax on the system”
Top players tend to be really smart like polymaths
Goal of a GM is like an organism, it starts with survival. Then you try to maximize your odds of a championship in a three-year window (if not in a rebuild). You need your internal odds to be > Vegas (5-6% for the 76ers) or you have no proprietary process
Teams have positive and negative assets. A bad contract for a player can be a negative asset
Data lets you ask more questions and attempt to answer them
Two biases he watches out for include the endowment effect and anchoring bias when it comes to players
There is no lack of data and you create alpha through unique data or better analysts. It’s hard to create an edge today
Took 25-30 years to realize that 3pts >>>>> 2pts and shooting more threes. The 50% additional expected value is huge, but manhood got challenged by admitting to that and hoops is a manly culture
Sleep is a huge edge but can’t force players to sleep better / more. Data is very clear on this
Sunspot problem with models —> to predict something rare the models will tell you 99.9% of the time everything is good. Need to tune them to find players with lots of upside
Interviews provide no value minus showing if they can get along with other humans (research is overwhelming on that)
You almost need obsessive people doing things that are against their own interest to create some of the great discoveries.
It’s part of a portfolio. You gotta do some crazy things, you gotta do some ambitious things, ’cause you don’t know
Hopes he is a better human from being a GM and working with people all the time
💣Words of Wisdom💣
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou
To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision. Few, if any, survive their teens. Most surrender to the vague but murderous pressure of adult conformity. It becomes easier to die and avoid conflicts than to maintain a constant battle with the superior forces of maturity.
Night Train to Lisbon - Pascal Mercier
So, the fear of death might be described as the fear of not being able to become whom one had planned to be.
“The measure of who we are is how we react to something that does not go our way” - San Antonio Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich
@Visakanv
39. if someone kicks your ass with kindness, marry them. or otherwise cherish them. good friends are hard to come by.
TechGnosis - Erik Davis
Terence McKenna, the cultural theorist who affixed his swirling psychedelic thumbprint on the technocultural debate throughout the 1990s, used to argue that time is a struggle between habit and novelty. Novelty, he defined somewhat nebulously, was the density of connection or complexity of a system; the more complex a system is, the more novelty it engenders. McKenna saw the universe as a kind of “novelty-conserving engine”: novelty is produced, gets set in historical concrete, and becomes the basis of further transformation. We spiral up.
🙏Thanks for reading🙏
What are your sanctuaries? Do you make time for them?
Let me know.
Any thoughts or comments, please share!
Namaste,
Christian
