Welcome to the Monday Muse, a short and free round up of stuff I found interesting in the last week. If you have comments or ideas you want to share, feel free to drop me a message any time!
1/ What I’ve Been Up To
On New Year’s day we checked out a crystal bowl session aka a sound bath. This was a very relaxing way to start the year. If you’re not familiar, a sound bath teacher uses various instruments to chill you out. These instruments might include Tibetan singing bowls, crystal bowls, gongs, bells, chimes, Japanese bronze bells or “suzu,” and other percussion instruments.
One study published in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine in 2018 found that a 45-minute sound bath led to a significant reduction in anxiety and an increase in feelings of relaxation and well-being in a group of healthy adults. And sleep, too, as I passed out pretty fast.
Magali, who’s a local full-time sound bath sensei in Tokyo hosted the session in his studio in Asukasa-bashi. Highly recommended, wherever you are!
2/ What I’ve Been Reading
Top 22 Breakthroughs of 2022 vs. 1922 by Peter Diamandis.
A really insightful and exciting deep dive into the technological breakthroughs in the last year. A few notable ones that caught my eye:
Synthesizing Life Without Sperm or Eggs. “This summer, scientists from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel were able to grow mouse embryos in a lab without the use of sperm, egg, or a womb. The scientists were able to do so by growing the mouse embryos inside a bioreactor made up of stem cells cultivated in a Petri dish.”
EVTOLs (Flying Cars): Regulatory Progress & Partnerships. “In 2022, the U.S. FAA proposed new rules that help pave the way for commercial air taxi operations by 2025, with the goal of air taxis in operations by the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.”
Net Positive FUSION Achieved! “The U.S. has pledged to eliminate all CO2 emissions from the electricity sector by 2035. Solar, wind, hydropower, and mini-fission nuclear reactors (a new generation much safer and cheaper than the current generation) would help achieve this audacious goal. But nuclear fusion would be far superior, providing a massive abundance of clean energy.”
3/ Tools I’ve Been Using
This was recommended to me by a couple of people already. ChatGPT is a super advanced chatbot using GPT-3 technology to understand and respond to user prompts in real-time. It's like having a conversation with a real person and does a pretty solid job of bringing together relevant information, in perfect English. I’ve been using it to summarize long chunks of text.
For example, I just took the above text about Top Breakthroughs in 2022 and asked for a summary. I then asked it some follow up questions, like to make the text more catchy and then to add emojis.
This is what it spit out:
That’s pretty solid, right?
Try it out and I’d be curious to know what use-cases you find for it in your work/life.
4/ What I’ve Been Listening To
Making the rounds through various chill hop playlists now and enjoying this one quite a bit:
5/ What I’ve Been Thinking About
Usually at the start of the new year we think about all of the goals we want to achieve and all of the new things we want to do.
But perhaps there’s another way to look at this. Maybe instead of trying to “attain” anything new, what if we let go?
What if we removed things from our plate, instead of adding them?
What if we spent time giving ourselves space, instead of filling up our calendar?
What if that actually gave us more joy and happiness?
Here’s a poem that I shared in our meditation group recently that speaks to this.
Let Go
Let go
Of all that binds you
Of all that burdens you
Of what you carry
Of all that shames you
Of fear
Of trespasses and transgressions
Of woundedness
Let go of guilt
Let go of anger
Let go of small mindedness and pettiness
Of ways of being that no longer work for you
Of compulsions that consume your living
Let go of what you cannot change
Let go of regret
Of that which haunts you
Let go of pain
Let go of ways in which you missed the mark
Let go
See you next week!