Hot Tub Spirituality

I then entered the classic California pipeline: when worldly pleasures fail you, attempt to locate the happiness without conditions. I became a self-therapy and meditation nerd, and, as a result, I achieved a much greater level of embodiment. I realized that I’d been stuck in my head for my whole life — that this is not a figure of speech, but a... See more

It’s disorienting that I don’t really have the experience of “choosing” anymore. It’s also hard to even really imagine the old way of being, which involved mentally simulating some future existence I might want to have, and then mentally flailing against the present moment in a futile effort to drag myself towards that imagined future.

A psychotechnology is anything that can alter your relationship with self, from mainstream talk therapy, to all kinds of meditation, to newfangled forms of therapy like IFS, etcetera. Different psychotechnologies will be more or less appropriate to a given individual. Some will be powerful in combination. There is no one “path,” although some... See more

Deep Okayness is not the feeling that I am awesome all the time. Instead, it is the total banishment of self-loathing. It is the deactivation of the part of my mind that used to attack itself. It’s the closure of the self as an attack surface. It’s the intuitive understanding that I am merely one of the apertures through which the universe... See more

In practice, this felt like releasing tension. A healthy inner space was created between me and the dirty kid in my mind. That person wasn’t identical to me, I was not my history. Simultaneously, though, I didn’t need to reject that person, either. This act of acceptance triggered a whole-body relaxation. It was like opening up a lens: unclenching... See more