Sensing Into Your Gift
Tomorrow’s events:
Collective Presencing w/ Ria Baeck. Every Friday @ 8:30 AM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Collective Presencing w/ Ria Baeck. Every Friday @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Practice Potluck w/ Joe Edelman. October 30, 2:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Raw Shadow w/ Arran Rogerson and Alyssa Polizzi. October 30th @ 6:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
The Dark Stoa: Weaponized Witches w/ Patrick Ryan. October 30th @ 8:30 PM ET. RSVP here.
Newly posted events:
Empathy Circle Practice w/ Edwin Rutsch. Every Second Sunday @ 3:30 PM ET. RSVP here. 120 mins. Starts on November 14th.
Men & Women: The Future of Love, Sex, and Friendship w/ Nina Power. November 6th, 13th, 20th, and 27th. 10:00 AM ET. RSVP here.
Stoic Provocations: If We Keep Telling Ourselves Stories We Are Fucked w/ Michael Smith. November 9th @ 12:00 PM. RSVP here.
Who Vouches For You? w/ Robin Hanson. November 18th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Designing Regenerative Cultures w/ Daniel Christian Wahl. November 23rd @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Nordic LARP w/ Johanna Koljonen. November 26th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Rap Unbattles w/ Tyson Wagner. November 30th, 2020 @ 9:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
TFW NO GF Screening + Q&A w/ Alex Lee Moyer. December 5th @ 8:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
An event to get excited about:
Strange Times: A Contemplative Perspective w/ Shinzen Young. November 24th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Mindfulness practice can transform the stress of current times into a force for rapid personal growth. Shinzen Young visits The Stoa to explore step-by-step how this works.
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October 29, 2020
I did a quick count, and I believe this is my 200th entry since writing here. My first one was on March 23rd, which was six days after a state of emergency was announced in Ontario due to COVID-19, and twelve days after the World Health Organization declared official pandemic status for the virus.
The first session at The Stoa was on March 21st, and it was a Situational Assessment from the general himself, Jordan Hall. We have almost 250 videos on the YouTube channel at the moment, and we probably have well over a hundred sessions that were not recorded.
The daemon is strong here. Somebody wrote to me recently:
The gravitational pull of The Stoa daemon is really strong. There's almost an addictive quality to the way I've been signing up for sessions that feels weirdly indulgent and out of control... and also makes me want to step back just to gather myself.
It is only a matter of time until others start noticing this energy. Cal Newport had a self-help book whose title reads: So Good They Can't Ignore You. Our take on this title would be: So Daemonic They Can’t Ignore Us.
I do not know what is next. I have been working hard in the last few days to catch up on administrative duties for The Stoa. My birthday weekend, and a few other things, put me really behind. Today I will be all caught up, and I am going to pause booking in guests at The Stoa.
Just looking at The Stoa’s YouTube channel postings for the last two weeks we’ve hosted William MacAskill, Derek Sivers, Howard Bloom, ContraPoints, and Forrest Landry. Now that is fucking dope, and so memetically diverse. I can keep going with getting big names on, but it is not wise to get too big at the moment, without focusing on cohering together more, and doing some collective shadow-work.
I am pretty sure the recent guests we've had on provide us with enough “awesomeness capital” to last for a while, and we can always leverage that in the future. I want to slow down, so I can relax for the month of December, and get me some Camille time, and hang out with my family.
I also want to focus on my desire for holistic development, and start seriously playing some games I have been neglecting: sleep, diet, fitness, budgeting, etc. These are games we might be able to play together via wise accountability groups, during the relaunch of the Metagame Mastermind series.
I really miss being creative in the actual design of sessions. I come alive doing this, and I really love designing a beautiful experience. I want to do more of this now, and I am excited about launching the “Stoic Provocation” series, amongst other fun events.
I also want to feel into the “sense of community” that is forming, and I want to attempt to sink into it more, and encourage it to grow, without unduly influencing it. I do not want some strange dynamic forming where a dysdaimonic steward is creating things on his own, without feeling into what is forming around The Stoa.
People have been asking me how they can help, and get involved more. I want to focus on that, and with a delicious prudence, I want us to move towards becoming an embodied tribe here at The Stoa.
In an earlier entry I mention that I sought Jordan Hall’s advice at the beginning of this project, about getting into the right relationship with the “Self Organizing Collective Intelligence” (SOCI) that was forming at The Stoa:
When I was corresponding with Jordan Hall about fostering the right kind of relationship with both my daemon and with the SOCI that is emerging at The Stoa, he advised me to create a relationship between my daemon and the SOCI’s daemon.
I now think it is the wrong conceptual move to view it as “my daemon,” and “the SOCI’s daemon,” and rather view something more like “my localized access to the daemon,” or “the SOCI’s decentralized access to the daemon.” Once you intimately feel the daemonic within, you start to feel it in others as well.
The foundation of The Stoa is basically this. It rests on the daemon, and that is why we are all here. While they might use a different term for this daemonic energy, I do feel it coursing through all of our regular facilitators: Steve Beattie, Tyson Wagner, Edwin Rutsch, Ria Baeck, A.J. Bond, Joe Edelman, Jessica Watson Miller, and Laurence Currie-Clark, as well as our past and current Sensemakers in Residence.
All of them are vibing with the daemon, and I am simply stewarding this vibe, and I am sensing into their gift. There are no contracts needed for this. You do not need contracts when you let the daemon channel through you, and when you let the daemon channel through you, you start giving your gift.
I have not felt like I was in a meaning crisis since this project started, because once you start giving your gift, the meaning crisis goes away, and more good news: your gift giving will probably help resolve the meta-crisis as well. And there is no point getting egoic about this, because nobody’s gift alone is going to resolve the meta-crisis; we need to all start giving our gifts.
I did not really feel like writing here today, and I do not know if I will write here tomorrow. I am not going to pressure myself to keep going if the daemon is not asking me to write publicly, and I also sense I need to return to some private journaling, to process some deep stuff that I am not prepared to write about publicly.
Maybe we will see each other tomorrow, or maybe we won’t, but I am going to keep doing what I need to do in order to keep giving my gift.
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