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A Quest for Self-Knowledge: From Self-Help to Somatic Healing (Part IV – My 7 Principles for Personal Development)

It has been only by writing this series of essays that I’ve come to realize that I have a set of principles I follow for my personal development. They might not be right for everyone, but they’ve certainly served me well.

#1. Go deeper than the surface level

I’ve repeatedly found that the real fruits of any personal development program or experience lie below the surface. There is always an introductory “light” version, which can be useful if you’re just looking for a taste. But don’t expect that to produce real transformation. 

I often notice that people who are “into” personal development will keep shopping around for different practices and gurus, only dipping their toes in the water before moving on to something else. This gives them the impression that they’ve “tried everything” and “nothing works,” when in fact, they’ve only inoculated themselves to a wide variety of powerful medicines.

For example, the Landmark Forum weekend seminar was impactful for me, but it was nothing compared to the half-dozen other courses from the same organization I went on to complete afterward. A single class can never compete with the impact of a full curriculum. 

The best way I’ve found to go beyond the surface is to take on a position of service or leadership (which are the same thing). It was only when I joined Landmark’s leadership training program and saw what it takes behind the scenes to produce transformation in others that the teachings truly sank in.

I’ve attended and participated in a variety of other programs and courses that didn’t even merit a mention in this series, simply because I didn’t go deep with them. Therefore they never had a chance to make their mark and become a part of who I am.

#2. Commit for a set period of time

Related to the above, it’s important to dedicate a substantial period of time to a given practice. I’ve compressed a seemingly large number of experiences into my story, but in reality, I almost never pursued more than one growth practice at a time or even one right after another. It takes time to integrate.

For example, after taking Joe Hudson’s weekend Tide Turners seminar in 2018, it took a full year before I felt ready to enroll in his more intensive week-long Groundbreakers program in 2019, and then another year before I participated in his online program The Art of Accomplishment Masterclass, and then another year before my wife and I joined a couple’s retreat he led in 2021. That’s four years of participating in and absorbing one person’s teachings, during which I didn’t pursue any other personal growth practice.

My typical rule of thumb is to have one big personal growth experience each year, as a kind of “spiritual rejuvenation” to ensure I’m remaining connected to my deepest self and that I’m not ignoring too many uncomfortable truths about myself. I know it’s time for my annual tuneup when life starts getting dull and loses its color, indicating that I’m starting to lose touch with my emotions and sense of wonder.

Committing to one practice for a set period and allowing one to settle before seeking another also ensures I’m not just seeking an endless series of dopamine hits in place of real change, or using courses as a way to distract from the necessary inner work. There is truly no rush, and the truth is, you can arrive at many of the same breakthroughs via multiple paths. It’s more important to go deep in one of them than to keep shopping around looking for the “perfect” option.

#3. Find a teacher, peers, and a structured environment

I’ve found far better results when I had a teacher, and a group of people undergoing the experience alongside me. This provides a strong source of accountability to ensure I keep showing up for others who depend on me. But just as importantly, I believe there is a mechanism buried deeply in our psyches that makes change much easier when done in groups.

We are a social species, and many aspects of all three levels – mind, heart, and body – are geared specifically to learn from other people. Doing anything in isolation is inherently foreign and unnatural for us, especially if it’s a confronting or scary experience like changing our most deeply rooted beliefs and ways of being. 

Other people give us outside perspectives to help shine light on our blindspots and give us comfort and encouragement at moments of fear. It’s also simply more fun and meaningful to undertake a challenge with others, and I’ve made some of my deepest friendships in adulthood as a result. 

Even Vipassana meditation retreats, which ostensibly are all about finding your own internal realizations in complete silence, benefit tremendously from the shared nature of the experience. There are also daily recorded teachings from the founder Goenka as well as a daily Q&A with the meditation teacher, which provide context and a sense of assurance.

This is why, whenever possible, I try to join a course, program, retreat, or group coaching experience, rather than only reading or researching a subject. 

#4. Occasionally go “off the reservation”

In contrast to the principle above, it’s crucial to occasionally go “off the reservation” and put yourself in an environment that is not planned and structured for you. If your breakthroughs depend on a perfectly ordered, predictable environment, then what good are they?

The true test of whether you’ve changed is diving headfirst into unstructured environments, such as when I attended Burning Man with almost no preparation. It forced me to adapt, and improvise, drawing on all the tools and lessons I now had at my disposal.

Another wonderful venue for this is travel, which inherently throws all kinds of surprising and uncomfortable scenarios at you. Although I haven’t included it here, I consider international travel and living abroad for longer periods a core part of my personal growth and do it regularly.

I firmly believe the ultimate goal of any structured program, skilled teacher, or new growth practice is to outgrow it. I don’t want to keep piling on one daily practice after another until my whole day is taken up in preparing to live my life, rather than living it. I see each new technique as a temporary season – like a metamorphosis I’m undergoing, until I eventually emerge from my cocoon as different from my previous self as a butterfly from a caterpillar, free to flutter off and live a full, vibrant life free of structures and rules.

#5. Share your stories in real time

This one is probably obvious by now, but I believe strongly in sharing your stories – not just at the end of the road when you’ve had all the insights and breakthroughs, but at each step of the journey.

This has numerous irreplaceable benefits:

Helping you integrate and fully internalize what you’re learning by turning it into a narrative on the page and in your mindAllowing you to more effectively connect and cross-reference insights across experiences and at different levels of mind, heart, and bodyDocumenting what you’ve experienced so you can revisit, recollect, and even reinterpret it in the futureGiving other people in your life the chance to learn from and maybe even participate in a new experience they wouldn’t have otherwise (which if they do, gives you a lot of interesting things to talk about and relate over)

I’ve found that the best time to share your stories isn’t even at the “conclusion” of a single experience. You never know when a given chapter of your growth journey will end, and by the time it does, the most fundamental insights you had when you were a beginner are likely to be forgotten.

No, the best time to share is in real time, right at the frontier of your own progress. 

For example, in 2019, I delivered a talk at a conference called Refactor Camp based on adrienne maree brown’s book Pleasure Activism. This was at the very beginning of my exploration of somatic, body-centric personal development, and in retrospect, I didn’t know what I was talking about. I had very little personal experience to speak from, so this talk was less about my expertise as it was about my curiosity, my open questions, my first tantalizing insights, and most of all, an invitation for other people in my network to surface potential next steps for me.

When you open-source your growth journey in real time, you’ll find that all sorts of people who are on a similar journey will be drawn to you. They’ll become your confidants, your partners, and your friends. Putting your story into narrative form can also be tremendously healing in its own right, as I’ve done with my father’s story in documentary form.

#6. Move toward where you feel shame

Looking back on the formative personal development milestones of my adult life, it all seems so neat and tidy, as if I sat down and planned it in advance. Nothing could be further from the truth. There was almost no point at which it didn’t feel chaotic, random, and accidental.

I now believe that personal growth isn’t really something you have to go out and pursue like wild game. It is constantly present all around you, and happening whether you like it or not. There is nothing more natural for humans than to grow and change, and life tends to conspire to give you exactly the experiences you need to grow (a lesson I learned from Michael Singer).

However, in our modern world of constantly multiplying optionality, you sometimes have to choose to pursue one path over another, if only for the sake of time management. In that case, the best rule of thumb I’ve found is to move toward whichever part of your life is most associated with shame. The feeling of shame is a signal that a part of you hasn’t been seen, accepted, embraced, and loved, and until it is, it will continue broadcasting pain. The longer you ignore it, the worse that pain will become and the more it will spread to other aspects of your life.

The reason I say “move toward” is that you don’t have to make a full frontal attack on that area, and probably shouldn’t. This isn’t about forcing yourself or dominating yourself. It’s about learning new ways to love yourself. 

If there’s an aspect of your life that feels too overwhelmingly shameful to approach or think about or feel at all, then that probably means you’re not ready to. Instead, pick an area that feels shameful but one you have some curiosity or openness about. And you can start at whichever level you’re most comfortable with – mind, heart, or body. For me, that usually means reading books and articles, which allows me to start gaining intellectual familiarity and a basic understanding before diving into my feelings or my gut.

#7. Seek variety and diversity

As this series illustrates, it’s important to me to seek a wide variety of different “modalities” – to gain exposure to different ways of thinking, feeling, acting, and practicing personal development. 

A lesson I took away from my religious upbringing is that no one has an exclusive monopoly on the truth. No one religion, or philosophy, or teacher has it all figured out. They each perceive one facet of the truth, and their blindspots have to be filled in by others.

By mixing and matching my approach to personal development, I protect myself against some of the worst abuses and pitfalls of metaphysics– the cult leaders who abuse their authority, the pseudo-science that dismisses logic and reason, the fundamentalist tendency to conform “perfectly” to one philosophy and denigrate all the others, and most subtle but important of all, the risk of confusing the map with the territory and mistaking my perception of reality with reality itself. 

This life is too complex and wondrous to be easily encapsulated into a single perspective. This universe is too big and mysterious to be explained by any one mental model. This reality is too wondrous to ever be fully understood, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on X, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

The post A Quest for Self-Knowledge: From Self-Help to Somatic Healing (Part IV – My 7 Principles for Personal Development) appeared first on Forte Labs.

A Quest for Self-Knowledge: From Self-Help to Somatic Healing (Part III – Awakening My Body)

In Part II, I told the story of how I opened my heart. This next chapter is about going further inward and downward – into the realm of the body and gut.

It all started when I was 22 and began to feel a nagging pain and tension in the back of my throat. That small discomfort eventually turned into a searing pain throughout the right side of my neck, accompanied by an inability to control my voice – to speak, to sing, or to laugh without a lot of effort. 

The social and psychological effects were even worse than the physical ones – I was so wrapped up and preoccupied with my voice dysfunction I found it impossible to naturally interact and connect with others, leading to intense feelings of isolation bordering on despair.

While I’d love to be able to say that my quest for self-knowledge was fueled by nothing but my insatiable thirst for truth, the reality is much simpler: it was pain that launched me on my journey. I turned inward because I had no other choice.

After several years of seeing a variety of medical specialists, undergoing countless tests and scans, and trying everything including powerful medication with severe side effects, I had almost given up hope of ever finding a remedy. That was when I turned to alternative, esoteric forms of personal development to find some relief from my suffering (you can read more about my journey through psychosomatic illness here).

By 2022, I’d explored Vipassana meditation, Landmark’s educational programs, psychedelics, and Joe Hudson’s coaching, and gained some incredible tools for turning my pain into something positive. 

But my quest began with the most fundamental sensations arising from within my body, and that is where it had to eventually return. Today my journey has led me full circle, back to where it all began: the realm of the body.

Discovering the root of my pain

It was in this third chapter of my story when I began to really get at the root of my chronic pain: that I had disconnected and dissociated from my body at a young age in order to survive painful experiences, treating the signals it was sending me as annoyances, distractions, or signs of weakness. 

The models for emotional expression I saw in my parents gave me the impression that there were certain “bad” emotions that should be avoided and ignored for the sake of family harmony. Conflict and disagreement in particular were swept under the rug.

I was always a sensitive, introverted child, and being thrust into the rowdy, rough-and-tumble world of school forced me to create a hard external shell to retreat into. I thought I had to be tough, to show I was a “real man,” and that meant first and foremost not succumbing to my own needs for comfort.

If I had to go to the bathroom, I would hold it for as long as I possibly could in an attempt to show my body who was in charge. If I was sick I refused to take medicine, because I didn’t want to feel weak and dependent. I purposefully wouldn’t put on a jacket when I was cold, or I’d refuse to eat when I was hungry, in order to “toughen myself up.”

Later in life, this compulsion toward self-numbing and self-punishment manifested itself in other ways. I began to develop a taste for danger as I became an adult, because it gave me a thrill that allowed me to feel excited and alive. I was attracted to places that offered acute risk, such as when I lived and volunteered in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, or worked in rural parts of northern Colombian (near FARC territory), or joined the Peace Corps in Eastern Ukraine. Somehow, I felt more at home and at ease living in these risky places because at least I felt alive.

As I started my career and business, this impulse to suppress my needs and wants at first felt like a terrific superpower. I could power through 12-hour days without a problem, work straight through the weekend, and ignore my needs for rest, recovery, and social connection seemingly forever. My ability to dominate my body caused me to receive a lot of praise, further cementing it as a core part of my identity.

But as the years passed and I entered my 30s, my dysfunctional relationship with my body began to break down. I could no longer physically push it the way I had throughout my 20s. Even if I could have, I didn’t want to have to do that anymore. While I’d gotten married and become a dad, that same relentless drive to push harder and move faster continued almost unabated. 

Yet I no longer knew what I was striving so hard for. What was so important that I had to sacrifice my present life to achieve?

Ayahuasca as somatic medicine

That sense of unease and weariness slowly grew throughout my mid-30s, finally breaking through the surface when I took part in my first ayahuasca ceremony in late 2023, which I wrote about in A Journey Between Worlds: The Story of My Ayahuasca Experience. 

I had experimented with various psychedelic substances in small ways before, but this was something different altogether: three potent ceremonies over three days, in the most conducive and supportive environment possible, and with a much earthier and more primal substance that was found in nature, not created in a lab. 

This was the first time I did healing work centered directly in the body, rather than using my mind or my heart as portals of entry. The mind loves to come up with theories, explanations, stories, interpretations, and justifications, and as valuable as those things are, I’ve come to believe that unless those ideas find their way into the tissues of the body, they will always remain merely intellectual playthings. The body speaks in a much more primitive language – the language of bodily fluids, physical urges, and visceral contraction and release.

I’ve learned that trauma isn’t primarily intellectual. What happened to you remains literally embedded in your nervous system, in your muscles and fascia, and even in the way your metabolism functions, your lungs breathe, and your posture holds you. Trauma shapes how you interpret your bodily sensations at the most fundamental level, thereby giving your everyday experience its default emotional state. Your body has hidden memories, storing fragments of your past all over your body, not just in your brain.

This is one reason trauma is so hard to heal from – it literally stays lodged in the tissues of the body, which continue to send the same urgent signals of panic no matter how many insights you think you’ve had.

Ayahuasca is known for the vomiting that often accompanies it, and I found that far from being an unfortunate side effect, it was an essential part of the healing experience. Vomiting is our body’s most visceral way of rejecting something that isn’t good for it, and that applies as much to ideas and stories as it does to poisonous substances. 

Instead of wrestling intellectually with an idea or a memory or a past traumatic event for hours, I found it was easier to just let go and allow the body to do what it needed to do. The change in mindset quickly followed.

For some, what their body needed to do was grieve, and their grief came out in spectacularly physical ways like wailing and prostrating and weeping. For others, it meant expressing fear, and they did so, with shuddering and shaking and shouting. 

For me, it meant reconciling with my younger self, and accepting that he had disconnected from his body and dissociated from the present as a way to escape the feelings he didn’t know how to process. I saw clearly who I had to become in order to survive, hardening myself and shutting down certain parts in order to make it through. 

I forgave that small boy, and thanked him, and in doing so, forgave myself, who is still that same boy. At the same time, I saw how these patterns of self-denial and emotional repression hadn’t started with me; they could be traced back through multiple generations of tough, resilient immigrants, passed on to me as my intergenerational inheritance. I saw that I could acknowledge the achievements of my ancestors, while also healing their pain using the full array of tools I had gained via the mind, the heart, and the body.

As I passed through all these experiences, and as the three-day retreat wound down, an awe-inspiring vision slowly began to fill me. I saw that there was an underlying theme to my life that transcended my writing, my teaching, and even my career: I am someone who creates bridges between worlds. Every time I say or write those words I feel emotion welling up from inside me.

Building a Second Brain was about connecting the right and left sides of the brain – making structure more creative and creativity more structured – but that was just one instance of a much larger theme. 

I’ve always built bridges: between the U.S. and Mexico and Brazil, between Christianity and secular culture, between liberals and conservatives, between the masculine and feminine, and between the body and mind. 

My ability to migrate between contexts and to see the good in every perspective, inherited from generations of my immigrant ancestors who roamed from one country and continent to another, is in fact my core superpower: to bridge the divide between and within people and transform the pain of separation into a source of connection.

My intuition tells me that the next chapter of my career and life will continue to be about embracing that inherent nature, and building bridges once again.

Fascial therapy as bodily restructuring

As part of my somatic explorations, I’ve seen a skilled fascial therapist (also sometimes known as a “bodyworker”) in Los Angeles regularly over the last few years. 

I’m always astounded that, within a couple hours, she can reliably locate and release emotions that have been trapped in my body, without me needing to do much except allow the accompanying thoughts, realizations, memories, and physical sensations to arise and flow through me without too much resistance.

I’ve come to understand that these sessions are changing me at a structural level, even though I have almost no understanding of what she’s doing. It isn’t primarily an intellectual process nor an emotional one. By releasing bodily tension directly, she is unwinding the underlying physiological sources of tension in my relationships, my decisions, my thoughts, and my goals. 

Often, as soon as she releases an underlying stiffness in my body, that part of my life immediately becomes more fluid as well. It’s not that I receive the exact answer to a problem I’m facing; it’s more that I regain the flexibility to consider the full range of possible options that my tension has been keeping me from seeing.

I’ve had to let go of the assumption that personal growth must always be wrenching, painful and confronting. Sometimes it does, but other times it requires nothing more than lying on a table and allowing things to come to the surface.

The somatic, bodily plane of my existence is the current frontier of my personal growth, and the one I’m most excited and intrigued by now. I think it was important that I started with the mind, since that was my “home base” and the entry point I was ready for in the beginning. It was also critical that I addressed the heart next, because I needed to learn how to allow my emotions to arise and use them to connect with others.

But these days, I am finding that the body offers some profound and tangible benefits:

Healing at the somatic level often happens faster and more efficiently than at the heart and mind levels, because I can integrate new ideas directly without having to change my beliefs or mental constructs first.Once you learn to listen to it, the body is very decisive and self-confident, issuing its wisdom in single-word responses, utterly primal and unshakeable in its conviction (this capability translates to much more effective decision-making in business and other areas of life).Body-based work is often more fun and dynamic, because it involves movement and play (this also makes it easier to integrate into your “normal” life in the form of morning routines, exercise, yoga, or meditation).Somatic work is more “agnostic” and content neutral – it doesn’t impose any particular doctrine or dogma on you, and there is nothing you have to believe (or even necessarily understand) to receive its benefits.You don’t have to learn new skills to participate in somatic healing – you just allow your own body to do what it already knows how to do.You don’t need more information for somatic work – the body and brain already possess a tremendous amount of information, and usually just need a higher level of connectivity to make sense of it.

My body-based explorations are only beginning, but have taken on a few other tantalizingly promising forms:

A more feminine approach to productivity, work, ambition, and effort, largely inspired by my wife Lauren and her understanding of nature’s cycles.Parenting, which is all about being present and embodied with children, since that is their default state (see my conversation with Joe Hudson on this topic here).Hosting in-person experiences such as entrepreneurial masterminds and our first Second Brain Summit , which in the past would have felt too overstimulating and overwhelming.Most recently, I’ve found that even inherently abstract topics, like my relationship with money , can be approached from a somatic perspective, allowing me to integrate new ways of thinking more quickly and at a deeper level.I’ve had a couple brief but powerful experiences with breathwork, and have been shocked how quickly and deeply I can go using nothing but my breath. I plan on exploring this avenue more in the future.

The aspect of somatic work I most appreciate is that it has given me a deep sense of certainty, rooted viscerally in my body, that I am okay. I can feel that everything will turn out alright, and that I can trust the journey of my life as it unfolds, without impatience or judgment.

The mind and the heart are wonderful, but they are also fickle creatures, fluttering around like hummingbirds reacting to every slight puff of wind. My body is like the earth, solid and monumental, unperturbed by the daily emotional weather, reminding me that I don’t have to be either.

I take great comfort these days in the constant reminders that I am an animal, an idea I would have previously felt aversion toward. I am a mammal like any other, and lying below all my abstract hopes and fears and worries and dreams is the biological reality of my skin and bones and guts and bowels.

Returning to that biological reality gives me peace. It roots me in the here and now. It compels me to seek out nature, one of the main reasons we decided to move to the mountains of Mexico recently. I am finding tremendous joy in coming home to my body after all these years of wandering in the wilderness of the mind like a prodigal son returning to his family after years of searching for something that he always had.

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on X, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

The post A Quest for Self-Knowledge: From Self-Help to Somatic Healing (Part III – Awakening My Body) appeared first on Forte Labs.

A Quest for Self-Knowledge: From Self-Help to Somatic Healing (Part II – Feeling My Heart)

In Part I, I recounted the first chapter in my personal growth journey, which was all about my mind and intellect and reframing the narratives that defined my life.

As transformational as that period was for me, around 2018 I once again began to sense that something was missing. 

I had gained a variety of tools to shift my perspectives from an intellectual point of view, but there was still a vibrancy and “juice” missing from my life.

My then-girlfriend Lauren and I decided to uproot ourselves and move to Mexico City partly to try and recapture a feeling of excitement and adventure that our work-oriented lives in the Bay Area had increasingly failed to provide. We felt stuck and bored like our seemingly impressive careers were failing to give us what we truly wanted.

But it wasn’t merely a change of scenery that would give me the feeling of aliveness I was searching for. Yet again, it was an inner change that was needed, not an outer one. The next chapter of my story was all about opening up my heart and the channels of emotion that had long been frozen inside of me, under the supervision of guides and teachers who had already done so themselves.

Burning Man – my first experience with psychedelics

In July 2018, I received a last-minute invitation to Burning Man, an eclectic week-long festival that takes place every year in the desert of Northern California. 

Burning Man is a legendary institution in the Bay Area. I’d heard about it for years, but never had the funds nor the contacts to go. With only a couple of days’ notice and a set of equipment and supplies that was barely adequate for the harsh conditions, I hitched a ride out of town to the desert.

Burning Man was disorienting for me right from the start. As the first morning dawned, I found myself on an endless white plain devoid of geographical (and cultural) reference points. I was completely unprepared, not just in practical terms but emotionally and psychologically. I had been in a period of obsessive, narrow-minded focus as the early cohorts of my Building a Second Brain course found traction. Rather than free me up, that success locked me down. I desperately clutched at what felt like a thin lifeline of success after years of struggle.

Black Rock City, as the sprawling tent city is known, was a fanciful dreamscape. On every side, I saw sculptures and contraptions of every shape and size: a 5-story tall crystal-encrusted gramophone, a ferris wheel full of skeletons, a giant artificial tree of leaves embedded with LEDs pulsing in rhythmic patterns, a spiraling ambulatory staircase full of old pictures. 

The camps weren’t mere habitations but works of art in themselves: giant carnival big tops criss-crossed with hammocks, geodesic domes full of foam toys, insulated yurts, and a full-size 747 fuselage someone had managed to tow out into the desert. And most dazzling of all were the people, dressed as sultans arrayed in their finery, as dinosaurs, bunnies, ballerinas, wizards, or in many cases, simply naked.

I didn’t know where to go or what to do in the sprawling tent city, not realizing that most people slept during the heat of the day and went out during the cooler nights. I hardly knew anyone even at the camp I was staying with, and thus was ignorant of the customs and traditions that give Burning Man its logic. I felt threatened and confronted by the wildly unorthodox clothing, art, music, sculptures, sounds, and even ways of speaking and behaving I faced on every side, with no source of familiarity or comfort to be found anywhere. It felt like culture shock but magnified tenfold.

In A Productivity Expert Goes to Burning Man I recounted how a profound experience with LSD on the final night of the festival was the turning point for me. 

Some of my campmates had found me huddled at the foot of The Man – the giant 80-foot statue at the center of the city that gets burned as a final ritual – consumed with loneliness and fear. They took me back to camp, we each took a tab of LSD, and soon afterward headed to Camp Mystic, an encampment of interconnected structures, artwork, venues, and workshops all designed for one purpose: to explore the state of consciousness afforded by this magical substance.

I spent the next 10 hours exploring Camp Mystic and the rest of Black Rock City beyond, immersed in an intensity of belonging, connection, beauty, and harmony like I’d never experienced in my life. Wandering under the stars, whole chapters of my life were rewritten, ancient interpretations and meanings dissolving and being remade. Forgotten memories exploded into my mind from nowhere, seeking the attention and forgiveness they needed to be complete. As I watched the sunrise, I was awed by the beauty and perfection of the universe, every strand converging and finding a connection in me, the sole interpreter and witness of my experience.

I recently attended a talk by Dr. Brad Jacobs, a physician and integrative medicine practitioner based in the San Francisco Bay Area. It was about how and why “peak experiences” are so powerful for personal growth. He defines such experiences as “moments of full immersion” that often create “intense joy, creativity and clarity, and where you feel a deep connection to yourself and the world around you.” They include near-death encounters, vocational challenges like those faced by first responders, extreme sports like skydiving, or deeply immersive ones such as spiritual awakenings or journeys with psychedelic medicine.

Dr. Jacobs’ explanation for why these experiences can change us so profoundly helped me finally understand how being part of something like Burning Man, which on the surface can seem so fanciful and even self-indulgent, can inspire inner change. It’s because they:

Overwhelm the sensesCall you to the present momentRelax fixation to prior beliefsSuspend your belief prediction modelFertilize cognitive and psychological flexibility

In other words, an intense or immersive experience pulls you strongly into the present moment, and then forces your mind to relax its grip as the sole filter on your reality. When you see and hear things you’ve never encountered before, you can no longer pretend that you have everything figured out and under control. Out of necessity, your mental model of reality has to loosen a bit to let this new information in, and in that moment of cognitive flexibility lies enormous potential to change fundamental beliefs and assumptions about many aspects of one’s life.

I believe that’s exactly what happened in my time at Burning Man, and there were three lasting changes it inspired in me.

First, the experience gave me a potent sense of peace within the vastness of the universe, a deep appreciation for the hilarity and absurdity of my existence, and an unexplainable certainty that everything is just the way it should be. I hadn’t had that feeling of “being at home in the universe” since my Christian childhood faith.

Second, I felt an immense, almost oceanic desire rising within me to help others and alleviate their suffering. I’d been so focused on my own survival for so long, far past the point where it was necessary, and now saw a new kind of purpose taking hold in me – to pass along the gift, to help others heal in the ways I’d been healed, to make a difference with this miracle of a life I’d been given.

And third, Burning Man was the first time I saw myself as being part of a global movement of human transformation. I encountered so many people contributing to it in their own way: energy and bodywork practitioners, fire-dancers, orgasmic meditators, Chinese and Eastern medicine practitioners, yoga and meditation teachers, therapists, artists, and writers. I attended workshops on Bitcoin, polyamory, and chocolate as a healing medium, my first exposure to these concepts that persist as interests to this day. I saw that this was work the spiritual traditions of the world had started thousands of years ago, and that we all now have a part to play in. I saw I wasn’t alone in my seeking.

That week in the desert was brief but felt like a microcosm of my life – a confused and clueless young man dropped into a threatening and incomprehensible world, only to be shown a door to a deeper underlying reality that made it all make sense.

Joe Hudson and The Art of Accomplishment

As wonderful as my Burning Man experience was, I struggled to integrate that newfound sense of aliveness and awe into my normal, day-to-day life. The high I’d experienced out in the desert gradually faded as I returned to the routine of my workweek.

As I’d done before, I began looking for a structured program and a teacher who could help me awaken and embody the new “self” I’d discovered. While attending a meetup in San Francisco, I heard someone speak whose words immediately resonated with me: Joe Hudson, a former venture capitalist and current executive coach. Little did I know, Joe would be my guide for the next chapter, which was all about learning to access my emotions.

I had built a new intellectual foundation, opening my mind to new possibilities and acquiring a set of practical skills I could draw on whenever I faced discouragement. It was now time to go deeper, from the head to the heart.

After hearing Joe speak, and with the encouragement of a friend who’d already taken it, I signed up for his introductory weekend course. I captured my experience there in Tide Turners: A Workshop on Using Business to Fuel Spiritual Awakening (this program has now evolved into the online-only Connection Course).

From that weekend workshop, I learned:

That vulnerability is a sign you’ve found your growth edge – that edge is different for every person and in every situation, can’t be planned or predicted in advance, and shifts moment to moment as a conversation unfolds. I discovered that I have the option of unlocking vulnerability in any interaction, simply by asking the question that lies at the edge of my comfort zone in the moment.The incredible power of open-ended, “How/What” questions to help people access their innate intelligence and resolve their own problems – instead of giving advice or proposing solutions, which usually just engenders resistance, I could invite them to tell the truth to themselves in a spirit of curiosity and self-love.How important it is to be impartial – to refrain from leading the conversation to a predetermined outcome of your choosing – and instead to be with people in their struggle, assume they know what’s best for them, really listen to what they’re saying, and reflect back to them the genius they already possess.“Joy is the matriarch of all emotions – she won’t enter a house where her children are not welcome” – this is a favorite and often-repeated quote of Joe’s, and its lesson is a north star for personal development. If you cut off access to any emotion – fear, disappointment, grief, anger – you also lose joy in the process. This observation functions as an accountability mechanism, reminding me that if I’m not feeling joy at any given time, it’s because I’ve lost one of her children along the way.

Joe’s guiding philosophy deeply resonated with me: that the most “worldly” experiences, such as in business, can fuel profound spiritual awakenings. That was also my first encounter with VIEW, an approach to having reliably deeper, more meaningful conversations that forms a cornerstone of Joe’s work, and now mine.

I would go on to take Joe’s more intensive week-long program the following year, in 2019, which I recounted in Groundbreakers: My Journey Healing Trauma, Unleashing Anger, and Awakening the Vagus Nerve (this program is still available only in person).

In many ways, Groundbreakers was the culmination of everything I had learned up to that point, like the final thesis for my master’s degree in applied self-development. It represented a leap from the world of the mind – with its sophisticated yet limited narratives, theories, models, and frameworks – to the world of the heart and its felt emotions.

During Groundbreakers, I worked through what felt like a lifetime of repressed emotions stuck in various parts of my body, from grief at the things I didn’t receive from my parents as a child, to a fear of failure that had been lurking in the back of my mind and unconsciously distorting my behavior for years. 

Most powerfully of all, I realized that I had shut down my anger as a child out of fear of my father’s reaction, to the point I was barely able to feel it at all anymore. On top of that, I actually felt proud of my inability to feel anger, as if it made me a better person, while under the surface that anger wreaked havoc on my inner life in its attempt to be heard. I discovered that anger is a form of surrender, and without it, all the other emotions remain throttled.

Here are some of the other lessons I took away from Groundbreakers:

Recognizing my internal dialogue and what it is trying to accomplish – I formed a new relationship with the “voice in my head,” seeing through the ways it uses guilt, shame, criticism, and self-doubt in an attempt to give me what I need, and found far more productive ways of doing so without beating myself up.Anger can be a transformative source of vulnerability and determination – I completely changed my understanding of what anger even is, from a regrettable source of pain and conflict to an essential component of living a vibrant life. I’ve since found that anger is the clearest signal I have of what I want and what truly matters to me, and the most unstoppable form of determination to go after that with everything I am.Self-love as the engine of personal growth – I had always judged myself harshly as not being good enough, or worthy enough, which had been my main motivation to learn and grow up to this point. But as that self-judgment ran out as a source of fuel, I reversed it and found that total and unconditional self-acceptance and self-love is a far more powerful one.Healing is deeper and faster when it happens on multiple levels – Joe’s work combines multiple forms of healing work, demonstrating how effective it is to cross-reference approaches at the mind, heart, and gut level.My heart as the bottleneck

Returning to normal life after Groundbreakers, I saw an immediate and dramatic impact on my work. 

My Building a Second Brain course had reached the point where it was ready for a larger stage and a wider audience, but I had felt stuck and fearful without fully realizing why. When I cleared my emotional channels and connected with my deepest seated desires, I was surprised to find within myself the kind of leader I didn’t know I needed. 

I realized that my style of leadership wasn’t about stoically charging forward in the face of implacable opposition like I’d been taught. It was actually about feeling every emotion – and I mean every emotion – much more deeply and viscerally as potent sources of information. I began to see that I could lead with authenticity and vulnerability, bringing others into the heart of my work instead of going it alone.

The newfound feeling of anger I had tapped into soon turned into a feeling of unbelievable clarity and determination. I got in touch with my anger at an unjust world that leaves too many people without options. I felt my anger that all the best knowledge and resources are reserved for the most privileged. I found my anger that people are suffering for lack of information that already exists and is already proven to work. 

With the determination to right these wrongs as my fuel, a few months later I sat down in our new apartment in Mexico City to begin writing the proposal for my book Building a Second Brain. Three and a half years later, that book was released to the world, and as of this writing has sold more than 250,000 copies worldwide in 25 languages.

It still amazes me to see how getting in touch with my emotions was crucial to becoming the kind of person who could write the book that wanted to be written. It’s about a seemingly technical subject – personal knowledge management – and yet just beneath the surface, it’s really about people’s inner lives and all the beliefs, stories, fears, and worries about information that plague them. It was only when I tapped into the depth and breadth of my own feelings and learned to express them fluidly without shutting down or dissociating, that I was able to tell my own story and the story of my work in a way that resonated and moved people.  

What I learned in this second chapter of my journey is that it is my heart’s capacity, not my brain’s capacity, that is the bottleneck to the change I want to see in myself and the world. 

Which means I don’t have to get smarter or more precise in my thinking to make progress. I can decide to get more connected, more present, and more expressive instead. Every time I’m faced with a decision and am tempted to do more research or acquire more insights, I’ve learned that I can instead close my eyes and listen to the still, small voice inside, which has access to a subterranean current of deep wisdom that is so much more vast, yet also somehow so much simpler, than anything my mind can access on its own. I still consider this a miracle every time.

Exploring the world of the heart opened up vast new possibilities for me. My relationships deepened, my courage and conviction strengthened, and my work became a pure expression of my creativity. I became my own best friend, unconditionally loving myself no matter what happened. I began to live for the moment to moment joy of it, not just to reach a far off destination.

And yet as my heart has unfolded, I’ve increasingly sensed that there are still deeper layers, and still deeper sensations to explore. The heart is just one organ after all, and we have 77 others. Next I’ll share the story of my current explorations at the new frontier of my growth: the somatic.

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on X, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

The post A Quest for Self-Knowledge: From Self-Help to Somatic Healing (Part II – Feeling My Heart) appeared first on Forte Labs.

Reflections on Our First In-Person Second Brain Summit

On October 3-4, 2024, we hosted our very first in-person Second Brain Summit in Los Angeles, and honestly, it was a dream come true. 

This event felt like a “bucket list” moment in every way. I’d count it among my top five life milestones, right up there with getting married, witnessing my children’s births, and signing my first book deal.

Looking back, I’m still in awe of the warmth, love, and generosity everyone displayed—from attendees to volunteers to our lineup of speakers.

Our MC Jo Franco hyping everyone up for the group photo

One of my biggest takeaways from the Summit was personal: I learned the incredible growth that comes from letting go. 

For much of this project, I had to place my trust in others to handle details big and small. For someone who’s used to doing everything himself (or at least attempting to), this was transformative. For the first time, I felt fully carried by a team of talented individuals working right alongside me, taking collective ownership of a vision we all believed in.

A special shoutout goes to Simply Storied, our event organizer. They made it all possible, guiding us through each stage with finesse and care. And of course, none of this would have happened without the energy and dedication of our team and volunteers.

The Simply Storied team and our fantastic volunteers

Now that I’ve had a month to process everything that happened, I’m ready to share my reflections with you, including some painful realizations and lessons learned.

Who joined the Second Brain Summit 

We welcomed 212 total attendees from 16 countries! Only 57% came from the U.S., with some traveling from faraway places such as Bali, Taiwan, and Australia to join us. 

59% were male and 41% female. A third of attendees identified as business owners and entrepreneurs, followed by employees and freelancers. 

I loved to see such a wide distribution of different ages at the Summit, as I think it’s super important for different generations to learn from each other:

Only 44% of attendees had ever purchased one of our courses or cohorts. So for many, it was the first time joining one of our experiences. 

I can confidently say that everyone who attended was a 10/10 in interest and passion. Each person followed such a unique and personal path to get there that we can’t identify a “typical” attendee profile. 

The highlights: What attendees loved the most  

Our highlights video will express this better than words ever could:

I was honestly taken aback by the positive things people said about the experience, starting about two hours in. They spoke about it being “life-changing” and “healing”; as the best conference they’d ever been to. 

My favorite quotes I overheard:

“You created the world you wanted to live in.” (from my dad)“This is a conference for high-functioning autistic people.” (this one made me laugh)“I finally found my people.” “This was a spiritual experience.” (from a speaker)

Here are the things attendees said they loved most: 

The incredible lineup of 39 speakers, their diversity along multiple dimensions, and how most stuck around and participated for the full two days of the conference. High-quality, warm and friendly, and interesting fellow attendees, whom many people noted were unlike any group they’d encountered elsewhere.The positive energy of the event, noting that people were genuinely excited to be there. The opportunity to meet people in real life whom they had known online for a while and to have informal yet deep conversations in person.  The size of the event (~200 people) was ideal for connecting with others and getting to know them beyond superficial “networking.”The seamless, frictionless, classy event design and management (kudos to Simply Storied team)The sponsors added a lot of value by offering relevant products and education about how to use them. The “Digital Swag Bag” full of courses, memberships, and tools, allowing attendees to go deeper into what they learned. 

Here’s how attendees reported feeling at the end of the summit (“inspiring connection” jumps out as perhaps the overarching theme of the entire summit):

By the end of the event, 98% of attendees said the Summit met or exceeded their expectations. Our Net Promoter Score (NPS) hit 80, a rare and impressive outcome that shows how likely they are to recommend it to others.

This shows how hungry people are for such communal experiences in our digital-centric world and that there’s huge potential in this area.

Our attendees and speakers mingling at happy hour. The financial snapshot

In the interest of transparency, I’d like to share what it took financially to bring this event to life.

Ticket sales brought in $120,604, and sponsorships contributed an additional $60,000, for a total of $180,604 in revenue. However, our total expenses came to $349,771, resulting in a net loss of $169,166. This essentially meant we subsidized each attendee by about $798 on top of the ticket price, which ranged from $999 (early-bird) to $1,200.

The primary challenge? We only sold about half as many tickets as I had originally envisioned, leaving us with the cost profile of a much larger event than we actually hosted. Although we made adjustments along the way, I was so committed to delivering a high-quality experience that I chose to eat the additional cost rather than cut essential aspects of the event.

Moving forward, it’s clear we’ll need a more sustainable financial model to make future Summits viable.

Standing ovation after my closing words What we’d do differently next time

After reviewing the attendee feedback and our own reflections as a team, here are the things we’d change if we were to host the Second Brain Summit again:

Increase the focus on the B2B and professional aspects of our niche, making it easier for people and their employers to justify the cost and time to attend.Prioritize interactive workshops and hands-on practical sessions, which can only be delivered live and in person. Cut non-essentials such as games, a reserved hotel block, and catered food. A smaller venue would also reduce costs for AV, rented furniture, on-site event staff, security, signage, etc.Pick a location different from downtown LA, as the surrounding neighborhood was pretty sketchy. Cap the attendance at an even lower number, so we are guaranteed to sell out and can spend more time on the event design rather than marketing/sales. Schedule fewer sessions concurrently. We had as many as 6 sessions happening at the same time, which was too many for people to choose from and created FOMO. Start conversations with sponsors earlier (9-12 months before the event, when budgets are being committed), seeking deeper, more strategic partnerships that would allow for higher sponsor revenue. Offer a recorded or live-streamed version of the Summit sessions, as so much value was on offer it would have been nice to capture it.Add a third day with an unstructured agenda, allowing for informal meals, walking around town, and follow-up meetups to process all the new information and deepen new relationships. Sell a “high-ticket program” on the backend of the summit, such as a group coaching program or mastermind, to support the financial side. 

With these changes, I believe we could make future Summits a financially viable and deeply impactful addition to the Second Brain community. I know of no better way to build true community and connection in our increasingly fragmented, distracted, isolated modern world.

I’m deeply grateful to everyone who joined, participated, and made this Summit possible. It’s an experience I’ll never forget, and I owe a huge “thank you” to every single one of you who helped make it real.

My wife Lauren and I A personal note

There was something about this summit that moved me at a very deep level. I felt myself changing, transforming into someone new. 

Diving into the emotions and insights afterward with my coach, I realized that gathering together all these wonderful people in a warm, welcoming environment had touched a nerve inside me: a longstanding feeling I’ve had that I didn’t belong anywhere.

I traced that feeling back to my school years when I attended 5 different schools in 5 years from 5th grade to 9th grade, which made me highly resilient and adaptable but also made me feel isolated and alone like I didn’t have real friends. I traced it further back, to being the child of immigrant parents from two separate countries, a true third culture kid.

That narrative – that I didn’t belong in any group and no one could understand me – simply couldn’t withstand the outpouring of acceptance and love of 200 people, all united together in one common purpose. It was just so obvious that everyone there had felt alone or misunderstood, but that we could, in the words of my father, “Create the world we wanted to live in” anyway.

Many people have asked me whether we plan on hosting another summit in the future. I honestly can’t say, but what I do know is that in the coming years community is going to be one of the last and most meaningful differentiators in a world transformed by AI. It’s one of the only things that can’t be generated algorithmically, no matter what “social” media tells you.

I honestly don’t know how the financial side makes sense, but I do know two things: that every time I’ve doubled down on community it’s always worked out; and that every time I’ve doubled down on what has aliveness and energy it’s worked out, even if I couldn’t envision how in the beginning.

So in one way or another, I’m going to keep seeking ways to build true, meaningful community, to bring people together whether virtually or in person, and to help forge relationships that transcend any particular app, trend, or niche, so that everyone in my community has the chance to feel that sense of shared purpose and belonging that has been so transformative for me.

The best snapshots from the Second Brain Summit

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A Quest for Self-Knowledge: From Self-Help to Somatic Healing (Part I – Opening My Mind)

When I left the religious faith of my youth in my early 20s, everything collapsed – my faith, my certainty, and the sources of meaning I had clung to since childhood. 

I grew up with a clear sense of purpose: fight the good fight, spread the gospel, and fulfill God’s divine plan for my life. Then, one day, I woke up and realized I didn’t believe any of it.

What do you do when the foundations of your life crumble, and the reality you once believed in dissolves away and slips through your fingers?

I didn’t have the answer at first, but over the next two decades, I began an unexpected journey—one that transformed not just what I believed, but who I was. Far from being the end of my spiritual path, leaving my religion was actually the beginning of it.

This blog series tells the story of how I pursued that path over the last 20 years. In the early days, I thought it was an external search, for someone or something outside of me. I eventually realized it is in fact an inner quest for self-knowledge about who I truly am.

With the benefit of hindsight, I can see that this quest has unfolded in three distinct stages. 

The first chapter was all about my mind and intellect, as I spent my 20s questioning the narratives that I’d constructed to explain my past. My logical brain, the prefrontal cortex, stood like a sentinel at the gates of my mind, and I needed to befriend him and assuage his fears before he’d allow me to go any further.

The second leg of my journey was centered on my heart and emotions, as I learned how to let down my walls and connect with other people vulnerably. It was about deprogramming my default attitude toward emotions – repression and avoidance – and finding new ways to let my emotions flow through me.

And today, at the precipice of my 40s, I’m at the start of a third chapter: reawakening and getting in touch with my body and my gut. It seems to be about changing how my nervous system works and responds to fear, intuition, and desire at the most fundamental level of my bodily sensations.

Let me tell you the story of this first chapter, beginning with my mind – the world of ideas, facts, and logic.

Reading to understand myself and the world

I had always been a dedicated reader, but my consumption of books took on a desperate, existential drive when I abandoned my religious beliefs. I felt like a child being born again, ironically, forced to make sense of the most fundamental building blocks of my reality anew.

I relearned the origins of the Middle East and early church history from scholarly sources instead of theological ones through books like Church History in Plain Language and The Gnostic Gospels. I read about Eastern religions, finding many principles and points of view that resonated with me in Buddhism and Hinduism. I devoured the books of James Michener, diving deep into places like Poland, Spain, South Africa, Alaska, Afghanistan, Mexico, and Palestine through the medium of historical fiction.

As I dove deeper and deeper into the past, I realized I also wanted to understand the future, and picked up my first science-fiction books. My preference was for “hard” sci-fi, which stuck to known or plausible scientific principles as much as possible. I eventually read over 100 sci-fi novels that inflamed my imagination with the potent possibilities of the unknown future.

I dabbled in literary fiction, thrillers, fantasy, mystery, and magical realism. I devoured biographies, travelogues, popular science, and speculative fiction. I had a habit of camping out at bookstores for many hours at a time, churning through a giant pile of books without purchasing any.

And then one day I discovered the category of self-help. 

It was 2005, and I was perusing the aisles at my local Borders bookstore in Mission Viejo, near where I grew up in South Orange County. That first book was called The Paradox of Choice, and it delivered a simple yet shocking message: having more options not only doesn’t lead to better choices in many cases; it leads to worse choices that we tend to be less satisfied with.

I was astounded by this insight. I just couldn’t believe such a practical, compelling idea was available for anyone to learn and apply to their own lives.

With the naivete only a wide-eyed 20-something is capable of, I thought it had radical implications for much of modern life, in which we are inundated with a constantly proliferating number of options for practically everything, and yet find ourselves with a pervasive sense of dissatisfaction and FOMO as a result. 

After that, I began to voraciously read every book on personal development I could get my hands on. Napoleon Hill taught me how to think and grow rich. Daniel Goleman introduced me to the importance of Emotional Intelligence. Tony Robbins introduced me to the tenets of positive psychology. Daniel Pink revealed the secrets to having an unstoppable drive. Malcolm Gladwell blew my mind with his analysis of tipping points. 

I was hooked.

I found it remarkable, and still do, that you can buy a book for $10 or $15 dollars (or read it for free at the local library, bookstore, or online via resources like the Gutenberg Project) and get instant access to a lifetime’s worth of knowledge from the world’s top experts on virtually any subject imaginable.

This realization changed everything for me. 

It taught me that everything in life is a “skill issue” – a known problem that someone has had before, has probably already figured out, and more than likely, is willing to help me with. I realized that I could choose any aspect of my life and reliably improve it through education and experimentation.

Looking back, these were the first stirrings of a newfound agency I felt in my life. 

With each new tool or insight I gained, the hold that my upbringing, my parents’ worldview, societal expectations, and default life scripts had over me was weakened. I began to see that I could decide who I wanted to be and how I wanted to feel. I wasn’t stuck with the natural temperament, skills, personality, or talents I was born with. My destiny was mine to author.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I had already embarked on a journey. It was a journey into outer space, to make sense of how the world worked and what my place in it might be. It was also a journey into inner space, to discover who I really was at my core.

The first cracks in an opening mind

My love of reading followed me through college, a few years living and studying abroad, two years of service in the Peace Corps, and my first couple of years working in San Francisco. My beaten and battered Kindle was always by my side, every digital highlight synced to the cloud for safekeeping.

But in 2013 things started to change. I decided to leave my consulting job and strike out on my own as a freelancer, plunging headfirst into a way of life with far more uncertainty and unpredictability than I had ever experienced. 

I can still recall waking up on that first Monday morning and realizing I had nowhere to go, nowhere to be, and no one expecting me. I had the sudden thought that if I suddenly dropped dead, it would take days for anyone to find my corpse. I finally had the complete freedom I’d dreamt of for years, but instead of feeling liberated, I felt terrified. It was like waking up adrift on the open ocean, with no solid ground anywhere in sight.

As I cast about over the subsequent months trying every way I could think of to make money, I was faced repeatedly and harshly with the reality that I lacked most of the qualities I needed. I didn’t have the commitment and consistency I needed to accomplish my goals. I had no idea what valuable skills and knowledge I had to offer potential clients, much less how to effectively articulate them and close the sale. I didn’t have the social skills needed to find collaborators and make new friends without the shared context of a workplace.

Yet the absence of these external, professional skills paled in comparison with the inner qualities I was missing. I had the habits and self-care routines of a typical 28-year-old male; that is, I lacked them completely. I had little understanding of my own psychology – the ruminating and worrying and recurring anxieties racing through my mind. I avoided most of my problems, ignoring warning signs in my mental and physical health until they became unbearable. I didn’t have a way of getting to the root of my blindspots and baggage and thus recreated them time and again.

This was all the more frustrating because I had read all the self-help books. I knew all the terminology, could cite all the studies, and was following the “right” advice. In theory, all this knowledge should have prepared me for the challenges I was facing. In reality, it was all conceptual or theoretical knowledge, very little of it rooted in my personal experience.

The stark contrast between the sophisticated theories in my head and the poor results and struggles I was experiencing in my life eventually reached a breaking point. I decided that I needed something different, something deeper that would change who I was, not just what I knew. In my desperation, I decided it was time to go beyond reading books and find the environments, teachers, and training that would give me visceral, first-hand experiences of what it meant to change who I was at the deepest level.

Mastering my attention through Vipassana meditation

I decided to seek out what I now call “transformational programs” – structured, immersive, embodied experiences facilitated by skilled teachers who know how to facilitate lasting change.

I was living in the San Francisco Bay Area at the time, the global mecca for self-development and self-exploration of all kinds, and couldn’t help but notice how many such programs existed and the benefits they seemed to produce for others.

I had picked up an introductory book on meditation and mindfulness which I’d discovered on an obscure online forum late one night. Over the course of a few weeks, I was introduced to the first elementary practices for calming my mind and observing my thoughts. 

The book introduced me to the classic “raisin exercise,” in which I closely examined a single raisin with all my powers of observation and all my senses, which showed me in sensual terms how much detail and complexity was hiding within my everyday perception. I wanted to go deeper but had little money as I struggled to make ends meet.

Soon afterward, I heard about a free 10-day meditation retreat known as Vipassana, which was hosted at retreat centers around the world. Free sounded like the right price to me, and I signed up, not knowing that it would be the portal to a new world and a new path that I am still following to this day.

I returned from that retreat and wrote my first blog post, 10 Days of Vipassana, recounting what I had learned:

Attention is a skill. Unless I intentionally cultivated it, the modern world’s constant barrage of distractions would inexorably undermine my ability to focus or even think clearly.Every distraction takes a toll. Distractions are not just momentary interruptions that leave no lasting trace. Each one I allow to yank my attention away conditions me with the subconscious habit of valuing the new at the expense of the important.How I pay attention is more important than what I pay attention to. Which means that I don’t have to perfectly control my environment or my inputs in order to feel the way I want to feel.Paying attention to something takes away its power. So much of my life was dominated by fear of pain of some kind. But pain is as insubstantial and impermanent as any other sensation, and by giving my full attention to any anger, doubt, shame, or envy I was feeling I could loosen its hold on me.

Most meaningfully of all, I discovered through prolonged meditation that happiness is my default state, like the bottom of the well of my mind. It wasn’t something I had to go out and find like a rare prize. It was always there waiting for me, which meant all I had to do was remove the things that were in the way and return to myself in order to find it again.

That first Vipassana retreat and the daily meditation habit I adopted afterward equipped me with the basic tools of introspection. It introduced me to the simple yet profound idea that there is a vast inner world inside of me and that I could explore that world freely using meditation, without permission from anyone.

Crucially, this experience also led me to begin writing in public. It was the first time that I felt I had experienced something unusual and interesting enough to be worth sharing. Writing itself would also become an essential practice, allowing me to structure, process, and integrate lessons for myself, with the added bonus of helping others and eventually, building a following.

Encountering psychological truths at the Landmark Forum

A couple of years later, my freelancing work had become more stable and for the first time, I had a little disposable income to spare. In the space of a few months, three separate friends told me about their experience at a weekend seminar called The Landmark Forum. I felt I was ready to begin investing money in my personal development, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity.

I can still remember what an enormous commitment it seemed like at the time – spending 3 full days and about $750 on myself felt like an outrageous indulgence. It was also a completely life-changing experience, which I wrote about in A Skeptic Goes to the Landmark Forum.

I went on to take the rest of the Landmark curriculum over the next two years, including about a half dozen courses on integrity, communication, and self-authorship. I eventually completed their intensive 5-month leadership program, known as the Introduction Leaders Program (ILP). 

Here are the main lessons I took away from that experience, which was a holistic education in many aspects of leadership:

Everything I think or believe is just a “story,” a narrative I’ve created to interpret and understand what’s happened, which means I can choose to disbelieve or edit or reframe any event from my past.Any time I’m blaming others, it’s usually to avoid taking responsibility for something myself, while also receiving hidden payoffs (such as self-righteousness or dominating others) that keep that blame locked in place.Witnessing the power of honest conversations in Landmark’s programs, I adopted vulnerability, collaboration, and openness to feedback as central values in my life, a sharp departure from my typical self-reliance and perfectionism (which led directly to the live cohort-based courses that would completely transform my career).I realized that trying to be “right,” which had driven me for much of my life, is ultimately futile when it comes to living an authentic life of intimacy with others.

Most meaningfully, I used these insights to take responsibility for my relationship with my father. I had had a long-running story that I was irreparably damaged because of how he raised me. I’d told myself that I couldn’t have the life I wanted because he had been too harsh, too critical, and had failed to listen to and support me in the way I needed him to. Those attitudes were, of course, a set of stories that kept me a victim toward any source of power or authority that reminded me of him.

Letting go of my resentment toward my father, while forgiving his imperfections and accepting that he was always just trying his best, unlocked a floodgate of gratitude not only toward him but for the life he had given me.

The power of transformational programs

Landmark and Vipassana served as my introduction to the category of “transformational programs.” 

They showed me that personal growth could be efficient. There were direct paths to concrete outcomes that irrefutably improved my life within a reasonable amount of time. These paths weren’t exactly predictable, but they also weren’t completely mysterious. Personal growth was something I could invest time, money, and attention in and reliably see tangible change in my life as a result.

I realized I didn’t have to wait until the end of my life to learn what life had to teach me – I could accelerate that process and yield the benefits while I was still young enough to enjoy them.

I began to develop a set of criteria for the kinds of programs I would seek out in the years to come:

A time limit – a clear beginning and end to the experience, allowing me to calibrate my commitment and see results without getting in over my head.A structure – whether that is a series of meditation prompts and guidelines over a certain number of days, or a formal curriculum with learning objectives, I sought a structure I could use to track my progress.Teachers and guides – whether a skilled facilitator imparting their tacit wisdom, a seminar leader following a workbook, or a volunteer silently serving food in the kitchen, I wanted guides on my journey who had already been where I wanted to go, and who could therefore help me see through my assumptions and blindspots more quickly.Social interaction – though there are periods when solo work is needed, the vulnerable sharing and vicarious learning that can only happen in groups makes social experiences far more enjoyable, and thus more sustainable and effective.Accessibility – I want experiences that others can learn about and sign up for themselves, allowing them to follow in my footsteps if they so choose so that my family and my community can grow alongside me.

Following these guidelines, each new book, teacher, program, and practice I’ve encountered has uncovered new layers of who I am, like a perfect diamond encrusted with dirt and mud slowly emerging as those layers are washed away.

At the same time, the world of the mind and the intellect was just the first leg of my journey, akin to stocking the ship and navigating the calm waters close to shore. In the next chapter, I learned that true transformation isn’t primarily about acquiring information, and doesn’t occur only on an intellectual level.

The deepest change happens on multiple levels, at multiple timescales, and changes every part of us, especially the parts we feel most ashamed and fearful of. For me, that meant my emotions, and thus it was my heart that I explored next.

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on X, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

The post A Quest for Self-Knowledge: From Self-Help to Somatic Healing (Part I – Opening My Mind) appeared first on Forte Labs.

Building a Second Brain – The TV Show

This is a proposal I wrote for a television show based on my bestselling book Building a Second Brain.

If it resonates with you and you’re in a position to make a TV show happen, please let me know by emailing hello@fortelabs.com. I’m open to a variety of formats, funding sources, routes to production, and distribution platforms for this project.

Introduction

Have you ever felt drowned in a sea of ideas, struggling to recall that one crucial piece of information when you most needed it? Have you ever spent hours scrolling social media, or consuming content online, only to find yourself unable to remember even one useful takeaway?

Imagine a world where your mind is freed from everything you’re trying to remember and keep track of, while every important detail and inspired thought remains safely tucked away and easily accessible within seconds. Welcome to the possibility of building a Second Brain – a digital extension of your mind that remembers everything, so you can accomplish anything. 

This isn’t just about storing information; it’s about reshaping the way you approach life. You are offloading your thoughts to technology so you can think more clearly and calmly. By organizing the digital realm where you likely spend hours every day you enhance your focus instead of splintering your attention. Aligning your online habits with your values and goals transforms the time you spend consuming content – from merely passing the time to compounding your learning and growth over time.

By creating a Second Brain, you’ll have a dedicated, digital space you can step into anytime you want to focus your energy on what truly matters to you. Rather than relying on your scarce self-discipline or willpower, you’ll have a cognitive exoskeleton designed to propel you forward into taking action on the goals and projects that could transform your life.

Inspired by the revolutionary concepts from my books Building a Second Brain and The PARA Method, which have sold over 300,000 copies worldwide, and the transformative experiences of thousands of my students, readers, and followers, I’m excited to bring the power of the Second Brain to television. Let’s dive deep into the world of digital organization, redefining the way we engage with information and using it to unlock the best version of ourselves.

The Show

I propose an intervention/makeover/personal transformation style unscripted show revolving around people’s digital organizational habits and creative projects. 

This genre typically shows an expert or “guru” who comes into a person’s environment, and shines a light on an aspect of their lives that they are ashamed about, in pain from, or that is holding them back in some way. 

For example:

Marie Kondo and people’s closetsRamit Sethi and people’s bank accountsQueer Eye and people’s wardrobesThe Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning and people’s possessionsThe Biggest Loser and people’s waistlinesDream Home Makeover and people’s homes

These are all domains that are crucial to our well-being and thriving, but that many of us feel disempowered or embarrassed by. 

There have been many such shows, but I’ve never seen one that deals with people’s digital life – their notes and documents, emails and text messages, web favorites and bookmarks, photos and videos, books and reading, YouTube videos and social media posts, etc. In my experience, most people would rather open up their homes or their bank accounts than show you what’s on their smartphones or computers, and that’s why we will find so many touching, hilarious, and ultimately meaningful stories there.

Why now?

Over the past decade we’ve become a digital-centric culture. 10 years ago, as of 2013, Americans spent more time on digital devices than watching TV. We consume digital media over 7 hours per day, with 44% of 18- to 49-year-olds saying that they go online “almost constantly.” Millennials (currently aged 24-41) are now the dominant economic, political, and cultural force in our society, and their experience of life is fundamentally shaped by the digital world. 

The Internet isn’t a thing anymore, it’s a place – the primary place we go to for education, entertainment, community, connection, and so many other needs and wants. Our digital lives are rich, fruitful landscapes where our hopes, dreams, and creative visions can come to life before our very eyes, as long as we have the will (and the tech-savvy skills) to see them through. 

Yet where is the authentic portrayal of that digital realm that has become such an important part of our experiences? At most, we’ll see a character in a TV show briefly sending a text message on a 5-year-old phone. Where is the self-discovery, the stories, the drama, and the life-changing inspiration that we find online every day?

The Stories

A starting point could be my story of struggling with a debilitating neurological condition that plunged me into a world of pain and shut down my ability to speak, ultimately leading to the realization of how crucial self-expression is to life (and inspiring my writing and teaching on this subject). 

Here are some of the other (real) stories we’ve heard from the graduates of our course, viewers of our YouTube videos, and readers of my books:

The Colorado pastor who interviews the families of the recently deceased in order to write their eulogies found himself overwhelmed by the quantity of information he was collecting and taking weeks to distill it. He began using a voice transcription app to record the interviews and summarize the key points in minutes, freeing up his time to spend with the bereaved. The UK single mom trying to juggle homeschooling and work, whose depression had advanced to the point that showering and brushing her teeth was a struggle. She adopted digital habits that led to her learning to manage her life and even enjoy reading again.The Florida education professor who felt frazzled managing her job while taking care of the kids, before she started using digital notes apps to capture ideas and insights on the fly, which made prepping for speeches something she can do in little batches during the small windows of her busy day.A college student who realized he was addicted to video games and watching his life pass him by. Upon discovering the power of a Second Brain, he began using it as a way to learn and grow while activating the same parts of his brain that video games once did.The Managing Director for an automaker in Mexico, who after treating her depression with medication, found that she also needed to change her routines around managing emails, her schedule, and her to-do list to put her life and career back on track. Now she’s teaching her team the same techniques and seeing it lift the performance of the whole department.The oncologist at a world-renowned cancer clinic who uses my techniques to condense his reading about new clinical trials and patient notes so he can quickly reference the information he needs while spending more time listening to and being present with his patients.The manager, whose company was being acquired and position made redundant, decided to utilize digital platforms to document and systematize his company’s knowledge. This led to him being named the General Manager of the new combined business, a position with far more responsibility and compensation.

And these are some of the topics and issues we can touch on:

The tension between personal productivity for succeeding in your career, and creativity as a means to personal fulfillmentThe epidemic of Information Overload and the crushing stress of all the information we consume and have to pay attention to every daySocial media’s impact on our attention span, mental health, and ability to focusThe explosion in freelancing, the creator economy, and remote work as powerful possibilities that require fluency in using digital tools to manage our work and lives to take advantage ofADHD and other neurodivergent conditions’ effect on how we think, and how to use technology to consume and interact with information in more effective waysContent consumption on online platforms as a major influencer of our thinking, while requiring more intentional habits to glean the most helpful ideas and insights from the noiseOur digital habits and the platforms on which they take place as important avenues for self-expression, self-determination, and creative agencyPotential challenges

Here are some of the main challenges we’d face in creating such a show, which also represent opportunities if we succeed:

How to represent digital spaces and virtual interactions in a visual, engaging, relatable wayWhat to call this subject (common terms include second brains, digital organization/hygiene/fluency, personal knowledge management, tools for thought, and others)How to frame the “promise” of watching the show (commiserate with others struggling with information overwhelm, gain inspiration from others overcoming relatable challenges, get new ideas for how to approach the digital world, be moved by the stories of courage and vulnerability as people confront their fears, etc.)How to make the stories relatable, grounded, and easy to understand, since this topic can easily become convoluted and abstractIdeas for portraying Second Brains on TV

Here are my initial ideas and notes on how we could portray digital environments and habits on the small screen:

Feature digital notes that are more visual rather than purely textual, including graphics, photos, drawings, diagrams, screenshots, etc.Project computer environments onto walls or 3D spaces that we can point to, talk about, and walk around in (like Hans Rosling did on the BBC)In Ramit Sethi’s show How to Get Rich there are some good examples of using a combination of zooming in, on-screen animations, and over-the-shoulder shots to make the screen feel less two-dimensionalGo out into the field and interview real people (architects, sex workers, casino owners, professional athletes, musicians, etc.) on how they use digital notes/second brains “in the wild” as part of their professions (a good example of this is the 1997 documentary Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, which profiled an animal trainer, topiary gardener, robot scientist, and biologist studying mole rats)Borrow ideas from Sherlock on how to film thoughts and subjective experiencesUse virtual or augmented reality environments to make the digital realm more tangible; for example, using the Apple Vision Pro to provide a new interface for interacting with digital content on our devicesCreate in-scene animated objects that I can interact with and move around (such as Bradley Cooper’s character in Limitless ), or immersive, full-screen animations that illustrate concepts and ideas, such as Steven Johnson does in How We Got to Now on PBSCreate a “studio” or “lab” with tangible materials and tools that are used to “think outside the brain,” like Stanford does in their design schoolHere’s a short video highlighting some interesting recent experiments in depicting digital/online behavior on screen

If this resonates with you and you’re in a position to make a TV show happen, please let me know by emailing hello@fortelabs.com. I’m open to a variety of formats and distribution platforms for this project.

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

The post Building a Second Brain – The TV Show appeared first on Forte Labs.

Unspeakable Pain: A Personal Journey Through Psychosomatic Illness

At the age of 22, one fine spring day at the Apple Store I worked at in college in San Diego, I began to feel a small scratch at the back of my throat. 

I tried for a few months to ignore it, but as it gradually grew worse – eventually turning into a searing pain throughout my neck and an inability to control my voice – I started seeing a series of doctors and specialists to identify the cause.

I tried anti-reflux medication, changing my diet, quitting coffee, anti-allergy pills, massage, voice therapy, and eventually, a powerful anti-seizure medication that gave me temporary relief but at the cost of whole body numbing and crippling memory loss. 

Why am I sharing this story with you?

Because this unexpected condition forced me onto a new path, and that path taught me incredibly valuable lessons – about psychosomatic pain and its sources, about the relationship between body and mind and how it can go wrong, and ultimately, about how to heal from the disconnection from myself that lay at the heart of it all.

In this essay, I’ll share with you what I’ve discovered in the hope it might help you too.

A descent into despair

At no point in my medical odyssey did I receive so much as a diagnosis – no MRI scan or neurological test or laboratory diagnostic could detect even the slightest thing wrong with me. 

I found that I was always treated as a collection of symptoms, and when a specialist couldn’t find the source of my problem in their assigned body part, they quickly passed me off to someone else.

After 7 years of this fruitless search, during which I saw more than a dozen doctors in four countries, I had made no progress, and the pain and tension I felt was worse than ever. It felt as if an area the size of a ping-pong ball at the back-right of my throat had lost all sensation, like when the dentist injects novocaine into your gums. This numbness inflamed all the surrounding areas as they struggled to compensate for the loss of function. This irritated other, even more distant muscles and ligaments in turn, like a slowly spreading wildfire of burning tension. 

Yet the physical pain was actually the least of my worries. It was really the social and psychological effects that sent me spiraling into despair.

When I opened my mouth to speak, I didn’t know what would come out. I might feel deep conviction in a business meeting, but my dysfunctional speech would come out weak and halting. I’d want to convey warmth and support to a friend, only to hear my words sounding monotone and strained. My words often had the opposite effect I intended, as if a demon had possessed me and was clutching me by the throat, distorting and undermining every word I spoke.

I can distinctly remember being at a house party in Oakland in 2014, and wanting to make a good impression. It was hosted by my then-girlfriend Lauren’s friends, and I wanted to fit in and be liked. I met someone who had also served in the Peace Corps, and was elated at the chance to connect in an environment full of strangers. But as I opened my mouth to speak, my voice was so tight and strained I couldn’t make myself heard at all, despite the relatively quiet surroundings. I might as well have been mute.

I left the party early, and as I walked home through the dark streets of downtown Oakland, a terrifying thought arose in my mind: “Life is not worth living if I have to live it this way.” I’m an inveterate optimist, and had never felt this depth of hopelessness. It felt like the end of the road, the lowest of lows. And I knew in that moment I needed to try something new.

Discovering relief by looking inside

Shortly thereafter, I attended my first Vipassana meditation retreat, mostly in the hope of learning to accept and make peace with my condition. 

Instead, on the final day of the retreat, something remarkable happened: My attention had sharpened to a fine point after days of silent meditation, and I moved that mental scalpel to the place in my throat that had caused me so much suffering. To my amazement, it came alive! 

Like the circuit breaker in a house being flipped to full power, the entire area around the back of my throat instantly lit up with full sensation. For the first time I could remember, I swallowed normally, feeling the sublime joy of all the muscles in my throat and neck working in beautiful synchrony. 

Sitting quietly in a room and looking inside of myself had accomplished what tens of thousands of dollars and years of medical appointments couldn’t touch: total, instantaneous relief. That was the moment I knew I’d found a new way, a new path, and a new world. I found such relief a second time when I tried LSD at Burning Man. And a third time, when I did anger work at a week-long course called Groundbreakers. I was hooked.

What all these experiences had in common was that they were pattern interrupters. They temporarily shifted how my body and nervous system were operating, and by doing so, reestablished an internal connection that I had disconnected as a child to survive painful experiences.

An exploration of psychosomatic illness

These brief flirtations with relief set me on a new course – to research and study the underlying mechanisms of what was happening to me in these situations, with the goal of replicating them permanently.

The most compelling explanation I found was in the book The Divided Mind, by Dr. John Sarno. 

In his book, Sarno describes his years of experience treating psychosomatic disorders, most of all, debilitating back pain. I had long resisted the idea that my condition was psychosomatic. It was so visceral that I couldn’t accept that it was “only in my mind.” But Dr. Sarno’s work makes a crucial distinction: while the source of the pain may be in a person’s mind, that doesn’t mean the pain isn’t completely real.

I was struck by how closely his description of the illnesses he treats matched my own (in bold): “The patient may experience a wide variety of highly debilitating maladies, including muscle weakness or paralysis, feelings of numbness or tingling, total absence of sensation, blindness, inability to use their vocal cords, and many others, all without any physical abnormalities in the body to account for such symptoms.” This seemed to describe my situation exactly.

As I kept reading, I was further startled to see his explanation of the cause: “…the cause is to be found in the unconscious regions of the mind…its purpose is to deliberately distract the conscious mind.” I couldn’t believe what I was reading. He seemed to be suggesting that the body creates physical symptoms as a protective measure, to distract or shield the conscious mind from thoughts and feelings that are too threatening or painful to bear.

I kept reading, and in his extensive descriptions of his typical patient profile, I saw myself clearly reflected:

Sarno notes that “…rage in the unconscious mind is central to understanding virtually all psychosomatic reactions.” I knew that repressed anger was one of my most deeply ingrained emotional patterns.He says that anxiety, depression, and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) often coincide with the apparent physical symptoms, which I’d also experienced.Perfectionism and other “repressive” behaviors are ubiquitous among psychosomatic pain sufferers, with patients often describing themselves as “hardworking, conscientious, responsible, driven, success-oriented, perpetual seekers of new challenges, sensitive to criticism, and their own severest critics,” which the subconscious mind interprets as a form of control or pressure and is thus enraged by.Many patients are the caretaker type and are always worrying about their family, friends, and relatives; at the same time, they’ve often experienced emotional abuse, including harsh or excessive discipline, absence or unavailability, temper, or unreasonable expectations from those same family members, creating another source of internal tension.A majority have come from families with hardworking, loving parents who conveyed overly high expectations and hopes for their children, families not characterized by any particularly unusual dynamics that would stand out in today’s society.

Ultimately, Dr. Sarno recommends the following treatment for his patients: that they directly face and bring to their conscious awareness the anger, emotional pain, and sadness brewing in their subconscious mind. He recommends a detailed step-by-step plan for how to do so, including reading his book and related materials, journaling and reflective writing exercises exploring possible sources of emotional pain, and cataloging situations that create suppressed rage. 

The emphasis throughout this process is on allowing the inner child to express their rage at all the responsibilities, pressures, disappointments, problems, and unfair expectations they’ve faced, and most of all, their self-imposed demands to achieve, take care of others, or be good. It’s about freeing yourself from needing other people’s recognition, and learning to care for yourself in a kinder, gentler, more forgiving way than perhaps you were raised. In other words, you are learning to be more compassionate with yourself.

In effect, the purpose of Dr. Sarno’s treatment is to “blow the cover” on the covert operation your body is running to keep you from thinking about the reservoir of rage within you. Once the big secret is out, there’s no sense in continuing the pain, and thus it ceases.

 

Healing through learning

Sarno finds the unavoidable conclusion of his work almost too good to be true: not only can physical pain be psychosomatic, but you can stop it by learning about it! 

And that is exactly what I found: the more I read and learned about Sarno’s work, the more the pain and tension in my throat dissipated, often in real time as the words entered my brain and my awareness of what was happening inside of me grew.

Another casual observation in Sarno’s book astounded me, and explained so much of my journey: “We know from experience that the theoretical wall, the barrier separating the conscious from the unconscious mind, cannot be breached from below—that is, the rage will not break through into consciousness—but there is nothing to stop us from intellectually breaching the barrier from above.” 

This explained why my personal journey had started with the mind and the intellect, as I read books and took courses on various aspects of personal development. I used my mind to create the “breach” that allowed my awareness to begin looking inside instead of outside for answers. Only then was I able to begin exploring the world of the heart and the emotions.

While intellectual understanding and self-study are crucial, Sarno also points out that it isn’t necessary to fully “figure out” or change repressed emotions. It is only necessary to acknowledge that they exist, and that they’re a normal part of life. He has found that truly accepting our genuine self, who feels many things, including feelings that might be unpleasant or painful, is what leads to relief.

The cause of psychogenic voice disorders

I discovered a 2008 paper called The role of psychogenic and psychosocial factors in the development of functional voice disorders. It examined a range of prior studies and concluded that psychogenic voice disorders “may develop in response to negative emotions following stressful life events,” and especially “situations where there was a strong challenge to speak out and yet a marked constraint against doing so.”

One thing I had never understood is why I would have the apparent symptoms of trauma when my childhood seemed relatively idyllic. This paper suggested an answer, indicating that “traumatic incidents and serious situations involving death, loss, separation and threat to personal or family security were reported infrequently” in patients with psychogenic voice disorders. 

Instead, the researchers found such disorders occurred more frequently in people who had “interpersonal problems with close partners or family members.” This included “difficulties with the expression of negative emotions related to repressed hostility, discomfort over sexual feelings and rebellion towards authority figures (Barton, 1960).” 

This seemed to fit my situation much more closely than the “acute” trauma caused by sexual assault, natural disasters, or extreme abuse. In my case, subtle, internalized forms of emotional repression led to subtle, internal symptoms of trauma. The suppression of anger in my family – the sweeping under the rug of any brewing conflict – might seem like it would have led to a peaceful household. In reality, it only turned the chaos inward where it was unleashed to do a different kind of damage.

Other common factors in the development of psychogenic voice disorders seemed to fit my situation closely as well. The patient data showed “a trend towards education and helping professions, and recent prevalence studies indicate teachers are more at risk for functional voice disorders than any other occupational group.” I had been a natural teacher almost my entire life.

The same paper proposed a possible explanation for the specific symptoms I’d faced: when emotions (such as anger, in my case) cannot be expressed, they are “reverted” to physiological symptoms associated with fight-or-flight. This reaction “is thought to prepare the organism for increased physical work, by fixing the upper extremities to the thoracic cage for combat, requiring firm adduction of the vocal folds and wide abduction to facilitate an increased volume and flow of oxygen in order to meet the body’s increased metabolic demands.”

In other words, when we repress emotions and don’t allow them to be expressed, the body reacts to this with a fight-or-flight response. In order to prepare for the increased physical exertion of fighting or fleeing, the body stabilizes the upper parts of the body (like the arms and shoulders) against the ribcage to create a solid foundation for movement. As part of that preparation, the vocal folds (or vocal cords) are brought together tightly to control the breath and then are spread apart to increase oxygen intake. 

This was the most precise description of what I experienced in my vocal cords I had yet encountered: a combination of too much tightness and tension, and somehow at the same time, too much looseness and lack of control. It was like reading the user’s manual for my body, specifically the troubleshooting section, where my seemingly unexplainable problem was described in precise detail.

Studying the vagus nerve

All my research was pointing to the vagus nerve, which I came to understand was the central actor in my story.

The vagus nerve is the longest nerve in the body, running from the diaphragm all the way up the torso, through the neck to the brain. It is like the “main information highway” of the body, connecting together and coordinating the parasympathetic nervous system in the heart, lungs, and digestive tract, and governing such functions as sucking, swallowing, facial expression, and the sounds produced by the larynx.

I began to study the vagus nerve intensely, filling my notes with anatomical diagrams and cross-sections of the throat from every direction. I found that right at the point it passes up through the right side of the neck, there is a “choke point.” If the nerve senses too much pain coming up through the nerves from the body, this is the last place it can shut itself off and thus prevent those signals from reaching the brain. Like a circuit breaker flipping off when it detects a dangerous surge of energy, the vagus nerve does the same for the body.

It was another book, The Body Keeps the Score by Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk, that helped me understand why the vagus nerve seemed so central to my symptoms.

He calls this complex of nerves our “social-engagement system.” When it’s functioning properly, “…we smile when others smile at us, we nod our heads when we agree, and we frown when friends tell us of their misfortunes.” It also sends signals down to our heart and lungs, slowing down our heart rate and increasing the depth of our breathing, making us feel calm and relaxed, centered, or pleasurably aroused. 

Dr. Van Der Kolk explains that any threat to our safety or social connections triggers changes in the vagus nerve. When something distressing happens, we automatically signal our upset in our facial expressions and tone of voice, which are meant to beckon others to come to our assistance. Our throat gets dry, our voice tense, our heart beats faster, and our respiration becomes more rapid and shallow. In other words, our bodies purposefully signal to others when we are distressed, effectively reaching out to the people who care about us for help.

And here I was desperately trying to hide my symptoms, doing everything I could think of to prevent anyone, even my closest family and friends, from realizing anything was amiss. As I saw what was happening, and clearly saw the war raging within myself that I was by definition always losing, I felt the edifice of my total self-reliance begin to collapse. I couldn’t do it all myself. I couldn’t carry it all myself. Not when I was a child, innocently looking for a way to express my rage. And not even as an adult, trying to achieve and succeed and improve all on my own. 

It was slowly becoming clear that anything that stimulated or awakened my vagus nerve immediately improved my throat symptoms. Both major emotional releases and psychedelic experiences, but also simpler things like breath holding, cool wind in my face, and playing with animals or children. I could often feel in real time my throat muscles tensing or releasing based on what I was doing moment to moment.

With time, I’ve come to see my vagus nerve’s sensitivity and tendency to shut down as a wonderful gift. I’ve realized it is akin to having a real-time barometer of how connected I am to my body and my heart at any given moment. It represents my inner child, prone to hide or run away at the first sign of something scary, but also the source of my deepest innocence and joy. 

When I abandon and dissociate from myself – by overworking, drinking too much coffee, distracting myself with social media, or not saying what I’m feeling – I can feel my throat closing down soon after. It is as if my vagus nerve switches off, protecting me from the pain emanating from my body but also throwing off my intuition, my self-awareness, and most concretely, my ability to speak, swallow, sing, or laugh. 

As soon as I find the courage to reconnect with my body, to bring my feelings back online, it always turns on again, and I have my voice back. It is the greatest blessing to receive such clear and unmistakable communication from my body – I would rather be stopped in my tracks as soon as I fall out of alignment with my authentic self, than spend years in disconnection and look back on my life with regret.

The post Unspeakable Pain: A Personal Journey Through Psychosomatic Illness appeared first on Forte Labs.

The 10 Most Transformative Books on Personal Development I’ve Read

I’ve read hundreds of books on productivity and self-improvement over the years.

Many of them are filled with vague prescriptions or clichéd advice, but a small number were truly transformative for me. They served as intellectual lighthouses on my journey, helping me understand what was happening to me as I explored my past, my psyche, and my pain.

Here are the 10 personal development books that have been most inspiring and impactful for me, in the order in which I encountered them (all the following links are affiliate links, for which I earn a small commission at no cost to you):

Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World, by Mark Williams and Dr. Danny Penman

I found this book on an obscure online forum late one night soon after arriving in San Francisco to begin my first professional job. 

I had read a lot of philosophical or mystical accounts of meditation and mindfulness, but this book was different. It describes a series of empirical, first-hand experiments I could run to reach my own conclusions, free of unprovable metaphysical claims.

I still remember the classic “raisin experiment” – a series of prompts in which you examine a single raisin in extreme detail using one of the senses at a time – which opened up a doorway into the infinite intricacy and subtlety of my everyday perception. Since then I’ve always returned to the idea that running experiments to uncover my own truths is far more powerful than just accepting someone else’s philosophy.

The Untethered Soul and The Surrender Experiment, by Michael Singer

Michael Singer’s first book, which I wrote about in The Untethered Soul: The Roadmap of My Personal Growth, has been like a user’s manual for my mind over the last decade. I’ve reread the book multiple times, and each time I’m astounded at how Singer is able to describe almost exactly what I’m experiencing inside the confines of my mind in such vivid detail.

It has served as a roadmap in my journey, reassuring me that each dissolution of a part of my identity is a good thing even when it feels disconcerting. 

His second book, The Surrender Experiment, is an autobiography of his spiritual journey, including his incredible achievements in business. It gave me hope that success in business is not incompatible with the spiritual life and that the former could even be a gateway to the latter. 

Emergent Strategy and Pleasure Activism, by adrienne maree brown

Adrienne maree brown’s book Emergent Strategy is a mainstay in political activist circles. I picked it up at my then-girlfriend Lauren’s suggestion and was skeptical at first, expecting a lot of sociopolitical theory and shrill finger-wagging.

Instead, I was shocked to discover a powerful framework based on nature metaphors for understanding and shaping change, systems, interdependence, and power, which I summarized in Emergent Strategy: Organizing for Social Justice.

Her followup book, Pleasure Activism, is an even more radical exploration of the “politics of pleasure,” and has influenced my thinking for years as I learned to tap into pleasure as a source of motivation in my work. I wrote about my takeaways in Pleasure as an Organizing Principle.

Man Enough: Fathers, Sons and the Search for Masculinity, by Frank Pittman

This was another book I read at Lauren’s recommendation. It is an exploration of what is known today as “toxic masculinity,” including all the ways our upbringing and societal expectations shape our understanding of what it means to be a man and a father.

Pittman was a psychiatrist, and thus his writing isn’t about abstract theories or political diatribes. It’s rooted in the real conversations and experiences of his patients, which gives his ideas a vulnerable, personal grounding.

His book helped me see and understand how masculinity had been communicated across generations in my family, how that legacy had affected me, and which parts I wanted to embrace or reject in my own life and parenting.

It Didn’t Start With You, by Mark Wolynn

Mark Wolynn’s book, which I wrote about in It Didn’t Start With You: How to Understand and Heal from Intergenerational Trauma, opened my eyes to the tremendous importance of family history in unraveling one’s own individual trauma. 

You would think that discovering how unresolved trauma is passed down through generations would feel like a great burden, adding to the already formidable burden imposed by a single life’s experiences. Instead, I experienced this revelation as a tremendous relief. Finally I had the context to understand why so much of my pain seemed to come from before I was even born.

Up until that point, I had never realized what a weighty responsibility it had been to feel that all my problems and shortcomings were mine and mine alone. To hold myself responsible for my own pain and its healing. This book helped me see my own healing efforts as a service to past generations of my ancestors, giving them so much more meaning and significance.

The Yoga of Eating, by Charles Eisenstein

Charles Eisenstein’s book, which I wrote about in The Yoga of Eating: Food as a Source of Information, gave me a whole new perspective on eating and food and its importance in cultivating my intuition and self-awareness.

I had never thought much about food, considering it a mere source of fuel for my brain. But as I got older, what I ate started to have a bigger impact on how I felt and performed. So I knew it was time to revisit that relationship.

Eisenstein’s book is such an unorthodox approach to this topic. It’s not based on science, nor does it recommend any particular diet. It’s about reframing how you understand the very nature of food – not just as macronutrients but as a potent source of information flowing from the external world into your cells.

The Body Keeps the Score, by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk

Dr. Bessel van der Kolk’s book is an encyclopedic tour de force of many aspects of trauma and its treatment, which I summarized in The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Treatment of Trauma.

This book rose to international mega-bestseller status, despite its semi-technical and often winding prose. I think that’s because it has become the banner for a broad increase in awareness of trauma, a complex and nuanced subject that can take many forms and has many potential causes and forms of treatment.

Our society is becoming “trauma-informed,” and this book is the best deep dive into what that often charged and misunderstood word really means in the context of our lives.

How Emotions Are Made, by Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett

Dr. Lisa Feldman Barret’s book gave me a completely new way of understanding emotions and how they work, which I recounted in How Emotions Are Made: The Theory of Constructed Emotion.

This book is mostly about the science of emotions, which is helpful for avoiding many of the unfounded assumptions and ancient cultural baggage around the topic. Dr. Barrett’s work creates a bridge between the heart and the mind, giving us a way to think and reason about our emotions, but also a way to feel into our thoughts.

I believe that emotions are the most important frontier of personal development in society today, and understanding what they are at the most fundamental level is crucial for exploring that frontier.

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

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VidCon 2024: 8 Takeaways on How YouTube and the Creator Economy Are Changing

In June 2024, I attended VidCon, the preeminent global conference on YouTube and all things Creator Economy.

It was the first large-scale event of its kind I’ve ever been a part of, and it introduced me to many fascinating and surprising trends emerging on the Internet.

Here are my top takeaways from the conference that are going to inform my work on our YouTube channel:

#1 – YouTube is becoming increasingly influential and dominant

YouTube continues to encroach on and replace traditional media consumption channels like cable television. In fact, the fastest growing device for YouTube viewing is connected TVs, and 10% of total TV-watching time in the U.S. is now spent on YouTube alone, outpacing all other digital platforms including Netflix. 

During a panel on TV viewing habits, it was fascinating to watch a veteran Disney VP repeatedly defer to Mr. Beast’s content strategist when it came to questions of how best to reach online audiences.

In the last five years, media spending on digital platforms (which includes all advertising spent by companies) has grown from $1 billion to $7 billion USD, an astonishing rise that shows no signs of slowing down.

Yet that’s still only 1.9% of the $360 billion in media spending per year in the U.S., meaning there’s still enormous room for growth. 

#2 – Creators are starting to figure out how to “exit”

In the past, most YouTubers were “accidental” – they stumbled onto the platform to pursue a geeky side interest or just for fun, and then unexpectedly found traction. These days, in contrast, creating content online has become a full-fledged career being pursued by millions.

I attended a session with the founders of The Game Theorists channel, MatPat and Steph, who create videos analyzing and explaining video games. After 13 years building multiple channels and acquiring tens of millions of subscribers, they were acquired by Lunar X in 2022. As part of the several years’ long transition, MatPat will be replaced with 4 other “hosts” who have been working with the company for as long as 10 years.

This points to one reason why “Goodbye YouTube” videos have become such a trend. The first generation of professional YouTubers is approaching their 40s, and many of them are truly leaving the platform. As they plan their exits, they’re experimenting with a range of options, from simply disappearing and riding off into the sunset, to bringing on other talent to their channels, to selling their IP to larger media companies.

Interestingly, one panelist noted that it’s worth building a YouTube channel with such an exit in mind, even if you never plan on leaving, because it will lead to a more sustainable, less risky, and more profitable backend business.

#3 – The difficulty of staying on top

Related to the above, one theme that I kept noticing throughout the event was just how difficult it is to stay on top. In various sessions, I heard from people who’d been at the top (whether measured by subscriber counts, views, or clout) only to lose their spot in the limelight as trends shifted and younger, harder-working YouTubers took their place.

The amount of work it takes to stay relevant on the platform seems staggering, with 70 or 80-hour workweeks seemingly common. This reinforced for me how challenging it is to create a sustainable business in an inherently unpredictable, quickly changing, trend-driven creative industry like the Creator Economy. And it made me all the more determined to find less fickle, longer-term income sources (such as books) that don’t depend on the whim of an algorithm.

#4 – Are you the Network, the Show, or the Talent?

We’re definitely seeing an expansion in the power and influence of major creators in mainstream culture.

One session explored how creators were once viewed primarily as “talent,” essentially using YouTube to kickstart their acting or hosting career in Hollywood. YouTubers like Lilly Singh were lauded for leveraging their online viewership to make the jump to “legitimate” TV shows and movies. 

But power, money, and influence are increasingly flowing to online creators, who command the vast audiences that major media companies are desperately trying to reach. This has led some creators to begin identifying primarily with a “show” – a repeatable format that often gets released as a series of similar videos over time. This gives the creator more options and more negotiating leverage, since a show can be taken over by another host, or sold to a different network, without losing its original appeal.

We’re now entering a third era, in which creators are accruing so much power and money that they are starting to see themselves as something even bigger – as a network unto themselves. For example, the aforementioned creators of The Game Theorist channel have expanded over time to include The Film Theorists, The Food Theorists, and The Style Theorists, each one applying the same format of in-depth nerdy analysis to a new category.

Lunar X didn’t merely acquire talent, or even a successful show; they acquired a thriving network of channels, which together provide far more financial and cultural weight with much less risk of any single one failing.

#5 – Generative AI is here to stay

Gen AI was a recurring theme of the conference. Seemingly everyone is experimenting with and exploring it. In the sessions I attended, I found a much more nuanced and complex view of its potential than what I typically see on social media.

A survey of online consumers presented at one session showed that 60% of them actually prefer GenAI content to human-created content. I think these are early signs that for certain people and certain topics, the sheer prolific variety that AI is capable of will make it superior.

81% of creators reported better engagement with their AI-generated content, again showing that the ability to rapidly and easily create hyper-customized content is going to appeal to certain niches and allow certain kinds of content to be created that wouldn’t be otherwise.

#6 – The incredible rise of fan culture

A keynote presentation by a YouTube executive analyzing major trends on the platform zeroed in on the rapid rise of “fan” culture over the last few years.

In their research, they found that 85% of people online aged 14-44 say they’re a fan of someone or something. 80% of those people say they use YouTube at least weekly to consume content about what they’re a fan of. 47% of Gen Z viewers say they’re part of a fandom that no one they know personally is a part of.

66% said that they watch more content unpacking or discussing the subject of their fandom, than the original content itself. This could take the form of fancams, explainers, reaction videos, fan art, or hour-long video essays analyzing every minute aspect of a new video by a prominent personality.

For example, when Rockstar Games released the trailer to its long-awaited sequel, Grand Theft Auto VI, it was viewed 93 million times in the first 24 hours, setting a new record. But fans of the franchise also immediately started creating reaction videos, breakdowns of the trailer, and detailed deep-dives, which themselves accumulated another 192 million views in the same 24-hour period.

In other words, even the most successful, viral videos are now only a stone dropped in a pond. Their true impact is amplified by the legions of fan-created ripples that grow and spread far beyond what the original video could do on its own.

Fans are morphing from passive viewers to active co-creators, with 65% of Gen Z survey respondents saying they consider themselves to be “creators”. In effect, they are partnering with the celebrities they adore and extending their reach and relevance to new levels. In YouTube’s words, “fan culture has become the central driver of emerging popular culture.”

#7 – YouTube is an economy unto itself

It’s tempting to list YouTube alongside the other major social media platforms, but my impression from VidCon is that’s not accurate. YouTube is the juggernaut of the Internet, an ever-growing black hole of attention consuming ever more of the wider economy.

I’ve always thought of YouTube as a way to attract attention and find followers, only to send them to my email newsletter for a longer-term relationship. But I was shocked to learn that there are actually 10 different ways to monetize on YouTube:

Advertising revenue (through the YouTube Partner Program)Channel memberships, where viewers pay a monthly fee for exclusive perksSuper Chat and Super Stickers, allowing viewers to pay to have their messages highlighted in live chatSuper Thanks, letting viewers purchase one-time animations to show appreciationMerchandise shelf, selling branded products directly on your channelYouTube Premium revenue, earning money when Premium members watch your contentSponsored content and brand deals, partnering with companies to promote products in your videosAffiliate marketing, earning commissions by promoting products with special linksCrowdfunding/fan funding through platforms like PatreonSelling your own products or services, using your channel to market digital or physical goods

YouTube is at its most powerful not as a lead acquisition source for other platforms, but as a self-contained, integrated economy in its own right. You can achieve all the critical components of a business – from acquiring customers to monetizing them to communicating and supporting them to developing new products and services – without leaving the platform. And as the viewership grows, that’s where the incentives will lie.

#8 – The acquisition of attention is core to every business

This is the insight that trumps all the others, because it explains both YouTube’s rapid rise, and the broader proliferation of all parts of the Creator Economy.

Every business, not just media or entertainment businesses, has to acquire attention to sell its products or services. The only thing that varies is how different businesses or industries go about that.

There have always been a variety of competing options, but as YouTube continues to grow and dominate more and more of the world’s attention, it is finding its way into every industry imaginable, whether for lead generation, community engagement, R&D, recruiting, advertising, brand awareness, customer education, or something else.

If TV was the dominant communications medium of the 20th century, and all roads led to it one way or the other, it seems like YouTube is well on its way to dominating the 21st century.

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How Your Projects Shape Who You Are

I’ve long believed that our choices about which projects to take on are among the most important decisions we make, and now I have evidence to back it up.

In an article on the TED blog and a paper called The Methodology of Personal Projects Analysis, research professor Brian R. Little examines how the pursuit of “personal projects” powerfully affects the trajectory of our lives. 

Little pioneered the development of a field called Personal Projects Analysis, or PPA, to study how the pursuit of such projects is a fundamental component of human well-being.

“Personal projects” by his definition include not just formal ones you might focus on at work, but informal ones as well. Toddlers are pursuing a project as they learn to walk. Lovers are pursuing a project as they fall in love. All the way to the highest reaches of human achievement, like landing on the moon.

The key factors in making them “personal” are that they are personally meaningful and that they are freely chosen, not imposed from the outside. Little’s research has shown that such “intrinsically regulated” projects tend to be more successful and lead to greater well-being than “externally regulated” projects.

Little and his colleagues have studied the projects of thousands of people, and found that they tend to have 15 active projects on average at any given time, falling into 6 major categories:

Occupational/Work: “Make sure the department budget is done.”Interpersonal: “Have dinner with the woman in the floppy hat.”Maintenance: “Get more ink cartridges.”Recreational: “Take a cruise holiday.”Health/Body: “Lose fifteen pounds.’Intrapersonal: “Try to deal with my sadness.”

They have found that a person’s collection of personal projects not only shapes their life but even who they are at their core.

This is a fundamentally different view of “personality”: We are not limited to a collection of traits fixed at birth, or shaped in childhood. We evolve over time through personally meaningful pursuits we decide to take on. This opens up the possibility that we can purposefully choose the ways we want to change, by choosing projects that give us new skills, perspectives, and ways of thinking.

In other words, by changing what you do, you can change who you are. Your actions speak louder than words, including the words others have applied to you in the form of labels like “introverted” or “extroverted,” “ambitious” or “lazy,” “focused” or “distractable.”

Little’s research found that we can even take on new traits to more effectively pursue our personal projects. We commit to delivering a talk, and as a result, start to take on the traits of a public speaker. We say yes to a new relationship, and begin to change into someone more vulnerable. He dubs these “free traits,” like free-floating personalities, we can grab ahold of and put on like a new outfit.

It turns out that there is more than “nature vs. nurture.” There is more to us than the genes we were born with, and the events that unfolded shortly after our birth. There is a third component – projects – and those projects are actively shaping who we are now and for many years into the future. 

Which is another way of saying, a single creative project can change the trajectory of your life. 

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

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