“The price of freedom is eternal diligence”
– Thomas Jefferson
I mentioned in my little intro post that I was a severe alcoholic for a while there with an embarrassing lack of willpower and discipline. Dropping booze began a snowball effect of getting other unnecessary garbage out and completely turning my life around. I began focusing on healthier things that tickled my fancy more, and started the never-ending work of trying to be a more complete and balanced individual.
Committing to just one simple thing can blossom into a whole new depth of self-discovery that I just can’t shut up about it. Around this time of year I happen to hit quite a few anniversaries of things I have either dropped, or added into my life as a practice. I’m proud of these and would like to share them with you, if you don’t mind, then discuss some of them below.
4 years No Booze
2 years No Nicotine
2 years Yoga Everyday
2 years Meditation Everyday
2 years Learning Spanish Everyday
1 year Running Every Week
I’ve debated on whether to make a post like this but I wouldn’t be where I am in my trading adventure or life without these bad boys. I’m concerned with coming off preach-y or like I have a guru complex, so please just know that is not my intention. I’ve lived on both sides of the tracks and this is what has been working best for me. I only hope to say something useful and lessen suffering through my ramblings.
As it is with all of my posts, I had no idea what I was going to say when I started this one. I did know, however, from the get-go that I wanted to use a quote that used to gnaw away at me like the dickens back in my drinking days.
Well, wouldn’t you know it, at the same time I began working on this very post, I started reading Michael Lewis’ book, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt. It just so happens to open with the very quote I had in mind!
These rituals take up well over an hour of my time every day but they keep my momentum going and help keep unnecessary distractions to a minimum.
I resist every single thing that’s good for me. All the activities that light me up require me to overcome resistance each and every time they call out to me. I’m into a lot of different things, and I have to overcome resistance with every single one of them, every single time. I think overcoming that is one of core lessons that discipline teaches you. You can’t rely on motivation.
I have the urge to be productive and have profound experiences at all times. I tried a lot of different things and worked my self silly before learning that these desires can be fulfilled with little effort. I discovered I was actually doing too much. Now I try to show up every day and to do less with intention.
By acting in accordance with All things, you can achieve your goals without forceful effort.
“When nothing is done, nothing is left undone”
– Tao Te Ching
Meditation
Thought is not reality; yet it is through thought that our realities are created.
So, truth be told, a few years ago I attempted meditating every day and I gave up around day 200. It’s not easy and I wasn’t approaching it correctly, this allowed the practice to transform into a huge burden on me. So I gave up and, in the aftermath, I didn’t meditate again for another 3 months.
In the time spent away from the practice, I began noticing that the inner peace I had been cultivating was fading out and I was returning to this frazzled, manic, and easily agitated person. The persistent chatter, anxiety, and restlessness all crept back in. Which, as you can imagine, was a bummer.
So I got back to it and it’s now been over 2 years of daily practice and I’ll probably never stop. Day 832 as of this posting.
The object of meditation is not to sit down and make your brain stop thinking. It’s to point out that your thoughts are having you, not the other way around.
I credit meditation as being one of the biggest tools to changing my life. If you can’t learn to sit and be with your thoughts you’re gonna find yourself reaching for distractions for the rest of your life. People nowadays can’t be at a red light for 3 seconds without pulling out their phone, and our attention spans are falling off a cliff with the world in TikTok shape.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
-Carl Jung
If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.
-Gospel of Thomas, verse 70
I can be a very excitable and reactionary person. Meditation puts space between something happening and my reaction to it, allowing me to choose instead of giving into the same old patterns that haven’t been working out all that well for me.
Over time you can start to work on the root issues of your patterns, habits, and repetitive thoughts. Your mind is like a lake and you’re more likely to see the bottom when the surface is calm.
It is difficult for me to sit and do nothing. I seem to have an endless supply of energy for someone who doesn’t sleep a lot, and I’ve had to learn the art of relaxing over the last few years, which has helped me tremendously with balance in my everyday life.
You begin to realize that you don’t really need to be doing anything most of the time. Everything is as it should be. You learn to stop resisting every little change or discomfort happening to you. Every annoyance, somebody else’s kid actin’ up in the store, rude customers at work, someone saying “horse blanket” too many times last year at Thanksgiving and ruining the whole meal for everyone.
You can reach a place where you’re mostly fine with any and all of it. You may even begin finding humor in your small misfortunes or at other people’s unconscious behaviors instead of letting them ruin your day.
I sit in silence for around 20 minutes each day. Sometimes more, sometimes a little less. I focus on my breathing with the fourfold breath aka box breathing. For 3 or 4 seconds at each stage you breathe in, hold, exhale out, hold. Sometimes I do a breathing exercise where I just exhale for longer than I inhale.
When a thought arises, and hundreds will, you simply bring your focus back to your breath. This can be frustrating and seem impossible at first. You get to see just how active and cluttered your mind is. It does get better.
Your breath is directly tied to your nervous system. Calming your breathing down tells your body that everything is A-OK. You can do the opposite and self induce a panic attack by breathing fast and shallow. Try it!
Over time you will find yourself coming back to your breathe throughout your day. Almost like a little hidden inner temple that you can retreat to if you notice yourself ruminating or anxious about something. You will begin noticing when you’re all tense and shrugged up and will have the tools to help regulate back to a more chill vibe.
If you’re a creative person (you are) you may find that area of your life expanding as well. Like any Aha or Eureka moment, ideas, solutions, and revelations often spring forth when the mind is at ease. The unconscious is where they seem to arise from.
I feel like in order to create something you’re truly proud of, it’s necessary for you to get out of the way. How you want it to be or your desire for perfection are mucking things all up. Meditation helps to dissolve the boundaries of who you think you are, allowing things to bubble forth that you didn’t know you had in ya.
Fulfilling art doesn’t usually feel like the artists actually did anything, but more allowed themselves to become an empty vessel that could then be properly filled and poured from.
Here’s an interesting anecdote I noticed when I was younger and still holds true to this day. I found that if I was having trouble learning or memorizing something on guitar, I could go to bed and by the next morning things would have smoothed out considerably. Almost as if I kept practicing in my sleep. It’s an odd feeling and you’ve probably experienced something similar with a problem in your life, but it just goes to show that there are things going on in our subconscious that we may not be fully aware of, scientifically and mystically speaking.
Meditation is constantly teaching me, it’s not always something as simple as focusing on your breath to be more chill. You’ll find it goes much, much deeper than that but I’m saving the crazy talk for the last section.Try starting with 5 minutes and see how you feel after a week.
Calmness is not a natural reaction, but a conscious choice.
“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”
– John Milton, “Paradise Lost”
Running
My grandpa ran every single day and I think about that a lot. Every day, dude. A few years back I ran every day just for a single month and it was rough. And I’m not even a grandpa.
I remember him being in the newspaper for it. “Rain or Shine” was the headline or something like that. It wasn’t uncommon for me to see him running down the sidewalk from my elementary school or spot him from the car with my mom driving around town.
I’ve been running around 14 years or so, but sporadically at best. I would go from times of intense training and miles to months without a single run. Running is good for me and my mental health and is another activity I’ll be doing until I can’t.
After my 40th birthday last year, I decided that I wanted to make a commitment of at least one run a week because of its obvious benefits and my lack of consistency. Truth be told I never want to go for a run, it’s only during and after the run that I feel great and am reminded why I do it in the first place.
Back in August is when I completed my first year of weekly runs and almost every single week I waited until the very last day to do it. This only further proves my point that I’m a rascal and I really need rules like this.
I don’t run with headphones as I use this as another form of meditation. I will either try to focus only on my breathing or I will meditate on a particular idea or issue. For instance, a lot of refining and editing for this blog goes on during my run, it doesn’t just pour out as the masterpiece that you see here before you. I can start the run with a problem and by the end I can see the way out. Practical magic.
This is what a year of my running looked like before I made the weekly rule.
This is a year of adhering to the rule.
I hope to ramp things up a little this year. I bought a treadmill this week to help me stay consistent, especially with our extreme temps in Florida.
Yoga
I chose to do yoga every day because, knowing me, I would just wait until Sunday, like I do with my running, if I settled on just once a week. Plus, what’s the point of stretching just once a week?
I started this out solo but now we do it as a family. All the animals even come out and join us on the mat every time.
We all know what yoga is so I don’t need to get into all that. The point is these practices help me to quiet my mind and bring my focus and energy back in. You start to establish and maintain a very peaceful inner life. Changing your inner life will change your outer life.
It also has the added benefit of making my body feel really good and increasing my balance comes in handy way more than I thought it would.
Nothing fancy, we pull out our mats and pick a class from one of three teachers we cycle through on YouTube. This is usually the first thing I’ll do to help settle me into my nightly routine and sets me up perfectly to slip into meditation.
Estoy aprendiendo español
I also learn a little bit of Spanish every day for good measure. Or should I say, bien measure?
You know, I don’t have a lot to say about this (for once) or really know why I’m doing it. I started before meeting Becky, who’s Cuban, so now I can pick out some of the words hurled at me when I keep accidently burning furniture with incense.
It’s like each skill that you learn is a fun, little upgrade for yourself. A lifetime of piling those up can lead to a more fulfilling one.
It Ain’t Me, I Ain’t No Prodigal Son, No!
Before you proceed, there’s a reason I saved this part for last. I need you to scroll down there and make sure you know what you’re getting yourself into.
Did you scroll down?
Yes, this is the condensed version. Here, you know what? Here’s the whole dang thing collapsed to two lines, then it’s your fault if you keep reading.
Religion – Bad
Hollerin’ into the Void – Probably couldn’t hurt nothin’
Ok, so, the way I speak might lead you to believe that I would call myself a Christian, but I’m not sure if that’s the term I would use. In fact, if you called me that in public I’d probably tell you to keep your voice down.
I was raised a Fundamentalist Christian, meaning I was taught to take the Bible literally. Everything in there is true and if one part isn’t true, then none of it is. That ended up being quite a hurdle for me down the line and led to my breakup with religion once I couldn’t reconcile it with facts.
My grandfather on my mom’s side was a Southern Baptist preacher and a fantastic drummer. He even played for Elvis when he was first getting started and got me my first kit at a pawn shop with a shotgun and a few rings.
My Dad seemed to not really fit into a church, though I can definitely remember him trying many before settling into his own thing at home with a sort of Jewish flair. In another dazzling display of the Universe’s infinite humor, although we no longer talk, I have found myself to align more with my Dad on this approach.
Did You Know?! The only time Jesus directly told someone they must be “born again” was to a religious person? John 3:3
I do believe in God. There have been times when I did not and I was very vocal and edgy about that as young people tend to be. I don’t necessarily like saying God because everyone has their own ideas, baggage, and hang-ups around that word. But I’m not gonna say Source, or The Divine, or any of that so God is what you get. People who are scarred by negative experiences are usually left wounded by people in the church, not stabbed in the back by God.
I do not believe in a Sky Daddy that’s willing to grant your every wish as long as you follow his rules. I will admit that is the idea that was beaten into my head since I was born and it is hard to shake.
I’m an occultist that views the Bible and other holy texts as trying to connect with and understand the same, underlying force of all forces. The Bible was not supposed to be read literally or as history, that’s pretty clear when you read it. I don’t even know how someone could argue against that, it’s absolutely chock full of contradictions. Even the whole birth story of Jesus is told two completely different ways.
I jive with the Taoist idea of this whole thing for the most part. That the creator is the impersonal, ultimate reality that underlies the Universe. The natural order of things. The flow of the Universe.
I also like the notion that everything is God, sorta the Pantheism or Panentheism view. Theism would mean that God and the Universe are separate whereas Pantheism is God is equal to the Universe and Panentheism is the Universe is contained within God. If God is truly infinite then when they create, they must make room and create inside of themselves.
If God were to create something outside of themselves, that would give them a limit where they stopped and that something else began. So I play a game where I think of everything as having different levels of consciousness and it’s all God experiencing itself. Everything is holy!
“I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things“. – Isaiah 45:7
Isn’t that interesting? And just like I used to hear in the intro song to “Married, With Children” before my Mom shouted from the kitchen that it was time for me to turn the channel, “You can’t have one without the other!”
All this to say, I don’t think any one has it exactly right, and I think it’s absolutely ludicrous if anyone thinks they do. It’s been a fun, life-long game of cat and mouse, though, and keeps me occupied.
“The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.”
– Opening line of Tao Te Ching
I practice ceremonial magick daily in the tradition of The Hermetic Order of The Golden Dawn as well as Chaos Magick. I’ve been at it for around 10 years and, oddly enough, magick is what led me back to believing again. I’m mostly drawn to Kabballah, mysticism, hermeticism, esotericism, and philosophy. I like to study many forms of spirituality and religion, as I believe if you want to truly know something, you should look at it from all sides.
All words are sacred and all prophets true; save only that they understand a little; solve the first half of the equation, leave the second unattacked.
– The Book of the Law
I think Jesus gets tied up with a lot of corny mess and not seen as a radical dude out there doing radical things, while telling you to do radical things, and then getting killed for it. Jesus was an apocalyptical preacher, trying to point Jews back to their Old Testament laws and the Jewish God, Yahweh, who, he admits, is just one God amongst many that has chosen that group as His people.
And actuallyyyyy the word, “Elohim”, which people just assume is another name for God, is a plural noun that combines both masculine and feminine elements. So Genesis doesn’t open with God creating every thing from nothing. Rather, it is a group of androgynous spiritual beings hovering above the waters of Chaos! Rock n’ Roll! The verb here is also used in Deuteronomy 32:11 to describe an eagle fluttering or hovering over its nest to encourage its young to fly.
The Bible is very different when you read it in its original language, and lots of people on both sides of the argument have very strong opinions on it without ever really reading it.
Jesus was a Jew and was not trying to start a new religion or start a new church. Jesus never says in the Synoptic Gospels that he is God or that you have to believe in him, that’s all added in later. He actually alludes to quite the opposite sometimes and tells people to keep their mouth shut when he performs miracles.
“You shall worship YHVH your God, and Him only shall you serve.” – Luke 4:8
“Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.” – Mark 10:18
“I can of Mine own self do nothing. As I hear, I judge; and My judgment is just, because I seek not Mine own will, but the will of the Father who hath sent Me. -John 5:30
Ok, so that’s out of the way.
This here is a very interesting passage and one of my favorites as Jesus neatly sums it all up. He is asked what the single greatest commandment is and he answers back with two commandments, in typical Jesus fashion. Basically, God is One so love Him with all you got, and love your neighbor as yourself. So God is One and you should love your neighbor as if they are one with you. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
Mark 12:28-31
28 And one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, asked him, “Which commandment is the most important of all?” 29 Jesus answered, “The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 30 And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ 31 The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”
32 And the scribe said to him, “You are right, Teacher. You have truly said that he is one, and there is no other besides him. 33 And to love him with all the heart and with all the understanding and with all the strength, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself, is much more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” 34 And when Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” And after that no one dared to ask him any more questions.
This is the only time where Jesus commends someone’s understanding of his core message in the Gospel of Mark, which is the oldest book of the Gospels. They are in the Temple and the scribe is waving his arms around and saying, “Oh, so all of this is pointless!”. Jesus says, “Yeah man, you pretty much got it figured out”, and it doesn’t involve following or believing in Jesus.
Ok, so where is the kingdom of God, then?
Luke 17:20-21- And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation. Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.
The Gospel of Thomas Saying 3 – … But the kingdom is within you, and it is outside of you. When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will know that you are the sons of the living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you are in poverty, and you are poverty.
I am a huge fan of the historical Jesus, that’s never really waned. I have his likeness and words tattooed on me in a few spots and I even meditate on his image sometimes. He’s sarcastic, sassy, rebellious, and I’m here for it. As it stands right now, I don’t necessarily believe that he is the literal son of a Deity that was sent down in human form as a sacrifice to save us.
I’ve approached God from many different angles in my life and whether you’re coming at it from the unwavering rules of ritual magick or you’re simply heartbroken, crying on the floor, again, and calling out, there seems to be something with a VERY good sense of humor listening and willing to help.
I’ve known many people throughout my life who are just banking on getting to Heaven and just passing through this moment. That’s actually one of my big gripes with religion. I think the point is to wake up to the heaven around you now.
You’re already in heaven and you’re making a mess of it.
Sidenote: I became an ordained minister 14 years ago this month. Something I did because I was brewing a beer with all Holy Water. Ain’t I a stinker?
Last Call
My life used to be chaos. Now I feel like a kid again. I’m in a band with close friends, playing airsoft with my son and his friends, looking at pretty flowers, doing art, and skateboarding.
I’ve had a theory that we’re trying to get back to some point in our childhood when we were less bogged down by life. I think we reach for things that put us in states of unawareness believing that the reason why we were mostly content as kids was because we were ignorant of the ways of the world. Addictions are born as we try numbing ourselves back to that feeling.
But I think we were just way more present and curious as kids. I think we were more aware and having a practice of bringing your focus to the present moment can help facilitate moments of childlike wonder and ease some of the burdens and stresses of living.
When you allow discipline to whittle away the things that don’t matter from your daily life, you start to naturally hone in on what’s really important. Life starts to unfold for you.
You don’t always need to think outside the box. Sometimes you need to make the box smaller. Limit yourself. When we can do anything, we often do nothing.
I’ll leave you with one last quote. It’s my personal rule for comedy but like most things, it can be applied elsewhere.
“The only thing embarrassing is not committing.”
Nanu Nanu,
Chris
Moses of the South 