This week’s letter is a little longer than usual, but this week was also fuller than usual and there’s much I want to share because of so many resonances with this work.

I had the great pleasure over the last week of spending most of it at an annual folk festival. The festival itself centers around the wealth of music in our regional and national community, and as the name suggests, the music is very organic and connected directly to the lives of people in relatable ways. The instruments are made of wood and strings and through them and raised voices we come together every year to celebrate who we are and what connects us as humans. It’s joyous, gritty, often muddy, and oh so full of life.

The festival itself is a highlight of many people’s annual lives and runs almost entirely on volunteer help. All of the moving parts of a large festival are run by people invested and interested in the overall success of the event. There are over a thousand people who step up with their time and effort to animate the cells of a complex organism so that tens of thousands of people can enjoy four days of chosen community in celebration of ourselves and our culture. Musicians get paid at respectable rates, the volunteers all get fed and given open access to the entire event, and ticket holders experience a phenomenal bill of top shelf music and craft. It is a truly a wondrous affair through and through, a win-win for everyone involved.

One of the most remarkable things about the four day event is that it could very well be called The Kindness Festival, as kindness and generosity are so abundantly infused into the very fabric of the experience. In it’s 63rd year, I’ve heard that this is the longest running festival in North America, and the culture that has grown up around it is immensely warm and welcoming. At every turn complete strangers and lifelong friends holler “Happy Fest!” and it creates both an invitation and a directive for the experience.

Because the gathering has cultivated such a pleasant and inclusive atmosphere over the years, there is ample opportunity to practice connection, kindness, and be open to possibility. Even though I have enjoyed this particular event for over 40 some years, this was the first time I approached it through the lens of this work and all of the writing I’ve done surrounding mindful kindness over the past two years. It was like walking into a living laboratory of what human community could be if left to our own devices.

What a revelation, to witness kindness and people taking care of one another in practice on a large scale and through all of the practicalities of a typical day. There was commerce and the exchange of goods and services, meals and medical care, as well as the challenges of rain, chilly mornings, and not enough sleep. And throughout it all there was a persistent sense of a warm, grounded, welcoming, and inclusive functional community. Yes, when all is said and done it is less than one week for most participants, but I couldn’t escape the sense that it still illustrated how people want to show up if given the choice.

As dreamy positive as most of it was, I also want to own the challenges that welled up in me while surrounded by such warmth and exuberance. Experiencing a fully energized version of myself brought to the surface some of the frustrations that I hold surrounding the most meaningful relationship I am blessed to be in, as it created such a vivid contrast. Without sugar coating it, I expressed that frustration in a less than admirable way to the human I love the most. I didn’t take the breath, and my expression of frustration was not mindful or considerate. I recognize in hindsight that I was so eager to be in the moment with this delicious celebration that I snapped at my love when she wasn’t right there with me energetically, and I hurt her by doing so.

I ended up leaving the festival for a time to ensure that we could talk in our own space and prioritize our healing, and our conversation was hard and real as I faced my failings. It really put me to the test of stating how I hurt her, and not making an excuse for it, just simply stating it. I am certainly not proud of failing so, and oh what a pitiful trap we all face that it’s the easiest thing in the world to hurt those that we care about the most. I can only take some comfort in our repair, as the conversation that followed affirmed our commitment to one another and deepened our dialogue together. I carry forward a more vivid charge to up my game in how I communicate when frustrated, tired, or angry, and am grateful beyond words that my partner is forgiving when I fall.

Reading back over this I get a powerful recognition that even though this breaks from my usual patterns with this letter, that this was an experience that really wanted to be shared. It has a life of its own, both the event itself and this telling about it, and I’m feeling the need to honor that. I walked away from the experience stating that my heart felt very full to overflowing, and it makes me realize how powerfully hungry this entire community (our entire world?) is for an experience of affirming that we can functionally come together when we chose to, and all walk away better for it when we do so. We desperately need this kind of affirmation in our lives in this day and age of division and chaos, to be reminded that people can be good to one another at scale, and that we do have the capacity to take care of one another while still honoring basic needs.

I also can’t help recognizing that the aftermath of this festival experience is following the same pattern of the wellness retreat, in that the real benefit, and the real effort required to achieve the real benefit, is in the following weeks and months after such a peak experience. The true and lasting value comes in how we work to integrate powerful insights and ground them into our daily lives, and is precisely where so much wellness work fails. When we’re not actively supported in the work that follows a peak through daily integrations and practical anchoring we can easily lose the benefits we’ve glimpsed, and that so often turns into resentment or guilt that we’ve somehow not become the person we glimpsed. We need the peak experiences of insight and celebration, yes, that’s what serves as reminders and guideposts. But to make it real, to make insights last, we all need help in learning the patterns of small repeatable practices woven into our daily lives that help ground our peak experiences and insights and turn them a practical part of our daily existence.

This is the work I’m dedicated to building and sharing through The University of Every Waking Day, small, digestible, practical, and repeatable daily practices that fit within a typical day. My failings always serve to remind me about who I don’t want to be, and who I would rather work towards being, that better version of myself that I glimpse during peak experiences, and who has a greater footing in every waking day through consistent practice.

Be Kind. See What Happens.

Eric

P.S. ~ When was the last time you went out of your way to ensure a rift or a wound didn’t fester into something greater?

It feels like the prevailing winds in the wellness world hold that the goal of practice is to not blow it, to keep our cool no matter what, to take the breath every single time we’re challenged or triggered so that the sharp word never even leaves our mouths. That is such a lovely idea and an instagram-able picture perfect posture, and you know as well as I do that it’s not ever going to happen that way. Or maybe it does, when we’ve hit peak flow when surrounded by like minded spiritual kin on day 3 of our reset retreat weekend. But what about the rest of the week, Monday through Friday when the demands of our lives constantly push us in unexpected ways and we’re in the thick of it with what we need to be doing most of the time?

I miss the breath all the time. I get triggered frequently when witnessing selfishness when out and about, or snap without thinking at a rude driver creating dangerous conditions for everyone else while doing 70 on the turnpike. It’s the easiest thing in the world to get short with the people I love most on the days I’m running on too little sleep, and the whole grand practice goes right out the window in the space of a second. Or does it?

The dare is not to stop missing opportunities to practice. The dare is to come back to them faster.

A big part of this work is acknowledging that most of us don’t have the luxury to be removed from the triggers, stressors, or demands of daily life, so we’ve got to keep it real. So it’s not about pretending we don’t get triggered and have to maintain the facade of the “it’s all good” zen buddha all of the time. Who really believes that anyway?

This practice is really all about the next time you catch yourself when you’re already a full sentence into the reaction, when you’re already snippy, already gone to a space you’d rather not be, and then remember to take the breath. If you want you can say three small words to help anchor the practice. Say them out loud if you can manage it, or under your breath if that is all you have. “Missed it. Reset.” Then you take the breath you forgot, right there in the middle of the mess, and you begin again from where you actually are.

That is it. That is the rep.

There’s something deeply powerful about acknowledging the missed opportunity and taking responsibility for it. And then to associate that ownership with a tool that helps us step back into intentionality ~ the reset button. Ownership, Action. “Missed it. Reset.” It’s a great image, and it really helps us integrate the practice into daily life.

Consistency was never built in the calm stretches where anyone can be kind. It’s built in the hard minutes, the ones with the traffic and the deadlines and the kid who won’t put on their shoes. Real change is not about getting a cleaner run at it tomorrow. It is about shortening the distance between the miss and the return, until coming back becomes the most natural thing you do, and humbly owning it becomes grace.

There’s another layer hiding in this one that I don’t want to miss. When you say “missed it, reset” where another person can hear you, it’s you refusing to perform. It’s you not pretending you had it handled the whole time. It’s owning being someone who lost it and chose to start over anyway, in front of whoever happens to be standing there, and that is a far more honest and respectable thing to hand someone than a calm you don’t actually feel.

So there’s your mission this week, if you choose to accept it. Miss it, notice that you missed it, and reset. Miss it again an hour later, and reset again. I have a feeling you will surprise yourself with how quickly the coming back starts to get easier once it’s truly in your sights.

Be Kind. See What Happens.

Eric

❧

THE UNIVERSITY OF EVERY WAKING DAY

@everywakingday

P.S. When was the last time you let someone see you reset in real time, instead of hiding the stumble?

Our family cat has been gone for two and a half weeks now, having wandered off into the woods in a way she’s never done before. There’s no way for us to know where she is, and that not-knowing has been an undercurrent of grief and worry coloring everything else. Is she hurt, lost somewhere, scared, or is she gone for good? Did she find refuge somewhere warm with someone else who is feeding her and caring for her like their own? There’s no way we can see that we end up with a definitive answer, so the worry sits under our days like a morning mist that never burns off later in the day. At some point we’ll just have to accept that she’s gone, and fully grieve for her, and the likelihood of that feels more present with every passing day.

And yet these days have also still been full of good and nourishing things.

That’s the part I keep chewing on, and marveling at. This past week we had some dear friends come visit for a couple of days, and their visit felt like its own small holiday. We cooked and ate ridiculously well, we laughed a lot, we got to share in their delight at being here in these peaceful woods, and we got to go deeper with people we already love. It was wonderful, soul nourishing, all of it oh so very real, even though throughout we carried the ache of the empty spot where our cat would normally be.

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I feel it most sharply playing with my kids. Right in the middle of that easy, tumbling joy, I feel the shape of her absence, because she would typically be right there in the thick of it with us, infected with the zoom-y energy of our play.

Its temptingly easy to think you have to pick, and machine culture insists we do. That you can’t really be in joy if you’re also carrying grief, that letting yourself laugh makes the worry a lie, or that the worry makes the laughter fake. But that is not how a true and awakening human actually works, and I think we all know this deep down in the vital places we are increasingly daring to inhabit again. The joy this week was not fake because I was worried, and the worry was not disloyal because I let myself laugh. They were both abundantly true in all of their nuances, held simultaneously in the same heart.

I’ve read about it before, but these past couple of weeks have opened me to experiencing in a deep and vibrant way the holding of contrary emotions. I’m seeing that when we’re pulled vigorously in opposite directions is not a failure to cope, but a crucially important kind of growth, a real mark of maturity in a culture that desperately wants us to fit neatly within an either/or 2 dimensional box.

A lot of this comes down to being kind to yourself, and the seeming paradox of finding strength through being soft. Letting ourselves stay open to what life is offering, the good meal with good friends and the evening in flow with your children, is not a betrayal of what you are grieving. I would say these are the very things that nourish us deeply enough to keep carrying the hard parts with any grace at all. We are most certainly allowed to do both, and we very much need to do both as we grow into ourselves.

So if this is a heavy season for you as well, I am certainly not going to tell you to cheer up. I am going to gently suggest you make room for it all in the sincere hope that you’ll find some grace in there too. Let the joy in without any guilt, and let the grief stay without shame. I’m learning to trust that they can share the room.

Be Kind. See What Happens.

Eric

❧

THE UNIVERSITY OF EVERY WAKING DAY

@everywakingday

P.S. Have you ever let yourself feel joy and grief in the same breath, and didn’t call it a contradiction?

Most of us have been fed a belief about loneliness, that if you feel it, something’s got to be wrong with you. That the warm, easy-going, connected people have something figured out that you’ve missed, and it’s your job to fix yourself in private until you finally catch up. Sound familiar? Feel familiar?

Straight up, this belief is not only completely backwards, it’s functionally impossible, and is doing an enormous amount of damage to both individuals and society as a whole. The romantic myth of the rugged individual is indefensibly toxic to its core and increasingly backing us into a collective corner of chronic anxiety and existential crises.

That ache you feel when connection is missing? It’s not a character flaw or a defect. It’s actually the most accurate internal guidance system you own. You are hardwired for connection through your DNA ~ it is literally programmed into us to seek each other out and to find meaning in what happens when you do. So when the connection thins, the ache shows up right on time. That is not you being broken. It’s the alarm working exactly as it was designed to because it’s thoroughly baked into your human operating system.

The challenging part is that we’ve gotten exquisitely good at quieting that alarm instead of answering it. We surround ourselves with beautiful substitutes and compelling distractions, the screen big enough to fill a wall and the little glowing rectangle we carry from room to room, and they can absolutely take the edge off for the evening. What they can’t do is feed the thing underneath, which is why they always ask for a little bit more of us tomorrow, and we willingly give ourselves over.

Married to all of this like incestuous twins is another story we’ve been sold so many times it just sounds like plain common sense ~ The Lie of Self-Sufficiency. The idea that the whole point of a successful life is to need no one, to be self-made, a person who has it handled. We hold that lie like it is the deepest wisdom, and then we end up baffled that so many capable, self-sufficient people feel so alone.

You were never meant to do this by yourself. Nobody ever was, and it’s pure fantasy to even try.

The part I find immensely hopeful, and the reason I’m building this whole thing, is that connection, and meaning, are skills. We tend to treat them like a trait, something you either have or you don’t, like the color of your eyes. But they’re not. They’re skills. And the moment you see it that way, everything shifts, because a skill is not a verdict on who you are. A skill is just a set of reps you have or have not done yet. The warm people are not a different species. They’ve just done more reps than you, and are further down a path that I am inviting you to start today.

That is the whole idea behind the University of Every Waking Day. It’s not a retreat that removes you from your familiar days, or a belief system you have to swallow, just the unconventional notion that your typical day, the one with the checkout line and the left-turn lane in it, is the actual classroom. Class has been in session this whole time. Most of us have never realized we were already enrolled.

So if you want somewhere to begin, begin absurdly small. The next time something gets under your skin, take one breath before you respond. Just one. That single breath is the entire practice in miniature, because it is the space where you get to choose who you are, instead of letting the old reflex choose for you.

I am not promising you a better life somewhere else. I am putting forward the idea that the day you are already living is far more full of opportunities to practice than it looks. Getting better at meeting these moments is a skill like any other, which means it is learnable, and available to you, starting now. We can practice this together until the art of being human that we’ve forgotten begins to return, and we can cultivate connection and meaningful moments within the day you are already living.

So let me leave you with this. When was the last time you took a deep breath on purpose when you got triggered by something, and gave yourself some space?

If any of this lands, I have written the whole thing down as a short manifesto I am calling The Lost Art of Being Human, and there is a free five-day practice that will open the door, one small rep at a time. Both are waiting at everywakingday.com whenever you are ready. No rush. Class is not going anywhere.

Be Kind. See What Happens.

Eric

P.S. If you try the one breath this week, and it works or it completely falls apart, I would genuinely love to hear about it. Just reply and tell me ~ I read every single one. After all, we’re Neighbors here.

We had all the moments you would hope for in our time together (that always goes by way too quickly), full of playfulness, insanely good food, laughter, swimming in the lake, and music. But the most meaningful moment arrived afterwards, in a note. One of the moms in our crew wrote to say how grateful she was for the positive men in the lives of her daughters, and she simply wanted to acknowledge how much it meant to her.

Of everything we shared that week, that is the one that landed the deepest. To be seen as a good presence in the life of a younger generation, as they grow into young adults, means the world to me. I am totally in awe of how good that feels. Proof in the pudding is the phrase that keeps bubbling up.

It amazes me even more since I was short on sleep the whole time, with so much going on and not wanting each day to end, and when I don’t sleep everything gets harder. When we’re sleep deprived It becomes far too easy to slip into a knee-jerk reaction or let little things get under my skin. There were a couple of moments this week that, in years past, I recognized would have gotten me.

But this year, they didn’t. I felt the old pull, took the deep breath that makes space for an intentional response, and let the difficulty pass without incident. That quiet non-event was incredibly satisfying, and more proof, this time of my own growth and mindfulness.

Then came the pleasant surprise. As we are away from home this month, nearly everyone I meet out in the world is a stranger. I have been into the same little hardware store a handful of times in recent weeks, and have encountered the same clerk each visit, and I have simply been my warm, curious self with her. This last time as I walked in she looked up and lit right up. “Oh hi!” she said, and I was asking after her day before I had even made it further into the store. I am fairly sure she doesn’t greet every customer that way, and it was a lovely reminder that it doesn’t take much, that a small handful of genuinely warm exchanges can begin to warm a whole neighborhood.

None of these moments were particularly seismic, but all of them were particularly good. And all of them were decidedly proof that this practice reliably gives something back ~ in how people meet you, and in how you meet yourself.

Be Kind. See What Happens.

Eric

❧

THE UNIVERSITY OF EVERY WAKING DAY

@everywakingday

P.S. When was the last time you were open enough to really let a stranger surprise you?

I recently dropped my mom off at the airport after a ten day visit, and I’ve been sitting with something ever since that I want to tell you about while it’s still warm.

I’ll be blunt, ten days with the person who has known you longer than anyone else is its own kind of practice, and certainly one of the biggest challenges to who we think we are than anything else. You can take the most evolved appearing human you’ve ever met and observe them in close quarters with their mom for 10 days and you’re going to see who they really are. There’s no one on earth who knows all your foibles, every weakness, and each of our failures the way she does, and there’s no one with a deeper investment in us, or a deeper love. That combination is exactly what makes this the hardest room most of us ever try to practice in.

So in the week leading up to her visit I decided to treat our time together as a dare to myself. Not to perform patience, but to actually find out where I am after a year of writing about mindfulness and all of this showing up that I’ve been on about. I really wanted to see whether the small daily practices I keep sharing with you actually hold when I’m faced with interpersonal challenges that have typically gotten under my skin.

There were several moments I felt it coming, dynamics I recognized on sight because they have triggered me as far back as I can remember. This time around, consistently, instead of reacting from that old reflexive place, I took the breath, let the space open, and stayed out of the trap.

I wish I could describe how good those choices felt. Not good like relief, good like building. Each knee-jerk reaction I didn’t have opened a door to something warmer that I could plainly see would not have happened otherwise, and a few of our conversations went genuinely deep, truly connective places that friction would have kept us from ever reaching.

By any measure, it was the warmest, most heart-felt and genuinely connective time she and I have ever spent as adults. We had conversations that I have only hoped we could have for years, and it felt amazing.

I’ve chosen to share this because I experienced it as one of the most affirming passages I’ve had since I started writing about mindful kindness as a practice. It was certainly the equivalent of a masters class in putting one’s practice to the test in sustained real world conditions. The contrast between this visit and the last few years was profound. I am feeling it as one of the greatest accomplishments I’ve had as an evolving human, and it came from nothing dramatic at all, only small practices consistently woven into the fabric of one day after another until they’ve started to become who I actually am.

Be Kind. See What Happens.

Eric

❧

THE UNIVERSITY OF EVERY WAKING DAY
@everywakingday

P.S. When was the last time you walked into the hardest room on purpose?

Our neighborhoods wake up one soft tie at a time, and the warmth and connection we build between near-strangers is one of the real key ingredients in everything we’re reaching for here.

But today I want to point us toward where this practice actually gets tested.

Home.

This is where the rubber meets the road.

Because with the people closest to us we all have baggage in how we perceive them and how they perceive us. And somewhere in all that shared history they have built a version of us in their minds, a role they can slot us into without thinking. Sometimes that role is exactly the one we are growing out of, on our way to becoming a better version of ourselves. That can make this work harder than any encounter with a stranger, and it asks us to stay fast to our own course even when the people we love are gently, lovingly pulling us back toward who we used to be because that’s what is familiar to them.

So here is my dare for you this week ~

Once a day, with someone you love, take one deep breath while you are right there in it with them.

That’s it, just one breath, taken in the middle of a conversation or right before a response, in the moment you feel the old pattern reaching for the wheel.

Because that single breath opens a space, and inside that space you get to choose how you want to act, instead of firing off the reaction that’s been running on autopilot.

One breath a day that creates space for choice. A small seed, planted now, in the soil that matters most.

We’re certainly going to circle back to more of these building blocks in the path ahead, and build on the foundations we are laying down. But for now, that conscious breath is all that’s needed.

Be Kind. See What Happens.

Eric

❧

THE UNIVERSITY OF EVERY WAKING DAY
@everywakingday

P.S. When was the last time you really paused, one full breath, before answering someone you love?

Our little community here just celebrated a century of summers around this lake, acknowledging that our cabins were always more of a village than anything else. We share a beach, an annual picnic, and a powerful agreement that transcends politics and economics that this particular place is worth tending, defending, and coming back to year after year.

Our photographs record the continuity. My grandfather as a young man picnicking along the shores of the lake with his boss. My mom as a little girl, standing in the same places where there are pictures of me as a little boy, where I now stand and watch my own kids. The same lake. Four generations in the same handful of spots, and the belonging in that is so palpable I can taste it like the maple syrup that’s a hallmark of these hills.

Arriving this summer pulled everything I’ve been exploring about kindness and belonging right up front and center. I see now that this is where the seeds were planted, long before I had any language for them. I’ve moved so many times over the years, and have always managed to build community wherever I landed, but throughout it all I always had a sense that something was missing, and carried a longing that pulled me in a connective direction though I could never quite name it. I can see it for what it is now, because every time I’ve felt that particular ache, I see that it has always been pointing me back here, my north star in the wilderness.

I suspect that if you’re drawn to reading this that you have your own version of this sense threaded throughout your own path. Somewhere in our ancestral memory I think most of us carry the same knowledge, that we belong here, that we were meant to be woven into a place through a community of people. Most of us get separated from it, not by one great catastrophe but by a thousand tiny cuts, the slow accumulation of moving and rushing and making do.

I don’t have a big lesson or challenge to share this week. What I’m sitting with instead is something simpler, and maybe because it’s simple is why it’s easy to lose, and shows why we need to be reminded every so often of the things that matter most. They tend to be the very first things the practical world asks us to set aside, or that get squashed by survival.

So that’s what I’m walking with this week, and I’d love for you to walk with it too. How do we keep the things that matter most in focus? And how do we remind ourselves of our human priorities exactly when we’re most likely to forget them, precisely when they’re the most important things to keep in focus?

Be Kind. See What Happens.

Eric

❧
THE UNIVERSITY OF EVERY WAKING DAY
@everywakingday

P.S. When was the last time you stood in a place that remembers you?

P.P.S Starting next week I am going to start sharing these letters on Tuesday mornings, as Sundays have proven to be a little more challenging in my weekly rhythm than anticipated. Just wanted to give you a heads up.

I mean that almost literally. There was a lightness in the way she moved, the way she told stories at dinner, the way she laughed, I couldn’t get enough! She’d had experiences there that genuinely opened something in her, made connections with people that were real and warm. Near her I could feel the glow like heat from a fire.

And then I watched our days do what our days typically do.

Not dramatically in that nothing went wrong. It was just the familiar momentum of the ordinary re-establishing itself through the endless emails, errands, and rhythms of a life that had been running without her for a week and needed tending. Slowly, steadily, the altitude she’d come home carrying began to drop. She told me more than once how frustrating it was, the teflon quality of it, how the insights that had felt so solid while away kept sliding off the surface of her regular days. We talked about ways to ground what she’d found using breathing practices and anchoring some of the specific feelings she’d opened to. Some of it helped.. but none of it truly held in a meaningful and lasting way.

Of course her experiences were genuine, the connections were real, and the insights true. That’s not the problem with retreats. I have come to believe that the dilemma is a design flaw baked into the format itself, and it’s practically invisible because the intensity of the experience makes it feel oh so good. During the experience it feels like it carries exactly the right amount of power to produce lasting change.

But intensity and integration are not the same thing. A week of profound experience, held at a careful remove from your actual life, gives you almost no opportunity to practice what you’re learning in the conditions that will actually test it when we land back home. The commute, the difficult conversation, next Wednesday’s afternoon slump that just is what it is. They all carry the energy of the familiar and that’s a lot of momentum to shift. You come home changed, and then home changes you back, because home has a thousand small repetitions and the retreat gave you almost none.

But right there is the insight that feels like it has the capacity to change everything ~ it’s all in the reps. The same reason why this doesn’t stick shows us the way we can make it stick.

I see this now in the flashes my wife gets when she runs into someone from the retreat in our neighborhood. They light up, both of them, and for a moment the glow comes back. A shared glance, a few words, and something real passes between them. It’s brief and it’s genuine and then it fades again. What that tells me is that the experience is still right there and accessible, it didn’t actually go anywhere. It just has no daily surface to live on.

What actually changes people, I’m more and more convinced of it, is the small and the repeated.

Not because small is humble or modest, but because it fits inside our day. Because small can be practiced in the grocery store and during your commute and through the conversation you weren’t planning to have. Because repetition is how anything gets wired into the body, and small makes it easily accessible throughout the day we’re already in.

The retreat gave my wife something precious and damn I want that for her! What it couldn’t give was the daily container to actually keep that energy present, and that would make all the difference in the world.

That’s what I’m interested in building here through The University of Every Waking Day ~ small practices simple enough to carry anywhere, repeatable enough to actually stick.

I haven’t really mentioned this much up until now because everything is taking me much longer than I had hoped it would. But I have been diligently working on a book and a course that dive deep into this idea of small and repeatable practices that easily integrate into our existing days and I can’t tell you how freakin excited I am to share them with you. For real, they are right around the corner.

Be Kind. See What Happens.

Eric

❧

THE UNIVERSITY OF EVERY WAKING DAY
@everywakingday

P.S. When was the last time you felt genuinely changed by something, and then watched it quietly slip away?

It was hot. I was sleep deprived and burning the candle at both ends in one of those stretches where work doesn’t let up and you tell yourself you’re handling it fine. And in the middle of all that, I snapped at my wife. Short. Curt. The kind of reaction that has no business coming from someone who’s spent this much time building a kindness practice.

I keep wanting to call it impatience, like that softens it somehow. But the more honest assessment is that I wasn’t patient at all. There was no patience to lose. There was just a knee-jerk reaction where a choice should have been, and I felt like a jerk the second it landed.

In the middle of being annoyed with myself about it, I’m realizing that the kindness practice was never really about kindness first. At it’s heart, it’s a mindfulness practice wearing kindness as its outer layer, as kindness is the vehicle that has the capacity for us to nurture meaningful connections with those around us, and mindfulness the underlying structure.

The whole point is giving yourself a heartbeat of space, just enough room to choose your response instead of reacting your way into one. This week I didn’t take that heartbeat. I went straight from hot and tired to short with my best friend, and I watched her feel stung by me before I even had the chance to own what I’d done.

It wasn’t a big thing, in the grand scheme of things. I’m not unhappy about the size of it. I’m unhappy about the absence of choice in it, and that’s where I’m being shown where I have to pay the most attention these days.

My wife sat with me this morning while I wrote this, and we talked about it again, differently than we had before, and it felt good. She told me she’s grateful I’m leaning into this instead of away from it, that naming the challenge is its own kind of practice. That’s the part I want you to have too, if you’re reading this and recognizing your own version of snapping at someone you love. The work isn’t becoming a person who never reacts. The work is noticing when you did, and being willing to sit in it with the person it landed on.

That sitting-in-it this morning is also how this next part of the letter developed. My wife simply tells the story of this episode better than I would, so I’m handing this one over to her.

Here’s how my wife remembers it:

It was field day at one of the elementary schools we visit for work, an inner-city school in the middle of their end-of-year celebrations. We arrived into pure chaos ~ teachers and PTO parents running in every direction, a hundred small fires to put out, nobody seeming like they really knew what was going on.

A woman introduced herself as the vice principal and showed us where we needed to be. She had that practical, no-nonsense energy you’d expect from someone holding a thousand details together on one of the busiest day of the year. Distracted, moving fast, doing her job efficiently.

Once we’d settled in, Eric reached out his hand and asked her name.

We saw her pause and she lit up a little, gave it to him, and asked his in return.

When he said “Eric,” everything in her shifted. She actually stepped back. The wind looked knocked out of her. Her eyes welled up, she started doing these little energetic hops with her hands fanning her face and she got flushed and breathless. With visible tears right there at the surface, she told us that as he’d been walking toward her, he reminded her of an old, dear friend. A friend named Eric.

When he said his own name out loud, she said it felt like a sign from the angels.

She apologized for the reaction, and we watched her compose herself as she went on to whatever needed managing next. We didn’t see her again. But I haven’t stopped thinking about her face in that moment and how powerfully she reacted, or marveling about how asking someone’s name can crack a door open like that, even for a couple of seconds, even in the middle of such a crazy day.

I don’t fully know what to do with that story except to keep telling it. Maybe in some form of poetic cosmic wisdom we were sent to that school to deliver something on behalf of a friend she’d lost. Maybe it was nothing more than a name landing in just the right way to serve someone’s path. Either way, we got a glimpse of someone’s inner world that I’m guessing she hadn’t planned on showing anyone, and it happened because of the simplest version of the practice there is.

Last week’s letter was about learning someone’s name, and this week that same entry level practice created a wondrous moment that no-one saw coming and continues to ripple in our world. It illustrates one of the most beautiful parts of this work, in that the practice doesn’t ever run out. The same small dare can continually open doors in new and wonderful ways, all the while living up to our core premise of cultivating connection and meaningful moments.

Be Kind. See What Happens.

Eric

❧

THE UNIVERSITY OF EVERY WAKING DAY

@everywakingday

P.S. When was the last time you owned a mistake in the same breath you made it?

A couple of years ago he was my first real experience of the shift from anonymous someone fulfilling a necessary role in our community to someone who became a real person for me. It was an extremely humbling moment when that change took place, and it keeps bubbling up recently for some reason so I’m going to embrace it today.

It was around the time that I really began to nurture my intentional awareness around mindful kindness, and it was one of those moments that felt so obvious all of a sudden, even though we had been walking past one another for an entire school year.

I didn’t know his name.

I always made a point of saying hello or at the very least making eye contact with it’s acknowledgement of presence, and he was always very gracious (and in hindsight, patient) with me. Also in hindsight I can see that every one of those glancing interactions brought him into slightly sharper focus each time. In essence, each greeting allowed me to see him more and more in that spectrum from role to human.

But the minute I realized I didn’t even know his name hit me like a bucket of cold water and literally stopped me in my tracks. I must have looked like the proverbial deer in the headlights, and perhaps it was my startled emptiness for that one moment that caught his attention in a different way as well because he arched an eyebrow towards me and that was my opening. I blurted out something along the lines of “I’m so sorry, but I don’t even know your name”, and we proceeded to introduce ourselves.

Such a simple thing, yet such a profoundly powerful thing. A name. Someone’s name. And all of a sudden there he is in my eyes, unmistakably a person, full of every single mystery that each one of us carries in our own personal history and wounds, interests and passions, frustrations and simple joys.

That’s the thing about micro-relationships. We can practice them for months, years even, and never cross the one inch that turns “the guy at the door” into “Marcus” or “Dee” or whoever they actually are. The role keeps standing in for the human. Even after we allow the human to start to show up.

So here’s my takeaway ~

A name is not a small thing. It’s the whole shift. The moment someone goes from a function in your day to a person in your life, even a tiny corner of it. You can have the same interaction, in the same spot, for years, and it can still be a transaction. Or you can ask one question, get one syllable back, and it becomes something else entirely. Same person. Same doorway. An entirely different world that you’re now inhabiting.

So that’s the dare this week.

Find out one name.

Not five. Not a whole project. Just one. The barista, the guy at the gas station, the woman who’s always walking her dog at the same time you’re walking somewhere. Someone you already regularly see. Someone whose face you’d recognize and whose name you’ve never once asked for.

“Hey, I realize I’ve never asked, what’s your name?”

That’s it. That’s the whole dare.

It’s ok that it might feel a little awkward. It probably will, actually, for about four whole seconds. And then it’ll be over, and you’ll have a name where there used to be a role, and something in the texture of that interaction will be different from now on. Not dramatically, but significantly.

What I keep coming back to is that we already have these people throughout our lives. We’re not being asked to go out and meet strangers or build some whole new social life. We’re being asked to finish something we’ve in essence already started. The relationship is right there, half-formed, waiting on one question.

Be Kind. See What Happens.

Eric

❧

THE UNIVERSITY OF EVERY WAKING DAY
@everywakingday

P.S. Once you start interacting with someone through their name, notice how their face softens every time they hear their own name reflected back at them. It’s absolutely delightful.

There weren’t any dramatic moments related to my kindness practice. No stranger who said something that stopped me cold. No single exchange I couldn’t stop thinking about on the drive home.

What I am recognizing is a week of full of interactions that felt easy and warm and alive, one after another, the way breathing feels when you’re not thinking about it.

There was a moment with a security guard who had the whole no-nonsense thing going, the kind of presence that says don’t even try it, and who softened into a smile before either of us quite knew what happened. I had more than a few moments of shared appreciation with people going about their days, where I created small invitations and other people said yes. Nothing particularly extraordinary. All of it particularly good.

The coolest thing I’m realizing about my week is that throughout it all, I wasn’t particularly trying.

I have had an extremely busy week with work and perhaps that is part of it, in that I didn’t have much bandwidth for anything other than staying on top of everything I had on my plate. Throughout it all, I’m realizing it didn’t feel like I was running a kindness experiment. I wasn’t practicing anything, not consciously at least. The warmth was just there, already woven into how I was moving through the day, the way a path through the woods gets easier the more it’s walked.

That’s what consistent practice does, quietly and over time. It stops being something you do and starts being something you are. It’s made me realize that I am feeling increasingly embodied in my kindness journey, and the foundations I’ve laid are allowing me to build a pretty satisfying house.

Another satisfying element of my week has been watching my wife arriving at her own version of this, the same unhurried warmth finding its way into small moments she might have rushed past before. I didn’t say anything in my witnessing. I just watched with gratitude, and when she mentioned one of her experiences to me, I felt a deeper sense of appreciation for her, as well as a sense of our arriving in a place we’ve sensed and are now increasingly inhabiting.

Here’s what I hope you’ll take away from this, especially if you’re in the early days of any form of practice: you don’t have to feel it yet.

The practice is working even when it feels effortful. Even when it’s awkward. Even when you forget and then remember and feel vaguely guilty that you forgot. The consistency is doing something underneath the surface, the way water shapes stone, slowly and without announcement. What really matters is showing up most days and keeping the spirit of your intention present. That’s the heart of what we’re playing with here, and I hope you find some reassurance in this.

One day you’ll have a week like mine, and you won’t be able to point to a single moment that explains it. You’ll just notice that things feel gentler. That you’re looking forward to the day rather than bracing for it. That the world, somehow, seems to be meeting you a little more warmly than it used to.

It’s our showing up more often than not that returns us to center.

It was there all along.

So were you.

Be Kind. See What Happens.

Eric

❧

THE UNIVERSITY OF EVERY WAKING DAY @everywakingday

P.S. When was the last time you really noticed that something was getting easier?

It wasn’t necessarily a choice, life simply accelerated as it has a way of doing regardless of our best intentions. A whole series of earlier than usual mornings and longer days resulted in the architecture of a personal practice being quietly crowded out by everything that felt more urgent. One morning skipped becomes two. Two becomes a week. A couple of weeks becomes the longest gap since I started, two years ago.

I noticed it the way you notice a sound has stopped. Not immediately but in the absence and the tickle of wanting to figure something out that feels puzzling but you’re not quite sure what it is.

When it finally dawned on me that I hadn’t engaged in my morning ritual for a while I had to laugh because then it felt so obvious, both why I had fallen away from it in the face of so much practicality, and also why I felt increasingly untethered from my center. It explained so much in terms of why the quality of my daily experience had been shifting and why my patience and presence were feeling diminished.

When I finally stepped back into the practice, what struck me most was this: it didn’t feel distant at all. It actually felt more vibrant and intentional than it had for a while. The return carried a quality that routine alone doesn’t produce. I felt a purposefulness that I saw in the clarity of hindsight that had started to dwindle. There was a deeper sense of gratitude infused in the doing that felt like throwing open your windows for the first time after a long winter. And I felt a kind of relief to be back that pleasantly surprised me with its intensity.

I was honestly kind of amazed at how familiar it still felt, like putting on a favorite pair of super comfy pants that you haven’t worn in a while and are thrilled to discover still fit in a super comfy way.

This whole episode got me to thinking about my own disillusionment with the wellness industry in general, and I’ve come to think about how some of the most vital and important ingredients in a truly effective and sustainable personal practice simply aren’t profitable.

Consistency is not the same as perfection, and so much of the forward facing wellness influencer machinery is obsessed with the appearance of perfection. And the return to practice, the moment you step back in after life has had its way with you, is not a failing but very much a part of a durable practice itself, and perfection has little to no tolerance of even a hint of failure.

The prevailing model is that transformation arrives in intensity through the weekend retreat, the ceremony, or the breakthrough seminar. It’s easy to sell the modality that promises to finally crack something open. And those experiences can be real, don’t get me wrong. I am not here to dismiss them. But intensity always fades, and therein lies the rub.

What remains, in terms of what actually has the power to change the quality and substance of your daily life, is the small repeated thing you return to. Not because you are disciplined in the way productivity culture means discipline. But because you have decided, time and again, that this matters, and that the quality of your inner life is decidedly worth tending. It is especially powerful when you dropped the thread, when the gap was longer than you intended, and you come back anyway.

The gap isn’t proof of failure. It is the moment that defines whether a practice is truly yours.

If you only return to something when conditions are perfect, it’s not a practice. It is a preference.

A practice is what you come back to consistently and over time.

This week’s reflection: not a dare, just a question to sit with.

What have you quietly set down that is worth picking back up?

The door to return is open. It is always open, and that’s one of the wonderful things about a true lifelong practice. Walking back through it with that unhurried, deliberate step, is not the end of an interruption.

It is the practice beginning again.

And that beginning, it turns out, is available every single morning.

Be Kind. See What Happens.

Eric

❧

THE UNIVERSITY OF EVERY WAKING DAY @everywakingday

P.S. When was the last time you returned to something you thought you’d lost?

So many of us are carrying a quiet ache right now. We are disconnected, depleted, and tired of being told the answer is another retreat, another spiritual modality, or yet another version of ourselves to become. We feel a real hunger, not for more information, but for warmth, belonging, and a path that doesn’t require leaving the life we’ve already built.

The University of Every Waking Day exists on a different premise. Your daily life is not in the way of your meaningful life, it is the way into a meaningful life. The grocery line, the school drop-off, the awkward elevator ride, the conversation with the neighbor you haven’t quite met but see from time to time ~ these are not interruptions to some deeper existence waiting elsewhere. They are the curriculum. Belonging, meaning, and a more human world are built in small repeated acts of presence, attention, and care, right where you already are.

Each week, we send a single short letter to your inbox. Sometimes a story from an typical moment that reveals something larger. Sometimes a small practice to carry through the week, a kindness dare, a way to slow one interaction, a reminder to learn someone’s name. Always a reflection. I’m never going to throw you a sales pitch dressed up as wisdom. The letters are designed to be read in a few minutes and lived for the rest of the week.

If you’ve sensed there has to be more but you’re worn out by spiritual content that stays abstract or treats you like a project to fix, this is a quieter way. You are not behind. You do not need to escape your life to find it. Sign up below, and we’ll meet you each week with something small and real, a reminder that the practice has already begun, in the day you are actually living.

Yes, we do have some courses, books, and related material if you want to go deeper, but in all honesty, even if you just dedicate yourself to giving a true and honest go with the prompts and challenges that we share each week, I’m confidant you’ll start to experience a transformation within your day sooner than later. Kindness and the mindfulness around it are a sustainable way of life that infuses everything good about traditional spiritual practices into bite sized actionable practices that we can employ wherever we are and by whoever we are.

I cordially invite you to give it a go. It might just very well be thing you’ve been looking for this entire time.

Be Kind. See What Happens.

Eric

I had just dropped my daughter off at school and was sitting at a red light when I saw her. She was frantically waving. A block ahead of her, the bus sat at its stop. She had spotted it, and was making her run to catch it, hustling hard through an obvious struggle with bags flopping and the wrong shoes for such a stretch.

The bus pulled out just as my light turned green and I watched her hands go up in frustration. She bent over, catching her breath, defeated and huffing hard.

Here is the part I keep coming back to. There is no way the driver didn’t see her. To pull into traffic, he had to check his mirrors. He saw a young woman half a block back, waving, running for him. He chose to go.

That is a small cruelty. I want to name it clearly. Not a bad day. Not a tight schedule. A choice. Five seconds he could have waited, and didn’t.

I circled the block. I had the urge to help.

Then I caught my own reflection in what I was about to do. A random man pulling up to a young woman in obvious distress at a bus stop, alone. Every safety lesson she has ever been taught would fire at once. My intention to help would not register as help. It would register as another thing to manage, and more than likely a potential threat to assess.

So I drove past. It felt agonizing, the contrast between my urge to help and the reality of the bigger picture.

I keep thinking about it. Not only because I couldn’t help her, but because of what she was left with. She had to sit at that stop and absorb, by herself, the cruelty of being seen and dismissed. Then sit there in a world structured so that even when a stranger does see clearly, the respectable thing he can do is keep moving. Even though she wouldn’t have been aware of that second thing, it still hung in the air, and both things more than likely inform the background of her every waking day.

Two cruelties hit her that morning. The bus driver’s. And the sting of the silence that lingers.

I don’t have a clean takeaway here. I don’t think there is one even though there is so much to chew on. But I do think the witnessing is its own thing. Refusing to let what happened to her go past me, even though I could not step into it. That is part of the practice, too. Maybe most of it.

The world gets warmer not only when more of us help, but when more of us refuse to look away from what we cannot fix.

A soft note: the Seven Day Kindness Kickstart is almost ready. I’ll have something concrete to share with you next week.

Be Kind. See What Happens.

Eric

❧

THE UNIVERSITY OF EVERY WAKING DAY

@everywakingday

P.S. When was the last time you really let what happened to a stranger count?

There are people you already see regularly. The cashier you smile at. The barista who knows your order. The neighbor you wave to. We tend to interact with the role a person is playing, the cashier, the barista, the doorman, while the rest of them stays invisible. We say thanks to the role and move on.

I’ve learned to think of these encounters as micro-relationships. Small recurring threads of contact with the same people, where the human in front of you is the point and not the role they're filling.

One of my regular neighborhood encounters is with Amanda, who rings up my groceries more often than not where I shop. Over time, I've made sure to make eye contact, learn her name, ask about her day. Nothing dramatic. Just steady warmth.

This week, I decided to try leveling up a notch.

When she finished ringing me up, I picked up the small bouquet of wildflowers I'd just bought from her, looked her in the eye, and said:

Thank you, Amanda. In the simple spirit of the world needing more kindness, these are for you.

She lit up. Her hand went to her heart. She took the flowers with a wide smile and a thank you. I packed my groceries, wished her a good day, and moved on.

Here's why I've been so careful with this. There's a real risk in approaching strangers, even with kind intent. You can create anxiety where you meant to bring warmth. The body reads unfamiliar person breaking the script as a small alarm before it reads anything else, and it’s something that needs to be kept in the forefront of our creativity with stranger interactions.

That alarm is not paranoia. It's a daily reality for most women and potentially for anyone whose being is in contrast to traditional patriarchal cis white male existence. So many of us have to navigate public spaces with a kind of low-level vigilance that men typically never have to think about. Any practice of bringing more warmth into the world has to start by honoring that vigilance, not overriding it.

That's why I've been working with these micro-relationships first. The thread of recognition is already there. The gift becomes a small lift instead of a startling departure.

You don't have to give flowers. The thing to notice is that you already have a small handful of these relationships. The dry cleaner. The doorman. The neighbor on the third floor. Each one is already half-warm.

This week, just notice yours. Wonder what a small upgrade might look like. You don't have to do anything yet.

The Seven Day Kindness Kickstart, which is heading into final form, has a few of these micro-relationship practices in it. I'll let you know when it's ready.

Be Kind. See What Happens.

Eric

❧

THE UNIVERSITY OF EVERY WAKING DAY

@everywakingday

P.S. When was the last time you really learned a stranger's name?

P.P.S Happy Mothers Day if you are one, know one, or have one ;-) and if you celebrate such things.  Me?  I try and make sure the mothers in my life feel honored and celebrated as much as possible, in the same sense that every day is Earth Day. But having one day to amplify the honoring, in the same spirit as a birthday, yes, that feels noble as well.  Cheers Moms!

Someone hands you your coffee. Holds the door. Rings up your groceries. Lets you merge in traffic.

We say thanks. Quickly. Already turning away. Already onto the next thing.

It’s not that we don’t mean it. It’s that we don’t really arrive at it.

I’ve been thinking about how strange this is, how often we deliver our gratitude in the same tone we use to dismiss someone. The word thanks doing double duty as appreciation and as exit ramp.

The people serving us all day, they feel the difference. They feel the brushed-by thanks and the truly-meant thanks. My experience over time tells me that most of them have stopped expecting the second one.

This week, try this. Once a day, when you’re about to thank someone, slow it down by one second.

That’s it. Just one second.

Stop walking. Look up. Make eye contact, hold it for that second. Let your face actually do the work of infusing meaning into that moment. Use their name if you know it.

And then go on with your day.

You don’t have to make it more than a moment. You just have to make that moment real.

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Most of the time you’ll feel a little warmth come back. Sometimes more than you expected. Once or twice this week, someone might actually pause in their own day for a beat, surprised. Once or twice you might be the surprise in someone else’s afternoon.

That moment of surprise is absolutely delicious. It is something I’ve come to look forward to, and it’s both sad and moving. Sad because it confirms they’ve come to expect the brushed-by thanks and have accepted it as normal. And moving because, well, someone has been moved outside of their usual brushed-by routine and into a moment of human warmth.

That’s the whole thing. That’s the practice.

This is the kind of small repeated moment the whole project rests on. The Seven Day Kindness Kickstart, which is heading into final form, is a longer collection of these daily practices that take almost no time and quietly change the texture and the quality of your week. I’ll let you know when it’s ready.

Be Kind. See What Happens.

Eric

❧

THE UNIVERSITY OF EVERY WAKING DAY

@everywakingday

P.S. When was the last time you really thanked someone slowly?

I was rounding the back of my car to load groceries. Someone was returning a cart. We both looked up at exactly the same moment, and there was a flash of mutual recognition — not the kind that says I know you, but the kind that says I see you, and you see me, and isn’t that something.

Neither of us said a word. We held the look for a beat longer than strangers usually do. A small nod. A soft smile. Then we both went back to our errands.

That moment brightened the rest of my day.

I think about these moments a lot. The wordless ones. The ones that don’t fit into our categories for what counts as important. They’re not breakthroughs. They’re not stories you’d tell at dinner. But they’re real, and they leave a mark.

Most of the meaning we’re hungry for isn’t waiting somewhere else. It’s already here — in parking lots, grocery lines, sidewalks, the spaces between strangers. We’ve been taught to look for transformation in retreats and programs and big decisions. But the most powerful practice I’ve found is much smaller: being present enough to catch the moments that are already happening. Letting them count.

You don’t have to become someone different to live a more meaningful life. You just have to start noticing what’s already here.

This is the first letter from The University of Every Waking Day, and I’m glad you’re here. The whole project rests on one idea: your daily life — the one you’re already living — is the curriculum.

A few things are taking shape in the background. The Seven Day Kindness Kickstart is in final editing and will be available soon, and there’s more in the pipeline I’ll tell you about as it gets closer. For now, this letter is the front porch. Come sit a while.

Be Kind. See What Happens.

Eric

❧ THE UNIVERSITY OF EVERY WAKING DAY

P.S. When was the last time you really looked at a stranger?

It all started with coining the phrase The University of Every Waking Day a bunch of years ago. It was born from wondering what would happen if we interacted with our every waking day as the primary context for improving our lives. This was in direct contrast to what feels like a very present cultural drive to draw us elsewhere for healing or growth. The sense of needing to go on a retreat in order to take the next big step, or attend the studio series on the latest yoga fad so you don’t miss out, or gain the next set of tools at a weekend seminar, or purify ourselves with the latest cleanse. It’s all oh so common, and a profitable multi-billion dollar industry that sometimes feels like it works best when you have to come back for more.

As a lifelong think-outside-the-box kind of guy, I couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if we chose to formalize our relationship towards personal growth and spiritual evolution with the radically simple idea that our fundamental context for leaning into building a better life, better relationships, and better communities, all with deeper meaning and purpose, has been starting us in the face every single day.

In fact, it has proven itself to be such a profoundly transformative path that I’ve come to call it The Most Powerful Practice.

Said like that, it feels like a grandiose premise with little grounding in reality. However, this path has been put to the test repeatedly and consistently over many years at this point, and I can honestly say that by shifting our mindset to interacting with our every waking day as a series of opportunities for bettering ourselves and optimizing our energy, the approach legitimately checks off all of the boxes for deep and sustainable personal growth and the nurturing of a meaningful and heartfelt daily life.

The mindset is mindbogglingly profound, precisely because we learn how to utilize the very interactions we are already having each and every day as the curriculum. In other words, when we start to be truly present with every person we interact with over the course of our typical day, and see each interaction, including with ourselves, as an opportunity to deepen our practice, something extremely powerful begins to shift in the very fabric of our lives.

And when we begin to embody the tools, prompts, and challenges that are presented in our courses, we start to transform the very nature of our world, one interaction at a time. Slow and steady wins the race.

Meaningless passes by random strangers and glancing encounters with acquaintances become the living laboratory for our experiments with crafting win-win scenarios. Routine structured check-ins with ourselves lay the foundation for having a full well to always be able to draw upon. And our ongoing interactions with family and loved ones are our proving grounds for becoming the best version of ourselves that we can imagine.

I’ve spent decades of my life actively searching for answers that feel satisfying and genuinely address our human condition, only to feel exhausted time after time when answers or insights that feel monumental or game-changing, had evaporated like the morning dew a week later. I got so frazzled by the glow of a wondrous retreat only to have it come crashing down through the realities of the next Thursday and all of its typical demands, all the while desperately trying to recapture that glow after the fact. Ultimately, I felt burnt out facing what feels like a huge disconnect between the idealized sense of self at my most energized, and the realities of day-to-day life with all of our responsibilities, cares, worries, and needs. And that was before fathering three beautiful children and adding that emotional and energetic roller coaster with all of those responsibilities to the mix.

In all transparency, I’ve also never found anything that lasts that didn’t require me to just believe in something I couldn’t see for myself. I grew up in a faith community, don’t get me wrong. But I also recognize that it’s not for everyone, and even if it is, what I’ve found complements and invigorates a faith tradition in such a beautiful way, bringing it forward into our daily lives to help it be a vibrant ongoing experience and not just something that we attend to on the weekends.

I am truly excited to share this work, and I feel grounded and confident that it genuinely has something substantial to offer anyone who holds an honest intention to grow and better their life in a sustainable and meaningful way. I am thrilled that it makes absolutely no difference where you come from or who you are other than that. That’s how powerful this practice is. Because I have firmly come to believe that our shared human values of wanting to be seen and honored for who we are, of wanting to care for those we love and be cared for in return, and of wanting to feel connected and part of our community or neighborhood are all values that we can build on and grow with. These qualities are hardwired into the very fabric of who we are as a species, so learning how to use these impulses as the very places we can pay attention to and grow with is a slam dunk grand slam dance through grace into being co-creators of the world we’d rather be living in.

There, I said it. We can co-create the world we’d rather be living in, one small but meaningful act at a time. Yes, The University of Every Waking Day is offering precisely that, in a methodical, patient, and supportive way. I cordially invite you to explore this work and see what it has to offer you and your personal evolution, and I sincerely hope to see you on the inside.

Eric Geoffrey Belcher

Founder

The University of Every Waking Day

The Most Powerful Practice

The Course in Kindness

The Seven Day Kindness Kickstart

www.everywakingday.com

p.s. ~ Disclaimer & Legal Declaration and simply for clarity’s sake ~ The name “The University of Every Waking Day” is being presented and used solely in the spirit of the idea that when we interact with our day as a primary context for self-improvement, we maximize opportunities for learning and growth. We are NOT presenting or putting forth material under the guise of being an accredited learning institution. In all transparency, we simply like the name and how it creates an invitation to reframe the nature of our interaction with every single day as a series of moments for personal optimization. Just in case you were wondering.

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