I’m officially living life ‘down unda’! Australia’s been good to me, especially after the retreat—nice, quiet places to stay and a reverse of seasons submerging my skin in sun.
Integration from my retreat has been smooth, too. It’s always a mystery to me in which ways my life will have gotten better. All of my meditation retreats have been notoriously suffering-oriented—like walking through a thick blizzard where you can barely see a few inches ahead. That means at the time it’s totally unknown what’s being cleared energetically and mentally from my system.
You can watch my hour-long live Q&A about my meditation retreat experience here. I tried filming it for YouTube too, but the shot was completely out of focus the whole time 😂😅.
I’m in Melbourne with some friends for the next two weeks (until around Christmas time) after which I’ll be flying over to New Zealand to write my book for 3 months. You can read the Preface under the ‘About the Book’ tab here. I could not be more excited.
On that note, last week I mentioned starting a Kickstarter for the project, but after some reflection, the whole “all or nothing” approach made no sense. After all, I’m going to write this dang book whether I reach that goal or not! So I moved the campaign onto my website where people can pre-order an early + signed hardback copy any time before March.
Click here to see all that. It’s $22 for an early-release PDF of the book and $55 for a signed hardcopy plus the early PDF.
I hope you enjoy this week's {Body} • {Mind} • {Soul} Newsletter and have a beautiful Sunday, - Ethan ॐ
Ethan Hill Owner, Yoga with Ethan
Invisible weight
Physical weight gain is obvious—you can see it and feel it. But there's another form of excess weight most people carry without recognizing it: emotional accumulation that drags down the energy body.
Your energy body functions like an invisible circulatory system, distributing specific frequencies of light to each of your cells for proper functioning. And just as blood vessels and lymphatic channels can become congested, these energetic pathways clog and overflow when overloaded.
When you see someone with rounded, collapsed shoulders—perhaps that's you—you're witnessing someone carrying a very real, though entirely non-physical, weight pressing down on them.
The good news? The energy body can "lose weight" through processes remarkably similar to physical weight loss: detoxification, fasting, and exercise.
Learn more below.
Practice Step-by-step instructions to turn theory into healing.
Mind at 10,000x speed
If you've ever watched a YouTube video or listened to a podcast on 2x speed, you understand how much more presence is required to catch everything that's being said.
As you speed up further, this becomes even more pronounced. On 3x speed, you can no longer do tasks like driving or cooking. At 4x speed, you need captions.
And at 10x speed? Almost nothing can be made out—perhaps a word here or there.
But what if you sped that content to 10,000x speed? I've never done it before, but have no doubt it would be so fast and high-pitched as to not even make a sound. At that rate, you probably wouldn't even know anything was being played, let alone recognize the subject being spoken about.
Here’s the point:
Research shows there's a gap of about 1/10,000th of a second between when something happens and when your brain begins processing it. During these infinitesimally small gaps, countless mental formations arise and pass away—perceptual events so rapid and subtle that conscious awareness can't register them individually.
By the time you finish reading this sentence, tens of thousands of these mental formations will have arisen and dissolved.
What exactly are these formations "saying"? And are they shaping your experience, despite you not being consciously aware of them?
This is the subconscious mind—the vast stream of mental activity happening in the background of everyday life, so fast as to not exist. And yet, these formations run your life; they are the assumptions you have about how things work, assumptions which impact every single one of your behaviors.
Let me say it more plainly: you are being controlled by a silent program happening internally, a program which is effectively just a regurgitation of other people's assumptions and your own conditioning.
Learning to meditate, then, is about slowing down enough to catch these rapid-fire formations as they arise. Once you can see them, you can question them. And once you can question them, you can change them.
Practice with me below.
Meditate Bite-sized audios to help you become the master of your mind.
“The Great Way is not difficult for those with no preferences.” — The 3rd Patriarch of Zen Verses
Can you see? You are handcuffed to your own self-proclaimed needs, weighted down by their constant demands to tweak the way things naturally appear.
For those who are free from this attachment or resistance, nothing is staining or confining. Experiences are seen to bubble up, stay for some time, and then fall away. They’re understood to be completely neutral, neither personal nor impersonal.
So we allow things to come. And allow things to go. And allow ourselves to be taken care of in the way that we are taken care of. It really needn’t be more difficult than that.
Journal Contemplative questions on the nature of inner freedom.