What is your calling? This is an unfolding of your Personal Cosmos.

What’s your Personal Cosmos? It means taking your own personal expression of the wisdom and altruistic lineages into reality.

All of us are individual essences that have a true, natural way of being. A way of aligning ourselves in altogether chaotic and creative, exciting explosions of creativity. Explosive creation of the concepts of play, loving kindness, peaceful equanimity, passionate curiosity, loving intimacy, light heartedness, and all sorts of altruistically-inclined notions of help and being of service to others.

These are what our heart wants - your personal combination of altruistically inclined and individually expressed creations.

In my own Personal Cosmos, my creation, loving-kindness is the natural state of being, and so within it are all sorts of orchestrated aspects of loving-kindness. And so Loving-Kindness Wins is both a true statement, and a call to action.

Your calling may be to gentleness, it may be to movement, it may be to intimacy, to compassion, to masculinity, femininity, art, love, wisdom. It may be to be expressive in some particular way, to be seen and understood. To nurture, to inspire, to use power for change. These callings are callings of the heart. They don’t necessarily require huge life changes. It’s deeper and more simple than that.

Telling yourself you need money, or time, or to change your circumstances to achieve this is a trap. An easy one to fall into, but a trap nonetheless, You telling yourself that you need money to do the things that will make you happy is an artifact of the world you have created for yourself in which there is suffering.

For me the phrase, the teaching “Loving-Kindness Wins!” has been revealed to me from higher realms for a long time now. And there has been resistance to exposing this, to choosing into it. What will people think - people don’t want a “Loving-Kindness Coach”. They won’t sign up for that. They want help with their relationships, their body, their jobs.

And while that is likely true, it is also true that the path to shift all of those things, is to practice loving-kindness. I know this at the core of my being now, in every cell of my body. And I’ve written a “My Philosophy” page to begin to explain this, and begun to share more and more the truth of this.

Letting go of who I want to be seen as, to be in alignment with what I really am, what is in my heart, is the path I choose. And I have faith that people will step into this with me, so we can help them in their relationships, their body, and their jobs.

So it has been a journey for me to step into being “the loving-kindness guy”. But here it is, I am, I have been, and now it’s front and center in very big letters at the top of my new website!

Discover what is in your heart, and then choose into it. The alternative is giving up once more. Once more on top of the hundred thousand previous times. It doesn’t take too much choosing into what the heart wants to start to feel the energy moving again. The energy of coming into alignment with the calling of your heart.

What operating system are you running in your mind?

You have one, but perhaps haven’t thought about it.

The whole technology world that we are now immersed in is an echo of our mind itself, and works in similar ways. The rapid expansion of technology is because it mimics and recreates systems already present in how our mind operates.

The Internet, including all our laptops and phones, is a vast system of interconnected apps, all running on operating systems, with all sorts of communication networks sending messages between them.

It has energy running through the whole system. Uses water to cool the big data center organs. Sometimes gets viruses and needs downtime to get over them.

Sound familiar? It has developed into a copy of how the mind and body operates.

The operating system is the main software that runs on the hardware. It’s the set of instructions that interface to the lower levels, and set up an environment for all our favorite apps to run. Your family app, your work app, your sex app, your be-good-husband app, your hang-out-with-friends app and so on!

You have created in your mind a complex web of apps, just like the internet! Clicking from one to the other, like you get lost down the YouTube or Netflix rabbit hole - that’s just how our minds operate.

We get lost down one app (working), then suddenly click over to another (thinking about how mean our boss is) and then lose ourselves down in that app (thinking about how mean our partner is also, and how awful people in general are, and on and on).

We have our favorite mind apps that we keep going back to, just like we keep going back to scroll on Facebook, or whatever our favorites internet apps are.

You don’t see the operating system because you’re almost always using your apps, but it’s always there, running in the background, and without it nothing would work. It fades into the background because you don’t pay attention specifically to it, but it actually defines how everything operates. The way your mind apps look and act is defined in great part by which operating system you are using, and how that is built.

So, back to the question - what is your operating system (OS)?

There are two choices, just like you have a choice of iPhone or Android:

• The Fear OS, or

• The Loving-Kindness OS.

I’ll leave it to you to interpret which one is which!

Here are some of the most popular apps available in the human app store! What are your favorites?

Default Apps on the Fear OS

These come pre-installed until you re-install your Loving-Kindness OS:

• The “They’re-So-Mean” App - runs constantly in the background, even when nobody’s doing anything.

• Why-Does-This-Always-Happen-to-Me - logs every disappointment, syncs automatically with victim-mode cloud storage.

• Compare-and-Despair - endlessly scrolls others’ highlight reels, drains energy fast.

• Should-Upgrade-Myself - pops up updates promising worthiness if you just try harder.

• Angry-At-Traffic - makes the whole world your enemy at 5 p.m.

• If-Only-They-Would-Change - refuses to uninstall even though it never actually works.

• Doomscroll - pulls you down the endless feed of human suffering.

• Future-Catastrophe-Simulator - consumes 98% of CPU when trying to sleep.

• Perfection-Pro - offers the illusion of control while freezing all creative functions.

• Emotional-Avoidance - disguises itself as “I’m fine,” suppresses all error messages.

Premium Apps on the Loving-Kindness OS

Available instantly once you upgrade:

• The “Everyone-Is-Doing-Their-Best” App - auto-translates judgment into compassion.

• Thank-You-Deluxe-Edition - sends spontaneous gratitude notifications to random moments.

• Gentle-Restart - one tap returns you to presence after a crash.

• Curiosity-Explorer - expands awareness bandwidth through wonder.

• Self-Soothing-Studio - generates warmth, safety, and inner touch.

• Kind-Speech - autocorrects harsh inner talk to tenderness.

• Shared-Humanity - syncs your heart with the collective.

• Breath-Messenger - delivers calm straight to the body network.

• PlayMode - reintroduces joy and playfulness as your default workflow.

Some of the apps run on both operating systems, which do you prefer?

• Productivity

  • On Fear OS: runs on anxiety and self-criticism. Automatically syncs with the the other most popular Fear OS apps, especially Compare-And-Despair, and Should-Upgrade-Myself

  • On Loving-Kindness OS: becomes Creative Flow, outputting from the heart.

• Relationships

  • On Fear OS: keeps score, waiting for the moment you can get them back.

  • On Loving-Kindness OS: continuous flow of connection and intimacy

Let me know if you want installation instructions for the Loving-Kindness OS!

A Channeled Wisdom Concept

This article is the first of many about a wisdom concept transmitted to me through the channel. Being a channel, the beings I speak with sometimes work with me over a long time to transmit a deep concept. Sometimes they use the method of giving me a new name for something instead of using an existing one. In this case it took a long time to get to this name, I couldn’t hear it well. Eventually as close as I got was the word linkatvi - pronounced Line-Kat-Vi. And then we both began to use that as the name to reference this developing concept.

If they used an existing word, I would have existing concepts that would automatically come with it. Using a new, basically nonsense word (although it turns out perhaps it’s not total nonsense), then there is a blank slate. And we develop the concept fresh, through repeated application of wisdom and insight developed through inquiry.

Challenging and time-consuming though it is to do it this way, I think it develops the concept more fully, from first principles, rather than being built in relative form to existing concepts.

More accurately - it allows for wisdom to shine brightly as itself, rather than comparatively.

What is Lin-kat-vi

It is an aspect of the fabric of the universe of the mind. It represents the force of nature that destroys - specifically destroys union. In other words, it builds walls to separate. We think of wall-building as a creative endeavor, but really it’s a destructive one from the point of view of togetherness. Building a wall of separation destroys togetherness.

What happens is that we are in some experience of togetherness. But we fear some aspect of what is in that togetherness, and so our reaction is to build a wall to separate. On one side of the wall is us, together with some of the things we don’t fear, and on the other side are the things we fear. The energy or force with which we build this wall this is lin-kat-vi.

Togetherness vs Sameness

Togetherness is not sameness. Togetherness can include all sorts of different elements that are together. Togetherness is about alignment, coming-together, not about sameness. And this underpins much of what gets created by linkatvi. In togetherness, we will see difference.

Fear

It is the fear of this difference that causes us to create a wall, from linkatvi, which will separate.

And so having created separateness and division, then on our side of the separation we will have sameness, defined by us, by our fear. Because we have excluded that which we fear, our fear abates.

We can relax, to a point, within the land we have divided out from togetherness, safe behind our wall.

Fear Castles

But then of course, because no wall is perfect, we will at some point see some difference now even within our land. And the fear of this causes linkatvi to build more. A wall gets created to divide again. And again. Smaller and smaller our land gets, and we end up inside a fear castle. With moats and walls and battlements. A curtain wall maintained by fear of difference within togetherness. Instead of seeing and embracing difference while remaining together, we choose - unconsciously and consciously - into destroying the togetherness., to try and see only sameness, because we believe that is the way to deal with fear. We remove from our sight that which we fear.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

✔️ The purpose of this podcast: applying wisdom teachings to real life

✔️ The foundational Be, Do, Have teaching—why it changes everything

✔️ How our culture conditions us to think we must have before we can be

✔️ Why wisdom is only real when it’s applied

✔️ What’s coming up in the first season

🔥 Big Takeaway: Wisdom isn’t about collecting knowledge—it’s about using it. The Be, Do, Have model is a direct path to shifting your life now.

🎙️ Coming Up Next: In the next episode, we break down the first question: “What do I want?” and how to start embodying it today.

📩 Get My Free Starter Kit! Sign up at CoyoteJackson.com for written teachings, a free mini eBook, and podcast updates.

💬 Let’s Connect! This podcast is all about community and conversation. If something resonates, comment below, email me, or share this with a friend.

I also reveal the deep connection between Buddhist meditation and Law of Attraction teachings—and how both are pointing to the exact same thing. You’ll learn the three-step Reality Creation Loop and how this deceptively simple practice, that is the essence of both the meditation and law of attraction traditions, can transform your daily experience, your inner state, and your life.

Whether you’re on a spiritual path, working on manifestation, or just curious about why meditation matters, this conversation might change how you see your mind, meditation, and your future.

What you’ll learn:

• The Reality Creation Loop: a 3-step process

• How meditation trains your ability to shift experience

• Why attention is the most powerful tool you have

• Real-life examples of transformation using this practice

🎧 More at coyotejackson.com

• How difficult times act as a spotlight—illuminating what’s really going on beneath the surface, revealing both our obstacles and our deeper needs. When life feels chaotic or painful, it brings what we need into sharper focus—if we’re willing to look.

• The powerful question at the heart of transformation:
  Instead of just asking “What should I do?”, I invite you to look deeper and ask, “What do I really want?” Not just the outer form (a job, a relationship, a number on the scale), but the underlying feeling or way of being you’re truly yearning for—peace, connection, safety, love.

• The link between navigating hardship and self-discovery:
  It’s often in our most challenging times that we gain clarity about what really matters. The discomfort, fear, or longing you feel is not just something to avoid—it’s a pointer to what your heart wants most.

• How to move from confusion to clarity:
  I share a practical exercise for reflecting on the seven areas of life, so you can see what you want—not just what you don’t want. Difficult times make our patterns and longings stand out in high relief, making it easier to see where we’re stuck and what we’re truly called toward.

• Why understanding alone won’t change your life—and what will:
  Real transformation happens when we practice—when we live from the feeling or state we desire, instead of getting lost in trying to analyze or explain our way out.

• Next episode preview: I’ll introduce the Reality Creation Loop—a 3-step process to actually live what you’ve discovered you want.
  
  

Free Book:
Want to dive deeper into this practice with written prompts and exercises?
Download the free eBook here: https://coyotejackson.com

Share Your Story
Have you had a moment where loving-kindness won? I’d love to hear it. Drop a comment below or send it through my site.

If this episode resonates, please subscribe. It helps the message reach more people who need it.

This next week or two as we go through the elections in the US fear and anxiety and worrying abound. As they have for many months now. Is this what you’re going through? I feel for you with all my heart. If you give me a few minutes to slow down and read this, this is my mission: to help you come back home to your loving kindness nature, and to be less fearful, less anxious, less angry, less confused and scared.

It’s not that there aren’t bad, difficult, challenging things happening, there are. But the answer to this cannot be to live in fear and worry and anxiety about each and every one. To spend every opportunity you find to engage in it, to prolong it, to scroll and scroll the stories, to read all the comments to find the most outrageous ones, to seek validation from others about it, to constantly recreate the worry over and over and over. Not if you want to be healthy, and be of real benefit to yourself and others.

In a very practical way each and every one of us can shift our own experience of this. Away from anxiety, and towards peaceful being, equanimity, and beneficial action. How? Loving Kindness Wins.

Practice this, and I mean yes right now, today! Many times today. Whenever you notice that you are in the middle of a rant about whatever the bad thing that is going on based on some article you read written by someone about something that someone said somewhere in the country in a speech sometime…… interrupt yourself. Become willing to do something different.

Connect with your own true nature of loving kindness. The loving kindness you feel when you pet your dog and they look at you with eyes of deep unconditional love. Or when you stroke the arm of your lover. Or what you feel for your family. Or when a friend says something about how they appreciate you that makes your eyes water with love and the feeling of being seen. Or wherever you feel the leap of your heart, the aching vulnerable powerful love in your heart.

That is your true nature. It lies underneath everything, all the fears and anxieties and layers of contraction that we build up as defense mechanisms. Come back to your true deep nature as loving kindness itself. For an instant you will know that loving kindness wins. Revel in that!

And, a moment later you might hear in your head “yeah but”. Yeah but, what if this happens. Yeah but, that’s pointless. Yeah but, that doesn’t accomplish anything. Yeah but they’re so wrong. Yeah but, yeah but, yeah but. The next time you read an article and then jump into another one and another one. Or you read some ignorant angry comment on a post.

Breathe. Stop.

Rather than engage in that, interrupt yourself again, and repeat the practice - come back to the feeling of loving kindness deep in your heart.

It is a deep wide nurturing cradle, this loving kindness. It pervades everything. It is wide and powerful and beautiful. But we don’t trust it, we forget it, we abandon it in favor of the fear. It is much bigger, more fundamental than the fear. But we bring the fear close, we wallow in it, we recreate it over and over. And so it becomes all we see. We think that is what is really fundamentally there. But it’s not.

Our fundamental nature is loving kindness. We need to pull back from our unconscious commitment to keep recreating fear and anxiety, and recognize that loving kindness is outside, surrounding everything.

Use Loving Kindness Wins! Use it as a mantra, a practice, an instruction, a truth to come home to. Commit to being more of yourself, your nature as a being of loving kindness, rather than the being of fear that another wounded human is unconsciously trying to get you to be.

Then you can do whatever is helpful and useful. Being in equanimity and vibrating with loving-kindness is not passive inaction. The actions you take from a place of loving kindness will have a very different, more beneficial outcome than the ones you take from fear and anxiety. So before you act out, throw the hateful comment onto a post, or keep reading the stories someone created about all the horrible stuff someone has done, first come back to Loving Kindness Wins. Then from that place, choose what you want to do, where you want to put your precious attention and time.

Make your choice, and vote. If you are called to work in the campaigns do that. Otherwise what path do you want to choose? You might choose to spread the message of Loving Kindness Wins instead of repeating and spreading hate, confusion and fear. Which path is going to help you more, and help our community navigate these times?

You could choose, instead of repeating the actions that are creating your anxiety and fear, to shift your attention to sharing your loving kindness with your friends and loved ones in the simple beautiful ways of your awakened heart. The core thread of love, affection, joy that is underneath your fear. Trust this, cultivate this, share and give this to everyone in your life.

In order to share your loving kindness with others it requires that you cultivate and grow your own connection with it, and so in sharing it with others your own experience of life will change, and move towards one of pure loving kindness all the time. Practice this every day, all day, every time you can remember, over and over and over, and loving kindness will win.

I challenge you to create this as a daily practice for the next week as you move through your life towards the elections and beyond. Practice Loving Kindness in your thoughts, in your words, in your actions at least once a day consciously choosing into this as a daily practice. Visualize it, feel it, connect with it, and share it with your family, friends and neighbors. And tell them to share it with theirs!

Thank you for reading. Thank you for being courageous in these difficult times. Thank you for choosing to try and do something different even if you try and fall down 1,000 times. Loving Kindness Wins.

If you are scared, anxious, angry, fearful of the future - Loving Kindness Wins.

Remember this, and practice this.  Loving Kindness Wins.

Simply, consistently, repeatedly come back to this fundamental truth. Loving Kindness Wins!

This time we find ourselves in is intensely difficult. We are suffering. Anxiety and fear abounds. There are so many stories of dire consequences, of terror over our direction, stories of the terrible horrors of war, democracy and civilizations collapsing, consequential policy choices being fought over. Aggression everywhere. 

In the face of this what ought we do? Fight, collapse, attack, run, hide?

I offer this: Loving Kindness Wins!

The hearing, the knowing of this provides relief as we let it in. Adopt it. Align to its energy. 

But fundamentally it is a practice instruction. Something we can tangibly do. We can practice loving kindness in the face of whatever it is that we struggle with. Our fear, our anxiety, our caught-upedness. Loving Kindness Wins.

I’ve heard so many stories from people who are experiencing the intense pull of these mind-states. They engage in spats and fights online, they talk politics with friends but it’s not really about politics, the issues, it’s about all the awful things that somebody is doing or saying. We constantly look for agreement and validation about how awful it is.

We must recognize what we are doing to ourselves, that there is very little healthy benefit to be gained from engaging our precious and powerful attention in this swirling vortex of negative thoughts. 

I’m not advocating for ignoring what’s going on. But I am advocating that we take full personal responsibility for our own well-being and for what we are feeding with the power of our mind. In any given situation, conversation, what world are you standing for? Are you - right in that moment - creating one in which the landscape is desolate, polarized, a Mad-Max landscape with warring factions destroying each other and our own loving nature? Or are you creating one in which Loving Kindness Wins? 

If you find yourself caught up in the endless stories of what’s going wrong, what he or she has said now, please choose to care how you feel. Really, really, care how you feel. The ignoring of this is highly damaging. It’s so important to notice what it’s doing to you, your body, your energy, your health, your loved ones, your community. Please, with all the loving kindness I can muster, I ask you to stop. Instead, remember, loving-kindness wins! Please choose, in every moment you can remember, to practice being in loving kindness. Then act from there. For yourself, and your loved ones, and all beings. You are worth it.

Repeat this consistently, with diligence, and you will completely change the experience you’re having of your life. Loving Kindness Wins.

• “Why does it always have to be me that reaches out?”

• “Shouldn’t they also put in the effort?”

• “I called them last time so it’s their turn now.”

• “The phone works both ways you know.”

• “Texting is just easier.”

• “If they wanted to talk with me they would reach out.”

• “If they loved me they would know I’m mad at them.”

One of my best friends has often told me I am the most difficult friend he has. Because I listen to what he says and I respond, and I tell him what I feel as a result of what he says. So he has to change how he behaves when he’s with me. He has to think and say what he actually means. He also says it is completely worth it. I’m ok with this.

The same friend told me some time ago that his life is better with me in it, and I said the same. It is beautiful and simple, and we have made it a practice to make this the ground that we always come back to. When one of us feels separated or miffed or misunderstood, we can come back together through the practice of conversation, of sharing with each vulnerably how we feel, because we always have that ground to stand on. 

Isolation, friendships and relationships during this intensely polarized, online and post-covid world can be challenging experiences. Like many other things, the fast-food version - comments and texts - are being much more consumed instead of the more involved practice of creating the whole-food version: conversation. Especially the difficult ones where you share how you’re really doing, or the impact of your friend’s words and actions. 

The bandwidth required to have vulnerable conversations is much higher than what’s available in texts & messages. And it needs both a speaking and a listening. To share what’s really going on in your internal life, not just your external one, requires a powerful listening be present. A listening into which you can speak your truth, your secret internal experience. And it requires that the speaker choose into honesty and say what’s true for them even when that is difficult.

But messaging usually does not have a listening. When we send just a text it will get read or listened to at some point. Perhaps. There is no real listening into which we are speaking. The recipient generally doesn’t say to all those around them - “oh wonderful, I just received a message from my friend. Please let me go away for a while so I can focus on reading this message to understand what they are saying and respond.” Hardly! It is skimmed at a glance while we are engaged in doing several other things. And this makes all the difference.

The vulnerability of sharing what is really going on in your life is the crux of how perhaps all spiritual paths work to create growth and transformation in people’s lives. Whether it’s the fifth step of AA, the confessional of the Catholic tradition, the spiritual friend or guru in Buddhist and other Eastern traditions, or the honesty and depth of conversations taking place in the listening and reflective container created by a good coach - all wisdom traditions teach that the path to connection and clear-seeing of the sacred world all around us is vulnerability, openness, acknowledging and sharing what is really going on and asking for help. 

Last night I lay on the rug in the living room, face to face with my boyfriend, and we talked for two hours, about what we were going through, about life, about our intentions, our practices, listening to each other and how we impact each other. Engaged in the deep co-operative conversation that is the lifeblood of a relationship. Vulnerable truthful speaking into powerful undefended listenings.

Vulnerability requires diving below our automatic reactions, using the skill of noticing. Noticing our reaction, and then bringing awareness and examination to our experience. 

To see through our resentments and defenses against getting hurt, to go past “Why should I call, it’s up to them to call me?”, we must remember the key question - “what do I want?”

Do you want a friendship, and the powerful experiences of being seen, understood, fulfilled, joy and fun that it brings? Then what does it matter, at all, who calls? What if it is you that calls every single time - does that actually matter? What if you enjoy your conversations, your time together however that is whether it’s in-person or on the phone, then why does it matter whether they ever call you or initiate coming to see you, if you are doing that? Someone has to of course, but who and the exact count of who does what, does this matter?

If them not calling you is actually them too afraid to tell you that they don’t want to spend time with you, then of course that is a different thing. But if it is a difference in your communication frequency or mobility of actions - if you are simply more likely to reach out and call, then why not honor that gift you have? Why not bring your ability to initiate conversation to your friendship and give it freely to your friend? If you are the one feeling disconnection, then isn’t it your responsibility and commitment to yourself and to what you want to create connection?

Whatever path we are on, when we are feeling lost, we can always come back to the common ground, to the trailhead. The ground of my relationships is wanting to help my friends grow into being fully themselves, it is myself wanting to be seen, it is wanting to co-operate in creating shared experiences, it is wanting to listen to what this beautiful human is going through, and wanting to share my inner and secret experiences so that I feel the heart connection and clearly see this other beautiful human. So, whenever we have wandered off this path, have got totally side-tracked, or gone backwards, whatever resentments we are feeling, we can choose at any point to come back to this starting point, this ground. Remember what we want, and then speak from there.

Of course it’s not about bypassing whatever has happened, what I or they have done or said - quite the opposite. We get to talk through everything that needs to be talked through to get to the clear space. It is however about doing that speaking from the common ground of relationship, of co-operation, of wanting, rather than from the fog of fear, mistrust and resentment. And creating a listening of openness, non-defensiveness, trust, and confidence in relationship.

I’ll end with one key instruction that I received recently: “Continue The Conversation.” This is one of my main practices today, and I am working with it in various ways to unpack it and practice it.

Continue the conversation.

Everything is a conversation
Allow it to happen. 
Continue it
Boundaries are a conversation
Trust is the fundamental field in which we can operate
Can feel the trust of the breath - don’t *know* the next breath will happen. But in the moment we trust it
Same thing with a conversation with a friend, or an enemy.
You don’t have to pre-plan it all. Manipulate the outcome.
Like the breath, simply trust, and let the conversation unfold.
Listen, then respond - take the step when a step is needed.
What if I’m always the one to reach out - so what? You are simply continuing the conversation.
When you breathe - you are being a conduit for electricity - conversation and connection. When you stop, when you block, pressure builds up.
Eventually this comes out in some way - anger, hatred of self or the other person.
It must flow to be healthy.
Like the breath - Each conversation is new, it’s a lightening rod for electricity to flow in ways it hasn’t before.
You may make discoveries, insights into the human condition, into your friend’s condition, into levels of connection you haven’t experienced before.
It’s the cutting edge of reality where you get to co-create together.
Brainstorm on a play, riff on a joke together, share stories and actually listen.
There is such beauty in the unscripted conversation that happens when you simply trust and open and continue to take steps
When you breathe you are being like a newborn baby, everything is full of wonder and curiosity - bring this to conversations.
Ask your friends - what are you going through, what did you do today, what experiences did you have, what were your struggles, where did you grow, what did you learn, who did you meet, how are you feeling right now, is there anything you are holding back from asking me about how I feel about you.
Tell someone you love them deeply, that your life is better with them in it, and allow that to be true by taking actions in alignment with that truth.
Be the best friend you can be simply by always continuing the conversation, like the breath, no matter what the previous breath was like, we take another.
No matter if the previous one was stunted and short, simply release it and breathe again.
Trust is the field that will hold you as you connect, as you speak.
The opposite of speaking is isolation, desolation, aloneness. Heart-hardening, breath-hardening. And addiction to substitutes - alcohol, TV, fake news.
The antidote is trust.
Take a new breath and speak.
Feeling the ongoing conversation with life
The basic trust of Life
Without it nothing could happen.

What is a Snow Lion? It’s a beautiful big shaggy lion, a mythical beast that  leaps from mountain top to mountain top, full of the joy of life. Its feet barely touch the ground as it leaps and soars shaking its mane bounding through the snow on the mountain peaks.

What is the source of all this joy? Discipline.

But this is not the kind of discipline you might imagine when you hear the word. Rather than the military version where we are doing it because someone is forcing us under threat of harm, which is often how we treat ourselves, this discipline is one that we invite into our lives. Just like invoking the sun to shine on, and inviting the rain to fall on a field to help plants grow up tall and strong and thrive, we invite, summon and call discipline into our lives to help us grow strong and thrive joyfully.

This view of discipline is a powerful reversal. For example if there is something we want to do like meditate every day, or exercise or eat well, the external version of discipline would be to force ourselves there and punish ourselves if we don’t do it. Tell ourselves we are lazy or stupid. It’s like someone else’s finger pointing at us, wagging. The discipline of the Snow Lion is very different. It is an invitation we make ourselves - it is an organic form. We choose to go and sit and meditate or eat a healthy meal because we know it will help us thrive. And if we don’t do it today, that’s ok but we can call upon our internal strength, work to summon our own natural discipline more strongly, and now go sit, knowing that it is good for us, that it helps us grow stronger.

We don’t tend to trust ourselves and so we resort to violence against ourselves. We don’t trust that we could do the things we want to do unless we are forcing ourselves into. So this reversal is a key part of spiritual transformation. To invoke Discipline is an act of gentleness not violence. It is an act of trust in ourselves. An act of love - inviting Discipline to come into our lives and be with us in a very intimate way.

So how exactly do we Dance the Path of Snow Lion?

Dancing the Path of Snow Lion

Step 1: Develop Clarity: bring your gaze down to what is right in front of you.

Get clear on what is going on just in the space right around you. Turn off the news, stop reading or watching stories about other people’s lives. Stop consuming. Bring your gaze and your attention to the six feet around you, and what is ahead of you - you and your own actual life.

What projects do you have going on in your life? For me when I’m in an overwhelm state I often have to write these out over and over and over again in my journal as way to bring some clarity. Get a complete dump of everything that is going on. What are all your commitments. What are all the things that you have running around in your mind as things that you should or are supposed to do. Get them all down on paper. Rewrite them over and over until they start to become clearer. This is a very helpful process to develop clarity, which is a seeing-through of the fog of overwhelm. Doing this itself requires you to begin to call in Discipline. The discipline to keep working on seeing, even when it’s foggy. Doing this develops the eyes of clarity. To have clarity it is necessary to develop clear-seeing eyes. Give up, renounce looking everywhere else besides what is right in front of you.

Step 2: Summon the Discipline to Choose

Now we must choose. We must make prioritization calls - what is most important right now? When we’re in the midst of overwhelm this - deciding what to do - can be very difficult, and that’s where the discipline comes in. We might only get a few words down on paper before we get distracted by the overwhelm, or go back to watching some Netflix. And then, in this step we choose into coming back. Invoke the sense of discipline to come back again and again, and focus on moving through what is in front of you.

I always think of the example from when I was working at a really high paced job in a technology startup in San Francisco. The pace was overwhelming, I had 50 meetings a week, and absolutely no time to do anything. I had to hire someone but there was absolutely no time to spend the many hours it would take to read all the resumes and do all the interviews. But of course if I didn’t, nothing would change. One of my favorite phrases - if nothing changes nothing changes. So, there was nothing for it but to dig in, invoke the discipline of Snow Lion, and make the really hard priority calls. I created the time first thing in the morning to spend two hours reading resumes and working on hiring someone. That meant I wasn’t working on a bunch of other urgent stuff, so some things didn’t get done. But ultimately I ended up hiring someone amazing that changed my experience there completely, and together we got so much more done.

So  we must identify what is the most important thing to work on. This is the same whether we’re talking  about work or personal or family or spiritual or any other kind of projects. I find it’s best to put them all together since they all contribute to the overwhelm. Then just keep digging and digging through them until you gain some clarity around what is it that is really on your plate, and what are the most important things you have to  do. And then choose - make a radical choice that you can’t do everything, and just do the most important thing right now. The process of moving on something will help free up all the undigested energy that is clogging up your body and world. 

Step 3: Create Structure. 

Having identified what to do, create the structure to do it. Again we call in the discipline of Snow Lion here. Does it look like getting up two hours earlier to work on this because your day is already full? That means going to bed early tonight - drop the desire to watch TV or whatever else you might do in those last two hours. There are a lot of ways to create structure, too many to cover in this post, but that might look like daily and weekly planning and review sessions, lots of journaling, set times in your calendar to work on the hard stuff, sticky notes in your home to remind you - any number of things. Whatever is useful is the metric to use. 

Structure is often something that we don’t like to embrace, similar to Discipline. But a similar reversal of the idea we have about it is in order. Structure is not something that takes away our freedom, quite the opposite - freedom comes from structure, from constraint. Structure is something to help us, to lean on when we need it, like a trellis that helps support a plant when it it windy. The importance of structure is immense, and well worth shifting our mindset around.

Step 4: Use the Discipline of Consistency & Focus

There is big magic in the combination of consistency and focus. In just a few days of consistent action, where we are focused on the most important things, it is amazing what we can move through. And after we get moving for a little while, and clear through some parts of our projects, the sense of lightness on the other side of the overwhelm can be very joyous.

Like when you’re in the ocean swimming in some really big waves. If you let them crash on top of you, and let yourself be dragged by them it’s very uncomfortable. If instead you turn towards them, then dive right into the middle of them - you’ve got to swim pretty hard for a while but then you surface on the other side out in clear water again.

So the main part of dancing this path is consistency and focus. Each time you get knocked down, use Tiger to get up again. Then invoke the discipline of Snow Lion to turn towards what is difficult but important. And repeat, and keep repeating.

Step 5: Remember to Dance

And when I feel very down about the situation, when I feel put-upon, that’s when I remember the word Dance. We can bring a sense of lightness to the whole situation. Actually enjoy the feeling of swimming hard through the wave. The sense of working hard on something that is important to us. Instead of letting doubt pull us down, even when things feel heavy, just lift your feet, and dance a little, a few steps here and there, looking out at the sky, the mountains, the birds.

Pretty soon you will find yourself leaping across those mountain tops and feeling the joy of the air rushing through your fur, being Snow Lion. And you may begin to feel a little fearless, and reach out your paws to support and invite others to walk the path. 

We should also know that these two paths are sequential - first Tiger, then Snow Lion, and also they are simultaneous. We must keep walking the path of Tiger as we move on to dance the path of Snow Lion. Transcend but include. It is the grounding in Tiger that allows us to dance as a Snow Lion. While we are dancing and leaping amongst the mountains, it is important to remember to also keep Tigering - keep eating well, brushing our teeth, exercising and all the other Tiger things that keep us moving and thriving.