⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

Can’t miss gems of the weird and wonderful

😇There Is No Happy Life Without Honesty: A podcast on the importance of authentic expression for healthy relationships and a fulfilling life. Click here to listen.

🪐The Colorful Constellations of Judy Schmidt: Cleaning up old Hubble telescope data to produce radiant images of galaxies and nebulae. See them here.

🎹Watch This Movie: Soul is an imaginative animated journey exploring what gives us our spark for living. Best animated film I’ve seen in years. Watch it on Disney+.

🎇New Year’s at The Needle: A stunning fireworks and light show merging the physical and digital using sky-mapping technology.Watch it here.

🤖Dall-E: An AI that generates unique images based on what you write. It’s truly astonishing we have trained neural networks to do this. Check it out here.

🎇 Image of The Week

Once in a while you come across a photo that you swear must be photoshopped. This one fall into that category for me. Here the Aurora Borealis appears as a giant phoenix. And yes, it’s real. It was taken by Hallgrimur Helgason in Iceland on a cold September morning in 2016.

💌 Send Your Love

There are people in your life that love you. People in your life that would miss you deeply if you were gone.

The principle of Memento Mori begs us to remember that someday we will die and in so doing we might live with a little more reverence and respect for the short time we have on this earth.

When we wrestle with our eventual “goneness” we can take actions we wouldn’t have considered otherwise. Here’s one that takes only a minute but could lead to a wealth of meaning down the road:

Randomly send your loved ones heartfelt audio messages saying “I love you.”

If tragedy strikes and you’re suddenly removed from this life they will cherish those messages immensely.

Listening to it in the future could offer them some small comfort as they reconnect to the love in and sound of your voice.

🚣‍♀️ Happiness That Humanity Has Not Known

Soak up these marvelous words from the ubermensch himself, Friedrich Nietzsche:

“Anyone who manages to experience the history of humanity as a whole as his own history will feel in an enormously generalized way all the grief of an invalid who thinks of health, of an old man who thinks of the dream of his youth, of a lover deprived of his beloved, of the martyr whose ideal is perishing, of the hero on the evening after a battle that has decided nothing but brought him wounds and the loss of his friend.

But if one endured, if one could endure this immense sum of grief of all kinds while yet being the hero who, as the second day of battle breaks, welcomes the dawn and his fortune, being a person whose horizon encompasses thousands of years, past and future, being the heir of all the nobility of all past spirit – an heir with a sense of obligation, the most aristocratic of old nobles and at the same time the first of a new nobility – the like of which no age has yet seen or dreamed of; if one could burden one’s soul with all of this – the oldest, the newest, losses, hopes, conquests, and the victories of humanity; if one could finally contain all this in one soul and crowd it into a single feeling – this would surely have to result in a happiness that humanity has not known so far: the happiness of a god full of power and love, full of tears and laughter, a happiness that, like the sun in the evening, continually bestows its inexhaustible riches, pouring them into the sea, feeling richest, as the sun does, only when even the poorest fishermen is still rowing with ‘golden oars! This godlike feeling would then be called – humaneness.”

🤓 Learn This Word

Meraki: A Greek word that means “to do something with passion, with absolute devotion, with undivided attention.  No matter how difficult a task, it is done with all your effort, with enthusiasm, with eagerness, with complete love; it is done with all your heart, a labour of love.”

⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked classic HighExistence article

Consolations from the Forest: Life-Altering Wisdom from Six Months Alone in a Siberian Cabin

In February of 2010, philosopher-writer Sylvain Tesson took a hiatus from his fast-paced city life and headed for a small cabin on the banks of Lake Baikal in Russia. With a hearty supply of pasta, tabasco, vodka, and Nietzsche, Tesson embarked upon the impressive 3-day journey from Irkutsk to the western shores of the deepest lake in the world, where he planned to spend six months in solitude. His consequent book, Consolations of the Forest, is a collection of journal entries written during that time, not to mention an inspiring and galvanizing peek into the vast realm of retreat.

If his reasons for going sound familiar, or at the very least intriguing, you too may be prime for a retreat of your own:

I talked too much
I wanted silence
Too behind with my mail and too many people to see
I was jealous of Crusoe
It’s better heated than my place in Paris
Tired of running errands
So I can scream and live naked
Because I hate the telephone and traffic noise

But before we get into some sage yet refreshingly unabashed admissions from this intrepid explorer, let’s address the pertinence of ‘the retreat’ with relation to our own lives.

[Keep Reading]

🎬 Endnote

We enjoyed leading the “Follow Your Bliss” workshop this past weekend. People joined in from all over the world. Here’s a small nugget of appreciation from one of the attendees:

“I wasn’t sure what to expect – but it definitely exceeded my expectations. This workshop was very valuable and I will definitely revisit and reflect on my notes from this. This filled me up with some great energy to keep dreaming, moving and shifting.”

Although the live event has passed, you can still enroll to access the workshop recording.

On a separate note, I appreciate so many of you responding to my questions regarding what you need help with this year. I’m moving through them slowly, giving each reply proper attention and care.

We hope you enjoyed this issue of Down The Rabbit Hole. Feel free to reply and tell us what you think.

With Wonder,

Mike Slavin & The HighExistence Team

P.S. Did a friend forward you this email? Read previous issues and sign-up to receive future issues here: https://highexistence.com/rabbithole