Free your mind
Again and again.
Not as an action but as a continual state of being.

Free your mind
From the concrete walls
The ones that box you in
That you crash into over and over
The vise that looms relentlessly firm as the sides slowly slide towards each other, collapsing in on the little open space you once had to breathe

Free your mind
From the gnawing fear of missing
Moments, deadlines, experiences, cues, clues, goals
Of missing out
The dread that crawls up your hunched shoulders as your fingers tap away, making your eyes spin, then droop, until your gaze goes hollow, spilling all purpose

The solution isn't to fight it - it's to learn how to manage it.

And it's hard. We're literally rewiring decades of neural pathways. But understanding WHY our minds betray us is the first step to taking back control.

Progress, not perfection.

Full post on Substack> buff.ly/4hCregC

We're not what we think or what we do.
The real version of ourselves is the ideal person we want to be. The person we would be if our impulses, emotions, and limiting beliefs didn't get the best of us. Sometimes our "chimp brain" hijacks us with behaviors we can't control in the moment.

What a great first impression. I still shudder thinking about it.

What happened to me in this situation is what Professor Steve Peters calls "being hijacked by my Chimp." In other words, the part of my brain ruled by emotion and reactivity took control of my body, despite my desire to remain calm.

All of their Zoom eyes turned to me.

My chest clenched into steel, my throat went dry, and all of the oxygen dissipated from my body. I could barely speak. I muttered a few words, but it didn't make much sense. Fear had overtaken me. I was faced with a fight-or-flight scenario, and my mind froze.

Read the full post on substack: sacredapostasy.substack.com

Each generation builds upon the foundations laid by those before it. My access to information doesn’t make me smarter than my ancestors. It makes me a beneficiary of their accumulated wisdom and the societal progress they enabled, even if that wisdom means that I no longer accept their beliefs.

At that moment, I wanted to diffuse the situation rather than add fuel to the fire. I also didn’t realize that there is actual evidence supporting the idea that intelligence has increased over generations. This is called the Flynn Effect.
....

“well you’re not smarter than us; you’re naive, misled, and have no life experience compared to all of us who believe in our religion.”

I almost didn’t answer.

“No… I’m not saying that. We just have access to more information.”

I was discussing with an older friend how I no longer shared his religious beliefs.

His words felt like they were being spat out. Half rhetorical, half impassioned offensive-defense. The unsaid implication being,

through which one's nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned. This trust in one's nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one's robes.”
-James Baldwin

Colorways:
1. Desert
2. Ocean

Prints available, link in bio

... Which has allowed me to fall in love with coffee. If you look closely, you’ll see a coffee plant in the background, captured on a trip to a coffee farm in Indonesia.
Identifying and filtering out bullshit is a mental muscle. Anyone can do it, but you gotta want to.

The ideas that spawned from his delusions became a shared reality for me and millions of others.

Prints available: www.sacredapostasy.com/products/p/a...

The moon, the stars, and the sun symbolize these, called telestial, terrestrial, and celestial, respectively. My adolescence and early adulthood were dominated by the drive to act in a way that would get me into the “celestial kingdom.”

The religion's founder created an all-encompassing narrative or dogma to answer life’s biggest questions. The mythology culminates in his description of the afterlife and three “kingdoms of glory,” or levels to heaven.