Oh, hey, what's up! Welcome to this week's digest. This is a very special 'Experiment' edition. I am sharing the results of two meaningful personal experiments, as well as a variety of content that encourages us to experiment with our ideas and ways of being to get feedback from the world.

• BLATANT SELF-PROMOTION - LAUNCHING MY COACHING PROGRAMS
• BOOK - A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle (My full Kindle highlights)
• BLOG POST - Farnam Street: Pain Plus Reflection Equals Progress by Shane Parrish
• BLOG POST - Medium: How is your conflict affinity? by Amar Singh
• BOOK - Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change by Pema Chodron (My full highlights)

• You are making a major crossroads decision like career path, graduate school, or relationship.
• You want to create more time and attention for the activities and people that matter most to you.
• You aspire to cultivate new health & wellness habits.
• You desire a more concrete purpose or vision for how you want your life to be.
• You feel a mounting discontentment despite all of the hard work and effort you pour into your life.

• As we no longer identify with our mental positions, we are able to be tolerant of other people’s beliefs and perspectives. We can temporarily shift our own perspective and see things through their eyes.
   
• The quicker you are in attaching verbal or mental labels to things, people, or situations, the more shallow and lifeless your reality becomes, and the more deadened you become to reality, the miracle of life that continuously unfolds within and around you. In this way, cleverness may be gained, but wisdom is lost, and so are joy, love, creativity, and aliveness.
   
• Most egos have conflicting wants. They want different things at different times or may not even know what they want except that they don’t want what is: the present moment. Unease, restlessness, boredom, anxiety, dissatisfaction, are the result of unfulfilled wanting.
   
• The underlying emotion that governs all the activity of the ego is fear. The fear of being nobody, the fear of nonexistence, the fear of death. All its activities are ultimately designed to eliminate this fear, but the most the ego can ever do is to cover it up temporarily... Once you realize and accept that all structures (forms) are unstable, even the seemingly solid material ones, peace arises within you.
   
• Resistance makes the world and the things of the world appear more real, more solid, and more lasting than they are, including your own form identity, the ego. It endows the world and the ego with a heaviness and an absolute importance that makes you take yourself and the world very seriously... The affluent world is even more deeply identified with form, more lost in content, more trapped in ego.
   
• Nonresistance, nonjudgment, and nonattachment are the three aspects of true freedom and enlightened living.
   
• The Roman philosopher Tacitus rightly observed that “the desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise.” If uncertainty is unacceptable to you, it turns into fear. If it is perfectly acceptable, it turns into increased aliveness, alertness, and creativity.

• Our painful moments are important moments. When we confront something painful, we are left with a choice between an ugly and painful truth or a beautiful delusion. Many of us opt for the latter and it slows our progress.
   
• Being open about weaknesses means being open about who we are in the moment. It doesn’t mean that’s who we are forever. But we can’t improve what we can’t see.
   
• The easy path means being the same person you were yesterday... The harder path is to embrace the pain and ask yourself what you could have done differently or better or what your blind spot was.

• Conflict is often helpful; we should aspire to become better at it. We should be able to disagree and argue in search of truth, while avoiding the negative side-effects that are often associated with conflict.
   
• Be vigilant about creating an environment where everyone’s opinions are valued and no one is denigrated or punished for dissent.
   
• The best way to argue kindly is take on your opponent's strongest arguments, not their weakest ones. This is referred to as steel-manning an argument.
   
• ...one of the kindest things you can do for another human is giving respectful, honest feedback... This is likely the hardest hurdle in the path to having better conflict — but definitely achievable with kindness, empathy and respect.
   
• Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.
   
• "...my work is my life. I spend the majority of my time working. Most of my friends I know through work. If I can’t be open and honest at work, then I’m not really living, am I?’’

• The very nature of our existence is forever in flux…Our attempts to find lasting pleasure, lasting security, are at odds with the fact that we’re part of a dynamic system in which everything and everyone is in process.
   
• When we resist change, it’s called suffering. But when we completely let go and not struggle against it, when we can embrace the groundlessness of our situation and relax into its dynamic quality, that’s called enlightenment… Another word for this is freedom – freedom from struggling against the fundamental ambiguity of being human.
   
• We have an urge to find relief from anxious feelings by clinging to something that gives us pleasure… We turn to anything to relieve the discomfort – food, alcohol, sex…
   
• We have a choice. We can spend our whole life suffering because we can’t relax with how things really are, or we can relax and embrace the open-endedness of the human situation, which is fresh, unfixed, unbiased.
   
• I can’t overestimate the importance of accepting ourselves exactly as we are right now, not as we wish we were or think we ought to be.
   
• What most of us have been doing is gearing our lives toward avoiding unpleasant feelings while clinging to whatever we think will make us feel good and feel secure. From a conventional point of view, this makes perfect sense. But from the vantage point of remaining with our direct experience, the vantage point of opening to the tentativeness of life, this strategy is self-defeating, the very thing that keeps us stuck.
   
• We can follow Chögyam Trungpa’s suggestion: Live your life as an experiment. Adopt an attitude of “I’m not sure what will help in this situation, but I’m going to experiment and try this.”
   
• We live in a world that is intrinsically good, intrinsically awake, and our path is to realize this. Simply put, the practice at this stage is to turn toward your experience, all of it, and never turn away.
   
• As Leonard Cohen once said about the benefits of meditation, “The less there was of me, the happier I got.”
   
• Knowing that it’s all passing so quickly makes everything I encounter exceedingly precious… We’re no longer looking for something other than right now, no longer looking for an ideal world.
   
• We need to help each other let go of the shore and stay in the middle of the river with no life jackets, no inner tubes, and no intention of ever clinging to anything again.