Similar Posts

  • | |

    #103 Show me one daily action

    So you say you want to be a writer?
    Show me one daily action that proves that’s true.

    So you say you value connection with family and friends?
    Show me one daily action that demonstrates you do.

    So you say you want to learn a foreign language?
    Show me one daily action. Show me you’ll follow through.

    Show me one daily action. Not for me. But for you.

    For you to start believing you care.

    That your dreams and desires aren’t just castles in the air.

    That you dare to build an identity that supports your values and aspirations.

    Because actions overrule thoughts.

    Actions form (or break) beliefs.

    Actions aligned with your values build trust in your good intentions, and change your identity.

    One action a day. That’s all it takes.

    Lukas Van Vyve
  • | |

    #110 Unexamined feelings

    I may say I am bored – but what do I feel?

    I may say I am angry – but what do I feel?

    I may say I am in love – but what do I feel?

    What does my body say?

    Can I examine my feelings a different way?

    Can I escape the tragedy of the spoken word?

    Can I resist unconscious categorization and re-learn to listen to what’s behind the language?

  • | |

    #45 The tragedy of the spoken word

    Language helps us describe the world we perceive. Yet in doing so, it closes our eyes, our ears, our touch, and our heart to the parts of the world we don’t have words for.

    Every language is a lens on a felt reality within and around us – both clarifying and categorizing the world, and limiting it by the words it has available.

    Learning more languages gives you new lenses – and a richer sense of reality.

    But just like the structure of our ears limit the sounds we can hear, and the structure of our eyes limit colors we can see, the structure of any language somehow limits our felt experience of the world.

    How do we re-access memories, emotions, hidden away in a long-forgotten language?

    How do we re-learn to listen to the voices of the wordless world speaking to our animal self… the voices that once upon a time, before verbal language emerged, were all we had?

    there’s an eternal song
    drowned out by the confines of my mother tongue
    a wordless melody that once made sense
    until our brain started blurring it with a lens
    narrowing it down
    neglecting its nuances through verbs and nouns

    with all its might language wants us to abide
    but the wordless world it tries to hide
    will forever be inside

    Lukas Van Vyve
  • | |

    #25 Pre-emptive disqualification

    In the series of self-sabotaging behavior I’ve observed in myself and others: “pre-emptively disqualifying yourself”.

    Before you even start, you’re depriving yourself already of any potential benefit of the exercise because you don’t know if you’ll get the EXACT benefit promised/desired by you.

    “This exercise might have cured your neck pain, but I’ve always had neck problems, it won’t chage anything.”

    “You might be able to write every day, but for me, in my situation, that would never be possible.”

    This shows a lack of understanding of learning principles. Because with any exercise, program, diet, methodology, you’ll never get the exact same results as someone else, because you can never replicate the exact circumstances and actions of a person.

    Instead, you do the exercise/program/diet/… within the framework of your own personal context/skills/past experience. Within that context, it will guide your learning process. But the outcome resulting from it is personal.

    Variance is to be expected, and this is a good thing. Because this is how innovation happens: actions in different types of circumstances lead to slightly different results. Sometime that leads to disappointment, sometimes to real breakthroughs.

    Getting different results, then, is not a reason to pre-emptively disqualify yourself, or to claim something doesn’t work. Because the true value doesn’t lie in getting the exact same results as someone else, but rather, to consciously set the general direction of our lives.

    Every day, we have to make so many decisions that lead us down different future paths, so modeling someone and using their actions as a guiding principle will greatly increase the probability of you going in the direction you desire, and getting results in the same ballpark.

    For example, I’ve been doing Dylan Werner’s yoga classes on Alo Moves (my go-to online yoga/fitness/meditation app) consistently for almost two years now. Even if I continue to follow his exact schedule for two more years, chances are, I still might not be able to do something like this:

    After all, we have a different body structure, different gene disposition, different circumstances, and I’ll have to adapt his schedule to my personal capacity.

    Still, if I follow his schedule I’ll definitely become much stronger and healthier than if I chose to model a couch potato, watch TV and eat fries and burgers all day. And that’s what it’s all about.

    Modeling, in that point of view, are an effective way to accelerate your progress and lead your life in the direction you want, without you having to know exactly which results you’ll get.

    In other words: when you let go of the need to predict exact future outcomes, you can stop pre-emptively disqualifying yourself, and start pro-actively setting the direction of your life.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *