I’m back home in Charlotte with my folks – feels good.
Having been away from the States for almost a year, I find myself nitpicking the way us Americans live. Small things like the our car-dominated lifestyle, or how little prāna our produce has are now seen in a whole new light. Perhaps we just don’t know that there are more connected, harmonious ways to live? Perhaps we would rather have our convenience, even at the expense of our health?
I don’t know. And frankly I don’t mind. I’m just grateful to be with my family and friends, and to be surrounded by their love and support.
In other news, I already have 4 people registered for my upcoming Perfect Posture Workshop. That feels good; most people hop on board at the last second, which can be a bit stressful.
Make sure to check out the details page – I think you’ll get a lot out of the workshop. As always, it’ll be recorded for scheduling conflicts.
Anyways…I hope you enjoy this week’s {Body} • {Mind} • {Soul} Newsletter and have a beautiful Sunday, - Ethan ॐ
When most people think of superfoods, they imagine exotic berries from distant rainforests or rare roots hidden in remote mountains. But the most powerful healing food on Earth grows on low, scrubby bushes in plain sight: wild blueberries.
Don't confuse these tiny powerhouses with their larger, cultivated cousins sold in most grocery stores. The difference between wild and cultivated blueberries is a landslide — exponentially more concentrated nutrition and healing compounds.
Wild blueberries have adapted to climate fluctuations over tens of thousands of years, developing more than 100 variable strains that ensure their species can never be completely eradicated.
“No other food on the planet has the ability to thrive in such trying conditions. It is the number-one adaptogen, period — even though it is not recognized as an adaptogenic food at all. There is more information in one wild blueberry plant than there is on the entire Internet.”
This resilience translates directly into healing power for your body. Wild blueberries contain the highest concentration of antioxidants of any food on the planet. They excel at heavy metal detoxification, particularly mercury, aluminum, and copper — toxins that accumulate in modern life and disrupt neurological function. They're also unmatched as brain food, supporting cognitive function, memory, and nervous system repair.
Remarkably, unlike every other fruit on the planet, freezing wild blueberries actually increases their nutritional potency. The stress of withstanding freezing temperatures pushes the fruit to perform at peak capacity, providing greater bioavailability of their healing compounds.
It is commonly said that identification with thought is the spiritual reason for the sufferings of the mind. But what exactly does that mean?
To be identified with a thought is to make the thought ‘me’ or ‘part of me’. For instance, when one thinks “I am a human,” or “I don’t know what’s going on here” the mind accidentally becomes convinced that who they are is the thing they are thinking about — that the thought is true in some ultimate, transcendental sense.
Actually, “becomes convinced” isn’t even the right phrasing to describe this process, because when identification with thought is strong enough, there simply is no alternative to it. The mind is not merely “convinced” (as though it were persuaded by a sound argument), but rather the ego structure takes it as an undeniable fact that it is what it says it is.
Essentially, identifying with a thought shifts one from merely being to the idea of being. Do you see the difference? You are not merely feeling the impersonal sensations of, say, confusion; you have become the illusory concept of one who is confused.
To the untrained mind, identification with thought does not seem so devastating an error. Where is the harm in identifying with the thought of having blue eyes, if one indeed has blue eyes?
The harm caused by such an act can be quite subtle: (1) identifying with a thought demands that a defense be mounted when the thought is ever challenged and (2) the inevitability of changing phenomena means whatever one identifies with will eventually dissolve.
I’ll go into detail on these two trap doors next week, but for now please enjoy a meditation to help you see how a thought is not actually you.
Meditate Bite-sized audios to help you become the master of your mind.
“At the center of the Universe dwells the Great Spirit. And that center is really everywhere. It is within each of us.” — Black Elk
If you imagine the Universe as an ever-expanding sphere, logic suggests there must be a center to it — an origin point from which the entire Cosmos ballooned outward.
Miraculously, according to physics, this isn't how reality works. There simply is no fixed geometrical center to the Universe. No matter how far you travel through space, you will always remain at the center of what you can observe.
This isn't a limitation of perspective — it's a fundamental truth about the nature of existence itself. Wherever you go, whatever you do, whenever you do it, your spirit — a fractal of Great Spirit — is at the very heart of it all.
Journal Contemplative questions on the nature of inner freedom.