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I Turned 24 Today. Here's What I Learned Since I Turned 23.

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I started doing this last year after reading Ryan Holiday’s birthday articles. This annual reflection is a helpful way for me to check in with what I’ve learnt, pinpoint any growth that’s occurred and share it with you. Sharing our learnings is incredibly important, I hope in doing this my hard learned lessons will help someone have an easier time. Here’s to another day and here’s to 24.   [*] Brazilian Jiu Jitsu came into my life this year. I can liken BJJ to being a strangely pleasurable version of desperately treading water yet always having your head submerged. Rickson Gracie summed up the benefits of the art form when he said: “Jiu-jitsu puts you completely in the moment, where you must have a complete focus on finding a solution to the problem. This trains the mind to build that focus, to increase your awareness, your capacity to solve problems.” In this sense it’s taught me invaluable life skills that I use every day. Jiu Jitsu is humbling, gruelling, empowering and by far t
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Ask For Help

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Society today places a huge emphasis on individuality, and independence. So many of us like to think they have the fortitude to do it all themselves, that our rugged independence will get them through whatever trial or tribulation they are confronted with. The Stoics had a different idea. They believed in a concept called ‘Sympatheia’- that we are part of one interconnected, interdependent human community, and that it was each and every person’s duty to support their fellow humans. Marcus tells us to “Meditate often on the interconnectedness and mutual interdependence of all the things in the Universe.”  To demonstrate this, let’s take my morning coffee as an example. For this coffee to get to me the beans were picked by someone, those beans were then transported to be processed, someone drove the beans to be packed into a shipping container, a whole crew sailed a ship all the way to New Zealand, it was unpacked and driven in a truck to my local supermarket, and finally it was stacke
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Kambo: My Experience Taking Medicinal Frog Poison

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  This week I terrified my friends and family when I told them I was going to an Amazonian ceremony where a frog poison called ‘Kambo’ would be rubbed into burns on my skin. Kambo is a sacred medicine that has been used by tribes in the Amazon for centuries. The secretion of the Giant Monkey Tree Frog has been used by the tribes as a medicine for ailments including malaria, fevers and snake bites. They also use it for clearing ‘negative energy,’ and assisting with lethargy, depression, and laziness. Hunters also claim it assists in energizing and strengthening them- allowing them to run faster with increased stamina, to be hyper-vigilant, eat less, sleep less and become more effective overall hunters. There is also evidence it is good for the immune system. Although the research field for Kambo is in its relative infancy, the early findings are positive and back up many of these claims. Here is a link to some of them: https://iakp.org/research/ My past mental health struggles are
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Sèlia Dos Santos: My Yoga Journey and Samsara

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  My name is Sèlia Dos Santos, I’m a 23 year old woman living in Belgium. I teach yoga and I’m a herbalist.   My yoga path started 5 years ago, I was always interested in the ‘spiritual’. One time I was scrolling down my youtube page and saw an ashtanga video from Laruga Glaser. I was fascinated! The way she has control over her body and mind was phenomenal- I felt the energy through my computer. I was curious about what people were experiencing through yoga since everyone claimed to feel free, happy and aligned once they started a (daily) yoga practice. I didn’t know what to expect. So I started doing yoga at home with videos. I started with the classic ‘Yoga with Adrienne’ classes, but I felt like it wasn’t my cup of tea. I stopped for a while and then I saw the documentary ‘My Dharma’- I was sold. From that moment I took my yoga practice more seriously, I practiced often and went to classes here and there, I read books and articles about yoga, and I watched a lot of videos about
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Memento Mori: Embracing Death to Live a Meaningful Life

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You could die today. You may cease to exist next time you leave the house. Death surrounds us whether we acknowledge it or not. People die of illness, in car crashes, in falls. They die young and unexpectedly and it could happen to you. Death is something we aren’t comfortable talking about it. The problem is we have a finite amount of time, and each day we wake we are another step closer to our deaths- another step closer to not existing. Our ego diverts our attention away from this because it is contrary to the comfortable delusion that we will not die, that we are the exception. But death is natural, it will happen to all of us and everyone we know The Stoics had a different approach to death. In Stoicism, ‘Memento Mori’ (remember that you will die), is a symbolic reminder of the inevitability of death. Memento Mori can free us from the fear of death, instead allowing us to befriend death- to allow it to become our motivator and a source for meaning and purpose. Let’s
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Feeling our feelings

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In high stress situations there is a tendency to resist what is happening. We disassociate and distract ourselves so that we don’t need to feel the unpleasantness of the situation. When I’m feeling particularly stressed, I find myself on my phone, feeling annoyed about my stress, mindlessly scrolling social media and engaging in some very creative methods of procrastination. We are wired to lean away from discomfort, but what is comfortable is not always good for us. Rather than accepting what is appearing for us emotionally in these moments- we choose to ignore it. Almost as if by not acknowledging the feeling and by hiding, it will make the feeling cease to exist. It reminds me of when I was a child and I was watching a scary movie. When I felt my fear begin to get overwhelming, I would cover my eyes. In many ways we operate from this fear based, childlike framework when it comes to facing and feeling our emotions. We carry so much shame around experiencing difficult emotio
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The Logic of Half-Arsing Your Way Out of a Slump

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It’s easy to feel like you’re in a slump right now. There’s a global pandemic raging on, we’re headed into a recession, thousands are losing their jobs and if you live where I live, you’ve probably got a similar skin tone to Edward Cullen due to what feels like only seeing the sun about twice in one month. When time like this hit, I often come back to this nugget of wisdom that I heard while I was at Uni: ‘Half-arsed is better than no-arse’ This means that it’s better to do the bare minimum even if it falls short of the ideal than to not do it at all. We can be so tough and critical of ourselves. We expect a lot from ourselves whether that to be having consistently high-quality workouts, to be fully focussed while working on our projects, or expecting ourselves to stick rigidly to a healthy diet. This is good but, when we fall short of these ideals even the slightest, we punish ourselves, indulge in some damning negative self-talk and feel defeated. The truth of the matte
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