Foxwizard (00:03)
What-ho, it’s foxwizard here and we are Questing Betwixt. Betwixt worlds amidst, the metacrisis. And if you're questing, it's worth kind of having a sense of what you're doing. And I find one of the most indispensable dispositions one can have is that towards daily journaling. And so in this podcast, we'll be sharing how to journal like a wizard. Well, like this wizard at least. I'll be sharing with you the template that I use for my daily journaling.

This is a way that you can cultivate and regenerate the capacity to think for yourself, but also to sense into what is emerging for you so that you can orientate yourself towards relevance-realisation towards meaningful contribution, towards deepening, unfurling and towards that which may be more authentic and true and meaningful for you and the world around you. So if this is helpful for you, I think you'll enjoy this episode. I'll see you soon.

Hi friends, yes, it is the 1st of November 2024 and in this episode we are going to be unpacking how to journal like a wizard. Why would one want to journal like a wizard? Why? To learn better spells, to advance, to level up, to have greater impact via one's intentionality, to translate and transmute conceptual reckonings into manifested reality or something like that. But in plain speak.

Journaling is one of the most profound ways to develop metacognition, to think about what you're thinking about, to cultivate one's own clear thinking, to ongoingly regenerate the capacity to think for oneself. And really with journaling, can have an earlier detection system for when things are going awry.

And with this, have an enhanced acuity as to what's happening with you, how you're responding to the world around you and how things are shifting. And then that allows you to be a little bit more intentional about how you cultivate fulfillment, depth, growth, satisfaction, and right relations and so on. So that's what we're going to be talking about today. This was a fairly advanced episode, but I will be covering some helpful practical suggestions for folks that are...

relatively new to journaling or returning to journaling or wanting to give it a go. So yes, you're going to look forward to that. Just in reflection of episode two, when I shared it with my museletter, I had an RSS little hiccup, which meant that some of the Apple podcasts and Spotify picked up episode one. Thank you to those who let me know about it swiftly. I have a wonderful person who helps me out with my ghost website. She got onto it and all is well now. I didn't actually like the episode that much personally. There's this weird thing where

that was an episode where I thought I could mostly wing it. And then as I was editing it, I realized just how rambling and all over the place my thinking was and my delivery of it. It's quite a painful process to edit one's own video podcast. And by the way, I treat video watches as second-class citizens here. This is primarily about the audio. So hence why there's not

bells and whistles to the video itself. It's just, it's just me talking to camera. This is mostly an audio experience. There's some sort of, I don't know, some people like watching video, but there's an extra intimacy, warmth and depth to audio only I find. But yeah, the windows of disenchantment. I feel like I could probably share that episode in half the time, but I've had a couple of folks, including a close, very close friend of mine share that it was actually quite timely that

it was just the invitation they needed to pause and to listen and to maybe take a little bit of time off because the growing disquiet, the discontent, the disenchantment, the disillusionment, the dis-ease, the lingering perhaps beckoning of depression, it was there. I don't know, I don't want to be the The Depresso-Wizard, the doomster champion of the dark, but there is something to be said about not denying the gloom and the despair.

And I actually would go as far to say, and I often quote Professor Randolph Nesse who posits that depression may be an adaptive mechanism to protect us against blind optimism. Cause that puts us into an energy conservative state, which means that we no longer persist with things that we, you know, part of us feels is not actually going to be useful or conducive or meaningful. And that makes sense. And so if you have,

If you're pursuing a goal that there's part of you that feels like it doesn't actually make sense, then perhaps the depressed mood state might kick in, putting you into a lower and more apathetic state. And it makes it harder for you to kind of summon the energy that you would otherwise need. I actually also feel like depression or grief and despair are almost like developmental milestones in the sense that this is part of our maturing into adulthood. But most of the mechanisms of modernity

wants to suppress this. It's like, cheer up, chin up, you know, stay positive. And because we never really get to approach or embrace or understand or accept and embody and allow our grief to take hold. And we keep denying it. And we keep denying these depressed thoughts and so on. We end up kind of stuck in this adolescent mode and never quite reach the greater depth and maturity that awaits on the other side.

So anyway, long story short, even though I didn't like episode two, it's very heartening to hear from folks that has resonated for them. I've also had a few folks ask me, what are my thoughts about Substack that I teased in the past in the museletter that I accompanied the last episode. And I will do an episode on why I ghosted Substack. I have a lot of friends that are gleefully joining Substack at the moment.

Yeah, I'll unpack that in a future episode. It involves power laws, network capture, dark patterns, multipolar traps, and perverse incentives and things like that. But as for this episode, we are diving deep into the wondrous art of journaling. Now, as I said before, this is not necessarily for everyone. In particular, after the intro bit, I'm going to be getting into some advanced journaling strategies, (lol, strategies), protocols.

dispositions, behaviors, patterns, I don't know, whatever you want to call it, particularly sharing my daily journaling structure. Now, just for context, my role is I am a mercenary wizard. I am paid to come in and offer the distillations of, you know, the synthesis of what sense making I have about what is emerging. And the reason

people hire me is because I'm offering something that is different from what the mainstream consensus narrative is. I'm often, and here's another episode I'm going to be talking about, you know, there are some of us that are a step ahead of the hype cycle. So when everyone's at the peak of inflated expectations, some of us are at the trough of disillusionment. When everyone's disillusioned, some of us are climbing the slope of enlightenment. And

And so what I'm trying to say here is journaling is particularly important in my domain. It allows me to clarify what thoughts are my own thoughts, how I've arrived to them, what biases might be influencing them. And just as a daily practice, as someone who is paying attention to what's happening in the world, it's also a way of kind of staying grounded and balanced.

And hopefully resisting the temptation to get swept up into fake arguments and all the perils of the internet. So if you don't work in a knowledge-based role, it may be that journaling once a week is enough of a frequency for you, and that's totally fine. You might not need to go into the depth of what I do. And with all of these things, you really need to kind of find the way that works for you. There is no one right way to journal. Just as Yumi Sakagawa says, there is no right way to meditate.

There are different approaches that may work for you. With that, we're going to be going through quite a bit here. I'm going to be sharing my morning tarot ritual, how I use cartography to not necessarily divine things, but to have a narrative provocation that allows me to reveal parts of what I may not otherwise have been consciously aware of. I'll be sharing with you

how I use the colors of magic, the gathering, the various mana systems to tap into things. I'll also be talking about how I intentionally bake in plot devices into my daily journaling so as to progress things. I'm not very good at what I was just doing there. Successful podcasters and whatnot, they do this tease thing where they don't actually talk about what they're talking about until the middle chunk, but the first bit's all about this tease.

I tried it just then. It doesn't feel natural for me. I just want to get into it. So let's do that. First of all, have you heard of the concept of morning pages? Of course you have. But if you haven't, Morning Pages by Julia Cameron, the author of The Artist's Way, which is a beautiful book for creative recovery. Really good book for...

most adults who were creative once all of us were, all of us are, and may need a process to kind of tap into and rediscover that creativity. It's a 12 week program and there are two key concepts that emerge from this. The first is morning pages and the second is artist dates. Artist dates are where you schedule some time for yourself doing something that is well-feeling, that fills your well of inspiration.

I don't think enough of us do this intentionally, intentionally cultivate artist dates. And if we were to expand this a little bit, the intentional, you know, ritual cultivation of solitude and of doing things that create, not create, that fill your well, that fill your cup, that have you inspired. For many of us, it's genuine time in nature. And by genuine time, I mean time where you are present, not on devices,

not engaged in inane group speak, but actually time in nature. For others, it's like time at the pub with friends, you know, once a week to actually catch up and connect, you know, phones aren't on the table. They're not even there. You're having a few beers, you're having a good chat with friends. For other times, it's like time to actually lie down and stare up at the clouds or look at the stars and things like that. For others, it's like going to peruse their local bookstore, actually taking a book that they've purchased, a physical book,

to their favourite cafe and sitting down and reading it. These artist dates are just so vital. I feel like in this busy, late stage capitalist world, we don't often make time for artist dates. So Julia Cameron's notion of that remains evergreen. The book itself, The Artists Way, I've done it a couple of times now. I feel like it's great. It's also

to me reads a little dated, it's a little bit hokey, it's a little bit modern in the sense of modernity, preferencing the individual's entitlement and all of this stuff. But the sensibilities remain the same. And if we bring that to the current context where we're seeking more of an ecological approach where we're

sensing into the role that we play as part of the greater system, it still holds true. So the second part of it was morning pages. Now morning pages as a journaling technique. Now you may be familiar with this already. I've got chapters for these podcasts nowadays, so you can skip ahead if you want to. The whole point of morning pages to write three pages of uninterrupted stream of consciousness writing. It's a really, really good pattern to get into.

What we're trying to do here is outpace the inner editor, the vigilant editor that will stop us from writing or speaking what we want to say that will... There’s this phenomenon: If you ever go hiking with a friend on a multi-day hike, there's a thing that usually by the end of day one, you've burnt through the surface level conversations. You've caught up on all the things you've talked about. Have you seen that movie or that show?

you've done the things. Day two, there sometimes begins to be patches of, long patches of silence. And sometimes just really interesting things emerge from seemingly out of nowhere. And day three, the silences continue, but the conversation deepens. Particularly if you've had some time under the stars or by the fire or things like that, there's something about the combination of the activity, the exhaustion that allows the monkey mind, the one that narrates everything and provides

endless chatter about things, you know, they kind of get exhausted and you outpace the monkey mind. And then beautiful gems emerge that reveal themselves to you that you may not otherwise have been aware of. This is the charm of morning pages. It takes some time to practice morning pages. For many of us who are used to typing on the keyboard,

it takes muscle memory. Like my hand cramps when it's been a while that I haven't done morning pages. And so one of the, the, the only-- the best way to cultivate a habit of morning pages is 750words.com. 750words.com. My friend Buster Benson created this quite a while ago. is wondrously,

authentic, irreverent, it's not doing any of the growth hack patterns that you typically see with these online websites. It's pure, it's private. And the point of 750words.com is to help you get into that stream and into that flow. As you're typing your words, whenever you pause and stop typing, there'll be a friendly little indicator to kind of prompt you back into your writing flow.

At the end of your session, once you hit 750 words, and the point is, once you hit 750 words is you stop then you don't kind of like, I'm on a roll now. I'm just going to keep going. It's a practice. This is not you perfecting something. This is not you performing anything. It's a practice, almost like a meditative practice or a contemplative practice where you're just allowing the stream of your consciousness to flow onto the page itself. And at the end of your session, you'll get a

a graph that kind of indicates how you went where you kind of dropped off. And for someone, this is this incredible feedback of something that we wouldn't otherwise get feedback for. It trains this flow state. And you'll find that as you kind of develop a streak that the ease in which you engage in morning pages flow increases. And the charm of morning pages is that on the third page,

and you know, if you think about it, 250 words per page, 750 words. The first page narrative, at least in my experiences, this kind of surface level narratives, there's whinging, there's complaints. I'll usually bemoan the tasks that I have for the day. I'll usually be harbouring some sort of like petty resentment about something and, and then, then it goes through and then I'll make some meta commentary about how my hands hurt or like, I'm not really sure what to do. And like, this feels like a waste of time and so on. And then

out of nowhere, not consciously conjured or anything, but subconsciously manifested, some interesting things will often emerge, not every time, but often. And these insights are so powerful. I, you know, there are other practices, by the way, like this is, this is a morning ritual for me, the journaling. Other people have, an intentional walk, and it's partly the body processing things and

If there's enough space for reflection and for noticing without being too forced about it, you can notice what emerges. You have to find the practice that works for you. But just, you know, as a wizard, journaling is really key. So I would really suggest even if, even if you're familiar with this, give 750words a go. Even just trialing it for a month, seeing how you go, there's actually monthly challenges which allow you to earn some pretty fun badges with this sincere ironic form.

You know, Buster knows that the gamification thing has gotten out of hand. But also at the same time, it's pretty cool to kind of get your turquoise horse badge or whatever. So give 750words a go. I oscillate between paper. And I'll tell you about this other thing. But one of the things I love doing is bring my journal to a cafe. Now, for those that are watching, even though I said that, you know, video is second class citizen.

Only the video folks can see this. I've got this lovely leather bound journal with a lovely pen. And then you'll see as it opens up this blank page paper thing here where you just see like pages of writing. For those that aren't watching, I'm flicking through a book. It's a weird flex. That's what I'm doing. I'm weirdly flexing. Look at how much shit I've written down on paper.

There is something magical about the sound of the pen on the page and the flow that happens like this and the sense of, know, it's a kind of a sense of progress of just meaningfully moving through the page and the end state after morning pages is always one of, I find, well not always, but mostly one of greater depth, greater insight. And this early, in the day allows you to orientate the

actions or the activities of your day. You then have more intentionality and you're less prone to falling into automatic patterns. Automaticity is something I am wary of, particularly in this heavily optimized age where we want to get shit done, we're all feeling time poor, we're all feeling really busy.

So it's natural that we tend to favor quick fixes from the solutions and default ways of doing things as I often keynote. But what it means is also like we go about our days in automatic mode. There's shit to do, there's errands to do, there's emails to do and so on. And that pattern can feel productive, but it may not be conducive to meaningful progress. It may be a delusion of progress. It may be a perpetuation of habituated behaviors, which means that you can go around in circles for years and not actually have any, you know,

not actually cultivate. How do we say this? We're on it all on a developmental journey. The development is partly cognitive complexity, it's partly the depth that we have deepening our sense, it's partly wisdom cultivation, it's relationality, it's integration of all of our parts, it's healing of our traumas, it's, it's the work that we do so that we can show up and be there for others.

If I harken back to what I was talking about with the window of disenchantment, I am so fortunate to have had friends that have been in a relatively better chapter of life when I was in my own dark chapter. They were there for me. They were resourced to have the patience, to have the kindness and the befriendment to be there for me, even as I was...

potentially a cantankerous prick during those times, as I was grappling with my own grief and my frustration and imbibing the horrors of what's happening in Gaza day by day, but even before that, what's happening with our planet and so forth, like they were just in a better place. Some of these friends now are in a dark chapter. I'm in a slightly better place. It is so nice to be able to be there for them too. Not in a chin up, know, stay positive. It'll be okay. There's always hope.

You look at what's happening over there, metal straws to replace plastic straws. That's great, isn't it? You know, not like that, but actually being like, yeah, I get it. It sucks. It sucks. You will feel, you will arrive at this post tragic, post doom state. You know, you'll have a sense of things again. But of course it's an oscillation and I'll say, look, and when you're there, it'll be my turn again to go back into the dark chapter because all of this is ebbs and flows. All of this is seasonality.

But partly the reason why we journal is so that we can be better. We can be better able to look after and contribute to and serve those and serve life around us. Ultimately all of life. We want to cultivate the ability to foster a deep sense of befriendment to all of life.

And so as I mentioned before, I would oscillate between paper-based journal. And then previously I used an app called Day One. The charm of Day One was it's one of the first journaling apps that was available on the Mac. And there's a compounding effect that happens if you maintain this practice over years. Day One has this feature where it will say, On This Day Last Year.

And it means that once you finish journaling, you can look back at what you were angsting about or writing about on this day, the previous year. Now, because I've been doing this for well over a decade, I have a deep acuity for the patterns that manifest. And it is often uncanny, uncanny what has happened the previous years. Now I'm going to show you again, for those that are watching, this that I'm holding up on the screen here is the Hobonichi 5-year journal.

This is something Kim has been doing for, she's on her fifth year of this now, and I'm not on my fifth year. but let's see, I've got two years here and you can see that there's like five years there and Kim does this at the end of the day just before bed. And it's like, draw, you know, write a paragraph, draw a little picture. It's amazing. We'll write about how we caught up with a specific friend that we don't, you know, haven't seen since last year.

And then after she's finished writing it, she'll look back on the previous things and realize it was actually on this day last year that we caught up with our friend. There'll be in my own world, I know that there's certain patterns of when I kind of get, I get springtime sadness. You know, I think I mentioned this previously. It's like, cool. I have the acuity. I can kind of prepare for that. It's just fascinating. Like the insight that you get as to one's own patterns, but also it allows you to get fatigued by your own bullshit.

And this is the gift. This is the gift of daily journaling, particularly in a context where you can actually see what's happened on this day last year. Three years in, you should be so sick of your own stories. You know, if there are particular bullshit narratives, rackets that you have, where you're constantly putting yourself as as the victim in the story or in this tragic position, but then you also have the metacognition to know that you're kind of bullshitting yourself and these same patterns keep on playing out. Well, you're going to have the evidence right there for you. And that.

That is powerful. That is powerful, friends. Without this, there are many people in the world, the majority perhaps, that persists year on year with the same bullshit stories. I don't mean bullshit in a way to put them down. I mean bullshit. Sorry, it sounds so harsh, doesn't it? The word bullshit. I use it in a philosophical sense. Bullshit is the indifference to truth. So a bullshitter is not necessarily dishonest. They're just

disinterested in whether it's true or not. It's just, it's just bullshit. As I've alluded to in previous newsletters, being a bullshit artist is a very effective commercial strategy in this attention economy. Doesn't help if you are more inclined towards intellectual honesty, though. So, but bullshit, I mean an indifference to truth. It's sometimes you can be dishonest, sometimes we can be lying with ourselves, but then we're going to realize that we are

multitudinous, have a plurality of selves. And so it might be that there's different parts in disagreement. So nowadays, though, I use Obsidian. obsidian.md Now, Obsidian is another app. It works across devices. But the beauty of this app is that there is no VCs funding it, it has a clear business model, is privacy respecting, is locally hosted.

You can use a syncing service if you want. And there's a “file over app” philosophy. And this is essentially that, let me read it out to you. “If you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you this freedom.” This is by Steph Ango, the CEO of Obsidian.

There's an integrity and ethics via the discord and the way that they go about things that I find so refreshing in this age. They're not trying to growth hack this and scale this. They're making a quality product that people will value and use and be willing to pay for. And there's no dark patterns, there's a wondrous community. And so I love the ethics of it, but the charm of it with obsidian, particularly if you do knowledge work, is you can start to graph your knowledge.

I have it synced with my Kindle highlights. I have it synced with my readwise highlights. I use it to map out connections. I've been using it for the book that I've been writing for you for the past eight years. And it surfaces connections that would otherwise remain opaque. So that's wonderful. I also use it for my journaling. And so what's going to happen now is I'm going to take you through the template that I have that pops up each day when I go to create a new note.

Now again, I try to do this most days. I'm not militant about it. If I haven't, like the way I treat a ritual like journaling is, is sometimes I quip that I have “a daily journaling habit that I do once or twice a week”. Ho ho ho. And people laugh in the audience. But I'm okay with it if I don't do it every day. But if a whole week has gone past, it's almost like the canary in the coal mine is

carked out, it's not makin’ song anymore. And it's an early indicator that something is awry. Like have I gotten so busy that I can't invest 20 to 30 minutes, (maybe 45 if I'm feeling in flow) to journaling in the morning? And it's it's a tripwire to catch me before I potentially fall into some darker patterns of being so perpetually busy that there's not actually time for myself or not time for self reflection. So for you, it might be once a week, it might be once or twice a week. But

I would encourage personally as a wizard, this is my bias, a daily journaling practice is really, really helpful.

Yes, I've got some notes here that I'm reading. Good writing is clear thinking. I think I've mentioned that the point of journaling, self-awareness, reflection, introspection, pattern acuity, regenerating our capacity to think for ourselves. Here I'm quoting this wonderful book by Carol Sandford, “No More Gold Stars, regenerating capacity to think for ourselves”.

I think this is a vital book. I don't want to be, how do I say this? I'm trying not to punch down these days, I'm trying not to poo poo others. But I do feel like we are in an epoch in life where we largely via institutionalizations and habituation and just the patterns of the late stage distraction economy in modernity, we largely do not think for ourselves. We also have

politicians and media that can perpetuate propaganda that we don't have the journalistic integrity anymore because a myriad factors include including perverse incentivization. So just we more than ever people need to develop the capacity to think for themselves. I feel very grateful, as part of being trained as an academic and going through and completing a PhD and lecturing at a few universities.

One needs to have an awareness of their own epistemology, and ultimately cultivate an epistemological humility. And to think about what they're thinking about, have the kind of requisite precautionary principles to hold to one's own sense of the world in a prototype sense is like a proto-synthesis of the world, and to kind of be fluid with one's ontology, as I described in Episode One. So let me go through the

template that I use each day knowing that take what you will that might be helpful. So I'll include some images in the post for this. With all of the episodes, I'm still trying to figure out how to kind of get more deep more kind of info on the Apple Podcasts or Spotify. But if  ever you go to foxwizard.com and this is E3. So: foxwizard.com/e3 episode three, you'll find a wealth of information and links for you there.

So the first thing I do is I explore the category of vibe. And I love the term vibe. It's so

The, the, the, it's so, how do we say this? It's so nebulous. You can't actually pinpoint vibe, but you can't measure vibe, but it's a felt-sense. It's so real. Like all of us know vibe. We walk into a room and if the vibe's off, we can feel it. And for me, I front end my journaling practice with this kind of felt-sense, the somatic bias so that I don't just bulldoze over with my thinking.

More than ever, I've come to realize that the body holds immense intelligence and wisdom. For many years, decades even, I've been obfuscating that wisdom. When I'm in facilitator mode and keynote mode and when I'm kind of plying my craft as a conjurer, a wizard, contextual conjurer, the felt-sense is there. But otherwise I have had many years of thinking my way through, bulldozing it with thoughts and kind of ignoring these felt senses. And so my daily journaling practice...

right at the start has felt-sense activities. So first of all, we start off with soma. So I do a felt-sense activity, I do a bodyscan, I feel what's going on? Like this morning.

This morning I felt into myself and I was like, Hmm, actually, what did I write? Let's just see. I can, I can literally just tell you right now. “temple tension or hum cheeks tight, nervous anticipation”. Yeah. That was my sense. I think I was nervously anticipating sitting in front of this, screen looking at a reflection myself speaking to the void in podcast form and just hoping it might resonate with a few folks out there in the æther. then I have mood.

So first soma, felt-sense activity, body scan, whilst felt-sense and the body scan will offer me more of a slightly more precise location of what I'm feeling and where, and I might be able to ascribe some words to it without kind of reducing it. It's just, it's my own journaling. one else is reading this.

Mood is then a more generalized sensation. Like what is my disposition? Where I'm at? What's my mood?

Then I reflect on what mana colours I seem to be channeling. In Magic the Gathering, a system of mana, magical energy, one might call it, was developed by, was it Richard Weisman? Gary Garfield? I forget exactly who. Richard Garfield. A set of colours. Black, white, green, red and blue.

Each of these colors have their philosophies, their energies, their dispositions associated with it. And then there are color combos and each of those have their things associated with it. So this morning I was feeling very blue green red, which is a temur lovely disposition for a podcast. But the past few days I was feeling kind of more like just literally pure black. Yesterday was pure black. And that just means I was kind of

just in a really pragmatic mood. I wasn't feeling whimsy. I was feeling like, all right, just got to get shit done. There was a sense of resignation and so on. And for me, having an acuity of my own manner that I'm channeling, is just a situational thing, but it's part of that somatic anchoring, where am I at? Then I draw my daily tarot reading. So hear me out, folks. I know that I've still got a lot of folks that are...

probably still warming to the, the more than rational, the magical, the mythical, the mystical things that I sometimes splice in. I have this beautiful tarot deck by Fyodor Pavlov and I draw three cards. And the beautiful thing about tarot is, well, I...

Let's say the beautiful thing about tarot is there are 3,651,648 possible combinations of the three cards that you can draw. If we include inversions, That's, that's quite a lot. And the point of drawing three cards at the start of the day is not necessarily divination. I don't approach this as, you know, the cards portending as to what the future may hold. I do this as narrative provocation.

After doing the felt-sense activity before going default into the automatic habituated whinge-mode that I'll often tend to do, the tarot draw spikes the mix. And so when I don't have my actual physical deck with me, I'll use the wondrous app developed by Tina Gong called Labyrinthos. Labyrinthos has a, in my experience, this is the most comprehensive, contemporary

resource for understanding tarot. And I say contemporary, there's still a deep honouring of the lineage of tarot and the various sensibilities and the symbols baked within it. But the app itself is just incredible. The affirmations that come with each card and the provocation that they bring is quite wondrous. I mean,

I'll read out today's draw. I actually did it on labyrinthos this morning. I drew the four of wands, community, home and gathering. “I deserve to celebrate my accomplishments”. It's probably why I'm just feeling good about sharing that episode two touched at least two people in the world. After the many hours of work that was spent

producing it, editing it, recording it, uploading it and so on. It's good. Two. And one of them was a close friend. So that's helpful. I then drew the death card, which is end of a cycle, beginnings, transformation, metamorphosis, the mantra being “loss can open the doorway for a new beginning”. Jeez. And you know, as we're talking about just at the start of a journaling practice, this is really quite a comforting way to approach things like

loss can open the doorway for a new beginning. And we're thinking about things like end of a cycle and so on. And, and today I happen to draw all upright cards, but usually there's an inversion worked within it. I had my final card with the nine of wands, which was, you know, the last stretch pushing forward, you can do this. And this is how it often feels at the end of the year. But if I was to look at the inverse of this card,

it would, okay, I can't actually do it from this part of the app, nevermind. Point being, you can right now download the labyrinthos app, I think Tina still has it for free. It's a ridiculously good resource. You should probably pay for it. It's so good. And you can integrate this as part of your pre-journaling practice, like, well: at the very beginning of your journaling practice.

the the... to treat these card draws as a provocation. Like what am I? Yeah, what's going on here? Like even right now, let's just draw. Let's just draw a card at random and see what see what see what you know, there's something quite magical you think every single moment leading to this moment from from the origins of the Big Bang to, the the formation of, new elements and molecules and then eventually

life seem to emerge from the chaos and then sentience emerging from there and we have this noösphere and we're on this kind of like unfurling infinite complexity and every single moment is leading to this moment of you listening to this right now as I shuffle these cards and draw the inverse, shit, the inverse eight of swords. this card is normally tragic. Look at it. I mean, you can't really see it, but it's just...

the inverse eight of (swords). So the good thing about sword cards is that the inverse is usually a bit better. So let's just see, I should be able to flex here and describe the meaning of the card to you straight away, but I don't want to stuff it up. let me just, the inverse.

was it? The inverse eight of swords.

Shit, that's wands. Okay.

Inverse eight of swords. Self acceptance, new perspective and freedom. “New truths guide me to a deeper understanding and acceptance”. You are moving forward from a time in which you felt trapped and victimized by your own thoughts and perceptions about yourself. You have recognized that your own beliefs may have been your greatest weaknesses.

Which I actually find right now as we think about it, and a bit of a theme to a lot of this stuff, partly the reason I had the episode on disenchantment is because we realized that a lot of what we feel is holding us back is actually illusionary by its very nature. We have a lot more choice than we might otherwise think. (Yes there’s also the systemic inequality and so forth.) But I don't mean to be so dismissive of that. But what I mean is sometimes we perpetuate these narratives and we become

these narratives that we have about ourselves can become tyrannical. They can become a form of imprisonment. you know, this, this theme of being able to kind of step up and through this, you know, there's partly this, this, this bias that I have of why am I doing this podcast? We are in a world where as Daniel Schmachtenberger would talk about it, intelligence is outpacing wisdom. And so we have rampant artificial intelligence, synthetic intelligence, you know, tech

with exponential implications in an economy that externalizes harm to the environment where we're now seeing ecocide, genocide, exponential extinction rates, climate collapse and catastrophe. And we are in a system that incentivizes it’s self-destruction. So thus we are on a self-terminating path that we can't help but play a part in and be complicit in. But some of us are awakening to the fact that this is happening and there are other choices. There are

alternative options to the default way of doing things. And part of my intentionality with this is to free you from any sense of imprisonment that you have so that you can actually quest and seek viable alternative options. This does mean leaving the safe, familiar, comfortable, predictable, measurable constructs behind and entering and venturing into the dark forest in a time betwixt worlds amidst the metacrisis.

This does mean that you need to have your wits, you need to have wit, wisdom and wiles to navigate and find your way amidst it all. But it is a process of developing and moving from a tragic or doom woke state into a post-tragic post-doom post-woke state where we can actually show up and participate and facilitate the ushering in of new viable alternative options to the default tragic way of doing things. So yeah.

So anyway, point back, I'm getting way off track here. With Tarot, when you do the draw, you don't fixate upon what the app or what the cards “mean”. Instead, you sense into whatever the meanings are and so forth, but you notice what you notice when that comes up. So the example that I used when I gave the, what was it? The first card that I drew today, which was the four of wands.

The mantra being, deserve to celebrate my accomplishments. I instantly had the image of sharing what the friend said with you in this podcast. So, and that was just, it just kind of emerged as a response from that. There's no kind of conscious conjuring of that. This is just what happened. And so therefore as part of your journaling practice, you might want to consider integrating tarot as a, as a, as a means of narrative provocation. And then when you do so notice what you notice.

If a particular feeling comes up or if a particular response comes up or if you have an image or a memory or something, notice, you know, get curious about that. What's going on there? Why did that emerge? Because then we go into the next section. And just before then I also track my sleep scores and my readiness scores via the oūra ring. Just to get a sense of that. And if you're not ready for tarot, I might also suggest that you could try an oracle deck. This is a supra oracle deck.

by the team at Uusi. And then you can just draw a card. Manifestation is what we got today. But if I was to draw another card that seems a little bit too contrived, let's see one more card, we have nothing. Okay. And one third card, we have “seeker”. And you just like might draw one of these cards and be like, there's a little bit of flavouring what's going on there. Of course, you don't want to force it. It's just narrative provocation. All right.

Now we get into the actual journaling part. 44 minutes in. I thought this could be a 20 minute episode. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this meandering path. There are two questions for this first section as we start to kind of get into it. I call this the OMM and AWE section. OMM and AWE.

And these questions come from Michael Bungay Stanier the author of The Coaching Habit, the million plus copies, you know, coaching book. Michael is a very close friend of mine, MBS, and he shall be on the podcast at some point. He actually listened to the previous episode, like the first episode too, which is very touched. know, MBS is this, yeah, anyway, he's a good friend. He's lovely.

So the OMM question, the first two questions in his book, The Coaching Habit, which is a fantastic book as all of his books are. The first question, OMM, O-M-M stands for what's On My Mind. And so as you're beginning to do your journaling, the question is, what's on your mind? What's on your mind? And MBS presents this as a, you know, it's a good way to kind of like in a coaching situation, you just kind of cut past the normal chit chat and like, right, what's on your mind?

Instead of talking about the weather and you know, what's going on and stuff like that, what's on your mind? And in some senses, I like that this journaling activity that this template that I've got, it's almost like it's drawing inspiration from coaching book because there is some sort of metacognitive, not even metacognitive, I'm trying to, I'm getting allergic to just pure cognition metaphors here. But there is a kind of coaching element here where you...

have this introspective, reflective, contemplative practice that allows for different parts of yourselves to...

observe and advise. So what's on your mind? The second question is the AWE question: And What Else? And I love that this question is almost like you can be in awe of what's on your mind. And that question of “and what else” is what we keep on asking. Because just as with the 750 words of the morning pages, just as we keep on going with the hiking and until we get to that, the

kind of the stuff below the surface, the stuff at depth. That's where the magic lies. And so I don't always get to 750 words with this, but the OMM and AWE question is key. What's on your mind or what's on my mind and what else?

So that's kind of the, you know, if I get distracted but I've done that bit, cool. I've done some journaling. This is great. The next section, I find quite novel. Before I get to that, let me just tell you what I saw Kim come up with today. She's gotten her obsidian, this lovely section called Stirrings. And there's a line that Kim has shared with me that's been so helpful. And that line is, “write towards desire”. Write towards desire.

I don't know, it might be the Capricorn in me. But I often approach so much of my world and work with this kind of dour heavy responsibility. Like what are my obligations? What are my duties? What am I responsible for? And what's professional? How do I need to show up? How can I best serve others and so forth? And there's this, there's this lovely kind of almost green-red muse way to kind of bypass that write towards desire. I was having this conversation with Kim.

a while ago where I'm like, the world just seems to just want its productivity hacks and I just, you know, I really just want to, I really just want to be able to like help people tap into a more, for want of a better word, a more mythic way of living where there's a focus on relationality, qualitative meaning making, sense making, this unfurling shared sense of mystery and awe and wonder as we co-create a world more curious and kind. And she's like, why don't you write towards that? You know, why don't you just do that? And I was like,

yeah, maybe I will. So, “stirrings” could be something for you, I only just saw that this morning, so it's not in my thing yet, but maybe it will be. The next section I go to after the OMM and AWE section is what I call The Shadow. And here's where I ask myself two questions. What am I avoiding? And what am I pretending to not know? And this might take some time for you to get there, but...

If you have been journaling for some time, you do your OMM and AWE section on your mind, and what else. And then it's worth surfacing, what are you pretending to not know? Like, if you are good at journaling, and you have a practice of it, you will catch yourself bullshitting, or at least avoiding or pretending you don't know something. And I find this really useful early in the day, because it's often like there's really important work that I'm anxious about that I'm avoiding.

And then I can easily manifest all these other kind of productive things to do that make me a pseudo sense of productivity whilst the important stuff doesn't happen. And so in this shadow section, I'm seeking tensions and conflicting values. I’m like, what's going on here? Are there any hidden commitments that are holding me back from doing the work that needs to be done? Like what's actually going on here? And...

Again, as we know from Immunity to Change, the work from Robert Keegan and Lisa Lahey, this hidden commitments and conflicting values is often what keeps us back from meaningful progress and change and just locked into these perpetuated patterns where change is incremental at best. So diving into the shadow is useful as part of your daily journaling practice. I then get into the shape of the day,

which I call day shaping. This is simply a time-boxing activity where I list out the hours, the waking hours of the day. And then with the perspective of as if this is an amusing hypothesis, I then posit how the day will work. And this is normally this idealized, optimized kind of naive sense of how the day will unfurl. Of course, within a couple of hours, the plan will go off track, but it's nice to think about how things will fit in. Normally here,

it gives me a grounded sense of reality because without doing this time boxing, I'll be naively often optimistic about all the shit that I can get done in a day. And so then after the shape of the day, I then have what I call The Plot. And here's where I asked myself, what is the single most important thing that will progress the story? And by the story, I don't mean there's any kind of fixed narrative here. This is a non-narrative approach to life. But if we do think

of our life as an unfurling story, of which of course we're not the central characters here. We are ecological expressions. There is no center. But if we were to think knowing what we know about ourselves and our patterns and our proclivities, what is it that we can do today that will genuinely progress the plot? And by progress the plot, mean, how do we make stuff interesting? Like how do we actually catalyze meaningful progress here? What is the single most important thing you can do today that will be conducive to meaningful progress and kind of

you know, do it for the plot. Maybe it is calling that friend you've been avoiding calling because I don't know, phone call anxiety or whatnot. Maybe it is publishing that thing. Maybe it is, having that conversation about, you know, a performance, a raise or something with your, with your team leader or something like that. Whatever it is, do that thing. And I love that each day has just one thing, like today's thing:

published episode 3 because I was embarrassed about episode 2. So I just want to get episode 3 going and keep this kind of podcast thing rolling along. We're going to have guest conversations happening soon. I will demonstrate to myself that I can do an episode in less than an hour or less than half an hour. I will show myself. I will prove to the world that I can do that. It's not going to be today, though. But what will progress the plot? is the question you ask yourself.

And then I also in the plot, have the ((secret task)), which I write in double brackets. What was my secret task today? I'm just looking here and yeah, so my single most important thing today was record episode 3. And my secret task is to maintain the glint. Maintain the glint. And this is partly because reflecting on the last episode about disenchantment.

There was a tiredness that leaked through my voice. I was mumbling, I was scattered, I was all over the place. There's a kind of a glint that we need to maintain —even as we dance our way into doom and despair— that allows for that trickster magic to manifest. And if we're dancing, we can dance with the trickster magic. If we're too serious and dour and fixed and heavy, then we're going to get fucked up by it. So maintain the glint is my secret task for the day. So for you.

Think about what is the single most important thing you can do today? What is your secret task? You don't go telling anyone these things. Maybe you can tell your people your most important thing to do. I find it's useful for me to share with Kim. Okay, the one main thing I've got to do today is this. And she's like, okay, cool. Got it. I don't, but I don't share my secret thing. I have this, that's like manifest. Then comes, then finally comes errands and tasks. Now, this is so deliberate.

So many people by default start their journaling practice by writing down things that they have to do. And this, at least from my experience, you might be different for you, but at least to my sensibilities, starting with constraining factors right at the front end of your journaling will add a sense of constraint. You'll already be imagining the stuff that you have to do. You'll already be feeling kind of potentially a sense of resentment or frustration or anxiety

or time scarcity because you've just loaded up all the tasks that you want to do. Instead, how I suggest start with somatic practice stuff first and intui, interospect. Then go mythical with your tarot stuff, narrative provocations, then sink into the imaginal what's on your mind and what else and then confront the shadow.

then you're ready to kind of sense into the shape of the day and realize here's my most important task. You didn't even do the plot thing before the shape of the day. And then at the very end, if you need to go pick up a box of tissues from the supermarket, put that then. And then the bonus thing at the very end, if I get time to it, I have an end of day reflection where I ask three simple questions.

Or: three sentence provocations. Today I did this, today I learnt this, and tomorrow I shall this. This is subtly an “Acceptance & Commitment Therapy” thing that I've baked into it. I to position any setbacks as learnings. Today I did this, today I learnt this, and tomorrow I shall blah. Whether I actually do it, who knows, that remains to be seen. crap, I've just closed the, I just closed my notes tab. I think I was at the very end there.

no, I'm just going open it up. E3. And then at the end, I also as a bonus, I will write in my five year journal. I'm not as good at this as Kim is, but I love the artifact that the Hobonichi five year journal is. So usually for me, this is a practice that I have on my first coffee in the morning. Specifically, I try to ward away time on the internet.

Another important thing here is all of this journaling practice ought to happen before you've even looked at the internet. The more you can preserve this, you you've just been, you know, you've just been in the underworld. You just have Hermes of the Dark take you into that realm. You've surfaced into the light of day. Do not turn to the internet to corrupt this beautiful, pure mind of yours. Not that any of our minds are pure, but just, just like...

Take a moment, do some journaling before you go corrupt yourself with the internet. That's the idea. And then also I like to say on this day last year, which I have as part of a plugin, as part of Obsidian. That's my friends is how I go about journaling. If you are, you know, you don't have to be a wizard, but you might want to learn some spells or at least have the magical sensibilities of wizardry. Most of good wizardry is actually learning when not to use magic. And it's,

When I say wizard here, I'm just, I'm trying to be a little bit glib. What we're talking about here is there is a mythic unfurling of yourself. And if you pay attention to what is emerging for you, if you notice the glimmers, if you notice the disquiet, if you heed the beckoning and the calling for what may bring you closer to alignment to what is authentic and true for you, then it might actually translate to a more meaningful progress. And the challenge of course, is that meaningful progress

in this day and age doesn't look like what the conventional delusions of progress do. Our delusions of progress look like numbers going up. It looks like, you know, shit getting done, boxes getting ticked and numbers going upwards. Meaningful progress is much more qualitative. It's warm, it's relational, it's fuzzy, it's nebulous, it's intuitive and requires active ongoing sense making and participation. That is the pathway to fulfillment, development, depth,

and the cultivation of satisfaction and meaningful contributions for this collective world that we share. I think I might be able to get this under an hour. So let's see. Thank you so much for joining me. foxwizard.com/e3 is where you'll find the show notes. I really appreciate those that have said nice things. This does feel, I always get a bit of a vulnerability hangover after sharing these episodes with you. And it does feel incredibly tedious after this. I'll have...

a few hours editing the transcript, I don't know if anyone reads. But anyway, I'm sure it's worth it. It's nice to be able to share some of these things with you at depth. Thank you so much for listening. And here we go! Together; onwards we quest. Thanks.