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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 221 (Nov 9, 2025) — Awareness, Burning Questions, Suffering to Transformation, & More
The Sloww Sunday newsletter sends to 10,000+ readers slowing down to the wisdom within. If you enjoy this issue, please help grow Sloww by forwarding this newsletter to others.
New to Sloww? Here’s what it’s about in a nutshell (which mirrors the newsletter sections below):
🔥 What ‘burning question’ is most alive for you?
A burning question often kicks off the never-ending cycle of: questioning → learning → developing (which leads to ever-deeper questioning and starts the cycle again). Do you know what burning question is driving you at the moment?
- “I remember in fourth or fifth grade when we started getting report cards, I got all A’s. I was looking at it, and I was thinking, well, that’s interesting: geography, mathematics chemistry, biology. They’re all A’s, but why are they all separate? What’s the difference between this thing and this thing? They should all fit together. I remember that becoming a really burning question for me: how do they all fit together?” — Ken Wilber
- “Some students may begin with some burning question that has long troubled them, and find that it is suitable for interdisciplinary inquiry. You are more likely to develop a good question if you care about the topic in which you are reading.” — Interdisciplinary Research (Summary | 🔒Premium)
You can learn more about this (and so much more) in the Synthesizer course.
0️⃣ Explore More: 50+ posts on Lifelong Learning & Deeper Development (Sloww Stage Support)
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💤 How’s your sleep?
Sleep was never something I thought about for the first 30+ years of my life because I was lucky enough to get good sleep. When something is working just fine, it’s not usually top of mind.
But, three years ago when we moved to New Mexico, my sleep started to suffer because it seemed like my body never fully adapted to the higher altitude. Then two years ago we got a puppy which further wrecked my sleep. And then one year ago we had a baby which absolutely destroyed my sleep to a level I never fathomed was even possible. Let’s just say I completely understand why chronic sleep deprivation is considered a form of torture. Needless to say, over the last few years, sleep went from a non-issue to the #1 issue in my life.
This week I was browsing the Biohackers subreddit and saw multiple posts asking for the top biohacks. Guess what’s always mentioned before anything else? Sleep, diet, and exercise. It reminded me of an easy way to remember the basics: MEDS.
1️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Intentional Living (Sloww Stage 1)
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🦋 From Suffering to Transformation
This month marks the 10-year anniversary of my existential crisis! Without the crisis, there would be no Sloww. This highlights the invaluable role that suffering plays in our lives. This week I came across the following in a random comment on Reddit: “No one wins an award for suffering the most.” While there’s no award for #1 sufferer, there is often a reward for suffering: transformation.
- “Suffering is given to you that you might open your eyes to the truth, that you might understand that there’s falsehood somewhere, just as physical pain is given to you so you will understand that there is disease or illness somewhere.” — Anthony de Mello
- “How do we begin to stop the war against ourselves? The wake up is usually some form of suffering … Suffering is really awareness’ way of letting us know there is a blockage. That invitation to let go is an expression of love because letting go is freeing.” — Tara Brach
- “I’ve never heard of anybody who awakens in their comfort zone … You need suffering for you to come to a point of realization that you do not need to suffer anymore … Suffering is most people’s only spiritual teacher.” — Eckhart Tolle
- “Where something becomes extremely difficult and unbearable, there we also stand already quite near its transformation.” — Rainer Maria Rilke
- “Every transformation demands as its precondition ‘the ending of a world’—the collapse of an old philosophy of life.” — Carl 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 seen any life transformation that didn’t begin with the person in question finally getting tired of their own bullshit.” — Elizabeth Gilbert
2️⃣ Explore More: 50+ posts on Life Purpose (Sloww Stage 2)
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🧠 The Wisdom of Peter Kingsley
I finally explored scholar-mystic Peter Kingsley a bit. The following is a nice audio interview along with my key takeaways after watching several of his videos:
On his work:
- “The core of my own work is that there is a sacred tradition at the roots of our own Western world. It’s really fundamental for us now at a collective level to get back to that sacred core of the Western world—behind all the misunderstandings, the rationalizing, the materializing—because otherwise there really isn’t much of a future for this Western civilization … We’re not separate. This is the problem. We start from the apparent sense of separateness which we Westerners have.”
On awakening:
- “(Be) willing to do anything for the sake of the truth … Someone who really, sincerely, is after the facts becomes a mystic sooner or later … Traditional awakening, or enlightenment, or realization, is when someone’s conditioning is broken … The stronger the experience or realization I would have, the more completely, totally, it would knock the bottom out of my life.”
On individuation:
- “(Paraphrasing Carl Jung) The process of individuation is hell. There’s nothing more lonely. There’s nothing more solitary. There is nothing quite as painful because it’s a process of dying. It is the process of surrendering oneself to the impersonal … I don’t see how you can have the personal making any sense or being meaningful without the impersonal.”
On silence:
- “So often we try to convince ourselves we are living a full, contented life, but there is always something pulling at our heart. Ambition and restlessness are just its shadows, and it will go on tearing at our hearts until we start to acknowledge what is missing … The element of silence was very important—somehow for there to be a pause, so we can actually hear there’s something missing. If you are silent, you can actually hear the silent voice of something inside us asking for something else.”
On going beyond thinking:
- “You can’t understand thinking unless you get beyond thinking … You can’t understand thinking by thinking about it … This is the path of initiation: that you have to get behind thinking. You have to get past this world that we exist in, in order to understand it. It doesn’t mean leaving anything behind—it doesn’t mean that you leave thoughts behind after that. You have to come back and do the best you can in this world of thinking.”
On awe and surprise:
- “God is always, always, always surprising. This reality, this what we serve, is always the unexpected … The essence of all religions, as far as I can see, is sheer awe … It’s this awe of the contact with the divine and how insignificant we are compared to that incredible, numinous, sacred power, and yet how essential we are.”
One more paradox:
- “The more we try to get something for ourselves, the less we end up with. It’s this very strange paradox that by trying to accumulate things for ourselves, we diminish ourselves. And, by somehow becoming nothing … then everything is given because you do become a part of everything—which is what we are in our essential nature anyway.”
3️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Mental Mastery (Sloww Stage 3)
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☯️ Awareness by Anthony de Mello
Anthony de Mello is one of my all-time favorite spiritual teachers. I’ve read six of his books and watched many of his videos, but somehow I just discovered his audio recording from a 1986 prayer workshop (one year before his death). It turns out this is what became his most popular book Awareness (Summary | 🔒Premium). What a gift! I plan on rereading the book while listening along to his incredible teaching style:
4️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Spiritual Seeing (Sloww Stage 4)
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“When something long since passed away comes back again in a changed world, it is new. To give birth to the ancient in a new time is creation … The task is to give birth to the old in a new time.” — Carl Jung
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All the best,
Kyle Kowalski
Founder, Sloww
