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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 121 (Oct 23, 2022) — Nervous System, Scientific Skepticism, Being + Mind, & More
Hi friend!
Sloww Sunday shares creations from Sloww and curations of fascinating finds to 10,000+ students of life. If you enjoy this issue, please help grow Sloww by forwarding the email version of this newsletter to others.
🌎 Lighter Living
Nervous System Mastery Course
Jonny Miller recently opened doors to another cohort of his online course Nervous System Mastery which runs from Nov 7 – Dec 9. If you aren’t familiar with Jonny, he’s spent thousands of hours researching, training, and mentoring—along with tens of thousands of dollars (quite literally)—to become a nervous system specialist.
Course Topics: rewiring maladaptive responses, emotional self-regulation, cultivating calm, exteroception vs interoception, stress resilience, heart rate variability (HRV), Non-Sleep-Deep-Rest (NSDR), polyvagal theory, ventral vagal tone, research-backed protocols, and much more.
Bonus (ends Oct 29): Sloww readers can get 10% off ($70) lifetime access with code SLOWW10. If you join, please use my affiliate link and mention my name in the enrollment application. I rarely do affiliate sharing, but I think Jonny’s created something unique and needed today.
“I’m so confident in these protocols and their capacity to create lasting shifts in the lives of our students that I’m offering a no questions asked full refund at any time.” — Jonny Miller
🧭 Higher Purpose
Struggling with lack of purpose? Keep going.
I’ve been there—specifically with an existential crisis in late 2015. Keep questioning. Keep searching. Keep seeking. Keep going. You’ll come out the other side and eventually thank your trials. Why? Because pain can be a key ingredient in passion and purpose. I now refer to time periods in my life as pre-crisis and post-crisis because that’s how pivotal it was for me.
Here are some of my favorite quotes that still resonate deeply:
“I’ve never seen any life transformation that didn’t begin with the person in question finally getting tired of their own bullshit.” — Elizabeth Gilbert
“I wanted more than a job. I wanted deeper congruence between my inner and outer life.” — Parker J. Palmer
“Every transformation demands as its precondition ‘the ending of a world’—the collapse of an old philosophy of life.” — C.G. Jung
“We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come.” — Joseph Campbell
“I’ve never heard of anybody who awakens in their comfort zone … Many people who are going through the early stages of the awakening process are no longer certain what their outer purpose is. What drives the world no longer drives them. Seeing the madness of our civilization so clearly, they may feel somewhat alienated from the culture around them. Some feel that they inhabit a no-man’s land between two worlds.” — Eckhart Tolle
Get the eBook: Ikigai 2.0: A Step-by-Step Guidebook to Finding Life Purpose & Making Money Meaningfully (+ Bonus Workbook)
Explore more: How do I find higher purpose (Sloww Stage 2)?
🧠 Mental Mastery
🆕 Book Summary: The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe by Steven Novella
This book covers a little bit of everything: scientific skepticism, neuropsychological humility, metacognition, pseudoscience, cognitive biases, fallacies, heuristics, and more.
Sloww Premium: Members get access to the 🔒Premium Summary.
PS: Many of these concepts are included in Mini Mind, but I’ll be considering adding the others in a future product update.
“This book is meant to be one giant inoculation against bad science, deception, and faulty thinking … If you’re reading this guide, you likely want to think for yourself and be purged of misinformation, sloppy thinking, and false beliefs … Ultimately this is a journey of self-discovery, and hopefully this book will serve as a guide on that journey. In these pages you will learn about the many ways in which your brain fails, its tendency to prefer nice clean and reassuring stories, the absolute mess that is your memory, and all the preprogrammed biases in your thinking.” — Steven Novella
Explore more: How do I master the mind (Sloww Stage 3)?
☯️ Timeless Wisdom
The Stained Glass Analogy = Being (Shared with the Collective) + Mind (Unique to the Individual)
In the short video linked above, Rupert Spira introduces an amazing analogy of the stained glass window. Highlights are below, and even more quotes are shared in the 🔒Sloww Society community.
“Think of the sun’s light, and think of innumerable stained glass windows. Every stained glass window a slightly different pattern, a slightly different size, a slightly different shape, a slightly different combination of colors and patterns. The same light flows through each window, and what comes out the other side is unique to that window. The sun’s light is conditioned by the window, and the pattern that emerges will be a unique expression of the one sunlight but conditioned by a particular window. Your mind is like a window that has its own particular form, shape, conditioning, qualities—and the one light of consciousness flows through it and comes out and is expressed uniquely according to the shape or the conditioning of your mind.”
What can you do? Two things:
“(1) Cultivate this openness to the impersonal light of consciousness which is the nature of our mind, and (2) shape one’s own mind in a way that enables the light of consciousness to flow through it. Opening to the light of consciousness is the same experience for each of us, but the way we condition or shape our minds is different … Depending on how you use your mind—what you practice, what you study, what you explore, what you do—all these things will shape your mind and that will determine what it is that flows through your mind and expresses itself in the world.”
Explore more: How do I embody wisdom (Sloww Stage 4)?
🤯 Mind Expanding
🆕 Book Summary: Conscious by Annaka Harris
This isn’t the easiest book to summarize, so I recommend reading the book in full if you’re interested because it’s short. That being said, this summary does include highlights on: consciousness, binding, the self, psychedelics, split brains, parasites, free will, and panpsychism. I shared a few mind-blowing excerpts on Twitter.
“This book is devoted to shaking up our everyday assumptions about the world we live in. Some facts are so important and so counterintuitive (matter is mostly made up of empty space; the earth is a spinning sphere in one of billions of solar systems in our galaxy; microscopic organisms cause disease; and so on) that we need to recall them again and again, until they finally permeate our culture and become the foundation for new thinking.” — Annaka Harris
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Go with the Sloww,
Kyle Kowalski
Synthesizer & Solopreneur
