Founder & CEO @ Close
We all know life is full of ups and downs, yet it’s so easy for us to get frustrated and torture ourselves when the pendulum of life suddenly swings from blissed out harmony to chaos and struggle. We must remember that life is a wheel that keeps spinning. These moments and feelings, both good and …
Recently I spent a week in complete darkness at a dark retreat. And very soon, I was faced with something I didn’t expect: Anxiety. I wasn’t even halfway through my first day of darkness, and out-of-control anxious thoughts kept appearing, and I had no idea how I’d make it through a week of darkness. Until …
I had an interesting experience recently at 4AM one morning where my hands turned into a tree. Not literally, of course, but they felt heavier, thicker, and larger than they really are. To me this was a symbolic display of how I was feeling recently with my two young sons. I had been constantly on …
I’ve been genuinely excited about returning to Germany – getting the chance to hug my children and see my mother, my brothers, my friends and loved ones. I had a moment of clarity when thinking about this upcoming reunion, and while it sounds cliche, I realized that every day is a gift. It’s not a …
Silence is an essential element of inner work. But in modern life, it’s pretty much as rare as a precious metal. It’s so easy to always be distracted, constantly consuming some kind of information or entertainment, engaging in some activity—we’ve got infinite ways to keep our minds busy. You have to consciously create silence in …
I’ve often used the words presence and awareness interchangeably—but they’re really not. They’re two distinctly different things, and in this episode, I discuss the difference, and talk about my recent experiments with awareness. TRANSCRIPT:[00:00:00] what is the difference between awareness and presence? [00:00:04] awareness is the foundation on which you can be present, but it’s …
Here’s a conversation we’ve had about Michael Ende, Author of The Neverending Story, Momo, and other great books (like “Das Gefängnis der Freiheit“). We then touched on the beauty of poetry and song lyrics, going on awareness walks, having 1-on-1’s with my sons, how interpreting my mother’s dream put my patience to the test, the …
I’m highly self-critical by nature, often to a fault. A good amount of the inner work I’ve been doing over the past 2 years has been about reigning that part of myself in. But now that I’m exploring the IFS (Internal Family Systems) I had a realization: While my inner critic has been the dominant …
In this episode, I talk about when parts of myself are at conflict with each other. I’m the type of person that’s very good at pushing myself to do things, I’ve got a strong inner pusher. But there’s also a part of me that sometimes just want to relax, take it easy and goof off. …