This companion piece to this week’s episode. The podcast is the full, unedited, and raw version; this is just the rundown of what I talked about. You can listen to this episode on Spotify, and Apple Podcasts for audio only. Gerhard is in Finland at a summer cabin, Justin is in Miami with a new machine and two condenser microphones held up by candles, and somewhere between those two facts we ended up on discipline, resistance, and why almost nobody acts on the voice they have been hearing for years. Also a new word: menifest, which neither of us can now say correctly, so here is the rundown. Finland, and the thing every friend group says once. Two Jans and a Marina booked a summer cabin an hour and a half west of Helsinki and asked if I wanted to come, and it is their first time here and they cannot get over how calm it is. September is about the limit for cabin weather, after that it gets cold and dark and you lose the part that makes it worth it. Which led to the conversation every group of friends has at least once, about buying land together somewhere remote and keeping it for themselves. Neither of us knows anyone who has actually done it. Candles as microphone stands. Justin’s seven year old MacBook has been retired and the new one does not sound like a jet engine, which matters more than it should, because recording with condenser mics means killing the AC, the fridge, the storm doors, and waiting for a gap in the flight path over Miami. It took him two weeks to work out the old fan was on every recording. The mics currently stay in position thanks to two candles and a cord, which is either engineering or devotion depending on how you look at it. Working without a nine to five takes more discipline, not less. When you have a job or kids or employees, the day has a shape whether you like it or not. What we do has no shape at all, which sounds like freedom and is, and also means that if you want to learn audio engineering or get to the gym or keep any practice going, nobody is going to build the container for you. Priming. The morning routine is really one idea, which is connecting with yourself before you connect with the world. Meditation, nine minutes of stretching, journaling, coffee, and the phone in flight mode all night until after the espresso. Then, and only then, the world gets access to you. The struggle phase. Flow has four phases and the first one is struggle, which is the minute where you sit down and your body suddenly needs water, a walk, or your phone. Enormous numbers of people quit within touching distance of the chemicals they were about to get. You just have to sit through it. The six things. Koya’s list of morning habits is sunlight, movement, hydration before coffee, breathwork, no scrolling, and journaling, and Gerhard turned out to be doing all six without having read it. Justin adds ten or fifteen minutes of handpan, which is his version of journaling. Why the habits fall apart without a north star. All of it means nothing without something underneath it. Tony Robbins’ six human needs work as a ladder: certainty and safety, then variety, then significance, then connection and love, and those four make the last two possible, which are growth and, at the top, contribution. Once you know what you are of service to, the routines stop being hacks you read about and start being preparation for something that will ask everything of you. The gremlin wants you exactly where you are. Justin had six weeks of COVID and then five more days of not going to the gym, each one with its own excellent reason, the class time moved, it looked like rain, he had recording to do. Then he went, and by the walk home the motivation was back. This is the thing worth remembering: you do not wake up motivated and then act. You act, and the motivation catches up. Resistance is not a sign you picked the wrong thing, it shows up because you are about to change, and it never fully goes away. And the opposite trap. People build rigid routines and get so precious about them that one missed day ruins the week, which is just control wearing a healthier outfit. Some days you are travelling and cannot run or meditate, and that is fine. The trickster throws the ball out and trusts it comes back, sometimes late, sometimes in the shape of a butterfly. If you recognised yourself in this piece, you are not the only one. A lot of us get very good at achieving, performing, and solving problems for everyone else, and slowly lose track of our own voice along the way. Eleven Dunbar is a curated membership community of dreamers, builders, and founders: a place to play, connect, and grow together. A place to find your voice, find your people, and create the impossible, without doing it all alone. Our home is Elfen Town, a cozy virtual town that is open around the clock. Members drop in at any hour to work side by side, play without an agenda, and have the kind of conversations where you can be your actual self. Beyond the town there are live gatherings, in-person meet-ups, and people who notice when you go quiet. The community is capped at 150. The suffering artist is a myth. Very German romanticism, the idea that making anything real has to hurt. It had a founder version too, in San Francisco, where taking no salary was treated as a rite of passage. Both are stories, and neither is a requirement. Five years. Two conversations this week. A woman in her forties who started crying on a call because someone else finally said out loud what she had been feeling for years, and a man at a dinner in Miami who had made a big career change, who Justin guessed had been thinking about it for three years. It had been five. Almost everyone has a version of this, and what usually breaks the loop is something that jolts you, a death, an injury, a breakup, a job lost. The practices and the people are the alternative to waiting for the jolt. Two layers. There is the layer that needs healing, the nervous system and the wounds, and that work is real. Underneath it is something that was never damaged, the essence you arrived with, and it is not asking to be fixed. It already knows and it wants the best for you. The whole job is remembering it is there. Right relation. The phrase comes from a shaman Justin worked with, and it means your body and heart being in right relation with your surroundings. The useful part is that it takes the judgment out. A room that is not yours is not a bad room, and you are not broken for feeling wrong in it. It is just not yours. Practicing being human. There is a scene in Westworld where the robots keep talking to each other when nobody is watching, because they are practicing. That is what this podcast is, and what most good conversations are. The alternative is stacking it all up inside you, where it turns into resentment and gets ten times harder to move. The one nobody does. We tell everyone about the problem except the person it is actually about. Friends, family, anyone who will listen, while the other person stays oblivious, which means you have done all the analysing and they have not even been told there is something to analyse. The canoe. You are rowing towards your north star and then your shoulders turn and you are in a tributary with low water and mud and something in the trees, and eventually you remember where you were supposed to be going and row back. The way back is hard and then you are in it again and it feels obvious. Then the next side quest arrives, as a person or an opportunity or just a thing that happens, and around it goes. The invitation. Pick the thing you have been not doing and go and do it today, badly, at the wrong time, in the rain. Do not wait to feel like it, because that is not the order it happens in. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit levityfield.substack.com
