Why me?

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 can’t stop thinking about it and whenever I tend to it, something lights up in me.

Every time I try to cram it into labels like spirituality, psychology or philosophy I feel like something is lost. Which is why I made up Full-Contact Living. (I am not the first person to use this term.)

FCL is a resonant idea for me. But I don’t know where its edges are. It’s more a centre of gravity than a doctrine. It’s an ongoing practice for me too, to remind me that this is it; that despite how it feels, life is never about to arrive. It’s absolutely and fully here, without effort.

I’m sharing it because this attitude has grown into something that has helped me feel more alive, awake and at home in this world than I thought possible. And because I think this kind of understanding is in high demand, in an increasingly shallow, left-hemispheric world.

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.