Spring Cleaning at The Stoa
Hey beautiful people,
The Stoa’s leaner wisdom gym is open for spiritual business. More recurring events will eventually be added, but you can RSVP now to the current sessions on The Stoa’s website.
Our Coaches in Resonance series is back as well. I will be returning to coaching for April and May, and you can book me in now, along with A.J. Bond and Tyson Wagner, here: www.thestoa.ca/coaches
More coaches will be added soon, and new one-off events at The Stoa will be announced before April 5th, which is when The Stoa will be fully open for spiritual business.
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March 24th, 2021
The only thing I had scheduled today was to provide a friend a reference check, which I just did. Now there are zero things scheduled for the day. This is heavenly. The thing for me to do now is obvious: listen to some Nick Drake and write a journal entry.
This might also be a good opportunity to communicate what The Stoa will look like on April 5th. Well, I do not know what it will fully look like, as I am figuring out a lot of this as I go, but I do know that the wisdom gym is going to be leaner. Ria Baeck, Laurence-Currie Clark, Steve Beattie, and Tyson Wagner are all back. Tyson will be having a new “Flow Lab,” which will be his daemonic lab to test out new experiments in flow.
I want to keep the gym lean for this new phase, at least at first, partly because I want to get into the habit of attending these sessions more. I always have a blast when I go to them, but I rarely went to the gym sessions because I was so Zoom’d out with all the one-off sessions. I am also going to slowly introduce new practices, before adding them to the gym. These practices will be in service to the second daemonic attractor of The Stoa.
The gym is open for spiritual business if you'd like to attend some sessions during the next two weeks. Regarding the one-off events, which I will be announcing sometime before we start back up on the 5th, they will be much fewer. I only want to be responsible for 1-3 events a week myself. I also want to streamline the scheduling for these, e.g. they only happen at 12 PM ET or between 6-8 PM ET.
The thing that fucked with my thumos often, and which put me in a constant state of frustration, was that my schedule was all over the place thanks to randomly scheduled events, that all had inconsistent amounts of prep. I want a daily rhythm, with wise routines and rituals. In essence, I want each day to be beautiful with a thumos-filled productivity.
The type of session I want to host, if they are going to be galaxy brain like, are ones with presentations that have slides. I sense this is partly what made Pat Ryan’s Dark Stoa and Evan McMullen’s The Bridge so special. Pat and Evan were also undiscovered geniuses, which The Stoa helped discover. I would never have guessed that the stewarding role would be a genius-discovering role. I totally want to discover more geniuses for year two.
I would like to do more artistic type events like the Chapel Perilous series, which a lot of people said was their favorite series at The Stoa. I loved collaborating with Rebecca, and it reminded me of the early sessions I designed with A.J., such as “Narcissistic Spotlight” and “Loving Cringe Meditation.” Those were awesome, and I desire to create more awesome experiences.
I was pulled towards doing more events on Clubhouse, but this pull was not a daemonic one, and it was more from the intense hype that was surrounding the app. Feeling into the pull, it was coming more from fear, which could be translated into this: Oh noes! Nobody is going to want to go on Zoom calls now because all of the cool kids are on Clubhouse. Quick steward, clout chase now!
Here is my assessment on Clubhouse after doing a bunch of sessions: the app is great for making random connections and it is a good funneling tool for whatever your thing is. The conversations can be good, but they are usually not great, given the constraints of the app. Zoom has more features to engender beautiful conversations and experiences. The incredibly beautiful party we had on Sunday could not have happened on Clubhouse.
I also want to lend out The Stoa more, as I did with Greg and Double G for “Body and Soul: The Mind of Culture,” Arran and Alyssa for “Shadowplay,” and Freya and Luea for “Soul Shivers: Dialogues of on Earth Regeneration.” All three series were great, and the facilitators pretty much handled all of the administrative matters, which was a great load off for me.
Ideally, I would like to lend the space to people who will attract different voices, demographics, and vibes that I could not attract alone. As a white heterosexual dudebroish male with meta-proclivities, there is going to be an unconscious bias for me to want to talk with white heterosexual dudebroish males with meta-proclivities, as they probably have a similar life experience as me, and are wrestling with similar existential issues.
To be clear: I have zero interest in virtue signalling how inclusive The Stoa is, nor do I desire to play the quota game, where representative quotas are consciously engineered. What would even be my reference point for this? The city or country where I live? Or maybe the entire world, since The Stoa is an international thing? I used to work in human resources, and if you are brutally honest, quota machinations usually boil down to this: what is the quota that will not get you cancelled?
I do think it is important to play chess with cancel culture, and consciously use some wise tactics to avoid unnecessary cancellation, but I would rather get cancelled than do any inauthentic virtue signalling. With that being said though, it does feel like the right move to entrust The Stoa to people who've found their way here, who are called to invite decent people to The Stoa that are not on my radar.
The “Coaches in Resonance” series is back as well, and along with A.J. and Tyson I will be back to doing coaching sessions in April and May, and we are now all available to be booked in. We will also be having two new coaches joining us: an “Embodiment Whisperer” and a “Trauma Mapper.” The ecology of coaches that we will have is going to be quite delicious.
I will also be engaging in activities that are adjacent to The Stoa, as I am called to be involved more with other live players who are shaping the noosphere. David Fuller and I designed a course together for Rebel Wisdom called “Becoming a Live Player,” which Rebel Wisdom will announce soon. It will be starting in a couple of months, and I will be the lead faculty for the course, along with Fuller.
It was really fun to design the course, and I was fondly reminded of the good old days where I designed public speaking and leadership workshops for the University of Toronto and for Dale Carnegie Training. I am realizing designing experiences is something I really love doing, and I sense I am getting better at it.
I will also be collaborating with Adam Robberts from The Side View on a writing project, and Anna Gát invited me to do an Interintellect debate on Stoicism, with me defending Stoicism. Given my terrible track record of converting people to the philosophy, she totally asked the wrong person, but it will probably be a good opportunity for me to embody my Stoicism.
Lastly, about these journals. Come April I would like to commit to at least one entry per week, ideally on the weekend. I had this unconscious pressure to write every day before, which did not feel fully daemonically aligned at times. That being said, I love writing so fucking much, so I am going to commit to one entry a week, but allow myself to write one whenever I am inspired to do so, which might be every day.
The next few days I will be relaxing and softly doing admin work, then on Saturday Camille and I head out for our road trip. I am excited to be away from the computer screen for a week, and spend some quality time with my beautiful wife.
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