Jesus could have chosen a more comfortable cross—but He didn’t. He could have worked a deus ex machina, summoning the hand of God to smite His captors and shield Him from injustice. He could have pleaded with the Romans to use ropes, not nails… But He didn’t.

Jesus knew, I think, that wherever He could go and whatever He could do, He would only find the same cross: His cross. He knew that the only true escape from the cross is victory over the cross, and the only true victory is love. Eighteen centuries later, Nietzsche (the most Christian of Antichrists) writes:

“My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different—not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it… but love it.”

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

How often do our eyes scan the horizon for a more comfortable cross to die on? How often do we think “If only…” and ask “Why me?” Even Jesus died with that question on His lips:

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

(Matthew 27:46, Mark 15:34).

Falling short of greatness, as Nietzsche would have it.

But love requires more than greatness; it requires victory even over victory itself—until love is all that remains.

May we know our cross and love it,

Simeon

Suggested Reading

The Crucified God by Jürgen Moltmann

What does it mean that God’s answer to suffering was to suffer? In The Crucified God, Jürgen Moltmann refuses to treat the cry of dereliction as an embarrassment to faith and makes it the centre of it — a God who does not rescue from the cross but enters it.

Order here to support SEEKER TO SEEKER at no extra cost. You can also browse my personal list of favourite books here.

Before becoming the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama studies under the greatest ascetics and meditation teachers of his time. He masters their techniques, and each teacher, in turn, offers to make him his successor. But Siddhartha always moves on, disappointed. His fierce search for liberation takes him to the brink of death, but even then he remains trapped in the labyrinth of his own mind.

What finally points the future Buddha the way, in the midst of exhaustion and despair, is a childhood memory:

“I recall once, when my father the Sakyan was working, and I was sitting in the cool shade of a rose-apple tree [that I experienced] rapture & pleasure born from seclusion, accompanied by directed thought & evaluation…’

“Then following on that memory came the realization: ‘That is the path to Awakening.’”

Mahāsaccaka Sutta; MN 36

The first and final secret of liberation, nirvāṇa, the Kingdom of Heaven, the good life, or whatever we like to call it, may be this: that it is simpler than anything we might imagine. As simple as a child resting in the shade of a tree.

Whenever we stray from what is simple—may we return,

Simeon

Suggested Reading

Selected Poems by R. S. Thomas

“RS Thomas was the greatest religious poet writing in English in the 20th century... His poems are an expression of his lifelong argument with himself, of his insistent search for God… His is an urgent, prophetic and unique voice.” (Amazon book description)

Order here to support SEEKER TO SEEKER at no extra cost. You can also browse my personal list of favourite books here.

Dear friends,

Are you focused on feeling GOOD, or are you focused on FEELING good? Modern psychology says that this distinction is a strong predictor of the quality of our lives.

I’ve been reading up on Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (or ACT) recently—a secular, science-based form of therapy that shares a surprising number of insights with Buddhism. One of these insights is that resisting or trying to “fix” difficult emotions only makes them worse. Countless studies have shown that the most reliable “technique” for facing suffering (or anxiety, desire, anger, etc.) is simply to allow ourselves to experience it. To feel it as it actually arises in the body-mind here and now. We don’t seek a way out of suffering; we feel our way through it and come out whole on the other side.

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I will also be responding to questions from the chat, so make sure you join and submit yours!

You can watch the lecture live (or in replay) here:

I hope this brings some extra clarity and motivation to your journey!

With love and gratitude,

Simeon

If “all phenomena are not-self” (as the Buddha says), then who inherits past karma, who gets reborn, and who becomes enlightened? And why did the Buddha reject every idea of a self while refusing to say that the self doesn’t exist?

I invite you to explore these questions and more on my upcoming live stream on YouTube this Saturday (August 29th) at 12:00 PM ET / 9:00 AM PT.

I’ve explored the Buddha’s no-self teaching before, but I recently discovered a new perspective on it that I want to share with you. It is a perspective that makes sense of the self view, the no-self view, and the letting go of views as stages of the same path to awakening.

I’ll spend most of the live stream discussing the Buddha’s landmark teaching as found in the original suttas of the Pali Canon. After the lecture, there will be time for Q&A where I will address your questions and thoughts.

I look forward to going live with you on Saturday! You can find the stream page here: https://youtube.com/live/ro2YSSHwU98?feature=share

With love and gratitude,

Simeon

I came across this tweet by Naval Ravikant:

“The only true test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life.”

The most perceptive and skillful among us (the argument goes) are those who best know how to fulfil their desires.

The tweet has appealed to many: shared 10,000 times, saved 11,000 times, and liked by 43,000 accounts. It is a tenet that vindicates both the pursuit of one’s desires and the exploitation of others’ desires, making all participants in our consumerist culture happy.

For the Buddha, a skillful (or “intelligent”) person is one who finds and applies the answer to the following question:

“[W]hat, having been done by me, will be for my long-term welfare & happiness?”

Cūḷa Kammavibhaṅga Sutta; MN 135

Maybe getting what we want out of life will be for our long-term welfare & happiness… Maybe not. Until we understand desire—where it comes from and what it leads to—putting our intelligence in full service to it is unintelligent indeed.

May we desire intelligently,

Simeon

Suggested Reading

To Have or To Be? by Erich Fromm

Erich Fromm, one of the twentieth century’s clearest psychological critics of consumer life, argued that two modes compete for every human life: having, which measures a life by what it acquires, and being, which measures it by what it becomes.

Order here to support SEEKER TO SEEKER at no extra cost. You can also browse my personal list of favourite books here.

Dear friends,

We’ll have our community group call this time tomorrow. This is a great way to connect with other seekers and exchange stories, insights, and questions on the path we share. Here are the details again:

🗓 Date: August 22nd

🕖 Time: 12:00 PM ET / 9:00 AM PT

📍 Sign Up: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/pLZ2FZ8CTWqHcg7NZyGB0Q

Remember, you…

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Dear friends,

Inner exploration can be a solitary journey, and there can be few opportunities in our everyday lives for conversations on the meaning of life, the nature of reality, and the challenges of self-discovery. Our seeker’s community, however, is ripe for such deep discussions and is already full of people interested in having them.

I’m writing to invite you to the next SEEKER TO SEEKER group call this Saturday (August 22nd), which is an opportunity for everyone to share (and hear others share) personal moments of learning, challenge, or transformation from recent weeks. I have been hosting these calls for my supporters on YouTube and Patreon for some time now, and I think it is only natural to make you, my supporters on Substack, part of them, too.

(I should have done so long ago…)

Our group video calls on Zoom are a great way to connect with fellow seekers, find support and inspiration, and hear different perspectives on the path we all share. There is also no requirement to speak, so you are free to join and simply listen. I hope to make the calls a monthly ritual for our community going forward.

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Most of us cannot explain the grammar of the languages we speak. This doesn’t keep us from using that grammar almost perfectly in the most sophisticated ways every day. The structure of language is invisible to us precisely because it underlies our thought patterns, not despite it. We can think about grammar analytically, but we are fluent in a language only to the degree that we don’t have to think about it when we speak it. Language ceases to be an object and is experienced as part of the subject.

The same principle applies to other unconscious contents. We are “fluent” in our traumas, our projections, and our defense mechanisms only when we are unaware of them. With our rational, conscious minds, we may wonder why we seem to make the same mistakes over and over again, while the unconscious “grammar” of our psyche dictates our every thought, word, and action. As Jung is quoted as saying: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

Most of all, we are “fluent” in our self-identity, the first and last concern of our conscious lives. As Yogācāra Buddhists pointed out centuries ago, a mental stream identifies as a self precisely to the degree that it is ignorant of the fact it is doing so. A deep enough glimpse into how the mind constructs the self can break the spell, and the mental stream wakes up from the dream of being you. Free of language, the mind can rest in silent and unutterable “thusness”.

May thought terminate in understanding,

Simeon

Suggested Reading

I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas R. Hofstadter

Where does the felt sense of “I” actually come from? Douglas Hofstadter proposes that a self is not a substance but a pattern, a loop of symbols folding back on themselves until an “I” seems to appear, real enough to grieve and love and mistake for solid ground. Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winner, 2007.

Order here to support SEEKER TO SEEKER at no extra cost. You can also browse my personal list of favourite books here.

Dear friends,

There is a Bulgarian movie called The World Is Big and Salvation Lurks Around the Corner, based on the novel by the same name. I’ve neither seen the movie nor read the novel, but the title is not something you forget easily.

The past month has been quite difficult for me. By now, I’ve learned that inner healing usually involves an encounter with long-avoided hurt… But it is one thing to know this as a principle, and quite another to experience it anew. And yet this latest cycle of my journey has brought me a new understanding of healing.

I now know I’ve been fleeing from suffering for most of my conscious life—through compulsive behavior and thinking, through workaholism, perfectionism, and countless other semi-conscious avoidance strategies. It took years of personal work and therapy for me to discover that fact. It took me decades to understand that sometimes (often) the healthiest thing you can do about suffering is to just allow yourself to experience it.

As soon as I recognized my avoidance of difficult emotions, I swung to the other extreme, and my defense mechanisms adopted a new strategy: trying to solve suffering. Now my response became mindfulness, or rather, an aggressive, impatient attempt at mindfulness. My assumption was that if I just concentrated my awareness in the right way, it would dissolve every experience that is not peaceful, joyful, and loving. Our “original mind” is free of defilements and suffering, the Buddhists say, so I concluded that if I was suffering, that just meant I was not mindful enough.

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Dear friends, two months ago, I announced that I was working on something: a guide for the journey of shadow work. Something that can help us discover the hidden parts of our psyche and find a healthy way to relate to them.

That work is now finished, and I can finally share the new Shadow Workbook.

Through over 40 pages and 8 exercises, the workbook explains the key principles of shadow integration and offers practical ways to implement them in your life. It also includes 5 companion videos linked at key sections, an appendix, and a map of literature, film, art, and music to enrich your journey.

All the theory and exercises in the workbook are based on the writings of key figures in depth psychology, such as Carl Jung, Edward Whitmont, James Hillman, Barbara Hannah, Liliane Frey-Rohn, Erich Neumann, and others.

You can buy the Shadow Workbook as a printable PDF here.

Meeting my shadow has been (and remains) one of the most transformative paths on my journey. I hope this tool offers a useful entry point to those who are yet to begin this work and a reliable companion to those who have already descended into their depths.

With love and gratitude,

Simeon

P.S. I created the Shadow Workbook in collaboration with my partner, Elly, and I want to give a shoutout to her for all the hard work she put into making this project a reality!

P.P.S. I also want to thank everyone who shared their feedback and ideas when I first announced this project. Your comments, messages, and emails helped shape the workbook into the most useful tool Elly and I could create.

P.P.P.S. If you need the Shadow Workbook but you cannot afford it, reach out via email and we will figure something out.

I invite you to watch the recording of my recent live stream about shadow work, where I present 3 practical exercises you can try out today.

Phil calls the Odyssey “the original seeker account”, seeing Odysseus as a man on a quest to win back his soul. In our conversation, we explore the spiritual wisdom of the epic and the lessons it can teach us to live more wisely ourselves. Some of the questions we touch on are:

- How do we heal the wounds that violence and temptation open in our souls?
- What can help us choose life over the false paradise of pleasure?
- How can telling our own story help us reclaim our lives from trauma and addiction?
- What is the force that can help us endure the dark night of the soul?

I hope this conversation inspires you to rediscover Homer’s masterpiece, and that it serves you as a companion on your own odyssey through life.

With love and gratitude,

Simeon

P.S. You can order Phil’s new book here. Your purchase would earn me a small commission at no extra cost to you.

The Wisdom of the Odyssey by Phil Cousineau

Our insistence on not suffering may well be the greatest source of our suffering. In our natural (and understandable) effort to avoid unnecessary pain, we quickly forget that there is necessary pain.

It is a sentiment of deep entitlement, once we consider it objectively. From subatomic annihilation through the indifferent brutality of nature and human culture, to the collision of galaxies—the world is engulfed in strife. And yet in the midst of that, we demand ever-persisting peace, joy, and flourishing. If our lives do not embody this ideal, we conclude there must be something wrong with our lives, not the ideal. We then view suffering as something unnatural, a bug in Creation that God overlooked on the seventh day.

One of the genius moves of the Buddha (or those who later compiled his teachings) is that he named suffering the First Noble Truth. This means suffering is not a bug, not even a feature of life—but one of its core building blocks.

To deny suffering (whether through resistance or through escape) is ultimately to deny life. The Buddha taught liberation from suffering as his first and last concern, but he insisted that this liberation comes only through a deep, sustained, curious, and compassionate look at the pain in our lives and where that pain comes from. Suffering is ultimately a teacher; once seen and heeded, suffering itself becomes our guide to liberation.

May we seek insight rather than escape,

Simeon

Suggested Reading

The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius

Written in prison in the months before his execution, Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy stages a dialogue between a condemned man and Lady Philosophy herself, who dismantles his grievance against fortune argument by argument. One of the oldest and clearest cases in the Western tradition that suffering, faced rather than resisted, need not be the end of peace.

Order here to support SEEKER TO SEEKER at no extra cost. You can also browse my personal list of favourite books here.

Why are we never content? Whatever we come to possess, experience, or achieve, it only brings us fleeting satisfaction and then leaves us with a hunger for more. Is it even possible to find peace and happiness that last?

Over two millennia ago, the Buddha confronted these same questions, and this led him to one of his deepest (and most counterintuitive) insights: that the very thing we’re all doing to find happiness is what keeps it from us.

A Gnawing Feeling

Anxiety, regret, disappointment, the gnawing feeling that something about our life is not quite as good as it can be... We humans have always had reasons to be dissatisfied, but probably never as many as we have today. We are, after all, living in the age of “endless opportunity”, which also means endless missed opportunities.

For every choice we’ve made, we know there are a million others we could’ve made that might just have turned out better. The fact that no achievement, experience, or possession grants us lasting contentment seems to confirm our suspicion. As does social media, constantly feeding us airbrushed images of perfect lives and ads for the next purchase that will solve all of our problems. We thus keep one another on the hamster wheel, never arriving at the life we are craving, but ever departing from the life we are actually living here and now.

This restless searching and discontent is not a modern malaise. Millennia ago, the Buddha diagnosed it as the universal affliction of human beings. In Pāli, the language of early Buddhism, it is called dukkha.

Dukkha is a notoriously difficult word to translate. It covers a whole range of meanings: “dissatisfaction”, “stress”, and “suffering” are different shades of it. But by dukkha, the Buddha does not mean any particular experience; he means the fact that every experience, sooner or later, brings us discontent.

Painful experiences bring discontent because, well, we would rather not feel pain. Pleasurable experiences bring discontent because they never last and only leave us wanting more. Even neutral experiences bring discontent, as their unstable coming and going keep us always on our toes, chasing fleeting peace and satisfaction in an unpredictable world.

This teaching can seem like a bleak view on life, like a form of pessimism or nihilism. But if we consider “the teaching within the teaching”, as it were, we actually find the key to that peace and happiness we are all craving.

The Teaching Within the Teaching

Think for a moment what it would mean to live as if nothing can bring you contentment. What would it be like to live your life exactly as you are already living it, with the only difference that you do not seek happiness in any achievement, possession, or experiences of whatever kind?

It’s easy to confuse the Buddha’s teaching with New Age slogans such as “peace comes from within” or the like. Owning a Porsche might not be the key to happiness, but then maybe a meditation retreat will do the job, or some life-changing psychedelic experience?

You see, the Buddha’s teaching goes deeper than merely internalising our quest for contentment. In the original suttas, he does recognize the bliss of deep meditation as superior to sensual pleasure. But even such transcendent experiences, the Buddha says, bring discontent. Why? For the simple reason that they never last.

It is irrelevant what we are pursuing in our quest for happiness, the Buddha says, be it a material or a spiritual thing. Our mistake is not that we are trying to get contentment from the wrong things. Our mistake is that we are trying to get contentment.

We are like a man looking for his sight. He will wear himself out searching the whole world and never once even glimpse it. If some well-intentioned guru tells him to look for his sight within, the man will only get more confused.

The heart of the Buddha’s message is that the very search for contentment is bringing us discontent. The search itself creates the lack it is trying to rectify. And the Buddha did not just talk about this; he exemplified it in his life.

Think of all the things you derive pleasure, joy, or satisfaction from in your life. These may include your relationships, your work, your home, money, sex, food, etc. Now imagine losing each and every one of these things. Imagine living penniless, stripped of all social status, owning only one set of clothes, living on whatever food strangers have to spare, and avoiding all sensual pleasures.

For most (if not all) of us, the above is a worst-case scenario. It is a life deprived of all our familiar sources of pleasure and comfort. But that’s exactly the kind of life the Buddha chose for himself and his most devoted followers! In the early suttas, we read:

Just as a bird, wherever it goes, flies with its wings as its only burden; so too is [the monk] content with a set of robes to provide for his body and almsfood to provide for his hunger. Wherever he goes, he takes only his barest necessities along. This is how a monk is content.

Samaññaphala Sutta; DN 2

For the Buddha, monastic life is not about deprivation or punishing ascetic practices. It is a life devoted to freedom. And a happy life.

It is staggering that most people’s worst-case scenario is actually the kind of life the Buddha embraced as most conducive to contentment. And we know as a historical fact that the richest and most powerful people of his time would visit his cell to seek guidance on how to live happier lives. Even just thinking about this can release some of our anxiety about not achieving or owning the right things. You don’t need more than a set of clothes and some food to be happy, the Buddha says… And in fact, he goes further. You don’t need anything at all.

Peace that Passeth Understanding

Let’s briefly look at nirvāṇa, or nibbāna in Pāli. Nibbāna is famously known as the goal of Buddhism, the end of all discontent. But the popular understanding of it as some great achievement, event, or experience is not what the Buddha had in mind. Here is how he speaks about nibbāna:

There is, monks, an unborn — unbecome — unmade — unfabricated [...] precisely because [that exists], escape from the born — become — made — fabricated is possible.

Nibbāna Sutta; Ud 8.3

I know this may sound way too mystical and abstract at first, but allow me to elaborate. The Buddha is making one of his most important points here.

Nibbāna is essentially what we are all craving: complete peace and happiness. Now, what could the Buddha mean by calling this “unborn” and “unfabricated”?

In our everyday language, the Buddha means that true peace and happiness cannot be produced, gained, or achieved. The things we produce, gain, or achieve—whether a Porsche or spiritual ecstasy—these come and go. And no matter how pleasurable or profound they feel, they always leave us with the aftertaste of discontent and further craving. Nibbāna is contentment that neither comes nor goes, but always is.

I understand this may seem removed from our everyday experience, but it is not only monks and scholars who can benefit from the Buddha’s deeper teachings. Living as a monk, practicing meditation, and studying the suttas can greatly help one realize nibbāna, but they are not necessary for it. And that’s the whole point. Nothing is necessary for nibbāna.

There is nothing you need to do, no place you need to visit, no experience you need to have, no item, knowledge, or teacher you need to be content. The reason why the Buddha recommends letting go of attachments is not that deprivation produces happiness. Nothing produces true happiness, as he clarifies; nibbāna is unfabricated. Rather, as we learn to no longer seek contentment through external or internal sources, we begin to recognize the unborn, ever-present contentment inherent in being. We don’t achieve nibbāna—we realize it.

I don’t think the only way to embody this insight is to retreat from the world and become a monk or a nun. I think we can realistically retain most of our interests, goals, plans, and activities, with the only difference that we are no longer milking them for fleeting pleasure or some imagined satisfaction. We can continue doing what is necessary and what brings us joy, only we no longer burden it with the expectation that it will sate our thirst for peace and happiness. We recognize nothing will sate that thirst, as the only reason this thirst exists is that we’re failing to recognize that which is already and always present.

Of course, discovering the truth of this insight is not as simple as reading this essay or a few suttas. An intellectual conclusion lacks the power to truly change our deeper patterns of thinking and behaviour. The Buddha knew this, and that is why he was not a philosopher. He acted more as a physician, and he prescribed a holistic approach to liberation, with guidance on the way we speak, act, work, meditate, and more. He called this approach the Noble Eightfold Path, and it is his practical guide to nibbāna.

So here is the paradox of the matter. There is nothing we need to do to be happy, but there are all these ways in which we are keeping ourselves unhappy that we need to relinquish. Even though nibbāna is not some distant destination, there is a path that leads to it. That path, however, does not consist of accumulating, but of releasing, not of making something happen, but of recognizing that which already is.

I invite you to read my essay on the Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path next, where we explore it with the help of one of the most powerful suttas. As always, thank you for reading, and remember: What you seek is seeking you. See you next time.

Dear friends,

I had a peculiar encounter recently that I want to share with you. I was with my fiancée and stepson in Greece, and I was struggling to fall asleep in our hot, tiny hotel room, which faced a noisy main street. I was sweating all over, tossing and turning, suspended in some kind of liminal, hallucinatory space where dream and reality intermingled. In this space, there appeared before me, just as real and matter-of-fact as the furniture around me, my old mentor, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

I was not in any way surprised by Nietzsche’s presence. If anything, I felt happy to see him after such a long time apart. As soon as I greeted him, I started sharing about my experiences in recent years and the lessons life has taught me. I was eager to hear his thoughts and for the two of us to celebrate our shared love of wisdom, as we had in old times. But this time, something was off.

Whatever insight or opinion I shared with him, Nietzsche obliterated it with impeccable logic and psychological criticism. Without mercy, he pointed out the vanity and inconsistencies in every bit of wisdom I thought I had acquired. The experience was humiliating. To make something good out of it, I decided to take it as a learning opportunity. I started agreeing with Nietzsche’s arguments (which appeared unassailable) and ended up extolling the exact opposite of every idea and view I had shared at first. I hoped my mentor would be pleased that, while I had not been able to reach the right conclusions myself, at least I could recognize the errors of my thinking.

To my utter dismay, Nietzsche shook his head in disapproval. He took each of the arguments he had given me—arguments I had just agreed with—and demonstrated how crude and naive they were. While at first I had been unable to defend my own position, I was now just as unable to defend the opposite of my position! Desperate and confused, I started suggesting alternative concepts, theories, and interpretations, hoping that something would land, but Nietzsche kept refuting every statement I made. Seeing that whatever I said only got me more tangled up in his web of logic, I gave up.

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How often do we break ourselves in our search for wholeness through work! We act on an assumption so deeply rooted as to be indistinguishable to us from truth: that we are incomplete in ourselves and only great effort can make us whole.

Regardless of whether it is work of the hands, the mind, or the heart, the goal is to make something happen that is worth the trouble. And—so the assumption goes—the greater the trouble, the worthier the work! We live an alchemist’s life, transmuting incompleteness and hardship into wholeness and achievement.

It is not that we are absolutely delusional. Some of the most important work is some of the most difficult, indeed. It is rather that we reduce creativity and activity to a linear model in which achievement is equivalent to the amount of suffering it requires. Sometimes, that’s just not the case. Sometimes (and the more mature the work, the more this applies), achievement lies not so much in what we make happen, but in what we allow to happen.

As our skill develops, the quality of our work is increasingly defined by how little effort it involves. How little we get in its way. This kind of work cannot arise out of the same anxiety and incompleteness that drive effort. Immersion, play, and celebration are necessary conditions for it—so much so that what we once called “effort”, we now experience as love.

This highest form of work cannot be our means for achieving wholeness, as it requires wholeness from the start. It is a means only to itself, having itself as its only end.

May we learn the art of effortless work,

Simeon

Suggested Reading

The Joyous Science by Friedrich Nietzsche

In The Joyous Science, Nietzsche writes philosophy as song, experiment, wound, laughter, and provocation. It is a book about learning to affirm life without needing life to become painless, moral, or safe. For readers interested in the creative life, it offers a bracing reminder that the highest seriousness may not appear as strain, but as freedom, style, and play.

Order here to support SEEKER TO SEEKER at no extra cost. You can also browse my personal list of favourite books here.

I am happy to present my second conversation with Peter Russell, where we speak about his new book, How to Meditate Without Even Trying. Peter and I go deep into both the practical and the metaphysical side of meditation, and he explains how relaxing into the practice can lead us deeper than our best efforts could.

I think this episode will be useful for anyone who has ever felt they are “bad” at meditation, unable to quiet the mind, or unsure how to bring practice into ordinary life. Peter and I explore the fundamentals of meditation, how to stick with it even with a busy schedule, what to do when thoughts and strong emotions appear, and how not to turn it into avoidance of the personal work we have to do. We also had a deep discussion on a few audience-submitted questions, and I thank everyone who helped shape the conversation!

Thank you all for your support, kind comments, and feedback! I hope you find this episode useful, and know that I couldn’t do this work without you.

With love and gratitude,

Simeon

Suggested Reading

How To Meditate Without Even Trying by Peter Russell

Order here to support SEEKER TO SEEKER at no extra cost. You can also browse my personal list of favourite books here.

“This once, but never again,” we hear a curse in the moment. And we toil at loud things to ring out through the ages, and at monuments to stand the test of time. But there is no test. From silence we come and to silence we return, along with our names and all we have named.

So we imagine our gods eternal, as we fail to perceive the divine in the moment. We argue for truths universal, as the relative slips the grasp of our minds. We close our eyes to the here and now and retreat into dreams of heavens. This desertion of life is called wisdom and faith by many!

We assume God so weak as to need to be eternal, truth so poor as to have to be universal, and heaven so distant as to be other than life. We assume that, like all else, these would burn away if placed in the furnace of time. And we don’t allow for the possibility that they may be the very spark of the present. What if it is a blessing that the moment carries?

“This once and never again… But forever!”

May we bless the moment back,

Simeon

Suggested Reading

The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel

What if eternity does not stand beyond time, but opens within it? In The Sabbath, Abraham Joshua Heschel teaches us to enter time as a sanctuary, where the fleeting moment is not an obstacle to the sacred but its very dwelling place.

Order here to support SEEKER TO SEEKER at no extra cost. You can also browse my personal list of favourite books here.

Dear friends,

I started working on something recently, and I want to share a bit about it with you. Any thoughts or feedback you could give me on it would be very valuable!

I’ve done a number of pieces now on shadow integration (working with the difficult parts of our inner life). Your comments on these have shown me just how universal this topic is and that it remains relevant at all stages of the path. So, I’m thinking of creating a tool that can aid shadow work, regardless of a person’s experience.

What I have in mind is a digital, printable workbook on shadow integration. It will be based on the work of key depth psychologists like Carl Jung, Erich Neumann, Liliane Frey-Rohn, and others. I see the workbook as containing brief theoretical explanations, followed by exercises adapted from the writings of the authors. The workbook will offer a structured path through the three stages Jung outlined: Recognition, Listening, Negotiation. This builds on the video on shadow integration I made last year: https://www.seekertoseeker.com/p/face-your-demons-and-grow

I imagine the workbook as something you spend 20 minutes per day on for a week or two and that guides you in encountering and making peace with those aspects of yourself you find most difficult to accept. Some of the exercises can be redone periodically as you deepen your understanding of your shadow.

This is the idea in brief. The workbook will be priced, but if anyone needs it and can’t afford it, they can reach out, and I’ll provide it for a symbolic price.

And here are some questions I have for you:

• Would you use this workbook if I create it?

• What would make it more valuable to you?

• Does €15 feel like a fair price for it?

I will be grateful for any feedback you can give me on this! If I go ahead with creating the workbook, your comments will help me shape it into the most useful tool for you.

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Working with my shadow has changed my life, and continues to change it. I hope this tool will open this experience to more people. Thank you for reading and for all your support!

With love and gratitude,

Simeon

Dear friends,

I’ve had something of a revelation recently that I want to share. It concerns a vulnerable, not-yet-healed part of myself, so I will approach it from somewhat farther away.

Lately, I’ve been reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. A key element of the story is the One Ring, forged by the Dark Lord in the fires of Mount Doom. As evil spreads over the land, the people’s final hope rests with two unassuming friends tasked with sneaking the Ring back into the mountain where it was forged. Only by casting the Ring back into the fires it came from can it be destroyed, along with the evil that created it. It is a gripping story, but only recently have I begun to appreciate how meaningful it is.

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