self relationship & exploration

First, you possess imperfect knowledge of yourself. You may think you want something up until the moment you’ve attained it, only to discover that having is not so pleasing a thing as wanting .

So many high-achieving people get trapped into obsessing about the external world and neglecting their internal world. When you’ve been suppressing things for so long, you can’t just decide to stop all at once. Learning to listen to yourself takes a long time. I used to think that I always had to justify everything to myself—that I needed to be

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Perhaps a more productive framework, then, is to focus on the accuracy of our self-knowledge, also known as self-awareness. How close to reality is your understanding of yourself at this moment? To what extent are you deceiving yourself when you call yourself a loser, ugly, dumb, or the smartest person in the room? Do you know your values, and how... See more

Before you begin meditating, it’s really helpful to adopt a permissive attitude towards your current state: however I am right now, it is fine. I like reminding myself that I don’t need to do anything to receive sensation—the universe will keep on being the universe, and interesting data will come to me, I don’t have to force anything. This can... See more

A large percentage of people’s problems in work, love and life are due to some combination of vagueness and passivity. You don’t know what you want to spend your time on; you don’t know what kind of person you really get along with; you don’t know what kind of clothing looks good to you; you don’t know what you value in a city; you don’t know how... See more

And, fundamentally, a critical attitude towards the current situation is detrimental to collectedness—it’s much easier to focus when you accept your current thoughts and emotions. Thus the most powerful meditation prompt I’ve ever heard, from Loch Kelly: “What is here now if there's no problem to solve?”