Happy wee boy. Difficulty connecting with others. No more happy wee boy. Loss of connection to self and body. Retreat into the mind.
A lifelong journey to dig up my body.
Now in the seventh decade of my life I can look back on this journey from a broader perspective.
I have travelled many a mile, trying to excavate my self, my body. To resurrect that happy wee boy.
The seminal guidebook for me, in hindsight, was Ken Wilbur’s ‘No Boundary’ in broad terms it characterises the self in terms of a number of boundaries – shadow, persona, ego, body, centaur and unity consciousness, from memory.
Persona + Shadow = Ego
The first boundary was my preoccupation in my 20s and 30s. I ended up in my mind and only had a notion of the person I should be (Persona). I was beset with feelings and their correlates which were alien. Wilbur suggests that these ‘symptoms’ needed to be or could be translated back to their original form – for example, fear as projected hostility. So, I spent a lot of time trying to translate my ‘symptoms’ back to there original forms. To realise an accurate Ego.
The next step in Wilbur’s map of the soul was the integration of Ego and Body as the Centaur. But, given my disconnect from myself and others, this was an integration which was inconceivable. More on that later.
So, I skipped a level and went for Unity Consciousness. How hard could it be? The idea that we are not our thoughts, not our emotions and not our body. We have thoughts. We have emotions (I prefer feelings). We have a body. But, we are not our thoughts, we are not our feelings and we are not our bodies. We can observe these things, but they are not the I(Eye) itself. Now, this was appealing to me as feelings were alien and weird. They couldn’t be related to, integrated. Especially not in purely conceptual terms.
“I am the hole in the flute that the breath of God passes though’”.
But, seeing the objects of consciousness essentially divorces you from your Being. No pain. No pleasure. No-thing. The epitome of this perspective was captured by a trial of oral Ketamine – I didn’t care, that I didn’t care!
And so, I returned to the level I had skipped in the Wilbur model of consciousness. The body. My feelings were an enigma to me. They didn’t fit neatly into the little boxes that our culture assigns to them. Mostly negative, Mostly indecipherable. What were these feelings? Why didn’t they comply with the culturally prescribed narrative? I had tried to grasp this terrain with my mind, with thought, to no avail. But, the world of Feelings, my feelings, remained enigmatic. Enter Interoception.
Feelings are largely bodily. Feelings, as culturally defined, are accompanied, comprised of bodily sensations. So, maybe, my road to emotional literacy would be through an archaeology of the body. of bodily sensation. I thought of this as the Goldengate Bridge, thought at one end and bodily sensations at the other, with the cloud of unknowing inundating the middle third.
So, I turned to cartographers of the body – Bubba Free John, Alexander Lowen, Eugene Ghendlin, TCM, Peter Levine – to somatic practices – Bioenergetics, Focussing, Somatic Experiencing (TM), Chi Kung, Sensate Focus, erotic hypnosis and interoceptive practices, more generally.
And, to be honest, that is where I am, still trying to decode the scrambled messages that my body mutters, if at all.
This ‘map’ describes the territory of my soul.
I intend to elaborate upon it. But, short of talking to myself as a half crazed madman, what does this journey speak to in you, in your experience? What experiences have you had? Is there any specific part of the journey that you would like to hear more about? Let me know in the comments and I will do my best to serve your interests.
So, here’s the thing. No matter how smooth you want life to be, it never is. There’s always something. The coffee goes cold. The Wi-Fi takes forever. The Amazon package that said “out for delivery” is now delayed another day. And, of course, the person ahead of you in traffic is driving like some Victorian lady on a Sunday stroll. These little frictions pile up tiny pebbles in your shoes. And if you ask a Buddhist teacher what that is, they’d probably tell you: that’s dukkha.
Now, on this podcast called Fifty Words for Snow, the hosts did a whole episode about it. They spoke with Katherine Griffith, head teacher at the Zen Center of Los Angeles. She explained how we often hear dukkha translated as “suffering,” and that’s why so many people think the First Noble Truth means “life is suffering.” But she says that’s misleading. It’s not just suffering in the dramatic sense. It’s dissatisfaction. It’s that subtle sense that things are never fully to our liking.
And once you start looking, it shows up everywhere. Think about it—every time you get something good, you’re already worried about losing it. Even in love, the best case is you spend decades with someone you adore, and then, well, one of you dies first. Even happiness comes with an expiration date. That constant hum of “not quite right” that’s dukkha.
Griffith put it in simple words: it’s just “things not going our way.” And once you hear it that way, you can’t unsee it. It’s in the small stuff, like the coffee or the Wi-Fi. It’s in the big stuff aging, illness, loss. And it’s in the deep existential stuff just being human, knowing nothing lasts.
Here’s the twist though: Buddhism doesn’t say this is a crisis. It’s just the way things are. And if we stop being shocked by it, if we quit acting like something’s gone terribly wrong every time life disappoints us, then something shifts. The point isn’t to love it, but to stop resisting it so much.
Griffith compared it to a chair with a design flaw. Life is like that. No matter how much you shift around, it’ll never feel fully comfortable. Yet we persist in writing complaint letters to the universe. We brace against every little discomfort, like the broken zipper, the traffic jam, the fact that our dead friends aren’t reachable on any platform. But the practice is: what if we stopped expecting everything to line up? What if we met dukkha with curiosity instead of frustration? Not in a fake “everything is perfect” kind of way, but in a softer, “yes, this too” way.
And the real turning point comes when you get tired of fighting it. On the podcast they ended with a blessing: “May you notice dukkha, again and again, until one of those times you finally think, I’m tired of this.” That’s when something clicks. Not a grand enlightenment, not fireworks in the sky, just a quiet shift. Like the morning star breaking through.
Now, all of that might sound abstract, but it actually ties right into how we live today. Because if you look around, there’s this massive cultural machine built on dukkha, social media. Platforms that were supposedly built to connect us are, ironically, some of the biggest engines of craving and dissatisfaction in modern life.
In Pāli, the ancient Buddhist language, craving is called taṇhā. Literally “thirst.” And Buddhist thought says this thirst is what generates suffering. A philosopher named Lee Clarke, who actually did a PhD on Buddhist philosophy, wrote a book called Thirst: A Cultural Critique of Contemporary Society. He argues that craving now seeps into pretty much every aspect of daily life knowledge, technology, shopping, relationships. And social media is where all of these threads get tangled together.
We live in the most connected society in history. You can message anyone, anywhere, instantly. And yet, loneliness is on the rise. In fact, in 2023, the World Health Organization declared loneliness a global public health concern. Social media was supposed to reduce that, but instead it’s often amplifying it.
Why? Clarke points out that social media is always a mediated form of communication. You’re behind a screen. You get unlimited time to type your response. You can control the awkward silences. But that’s exactly why it fails to give us real connection. The spontaneity of face-to-face conversations the way they branch out into unexpected places—is where intimacy happens. Social media can’t capture that. Which means, no matter how much you scroll, it leaves a residue of isolation.
Buddhist thinking says our language and thought often split the world into subject and object me versus you, here versus there and that dualistic split keeps us from seeing reality as it is. Zen philosopher Shigenori Nagatomo even called this “ego-logical thinking.” Social media just piles another layer of separation on top. Instead of bridging people, it’s a screen that magnifies delusion.
And then there’s what Clarke calls “externalisation.” Basically, society’s obsession with appearances. On social media, people who look better are often treated better. So we end up performing curating our image for likes, comparing our lives to others, falling into what he describes as “comparative craving.” You look at your feed and wish your life was as good as theirs. But it’s all an edited reality.
This is what Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han talks about when he calls it “the aesthetics of the smooth.” Everything has to look polished kids have to be cute, food must look perfect, bodies young and sexualised. If it’s not smooth enough, you don’t get likes. The imperfection gets filtered out. But Buddhism says craving for perfection, or for a permanent sense of self, is the root of suffering. Unlike most religions, Buddhism doesn’t argue that there’s a fixed “me” or soul. Posts and images, no matter how perfected, won’t create permanence. They’ll just deepen the cycle of craving.
So, applying Buddhist thinking here, the way forward is to treat social media as an edited reality. Sometimes a bridge, sure, but often a barrier. Contentment comes more from face to face presence, not from likes. And if you see through the illusion, that’s already a form of awakening.
This theme that dukkha shows up everywhere, not just in traffic jams or Wi-Fi issues, but even in the way we chase validation online links surprisingly well with Shakespeare. Sounds like a leap, but stay with me.
Because Shakespeare, in his plays, keeps circling around the same existential tension. Take Hamlet, for instance. The whole play starts with the question “Who’s there?” And that’s not just an opening line it’s one of the most fundamental spiritual questions across traditions. The Hindu sage Ramana Maharshi taught Nan Yar? “Who am I?” as the doorway to self-realisation. Buddhism and Hinduism both circle around that inquiry.
One writer actually wrote a book called The Buddha and the Bard, exploring this exact overlap. The idea is that Shakespeare, as an actor and then a playwright, had this mind spacious enough to hold all kinds of human experience. Night after night, he emptied himself into roles. And in doing that, he may have perceived what Buddhism calls the root of suffering: believing we are fixed selves, permanent players.
Look at Hamlet’s famous “What a piece of work is a man!” speech. He praises humanity’s reason, form, and faculties like we’re angelic, godlike even. And then he undercuts it: to him, all that grandeur is just a “quintessence of dust.” That phrase is a contradiction. Quintessence was thought to be incorruptible, the substance of stars, the most precious essence. Dust is corruption and decay. So to call us a “quintessence of dust” is to name the paradox of human existence. Miraculous, but impermanent. Eternal-seeming, but fading all the same.
And that’s pure dukkha. The Buddhist sutras break it down into three kinds. First, the dukkha of painful experiences the stuff we don’t want but get anyway. Second, the dukkha of pleasurable experiences the kind that makes us uneasy because pleasure never lasts. And third, the dukkha of conditioned experience, called saṅkhāra dukkha. That’s the background hum, the sense that something is never quite right in life.
Hamlet is steeped in that third kind. He feels the world is “out of joint.” His melancholy shows us the weight of impermanence, the sense of separation, the futility of seeking ultimate meaning. It’s exactly what Buddhists call the suffering of conditioned existence.
But Buddhism doesn’t stop there. It also points to what’s beyond the dust. In Mahāyāna traditions, that’s called Buddha Nature, or tathāgatagarbha the indwelling potential for awakening. In Theravāda it’s called Luminous Mind, pabhassara citta. The Buddha himself said, “Luminous is the mind. And it is defiled by incoming defilements.” In other words, underneath the clouds, the sun is always shining. Our mind is fundamentally radiant, covered over only by temporary defilements.
Hamlet can’t see the stars for the “vapours” of dishonesty and corruption in Elsinore. Buddhists would say the same about us we can’t see our luminous mind because it’s obscured by greed, anger, delusion, arrogance. But the practice is to sit still, watch thoughts arise and pass, and slowly realise that what you are isn’t the vapour. It’s the space behind it.
Shakespeare’s characters often echo this. Lines from Juliet or Polonius sound eerily like pieces of the Eightfold Path. The point is that his plays reflect the same insight Buddhism offers: we suffer because we mistake the dust for the essence. But if we stay awake, even amid the dust, we can glimpse that spaciousness.
And that’s the thread tying it all together. Whether it’s cold coffee, social media loneliness, or a prince railing against the rottenness of Denmark, it all circles back to the same human condition: dukkha. Things not going our way. And the way through isn’t to fix every flaw, because you never can. It’s to see the flaws for what they are, soften a little, and recognise that behind the clouds, the luminous mind is already there.
Alright, that’s where I’ll leave it. Thanks for staying with me through the dust and the Wi-Fi delays and the Shakespeare. See you next time.
Most people think freedom means having options. A menu of choices. The ability to do what you want when you want. But existential freedom is something entirely different, and honestly, it’s terrifying. It’s the recognition that you are radically free whether you like it or not. There’s no script, no predetermined path, no cosmic instruction manual. You’re thrown into existence, and every moment demands that you create meaning from nothing. That’s not the kind of freedom people celebrate. It’s the kind that keeps you up at night.
The existentialists understood this. Jean-Paul Sartre famously wrote that we are “condemned to be free.” Condemned. Not blessed, not gifted, condemned. Because with absolute freedom comes absolute responsibility. You can’t blame your parents, your genes, your circumstances, or God for who you become. At the most fundamental level, you are the author of your life, and that authorship is inescapable. Even refusing to choose is a choice. Even denying your freedom is an act of freedom.
This is where existential anxiety comes from. It’s not the everyday worry about bills or deadlines. It’s deeper, more primal. It’s the dizziness you feel when you realize there’s no safety net, no guaranteed meaning, no external authority to tell you what matters. Søren Kierkegaard called it “the dizziness of freedom.” Stand at the edge of a cliff and you don’t just fear falling, you fear the freedom to jump. That vertigo isn’t about danger, it’s about possibility. It’s the awareness that in every moment, you could choose something radically different, and nothing stops you except you.
The existentialists identified what they called the existential givens, the unavoidable facts of human existence. There are four big ones: death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness. And here’s the kicker, you can’t escape any of them, but how you respond to them determines whether you live authentically or spend your life running.
Death is the most obvious. We all die. No exceptions. And unlike other animals, we know it’s coming. That knowledge colors everything. It can paralyze you with fear, or it can wake you up. Heidegger talked about “being-toward-death,” the idea that acknowledging your mortality isn’t morbid, it’s clarifying. When you truly grasp that your time is finite, trivial concerns fall away. You stop postponing what matters. You stop living as if you have forever. Death, paradoxically, gives life urgency and weight. It’s the deadline that forces you to decide what you actually care about.
Then there’s isolation. Not loneliness in the social sense, though that’s part of it. Existential isolation is the recognition that no matter how close you get to another person, there’s an unbridgeable gap. You can’t fully know what it’s like to be them, and they can’t fully know you. You were born alone, you’ll die alone, and in between, your subjective experience is yours and yours alone. That sounds bleak, but it’s also liberating. If you can’t escape into someone else’s existence, you’re forced to own yours. Relationships become more honest when you stop expecting them to complete you or rescue you from yourself.
Meaninglessness is the hardest one for most people. We’re meaning-making creatures. We crave purpose, narrative, significance. But the universe doesn’t provide it. There’s no inherent meaning baked into existence. The stars don’t care about you. History doesn’t care. Nature is indifferent. Camus captured this with his essay on Sisyphus, the Greek figure condemned to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity, only to watch it roll back down. Absurd, pointless, exhausting. And yet Camus ends with a stunning line: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Why? Because Sisyphus owns his struggle. He doesn’t need the gods to validate his effort. He creates his own meaning by choosing to push the boulder. That defiance, that refusal to collapse into despair, that’s existential freedom.
And then there’s freedom itself, which is both the gift and the burden. You are free to choose, but that means you’re responsible for your choices. You can’t outsource that. Politicians, priests, parents, they can guide you, but they can’t choose for you. And when you try to escape that responsibility, when you live in what Sartre called “bad faith,” pretending you had no choice, you shrink your humanity. Bad faith looks like saying “I had to take this job” when you didn’t. “I had no choice but to stay in this relationship” when you did. “That’s just how I am” when you could be different. Bad faith is the refusal to admit you’re free, and it’s the most common form of self-betrayal.
Viktor Frankl lived this philosophy in the most extreme circumstances imaginable. A Jewish psychiatrist, he survived Nazi concentration camps, Auschwitz, Dachau, places designed to strip people of their humanity. Everything was taken from him. His family, his possessions, his professional identity, even his name replaced by a number. And yet, Frankl discovered a kind of freedom that couldn’t be taken. He wrote, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms, to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
He watched men in the camps who, despite unimaginable suffering, maintained their dignity. They comforted others. They shared their last scrap of bread. They refused to let their captors define them. And he also watched men collapse into bitterness and brutality. Same conditions, different responses. The difference wasn’t external. It was internal. It was the choice to find meaning even in suffering, to see themselves as more than victims, to affirm their humanity when everything around them denied it.
Frankl described a space between stimulus and response. The Nazis controlled the stimulus, the camps, the cruelty, the deprivation. But they couldn’t control the response. In that space, Frankl said, lies our freedom. And in that freedom lies our growth and our liberation. This is the core insight of existential psychology: circumstances don’t determine you. Your relationship to those circumstances does.
After the war, Frankl developed logotherapy, therapy centered on meaning. He rejected Freud’s focus on the past and unconscious drives. For Frankl, what mattered wasn’t where you came from but where you’re going. What’s pulling you forward? What do you care about enough to suffer for? He believed neurosis often stems from existential vacuum, a lack of meaning. When people feel their lives don’t matter, they fill that void with distraction, addiction, materialism, anything to numb the ache. But the cure isn’t pleasure or comfort. It’s meaning. And meaning isn’t found, it’s created through commitment, through deciding what you stand for and acting accordingly.
Existential freedom isn’t about doing whatever you want without consequences. It’s about recognizing that even in the most constrained circumstances, you have agency over your inner life. You choose what you value. You choose what you focus on. You choose whether to live authentically or hide behind excuses.
But here’s where it gets tricky. That kind of freedom is uncomfortable. Most people don’t want it. It’s easier to believe you’re a product of your upbringing, your brain chemistry, your bad luck. It’s easier to blame and complain than to take ownership. This is why anxiety is epidemic right now. Between 2008 and 2018, anxiety surged for all American adults under fifty, with the steepest increases among young adults. By 2022, half of adults under thirty reported feeling anxious most or all of the time. That’s not just stress. It’s existential dread dressed up as worry.
Why now? Because we live in a culture that promises comfort, convenience, and control. We’re told that if we work hard enough, buy the right things, follow the right advice, life will be safe and predictable. But it’s a lie. Life is uncertain. Suffering is inevitable. Control is an illusion. And when that reality crashes through the fantasy, people panic. They’ve never learned to sit with uncertainty. They’ve never developed the psychological tools to create meaning in the face of chaos.
The antidote isn’t more distraction. It’s more awareness. This is where mindfulness enters the existential picture. Jon Kabat-Zinn brought Buddhist mindfulness into Western medicine and psychology, and its power lies in exactly what the existentialists described: presence. Mindfulness teaches you to observe your thoughts and feelings without being ruled by them. You notice the anxiety, the fear, the urge to run, and you don’t act on it automatically. You create that space between stimulus and response. You choose.
Without awareness, you’re on autopilot. Freud and Skinner might be right about you. You’re just reacting, driven by conditioning and unconscious patterns. But with awareness, you wake up. You see that thoughts are just thoughts, not truth. Emotions are just weather passing through, not permanent states. And in that seeing, you reclaim your freedom.
Existential freedom also has a relational dimension. This might sound paradoxical. How can you be radically free and also deeply connected? But the existentialists understood that authentic relationships require freedom. When you hide behind roles, when you perform who you think you should be, when you manipulate others to meet your needs, you’re not free and neither are they. Real intimacy happens when two people show up as themselves, flawed and finite, and choose each other anyway. That choice, renewed daily, is an act of existential freedom.
Martin Buber talked about I-Thou relationships versus I-It relationships. I-It treats the other person as an object, a means to an end. I-Thou encounters them as a whole being, unique and irreducible. I-Thou relationships are risky because they demand vulnerability. You can’t control the outcome. But they’re also where meaning lives. When you stop using people and start seeing them, when you stop hiding and start showing up, relationships become spaces of mutual freedom.
The existentialists also knew that freedom isn’t just individual. We’re thrown into a world with others, and our choices affect them. Sartre wrote that when you choose for yourself, you choose for all humanity. Not literally, but symbolically. Your actions create a model of what it means to be human. If you live with courage, honesty, and responsibility, you affirm those values for everyone. If you live in bad faith, you contribute to a culture of evasion. Freedom is personal, but it’s never private.
This is why meaning is so crucial. Viktor Frankl found that people who oriented their lives toward meaning, what philosophers call eudaimonic happiness, were more resilient, more satisfied, and more capable of enduring hardship than those chasing pleasure. Meaning isn’t a feeling. It’s a commitment. It’s deciding that something matters enough to organize your life around it, whether that’s family, creativity, justice, service, truth, or love. And once you commit, once you choose your meaning, the world changes. Obstacles become challenges instead of catastrophes. Suffering becomes bearable because it’s in service of something larger than comfort.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: you are the meaning-maker. Not your parents, not your culture, not your circumstances. You. And that’s both the terror and the gift of existential freedom. You can’t blame anyone else for a meaningless life, but you also can’t credit anyone else for a meaningful one. It’s on you. Every single day, you’re writing the story of who you are. The question is whether you’re writing it consciously or sleepwalking through someone else’s script.
Existential freedom doesn’t promise happiness. It promises authenticity. It says you can live as yourself, fully awake to your mortality, your isolation, your responsibility, and your radical freedom, and in that wakefulness, find something worth living for. Not because the universe handed it to you, but because you created it.
And that’s where we’ll leave it. Thanks for sticking with me.
You know, one of the most interesting things that’s ever come up in spiritual conversation is this idea of the “vital shock.” People have called it different things over the years, but the basic thread is the same: it’s that deep recoil from life itself, that instinctive contraction when we realize what it means to be a vulnerable, mortal creature in a body. Some people describe it as the refusal to be born, others as the denial of death, and others still as the root of ego itself.
Back in the mid-70s, there was this seminar where Bubba Free John, later known as Adi Da, was talking with his students about it. One of them, Tom Riley, was trying to wrap his head around how the release of this shock tied in with ego death. He asked if ego death was something that happened way deeper, at the level of the heart, or if it could happen just in the release of this vital shock. Bubba told him, in a kind of matter-of-fact way, that ultimately, yes, the deepest version of it happens when the knot at the core of our being opens. But he also said we don’t need to over-mystify it. Because in a very real sense, ego death is simply the absence of self-definition.
Think about that for a second. Most of the time, we’re busy telling ourselves who we are. We’re narrating our lives, identifying as “me,” constantly meditating on ourselves. But when there’s real insight, when there’s real self-enquiry, even for a moment, that activity stops. And when it does, consciousness naturally rests in its prior condition, the condition it was in before we started carving up reality into me and not-me. In those moments, there’s no contraction, no attention fixated on being a separate someone. There’s just this radiant happiness that doesn’t need to be achieved.
Bubba was very clear that this isn’t some kind of dramatic death experience where you’re sitting in the dark feeling like someone has died. It’s not about becoming a bigger self either. It’s about falling back into what was always already the case, the condition before the contraction. He told them that a lot of people like to make spiritual life dramatic, to turn it into this heroic story filled with fear and overcoming fear. But the real thing doesn’t require that. If you actually grasp what’s going on, there doesn’t need to be any big, karmic drama at all. You don’t have to stage-manage an experience of ego death to prove something to yourself.
Now, of course, people sometimes still get caught in those dramas. They feel like they have to pass through phases, face down fear, get torn apart and rebuilt. And that can happen, but it’s not necessary. The essential thing is understanding and the actual realization of the Divine as your prior condition. If that’s present, everything else is optional.
At one point Tom admitted that he sometimes got confused in his own practice. He’d feel what he called Presence, like a clarity or a great immunity, and he wasn’t sure if that was really Presence or just some internal trick he was pulling. Bubba didn’t dismiss it. He said, yeah, sometimes we’re fooling around with little mechanisms inside ourselves without even realizing it. And he pointed out that you can sit there and watch yourself all day, analyze what’s going on, but that will only give you data, some information. The real depth comes when, at some random moment in the course of practice, it suddenly becomes clear what you’ve been doing.
That was the whole vibe of his teaching: don’t try to manipulate yourself into having some special drama. Just do the practice, live it out, and in the natural course of that, insight will arise.
And here’s where it ties back to this whole thing about death and dying. Because if you step back and look at life biologically, the body is this regenerative machine. It repairs itself, replaces cells, maintains itself until it can’t anymore. Eventually the renewal slows down, degeneration kicks in, and the body heads toward clinical death. That’s just how it works.
But psychologically, we humans are driven by this incredibly strong survival instinct. Even when the body is wearing down, the mind pushes forward, wanting to hold on. And culturally, we tend to shy away from death. We focus on birth, growth, achievement. Death gets pushed to the margins. We don’t really prepare for it, especially in modern societies. Talking about death with children is almost taboo, as if acknowledging it will somehow make it come sooner.
Sri Aurobindo, the Indian mystic, talked about this in terms of the vital shock. He said every human being experiences it, this recoil of awareness from recognizing the vulnerability and mortality of the flesh. It’s like a universal trauma, but one we automatically suppress. As kids, we’re encouraged to grow, achieve, become independent. Any anxiety we feel about our fragility gets discouraged or shut down. We push it into the unconscious and carry on.
But the truth is, that denial shapes a lot of our lives. We spend years building identities, achieving, refining the ego so it can have a sense of control, even though that control is mostly illusory. Underneath it all is the need to feel safe, accepted, and comfortable. Then, as we age, those illusions start to crack. Our bodies weaken, our control slips, and the reality of mortality sets in. That’s when things like midlife crises happen, when we’re suddenly forced to reassess everything we’ve built.
It can feel unfair, like losing ground. And in a youth-obsessed culture, where aging isn’t celebrated as ripening into wisdom but seen as decline, the fear only grows. People panic, resist, cling to their survival instinct harder than ever. But if you look at it differently, this descent into limitation is actually training. It’s life nudging us toward flexibility, toward letting go, toward accepting reality as it is.
And this is where Adi Da’s later talks add another layer. He pointed out that the refusal to be born is just another way of talking about vital shock. He said we’ve built our entire psychological pattern around that initial recoil. Instead of simply being the body, being alive, we pull back and make the subject, the inner self, the center of everything. That’s the whole structure of ego.
His teaching flipped that around. He said real enlightenment isn’t about escaping the body, it’s about becoming the body completely in consciousness. When you confess the body fully, you stop fearing death, because the body already knows about death. The universe knows about it. You don’t have to. The ego worries about the body dying, but when you’re simply the body, lived directly, there’s rest. There’s egolessness.
He was careful to make a distinction here. In psychology, there are plenty of arguments for the “body point of view.” But most of them, he said, don’t go deep enough. They stay on the level of low integration or even vulgar indulgence. His point was that in true realization, you become bodily the way a lover does, not the way a desirer does. A lover is fully in it, fully embodied, but without the contraction of neediness.
So in practice, that means the divisions start to dissolve. The sense of self and the body stops being two things. The body and the world stop being separate. There’s this tacit intuition that everything is the same Mystery, the same Condition. You don’t stand apart from it anymore. You confess the ego, you confess the body, and by doing so, you’re no longer trapped in inward fretting. You see the Whole.
If you step back, you can see how these perspectives all line up. On the one hand, you’ve got the biological reality: the body regenerates, then declines, then dies. On the other hand, you’ve got the psychological response: survival instinct, denial of mortality, vital shock, ego formation. And then you’ve got the spiritual teaching: that all of this can be met not with panic or resistance, but with enquiry, with falling back into the prior condition of consciousness, with confessing the body completely.
So when people talk about ego death, vital shock, fear of dying, or the refusal to be born, they’re all circling around the same thing. It’s the contraction away from reality, the attempt to protect a separate self. And the release of that contraction isn’t some dramatic end-of-the-world experience. It’s a relaxation into what’s always been true.
That’s why Bubba, back in that seminar, kept emphasizing not to force some big heroic drama. If you’re constantly trying to have an experience, you’re still just playing out the contraction. Real understanding is quieter, subtler, more absolute than that.
And when you see it, when you really grasp it, death itself doesn’t carry the same weight. The body already knows. The universe already knows. You don’t have to.
And that’s where I’ll leave it. Thanks for hanging in with me through all that depth. If it stirred something in you, let it settle, don’t force it. Until next time.
Joy is one of those words we all know but rarely stop to define. Ask ten people what it means, and you’ll probably hear ten different answers: feeling happy, being satisfied, getting what you want. But psychologists and researchers point out that joy is something much deeper. It isn’t just a fleeting emotion that comes and goes like the weather. Joy is more like a steady orientation toward life, a way of being that runs beneath the ups and downs of daily moods.
You can see the difference when you compare joy with happiness. Happiness is great, no one’s knocking it. But happiness usually describes moments of comfort, pleasure, or excitement. It comes when things line up just right: good food, a fun event, a beautiful day. The problem is, happiness doesn’t last very long. The phone battery dies, the meal is over, the holiday ends, and the glow fades. Joy doesn’t work that way. Joy can stay with you even when life feels messy, even when you’re sad or grieving.
That’s because joy is tied to meaning. It shows up when you live in line with your values, when you use your strengths in a way that feels true to you, and when you deepen your relationships with others. You can be crying at your child’s graduation, torn between pride and nostalgia, and still feel joy. You can be at a funeral, grieving someone you loved, and still feel joy in the fact that they mattered so much to you. Joy is the deep current beneath the surface waves.
Psychologist Pamela King, who studies joy, describes it as a virtue more than an emotion. It’s cultivated through three main pathways: authenticity, relationships, and meaning. Authenticity is about showing up as yourself, not a polished version or someone else’s expectations. Relationships are about investing in others and allowing yourself to be supported in return. Meaning is about aligning your life with ideals that feel morally or spiritually right to you. When these three elements come together, joy tends to follow.
That distinction matters, because we live in a culture that often confuses joy with consumption. Ads and social media feeds tell us joy is found in buying the next thing, upgrading, staying comfortable, and avoiding anything painful. But research shows this doesn’t hold up. Psychologists call that the “hedonic model”, the idea that life satisfaction comes from maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. It makes sense on paper, but the effect is short-lived. You get a dopamine rush from the new gadget, and within days or weeks, it fades.
Joy belongs to a different model: the “eudaimonic” one. Instead of chasing quick highs, this model is about fulfillment. It asks questions like: Am I growing as a person? Am I contributing to something larger than myself? Am I living in alignment with what I believe is right? Joy doesn’t require constant comfort. In fact, it often grows stronger when we face challenges with integrity. That’s why people sometimes describe joy after overcoming hardship, or even in the middle of sorrow, because the experience connects deeply with what they value.
Science backs this up. Joy isn’t just a vague feeling; it shows up in the body and brain. A few chemicals are central. Serotonin helps regulate your mood and sense of stability. Dopamine fuels motivation and reward, that feeling of progress and possibility. Oxytocin strengthens bonding and trust, showing up in hugs, acts of care, or moments of connection. Endorphins relieve stress and produce that sense of lightness you get after exercise or laughter.
But here’s the thing: you don’t just wait around for these chemicals to hit. Daily choices influence them. Exercise and movement boost serotonin and endorphins. Sleep resets brain chemistry and makes joy more accessible the next day. Spending time with friends or loved ones raises oxytocin. Achieving goals triggers dopamine. Even mindfulness and gratitude practices are linked to shifts in serotonin and other systems that stabilize mood. Joy isn’t an accident, it’s something we can actively cultivate.
One of the clearest frameworks for how to do this comes from Martin Seligman, a founder of positive psychology. His PERMA model explains well-being as a mix of five ingredients: Positive emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishments. Joy touches every one of these. Positive emotions are obvious — joy is part of that. Engagement is about flow, those times you lose yourself in something challenging but rewarding, which often produces joy. Relationships? Joy deepens when shared. Meaning gives joy its foundation. And accomplishments bring that spark of satisfaction that can blossom into joy when they connect with our values.
The idea of flow, developed by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, is especially connected to joy. Flow happens when you’re fully absorbed in something you care about. You’re not overthinking, not checking the clock, not worrying about whether you’re “happy.” You’re just present, challenged, and engaged. It could be painting, playing music, solving a tough problem, or even rock climbing. Flow produces joy not because it’s always “fun” in the shallow sense, but because it connects effort with meaning.
Lifestyle choices play a huge role too. Research shows regular exercise doesn’t just improve your physical health, it boosts resilience and mood, making joy more likely. Sleep is another big one. During sleep, the brain resets, clears out stress chemicals, and helps us process emotional experiences. Nutrition also affects mood more than most people realize, especially through the gut microbiome, which is linked to serotonin production. And perhaps the most consistent predictor of joy across studies is social connection. The Harvard Study of Adult Development, which has been running for over 80 years, found that strong relationships are the single best predictor of a joyful, healthy life.
This tells us something important: joy isn’t a private project. It grows in community. Helping others, practicing kindness, and being open to receiving kindness in return all boost joy. Even small acts, giving someone a compliment, volunteering an hour of your time, or just really listening, can have measurable effects on mood and well-being. That’s because joy isn’t only about self-satisfaction; it’s about resonance. It’s about your life vibrating in tune with the lives of others.
Mindfulness also shows up here. It doesn’t have to mean long meditation sessions on a cushion. Mindfulness is simply paying attention, to your breath, your surroundings, the people in front of you. When you’re mindful, you notice the small joys you might otherwise miss: the warmth of sunlight, the taste of food, the sound of laughter. Neuroscience shows mindfulness lowers stress hormones and shifts brain activity toward regions linked to positive emotions. Over time, this creates more space for joy to arise.
So if we step back, what’s the bigger picture? Joy is not the same as happiness. Happiness is about how we feel in the moment, and it’s valuable, but temporary. Joy is about how we live, and it endures even when things aren’t perfect. It shows up when we’re authentic, when we’re connected, and when we’re living with meaning. It’s supported by our biology, but shaped by our choices. And it grows stronger the more we share it with others.
The takeaway is simple but powerful: joy is something we cultivate. It’s not about avoiding pain or stacking up pleasures. It’s about aligning our lives with what matters most, and practicing habits that support the brain and body along the way. When we do that, joy becomes less of a rare spark and more of a steady flame, something that carries us through both the bright days and the hard ones.
What happens when we do nothing? We feel bored and…..we do something. Most often, we distract ourselves, we get lost in distractions, lose this listless discomfort! And then…do it all over again. Wash, rinse, repeat. Think about it!
You know that feeling when you’re just sitting there, staring at the wall, or maybe zoning out while a video game’s still flickering in the background, and you’re like… “Ugh, I’m bored”? Yeah, it feels kinda of pointless, right? Like dead air in your brain. But here’s the weird twist: psychologists are actually saying boredom isn’t just this empty, useless thing. It’s more like an alarm bell, a signal that your brain is screaming, “Hey, I need something new. Change it up.”
And this isn’t just speculation. There’s this study out of Texas A and M, led by Dr. Heather Lench, with some collaboration from Dr. Shane Bench at Utah State University Eastern. They basically dug deep into boredom and came back with a really counterintuitive point: boredom doesn’t just push us toward pleasure, it pushes us toward anything different, even if it sucks. Like, you’re bored, and suddenly eating something gross or taking some random risk feels better than just sitting there in the void.
Lench put it really clearly. She said, “When we feel bored, we want change, even if that change is unpleasant. It’s about feeling something new, whether that is positive or negative.” So, boredom is like this inner shove to get us unstuck. And when you think about it from an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense. If our ancestors were just chilling, doing nothing for too long, they might have missed opportunities, resources, or even threats. Boredom evolved to keep us moving, curious, maybe even reckless, but definitely not stagnant.
Now, here’s where it gets kind of funny-slash-scary. That drive for novelty? It can go in two directions. On the one hand, boredom can spark creativity, focus, productivity like when you finally write that poem, paint that wall, or start a new project. But it can also steer people into risky stuff: addictions, bad decisions, drugs, reckless behaviors. It all depends on how someone handles the state of being bored. Some people channel it into building or exploring, others spiral into frustration or self-blame, or they start looking for thrill in dangerous places.
And that’s why this study redefines boredom not as this passive emptiness but as a functional emotion a real psychological mechanism. Lench even said it explains some of those “puzzling behaviors” we see all the time, where people make choices that look completely irrational, almost like they’re sabotaging themselves. But really, they’re just driven by this deeper craving to feel something different.
Here’s a detail from their experiments that blew my mind: in the third study, they set things up so people got bored by either positive or negative stimuli. Like, they were literally tired of good vibes or sick of negative vibes. And what happened? People who were bored with positivity actually sought out negative experiences, while people bored with negativity went looking for positive ones. That flips the whole pleasure principle on its head. It’s not about moving toward happiness, it’s about moving away from monotony.
And Dr. Lench summed it up really well our brains crave stimulation. If things get too routine, or feel irrelevant to our goals, boredom is like, “Shift gears. Now.” Even if the shift takes you into something unpleasant.
So yeah, boredom is powerful. But here’s the twist: that was just the psychologist’s perspective. Over on the philosophy side of things, there’s another take that gets a lot deeper like existential-depth deep. And I think this is where boredom gets really interesting.
So let’s bring in Martin Heidegger, the German philosopher who, let’s be honest, isn’t usually the guy you’d expect to help with TikTok burnout. But his whole framework around technology and Being actually nails what’s going on with our overstimulated lives.
Heidegger argued that modern technology isn’t just a bunch of tools. It’s a way of revealing the world shaping how we see everything, including ourselves. And in today’s digital culture, that “revealing” is dominated by speed, visibility, algorithms, and the compulsive push for content. Life basically starts to mirror the feed: always updating, always now, allergic to slowness or silence.
And here’s the problem: what all that noise takes away isn’t just our attention it’s the deeper reflection. The ability to sit in silence, to face an unfilled moment, to actually reflect on life or ourselves. We lose the capacity for real stillness. And when silence does show up, what do we do? We grab the phone. We look around for distraction, not for connection, but just to not feel the emptiness. Heidegger called this pull “das Man,” or “the they” this ghostly collective we all kind of fall into. We copy trends, follow likes, and let algorithms set the rhythm. It’s comforting, but it erases individuality.
That’s where boredom comes in again. Heidegger saw boredom, especially what he called “profound boredom,” as this privileged mood, a doorway to seeing Being itself. In his 1929 to 1930 lecture series The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, he described it as the moment when everything people, objects, even yourself just sort of withdraws into indifference. Sounds depressing, but what he meant was: in that space, reality itself reveals something deeper. Boredom isn’t just absence, it’s a threshold. It clears the table so meaning has room to appear.
Now think about that compared to digital life. Today we treat boredom like a disease. It’s shameful. We hate it, avoid it, patch it instantly with scrolling or background noise. What disappears in that process isn’t just quiet time. It’s the metaphysical access, the chance for depth. And Heidegger was worried about this long before smartphones existed he called it the “forgetting of being.” In our time, it looks like losing boredom itself, and with it, losing the pause, the reflection, the authentic “I.”
So while the psychologists are saying boredom drives novelty and sometimes risk, Heidegger’s basically saying: without boredom, we lose ourselves. Both sides kind of line up in a way boredom is necessary. It’s not just something to fill. It’s a signal and also a doorway.
And then there’s another perspective that ties these threads together in a really personal way this idea that boredom is actually vital for creativity. There’s this story someone told about going on a ten day Vipassana retreat. That’s one of those silent meditation marathons: ten hours a day sitting, no talking, no phones, no books, not even a notebook to scribble in. Total cut off. If you want a modern test of boredom tolerance, that’s it.
The person who went said they didn’t remember being crushed by boredom back then, but looking back now, in a world where every spare moment is hijacked by scrolling, they feel like they’d never be able to do it again. And that reaction itself says a lot. It’s like we’ve lost the muscle for stillness. They even described boredom as a kind of nourishment for the brain something we used to just slip into naturally in downtime: walking to school, waiting for a friend, sitting in traffic. Those little pauses are gone now, paved over with TikTok clips, endless feeds, and notifications.
And here’s the darker twist: boredom has been commodified. Platforms and algorithms literally detect when your attention dips and hit you with fresh content engineered to pull you back in. What used to be a natural pause for inner reflection has been turned into a marketplace for your attention. Boredom isn’t allowed to breathe anymore.
That’s where the creativity angle comes in. The author pointed out that constant digital distraction doesn’t just steal time, it threatens our creative instincts. There’s this quote from Drew Haller’s piece, “Killing Counterculture,” saying if media only rewards speed and virality, then what we need to do is the opposite. Slow down, prioritize depth, and defend creativity as something more than just instant content.
And honestly, that connects perfectly with both psychology and philosophy. On the psychological side, boredom pushes you toward new experiences and if you can harness that in a positive direction, you get art, invention, innovation. On the philosophical side, boredom is the threshold where real reflection and depth emerge. And in everyday life, boredom used to be just… everywhere. In line at the grocery store, sitting on the bus, lying in bed before sleep. Those were the moments where ideas could grow.
Now, most of us feel almost allergic to boredom. We avoid it so fast we don’t even realize what we’re giving up. But if you look at what the studies say, and what thinkers like Heidegger warned about, and what people notice in their own creative lives, it’s clear boredom isn’t something to escape. It’s something to reclaim.
So yeah, boredom feels uncomfortable. Sometimes it even pushes us toward risky or dumb choices. But if we sit with it really let it arrive it can open up new paths, spark creativity, or even connect us with something deeper about ourselves.
PracticallyPsychology 