Join Me for a Tiny Experiment
Just a battle for the resources to live your life, just teeny tiny
Am writing to you from Washington, DC this week, as though to really lay on thick the blarghy blargh blargh of the moment (this post includes references to the scientific method, so I’m keeping it technical terms only lol). 80% of this readership is living in the US — hi. As a reader myself of daily and multi-week newsletters that process the world, I’ve been curious lately what I can add to the mix.
This space isn’t about the news.
But it is about how we show up — in the actual world. Which is shaped by the news.
As are we, to say the least. (I’m now imagining what exactly that shape might be.)
So this month I’m offering something small but doable — and quite kind, I hope.
A tiny experiment, in the vein of neuroscientist and author, Anne-Laure Le Cunff.
Inspired by something my mom shared in a How to Show Up Q&A you can watch:
She told us that years ago (and unbeknownst to me!) she began a tiny experiment:
I decided that every time I said something mean to myself, I was just going to write it down.
So for a week, I carried around one of these little spiral notebooks with me (nowadays it could have been a phone), and every time I said “oh that’s so stupid, you’re just never gonna get it” in my head — which I couldn’t stop because it was just a thought — I just wrote it down.
I just wrote it down.
And then at the end of the week, I read the notebook. And I had like about a dozen stock phrases that I was beating myself up with.
And I thought: Jesus! These things are really thoughts. They’re just baseball bats.
And they didn’t STOP right away. But every time they came after I read that notebook, I was able to dismiss them.
And gradually they totally stopped.
And it’s been many many years.
I do not criticize myself at all. I just don’t have negative thoughts.
I know my mom: this tracks. She’s really at peace. She does Qi Gong every day. She’s having a creative surge with her songwriting in her grandmother years. She loves her friends and doesn’t hold grudges. She’s easy to talk to about stuff going on in my life. She’s writing her memoir without big attachment about what happens with it. She and my dad are really sweet to each other.
Is this a tiny experiment you’d be into trying, along with me? I wonder if it would, among other things, normalize the stock phrases in our own heads.
We’re all hearing them — and once we see them, we can’t unsee how dumb they are.
Or such is the hypothesis!
Well… that AND that it’ll help us show up in our absolute magnificence.
Related: I’m in the middle of reading PEAK MIND by Amishi P. Jha, PhD — which has the delightful subtitle “find your focus, own your attention, invest 12 minutes a day.” So clearly tiny experiments are really appealing to me right now. She writes in the intro that mindfulness training — meaning meditation, although I think it’s pretty easy to argue that what my mom is suggesting is also a mindfulness training — is a form of brain training.
And she offers that “this ancient but enduring mental practice isn’t an abstract or exclusively philosophical endeavor. It’s a battle for the resources to live your life.”
In the rallying cry of that language, in the implied violence of the battle, it’s hard not to feel echoes of the danger we’re in — our neighbors are in, our community, our democracy — and the weight we’re carrying as sensitive souls breathing the blarghy blargh blargh in the air.
All the more reason to lay our inner baseball bats down.
If you’d like to join the experiment in real time, so we’re in solidarity as we try this new weird thing and face some of our inner voices but like TOGETHER, here’s the invitation:
💥 Let’s begin this Saturday, November 1st. And then meet on Friday, November 7th for our next How to Show Up Q&A and gently muse about our findings 💥
If you want in: between now and November 1st, pick out a tiny notebook or choose which phone app you’ll use (I think I’m going to go with the classic “Notes”).
NOV 1: Begin! Observe! Reel in horror! Or notetake in mischief! Just write it down.
NOV 7: Process. No need to share the details with anyone. But come to get seen and heard, wonder aloud, whatever came up, whatever needs to get released or reclaimed.
10:30a PT / 1:30p ET Friday, November 7th. Zoom link will go out that morning.
Love and good company,
Samara
PS. Thank you to Dr. Jane R. Shore for the “tiny experiments” inspiration! Go check out her Substack School of Thought. And of course Nancy Ellen Abrams, the mom in question, and her Substack The Philosophical Cabaret 💥
