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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 173 (Feb 4, 2024) — RAIN Method, Breathing Practices, Two Purposes, & More
Sloww Sunday shares my latest and greatest creations and curations to 10,000+ students of life. If you enjoy this issue, please help grow Sloww by forwarding this newsletter to other lifelong learners.
📚 Lifelong Learning & Deeper Development
An Intro Guide to Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory
Ken Wilber, one of the greatest living synthesizers, just turned 75 years old a few days ago. I was late to the game discovering Wilber and his Integral Theory, but I’ve tried to make up for lost time by giving myself a crash course on his worldview. I’ll also be reading his upcoming book that will be published in April titled Finding Radical Wholeness: The Integral Path to Unity, Growth, and Delight.
If you’re looking for an intro to Integral Theory, here are 20 tenets and philosophical principles. For book summaries:
- The Integral Vision (Book Summary)
- A Brief History of Everything (Book Summary)
- A Theory of Everything (Book Summary)
- Integral Psychology (Book Summary Coming + Premium Synthesis)
- Integral Spirituality (Book Summary Coming + Premium Synthesis)
When asked about applications of Integral Theory that excite him the most these days, Wilber said:
- “I appreciate the developmental component a lot, and the fact that everybody is going through a certain stage of development.”
Explore more: 50+ posts on Lifelong Learning & Deeper Development (Sloww Stage Support)
🌎 Lighter Living
Ready to master your nervous system?
Jonny Miller’s online course Nervous System Mastery is back for its 5th cohort running from March 25 – April 26. I participated in the 2nd cohort and shared my NSM experience and key takeaways (🔒). Jonny says the NSM training is for you if you’d like to rewire your neurobiology with evidence-backed protocols and a life-changing toolkit to cultivate calm, upgrade resilience, and increase aliveness.
Bonus: Jonny was kind enough to offer Sloww readers a discount of $250 with code SLOWW at checkout here!
“It’s almost as if to truly master our nervous system, our conscious mind needs to surrender to its wisdom.” — Jonny Miller
Explore more: 100+ posts on Intentional Living (Sloww Stage 1)
🧭 Higher Purpose
Outer Purpose vs Inner Purpose
One of my epiphanies from Eckhart Tolle is the concept of outer purpose vs inner purpose which he covers in both his main books: The Power of Now (Book Summary | 🔒Premium Synthesis) & A New Earth (Book Summary | 🔒Premium Synthesis):
- Outer Purpose is secondary (doing; what you do; varies greatly from person to person): belongs to the horizontal dimension of space and time; to arrive at your goal or destination, to accomplish what you set out to do, to achieve this or that (which implies future); always relative, unstable, and impermanent; doesn’t last forever (replaced by some other outer purpose); cannot give you lasting fulfillment; make it subservient to your inner purpose.
- Inner Purpose is primary (being; what you are; shared with humanity): concerns a deepening of your being in the vertical dimension of the timeless now; has nothing to do with future but everything to do with the quality of your consciousness at this moment; has nothing to do with where you are going or what you are doing, but everything to do with how; to bring consciousness into this dimension and enable it to flow into what you do by living in conscious oneness with the totality (conscious alignment with universal intelligence); to awaken (out of identification with form).
“Finding and living in alignment with the inner purpose is the foundation for fulfilling your outer purpose … Awakened doing is the alignment of your outer purpose—what you do—with your inner purpose—awakening and staying awake. Through awakened doing, you become one with the outgoing purpose of the universe. Consciousness flows through you into this world. It flows into your thoughts and inspires them. It flows into what you do and guides and empowers it.” — Eckhart Tolle
Explore more: 50+ posts on Life Purpose (Sloww Stage 2)
🧠 Mental Mastery
The Blind Men & The Elephant
A classic short story on perspective:
Explore more: 75+ posts on Mental Mastery (Sloww Stage 3)
☯️ Spiritual Seeing
The RAIN Method from Tara Brach
I just published this page of Tara Brach quotes which includes her method/technique called “RAIN”:
- “When we get caught in the trance of unworthiness, we can say, ‘Okay, just pause’ … RAIN is a process of detangling the trance, and it really comes down to a mindful awareness with kindness … What RAIN does when we offer ourselves attention and bring in nurturing, is a kind of spiritual re-parenting. We’re bringing the presence and kindness we need to heal.” — Tara Brach
RAIN Breakdown:
- Recognize: Recognize what’s going on. See what’s here. All the thoughts and feelings of unworthiness right here. Name it.
- Allow: Allow it to be here, not to fight it, not to judge it, just let be. Just allow it all to be there. Don’t try to get away from what’s going on. Deepen the pause.
- Investigate: Investigating is connecting with what’s going on in the body but with kindness. Deepen the inquiry into the body, and feel what’s there. Contact it. Investigate with an intimate attention; just bring a gentle yet interested attention to what’s going on. This is where we start loosening the grip to free us from the trance. You have to get under the thoughts, under the storyline.
- Nurture (or Not Identified): It sounds like a dry term, but it’s actually liberation. When I’m not identified with that unworthy self, I’m free to inhabit my wholeness. I’m free to inhabit the loving awareness that’s really here but been clouded over. Bring kindness to what we find. When we do that, we experience what’s called ‘after the RAIN’ which means we start opening to our natural being.
Explore more: 50+ posts on Spiritual Seeing (Sloww Stage 4)
💬 Final Thought
Wise Words from Wei Wu Wei
“Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9 percent of everything you think, and of everything you do, is for yourself—and there isn’t one.” — Wei Wu Wei
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All the best,
Kyle Kowalski
Founder, Sloww
