From Inspiration to Integration: How to Keep Your Aha Moments Alive
Hello and welcome to rewilding philosophy. Your letters for ekophilosophical health.
How often have you read a book or attended a seminar that inspired you to change your life, only to forget about the content and wisdom a few days or hours later?
When we learn new philosophies for life, new ideas that we want to live by, the learning merely happens in a light bold moment. While we might have an insight that way, the insight loses its momentum if we don’t incorporate it into our everyday life.
I have read hundreds of books, visited dozens of seminars and conferences and all sorts of events that gave me those “aha-moments”, insights I wanted to incorporate into my life. Those aha-moments don’t have to be huge life-changing insights, they might also be small nuggets of wisdom and knowledge, for example “always leave a place more beautiful than you have found it.”
But then, life would resume. The incandescent moments of clarity, those epiphanies that dazzled me, begin to fade, not into vibrant hues, but into dull fragments that slip quietly, imperceptibly, into nowhere.
I sometimes see myself as a collector of insights, yet I often falter when it comes to transformation.
The most compelling aha-moments for me involve relational philosophies. While I conceptually understand our interconnectedness with and magnificence of the universe, I often forget this in my daily life.
This cycle—of insight, knowledge and idea acquisition followed by the erosion of resolve—is not just disheartening but also illuminating in its own right. It points to a deeper truth about the nature of philosophical health: that while there is power in discovering a philosophy to live by - and it’s a for me exhilarating process to do that -, the transformation is in the persistence with which it is nurtured and cultivated amidst my mundane, every day life. It’s only by breathing life into these learnings each day that I can hope to transform some of that insight and knowledge into a way of life.
In a way, I would say that this is what my work is about: about the process of making healthy philosophies, those that bring care, kindness, kinship, magic and regeneration into our collapsing world, into a lifestyle, into a way of life, into something we don’t just preach, something I don’t just preach, but actually engage to live by.
Ecology of Practices
A key to embodying this knowledge is, as John Vervaeke calls it, an "ecology of practices."
He writes
“An “ecology of practice” is a purposeful arrangement (“a logos”) of meaningful practices. It is an integrated network of activities designed to stimulate your mental, spiritual and physical sense of connection – i.e. the connection to yourself, to others, and to the world at large. Conventional intellectual learning is not sufficient for philia sophia, the project of loving and cultivating wisdom. This is a task that involves the whole of the person. It involves the body as well as the mind, requires movement as well as stillness. It adds sociability to solitude, and spontaneous creativity to methodical reasoning. … An ecology is a living system of relationships. There is no “panacea practice,” some perfect salve that will guarantee good perspective and sound action in daily life. The individual and her attention is a complex system of interrelated forces and influences, and requires an interrelated system of interventions to help gain balance, offset various biases, and create a tension of perspectives that help keep things in proportion.”
I have found that I need such an ecology of practices to embody certain parts of my philosophy in my everyday life. In fact, many of them feel like they have become the cornerstone of my being. Some of them almost seem like a compulsion - if I skip them - something feels a bit off.
The practices that Varveake suggests address different aspects of our cognitive complexion. Namely: dialogical, imaginal, mindful and embodied. The according practices are embodiment, authentic relating, philosophical fellowship, meditation, socratic imaginal self reflection and dialectic-into-dialogos practice.
The cornerstones of my own practice are
meditation: just 15minutes,, including phases like meta meditation, where I connect with the the whole of the universe and wish love and success to my greatest nemesis.
journaling: about what is happening and about who I want to become. And, I never expected it, but expressing gratitude daily has really shifted my perception.
reading: not just any, but specific books on the nature of reality that I reread over and over again, that resemble a way of life I want to live. Reading is so important for me, not to just absorb the words, but to absorb the energy and authenticity and way of life of the author - but more about that another time.
Tarot cards: I don’t do this daily, but regularly. I love how my mind always relates to the card and reveals something that is alive in me at that specific moment.
exercise: this is a bit part of my life at the moment. The patterns of resistance I experience during exercise are the same I experience in everyday life. How I deal with them teaches me how to deal with them in other situations. Also, just feeling my body become stronger is amazing. There is so much to say about the benefits of exercise and there is no need for me to recap them here. I think the undervalued benefit is that exercise brings us into our mind into body, and our body into the world.
offerings: this is something I am only just starting - to give offerings to places and other beings, to GAIA, as a conscious act of gratitude. I recently read that we are always already in a reciprocal relationship with the planet. And I agree somewhat. At the same time, I think we can make this explicit, to bring it into our conscious though offerings. Which brings me to another key of those practices…
Ecology of Rituals
I find that those practices can remain meaningless if we don’t infuse them with meaning through turning them into rituals.
A ritual, unlike a practice, is imbued with significance and adorned with layers of intent. While a practice is often seen as a repetitive act taken up in pursuit of proficiency or improvement, a ritual transcends this; it suffuses habit with intention and meaning that then weaves itself into the very fabric of our being. Rituals are the sacred containers of habit, infusing the mundane with a spiritual resonance and anchoring our practices in a greater narrative.
“Rituals determine a frame and a period of time for paying homage to what people recognize as being essential to life, namely, the present moment, harmony, and the attention that is conferred to all the gestures in the exchange.” Corine Pelluchon
Some of the practices I described above were very hard for me to maintain regularly when I focused only on myself, thinking they would make me a “better person.” However, when I shifted my intention toward a greater purpose and meaning, it not only became easier to engage in these practices, but I also began to feel a sort of devotion that gave them a sense of wholeness and completion.
“Many meditations, ceremonies, celebrations, rituals, and other practices can help us deepen our respect for, and commune with, the wild energies of nature and the spirits of our places.” Arne Ness
I am still in the beginning of understanding ritual and will likely write more about it in the future. For now, I can say is that a ritual serves as sort of a bridge between our inner and outer worlds, a space where we can return to recalibrate and reconnect with the deeper currents that guide our existence and our entanglements with all that is, human and more-than-human.
It’s these currents, that I need to be reminded off daily in order to live my life with those intentions.
“So what does, you could say, ritualized, healthy, ongoing relationship with impulse look like rituals that actually enact that primal longing, that sing of separation, like the devotional hymns do in Indian tradition, that don't try to deny that that longing exists, but celebrate that longing. And you could say, return it to its source. Right? What I am longing for, ultimately, what I am longing for, if the Indian traditions are to be believed, particularly the Bhakti traditions, ultimately what I'm longing for is a connection to the source of that very longing itself, right? Ultimately, every human being carries with them a desire for reunification with source, reunification with the animate flow of creation, right?” Joshua Schrei
And it’s through an ecology of rituals, that those insights, knowledge and ideas which once flickered and threatened to fade away quickly are kept alive - the alchemy through which we continuously turn them into a way of life.
There are many ways to invite the holy into our lives, but none so immediate as prayer and ritual. Toko-pa Turner
If this exploration resonates with you, please share with a friend or colleague who might benefit from it as well.