Dare to meet life intimately


Dare to meet life intimately.

Life will only be as fulfilling as the depth with which we’re willing to meet it.

Surface-level connections will fulfill us… at the surface.

But our depths crave intimacy and sharing. Intimacy craves depth, not masks and walls.

What if we stopped holding life at arm’s length?

What if we entered into an intimate relationship with all that is?

What if we were willing to walk through life…

… holding everything with care and protection

… seeing fully

… being seen fully

… open

… being opened

… sharing

… embracing what is, not what we think should be

… releasing masks and performance

… touching and being touched

… loving wholeheartedly

… being moved by life?

The tragedy is that we’ve narrowed down the idea of “intimacy” to something that only happens behind closed doors. (Another tragedy is that sex does not necessarily include intimacy—sometimes, it’s anything but.)

But why not be intimate in every realm of our lives? 

Why not share deeply during lunchtime?

Why not be willing to be moved by a random conversation in line at the drugstore?

Why not hold with care what you see on your walk?

Intimacy is everywhere, if we have the courage to meet it: a type of quantum entanglement that thrills in knowing us—as we know ourselves—more and more fully.

An intimate life is a gift to humanity.

Why not live life as if it were a love letter to the planet?

Laugh until you snort on a regular basis


Laugh until you snort on a regular basis.

I think this one’s pretty self-explanatory.

But in case you’re not convinced laughing can actually shift a paradigm, consider this:

  • Laughter can actually help the nervous system shift out of a fight or flight response.

  • Laughing releases endorphins.

  • Laughter enhances social bonds.

If a story elicits a laugh, it’s probably because we’re seeing something from a different perspective, opening up other possibilities.

What do all of these have in common? They help us grow.

So, really, laughter is evolutionary. 

That’s the paradigm shift: we can evolve through laughter, not pain.

Welcome to The Pleasure Paradigm: choosing pleasure IS the paradigm shift.

Go forth and get your laugh on.

Don’t you love it when homework is easy?

The best tool I ever learned


Replace judgment with curiosity.

This is one of the best tools I ever learned.

Instead of immediately adding my judgment to a situation, if I add curiosity I can expand my understanding—and if I can expand my understanding, I might be able to help transform a problem, instead of just being ticked off about it.

So, instead of:

“What a dumb idea, I can’t believe they did that, what a nincompoop!”

It becomes:

“How interesting that they are a nincompoop. I wonder why?”

(This also applies to my own nincompoopery. And to yours.)

This helps me to see the factors at play that produced said nincompoopery: the conditions, desires, and needs that led someone to believe nincompoopery was their best option.

And when I can understand that the behavior was a result of a variety of factors—and have compassion for it—I can start to imagine how to shift some of the factors that perpetuate nincompoopery, and OFFER OTHER POSSIBILITIES.

(To be clear: This does not mean we excuse or tolerate bad behavior. I’ve said this before, and I’ll continue to say it: just because we can become aware of the conditions that led someone to choose bad behavior—or worse, violence, abuse, destruction, neglect—does not mean anyone is absolved of their actions. We are all accountable for our actions. And, the only way to change behavior is to offer other options—when we can practice curiosity, we can better fathom off-ramps from destructive behavior and provide alternatives.)

Curiosity is generative. Judgment is not.

There’s a time and place for judgment—but there are so many things that need the fuel of curiosity to help drive actual transformation.

More often than not, judgment is stagnant; it stops the exploration, and the evolution. Judgment is seductive—it feels good to judge someone for bad behavior, like we’re aligning with the high ground. The problem is, it rarely spurs change. And if you truly want real change, then judgment just isn’t the right tool.

Next time you find yourself judging—someone, something, or yourself—see if you can add curiosity to see what conditions produced the thing you’re judging.

This is where the wiggle room is. And wiggle room provides the off-ramp from nincompoopery.

This is how we act in partnership with what life is actually presenting, rather than what we think it SHOULD be presenting and judging it for not doing that. And acting in partnership with reality is the only way to shift it.

Why value emotional intelligence?


Intelligence is a good thing. Thinking is a good thing. Intellect is a good thing. Reason is a good thing. Thoughtfulness is a good thing.

Here’s the thing: emotions have intelligence.

They are also a good thing.

When we develop the skills to listen to them, rather than tamp them down, we are actually amplifying our intelligence.

Emotions are information. They are data-conveying states that arise from the body’s experience of life.

If we dismiss our emotions in favor of our “rational” thoughts, we are dismissing half of our body’s own lived experience. Basically, it’s like gaslighting ourselves.

Not so intelligent.

Emotions exist for a reason: to communicate to us what we need and desire, and as part of the elegant human feedback system.

Emotions try to get us to course correct when needs and desires aren’t being met (fear, grief, anger, e.g.), and to feel satiated when they are (joy, pride, awe, e.g.). 

When emotions work in tandem with our reason, they are an elegant alignment system. 

To attempt to reason our way out of feeling emotion is to shut down a major line of communication—all of that rich information.

Our bodies have their own natural intelligence. When we learn to tune into it all, we give ourselves more awareness, which equals more ways to navigate ourselves and our lives.

That is powerful. That is power. That is human power. Why not use it all?

Why not be human and love humanness?

What could change in the world if we acted more human, not less?

From where I sit, we are living in an increasingly anti-sensory, anti-human world.

So much of life asks us to show up as brains, with bodies in tow as afterthoughts or inconveniences.

Emotions, exhaustion, illness, inconsistency, injury, are considered liabilities.

Have you ever asked yourself: liabilities to what?

Our humanness is a liability to systems that require relentless productivity, predictability, replication, perfection: all those things machines do so they can keep feeding a bigger machine.

But we are bodies.

We are soft around the edges. We intake life, and that affects us physically, emotionally, spiritually—as individuals, and as a collective.

We output life, and that affects us physically, emotionally, spiritually. We have needs and desires that must be met.

But we’ve lost sight of the true needs of humans in an attempt to model ourselves on machine-like perfection.

Humans need healthy connection with other humans. We need to be held. We need healthy pleasure. We need joy and rest and to feel our own fire. We need purpose and community. We need a healthy environment. We need to feel sunlight, clean water, rich soil.

But we’ve treated these as negotiables, afterthoughts, non-essentials—in service to our brains.

Somehow, that became “reasonable.”

The idea of perfection is lovely. Productivity can feel good. Consistency is a fantastic skill.

But there is no movement in perfection—if it changes, it is no longer perfect—so it holds itself rigid and impenetrable until it cracks under the strain.

Perfection cracks because life is change. Life is movement, fluid, sensory, material, and messy.

Our bodily intelligence is what takes in all of this data and feeds it to the brain so it can discern how to feel and act—but we’ve been getting this backwards, assuming it’s our brains that should instruct our bodies. 

Unknowingly, we’ve pit our beliefs against our nervous systems.

What if we flipped the script? What if we knew the body held prized intelligence?

What if we could learn to tune in to our bodily and emotional intelligence and then combine that with the knowledge and beliefs in our brains?

Then, we get to fulfill our purpose—not to be just really smart disembodied brains, but to be wholly human.

Humanful.

Then, feeding our brains with new knowledge and skills becomes an amazing asset to building happy, healthy lives—together.

Let’s do that.