Meditation - Train your mind
There is so much information around meditation that it can be overwhelming or unclear. This is what I’m finding as I begin to teach more and more. So let’s get practical shall we?
Let’s remove all the fluff and get to the core of what it means for me, you and all those who are living the big city life because most of us are not going to be in a temple or kicking it in nature for extensive periods of time where we can tap into the mother.
If we decide to live in a monastery our intentions and results will be very different. But we are living amidst millions of other humans and consuming each other’s energies that can be overwhelming especially when it’s bouncing of the concrete jungle in which we habitat.
So, what are the benefits of meditation for the urban dweller?
1. The most important thing to know is that every time we sit in a meditative state, we are training our mind.
2. The more consistently we sit, the more we begin to learn and experience the difference between mind and brain.
3. As we separate the mind and brain by exploring and tapping into rest of our body, we begin to create space between stimulus and response which means we become less and less reactive and more responsive (your loved ones will thank you).
4. It’s beautiful to meditate on our own but when we meditate with others we silently hold space and support each other as we train our minds to journey to the deepest parts of our self.
5. There are studies on the impact that meditation has on the brain, but it’s not as direct as you would think. The brain flourishes for two reasons. One, we begin to move the mind (the driver and what actually runs the brain) into the body. This gives the brain a chance to rest and restore. Two, when we move awareness, breath and our minds into other areas of our body, we activate and wake up at a cellular level which then wires and expands our brain. We tap into the whole body intelligence including our heart and gut.
I know what you’re thinking. Talib, do you have scientific proof? Here is what I say to that. Don’t wait for science to make your move. You don’t have to believe me or wait for science. You need to experience it for your self because you are science so start experimenting.
The Mind is the driver of all human behaviour. You want to change the world? Begin with changing your mind.
See you on the cushion.
P.S. if you have any questions about the above or anything else in regards to meditation for the urban dweller, shoot me a message.
P.S.S. One last thing. Here is bold guarantee. Join me one to two times a week for 4 weeks (check my classes schedule) and I will guarantee you will not only experience the power during meditation but you will experience results in your day to day. A shift in patience, awareness of self and others, slowly beginning the journey toward becoming more responsive and less reactive, gifting yourself with a more relaxed state of mind.
Freedom
Our external world is a reflection of our internal world.
Seeds planted, roots spread deep into to our unconscious,
An unconscious that only the mind can access.
These roots sprout through the soil of our being and dance in the external.
It is not freedom from mind, but freedom because of mind.
Freedom birthed from the inside out.
A meditative state of mind.
Smiling from the inside out
What are the benefits of a meditation practice?
This is actually a big question because the benefits are unique to your current state of mind. Are there practical benefits that arise from a consistent meditation practice? Certainly and the research is out there for all too consume via our good old friend Google but I want to share my own experience, data that has been birthed from years of practice.
Over the next few weeks I’ll share how its evolved and impacted my day to day over the last 17 years. I’ll breakdown how its helped me to become more self aware which has led to deeper awareness of others and the environment in which I play. How self awareness led to self compassion and self compassion led to self confidence, a self confidence constructed from the inside out.
But for now, I would like to begin with this photo, this smile. For most of my life I learned to smile on the outside only to be struggling, filled with tears and pain on the inside, tears of guilt, tears of shame, tears of unworthiness and tears of not feeling fucking good enough. Perhaps I am one of few or one of many who spent their lives smiling on the outside with unattended wounds on the inside. Time will tell.
This photo however, this smile and the smiles you will experience when we cross paths, it’s a smile that has its roots deep within my being, the smile is the surface, but the foundation, the roots of this smile are now filled with joy, with love, with gratitude and pure awe of this opportunity to live a human existence in this body I’ve been gifted.
This is a smile that represents hope for me, hope for you and hope for the collective state of mind.
It took me a long to time to prioritize this deeper need within myself, the desire to turn up the volume of the voice within that had been muzzled for so long by the projection of others shame and guilt.
We explore and yearn for nature without but in the process we have forgotten about the nature within. It is a dance, a two way street, a dance between the internal and the external.
To meditate is to begin listening, to deeply listen to the conversation within. To listen to self is to love. To increase the capacity to love your self is to increase your love for another and the environment in which we all play.
If you are yearning, if you are ready to begin exploring deeper within, to experience what it feels like to smile from the inside out, you can find me and others who are happy to hold the flashlight as you begin to carve out this path of yours.
This a love note from my insides calling out to your insides.
With love, gratitude and joy.
P.S. If you are ready to play, check out the classes section to see where I’m hanging.
The Remote
The external world is my television. I am the projector and I have access to the remote if I choose to take control. Our external projection is a reflection of our internal state. That is a fear inducing thought. We have full control to change the channel? It’s much easier, regardless of how unfulfilling it may be, to walk the path guided by others. To take back the remote means that we are now in full control and responsible for every action we take. Here is the thing. By choosing not to take the remote, we are still fully responsible. The state of the outer world is a reflection of your inner world. We are all responsible for the show that is playing outside of us. The more we watch the same show, the more we encourage it to keep playing.
It’s time to take back your remote and change the channel.
This is what came up for me in savasana, some light morning thoughts on a cloudy Friday morning:-). We get comfortable with a particular channel, mine being my my current business as an example. I don’t want to change it because it’s so familiar, so comfortable. Even though its clear that it’s not my path, I know how to navigate my way through, but teaching yoga, leading meditations, performing comedy, speaking on stage, writing and running workshops around the evolution of human consciousness, inspiring others to turn their gaze inward, to experience the power of mind and the exploration of energetic body (which is the next evolution of humanity if we don’t completely fuck it up). Being a leader that leads from the front? Where will that take me? Thats an entirely different scary ass channel.
How about when the heart is broken? How about when it cracks instead of closing it back up, that we explore, we go deeper within. How will that project? How will that shift the internal and eternal? This heart of mine has been more like an Airbnb then a permanent residency. I don’t let people stay too long because if they do and one day decide to leave then I am left with this gaping hole within. Lets say I do open up for the long term stay, take the risk and one day she or he or they leave, instead of closing up, can I remain open, dig deeper, explore the depths of this heart, to dive into emptiness, the pain and come out the other side?
Have you ever noticed when your heart breaks, how raw you feel and how others notice a profound shift in you even if its for a brief moment? Despite how tired you may be from the sleepless nights, others see and feel you a little more then usual. They may say, "wow, you are really glowing today!” or “you are looking beautiful, did you do something with your hair?” (I get neither, probably because I fill this cracks up with a concrete like material). The outside worlds notices. A broken heart is an open heart and an open heart pours onto others the sweetness of what it means to be human at its core.
We are responsible whether we take control of the remote or not. Our external projections are a reflection of our internal state. Are you willing to change the channel? To begin creating a different show? Can you live and show up in this life with an open broken heart, the place where the nectar of our true state of being flows from?
I am responsible.
You are responsible.
We are all responsible.
Lets not fuck it up.
Coming home
Unconscious to conscious.
I caught myself. Resistance snuck in.
Fear almost steered me away.
I want to come home to her.
It’s easy and safe to walk the other direction, returning to the same hamster wheel.
Why the fear requires more digging, but for now knowing is enough.
The distance between adoration and loving to completely falling is just a few steps away.
I want to come home to her.
My deepest desire is my deepest fear.
The heart.
How did I get here?
Re-training to reach my natural state.
Moving from 'what if it doesn’t work?', to imagining 'what if it does work?’.
This simple flip of a question is enough to turn the mind upside down.
This place is still scary but I am happy to see, to catch my self, to take the step on the path of my deepest desire.
I strayed, but not to far.
I got you, I caught you, I won’t let you. The stakes of this loss to high.
She entered my dreams.
I am beginning to wake up. I can see again.
The mind likes to dance in many directions but the heart is a one way street.
I want to come home to her.
To express the words in my heart.
The throat is blocked so I bypass and pour myself onto paper.
Trembling. From head to heart. Asking the question.
Where is your heart Talib?
Where is your heart Talib?
Where is your heart Talib?
To bring me back down, to stay connected, to simultaneously break the old habit and create a new one.
It’s habit to calculate love in the head.
Brain and mind formulate expectations of love.
Mind and heart is where I am trying now, retraining to feel love.
From thinking into feeling.
I want to come home to her.
Cleansed by darkness
As it began to fill me up,
Take over my entire body,
From the inside out, I could feel it just engulf me.
It was slow motion this time.
I felt it’s arrival, excused myself and returned to my room,
Where I stayed for hours in a state so dark that I wasn’t sure if I would return.
Eight hours later I came out.
Cleansed by the darkness from within.
Not knowing the future, letting go of the past, only the ability to be present remained.
Unaware at the time, the next stage of my life had begun.
Love affair with sour keys
There was once a time when me and sour keys had a beautiful relationship. Every time I had some money I would take them out on a date with my taste buds which would usually start at the local convenience store. The problem was it was more of a Romeo and Juliet ending as oppose to Sleepless in Seattle.
See, as much as my taste buds wanted to spend time with sour keys and deepen the relationship, my parents worked very hard to keep us apart. I vowed that one day when I'm an adult making my own money I'm going to make sure that sour keys and my taste buds spend as much time together as possible. No one will keep us apart!
Unlike Romeo and Juliet, me and sour keys are very much alive, but the same could not be said for our relationship.
Now that I'm an adult (most of the time) and I earn my own money, I sadly have moved on and no longer desire to reestablish my connection with the delicious little fuckers.
I know, trust me, it still breaks my heart. However, one thing I do well is learn my lesson (ok, maybe not well and there is probably room for a lot of improvement). Now when I desire something I don't wait. I make a plan, although a shortened time frame, I still painfully procrastinate, but eventually I do it.
For most of my life I postponed my deepest wants and desires for some unknown future date.
Have you ever heard someone say, when I retire I'm going to travel the world?
Let this sour key experience of mine be an expansion of awareness for you and me. What we desire at age 30 for example, will be different then 40 and what we desire at age 40 will be different from 50. You get where I'm going with this?
If you are 30 and really want to back pack in South America, make a plan and fucking do it, because even at the age of 40, being the healthiest I have ever been, it is not my first choice and for most of us, who the fuck wants to back pack anywhere in there 60's, 70's or 80’s anyways? Not this guy.
Oh well, where one relationship ends, another begins. Me and chocolate chip cookies have become quite intimate over the last few years (sorry sour keys, but I've evolved). I don't know how long it will last but I cherish every moment we have together. Sometimes we even invite oatmeal and it becomes quite the threesome. The only threesome I will probably ever have.
Is there anything you deeply desire in this moment but holding it off to experience some day, one day in the future?
If you always dreamed of backpacking Europe. If you always wanted to change your job or start a business. If you want to take cooking lessons, dancing lessons or sing karaoke. Just do it. The desires don’t have to be big they just need to be yours, they need to be heard, given some love and affection and applied before they reach there inevitable expiry date.
We have collectively created a habit of denying ourselves of even the tiniest enjoyment and opportunities to express ourselves for the sake of adulthood and so called responsibilities (i.e. excuses).
Whatever desire you are suppressing in this moment just remember, you may not want tomorrow what you want today.
God is in my genitals
Surrounded by Catholicism
Surrounded by Judaism
Drowned in Islam
Correction
It’s not the originals but your books of perception that you surrounded and drowned me in
You collect others perceptions and have written your own books
This is just the way it is you say
God is everywhere watching you
You suppressed me, you shamed me and filled me debilitating with guilt
You wrapped my roots with a ball and chain that linked to the noose around my neck
You energetically handicapped me
Sexuality and Spirituality are two sides of the same kind but you sold me otherwise
Every time I desire, I am energetically handicapped and reminded of where I will end up if I follow through
Your God judges me for my thoughts and acts of desire
Lucifer! I found you another customer to burn in your fire!
You say they are separate in your books of perception when in fact they are partners
I don’t need to burn in Lucifers fire pit to suffer.
The guilt and shame you poor over me is punishment enough
Suffocation of my roots
Relationships that lack depth and fear of abundance
Disconnected from my power
walking around with a closed heart doused in darkness
Scared to share my voice
Inability to see
and connect to the heavens
With one hand you suppress the flower, stick an on/off switch on it and expect it to bloom on demand
With the other hand, you let the faucet run, under the false assumption there is unlimited supply you flush the seeds of life in the depth of the ocean
Do you not have respect for the rest of you being?
How could you? When you have wrapped the roots of being so tightly
I’m on to you, I see what you did. Very clever.
It is not me but your book of perceptions that will burn in Lucifers fire
You look outside for God
Where are you God? All I see is darkness and destruction
You keep looking outside with this confused face
You run to me, the world is ending, the world is ending, the world is ending
I listen to your list of reasons that reach infinity
Can’t you see that what you see is the reflection of your Self?
Don’t you see what I see?
That Sexuality and spirituality are two sides of the same coin?
I found the key to release your ball and chain, to open the gateway to heaven
(Long sigh)
Creating beautiful deep relationships, embracing abundance
Plugged into my power
Showing up with an open heart
Sharing my voice
I can finally see
and just getting a glimpse of heaven on earth
The world is not ending
The world is not ending
The world is not ending
Because I am only just fucking beginning.
Hey dummy, life is this way
This piece by Robert Rausenberg captures my upbringing perfectly.
Born and raised in Toronto by Indian immigrants doing their best to raise me as a Muslim and sustain eastern cultures. From the age of six I grew up in a town where I was one of single digit brown peeps, surrounded by Jewish, Italian and multi generation Canadians, east and west contradicted each other consistently outside and inside of me.
They all pointed me in different directions and it was hard to carve out an authentic path when everyone is enticing you too join their tribe. My answer to all this confusion? To join all the tribes, to be everywhere all the time. I mastered the art of adaptation and simultaneously each group fed a different need of mine.
Some were into hockey, others basketball, others read, discussed politics and were big foodies, some just loved to have some drinks, smoke joints and play video games while others liked to go for all night parties and drop some serious mind altering substances. Some were spiritual, some loved to dance, play board games and others loved to go for walks in the park.
I played in a lot of different worlds and feel lucky for it, but it wasn’t all fun and games. When being yourself is not your full-time job, the mind body and soul can get tired and confused. There was a ton of inner conflict that parked itself inside of me. I would have to keep a lot of secrets, like I couldn’t tell my parents that I drank, smoked, hung out with girls and went to clubs.
I couldn’t mix different groups of friends because they were so different and had unaligned interests. I danced between groups all the time, wearing multiple hats. This sort of upbringing was fun but the secret lives weigh on you and always having to be only a part of yourself is fucking exhausting. What to do?
Which way to go is confusing for most people, but if I could have used one set of guidance it would be this:
Learn to spend time with yourself, meditate, sit in silence, go inward and expand the internal self.
Now, would I have understood this in my teens and twenties? Maybe, maybe not, but I still think it is valuable to plant the seed to discovering the authentic Self within our children.
To release or not to release
Men carry the seeds of humanity. How much energy does each sperm hold? I don’t know, but considering its the seed of life I’m going to say a fucking ton (how is that for scientific measurement?).
Every time we ejaculate we release our energy and if we shift our mindset and see ourselves as primarily energetic beings as oppose to physical beings then we can begin to experience and understand the plus and minus of masturbation.
A few points from my own experience:
Personally, I carried guilt and shame around the act of masturbation (A result of eastern upbringing in a western world). Every time I pleasured myself the weight of guilt and shame would way me down so much the next day that I fell into a mini depressive state.
Simultaneously, I was energetically exhausting myself because each time I masturbate there is enormous release of energy which takes a day or two to recover (for some it could take weeks).
We can't talk about masturbation without bringing in the world of pornography and it's excessive consumption due to accessibility and quality. We men are programming our brains, especially our youth in a way that is unhealthy for men and results in physical, emotional and energetic abuse towards women.
Here is the thing, my experience with porn wasn’t all bad. Yes, it wired my brain in some unhealthy ways (fortunately I don’t have an addictive personality and I consciously controlled consumption) but in some ways it taught me how to have sex. How and where else would I have learned? It’s not like we received a penis manual in public or islamic school (I know, shocking, no penis manuals in religious school). We inherited a very powerful tool that came with zero instructions.
I cannot speak for everyone, I will only share what I have experienced and practiced, both my experience with pornography and masturbation, the last three years of no porn and aside from a three to five times (only once this year), no masturbation. Yes, only three to fives times since January 1, 2015.
Don’t worry, nobody has been harmed in this longitudinal study.
If you want to try not masturbating, I would check out the Tim Ferries challenge from a few years ago called NOBNOM. No masturbation or booze for 30 days but sex is permitted. Obviously no porn unless you like torturing yourself.
https://tim.blog/2014/07/30/nobnom-no-booze-no-masturbating/
Also, here is a link to Daosit sexual practices (closet thing you will ever find to a penis manual) which teaches you how to move the energy in your pelvic floor. It's only beneficial to NOT masturbate if you learn to distribute and move the retained energy thorough your entire being.
http://www.stic.gov.et/documents/36836/106070/%5BMantak_Chia%2C_Michael_Winn%5D_Taoist_Secrets_of_Love%28BookFi.org%29.pdf/47388dc9-f4da-0444-57b7-8d0a5483b0a2?version=1.0
As a man, if you are living in a major city like Toronto or New York then withholding from masturbating without alternative ways of moving your energy can lead to negative effects unless you have a sexual partner(s) where you can share this energy.
The question that I get is, why do you not get tired after sex but tired after masturbation? The reason according to Daoists and Ayurvedic texts that I've read is that women have unlimited yin energy which replenishes our energy and balances it out after we release.
This brings to surface another idea that I have been developing an awareness and deeper understanding around. On the surface men seem to want to fuck everything and are fascinated by a women's physical body. However, what I believe we are actually thirsting for when we go deeper is a women's yin energy to balance our yang energy.
Why are we so focused on the physical? Well, this is where porn but equally the mainstream media come into play. We have put an incredible amount of importance and emphasis on the female’s physical body. Just stand in line at any pharmacy store and check out the magazines by the checkout counter.
After three years of almost no masturbation or pornography here are the shifts and benefits.
Actually, before I go into the benefits there are three reasons that I am able to live like this:
I have been with incredible lovers that have similar sex drives.
Practicing yoga and meditation helps move and distribute my energy throughout my entire being. I have recently dived into kundalini yoga which helps move the energy from the pelvic floor and up the spine.
Learning and working towards mastering daoist sexual practices which I am far from mastering makes me a better lover and helps for the times I am single.
Benefits to retaining the seed and not watching pornography or consuming any or very little mainstream media:
Relationships with women will evolve from a predominantly physical connection to a more energetic connection.
Appreciate for women's physical bodies but you will desire women that you connect with energetically which is much fewer and no longer will suffer from what Barry Schwartz’s calls the Paradox of Choice.
The ability to retain your seed means retaining your energy. Retaining energy means functioning at a higher vibration. When we begin functioning at a higher vibration we attract different types of lovers, friends and also aligned life opportunities. We begin playing in a higher vibrational playground (when you begin playing in this higher vibrational playground, its very difficult to go back).
Alcohol, drugs and unhealthy food are counter intuitive to the preservation of this seed so desire to alter your state of mind will lessen over time.
Preserving energy results in a man who is confident from the inside out, something that consciously and subconsciously every women desires.
Your energy can be felt and witnessed externally which attracts the people and circumstances that are aligned with your deeper being.
Respect and see women in a much more loving way and not just as the opppsite sex that you want to fuck (consuming pornography wires the brain to desire an unhealthy amount of women).
Incredible intimacy with your partners. When the root of a connection begins with our energetic being, making love takes on an entirely new level of intimacy.
Your dating life and connection with real women as oppose to dating your laptop, leads to more intimacy, a more fulfilled life and decrease loneliness.
There is a drawback however when you cut out porn and decrease/stop masturbating.
Your right hand will lose it’s best friend. It’s sad, but I promise, it’s fucking worth it.
You will experience more intimacy in your relationships and not just romantically.
You will connect more deeply with your Self
You will create space in your brain to think about something other then imagining where you want to stick your penis which leads to a 1000% increase in productivity.
Perhaps this is not even a conversation about masturbation.
To remain stuck on the idea whether masturbation for men is good for us or not is to remain stuck on the physical, on the surface level.
Perhaps the questions we should be asking is are we ready to begin connecting more deeply with our energetic bodies and if we are, then is retaining the seed of life which holds an abundance of universal energy, an abundance of our energy and furthermore in order to reconnect to our spiritual being, the only way to do that is to go through our energetic being.
Can we by bypass the physical and energetic being and go straight to the spiritual? Yes, but the outcome ain’t pretty. The result will likely be a disconnect from some of the most amazing aspects of being human.
If we begin to look at it as three stages, physical, energetic and spiritual then we learn that we have an enormous amount of autonomy over our own being, we can now become our own scientists simply because of all the tools that are available to us and thanks to the evolution of all three areas we no longer have to look to any one religion to access and understand our full Self, a Self where all three stages are crucial to our own evolution as well as that of humanity as a whole.
It's just a thought. Perhaps I've lost my marbles or perhaps I've found them:-). Time will tell all. All I request is that you play with your Self in a different more evolved way, in a more conscious way that benefits you at a deeper level and makes you a more evolved and balanced human being.
I want to end on this note. The road to syncing the physical, energetic and spiritual body I believe is the ultimate goal of humanity. We are overly obsessed with the physical being, some with the energetic and others with the spiritual. However, our evolution of being, conscious evolution of humanity is moving towards a collective synchronicity.
Hearts filled with stones
As I walked back to my room I noticed that throughout the walkway there were decorative hearts filled with stones. It triggered a thought in me and it's not what you would think being in this paradise called Bali.
These hearts filled with stones was a reflection of a heart I had been walking around with most of my life. When we shut ourselves out, suppress the feelings and mask the pain with the hope that it goes away, that pain hardens and turns into little stones that are lodged within the heart.
Have you ever experienced heart break and or disappointment from others, those you have loved and trusted? If you answered no then you are the lucky .00001 percent. For the rest of you mortals I ask, what did you do with that pain and disappointment? Did you embrace it, acknowledge it and heal it or like me did you tuck away each defeat and let down you experienced in life?
One of the ways that suppressed pain showed up for me was in the form anger. Especially being a man, we are encouraged to store all the pain away, to man the fuck up. This is how we are nurtured from a young age and then everyone acts surprised when the only emotion that we have the ability to display with ease is anger.
These heart filled stones seemed beautiful on this path, but inside of us, the beauty is a heart that is clear, that doesn’t hold on, that forgives and lets go so that it has space to give and receive and to experience and display emotions other then anger. The alternative is we live in the lull of silent pain, where giving and receiving are softly excruciating because there is limited vacancy for an abundance of love.
When the experience of pain and sorrow is not respected, mourned and released properly, when we display a false perception of toughness to the world, this tearless society that we have created is a life lived partially.
Has anyone ever told you to stop crying? Men hear this a lot throughout their life. Many women today are in search for the strong emotionally intelligent masculine. That's a wonderful dream, but let's focus together on redefining how we raise our boys and transition them into manhood because even though the game has changed, boys and men are still given the same set of expired rules. It's sad that we have so much opportunity to evolve yet we remain for the most part in status quo for the sake of comfort.
You know why anger is excepted in men? It's because suppressing tears and other natural emotions we are left with permission to express only one emotion. Anger. Yes, anger is an emotion in case you have forgotten. I say this because so many men walk around and lose there fucking shit (guilty as charged) and claim proudly, I’m not emotional.
Dude, anger is an emotion. It's like we have a whole list of emotions, instead of distributing it to all emotions, we stuff all our emotional energy into the anger jar until it blows the lid off.
Emotions are not gender specific. Embracing and experiencing all emotions is to be human.
Now we live in a world that has maximized the masculine energy where women too are expected to tuck away natural emotions, especially in the workplace.
It was in 2014, while on a retreat in Costa Rica that I experienced for the first time in my adult life a glimpse of a fully open heart. I wish that I could package that moment up and gift it to all seven plus billion people in this world because I think it's the most powerful way to live a human life.
It's been some hard work to release most of the stones over a period of ten years, learning to create space and showing up with an open heart (more times then not), but we have an opportunity today to lay a new foundations for the millions of children around the world so they don’t have to walk around with heavy hearts.
Lets step on the brakes and stop the comfort train and begin reimagining and recreating what it means to be human, if not for us, then for the children who may appreciate and benefit from the fresh seeds we plant for their future.
Business Lessons From a Smelly Fruit
Business is the main meal, and the fuck-ups are the appetizers we never ordered but are forced to eat. It’s only after we fully accept and consume them that we experience the nutrients that follow the failures.
There are beautiful lessons to learn if you open yourself up and embrace these delicious, unwanted appetizers. Here’s another way of looking at it: While in Bali for a yoga retreat, my friend Scott went on and on about a tropical fruit called durian and how delicious it was. But we didn’t have any at the retreat. One, it’s hard to get, and two, it wasn’t allowed on the resort because of its unbearable odor.
It wasn’t until the day we were on our way back to Ubud that our friend Keduk surprised us. We stopped off at the side of the road and exited the van. He bought us durian, but it was tied to the back of the tailpipe because he didn’t want to stink up the car.
Durian Fruit
If you Google durian fruit smell, here’s what comes up: “Its odor is best described as…turpentine and onions, garnished with a gym sock.”
In business, it’s not as important to avoid fuck-ups as it is to accept their inevitability and learn how to respond when they arrive. Business fuck-ups are kind of like the durian fruit: they’re uncomfortable to hold onto, smell like shit, but taste amazing when you dive in and are one of the most nutritious fruits on earth.
What’s even more interesting is that if you don’t want to walk around with smelly durian breath, the trick is to pour water into the empty durian shell and drink it. The same properties that make you stinky are the same properties that will freshen your breath.
Hmmmm…maybe this stinky little tropical fruit isn’t just a metaphor for business failures but for our entire lives.
Learning to leave the safety of your compound
There is a fear instilled within me to try new things in life. Be safe and don’t take risks. Its hammered into my psyche from multiple directions. When we don’t do and try new things, yes we are safe but we also miss out on the pure enjoyment and pleasure that comes with mastering something new. I felt like this while recently learning to ride a scooter in Ubud, Bali. I was scared and hesitated, even as the Villa’s staff taught me and I rode up and down the driveway in the compound, I had my doubts and I could see in in the staffs eyes, so did they (if they could speak English they probably would have tried to convince me to walk and take taxis) but I stuck to it, popped on a helmet, gathered up some courage and off I went to my first destination, the Yoga Barn for a Tibetan Bowl Meditation class.
I think its important to share that before I went out, I went back to my room to Youtube how to ride a scooter. I checked out a few videos and found myself feeling more nervous and scared. In my experience when trying something new its always worked best to just do it. Ignorance truly is bliss. The more information you intake the harder it is to proceed because we begin rationalizing and getting into our own heads. I turned it off, said fuck it and went back out. As I am writing to you from Toronto, I would like to share that I have returned in one piece. By the end of my trip I was zipping around like a pro and having so much fun! It was pure joy. To think that I could have gone an entirely other direction and missed out on this joyful experience and feeling of freedom.
I thought to myself, where else in my life am I hesitating to try something new for the fear of falling and getting hurt? What areas in my life have I been practicing within the safety of my compound yet still hesitant to venture out?
Then it came to me. I have posting block! See, I have been writing a lot more then I have been sharing. Every now and then I have ventured out, sharing a post sporadically, but I have for the most part been keeping my words to myself. That fear of judgment, of failing and the endless list of ‘what ifs’ hold me back.
It’s like how I was learning to ride a scooter on the driveway. I could have decided to never leave the compound but there would have been so many beautiful experiences that I would have missed out on. So, here I am making a commitment to myself to venture out of the compound with my writing, trusting that this too will expand my internal and external Self and be filled with beautiful experiences.
Where in your life have you been practicing within your own compound but fear and hesitate to get yourself on to that road and give yourself the opportunity to feel joy, expand your internal and external Self and experience more beauty?
Giving Birth to Consciousness
This piece was inspired by a recent conversation with a friend: Do we have enough health and wellness practitioners? Enough alternative healers? The short answer is no—we don’t. The longer answer is that we're far from balancing the scales. Look at the health and wellness field compared to the industries that keep us in unconscious cycles—food, pharmaceuticals, media, and work environments. Just step into a grocery store, liquor store, or notice the number of fast-food spots and bars filling up daily in Toronto. We have a lot of evolving to do to reach a higher vibrational state, to live more consciously.
So, what is consciousness? It’s being present, making decisions in the now for the now. It’s hard, I know. Even after years of my own growth, I still have my unconscious moments. Living in a city filled with endless temptations, I say I dance between two worlds. My aim is to dance in the conscious world most of the time, and, hopefully, one day, fully.
When I indulge in unconscious consumption—processed food, sugar, or a night out drinking with friends—it pulls me down into a fog. The moment feels great, but the day or two after? I'm in a low-energy, detached state. As my friend Anam says, we’re borrowing happiness from tomorrow.
There’s a growing list of healers—naturopaths, nutritionists, energy healers, bodyworkers, meditation and yoga teachers—who aren’t recognized by outdated systems of government and insurance. Why? Because embracing these healers would disrupt industries with deep financial roots in food, medicine, and pharmaceuticals. Those in power play a short-term game, focused on immediate gains. I don’t blame them; change is scary, no matter how much planning goes into it. But an unknown future is better than a stale, outdated present.
It may seem like alternative healers are abundant, but in reality, they barely scratch the surface of what’s needed. As more health and wellness practitioners enter the field, we'll start seeing support from governments and corporations because, currently, many can’t afford holistic options outside what insurance covers. Instead, people turn to drugs from the pharmaceutical industry because that’s what’s accessible.
So, how do we get insurance companies and governments to invest in proven holistic approaches? By encouraging more practitioners and keeping open minds.
Alternative healing is still a new concept to many, but if we want to shift the collective mindset, I encourage you to explore these paths yourself. We’re moving towards a beautiful blend of old and new, East and West. But to evolve as a society, we need to make choices that either move us forward or hold us back.
Earth is like a mother on the verge of giving birth. This new baby’s name is consciousness. And it’s the healers I mentioned who are the doctors, guiding this birth, holding the Earth’s hand, urging her to push. We see the head; we hear the cry. But there’s work left before consciousness is fully delivered.
It’s not about old religions.
It’s not about past leaders.
It’s not about clinging to outdated systems.
It’s about you and me.
Let’s give birth to this baby.
Let consciousness scream, dance, and play with us.
Some are fighting this birth, but we can tip the scale. It starts with each of us nurturing our own abilities, discovering and unlocking them. Where to begin? Start by being conscious of where you place your mind. Humanity’s evolution depends on it.
No pressure.
The Challenges of Showing Gratitude and Saying Thank You
I had an interesting realization the other night and have been wanting to write this all month. A pattern has surfaced within me—an inability to truly thank those who’ve had a profound impact on my life. When it’s someone I’ve known for only a short time, expressing my gratitude feels natural, like my thankfulness can match what I received.
But when it comes to people—and in this case, an entire community like GLP—that have profoundly shaped my life, I feel like no words could ever be enough. Nothing I say could measure up to the appreciation and love I feel.
Every single day, I find myself speaking about the GLP community, expressing my admiration and appreciation out loud. Talking about the impact you've all had on me is one of my proudest moments each day. You’ve shown me how to give and receive love, taught me that I am enough, and even shifted my view on social media—it’s not just a place for distraction, but a space that can truly connect and uplift.
You’ve given me permission to dive deeper, to be unapologetically myself.
As I entered a new decade, I took a moment to reflect on the one that just passed. My early thirties weren’t easy, but I got through them. I knew, even then, that there was a reward waiting. And in 2014, I received it—a gift that continues to unfold.
That gift is all of you.
I feel like I won the happiness lottery, a lottery that gave me access to a world of feeling good enough, a lottery that allowed me to shed all the masks I wore and simply be. The prize? A deeper self-awareness, an acceptance of who I am, and the permission to wear just one hat—my own.
Every day, I feel like the luckiest person alive, and it’s because of each of you. I love you all deeply. Thank you for being in my life and for being such incredible examples to follow.
Many see the world through a lens of negativity. I choose to see all of you. This community gives me the hope I need. When people complain about the state of the world, I think of you all and smile—inside and out. I know each of you is transforming, within and without, and your presence alone is impacting the world.
Regardless of how much darkness surrounds us, this community will always be the light the world needs. You are the flashlight that illuminates my path, that keeps hope alive, even in the darkest of times.
It’s by standing on the shoulders of this community that I can see the beauty that lies ahead.
The Collective Mind (mini challenge)
The individual mind feeds the collective mind.
We’re often so focused on pollution in the outside world—like climate change—but the real change starts with the pollution within. Building awareness around the state of our minds leads to more lasting, meaningful change for the collective. It’s our internal world that shapes the external. When we begin to truly understand this, we’ll realize we can influence the world outside us by turning inward and becoming more mindful of what we consume.
Is it challenging? Absolutely. With the constant flood of media, I’d be lying if I said I never get sucked in. But luckily, my ADD nature tends to pull me back out of the media vortex pretty quickly.
Here’s a small challenge to help build awareness around this:
Spend the next week just paying attention to what you consume and noticing how it makes you feel. Then, the following week, take a break from your usual consumption—no news, social media, Netflix, or whatever you typically turn to—and observe how you feel.
Share your experience with those close to you. Notice if even subtle changes show up in your mood or the way you go through your day-to-day life.
Did you feel any difference in your mindset?
Speechless Love
The ability to elevate and motivate one another without words.
She gave him strength, while he gave her breadth.
An open heart does wonders. He is beginning to feel again.
He imagines what it would be like to hold her, to feel her energy.
There’s such a difference between pure love and pure sexuality.
Sex without love can be good.
But sex filled with an abundance of love—where heart, soul, and mind are fully present—is out of this world.
Quivering lips. Exponentially better.
For the first time, he thought about loving someone the way he loved her.
The heart takes time to heal, especially when it’s been closed off.
When we stop letting the light in or letting it out, there’s only darkness.
Always stay open. Wide open. Heart open.
Living with an Open Broken Heart
I once heard a wise woman say that Buddhists live with an open broken heart. That sentiment stayed with me, and it’s what I strive for most today. My first test came unexpectedly, like a punch in the gut followed by an aching heart. Love takes many forms, but one thing they all have in common is that it hurts when it leaves.
I’ve realized I have anxiety about people leaving. It wasn’t something I considered until my ex pointed it out. My anxiety stems from the fact that the people I loved, and who should have loved me—who do love me—have left. Sometimes, they’ve left multiple times.
After my first love didn’t work out, I shut my heart completely. But the truth is, there wasn’t much effort needed in locking it up because I had already kept most of it on lockdown. Occasionally, I’d open it to take a peek at what could be, but mostly it was closed. It was a defence mechanism, a result of broken trust.
Whether rational or not, in my mind, trust had been broken. I didn’t feel like I mattered, so people would leave or make decisions that didn’t consider me. That’s been my reality, perhaps even since birth.
Today, though, I kept a promise I made to myself back in the summer of 2014. I committed to living with an open broken heart. I know it hurts right now, but I also know it’s the same pain that’s opening my heart a little wider. It’s the same pain that increases my capacity to love. It’s a pain that reminds me I’m starting to feel again.
Why people come into our lives is a mystery. But when you live from this place of openness, it’s a mystery worth exploring—and staying open to—now and forever.
I’ve come to realize that my journey in this lifetime, my greatest challenge, is to love and to be loved. Compared to that, everything else feels like a walk in the park.
I don’t know how this story ends, but one thing is certain: sadness is just a step closer to happiness.
To be continued...
Weapons and Pornography. Is it just Good Business?
Have you ever wondered why we constantly talk about how the world is in turmoil, how humans kill everything, including each other, yet no one seems to mention the weapons manufacturers and dealers? I believe the world is filled with much more good than bad, but the media loves to cater to our primitive brains, and we willingly consume it.
It’s fascinating that there’s rarely any coverage on where the weapons responsible for millions of deaths are actually coming from. All these weapons must be coming from somewhere, right?
Imagine if I owned a weapons manufacturing company, which, according to Google, is a five hundred billion-dollar industry. How invested would I be in world peace? What’s my marketing strategy to move everything from bullets to tanks and fighter jets? What motivates me as a weapons manufacturer? I’d be thrilled for wars and instability. Peace, after all, is bad for business. Love is bad for business. But instability and chaos? That keeps the money flowing.
Now, let’s think about pornography. While it’s not as massive as the weapons industry, it’s still a multi-billion-dollar industry. They produce, and we consume.
If we take ethics out of the conversation for a moment, are the pharmaceutical, oil, insurance, and education industries any different? The products and services may vary, but the systems keeping them afloat are nearly identical. They sell, and we buy. We actively contribute to these systems.
So, what do we do? Do we raise the white flag and say, "I’m just one person; what can I possibly do? I’ll never break the system. It’s too big." Or do we fight? Do we protest, picket, and expose their crimes to the world?
Both are fair positions, but they share one common outcome: neither leads to lasting change.
What if we approached this differently? Let’s move from a macro to a micro level. Let’s look at you and me and our habits. Habits are pathways wired in our brains. I learned in Positive Psychology that existing pathways can’t be destroyed, but we can create new ones parallel to the old. The more we walk the new path, the weaker the old one becomes.
Here’s where I’m going with this. I like to use smoking as an example because I smoked for almost twenty-five years. Fifteen of those years, I struggled with quitting and restarting. I had many pathways and triggers that led me to light up. One was driving. Every time I drove, especially in traffic, I would smoke. To change that habit, I didn’t try to break the pathway (well, at first I did). Instead, I replaced it. I drank coffee, water, or tea while driving instead of smoking. Eventually, the new pathway became stronger, and I succeeded in quitting.
As bad as these systems—war, pornography, or any other—are, our feelings alone won’t change them. These pathways are too strong and deeply ingrained.
What is possible, however, is countering them by creating new systems. Trying to break the old pathways from the top down results in zero long-term change.
It’s time to create new pathways and systems from the ground up, understanding that we may never witness the results. But we must trust that it’s worth the effort.
The 'Other' Woman
Those words, those words we use to degrade and label others, are endless when it comes to women. Not to say that men aren't pressured by societal expectations—it's just that we bring women down so much more in our societies. We perfect them in our media, raise them on who they should be, not who they are.
Here’s the measure of a perfect woman:
Please spend your entire life working towards being someone and something unachievable, something that guarantees failure in the eyes of the complex society that surrounds you. Their gazes wrap around you, suffocating you. It's hard to breathe, hard to see your worth, to see your own beauty, because every morning when you look in the mirror, you see everything you aren’t.
You’ve built a wall. You’ve painted someone else onto your mirrors, someone you want to see because society has formed the model you must aspire to be.
Every now and then, you peek behind the painting, but you quickly step back because you’ve failed to become the "other." All that’s left is you—a beautiful you—tucked beneath the layers of expectations that others have thrown on you, expectations you can never fulfill. Because we can never be someone else when we are our self.
How could you possibly be the "other"? Where would the "other" fit inside you? There’s no reason to try, because you have your own heart, your own soul, your body, and your mind. You’ve been wearing the clothes of the "other," but they will never penetrate your being.
So, you failed to become the woman you painted on your mirrors, and in the process, you’ve suppressed your self. Where do you stand now? In the middle of nowhere. You hate yourself and you’ve failed to become the "other."
Where are you now? How do you feel when you get home and take off the "other's" clothes?
When will you begin to remove the painting from your mirrors and replace it with the portrait of your self?
Pick up that shovel and rid yourself of the dirt that has been thrown over you your entire life. Show me. Show us. I beg you. We need you to express yourself. We cannot survive without you.
Let us see your self-portrait.
I love you. We love you. And you need to love you. Just allow yourself to be the beauty you’ve always been.