Founder @fieldmeditation | Faculty @CUBoulder | Embodied Presence | Embrace Complexity |
Boulder, CO
Joined October 2009
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Peter McEwen retweeted
“I know that this really helps me. I’m just going to do something different.”
“I found that this works best for me, but I’m really looking forward to doing this other thing instead.”
Instead of doing the slow patient work that actually does the trick, I’m going to pursue a dopamine hit.
I want to avoid actual change and growth, while appearing to work on change and growth.
Peter McEwen retweeted
Join the Unclenching Round Table ~ with myself @techgnostic & @OortCloudAtlas next Friday
→ luma.com/kykeqv9n
Join @jonnym1ller, @OortCloudAtlas, and me for an exploration and discussion of Jonny’s hit essay “How to Unclench.”
Expect perspectives from nervous system practice, nondual meditation, Tibetan yoga, and developmental psychology.
Nov 6 @ 2pm PT
Links in 🧵
Peter McEwen retweeted
Many of us think we want to get away from tension.
But without tension, life doesn’t exist.
Literally. If you take the tension out of your body, you and all your cells will die.
Learning to dance with tension unlocks your vitality.
Peter McEwen retweeted
Precognitive dreamers, check out the new AMC+ series Archive X. I MAY make an appearance in Episode 3, "Dark Visions."
Host Jeffrey Kripal, producer Harris Fishman, and the team at October Films did an excellent job!
Peter McEwen retweeted
Full endorsement. Already Free by Bruce Tift becomes more profound with each read
okay so bruce tift's book is one of my favorite books ever and is lowkey lifechanging. here are some things I'm appreciating about it:
- attention is all you need...on your body sensations. it's funny how long we might spend meditating and still just refuse to go down into what the actual body sensations are like, without commentary, without trying to change them, without trying to bliss out, just being with them as they are
- "enlightenment", whatever it is, is not going to fundamentally change your humanity. an enlightened human is still a human, and humans have the following tendencies: they experience all the emotions (including the "bad" emotions like sadness anxiety fear anger envy), they feel physical pain, they get disappointed by life, and they are forever capable of hurting people or behaving unethically
- the book kind of feels like a spaced repetition exercise for embodied immediacy. on a surface level, he's kind of saying the exact same thing over and over again like a hundred times. but somehow, if you actually pay attention to it, you start to go, oh wow this is really doing something and it's hitting deeper and deeper every time
- he asks you to approach the contradictions of life "without hope of resolution," without hope of "solving" your experience of being a human, because your experience is not something to solve but rather is an endless, ongoing, often-challenging process. life will continue to be challenging at times, forever
- "without hope of resolution" to me also means, stop meditating with the hope of achieving something, with the expectation that it's supposed to make you feel good or you're supposed to be different in some important way on the other side of it. if you're meditating with the hope that you feel better, you are completely missing the point and are just playing an ego game [^1]. the point is to continue to build a tolerance for your experience as it is. "enlightenment is the ultimate disappointment"
- whatever we may believe about "enlightenment", you will continue to undergo further development as a human for the rest of your life, if you choose to
[^1] hold this view lightly, different people need different views at different times
Peter McEwen retweeted
okay so bruce tift's book is one of my favorite books ever and is lowkey lifechanging. here are some things I'm appreciating about it:
- attention is all you need...on your body sensations. it's funny how long we might spend meditating and still just refuse to go down into what the actual body sensations are like, without commentary, without trying to change them, without trying to bliss out, just being with them as they are
- "enlightenment", whatever it is, is not going to fundamentally change your humanity. an enlightened human is still a human, and humans have the following tendencies: they experience all the emotions (including the "bad" emotions like sadness anxiety fear anger envy), they feel physical pain, they get disappointed by life, and they are forever capable of hurting people or behaving unethically
- the book kind of feels like a spaced repetition exercise for embodied immediacy. on a surface level, he's kind of saying the exact same thing over and over again like a hundred times. but somehow, if you actually pay attention to it, you start to go, oh wow this is really doing something and it's hitting deeper and deeper every time
- he asks you to approach the contradictions of life "without hope of resolution," without hope of "solving" your experience of being a human, because your experience is not something to solve but rather is an endless, ongoing, often-challenging process. life will continue to be challenging at times, forever
- "without hope of resolution" to me also means, stop meditating with the hope of achieving something, with the expectation that it's supposed to make you feel good or you're supposed to be different in some important way on the other side of it. if you're meditating with the hope that you feel better, you are completely missing the point and are just playing an ego game [^1]. the point is to continue to build a tolerance for your experience as it is. "enlightenment is the ultimate disappointment"
- whatever we may believe about "enlightenment", you will continue to undergo further development as a human for the rest of your life, if you choose to
[^1] hold this view lightly, different people need different views at different times
Peter McEwen retweeted
Sharing my latest podcast with Dr. Gena Gorlin (@Gena_I_Gorlin) on why Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection, self-authorship, how to actually update beliefs, and her upcoming book on "Builder's Mindset"!
People who criticize introspection are often in a confusion; they conflate repetitive, ruminative self-analysis with the reflection people need to make important decisions, spot blindspots, and grow
It's obvious one has to work *with* their psychology, especially as they encounter blocks. Anything worth doing at our edge will induce fear, and however we move through that will involve some level of introspection.
Introspection is a skill, and there are methods and frameworks available to develop that skil!
Of course, there are ways that we can stuck. Even valuable frameworks like IFS (Internal Family Systems) can leave us, at times, *more* stuck and in the same loops.
We discuss useful introspection, identifying rumination, more wholesome ambition, and how people actually can change.
Podcast links in bio! This is the first episode for the newly rebranded Attention Copilot podcast
Timestamps:
00:00 — Andreessen, Senra, and the case for introspection
04:29 — What is the builder’s mindset?
11:31 — Why we procrastinate on things we want
17:54 — The drill sergeant and Zen guru’s shared assumption
21:43 — Who chose the ladder you’re climbing?
38:22 — Are builders born or made?
45:16 — “Death is the default”, but default isn’t destiny
53:14 — Repairing problems and building a life
57:38 — Gena’s critique of Internal Family Systems
1:01:49 — How people change their mindsets through practice
1:06:47 — Why we fluctuate between our best and worst selves
1:16:01 — Relationships through the builder’s mindset
1:20:36 — Gena’s writing and forthcoming book
Peter McEwen retweeted
👀
All you creative spiritual types, this one looks good.
Sasha Chapin and I are getting together on October 7 at 1 PM MT for an hour-long conversation about creativity, spiritual practice, craft, and personal mythmaking. A thread running through the conversation is the oscillation between openness and choice in creative work.
🔗 in 🧵 👇🏼
There is the receptive side: curiosity, play, aesthetic arrest, the suspension of what we already know. And then there is making something, which requires judgment, technique, and revision. A writer chooses this sentence instead of another, abandoning countless alternatives.
It's online and open to anyone who would like to join us.
Peter McEwen retweeted
🧵 Distorting teachings:
Every week someone on social is warning that you're doing it wrong, that you're not practicing authentic dharma, that you'd better get serious or forfeit the whole thing. I get the concern underneath it, but the tone seems directed at people who don't yet know what's being pointed at, and threatening someone toward a recognition they haven't had yet breeds more confusion than sanity. They may end up substituting fantasy for immediate experience, which generates confusion, anxiety, disembodiment, and things like that.
Peter McEwen retweeted
It's probably more accurate to say we are guaranteed to distort the teachings, all of us. Highly realized people still make short-sighted, human choices and misread the moment. That isn't a lapse. It's an ornament to the trial. We all live a messy human life, and mistakes and confusion are a medium the whole thing unravels within.
Peter McEwen retweeted
All you can ever do is say, look, I'm presenting my understanding of some very complex teachings, and I've basically scratched the surface, and anybody who has a different intuition about this should respect that and go pursue it. You're going to hear my best understanding based on however many years of study, but please don't take anything I say as if it's something to be believed. That's it. You just tell people what's true for you and you stop entertaining yourself with "am I distorting it?" Because of course we are.
Peter McEwen retweeted
I suspect we're approaching a time where if you want to protect creative work, it has to be something that can't be digitized. AI has made is so that creative works speed run through the lifecycle from cool to cliche in a matter of months. This contributes to our cultural stagnation, making it hard for real creators to produce something with meaningful, lasting effects on other real creators. Everything becomes a meme, which is to say meaningless and trite.
Peter McEwen retweeted
Modulation of Pain Sensitivity by a Hyperventilatory Breathing Exercise and Cold Exposure Training
Peter McEwen retweeted
Peter's cohorts are really great. If you are Dzogchen-curious or you have already been practicing in a Tantric Buddhist lineage and you want to do some broadening, deepening cross-study, he puts his whole heart into these cohorts and gives so much material. plus, Bruce Tift!
We won’t become something different in the future — our experience exists only in the present. Practice means becoming increasingly willing to engage directly with that immediacy — including the vulnerability, uncertainty, and limitations of being human
thefield.us/courses/dzogchen…
Peter McEwen retweeted
Here is a link to the deck for this morning's “Working with Difficult Feelings.” May it benefit.
There are so many healthful mental and physiological health interventions, and this workshop covered just a fraction of them.
speakers.thefield.us/emotion…
Peter McEwen retweeted
Dzogchen’s attitude has a paradoxical quality: it looks like we are practicing to change our experience, yet we continually engage with our everyday human concerns. This is not a path of transcendence, but an experience of irresolvable immediacy.
Peter McEwen retweeted
Writer Sasha Chapin joins Peter McEwen for an hour-long conversation about creativity, spiritual practice, craft, personal mythmaking, and the movement between openness and deliberate action.
luma.com/fkx04xio
Peter McEwen retweeted
Almost every “healthy” habit can double as a hiding place from a feeling.
I help people find the emotion underneath the self-improvement, instead of optimizing around it.
Follow me for tools, experiments, and more @FU_joehudson