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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 077 (Sept 19, 2021) — Deep Breathing, Waking Up, The Code of Life, & More
Happy Sunday!
Here’s the latest from Sloww along with the most interesting things I discovered last week.
To respect your time and attention, every newsletter can be read in under 5 minutes. If you enjoy it, please take 5 seconds to share it with some friends and family. 🙏
New News
💬 The new online community—the “Sloww Society”—officially launched! An email went out to Premium members yesterday requesting brave souls willing to “beta test” the community, start connecting in it, and give feedback & suggestions. So far, around 50 members have volunteered. If you’re interested in joining them, message me “I’m in!” via email or Twitter and I’ll send you an early invite to the community. No worries if you don’t want to be the first one to show up to the party. Invites will roll out to all Premium members over the course of this week.
🆕 Now that the community is live, I’ll be shifting focus back to publishing some new free and Premium content this week!
Sloww Stuff
A Mini Guide to Blow Your Mind
🧠 The Lottery of Birth: All the Things You Don’t Control in Life
🧠 The Ovarian Lottery: A Thought Experiment from Warren Buffett
🧠 The Four Characters of Your Mind: “Whole Brain Living” by Jill Bolte Taylor (Book Summary)
🧠 50+ Deep Perspectives on Humanity’s Underlying & Ultimate Challenge (Hint: Ourselves)
🔒 Do You Control Your Life Path?
🔒 Do You Live Life, or Does Life Live You?
Modern Knowledge
🫁 Stressed Out? Try the 4-7-8 Breathing Exercise
(2 mins | YouTube)
James Nestor is the NYT bestselling author of “Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art.” In this short video, he explains a breathing technique which works wonders for calming yourself down or falling asleep.
4-7-8 Breathing Exercise:
- Inhale to a count of 4 seconds
- Hold your breath for 7 seconds
- Exhale for 8 seconds
- (Repeat 5-6 rounds)
“The perfect breath is this: Breathe in for about 5.5 seconds, then exhale for 5.5 seconds. That’s 5.5 breaths a minute for a total of about 5.5 liters of air.” — James Nestor
Pair with:
- Breathing is one of Brian Johnson’s optimal living fundamentals. He says optimizing his breathing is actually the thing that may have changed his life the most.
Timeless Wisdom
🙏 Rare Anthony de Mello Videos
(Tony de Mello Website)
Spiritual teacher Anthony de Mello is a true gem. I’ve mentioned these videos before in a very early issue of Sloww Sunday (Issue #008), but they are so good they are worth highlighting again—especially because you will not find them on YouTube. Enjoy them while you can!
Videos include:
- A Way to God for Today (6 parts)
- Rediscovering Life (1 part)
- WAKE UP (3 parts)
“I’ll promise you this: I have not known a single person who gave time to being aware who didn’t see a difference in a matter of weeks. The quality of their life changes, so they don’t have to take it on faith anymore. They see it; they’re different. They react differently. In fact, they react less and act more. You see things you’ve never seen before.” — Anthony de Mello
Pair with:
Mind Expanding
🤯 How to Build a Human Being: The Code of Life Visualized
(15 mins | YouTube)
Now this is how to give a TED Talk. This presentation by scientist and entrepreneur Riccardo Sabatini is the definition of mind-blowing. He’s working to understand the miracle and code of life in an effort to personalize healthcare. For the first time in history, the genome of a single human being was printed letter-by-letter and page-by-page. How many pages did it take? 262,000 pages!
“The more we learn, the more we will be confronted with decisions that we never had to face before about life, about death, about parenting. We are touching the very inner detail on how life works. And it’s a revolution that cannot be confined in the domain of science or technology. This must be a global conversation. We must start to think of the future we’re building as a humanity. We need to interact with creatives, with artists, with philosophers, with politicians. Everyone is involved, because it’s the future of our species.” — Riccardo Sabatini
Pair with:
- “Human Nature” Documentary (Issue #035)
- “Unnatural Selection” Docuseries (Issue #050)
🤔 Deep Thought
It’s not selfish to discover yourself and become who you are. Why? Because the hero’s/heroine’s journey ends with you selflessly giving yourself away in service to something beyond yourself.
This is the paradox of purpose: Your selfishness is your selflessness. Your self-actualization is your self-transcendence.
“If you are doing the work that you love and are devoted to the value that you hold highest, you are being as selfish as possible, and yet are also being unselfish and altruistic.” — Abraham Maslow
💭 Wise Words
I recently learned that Viktor Frankl never actually said these famous words attributed to him:
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
It’s most likely a paraphrasing that came from Rollo May:
“I would define mental health as the capacity to be aware of the gap between stimulus and response, together with the capacity to use this gap constructively.”
Either way, wise words indeed. Actively practice pausing and creating space between stimulus and response during the good times so you have the capacity to use it during the tough times when you need it most.
Sharing: If you enjoyed this issue, please help grow Sloww by sending this post to some friends and family or by sharing it on social media. It’s free and easy for anyone to subscribe here.
Support: Sloww is a one-human labor of love. If you’re interested in supporting me, there are several financial and non-financial ways to support.
Feedback: Have something you want to say, or just want to say hi? It’s always much appreciated. Just send me an email or reach out socially.
Have an aware week!
Kyle Kowalski
Synthesizer & Solopreneur, Sloww
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