Mike Slavin • December 6, 2020 • 3 min read

Remember The Breath

⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

Can’t miss gems of the weird and wonderful

🚀The Slash App: Get more done than ever before with an app designed to keep you in flow by focusing less on “to-dos” and more on DOING. Learn more here.

🔍 Carl Jung’s Fantastical Retreat: Uncommon rituals can serve as the creative catalyst for some of history’s brightest thinkers. Read about Carl Jung’s here.

💜 Practicing Loving Kindness: A beautiful article exploring the value of loving kindness meditation to promote flourishing relationships with others and compassion towards yourself. Read more here.

⛅️ Cloud Appreciation Society: An unusual organization devoted to celebrating the beauty of clouds. Read their manifesto here.

⏭ The Thing From The Future: A award-winning imagination game that challenges players to envision alternative futures. Learn more here.

🎇 Image of The Week

This is a special photo. This vibrantly colored bird is the South Philippine Dwarf Kingfisher. This is the first photo of a fledgling ever captured. It was taken on March 11th, 2020 by Dr. Miguel David De Leon.

🧘‍♀️ Remember The Breath

You’re likely reading this email on your phone, if not, a tablet or laptop. Using these magical devices, there are millions of digital places you could be right now.

I’m grateful that somehow through all of the noise, you managed to find your way here. And you could click away at any second so our time here could really be quite brief.

But for just a moment, while I have it, I’d like to point your attention to your breath. It might be a hectic day, it’s certainly been a hectic year, and we all can benefit from small reminders to turn our senses inward, let the chaos of daily life momentarily fade into the background, and focus on our breath.

If you would just take a slow, deep breath in filling your lungs until you naturally feel ready to exhale. If it feels right, allow yourself to sigh while you exhale to help release some tension.

Let’s do that again. Deep breath. Full lungs. Exhale. Sigh.

One more time. Go ahead. You know the motions.

There. If you followed along, I hope you enjoyed taking that brief pause with me. As you go about your day, especially as you feel yourself getting stressed, remember the breath and the peace that waits within it.

🦒 The Feeling of Universal Oddity

A wonder-provoking passage from Alan Watts on the foundational weirdness of the world:

“It is a special kind of enlightenment to have this feeling that the usual, the way things normally are, is odd—uncanny and highly improbable. G. K. Chesterton once said that it is one thing to be amazed at a gorgon or a griffin, creatures which do not exist; but it is quite another and much higher thing to be amazed at a rhinoceros or a giraffe, creatures which do exist and look as if they don’t.

This feeling of universal oddity includes a basic and intense wondering about the sense of things. Why, of all possible worlds, this colossal and apparently unnecessary multitude of galaxies in a mysteriously curved space-time continuum, these myriads of differing tube-species playing frantic games of one-upmanship, these numberless ways of ‘doing it’ from the elegant architecture of the snow crystal or the diatom to the startling magnificence of the lyrebird or the peacock?”

🤓 Learn This Word

Ubuntu: This is a word from southern Africa meaning “I am because we are” or “humanity towards others.” It can also be used in reference to “the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity.”