Another Finger

This episode I decided to share some of my favorite books I read or listened to in 2023.
Here's a list of all the books mentioned in this episode.

Fiction:
Tenth of December - George Saunders
Liberation Day - George Saunders
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain - George Saunders
Norse Mythology - Neil Gaiman

Philosophy:
The Creative Act - Rick Rubin 
The Wisdom of Insecurity - Alan Watts.
Be Water, My Friend - Shannon Lee 
Pure Meditation - Pema Chodron
Meditations - Marcus Aurelius
Letters from a Stoic - Seneca
How to be a Stoic - Massimo Pigliucci
A field guide to a Happy Life - Massimo Pigliucci
Think Like a Stoic - Massimo Pigliucci
Discipline in Destiny - Ryan Holiday
Stillness is the Key - Ryan Holiday
The Obstacle is the Way - Ryan Holiday 
Courage is Calling - Ryan Holiday
The Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu, Stephen Mitchell Translation
The Art of Living - Thich Nhat Hahn

Politics and Political Theory:
What's Our Problem? - Tim Urban
The Cruelty is the Point - Adam Serwer
Poverty, by America - Matthew Desmond
Ghettoside - Jill Leovy
The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace - Jeff Hobbs
Charter Schools and Their Enemies - Thomas Sowell

Parenting:
Bringing up Bébe - Pamela Druckerman 
How to Raise Successful People - Esther Wojcicki
It. Goes. So. Fast. - Mary Louise Kelly

Sociology:
Braiding Sweetgrass - Robin Wall Kimmerer
The Myth of Normal - Gabor Maté MD and Daniel Maté
A Hunter-Gatherers Guide to the 21st Century - Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein
10 Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Account Right Now - Jaron Lanier
Deepfakes - Nina Schick
The Art of the Good Life - Rolph Dobelli
The Good Life - Robert Waldinger
Irreversible Damage - Abigail Shrier
Pageboy - Elliot Page

One excellent book I accidentally left out was yet another great on from Michael Pollan,  The Botany of Desire. 

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Cover Art: Rory Jenkins  

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With the New Year upon us, many of us have embarked on the old tradition of setting New Years Resolutions. We do a little inventory on our lives and determine to change what we don’t like about ourselves, our behaviors or environment. We’ll try to ad that which is missing, or subtract that which is useless or harmful in one way or another. In general, I think this self reflection a good thing to do. But why limit it to just once a year?

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Lo and behold, Santa delivered this episode directly to your device while you were sleeping! What a sneaky and jolly good fellow.
Christmas itself has changed more than my opinions about it. As I get older, and now have a child of my own, my relationship to this holiday continues to change.

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I couldn't decide what to title this episode so as not to give it all away. There were several good title contenders: Doobie Dilemma, Doobie Dunce, Kush Core, Cannabis Coma, Cannabis Creep, Cannabis Corpse, Moderate Mary, From  Mary to Buddha, Taking the Bud out of Buddha etc. the list could go on and on. Ultimately, I decided on Cannabinoid Android for the reference to the Radiohead song 'Paranoid Android', which I love. 
In this episode I discuss some of the things which have been both a help and a hindrance to me over the years and what I plan to do about it.
Stay to the end, I've got something new up my sleeve. 

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The big news is revealed. Plus, how do you pull yourself out of a creative funk? What have I been doing since my last recording? 
Just the act of freely expressing oneself, even if only to oneself, is extremely liberating. If you stick with it until the steam subsides, you just might get to the root of the issue. 

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Recorded on August 3, 2023, the third anniversary of the podcast. This episode sat untouched for nearly 4 months before I edited it. This episode is a bit of a three year recap, some things I've noticed, learned, and would like to change. Why has it taken 3 and a half months to edit this episode? We'll talk about that in Episode 25. Stay tuned.

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She is here! The light has emerged out of the darkness.
All things are held in a state of balance. Picture the Chinese symbol of Yin Yang. Equal parts black and white, which chase one another in a circle infinitely. They coexist. They are intertwined. Not a single thing is exempt from this. There is a dark side to everything light, but there’s also a light side to everything dark. There is always a positive with a negative. We see it in electrical currents.. We see it in the breath, the in flow and out flow as the heart pumps blood throughout our bodies. These energies exist in every single atom with electrons and protons. These atoms make up the entire existence of everything. Nothing is exempt. So why should we be surprised when this constant up and down manifests throughout our lives?


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These are my final words as a childless man. Our baby is due to be born this week and I am equally excited and nervous. I just want to do good by this human being. Also, some big news is revealed at the end. Stick around.

Cover Art: Rory Jenkins  
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Ep 20: J is now 20 weeks pregnant! We're halfway there… to the beginning. 
Plus, fiction. I've been reading it, and enjoying it!

Cover Art: Rory Jenkins  
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Our choices have determined much of our life. 
Choose wisely.
Happy Holidays!
Give well, receive well. 
Be mindful of your Resolutions this year.

Cover Art: Rory Jenkins  
Email: l3m0nsh4rk@gmail.com
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A brief review of my experience my first 7 day silent retreat with Refuge Recovery and Noah Levine. I encourage you to find a retreat and enjoy it. Go deep.

Cover Art: Rory Jenkins  
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About to walk in to a week long silent retreat. This will be my first retreat of any kind. Excited to see what's on the other side.
Also... there is some Big News in here, but you must listen to learn.

Cover Art: Rory Jenkins  
Email: l3m0nsh4rk@gmail.com
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This is a call to use mindfulness as we vote this election cycle. There are ideas for healing our great division in the U.S. This is also a plea to treat others with kindness, love, and respect. If you're interested in finding common ground, and you'd like to have an open and honest discussion or you believe I am missing some information which you have access to, feel free to reach out. Email me at support@anotherfinger.com
Much Love.

Cover Art: Rory Jenkins  
Email: l3m0nsh4rk@gmail.com
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Vacations are interesting things. They are like little life microcosms. In most instances we attempt to vacate our regular lives, jobs and responsibilities. Yet we find pretty quickly that we cannot escape ourselves. Sometimes in an attempt to be free of stress for a short time, we end up creating a lot more of it through our planning and expectations. We make a plan and we want to stick to it. A lot of the time we go into them having certain expectations of people, locations, experiences and accommodations. In my case on this trip, much like the beginning of life, I didn’t choose where I was going or who I was going with. As I was invited on this trip, it was a bit easier to sit back and enjoy the ride. I decided that I would use this vacation to practice mindfulness. To be present, and to be okay with what is in every moment. 

Quoted in this episode is a passage from Many Lives, Many Masters by Brian L. Weiss

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A few years ago I was having a difficult time in my mind. My life on paper was great, but I was constantly being bombarded with thoughts of inadequacy, meaninglessness, and unimportance. 

I had heard the founder of Headspace, a meditation app, in a radio interview some months earlier and had downloaded the app upon his promise of making life a little bit better if I dedicated at least five minutes a day to mindful meditation. I wasn’t able to find even 5 minutes to try this app out that had sat unopened on my phone for two or three months, until one day when I was finally fed up with my minds constant chatter. I put in some headphones, opened the app and started the 5 minute animated introduction. 

This is how I stumbled upon a daily mindful meditation practice. 

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Don’t cheat yourself. Learn to enjoy every moment. Learn to be present in the now. If you can make these slight shifts in your mental attitudes you will regret nothing. You will have lived life to its fullest. The quality of your life will meet exactly the quality of your attention now. If you choose to rush through, that’s what you’ll get. If you choose to be annoyed, that’s what you’ll get. If you choose to hate, dislike, distrust, that’s what you’ll get. The energy with which you choose to live your life is the energy you’re putting out into the world and the world will respond in kind. Like finds like. Catch yourself when you get caught up in poor attitudes, reframe the situation and do what you need to do with gratitude, compassion and love. Learn what life has to teach. This is how to lift yourself and everything around you. This is the real revolution. But only you can make the choice, one moment at a time. 

In the words of the late great Ram Dass, “Be here now.”

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Cover Art: Rory Jenkins  
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 I have been asked to record a few guided meditations from some of you who listen, so here is the first of them. This is a meditation from Noah Levine's Refuge Recovery World Services' (RRWS) program. I highly recommend the book; Refuge Recovery: A Buddhist Path to Recovery From Addiction to anyone struggling with addictive behaviors of any kind. Thanks to my good friend who lent his copy to me. I'm forever grateful. 

From the back the book:

"Refuge Recovery is a Buddhist-oriented, nontheistic recovery program that does not ask anyone to believe anything, only to trust the process and do the hard work of recovery. In fact, no previous experience or knowledge of Buddhism is required.  Recovery is possible, and this book provides a systematic approach to treating and recovering from all forms of addictions. When sincerely practiced, the program will ensure a full recovery from addiction and a lifelong sense of well-being and happiness."

NOAH LEVINE, M.A., has been using Buddhist practices to recover from addiction since 1988. He is the founding teacher of Against the Stream Buddhist Meditation Society. Visit the author online at www.refugerecovery.org

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We know little to nothing about all of what is going on around us at any given moment. It is natural for us to want to make sense of the world, just spend some time with a curious child and you’ll see this natural tendency. Our desire for knowledge may take us further from the Eternal Tao, that which cannot be named. Perhaps this is because we begin to divide and categorize and label everything we see. We then create self and other, believing that we are separate.

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Meditation is itself a practice in doing not doing. While it is true that meditation is an action which we perform, what we are really doing is absolutely nothing. This action of non-action can be difficult for many people to accept, especially in the west, where we have a difficult time just sitting and doing nothing.

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Alan Watts has an analogy to life, or of living life rather, to that of dancing or playing music. He jokingly and rhetorically points out that the purpose of music is not the end of a composition. If it were, he says, the best composers would be the ones who played the fastest, who arrived at the end the quickest. We don’t go to a concert to see one final crescendo, one final crashing note. We enjoy the play of the music as it goes along. Likewise when we dance, the purpose is not to arrive at some specified point on the floor. The point of dancing is to dance. Life therefore is a playing of the music, the dancing the dance, and there is no point on the dance floor upon which we are supposed to arrive.

Cover Art: Rory Jenkins  
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