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How to Find Flow in Everyday Life

How to Find Flow in Everyday Life

Have you ever spent time where you weren’t fully engaged with what you were doing, but you also weren’t really relaxed at all? I know I have been there, more often than I’d like to admit.

If you’ve found yourself in this in-between gray area of being active and relaxed, then one way that you can get out of that area is to spend more time in flow. Flowis what happens when we are so engaged with…

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How to Take Action (Even When You’re Afraid)

How to Take Action (Even When You’re Afraid)

How often have you found yourself wanting to make a change or try something new, but found that fear holds you back? You can imagine yourself at the end when you’ve accomplished what you wanted, but taking the first step towards it is terrifying?

I hear you loud and clear. I would say that I’m a mostly fearful person. “Cautious” is the word I use when I’m being euphemistic around people I don’t…

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How to Stay Focused Using the Pomodoro Technique

How to Stay Focused Using the Pomodoro Technique

It’s hard for me to focus on anything. What about you?

In his book Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says that one major aspect of optimal experience, or flow,is that all of our attention is “used up.” There simply isn’t any attention, or psychic energy, left to think about anything other than the task at hand, and that’s why we enjoy these tasks! We can forget about all of our other problems and…

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5 Tips for Slowing Down Your Life

5 Tips for Slowing Down Your Life

In this always-on, fast-paced world, it can be hard to remember to slow down, or even think about why we would want such a thing. There’s always something we could improve, work on, or learn about, and the longer we procrastinate the more time we waste.

In Aesop’s fable of the tortoise and the hare, the slow and steady Tortoise wins the race. While it can be fun and exciting to be busy and push…

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What is Self-Care, Really?

What is Self-Care, Really?

Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.—Audre Lorde

You may have noticed more and more people talking about self-care recently, and how it’s important to practice self-care and lists of 52 Self-Care Ideas to Practice Right Now! It’s being (or maybe already has been completely) co-opted by maybe-well-intentioned people who are…

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Chapter 20: Union

Whereas once Violet may have been frightened by the oppressive void on all sides, she was more afraid of both Leo and Mother Star. Puffed up and astral, Leo towered before the two of them, Violet feeling incredibly small and insignificant while Mother Star stood firm and calm. It took all of Violet’s might not to sink in the void and disappear forever. It felt like Leo’s furious expansion was…

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8 Things We Need to Have More Flow

8 Things We Need to Have More Flow

In his book Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says that flow experiences make life more enjoyable overall, and that flow is “the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter.” Although some activities are designed to make it easy to find flow—such as games, sports, and art—most of life is not spend absorbed in one of these activities.

While we can’t spend…

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Chapter 19: Void

Ralph’s directions led Thisbe back into the Immortal Society proper, to a door marked “Grieving.” She had seen the door before, of course, and figured the room beyond was to provide a therapeutic space for Immortals who lost loved ones. After all, they outlived their natural-body friends and family, and although they may not have spoken in years, Thisbe imagined it would still be difficult to…

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Why High Energy Isn't Necessarily Good

Why High Energy Isn’t Necessarily Good

There’s an unspoken assumption that we could all use more energy because energy is unequivocally a good thing. Just look at how prevalent caffeinated beverages are–coffee, tea, soda, and energy drinks–all demonstrate the implicit bias we have that we need more energy. It seems that to be anything less than high-energy is something to be avoided. But is all this energy doing us any good? Is high…

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Chapter 18: Resolve

Violet walked to school the next day, but she did not intend on staying at school that day. Her plan was to find Madeleine and Camilla as soon as she could so they could make their way to the safe space so Leo and Paul could be reunited, and she could let Mother Star know about it and her mother could be returned to her. On her way, Violet saw lots of people walking down the middle of the road,…

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5 Things You Should Know Before You Start a Meditation Practice

I have a new blog post up! "5 Things You Should Know Before You Start a Meditation Practice"

Photo by Jordan Opel on Unsplash

Do a search on meditation or mindfulness and you won’t find many articles criticizing the practices; some people have gone so far as to say that it truly is a panacea for our modern ills, and since there’s no actual drug there are no side effects.

In my two years of practicing meditation, I have come to a more nuanced understanding of meditation’s benefits as…

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Chapter 17: Control

Violet was driving along the bypass, heading home after school, when she heard a noise up ahead like the whirring of an engine. A wave of people shouting came from up ahead and the sound of metal clanking together and then it was Violet’s turn: her motorbike dropped to the street, startling her and sending eruptions of displeasure amongst her and the other drivers on the bypass. She didn’t need…

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I posted my first article on Medium! It’s about CBD in general because I couldn’t find a satisfactory overview that answered my questions about it, so here’s one that answered it for me and maybe will for you too!

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What would you like to see?

What would you like to see? I want to revitalize my blog and I'd like your input!

Hello hi did you miss me? It has been a while since I have written a blog post just as me that isn’t a chapter update for my web novel Project Leopold.

I want to commit to more consistently writing content for this blog again, but I am glad I took the time off to clarify for myself the direction I wanted this to go in. I have recently begun freelance writing (like, as-of-September-of-this-year…

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Chapter 16: Paul

Paul walked to the community gym near Ulric’s apartment. He didn’t know how to drive, and Ulric allowed Paul to go anywhere he could walk to as long as he was back by 5:30pm, when Ulric usually got home, and also kept his tablet with him so Ulric could get a hold of him. Ulric prepared a list of tasks for Paul to complete each day, or else Paul ran the risk of doing nothing with his day except…

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Chapter 15: Freedom

Photo by Bryan Goff on Unsplash. Finding this in the middle? I recommend you start at the beginning!

Icarus called Shiloh Grames. He hadn’t spoken to him in who knew how long, and if he hadn’t recently revisited his memories of his own experience with the animus experiments he might not have thought of it. Shiloh never once came to Icarus’s arcade and so he didn’t have a lot of information to…

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Chapter 14: Immortal

Photo by Bryan Goff on Unsplash. Finding this in the middle? I recommend you start at the beginning!

Violet rode her motorbike to Thisbe’s house unit. Thisbe waited outside, scrolling through her tablet’s newsfeed. Her face was pinched into a frown that made it look almost ugly. She quickly changed her expression as she heard Violet kill her engine.

“Oh hey,” she said. “I am so glad that you…