Mindful Matter
Q&A with Daren Thomas Magee
This month’s art is by California-based illustrationist, Daren Thomas Magee. Daren is inspired by the human condition and hopes that his art resonates within all who experience it. He believes, "Tracing back far enough we’re all kin. It's vitally important to remember that as much as possible. It can provide a deeper sense of empathy for our fellow humans." For a little more about Daren, here's a short Q&A! Where is home for you? The beautiful Valley of the Moon, Ojai, California. What is your definition of a successful life? A successful life is one where you had the ability and space to express yourself fully without restraints or restrictions. Describe your perfect day. Early morning coffee. Create art. Spend quality time with my family. Go to bed peacefully with nothing weighing on my conscience. How did you get into design? I’ve always had an interest in how design influences our world. I started arranging things at an early age and delivered them to the world in whatever form I could accomplish. Having no classical training I’ve never been bound by any preset rules of the industry. Where do you find inspiration? Nature provides the greatest inspiration to me. It has no ego and exists purely based on how it best fits in its environment. What's your dream design project? Something huge, like billboard size! Which designers or thinkers influence/inspire you? Terrence McKenna and his willingness to explore the depths of his conscience has been an inspiration to me for a long time. What was the inspiration behind this design? I work with hands a lot. They are the most versatile tool in the animal kingdom. I am so grateful for their endless abilities and love finding new ways to use them in design. At the moment, what is your favorite… Color: Army Green Food: Sushi Song: ‘Around the Horn’ by Phosphorescent Quote: “You don't look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you.” -Alan Watts
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The chairman of the mind.
I am the kind of person whose mind doesn’t stop racing. It is my default mode; I’m constantly thinking through what has happened and what could be — avoiding, at all costs, the present moment. At times, I like to think of this as an asset that helps me come up with new ideas. But most of the time, this non-stop background dialogue is distracting, exhausting, and often anxiety-inducing. My mind will replay something that went wrong until I thoroughly feel horrible. Or, it starts randomly highlighting all the things on my never ending to-do list or surfacing all the things that could go wrong with our upcoming round of production. Listening to a recent Tim Ferris interview with physicist Safi Bahcall, I was reminded that I’m not alone. In fact, Safi has come up with a pretty clever way of working with — not against — the thoughts that attempt to hijack our minds, time, and energy. He suggests that we begin by personifying each type of thought. For example, the voice that is constantly replaying that bad investment you made months ago — call that voice Mr. Money. The voice that is constantly creating concerns about what could go wrong on your next camping trip — call that voice Concerned Camper. The voice that keeps obsessing about the moment you made a mistake at work — say hello to Worried Worker. And on and on, repeating for each voice in your head that is fighting for your attention. Safi, calls this the “Chairman of the Mind” technique (though feel free to call it the Chairwoman or Chairperson of the Mind technique too). He explains how he visualizes a mock “board meeting” when his thoughts are getting the best of him: “You start by assuming positive intent. The character that’s stewing about the work, you thank them for their thoughts and you say... ‘I hear you — the reason you’re replaying this video in my head is that something happened today and you’re replaying that video over and over; there’s a very good reason that you’re doing that, and I appreciate that because you’re watching out for me. You want me to learn the lesson from that video.’ … You analyze it and you say, ‘Here’s what you’re trying to tell me. It’s this lesson. I said this stupid thing to my boss. I really shouldn’t do that. in this situation, here’s what I should do.’ And then you ask… ‘Did I get the lesson right?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Was that good?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Do you want to keep going, or was that enough for tonight?’… ‘No, we’re done.’ Boom, sits down. Then you go to the next… You start by thanking it for watching out for you. Assume positive intent. Instead of making enemies with your thoughts and trying to suppress them, you become partners with them, friends with them. Now, you walk through one by one, each of the three or four or five characters that were playing videos or audio about stuff that happened that day that you are stewing about. You just walk around the table. As soon as you’re done, as soon as the last person says, ‘Okay, I’m done,’ you feel this incredible calm… Because these guys are done.” In Safi’s experience, these voices — like people — just want our acknowledgment. And when we take a moment, hear them out, and seek the lessons, the thoughts dissipate and we are better for having learned from them. I was lying in bed the other night with thoughts racing and I gave this a try. To my surprise, I found it to be an effective, even enjoyable, way to acknowledge and organize the thoughts in my mind. Taking this technique a bit further, I have found that writing is an incredible way of getting thoughts out of my head and onto the page. We built Reflection.app for that exact reason. Beyond just being an oasis for your thoughts, Reflection.app guides you every month through a monthly review so you can identify patterns and set new intentions. I like to think of it as a Vice-Chair to my Board of Directors :-) Dave RadparvarCo-Founder, Holstee
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Time brings perspective, reflection brings clarity.
The Stoics, in all their practical wisdom, were advocates of reflection. Famed Stoic philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca captured the importance of reflection in this quote that I love: “I will keep constant watch over myself and — most usefully — will put each day up for review. For this is what makes us evil — that none of us looks back upon our own lives. We reflect upon only that which we are about to do. And yet our plans for the future descend from the past.” — Seneca It’s a powerful reminder. Over the past few months, I have moved my own reflection practice to Reflection.app — our new web-based app that organizes your Highlights, Lowlights, and Free Writes into a private and secure digital journal. Hands-down what I value most about the app is the guided Monthly Review. Looking back gives me a chance to revisit and feel grateful for all the beautiful moments I experienced over the past month. At the same time, it also gives me a chance to learn from and find peace with unfortunate events and challenging moments. Epictetus, a former slave whose pursuit of wisdom led him to become one of Stoicism’s most analytical thinkers, once said: “The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control.” — Epictetus Inspired in part by this Stoic approach, our Monthly Review includes a simple yet powerful framework for processing the month’s more challenging moments. For each Lowlight, you are prompted to ask yourself: “Was this within your control?” Then, there is an important follow up. Here is a preview: For Lowlights within your control, you’re asked: What would you do differently next time? For Lowlights outside of your control, you’re asked: How can you find peace with this? By revisiting my Lowlights days or weeks later, I have the distance I need to understand my experiences, emotions and actions — and view them with a more equanimous state of mind, seeing them without judgment but rather with the goal of finding peace and growth. It’s incredible how much perspective a bit of time can bring. Dave RadparvarCo-Founder, Holstee P.S. One of the most powerful features of Reflection.app is the way your daily journaling feeds directly into your Monthly Reviews, which feed directly into your End-of-Year Review. Our End-of-Year Review template launches in the coming weeks; sign up for Reflection.app now to get notified. P.P.S. We have released a ton of updates to Reflection.app in the past few weeks, including a bunch of bug fixes, new authentication options, and a roadmap to track your feature requests.
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Gearing Up for the Holstee Membership 2020
We launched the Holstee Membership four years ago as a monthly guided deep-dive into 12 mindful themes to help you slow down and carve out time for meaningful reflection and growth. Since then, we have been actively listening to our members to find ways to make this monthly exploration more insightful, inspiring, valuable, and fun. For 2020, our goal for the membership was to create space — more space for you to reflect and more space for us to dive deeper into the activities, research, and wisdom we have on each theme (without letting all that paper pile up). For this next evolution we have decided to replace our monthly printed Holstee Guide with a new Holstee Pocket Journal. This passport-size notebook is designed for on-the-go reflection. You can now capture your daily experiences and reflect on the month’s theme anytime, anywhere. Each monthly pocket journal will dive into one of our core themes through writing prompts, inspiring theme-based quotes, and a guided end-of-month review. We will keep the deeper content and research and take it a bit further with more nuggets of wisdom and inspiration. This content will live in a Digital Guide, with access to theme-specific activities and philosophies in one robust resource each month. Available as a printer-friendly PDF, there will be more space for you to go deeper if you choose. And of course, let’s not forget the Monthly Art! We will continue to include a high-quality letterpress print designed by artists from around the world in each pack. Not much changing here since our monthly designs are a crowd favorite. :-) For those who only want the art sent to them in the mail (and not the Pocket Journal) we will continue to offer our Art Membership with online access to the new Digital Guides. If you aren’t yet a Member, your first month is on us! Just use the code TRYHOLSTEE at checkout. To what lies ahead! Mike and Dave RadparvarCo-Founders, Holstee
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Understanding value in the stock market — and in life.
During a finance class I took in college, I learned an important lesson about the stock market — but also about life. I learned that the current state of reality can be overshadowed by expectations. For example, if a publicly traded company's sales or earnings fall short of analyst expectations, it can cause the company's valuation (and stock price) to drop — even if the company is otherwise performing well. This is because the current market valuation usually includes future expectations (sales, expenses, market growth, etc). While this is an important reality of the stock market, it doesn't need to be how we evaluate our own lives. In other words, we don't need to compare how things are with how we expected them to be in order to determine the value of what we have right now. This comparison trap makes it very hard to feel gratitude in the present moment. Our fixation on ‘what was’ and ‘what could be’ makes it difficult to see ‘what is’. It isn’t that we need to be grateful for everything. But in every moment, if we open ourselves to it, there is something to be grateful for. Dave RadparvarCo-Founder, Holstee
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Q&A with Kristi Nelson
Kristi Nelson is the Executive Director of A Network for Grateful Living (Gratefulness.org) and has dedicated her life to nonprofit leadership, fundraising, and organizational development. She’s passionate about strengthening organizations committed to progressive social and spiritual change. For a little more about Kristi, here's a short Q&A! For those who received November's 2019 Gratitude Kit, as a part of our monthly Holstee Membership, you will notice that some pieces of this Q&A are featured in the guide! “I see gratitude as an inside-job, available to us in great abundance if we make it a moment-to-moment practice so that we don’t take life - and its existing gifts - for granted.” — Kristi Nelson What is it that makes you feel most alive? First thoughts: Nature. Love. Light. Poetry. Especially when I get to experience them all at the same time. I am captivated by love for nature and the nature of love, love of light and the light of love, and the essential poetry of it all. And of course it is gratitude for every speck of what inspires aliveness that brings me even more alive. The longer I live, the more I am enlivened by being a student of Life in all its moments and manifestations. Knowing that I can learn from everything deeply experienced, I would like to believe that I come alive in the whole “great fullness” of life. What initially drew you to the work you are doing now? I was always wired for gratitude, but when I was diagnosed with stage IV cancer in my early 30’s, my capacity for appreciating life - and everything in it - grew to a whole new level. Gratefulness now offered an enhanced articulation and framework for how I related to life. It was like mindfulness + gratitude + reverence + love, all in one. I began to look for a lifestyle that could embrace all of that, and allow me to practice with my heart and eyes wide open. I found it. What do people tend to get wrong about gratitude? We tend to reserve gratitude for the moments when circumstances and people deliver the exact experience we are looking for. This can turn into a kind of hustle for more and more gratitude-inducing moments. Like the pursuit of happiness, it can put gratitude beyond us and turn it into something we need to orchestrate and await. I see gratitude as an inside-job, available to us in great abundance if we make it a moment-to-moment practice so that we don’t take life - and its existing gifts - for granted. What is your definition of a successful life? Love as a vibrantly active verb. Success is that the people we love know that we love them. They feel it, hear it, see it. But not just our small, chosen circles. A successful life would mean that a much more diverse and vast swath of humanity gets included among those “people we love” so that less and less of the world need wonder whether they are loved. Loving that way is available to us in every moment. The challenge is to step up to every interaction and opportunity with our most generous hearts on the line. How do you want to be remembered? That I was simply, relentlessly, intensely grateful for the opportunity to live and love every day, and that I sought not to take this privilege - or any of my privileges and blessings - for granted.
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