I was at home. With a deep sense of rootedness. An awareness that is my place. Where I was born, where I grew up, and where I left never expecting to return.

Yet here I am. Here I plan to raise our children. Here I plan to grow old.

It still feels strange to write that. But also true and beautiful. I've spent much of my life chasing new places and things. Keeping doors open and maximizing optionality. Now I'm drawn to commitment. Allowing paths of possibilities to fade behind me. Deepening into the pathless existence that springs from this place.

Creating Space

It’s been a weird and wild last 18 months.

After 5 years of being mostly offline, I spent 2022 very online. I started sharing on Twitter, began writing on Substack, and recorded a podcast with internet friends. It was a blast. I connected with amazing people, discovered new ideas, and embraced new activities. I evolved in more ways than expected.

My broader life was also changing. My wife and I had our first child, who transformed from a tiny nugget nestling on my chest into a rambunctious toddler racing around our house. We moved back to my hometown, trading our comfortable life in North Carolina for a complex reunion with Rhode Island. We left a small lot in a cozy suburban neighborhood for a few acres nestled between a conservation forest and a cooperative farm.

In early May, I sensed I needed a season of solitude to let these changes settle in. I needed to stop talking, stop posting, and stop writing. I needed to listen. To create space to align more with our land, to connect more with my body, and to deepen more into our local community.

Interesting things began bubbling up in unexpected ways. The energy I was channeling online flowed into daily life.

I discovered neighbors raising goats, creating meadows, and growing mushrooms. We gathered for community events around the farm, milled trees, and built picnic tables.

I stumbled into a new yoga studio and immersed myself in the practice. I connected with local breathwork practitioners and discovered new modalities to connect with the body. Slowly, I began to imagine different ways I might create local offerings and contribute to our community.

It's too early to write the full story of these last few months. It's too soon to make meaning of everything that has emerged. But I can share a few pieces that feel particularly relevant.

Bridging online and local worlds

In my life, I've experienced the extremes of being totally offline running local businesses, and very online. Parts of me feel pulled toward each existence. Yet, I sense the real magic for me occurs at the intersection. It's contributing to my local community and participating in the broader virtual conversation. It's nurturing activities that exist only in a single space and time. And, also creating things that ripple out through the internet to unknown places and future moments.

Relationship to and interconnection of everything

In my work in fitness, I often talk about the importance of our relationship to the activity. It's not just what we do, but how and why we do it that matters. This extends to all aspects of our lives. Our food. Our home. Our gardens. Our work. Our relationships. Our community. etc, etc.

More and more, I'm experiencing how connected all these areas are. It's impossible to isolate my approach to exercise from the rest of my life. It exists in connection to where I live and what I eat. It contributes to the energy and emotional state I bring to my relationships, work, and community. The same is true of everything we do.

Playing long games

For most of my life, I've been in a rush. Driven by an inner pressure to race through achievements and milestones. Lately, I've encountered a new way of operating and being. It’s unfamiliar and uncomfortable.

Patience, perhaps. In place of sprinting, there is comfort going slow. In place of chasing, a willingness to pause, stop, and create space.

My best explanation is that I've finally begun to embody a quote by John Steinbeck I first encountered in ’s fantastic book, The Pathless Path:

"If it is right, it happens—The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.”

On the horizon

In the spirit of this, I have a few updates on this newsletter and my broader creative pursuits.

In the weeks ahead, I'm going to merge my writing "On Renewal" and "Intuitive Fitness" into a single newsletter. I’ll also be noodling on a personal site that helps me better organize my different endeavors and explore my interests.

I want to create a container that honors the connection between all these areas. I cannot write about exercise without incorporating ideas I discover through ecology. I cannot explore themes of renewal without integrating the role of embodiment, movement, and vitality.

Grouping these together under my name acknowledges the reality that I don't know what will unfold and emerge over the next decade. I only know I want to keep exploring, writing, and sharing.

No action is necessary on your end as I'll combine the publications on my end. And no pressure to join the next chapter of this journey. You can unsubscribe at any point if it's no longer resonating with you.

One of my core life philosophies is that we can build in conditions that honor change and nurture our ability to adapt. These tweaks in my creative containers and approach are a few small ways of leaning in on this process.

Thank you for reading and joining me in exploring these themes. As always, don’t hesitate to reach out directly or via the comments if you have reflections, ideas, or questions.

I wrote about these themes of renewal and uncertainty in a guest post for as he savors his first month of parenthood. I’m sharing it below for everyone who isn't already subscribed to Paul’s newsletter

I love the way Paul explores our relationship with work and shares ideas about discovering new possibilities in life. His book The Pathless Path is a must-read for anyone interested in new stories and paths. Paul is truly one of the most generous and supportive people on the internet. It’s inspiring to see the success and impact he is having by doing it his own way.

#1 Renewal on the Pathless Path

For most of my life, I have tried to plan, predict, and control. Perhaps, it is just my personality. Or, maybe it was from attending school, playing sports, studying economics, and working in consulting. These structured activities reward goal-setting and strategizing.

Yet when you embrace pathless paths, you acknowledge the inherent uncertainty in life. You recognize the futility of trying to control everything. You open yourself to the possibility of discovering things you could never plan or predict.

New questions emerge:

How can we increase our capacity to respond to change? How do we create conditions to nurture our vitality through the winding journey? How do we become capable of rising to the uncertain challenges of our future?

To me, these questions point toward self-renewal. The idea that an entity like ourselves can have the capacity to adapt to a changing environment. We can build in the resources and skills within us to sustain and thrive through uncertainty. This applies not only to us as individuals, but also to our organizations and even our society.

Instead of people that become more rigid and resistant to change, we can become more resourceful and resilient. Instead of organizations that are stagnant and prone to disruption, we can design them to be innovative and responsive to the evolving world. Instead of accepting a society that is bureaucratic and protects the status quo, we can contribute to one that is dynamic and unleashes the creativity of its citizens.

I know this might sound dramatic and maybe even a bit naive. Yet, I believe this is one of the most important activities of our time. As John Gardner says in his powerful book “Self-Renewal” (written back in 1961):

"Unless we attend to the requirements of renewal, aging institutions and organizations will eventually bring our civilization to moldering ruin. Unless we cope with the ways in which modern society oppresses the individual, we shall lose the creative spark that renews both societies and [individuals]. Unless we foster versatile, innovative and self-renewing men and women, all the ingenious social arrangements in the world will not help us."

The renewal of society depends on the renewal of individuals. It starts with us.

This may sound daunting or depressing. But the good news is that by embracing our own pathless paths we become these types of people. We hone our ability to question, explore, innovate, and adapt. We push back against the “default path” that celebrates the status quo and stifles the creativity of so many. We throw our unique gifts into the world and inspire others to do the same. 

To me, a pathless path is about knowing that we don’t know exactly where we are going or who we will become.

Self-renewal is our ability to respond to the inevitable change we encounter in ourselves and the world around us.

#2 Rediscovering “Non-Doing”

More and more, I believe a big piece of thriving on a pathless path and being capable of renewal lies in the concept of “non-doing.”

I’ll never forget when I met Paul last February during a curiosity convo. I described my detailed plan to begin writing and expanding my business online. He just laughed and said: “You have no idea where you’ll be in a year. Just start and give yourself space to see what happens”

Paul was nudging me towards non-doing. He was reminding me of what he had said in his book that “nothing good gets away, as long as you create the space to let it emerge.”

The irony of Paul giving me this advice was that I had built my entire fitness business around the same concept. My goal is to help people shift from "forcing themselves to exercise" to creating an enjoyable, evolving, and intuitive approach.

But I wasn’t applying this idea across my broader life. In many areas, I still obsessed with planning, goal setting, and grinding my way to success.

Thankfully, once I joined Twitter (because Paul demanded I create an account during our call), I started to see non-doing everywhere. Even better, I met other people who could guide me to embrace it in more domains:

• There was Rob Hardy talking about “non-coercive marketing”.

• Michael Ashcroft teaching us to “withhold definition” and “expand our awareness”.

• Sasha Chapin helping us write by realizing that “grinding away at sentences isn’t working hard, it’s inhabiting the flow of language.”

• Cécile Marion encouraging us to take a sabbatical to “create space to awaken our curiosity.”

• Lou Tamposi highlighting the way we can “fight against the current, or you can be like water” in our cooking and broader life.

• Jonny Miller reminding us that “we do not DO sleep, instead we create conditions for sleep to emerge in the nervous system.”

• Kristen Haaf explaining that the first step to landscape design is “to just be on your land, the next steps emerge out of that space.”

And so many others. Today I find myself applying “non-doing” in many more areas of life. But I’m still struck by questions like:

Why do I need to repeatedly relearn these lessons in different domains? How can I be so comfortable embracing it in one area and so blind to it in others? What would it look like to welcome non-doing more fully into my life? 

#3 Seeds of Renewal

This all may sound a bit philosophical so let me share a few concrete examples. If you’re like me, you may need some extra deconditioning and inspiration on ways to incorporate these ideas in your life.

Try Embodied Exercise

I’m clearly biased, but I believe that one of the best places to start is by reconnecting with our bodies. After all, our body is the vessel in which we navigate our pathless paths. Exercise gives us the energy and resilience to sustain the long game of life.

But there’s a deeper way it creates conditions for renewal. If we take an embodied approach, we experience the physical sensations that arise as we move our body. We notice the way that stretching our capacities can feel good. We get stronger, fitter, and faster. The change is tangible. Our progress is visible.

Experiencing this growth reminds us of all the ways we can change. We start to notice subtle shifts in more subjective areas like our mood and confidence. A sense of possibility and progress ripples across our life.

Like so many areas, it matters less where you start than that you start. So I invite you to reimagine exercise from within:

Intuitive Fitness

Reimagine Exercise from Within

Welcome! You’ve stumbled into a corner of the internet built around a surprisingly controversial idea: exercise can be enjoyable for everyone. Fitness is a loaded word. For some, it represents one of their favorite activities. It’s a source of joy, excitement, and pride. Yet, for many others, it evokes a flood of negativity. It’s a reminder of dread, fail…

Read more

3 years ago · 13 likes · 2 comments · Sam Sager

Start a Garden

After exercise, nothing has helped me embrace these ideas more than starting a garden. You’ve likely heard of the “Metaphors We Live By”. Well as a former college athlete, my dominant metaphors were sports-related. Gardening has shifted my day to day lens from competition to creation. From winning to nurturing. From chasing goals to creating conditions to let them unfold.

A funny part about gardening is how quickly you realize that you can’t force things to grow. And, you definitely can’t beat nature. All you can do is create a fertile environment and be patient. The seeds, soil, and sun do the rest.

Gardening gives you a visceral sense of change, death, non-doing and renewal. If you’re not sure where to start, I documented the beginning of my journey in this thread.

Create a Project

Now this last one isn’t quite as easy as planting some kale or strawberries, but it’s likely even more transformative. Something special happens when we start a creative project or a business. It’s a chance to “bring forth what is within us” and share it with the world. Whatever we put in, we usually get more back.

A moment that stands out over the last decade is when I left the corporate world to launch a local food business. It was my first step down a more pathless path and it shaped me in many new ways.

We eventually sold it to our chef and some local investors but the experience taught me way more than just business. It showed me how when we work on a project, the project works on us. If we plunge into new terrain we encounter new ideas, new challenges, and new ways of being. We evolve and increase our capacity for self-renewal.

#4 Book Recommendations

This wouldn’t be a proper edition of Boundless without a few book recs. So here are some favorites on these themes:

1 // Self-Renewal By John W. Gardner – I hope I’ve already piqued your interest in Gardner’s seminal work. It’s perfect for anyone interested in how we can support renewal in ourselves, our organizations, and our society.

2 // Tao Te Ching By Lau Tzu – This is a great starting point if you have an interest in non-doing. I recommend starting Stephen Mitchell's translation and then reading a few others (the Ursula K. Le Guin one is another favorite).

3 // Timeless Way of Building By Christopher Alexander – A book on architecture? Yes, it’s technically about how we design spaces but it’s really about how order and beauty emerge naturally. It highlights how can enable more aliveness in ourselves and the environment around us. Here’s a twitter thread on key ideas if you want a preview.

4 // A Natural History of the Senses By Diane Ackerman – This hidden gem brings to life the power and beauty of each of the senses in exquisite detail. It explains how “The senses don’t just make sense of life in bold or subtle acts of clarity, they tear reality apart into vibrant morsels and reassemble them into a meaningful pattern”

I’ll leave you with one final quote from Gardner that captures why I’m such a big believer in the community Paul is building around the Pathless Path.

"The future is shaped by men and women with a steady even zestful confidence that on balance their efforts will not have been in vain. They take failure and defeat not as a reason to doubt themselves but as a reason to strengthen resolve. Some combination of hope, vitality, and indomitability makes them willing to bet their lives on ventures of unknown outcome.

Thanks for Reading!

To support my work please consider sharing this newsletter with a friend and subscribing to the On Renewal podcast (Spotify | Apple Podcasts).

Subscribe now

A few days ago, I was out on my morning walk and noticed that my mind felt unusually calm while my body buzzed with energy. I always love this time outdoors yet something about this morning was different. I slowed my pace, felt the squish of the thawing ground, and looked around. I saw nothing notable yet the scene was exploding with life.

The birds were back.

I had been unconsciously listening to their chirps and chatter. As I brought my attention to their beautiful racket, I noticed my mood and energy heighten even more. The connection was undeniable.

So when I returned home, I poked around the internet and came across numerous studies highlighting the way birdsong reduces stress, lowers anxiety, enhances mood, and even increases productivity.

Sensory Limitations

This notion that these natural melodies have a positive impact may not surprise anyone who has experience with music. Yet, the world of auditory sensations doesn’t come instinctively to me.

I have Amusia, a more extreme version of tone-deafness, where you not only don’t hear pitch but also struggle with musical memory and recognition. I’m not exaggerating when I say that I’ve never had a song stuck in my head. And, I’m not joking when I share that I can’t sing “Happy Birthday” or “Row Row Row Your Boat” to tune.

For most of my life, I’ve ignored these difficulties. They felt isolated to my challenges learning an instrument, my difficulties dancing to a beat, and my poor contributions to celebratory songs.

But now I wonder if there’s not a broader and more persistent way in which these auditory limitations impact my day-to-day experience. Is there an entire depth of sensory terrain that I’m not experiencing? Are there ways that I can’t even imagine that this dulls my life?

It’s interesting to compare this condition to other abnormalities like color blindness, and lack of smell (anosmia). If I lost my capacity to see a range of colors, I’d surely mourn the new narrowness of my visual experience. Just as those who lost their smell from Covid, complained about the way it muted their daily life.

It’s easy to assume that others experience and process sensations in a similar way to us. In reality, there’s a vast range across people. I was chatting with a few friends the other day who mentioned that they have Aphantasia and have no ability to visualize images in their minds.

Close your eyes and imagine an apple. What do you see?

People with Aphantasia see nothing while others might see a colorful and photorealistic apple. Here’s a popular chart that highlights the spectrum of what people see in response to this prompt:

The range of different experiences is striking. It makes me curious about where else our sensory capacities differ and in what ways they are capable of changing.

Sensory Clarity

I used to be a four on the apple aphantasia scale. Now I’m a two. The increase in my capacity for visual imagination has been dramatic and I attribute it to practicing Unified Mindfulness.

Unlike approaches focused solely on concentration, Unified Mindfulness stresses the importance of also developing sensory clarity:

“the ability to track and explore your moment-by-moment experience in real-time” and “determine what sights, sounds, and/or feelings constitute your experience of life.”1

Instead of just focusing on a single object like our breath, Unified Mindfulness encourages us to explore sensations across what they call See, Hear, and Feel domains. They even further break this down into sensations from outside of us (e.g. physical sights) and within us (e.g. mental images). Here’s a nice visual of the different types of sensations they highlight in this framework:

Through this practice, I’ve increased my sensory clarity of mental images, physical sounds, body sensations, and more. These changes have bled into the rest of my life where my day-to-day experience now feels brighter and richer. Almost as if the resolution of daily life has been turned slightly up.

Sensory Altered States

Unfortunately, Unified Mindfulness has not cured my amusia. While I have greater awareness of auditory sensations, I still struggle with melody, harmony, and rhythm. But I now believe that I’m capable of overcoming this condition despite not yet knowing exactly how.

This sense of possibility comes from my experiences with psychedelics. My sensory experience of listening to music during a psychedelic-induced state was profoundly different. I can’t say if it matches how others normally experience music but it felt like I could finally hear the variety, depth, and beauty within the sound.

This hasn’t transformed my experience of music without psychedelics yet it gives me hope. Studies highlight how psychedelics alter brain activity and connectivity to music.

In fortuitous timing, just published a post yesterday on how he cured his Aphantasia. It’s a fascinating read. He shares examples of exercises he practiced, emotional connections to his imagination, and experiments with micro-dosing. The fact that he saw a dramatic improvement in just two weeks gives me even more confidence that we can overcome many sensory abnormalities.

Perhaps with further exploration within the auditory terrain, I can rewire my brain to fully experience the sensations of music. I can harness the power of neuroplasticity to increase my sensory capacities far more than I used to think was possible.2

Sensory Understanding

In my explorations of our senses, I recently discovered an older book by Diane Ackerman called A Natural History of the Senses. It perfectly captures the beauty, power, and stories of each of the senses:

“The senses don’t just make sense of life in bold or subtle acts of clarity, they tear reality apart into vibrant morsels and reassemble them into a meaningful pattern… The senses feed shards of information to the brain like microscopic pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

Ackerman brings to life each of the five core senses in exquisite detail, like this introduction to smell:

“Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary, and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the Poconos, when wild blueberry bushes teemed with succulent fruit and the opposite sex was as mysterious as space travel.”

She highlights the way our senses shape how we understand the world:

We may neutralize one or more of the senses temporarily— by floating in body-temperature water, for instance— but that only heights the others. There is no way which to understand the world without first detecting it through the radar-net of our senses.

This reality that our senses provide the raw material for our experience of life is always present yet so often ignored. It’s easy to go through life without thinking about how our smell, hearing, vision, taste, and touch are shaping our reality.

There’s immense potential to bring more awareness to these sensory domains and explore how we can enhance these sensory capacities. Doing so can bring us more deeply into the present moment, connect us more strongly to our memories, and enhance the clarity of our imaginations.

By changing how we experience the senses, we can change how we understand our world and ourselves. We renew and evolve in ways that we didn’t know were possible.

Thanks for Reading!

To support my work please consider sharing this newsletter with a friend and subscribing to the On Renewal podcast (Spotify | Apple Podcasts).

Subscribe now

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It’s been a challenging month. I knew moving was hard but underestimated the toll it would take this time. Turns out uprooting your life with a 10-month-old is a different beast. At least she seems unfazed by the chaos.

One bright spot has been exploring our new property and the surrounding forest. Most mornings I take our daughter and dogs for a walk in the woods behind our house. As I walk onto the trail, my breath slows and my mind empties. The running list of to-dos fades away. I smell the pines, hear the rustle of leaves, and taste the crisp winter air. I feel grateful and settled, for at least a moment.

I reach my favorite part of the woods. An old stone wall emerges unexpectedly, surrounded by overgrowth. The trees seem to swallow it up. My mind wanders to someone building it hundreds of years ago. I picture what the landscape looked like then, cleared for pasture or production. I smile imagining the forest slowly reclaiming the land. Nature rebuilding a vibrant ecosystem.1

Visions of a Food Forest

I’ve been thinking a lot about ecology as I study the land around our house. My vision is to build a vibrant food forest, an edible garden that mimics a forest to become a self-sustaining ecosystem:

“Land health is the capacity for self-renewal in the soils, waters, plants, and animals that collectively comprise the land.” - Aldo Leopold2

To do this, we’ll add not only edible plants that regrow year after year but also plants that capture and recycle nutrients into the soil. We’ll combine fruit trees and berries with nitrogen-fixing shrubs and deep-rooted plants that gather nutrients from below to enhance the soil. We’ll add groundcover to minimize weeds, plants that produce mulch, and find ways to help retain water. Hopefully, all of this invites beneficial insects, birds, and animals to come and contribute to the diverse ecosystem. Eventually, we’ll incorporate chickens and perhaps other animals.

Since the goal is to minimize the need for external fertilizer and supplemental water, I’ll try to design the food forest so it can persist without outside inputs. Given the complexity of the task, we may never reach this ideal but its fun to strive toward it.

The Burden of Intervention

To learn as much as I can, I’m soaking up Edible Forest Gardens which provides a deep dive into the ecology and design of self-renewing gardens.

One concept they describe is “Shifting the burden to the intervenor”. Anytime we intervene with a self-regulating system, we're signing up to bear the burden of maintaining it. Even if we prevent visible repercussions, we often decrease the system's ability to regulate and sustain itself. Instead of a self-renewing system, we create dependency on ourselves to prevent decay. We sign up to take on greater responsibility and expend more effort to make it work.

Functional Interconnection

The proposed antidote to the burden of intervention in Edible Forest Gardens is Functional Interconnection:

“Wild ecosystems contain webs of cooperation and interdependence that help generate the emergent system properties of stability, resilience, and harmony.

Such healthy systems create no waste and generate no pollution because the inherent by-products of every living thing become food for some other living thing.

They take no outside work to maintain because the networked system of elements regulates fluctuations in the ecosystem and its populations.

In this way, we design a food forest to be a networked ecosystem where the components meet the needs of each other. We shift the responsibility and work back to the garden itself. We build in the capacity for self-renewal.

Self-Regulating Health

I read about these ideas in the context of gardening but my mind immediately went to the world of human health. More and more, people are relying on extreme interventions with the body. As a type 1 diabetic, I have a deep appreciation for modern medicine. I would be dead without it.

Caution with Miracle Drugs

Yet, I’m wary as I see the uptick in men doing testosterone replacement therapy (TRT) at younger and younger ages. I shudder as I see the explosion of interest in GLP-1 drugs for cosmetic weight loss.3 In both cases, doctors openly acknowledge that they only work if you continue to use them. Worse, they further impair your body's natural ability to produce testosterone or regulate weight.

If you haven’t heard much about these “miracle drugs” you will soon. Celebrities are taking them to rapidly transform their bodies. Tech thought leaders are using and hyping them up. I’m not saying these drugs don’t have value or are never appropriate. I’m highlighting the consequences and unknowns of intervention in a system as complex as the human body.

We should first exhaust all avenues to restore our bodies' self-regulating and self-renewing capacities. Nail down the foundational pieces like exercise, sleep, and nutrition. Explore everything across the full spectrum of physical, psychological, and spiritual healing. My friend just published a great list of A Dozen Ways to Live Real Good. My bet is many people who experiment with these for six months would discover they don’t need a lifetime of pharmacological intervention.

Healing with Psychedelics

An area of healing that I’m fascinated by is psychedelic medicine. Yes, it too is a form of intervention. Much of the same caution applies. Yet there are also ways in which they seem to be capable of helping the body heal itself in certain contexts. I just had Dr. Tracy Townsend join On Renewal to share her perspective on psychedelic medicine. I was particularly fascinated by her ideas about how psychedelics can create conditions to support more holistic healing and a sense of wholeness. Check it out:

On The Horizon

One of the things I’m most excited about this spring is taking 's course, Bring Your Land to Life. It’s a six-week deep dive into ecological thinking, soil regeneration, rainwater capture, and landscape design. Perfect timing as I begin to map out the vision of the food forest.

If you’d like to join me, Kristen has kindly offered a 15% discount to readers and listeners of On Renewal. Mention me or this newsletter when you apply and she’ll send you the code. I’m not part of a referral program or receiving any compensation for this, just a big fan. For more on Kristen's philosophy check out this clip from our On Renewal episode on Life-Giving landscapes.

Also on the horizon is a pilot course on Intuitive Fitness. Starting in March, I’m going run a four to six week experience on embracing embodied exercise in your own life.4 In the meantime, I’ve been publishing more on these ideas through the Intuitive Fitness newsletter. You can subscribe here:

Intuitive Fitness

Explorations in enjoyable exercise. Discover your own path from within.

By Sam Sager

Thanks for Reading!

To support my work please consider sharing this newsletter with a friend and subscribing to the On Renewal podcast (Spotify | Apple Podcasts).

Unfolding in the New Year

It’s become popular to shit on new years resolutions: “why wait?”, “they all fail”, “systems over goals”, etc, etc. I understand the sentiment but think the criticism misses two valuable pieces. There’s a collective energy toward change and a tangible sense of a fresh start in the new year.

Just in the last week, I’ve had numerous friends and family ask me about my intentions for the new year. The new calendar creates a visual cue of a fresh canvas to start from. There’s a seasonal sense of possibility in the air.

Change is hard. It requires breaking the inertia of the status quo and building momentum toward something new. Having a community of others in it with you can provide valuable support. Embracing an end-of-year deadline can create an explicit starting point and an extra nudge to get started.

I don’t think the new year is a silver bullet for behavior change. Yet, it’s here. Why not embrace its unique elements? In today’s world, there are so few moments when people come together to embrace intentional transformation. Instead of attacking new years, perhaps we should create other dedicated times throughout the year for shared self-renewal.1

Personally, I like to pick a theme that captures my intention for the year. In 2022, it was cultivate. In every aspect of my life, it felt like a year to focus on creating conditions conducive to growing new things.

For 2023, my theme is unfolding. I sense a ton of stored energy waiting to emerge. The environment is now ripe for production. Yet, I know I need to give things space to develop naturally without forcing them. This quote from Sharon Salzberg is a perfect reminder for when I feel the desire to rush the process:

“Patience doesn't mean making a pact with the devil of denial, ignoring our emotions and aspirations. It means being wholeheartedly engaged in the process that's unfolding, rather than ripping open a budding flower or demanding a caterpillar hurry up and get that chrysalis stage over with” - Sharon Salzberg

Doubling Down on Shared Places

This connects to a broader realization of how much our environment and community shape our lives. We moved to New England so our daughter would grow up in a community of our family and friends. But this meant trading the North Carolina weather we love for cold and dark New England winters. Selecting where to live is an exercise in trade-offs. It forces us to confront the difficult questions about what matters most and what we are willing to give up for it.

In our case, we realized that nothing mattered to us as much as embracing community. Wendell Berry captures it perfectly in his book the Long-Legged House2:

“A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other's lives. It is the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other, the freedom with which they come and go among themselves.” - Wendell Berry

Physical proximity helps shape in-person communities, yet it’s the people and relationships that give them meaning.

I believe this same spirit translates into virtual communities. The best ones create a strong sense that the “place is shared” in an intentional way. In the new year, I’m planning to double down on a few communities that feel particularly alive to me. One I’m particularly enjoying is The Frontier, where an amazing collection of people have gathered to support each other’s creative journeys.

Introducing Intuitive Fitness

I’m excited to share a new project that has been simmering for months, The Intuitive Fitness newsletter. This is a dedicated place to go deeper into the ideas introduced in my essay on Embodied Exercise. It’s a container to explore more enjoyable and effective approaches to fitness. If interested, please check out the first post below and subscribe. My intention is for this to evolve into a community of people who share an interest in embracing enjoyable exercise and intuitive fitness:

Intuitive Fitness

Reimagine Exercise from Within

Welcome! You’ve stumbled into a corner of the internet built around a surprisingly controversial idea: exercise can be enjoyable for everyone. Fitness is a loaded word. For some, it represents one of their favorite activities. It’s a source of joy, excitement, and pride. Yet, for many others, it evokes a flood of negativity. It’s a reminder of dread, fail…

Read more

3 years ago · 5 likes · 1 comment · Sam Sager

I am keeping these as separate publications and plan to continue to focus the On Renewal world on broader themes from my life.

As always, I’d love to hear if you have any thoughts on these topics or a theme you’re leaning into for the new year. Please share in the comments or by replying directly to the email.

Thanks for Reading!

To support my work please consider sharing this newsletter with a friend and subscribing to the On Renewal podcast (Spotify | Apple Podcasts). I have some really exciting guests joining in the months ahead. For a hint of one of the guests, check out this article about how East Fork Pottery is on the cusp of a new evolution.

Subscribe now

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Honoring Seasons

It’s cold and dark here. The days start more slowly and end more quickly. There is something magical about experiencing a place as winter emerges. The trees are bare, the perennials are dead, and the animals seem to have a sense of urgency. Everything is vulnerable, and the landscape feels stripped to its essential form. Even the sunrises and sunsets have a stark feel to them:

Wintering

This environment brings to mind Wintering, a beautiful book about “the power of rest and retreat in difficult times”. It reminds us to honor the seasons of our life and embrace periods of darkness, solitude, and rest.

These challenging times can be seasons of renewal when transformation and new life are born:

“Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximizing scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.”1

By first recognizing how life is cyclical:

“To get better at wintering, we need to address our very notion of time. We tend to imagine that our lives are linear, but they are in fact cyclical. I would not, of course, seek to deny that we gradually grow older, but while doing so, we pass through phases of good health and ill, of optimism and deep doubt, of freedom and constraint. There are times when everything seems easy, and times when it all seems impossibly hard.

And, trusting that progress will emerge as we continue this repeating journey:

To make that manageable, we just have to remember that our present will one day become a past, and our future will be our present. We know that because it’s happened before. The things we put behind us will often come around again. The things that trouble us now will often come around again. Each time we endure the cycle, we ratchet up a notch. We learn from the last time around, and we do a few things better this time; we develop tricks of the mind to see us through. This is how progress is made.

I’ve come to appreciate how this applies across all areas of my life. I used to think the ideal was often to be the same all the time: same routine, same habits, same diet, etc. Activities like gardening, parenting, and meditating have opened my eyes to how much of life is cycling through repeating patterns. Starting a business and helping other business owners highlighted how these principles apply to organizations as they navigate the seasons of their industry and the economy. The greatest risk arises if we “fight the winter” and don’t adapt to the environment around us.

Dormancy in Fitness

This idea of cycling through seasons is especially relevant to fitness.

Many people imagine an exercise routine where they always do the same workouts, at the same intensity, and see the same results. The expectation is continual progress toward their goals.

The reality is almost always different. Life throws us challenges. Work gets in the way. Family takes priority. Sickness, travel, or something unexpected sets us back.

We try to grind through despite the additional stress. Our enjoyment dips. Our progress stagnates. We might even get hurt or move backward.

We’re fighting nature. We’re being rigid instead of adapting to the season we’re in. We fear dialing back will derail us when it’s pushing through that truly sets us up to fail. The real benefits and gains from exercise accrue slowly over time. Our ability to sustain our effort over many years is far more valuable than our ability to maintain intensity in every season.

The best examples of this are the people training with the highest stakes. Professional athletes take time to rest in the off-season. Elite weightlifters, bodybuilders, and runners embrace periodization:

Periodization is the planned manipulation of training variables (load, sets, and repetitions) in order to maximize training adaptations and to prevent the onset of overtraining syndrome2

This approach has been shown to be the optimal strategy even with elite competitors who structure their lives to minimize stress and maximize recovery.3 It's even more important for the rest of us who face the oscillating intensity of daily life.

There are periods in our lives when the best thing we can do for our fitness is to enter a season of dormancy. Suspend our normal routine. Dial the effort back. Slow down. Adapt to our current conditions. Conserve our energy. And position ourselves to reemerge in the next season with fresh life.

The Fertile Void

These ideas connect to a theme that I've come to appreciate deeply: The Fertile Void. The term comes from the world of Gestalt Therapy founded by Fritz Perls who believed in a “cycle of the interdependency of organism and environment.”4

I’ll write more on this concept as I continue to explore it in my own life, but these visualizations of the Gestalt Cycle of Experience capture the essence:

By honoring the cyclical seasons and withdrawing when necessary, we create a space that is ripe for new life and activity to emerge.

Writing and Community

One of the highlights of this year has been starting to write publicly. It’s been both cathartic and generative, helping me process past experiences and open to new opportunities. I’m incredibly grateful to all of the people who provided encouragement most notably and . If you're interested in sharing online, I recommend immersing yourself in Paul and Rob's writing.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve loved getting a flurry of emails with the subject line “<Twitter Friend> is writing on substack”. It’s exciting to see more people sharing essays and newsletters. It feels like there is a vibrant writing community emerging. In that spirit, I want to highlight a few people that recently started sharing on Substack:

with an amazing essay on Grief and Running.

with unique and powerful writing like The Ordinary Boy.

with Grandmotherly Wisdom like You Can't Raise a Baby Online.

with a powerful piece In Honor of Shaking.

with a newsletter with gems like Creating an Anti-fragile Family.

Check these out and subscribe if the writing speaks to you. And, if you’ve started writing or are thinking about publishing something, please share as I’d love to read it.

On the Horizon

It’s tough to believe it’s already December. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be reflecting on the past year and building momentum for the new one. If you’re interested in annual reviews or hunting for good reflection questions, has a great guide you can download here.

And if you’re looking for inspiration on how to embrace change in your life, I just published a conversation with Steve on self-unfolding and slow change.

If this theme of honoring seasons, wintering, dormancy, and the fertile void sparked any ideas or brought to mind other books, I’d love to hear about it. Shoot me an email or share in the comments.

I’ve leave you with one final quote from Wintering: “We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.”

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As a child, I was obsessed with playing sports. I loved being on a team, competing to win, and striving to get better. During these years, exercise felt easy. I thrived on external motivation, tangible goals, and consistent progress. Yet, within a year of graduating college and "retiring" from baseball, I felt stuck. My body hurt. I lacked the motivation to exercise. I could feel my strength and energy decreasing by the day.

I have a vivid memory of standing in the gym one evening with a gnawing sense of pointlessness. I looked at the weights and felt empty. I asked myself why I should lift them and got no answer. I felt weak, both physically and mentally. My strength was decaying. My willpower was nonexistent. My spirit seemed broken. 

It may sound dramatic, but I’m willing to bet you've felt like this. Most people I chat with in my fitness coaching practice have encountered similar feelings about exercise at least once. Some people get stuck here and struggle to ever get out.

A common response is to fight through the malaise: set an exciting goal, make a public commitment, or hire a coach. These external motivators are intended to inspire action and create accountability. They sometimes work but far too often we find ourselves back where we started. We repeat the cycle assuming something is wrong with us and looking to the external world for an answer. 

I think there’s a better way: intentionally cultivating intrinsic motivation for exercise. Take a quick look at these definitions:

Extrinsic motivation involves engaging in an activity because it leads to a tangible reward or avoids punishment.

Intrinsic motivation involves doing something because it is both interesting and deeply satisfying for its own sake.

Now think of why and how most people exercise. 

To lose a few pounds or gain muscle? To achieve a PR or complete a race? These are rewards we chase. Hitting the gym to not feel guilt or shame? Creating an accountability system to never miss a workout? These are punishments we try to avoid. Our society is built around extrinsic motivation and this defines the default path to exercise. 

You hear it in how many people talk about exercise. A focus entirely on the benefits you get after doing it. Or, the strategies to “push through the pain” and “embrace the suck.” Ironically, people who say these things have often discovered their own intrinsic motivation. Many truly enjoy exercise during the activity itself. 

I believe this happens naturally for most people who exercise regularly. There’s some truth in the expression “just do it and it will become enjoyable”. Yet, the sad reality is many people never get to this point. So I’ve spent years exploring how others could recreate this shift more quickly and reliably. I now believe everyone can intentionally design an approach to exercise that unlocks joy for the activity itself. 

So, let’s get you out of your head and into your body where you can discover the intrinsic joy of exercise.

Introducing embodied exercise

Embodied exercise is moving your body while paying attention to everything you experience. Move and feel it. Cultivate presence to experience whatever emerges within. Your breathing, muscle contraction, heart rate, adrenaline, fatigue, and yes even joy. 

Taking an embodied approach unlocks intrinsic motivation because it connects you to the actual experience of exercise within your body. This unlocks deep intrigue and satisfaction. Curiosity and enjoyment occur during the exercise itself not when you have completed it or when you’ve achieved an external goal. 

You shift from the satisfaction of completing a workout to satisfaction of doing a workout. Instead of grinding through months of painful or unsatisfying exercise with blind faith, you can intentionally cultivate this approach from day one.

If you’re like me, you may be more familiar with the opposite approach. Instead of feeling what’s happening within our body, we disassociate from it. Instead of listening to what our body is saying, we force it to comply. Instead of letting our body naturally complete movements, we use our minds to control every move.

Now imagine you want to start running and let’s compare two different approaches:

“Default” Running: You set a goal to run a 10k and sign up for a race. You tell all your friends to create accountability. You start pushing yourself to run further and faster to quickly achieve your goal. The pace feels uncomfortable but you force your body through it. Time goes by faster if you disassociate so you lose yourself in your thoughts or a playlist. Sometimes you get a “runner’s high” but it’s a vague satisfaction you can’t describe. Your mileage increases. You complete the race. Your friends are proud. But you’re not sure what to do next. Sign up for a longer race? Take a break because you hit your goal? You’re stuck in a loop of extrinsic motivation.

“Embodied" Running: You set an intention to fully experience the activity of running within your body. You ask friends for tips on technique to cultivate enjoyment. You start slowly and listen to your body. You explore how different paces and distances feel in your lungs, heart, and legs. You find that if you bring your awareness deep into certain places in your body you experience a flood of interesting sensations. Sometimes you stop thinking altogether, lost in the meditative flow of each foot hitting the ground. You’re intrigued, so you start running more often. Your runs get longer. You realize your pace has increased without even trying. You aren’t worried about what’s next because you enjoy the experience so much. You’ve become someone who runs for the joy of it. You’re effortlessly powered by intrinsic motivation.

Call me crazy but the second version sounds less stressful and way more fun. And the beauty is you can take a similar approach with any type of exercise.

“Doing” embodied exercise

Here’s a secret. You don’t actually need me or anyone else to teach you how to “do” embodied exercise. It’s innate. A natural capacity we’re born with that so many of us lose. Just watch an infant learning to crawl or a group of kids playing during recess. You’ll see them fully immersed in their own experience of the activity and often radiating joy.

Recapturing this magic is a process of unlearning and unwinding. I’ll provide a few entry points and intentions for you to experiment with but the ultimate shift is to begin to listen less to others like me and more to your own sensations, desires, and evolving experiences. 

Experiencing Embodiment in a Single Exercise

Pick a specific exercise that you are already familiar with. Perhaps a push-up or a bodyweight squat.

Do a few reps without thinking. Now slow it way down. 

Can you feel how different muscles activate at different points? Can you notice where it’s smooth and where it feels sticky? 

Bring attention to sensations of fatigue as you do these slow reps. Notice how much harder the slow reps are than normal reps. Take a rest and bring your awareness to how your entire body feels.

What do you feel in your body?

Now let’s flip the tempo and speed it up. Do the same exercise but even faster than normal. 

What shifts do you notice? Can you feel your heart rate increase? 

Bring attention to whatever sensations are most present in your body. Now rest again and bring your awareness back to how your body feels.

Any different?

Congrats, you’ve just done embodied exercise.

You can extend this approach of going super slow or increasing the tempo to jogging, dancing, swimming, and any other movement. Shifting the pace and intensity is a way of intentionally heightening our internal experience so we can more easily experience it.

Bringing Embodiment to any Physical Activity 

The power of an embodied approach is that we can introduce it into any movement and bring it to the physical activity we already do. One way to do this is through somatic cues. Short questions to nudge our awareness into the sensations with our body. Some of my favorites are:

What muscles can I feel contract during this exercise?

How is my breath changing throughout this activity?

Can I feel my heart rate go up as the intensity increases?

At what rep do I first feel subtle burning (lactic acid) in my muscles?

Where am I holding tension in my body during this movement?

What does my contact with the ground feel like?

How do I feel when I invite this movement to be 10% more fluid?

Another counterintuitive portal into the body is fatigue questioning. It occurs in the moment during a run, a ride, or a set of reps where you start to hear that familiar voice saying “stop” or “I’m tired”. Instead of shouting back or trying to push it down, you can get curious.

Oh, my body is telling me something. Can I experience it fully?

Where is the fatigue? Is it in my muscles? My lungs?

What part of my body can’t actually do this anymore?

This curiosity and somatic exploration often soften the feeling of discomfort. You realize that the voice saying “stop” wasn’t coming from a place of danger or failure but a place of discovery or newness. You’re on the edge of your comfort zone. This is a place where magic can happen. An opportunity to open to new sensations, new feelings, and new capacities.

The more you lean into your body at this moment, the less scary it becomes. Not only are you discovering a new terrain of sensory experiences but you have contact with your body to know when it actually needs to stop. Experiencing this edge of our comfort zone fully within your body is a transformative moment on the path to experiencing the full joy of exercise. For many, this becomes one of the experiences they love most about exercise.

Unlocking intrinsic motivation and joy

Now that you’ve experienced embodied exercise let’s return to how it can shift our motivation and cultivate joy within the activity. We’re not here just to add more exercises that you should do. We’re here to become people who truly enjoy exercise.

Embodied exercise nudges us to intentionally focus on how it feels to move our body. By bringing our awareness to the various physical sensations that arise we more deeply connect with the immediate experiences of exercise. We develop a relationship with exercise that is grounded in the present moment. It is only here that we can fully experience joy during exercise 

As we cultivate deeper awareness and understanding of our body, we uncover previously hidden connections between mental, emotional, and physical states. Through these connections, we further connect to our inner desires, preferences, and patterns. This growing field of awareness unlocks more of our intrinsic motivation, for exercise and life more broadly. 

From this space, we can build a deeply intuitive approach to exercise. Instead of looking to experts to tell us what we should do, we can listen to our bodies to hear what we want to do. Instead of forcing ourselves to rigidly follow a predefined schedule, we can cultivate space within our daily life that makes exercise inevitable. We can let go of grinding and discover flow. Exercise can feel effortless. 

Embracing embodied exercise is taking the courageous step to welcome the full breadth of our experiences and unlock the full power of our bodies. The way we approach activities like exercise is often how we live our lives. We can grind through it chasing external accomplishments and rushing to the next milestone. Or, we can deeply connect to our own experiences and discover the joy within the journey.

UPDATE: I’ve started a new publication to explore the topic of embodied exercise and intuitive fitness in depth. You can check it out and subscribe here.

Intuitive Fitness

Reimagine Exercise from Within

Welcome! You’ve stumbled into a corner of the internet built around a surprisingly controversial idea: exercise can be enjoyable for everyone. Fitness is a loaded word. For some, it represents one of their favorite activities. It’s a source of joy, excitement, and pride. Yet, for many others, it evokes a flood of negativity. It’s a reminder of dread, fail…

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3 years ago · 7 likes · 2 comments · Sam Sager

Thank you for reading! Please don’t hesitate to reach out with any thoughts or questions. You can explore more of my philosophy around exercise at intuitivefitness.co. Here is the dedicated newsletter to explore enjoyable exercise and intuitive fitness in more depth:

Intuitive Fitness

Explorations in enjoyable exercise. Discover your own path from within.

By Sam Sager

This is the Renewal Rundown a monthly newsletter where I share a few updates, ideas, and sources of inspiration on applying self-renewal to ourselves and the world around us. Let’s jump in!

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Reflections on Place

The word savor is on my mind as we pack our life into boxes. I’m prone to steer my attention forward, focusing on the rush of getting somewhere new. It’s exciting but costly. I lose contact with the beautiful things in this moment and this place. Shifting to savoring reminds me to:

Appreciate the perfect fall weather, colorful trees, and late flowers before the cold winter. Sit in my garden a few more times and reflect on the lessons learned. Visit my favorite coffee shop and say goodbye to the baristas. Hang with local friends and revisit our favorite hiking spots. Enjoy our last days in our current home and laugh at the memories. Recognize this state of transition and the opportunities within it.

In this space, I feel deep gratitude. Even though we are leaving after just a few years, I’m glad we thought we’d live here for decades and acted accordingly. It meant studying the land, building soil, connecting with neighbors, cultivating community, and planting things that others can now enjoy. Even if you leave, fully committing to a place is worth it. In the words of the great David Holmgren: “what I take away in my head is worth way more than what I leave behind."

These reflections bring to mind authors that have written books that read like love letters to a specific place. One of my favorites is The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd about her experience in the Cairngorm mountains of Scotland:

“Summer on the high plateau can be delectable as honey; it can also be a roaring scourge. To those who love the place, both are good, since both are part of its essential nature. And it is to know its essential nature that I am seeking here.

Hit me up with recommendations if you have any favorite books in this genre.

Reflections on Work

Given our move, I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about work. In the short term, not much will change. Yet, I’m aware of how much our environment shapes us and my work has evolved significantly each time I’ve moved.

I wrote about these experiences wrestling with Work, Ambition, and Identity over the last decade and explored different components of how we work on three recent podcast episodes:

Paul Millard

On the societal pressures that define our default approaches to work and strategies to break free to discover new ways of working:

Dan Shipper

On why we should view productivity as emotion regulation and how we can bring more of ourselves into our work:

Cécile Marion

On how individuals can thrive in large organizations, develop skills to drive change at scale, and embrace the power of a sabbatical

These conversations highlight how we can more intentionally shape our work and how our work can shape us. In this way, it’s a source of renewal for not only the world around us but also for ourselves.

If you’re interested in further exploring your relationship to work, I recommend these two books:

The Great Work of Your Life, by Stephen Cope

We derive the greatest pleasure and fulfillment when all our faculties are drawn together into our life’s work. In this state of absorption, we experience extraordinary satisfaction. We human beings are attracted to the experience of intense involvement

Three Marriages, by David Whyte

“Work, like marriage, is a place you can lose yourself more easily perhaps than finding yourself. It is a place full of powerful undercurrents, a place to find our selves, but also, a place to drown, losing all sense of our own voice, our own contribution and conversation.”

On the Horizon

I’m excited to share a long-form essay I’ve been working on about how embodied exercise can unlock the joy of exercise. It will go live soon as part of Tasshin Fogleman’s Essay contest, where I expect there to be an amazing collection of writing on interesting topics.

After this, I’ll be shifting into a quiet season as we settle into our new home. I believe times of transition can be powerful opportunities for renewal and plan to use it as a chance to open to new possibilities in my daily life.

I will also use this time to explore a few ideas I have for this newsletter, the On Renewal Podcast, and my work more broadly. If you have ideas for any of these, I’d love to hear them. Please don’t hesitate to reply to this email or add a comment below.

Thanks for Reading!

To support my work please consider sharing this newsletter with a friend and subscribing to the On Renewal podcast (Spotify | Apple Podcasts).

As a quick reminder, this is the Renewal Rundown a monthly newsletter where I share a few updates, ideas, and favorite sources of inspiration on applying self-renewal to ourselves and the world around us. I will continue to publish longer-form essays regularly. Let’s jump in!

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🎙 The On Renewal Podcast

One of the highlights of the last month was launching a podcast and interviewing four people I deeply admire.

The theme of The On Renewal Podcast is how we create conditions to adapt within ourselves, our organizations, and the natural world around us. Change is constant. We must build the capacity to evolve and sustain without knowing what the future holds. We can’t do this alone. We need each other to learn from, expand our sense of possibility, and craft a shared vision worth striving for.

This podcast is a small way of supporting this. I plan to chat with a wide range of guests and cross-pollinate ideas across domains: identifying common themes, opening our eyes to new terrain, and accelerating our thinking.

We will explore timeless ideas, not current events. We will cover vast terrain, not a narrow niche. My hope is that these conversations will only become more relevant and valuable in the years ahead as the collection and connections between them grow.

Below is a quick introduction to each episode so you can see which spark your curiosity. I’ve also included a quote from each discussion on the theme of non-doing1 to highlight how the same concept is bubbling up in different people's lives.

Rob Hardy - From Rigidity to Fluidity

Rob joins us to talk about his work building joyful internet businesses and non-coercive marketing is really about inner transformation and reconnecting with our intuition.

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Most of what I do now feels easy and flowing and intuitive. To contrast to how I used to show up in the world, putting a ton of a ton of pressure on myself, forcing myself to do these complex meticulous things like building funnels and building out my email, all the things that I thought I should do to build a business. It still blows my mind how easy and fun everything I'm doing now is. how little force is being applied. And how it seems to be working better than when I was then when I was doing all of the right things so to speak. 

Jonny Miller - Cultivating Resilience and Rising out of Reactivity

Jonny take us on a sensory adventure to explore the nervous system and learn about how meditation, breathwork, and environment design can help us prevent burnout, cultivate resilience, and become less reactive.

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This has been a journey that I've been on for the last 7 to 8 years and i still catch myself gripping in various ways, like overefforting, and pushing too hard. For me it's a process of remembering and forgetting. And, the moments when I'm in this effortless, ease, and flow it feels so amazing and i'm more creative and productive. I get further towards whatever my desires and goals than if i'm actually struggling and pushing. 

Case Bradford - Discovering Intuitive Exercise

Case shares his journey ditching the gym for a nature-based approach and we explore how everyone call cultivate a more intuitive approach to physical movement, skill development, creativity, and other facets of our lives.

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I have a lot of open flow. Part of it is because I enjoy it. I really believe it's important to incorporate what you enjoy into anything you want to do. It becomes an ascending spiral, a self-fulfilling engine that's I like doing this so I'm definitely go do it so i'm not going to force myself. So it's got it's own wind in it's sails"

Kristen Haaf - Growing Life-Giving Landscapes

Kristen highlights her experiences as a landscape architect and provides guidance on slowing down, cultivating a regenerative mindset, enhancing our sensory capacities, and embracing ecological thinking to get started gardening and more deeply connect to the natural world.

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I'm pretty adamant that the very first step is non-doing and being able to just be. The more you can just be on your own land, the next steps can start to emerge out of that space as opposed to them being something you have to force. And letting something just emerge is actually a lot easier. it's more joyful. and it results in a better place to be in the long run

📖 Non-doing and The Timeless Way

Speaking of non-doing, I just finished The Timeless Way of Building2, by Christopher Alexander. Technically it’s a book about architecture but it’s really about so much more. It’s a philosophy on how to cultivate beauty and aliveness in the world around us. It’s about honoring the unique forces within a place and trusting our own intuitions on what feels good:

The TIMELESS WAY is "a process which brings order out of nothing but ourselves; it cannot be attained, but will happen of it's own accord, if we will only let it".

Which requires knowing THE QUALITY we are seeking. “There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named."

This search for ALIVENESS extends across our lives: "The search we make for this quality, in our own lives, is the central search of any person, and the crux of any individual person's story. It is the search for those moments and situations when we are most alive"

We thrive when we are free of INNER CONTRADICTIONS: "most men are not fully true to their own inner natures or fully 'real'... When you meet a person who is true to himself, you feel at once that he is 'more real' than other people are".

Here’s a thread I shared that goes into more depth on my favorite ideas and some questions the book left me with. It was fun to see it take off and introduce these ideas to a ton of new people.

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🏃‍♀️ A Pattern-Language for Effortless Exercise

As I read The Timeless Way of Building, one question kept nagging at me:

Could I create a Pattern-Language that would point people towards more intuitive exercise?

Just like Alexander describes how many people have lost the ability to design their own homes and surroundings, many people have lost the ability to embrace exercise from within. Instead, they look to experts and articles to tell them how to move their own body.

The tension is that it’s not as simple as just telling people to do whatever they want or feel. Alexander describes the challenge like this:

“this has gone so far that most people shrink in fear, from the task of designing their surroundings. They are afraid that they will make foolish mistakes, afraid that people will laugh at them, afraid that they will do something "in bad taste". And the fear is justified. Once people withdraw from the normal everyday experience of building, and lose their pattern languages, they are literally no long able to make good decisions about their surroundings, because they no longer know what really matters and what doesn’t"

Once our natural capacities have been eroded we need to rediscover them by reconnecting to our own intuition. Michael Ashcroft shared another great way of thinking about this in the “Faulty Sensory Appreciation” principal (from the teachings of a different Alexander (FM):

Another essential piece that Christopher Alexander constantly articulates is that good versus bad is an objective matter. While it’s unique to the circumstances and should be judged by our feelings as much as our intellect, it’s not purely subjective. There are some patterns that are alive and others that are dead. There are characteristics that make some things self-renewing and others decaying:

"The fact that the difference between a good building and a bad building, between a good town and a bad town, is an objective matter. It is the difference between health and sickness, wholeness and dividedness, self-maintenance and self-destruction”

Extending to exercise, it’s as simple as this: some approaches work and others do not. Some patterns make your physical activity and body come alive, and others make them feel lifeless..

Therefore, A Pattern Language for Effortless Exercise would take us through a process to rediscover our intuitive ability to embrace physical activity that makes us feel fully alive. Once we’ve relearned this, we can release any effort. It can become effortless.

"first learn a discipline which teaches us the true relationship between ourselves and our surroundings...then, once this discipline has done its work... be ready to give up the discipline, and act as nature does."

I’m just starting to explore what this looks. It’s daunting. The scale of what’s involved scares me. This is a 10-year journey, not a 6-month project. Yet, something is calling me to embrace this adventure. Who am I to say no?

I’ll write more about it as it unfolds. For now, here are a few final ideas about A Pattern Language from Alexander that I’m reflecting on to get started:

• Each pattern is a three-part rule, which expresses a relation between a certain context, a problem, and a solution

• Patterns can exist at all scales and have to be created in a way that can be shared

• A pattern only works, fully, when it deals with all the forces that are actually present in a situation

• Each pattern then, depends both on the smaller patterns it contains, and on the large patterns within which it is contained

• Each pattern sits at the center of a network of connections which connect it to certain other patters that help complete it

• And it is the network of these connections between patterns which creates the language

I’d love to hear from you if you have thoughts on the podcast, The Timeless Way, or creating a pattern language for effortless exercise. All replies come right to my inbox.

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So let’s back up. I’ve always been interested in physical and mental wellness. I’ve gone down rabbit holes on exercise, meditation, cold exposure, therapy, float tanks, psychedelics, and pretty much any area with a shred of potential. Yet, I always felt like something was missing.

There was a lack of contact with my experience of these things. Looking back, I did them but didn’t really feel them. Most of the experience occurred in my head with a stream of thoughts narrating the activity. I was disembodied.

Of course, I didn’t know this at the time. If this sounds foreign to you, you are likely someone who didn’t need to learn this lesson after three decades of life. I’m jealous. But my guess from conversations with friends is that many of you may be familiar with this way of being: overactive thoughts, low awareness of physical sensations, and difficulty feeling emotions. A thinking-centric way of living.

This is where I was when I joined Jonny Miller’s course on Nervous System Mastery1. I was expecting to learn some cool tricks, not to have my entire way of being called into question. That changed when he introduced a concept I’d never heard of: Interoception.

Interoception is awareness of how you feel inside your body. Not just the surface stuff like emotions but the physiological stuff most of us ignore. Our heart rate, muscle tension, adrenaline, respiration, and all the other fun stuff happening within. Collectively these make up our internal state.

I'm a bit embarrassed to admit how much this concept rocked my world. It's not that I never felt anything like some crazy robot. It’s just that it was dull background noise buried beneath everything happening in my head. I spent so much time trying crazy shit like breath-holds and ice baths without truly paying attention to the experience in my body. It was like trying to cook without tasting the food!

At this point, I’m feeling FOMO. There’s this whole world of sensory experiences that I don’t know how to access. Thankfully, Jonny is about to blow the door open and invite me on a sensory adventure. The portal is self-regulation protocols. Simple breathing exercises that can up or down-regulate your nervous system by influencing a change in your body. These techniques create a noticeable shift in how your body feels in the moment. It’s a beautiful feedback loop. The sensory changes help train your interoception, improved interoception unlocks more sensations, and the cycle continues. I felt like a little kid again, learning a new terrain of experiences.

Let’s use the crazy Voo-Humm breathing as an example. Back to me sitting in bed. As I begin the technique, the sound is startling. It's a reverberating echo that feels like it comes from your belly and then your jaw. It's weird to feel cut off from the external world but present to such loud noises. I fall into a rhythm where my exhales get longer and my humming gets louder. I feel myself start to smile. Partly because I know I look ridiculous but more so because I'm starting to feel really good. I notice my head feels like it’s buzzing. My entire body feels centered and calm. There's a spaciousness and a sense of peace that I'm not used to. If this is the nitric oxide, I want more!  

So what’s happening here? The different sounds create a vibration in your belly and throat that brings sensory awareness deep within your body. At the same time, the technique creates a dramatic increase in nitric oxide which relaxes the inner muscles of your blood vessels to increase blood flow and lower blood pressure. The combination is a deep state of calm. But it’s not just a story in your head it’s connected directly to a felt sense of what is happening in your body. Intention, curiosity, and practice bring the physical sensations in your body more into your awareness. As you train your sensory clarity, you begin to notice a new world of sensations.

The coolest part is that there is a different technique to change your state in all directions. Want to increase your alertness before a meeting or energy before a workout? Try bellows breathing. Interested in improving your capacity to respond to stress? Practice breath holds.

It’s a slippery slope. Once you’ve experienced your ability to shift your state, it’s hard not to want to do it all the time. It can be tempting to start to always try to control how you feel. Yet, over time the novelty of the techniques softens and this desire lessens. You realize it’s equally powerful to simply bring awareness to how you feel within your body and align your activities to honor that. You can use your environment and the rhythm of the day to create conditions that support how you want to feel during different activities. And, then sprinkle in a quick breathing protocol when you need a nudge in one direction.

The most powerful part of my experience exploring breathwork is how the skill of interoception has extended into all aspects of my life. It’s completely transformed my approach to fitness where every workout is now an opportunity to connect to the body. It’s evolved my meditation practice where increases in sensory clarity are a frequent source of excitement and joy2. It helps me embrace more intuitive decisions in my business3 and expands my sense of connection with others. I could go on and on.

Most of all, this journey has taught me that there is deep wisdom within our own bodies that we can tap into if we learn how to listen.

For a deeper dive into these practices, check out this podcast I recorded with Jonny Miller on breathwork and nervous system mastery.

Stay tuned for part 2 on how guided breathwork journeys helped me shed past patterns, release stored emotions, and step more fully into my own body.

Enough housekeeping, let’s jump in!

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🏡 Extreme Rain and Fall Gardens

We’re deep in the peak of summer here in central North Carolina. Thick humid heat all day long. It’s 80℉ most mornings when I take my dogs for our sunrise stroll. The only silver lining is it’s basically a massive free steam room so I don’t need to buy a sauna.

The biggest surprise this summer has been the rain. It’s so frequent and heavy that even the vegetable garden is thriving without supplemental watering. Part of this is a conscious effort to slowly challenge the plants to thrive with less intervention

But it seems like the rain is part of broader changes to our local weather patterns. Axios covered troubling trends in extreme rainfall in North Carolina:

It's "virtually certain" the amount of water vapor over North Carolina is rising, due to increased ocean and atmospheric temperatures driven by global warming, according to NCICS. More available water vapor leads to more intense and frequent rainfall events, said Kathie Dello, director of the North Carolina State Climate Office.

It’s nice to not have to water during the summer heat but I worry about the long-term impact on our ecosystems. Some change can be helpful until it crosses a threshold and becomes disruptive. Not to mention, the challenges it could create with flooding and hurricanes. Meanwhile, my family in New England has barely seen any rain and there are draught warnings across much of the country. Yikes!

On a more fun note, I’m starting to prep and plant the fall garden. Niki Jabbour is a great resource and shared some fall veggies that can be planted now. Homestead and Chill has an amazing guide to fall planting for first-timers.

👶🏃 Moving like a Baby and The Importance of Stability

In early July, I headed down to South Carolina for a weekend course on Dynamic Neuromuscular Stabilization (DNS). This is a school of exercise and rehab that focuses on helping people improve posture and movement patterns by mimicking how babies learn to walk. It was fascinating.

Instead of thinking about mobility as developing new skills, we can view it as recapturing our innate capacities. The key is learning how to unwind decades of compensations and restrictions. Our bodies are amazingly creative. If we lack sensory info in one muscle, we compensate with another. If we lack joint mobility, we find a workaround. These are protective patterns that keep our bodies safe and functional but lead to poor posture and movement.

DNS helps unwind these restrictions by relearning to breathe, stabilize, and move correctly. They encourage you to explore developmental positions like sitting, rolling, and crawling to regain natural movement patterns. It looks funny but it works! Here’s a thread I wrote introducing some of the key concepts and techniques.

One of the reasons I am so interested in integrating DNS into my own movement practice and fitness work with clients is the importance of stability. As we age, one of the greatest risks we face is falling. More than 1 in 3 people over 65 falls every year! And, falls are the leading cause of injury and death from injury among older Americans.

Yet, so few of us intentionally train our bodies to create the stability we need to prevent these falls later in life. Our bodies all face forces of decay: decreases in muscle, strength, bone density, joint/tendon function, balance, and motor control. You can even see these changes reflected in many older adults’ posture and gait. Stability becomes absolutely critical. Unfortunately, it’s challenging to regain at this stage if it’s lost. Like investing for retirement, the time to train stability is while we are young. Peter Attia even goes as far as to say that stability is the foundation of all exercise.

📚 From the Bookshelf

In July, I found myself exploring a bunch of different books without many pulling me in. But there were a couple of gems:

One-Straw Revolution was fantastic. Often described as “Zen & The Art of Farming”, you can think of it as non-doing applied to gardening. It’s full of practical tips on growing food and deep wisdom on what can be known, what we value, and how interconnected our world is. I shared a bunch of quotes in this thread but my favorite is this one on how gardening can transform us:

“When it is understood that one loses joy and happiness in the attempt to possess them, the essence of natural farming will be realized. The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.”

Longevity Simplified was a surprisingly easy read and packed with actionable ideas. Most stuff on the science of longevity is complex or controversial. This was the opposite. Dr. Luks, an actively practicing orthopedic surgeon, clearly explains the importance of metabolic health, the challenges to our vitality as we age, and a simple playbook to expand our health span. It’s also full of great visuals like the one below. This will now be my go-to book to share with people interested in the science of longevity or, as I’d prefer to call it, the science of renewal :)

On the Horizon

August is shaping up to be an exciting month.

I got invited to join the Doomer Optimism podcast to cohost an episode interviewing David Holmgren, one of the founders of permaculture. He’s one of my heroes so this is a bit surreal. We’re going to focus on applying permaculture to suburban settings. Send me a note if you have any questions for him or topics for us to discuss.

We have some out-of-town guests visiting and our first plane ride with our five-month-old. Please send us calming energy and any tips for surviving a 2-3 hour flight with a baby 🙏.

Lastly, I have an exciting new project launching in August that I can’t wait to share with you.

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Thanks for reading! Please don’t hesitate to reach out with any thoughts or questions. I love connecting on these themes and learning about new areas to explore.

My schedule is always open for curiosity conversations and I offer a free strategy session for anyone interested in chatting about how to take a more intuitive approach to their fitness.

Illustration Attribution

The cover illustration was created and generously shared by Silvia Bastos through CC licensing. Check out more of Silvia’s illustrations: silviamakesdrawings.com and support Silvia’s work: www.patreon.com/silviamakesdrawings