Yesterday, I wrote that:
I’d love to pretend I’m reporting from a place of enlightened awareness, but the truth is that 90% of whatever wisdom you might find here was stumbled upon through crisis and catastrophe. I’m always trying something, and after a few decades, you get a definitive sense of what does not work.
When I was a teenager, I felt a pervasive sense of yearning for “something more.” The default story of status and success was already ringing hollow and I found myself drawn to figures like Carl Jung and traditions like Taoism.
Full-Contact Living is explicitly ambitious. It aims to foster meditative realisation, psychological well-being, creative energy, relational harmony and philosophical discernment.
So why me? I’ve no academic background, I’ve been through my fair share of mental health crises, and I’m not part of any spiritual lineage.
I’m just a guy who meditates, reads, and thinks a lot while possessing a strange collection of personality traits that both enable this inquiry and make it highly enjoyable.
I grew up discontent with much of the story I was told about human beings and the cosmos. It felt like a flattened caricature with little appreciation of the inner depths I spent most of my days exploring.
At some point, I felt called to the depths. Through a mix of wonder and frustration, I began inhaling esoteric content and practising meditation.
These practices changed me, but there were many questions left unanswered, many undesirable ideas floating around these communities and little shared language for articulating these experiences.
I have spent my life constructing a big picture in my head.
This picture was born in a struggle to understand myself and the world. Or perhaps, more candidly, to find a better way to engage with a world that felt overwhelming and intrusive (hello fellow 5s 👋).
This picture was not just written in words or captured in ideas; it was shaped through experience and tended to through practice. It’s a living view—something enacted, not just understood.