Wonderful Magical Moments of Awe...
🔥Welcome to volume 0008!🔥
I’m Christian Champ. This is the ☯️Middleway Newsletter ☯️. It is a place where I write, explore and share.
🧗Those Wonderful Magical Moments of Awe🎨
When do you experience awe? What are the magical moments in your life? How do we create more moments of awe?
Skiing the trees in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Biking through Chicago during rush hour traffic. Hiking the Grand Canyon. Accomplishing a personal record in the gym. Losing you self on a long arduous walk. Birthing a child. Getting lost in a quake book that alters your reality. Dancing or singing with a group of friends. Helping some one by throwing yourself out there and watching from afar as they make it happen.
Awe is respect mixed with fear and wonder brought on by something beautiful and sacred. When we lose ourselves in the utter brilliance of the moment. Life becomes cosmic awesomeness. In every awe moment there is some risk. We need to put ourselves our there. We live our hero’s journey.
Awe comes from our practices, pursuits and play. We bolster the occurrence of awe by living with gratitude and appreciation. Like Alan Watts notes, it is amazing that we are on this rock ball rotating around a spherical fire.
We need to remember to position ourselves for awe. Inviting awe into our lives ready to receive it and embracing our beautiful struggles
📓Articles to Read📓
David Byrne’s website Reasons to be Cheerful has launched.
Here is the video intro to the site. Bryne inspired me to try to ride a bike in every city that I visit. He lays out his strategy in his highly recommended book Bicycle Diaries.
Some Highlighted Pieces
Necessity of Nuclear by Brian Eno
Beautiful Pema Chodrin piece on the six kinds of loneliness that she includes in her book recommended book When Things Fall Apart. Her description of the Middle Way is excellent.
Our Birthright: The Middle Way
As human beings, not only do we seek resolution, but we also feel that we deserve resolution. However, not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution. We don’t deserve resolution; we deserve something better than that. We deserve our birthright, which is the middle way, an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity. To the degree that we’ve been avoiding uncertainty, we’re naturally going to have withdrawal symptoms—withdrawal from always thinking that there’s a problem and that someone, somewhere, needs to fix it.
The middle way encourages us to awaken the bravery that exists in everyone without exception, including you and me.
The middle way is wide open, but it’s tough going, because it goes against the grain of an ancient neurotic pattern that we all share. When we feel lonely, when we feel hopeless, what we want to do is move to the right or the left. We don’t want to sit and feel what we feel. We don’t want to go through the detox. Yet the middle way encourages us to do just that. It encourages us to awaken the bravery that exists in everyone without exception, including you and me.
Brad Stulberg on Finding Balance in Life (and needing just enough chaos)
How to Find Allostasis
Pick an area of your life.
Reflect on how you are currently pursuing it.
Think about whether you have too much routine and too many constraints or too much freedom and chaos. Do you lean toward order? Or do you lean toward disorder?
Attempt to bring these forces into an ebb and flow that feels right for you.
Check in every few weeks and evaluate your progress. How are you doing? How are you feeling?
Travel is not a cure for the mind! Getting to know ourselves trumps trying to find ourselves in far away places (but far and away places can help when we are of the right mind).
📚 Books to Read 📚
Pema Chodrin - When Things Fall Apart (book / audible)
🎙️ Listen / Watch 📺
Act Two is challenging (reminds me of why so many people just do Act One over and over again)
Liminal space of ideas - short life
Balancing serious vs. humor —> Too much or too little humor is a problem
Humor before complexity and humor after complexity (fear hits you first but you realize it should be compassion and play)
Excellence as mediocre
Econ Talk on Leadership, Humility and Confidence
Attempts to tackle the tricky subject of confidence vs. truth when leading
People want reassurance many times not gray areas or probabilities
Politicians and CEOs master the black and white when it is really gray… is that a feature or a bug?
Shaking the snow global to remain open to new experiences and create a reboot of the system
Integration to humble the voice in the head. Losing himself in song, dance, sex, and forgetting himself for awhile. Those experiences that “take your breath away”. Experiencing “humbling of the ego” and the default mode network.
We live next to the miracles that we ignore. Ecstatic surrender.
Too much freedom and too much constriction is a problem. We need to impose constrictions to create freedom. (Reminding me of chaos and order / the yin and the yang of life)
Radical present is what creates timeless when we can surrender to the experience
Tom B notes the power of movement and choosing a path along with needing to experience new realities, that holding two contradictory ideas in your mind
“If I am not lovable from who I am, then I’ll be lovable from what I do” — issue a high achievers run into
Jason learns by mentally preparing himself with eating well, novelty, and present then use quotes and ideas —> Dali “I am drugs” - “Art is the lie that tells the truth” - “Fiction more real than reality” - “inspiration, transformation and catharsis” that he mind map his ideas / reality / trigger unconscious
Chop wood and carry water
Like Buckminster Fuller said “Don’t fight the forces”
We need nuclear power
We need to try stuff and we need stories to allow us to try stuff
Collapse risk and forcing function potential of current existentialist risks
Start from zone zero
💣Quote Bombs💣
Joseph Campbell
But you must be ready for it. The goal is to live with godlike composure on the full rush of energy, like Dionysus riding the leopard, without being torn to pieces. A bit of advice given to a young Native American at the time of his initiation: “As you go the way of life, you will see a great chasm. Jump. It is not as wide as you think.”
Stewart Alsop III
Remember: There is no return to normal, the way things used to be. That's not how change works. It's a one way path and the destination is certain 100% of the time. We are headed for something different, something new, and also something temporary. Embrace it!
Tim Ferriss
"Life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact, and that is that everything around you that you call 'life' was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again."
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - Flow
The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen.
Remember to chase the awe, notice the awe, appreciate the awe and be grateful for our rock ball called Earth. Stretch yourself to find these optimal experiences while remembering to shake up the snow global.
Thanks for reading.
Any thoughts or comments, please reach out.
Namaste,
Christian
