Author: Joel

Nerves and Non-violence

May 2, 2026

Your nervous system is perfect. It has been honed over many years to keep you safe and to help you interact with others in meaningful ways. You may think you are overly sensitive at times, but there is no such thing as being too sensitive (or too emotional). You just need to understand the task: to utilize your nervous system’s powerful precision to respond to all the stimuli you encounter in the world. You deserve the chance to figure out how you feel about everything, how everything that has ...  Keep reading

Forget Yourself

April 11, 2026

When you were a child, your first thought when you woke up in the morning was not about productivity – all the things you had to get done in the day. You woke up everyday with something interesting you wanted to work on – something beautiful in mind to create. When you were your most creative self, it was as if “time” and “days” didn’t exist. You were literally inside the drawing or the song or the Lego building with which you had, at the time, ...  Keep reading

Being Fluid

March 11, 2026

The world can make you hard. Over time, as you consistently brace yourself against what threatens you, the rigidity calcifies in your muscles. The world is harsh and demanding, but you have also been harsh and demanding toward yourself. You have constructed a set of rules (knowingly or not), against which you are always measuring yourself (and others). That has only served to close you off to the world around and protect you from landing and lodging yourself in the world as your most authentic ...  Keep reading

Non-violence

Slowing Down Becomes Non-Violence

February 1, 2026

Given a long enough timeline, you can do anything. The work must happen on the inside, which means you must slow down. That is what all this inner work is aimed at doing: giving you control over your internal experience. Meditation, then, is not just an end in itself (trying to rid yourself of thoughts). It is a practice that is fundamental to redeeming everything that has come from outside you and has become your inner experience. Once you ...  Keep reading

Your Orientation Matters

December 13, 2025

So much of our consternation and anxiety come about because we are oriented against the way life is. When you’re oriented toward always being right, it hurts real bad to be wrong. When you are oriented toward being perfect, you get defensive when it is insinuated you are not. And when you are oriented toward projecting a certain image to the world, you brace yourself against anything less being portrayed. All this fighting against the natural way of things creates anxiety. We spend a lot of ...  Keep reading

Deconstruction

Free God

November 29, 2025

It’s not that I don’t believe in God. It’s that I don’t believe in your God – the one you have made in your image and that seeks to protect and preserve only the people you can tolerate, excluding the people who are not like you and do not believe like you do. God is not who you think God is. And God is not who your religion says God is. If that were so, then God would be small and containable inside your finite brain. God is not who I think God is, either. God is bigger than that.

We ...  Keep reading

Growth

Reaching Out

November 22, 2025

Anytime you reach a paradox, or what appears to be a dead end or an impasse, it is time to reach out for something new. This is a creative process because what you are reaching out for has not been revealed or discovered yet. It is reaching into new space and adding complexity, like cell mitosis. Complexity is what will help us now. There is too much “it has to be this way or that way,” in our discourse, too much blunt application of principles.

If you are going to build something beautiful, ...  Keep reading