Buddha Bike

  • Yes? What else?

    January 11, 2025 @ 11:08am – Bolinda, Macedon, Australia

    It’s a shame we take our thoughts so seriously.

    They distract and pull us away from what’s actually going on. They sneakily absorb our attention without us noticing. Spiritual teacher Osho goes further, calling them “parasites”.

    If we could just take a step back and find a little distance, our thoughts might have less influence over us. We might be able to live without instantly reacting or getting caught up in their stories.

    This is possible with a little mindfulness, and shows us there’s nothing there to worry about.

    With “humility and the patience”, Richard Rohr says, “you will say 98% of your thought patterns are repetitive and useless.”

    So what do we do with them?

    Even if they are mostly negative or trivial, it’s not possible to stop the tap of thoughts. Instead, the usual advice is that we should treat them kindly.

    It’s good advice. Letting your thoughts float by without clutching onto them or harsh judgement helps to de-potentiate their energy and prevents one from acting them out. Altering your nervous system with a long walk or a cold plunge can also help.

    But it’s not easy to be kind and understanding, especially when we are dealing with persistent, ‘sticky’ or uncomfortable thoughts.

    So here’s another approach.

    Your thoughts are racing, they’re really distracting you, and pretty soon you’ll be completely carried off by them. When that happens, try saying this:

    “Yes? What else.”

    Let’s say you’re upset about the dinner you’ve cooked for yourself. Thoughts might show up like:

    • “I should have planned this better.”
    • “I should have eaten that yesterday, now it’s going to go bad.”
    • “I wish this looked more appetising.”

    Step 1: Say “Yes?”

    Firstly, affirm the thought by saying, internally or out loud, “Yes?”

    When you say this, try to take on the attitude of someone who is patient, a little bemused, and on the verge of exasperation, like someone dealing with a person who doesn’t quite know what they’re doing.

    “Yes?” is a statement of recognition. You’ve grabbed hold of something that usually lives in the dark and you’ve brought it out into the light. And you want to do so without being judgmental. We’re not wishing it away or demanding it be different.

    The thought may not feel very nice to touch. The thought might have a feeling tone of desperation, or sadness or some other emotion. If it’s something annoying, problematic or scary, you’ll probably want to drop it and do something else. Eat some food, watch YouTube, whatever. Or you might fall back into the old pattern and get carried away thinking about it.

    Step 2: Say “What else?”

    If you can stomach one thought without distraction, see if you can handle a second.

    After you say “Yes?” then say, “What else?”

    Another thought might arrive.

    The attitude should be the same. Slightly impatient, but non-judgmental.

    When you do this, you’ve made the choice to grab some more stuff  from down in the drain.

    “What else?”
    “What else?”
    (“Is that all ya got?”)

    We keep that attitude going. We’re rolling our eyes at ourselves. We’re nodding. It’s not scary. It’s maybe even a bit boring. It’s not the end of the world. It’s just more thoughts.

    When big, heavy thoughts appear

    Sometimes really “big” thoughts will come up. 

    • “I’m never going to be able to cook something nice.”
    • “I’m a loser.”
    • “It’s never going to change.”
    • “I’m going to be broke forever.”
    • “I don’t know what to do.”

    They might feel scarily true, like facts rather than opinions. We might call these beliefs. A belief quietly trains you to expect certain things from life. Like a child might expect to see Santa on the roof on Christmas Eve. But they’re just thoughts too, just ones you’ve probably thought a lot of times in your life.

    And what do we say to beliefs? Same as we do to any other thought. 

    Yes? What else.

    When we say “What else?” we don’t treat one thought as more special than another. And why should we? I didn’t choose any of the thoughts that arrived in my head, so why should I honour some over others?

    By doing this over and over, we’re teaching ourselves that we can handle any thought. 

    Tips and caveats

    This is a slow process, and we shouldn’t need to rush into it.

    Start small
    It will feel stupid at first. You are talking to yourself. Start with small, everyday thoughts, before trying this with bigger beliefs. Practice while washing up.

    Don’t go deep
    There’s no need to spend any time trying to understand or intellectualise the thoughts. This isn’t depth-psychology. All I’m suggesting is three words, plus a basic, non-judgmental attitude.

    Watch out for moods
    If you’re in a really good mood, you probably won’t want to do this at all.
    If you’re in a really bad mood or feeling very reactive, I wouldn’t recommend it either. We’re adding attention to our thoughts, which might fuel some flames unnecessarily.

    Why this works

    One big reason this sort of practice is helpful is because it’s the exact opposite of what we usually do. Most of the time we do one of the following with our thoughts:

    • Buy it totally and get completely identified with it
    • Resist and rage against it
    • Run from it, numbing out with food, tv or other distractions.

    But to simply look at a thought, raise our eyebrows, keep looking, and calmly ask for more, is a complete 180. And we could all do more 180s.

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  • Designing like a spreadsheet

    November 1, 2025 @ 5:56pm – Porepunkah, Australia

    Nudge. Change position. Change label. Undo. Redo. You hit a wall. You think about deleting everything and starting from scratch. 

    Then, an idea hits! light bulb

    You race after it, leaving a stream of frames and layers behind you. Looking over your canvas filled with colourful shapes, you feel like you’ve really diverged in a creative way. 

    But have you actually made progress? What decisions did you make exactly? And are you any closer to a solution? Often, it’s not clear. And sometimes there’s a sinking feeling that you’ve actually gone backwards.

    This random, slightly automatic way of designing can make it difficult to feel confident about what you’ve made, and can be painful for your collaborators. Engineers can’t find the ‘latest’ design and design crits and reviews can suffer from murky rationale. Not great.

    A method to the madness

    Inspired by another designer, who was much more methodical and measured than me, I started to experiment with a different way of working.

    It looked something like this:

    Each new approach is labelled (eg. “Full width panel). Variations or iterations related to it are also labelled and grouped together.

      Then, when you’re ready, you create another direction and branch into related solutions from there.

      Why this worked for me

      At the time, I had started to work on product experiments, usually described as “growth design”. This meant I was thinking about smaller changes to workflows that could be built and tested rapidly. 

      Every solution also required a strong prediction or bet about how it would move a metric, expressed as something like “If we do X, then Y will happen, because X”.

      Using this structure, I could organise my design file like a spreadsheet, with each hypothesis followed by a series of ideas. Once I felt I had exhausted that line of thinking, I moved onto a different hypothesis and another “row” of executions.

      I remember reading about how designers at Spotify worked in a similar way. They called it “thoughtful execution”. Spotify designer Annina Koskinen explains why it’s important to explore multiple hypotheses (rows) and multiple executions (cells).

      “Any problem or opportunity can be addressed in multiple different ways with varying results. That’s why it’s important to create multiple hypotheses per opportunity to see which one leads to the most desirable results. Each of the hypotheses can have several solution executions, so you can’t prove or disprove a hypothesis by just trying out one design solution.”

      Aside from being a helpful way to organise and keep track of experiment solutions, I noticed a few other benefits:

      1. More creativity

      We have funny rules in our heads about what counts as creativity. For me, I thought I had to be kind of messy and impulsive to find these lightbulb moments. I don’t think that’s true. Sometimes a little more constraint can force us to think out of the box (like the repetition of crazy 8’s).

      2. More buy-in

      Working from goal to hypothesis to solution gave me a chain of reasoning that helped a lot when I was presenting work to stakeholders. It’s easier to gain consensus progressively, at each of these stages (a bit like going from lo-fi to hi-fi). It can be much harder to find agreement when we present a piece of work that has a lot of different ideas and assumptions baked into it. 

      3. More intentionality

      By labelling screens with a “why” (hypothesis) or a “how” (execution), I’m forcing myself to ask:

      • What’s actually different here?
      • What problem am I trying to solve that the last one didn’t?
      • What am I actually exploring here? What do I want to see?

      That little pause and questioning can help prevent you from doing and re-doing the same thing over and over.

      With a bit of structure in place, it makes it easier to work effectively with tools like Gemini. Gemini can help suggest new solutions for existing hypotheses or generate altogether new hypotheses you may not have thought of.

      Putting it to work

      In general, I’ve enjoyed less chaos in my Figma files while keeping (I think) my creativity intact. So if you’ve ever felt yourself spinning wheels, re-doing stuff, losing track of decisions, try out this method.

      Most of us where I work at Xero are designing complex tools and workflows with lots of moving parts, and we don’t have the need to test different dimensions in this way. But if you’re designing more specific changes or in a high-traffic space like a check-out flow, designing a bit more like spreadsheet might work for you.

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    1. Is this co-design?

      December 29, 2023 @ 7:01pm – Jiaoxi, Taiwan

      When we set out to co-design, we’re usually intending to get clear on a strategy or approach, find alignment across different groups and discover some new ideas together. If we’re putting together a formal workshop, we might plan, re-plan, create activities and facilitate the best we can. 

      And often these types of things work well. But the expectations don’t always match reality. Ideas can get a bit lost in translation. Some participants invariably feel left out, or misunderstood. And worse, the designer might end up creating something altogether different. It’s like the workshop never happened. 

      For some of those reasons, it’s natural for a designer to want to work in smaller groups, or by themselves, avoiding this way of working entirely. There’s less overhead and you can move faster if it’s just you and some focus time right? But less collaboration doesn’t work great either. Whenever I’m designing alone for too long or with limited input from other collaborators, I hit a dead end pretty quickly.

      No one should design like this, even if it feels easier or more comfortable in the short term. I often think of this quote (now five years old) from Bob Baxley, reflecting on Apple’s review-heavy design culture: “If you ever found yourself sitting at your desk by yourself with your headphones on, stressing ’cause you felt like you had to figure it out on your own, something was really broken.”

      Meet me halfway?

      To make co-design more palatable, effective and integrated into our ways of working, we need something to fill that middle ground, somewhere between intensive multi-day workshops and flying solo. 

      Recently, I found myself in a cross-functional group that had formed to help with product growth. We wanted to test out a lot of little experiments and see if any helped customers to get onboarded and set-up faster. This shared goal had given us valuable alignment to begin with, but we still needed to decide what experiments to run and how they should work. We had limited time and a big backlog of experiments to flesh out. How were we going to work together?

      Once or twice a week, we’d come together to ‘frame’ or ‘shape’ an experiment. We’d discuss the problem it would solve, risks and a few possible approaches. It was never longer than an hour, and it was purposefully unstructured. There might be some ideation or diagraming or maybe we’d spend most the session on the right problem to solve.

      Initially, I found this working session really frustrating. I’d think, shouldn’t the designer be doing this? How can we start to design without exactly understanding the problem? There wasn’t any time to optimise or improve the activities. I had the typical fear (of designers) that we were rushing into solutions, and we were! But we also needed to agree (or disagree) and commit, so we could move onto the next experiment and keep moving.

      But slowly, I started to see some benefits. When it came time for me to actually design something, I was no longer starting with a blank slate. Many of the edge cases that would have me spinning wheels had already been resolved. And design reviews were more effective, since everyone had shared context and had already contributed significantly to the concept. I didn’t feel like I was shouting down a one-way telephone line.

      Why did it work?

      I think this sort of framing activity worked well for us because:

      • Everyone involved was responsible for driving the same goal
      • We’d already prioritized the rough idea, so we could focus purely on the how rather than the why
      • Each experiment was scoped to no more than two weeks to build, so there was a natural expectation for designing to be similarly fast rocket

      But most importantly, it succeeded because we allowed it to, without forcing it. If this was ‘co-design’, we never labelled it such. We need to allow co-designing to express in ways that are appropriate to your particular team or project. If you’re designing a new product from scratch, co-design will likely look very different. And that’s ok! It’s easy to get attached to how you think alignment and agreement should look. But if we’re too rigid in how we expect collaboration to happen, it probably won’t.

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    2. Swimming under pressure

      October 29, 2020 @ 6:24am – Canberra, Australia

      I’m lap swimming, like I usually do on a Monday evening. It’s a coached squad and there are six or seven others in my lane. We’re meant to swim about five seconds apart, but we tend to bunch closer, so the person in front is almost kicking in your face. Swimming that close gives you a bit of a ‘draft’ and uses less energy.

      We order ourselves fastest to slowest, which generally works well. I’m usually the second slowest. If I miss a few weeks or have an off-day, I’m dead last. When we’re asked to swim “fast,” I only need to keep in touch with the person just ahead of me, someone slightly quicker. If I were near the front, I simply couldn’t keep up.

      And that’s exactly what I found myself struggling with. We were meant to be swimming at a moderate pace, but I noticed a gap opening between me and the swimmer ahead. “What’s going on?” I wondered, kicking harder and pulling faster. “Am I slow? Or are they extra fast tonight?” 

      Over the next few laps, I worked to close the gap, eventually bringing it down to a body length. I felt satisfied, but I was gassed. In trying to keep up, I’d been swimming much harder than the coach had asked. It wasn’t sustainable. Luckily, the set ended, and I could rest for a few minutes before we started again.

      I think one of the main reasons I strain to keep up is because I hate the feeling of being passed, or of slowing someone down behind me. It’s the same pressured tension you might have felt when rushing to an appointment, gripping the steering wheel as traffic refuses to move

      Before that moment, I’d never really admitted that to myself. I’m far more likely to get irritated, blame others, vow to get fitter, or just swim harder. Anything rather than really acknowledge that bad feeling. 

      Sometimes I’ll move to the very back, so there’s no one behind me. Back there, there’s no pressure, no fear of blocking anyone. But usually someone’s already claimed that spot. There’s usually a swimmer nursing some kind of sore shoulder or something who insists, “No, you’re faster than me, stay where you are” or “where do you think you’re going?” And so I’m back where I started. Burning with indignation, trying to keep up with the person in front while the swimmer behind is on my heels (literally). So much for that shoulder.

      Another way to avoid being passed is to just give up and get out. This isn’t usually my style, but I do see this in my lane all the time. A swimmer is up near the front, swimming strongly for three-quarters of the set, then suddenly veers off to the side, clutching a calf or hamstring in mock agony. A cramp, exhaustion, hunger or a multitude of other excuses can become a get-out-of-the-pool-free card. With a laugh or a shrug, they no longer have to worry about keeping up.

      Luckily, there’s a simple antidote. Just let yourself get passed! Relax. But you’ve really got to let it happen. No excuses. Swim the best you can, and if someone passes you, you got passed, simple as that. Remind yourself that no one has asked you to not get passed, except yourself. Obviously, it’s not going to feel good, but that’s sort of the point.

      Exposure always helps, but there’s deeper assumptions to fight if we want to avoid this reaction for good. 

      Falling behind and keeping up both assume there’s a race, a specific result that’s expected. 

      But that goal line doesn’t exist. The pressure is entirely self-created. 

      When we see that clearly, the straining and the avoiding are no longer needed.

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    3. Totally and seriously

      October 1, 2008 @ 6:58am – Central Bulgaria

      Imagine you have to get on stage dressed as a giant carrot and get chased around by a guy dressed as a rabbit.

      You’ve got a job. You pay the bills. You just don’t do stuff like this. It’s ridiculous. It feels silly and wrong. 

      But, not only do you need to run around with this rabbit, you’ve got to do it as seriously as possible.

      Usually to be serious at something, we try and be good at it, or at least try hard to get it right. We roll up our sleeves, ‘focus’ or might screw up our face in concentration. We take things seriously if they are important to us, or when we care about the result.

      It may be easy to think you’re being serious, but being serious is more serious than you think.

      Let’s go back to the carrot suit. Have you put it on yet? Great.

      It’s going to be difficult to take something this silly and make it serious.

      But. What if:

      You’ve been doing this carrot – rabbit thing for 50 years. It’s not just a one off stunt. It’s been the career of your lifetime.

      It’s been your livelihood too. It’s got your kids through college and made a nest egg for retirement.

      It’s also been passed down your family line. Your father did it before you, and his father, and so on, further back than anyone knows.

      Over the years it’s helped you through your own struggles. Addictions. Mistakes. It’s taught you things. You might not even be standing here if it wasn’t for this Carrot suit.

      Finally, and maybe most importantly, you enjoy it. You see the benefit not only for yourself, but you want to share it with others who might benefit too.

      Now, when you think of all those things at once, as you’re dressed as a carrot, I think you’re getting a bit closer to what serious looks and feels like.

      And I think we’d all be better off if we did things more seriously. 

      Like singing, for example.

      I’ve always disliked karaoke, because I’m not very good at singing and I feel uncomfortable looking and sounding bad in front of other people.

      But I’ve found the more seriously I sing, the better I sound and the less uncomfortable I feel.

      To do something seriously, means to do it totally. You can’t have one foot in and one foot out. That carrot guy isn’t hesitating or doing it half-heartedly is he? Why would he?

      It’s a bit like a dog chasing a ball. There’s not much inner conflict, umming and erring or hesitation when a dog chases a ball. The dog is not divided. It just does.

      Totally, and seriously.

      Also published on Substack

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    4. The Slow and Painful way to Effective Speaking

      October 4, 2025 @ 10:55am – Boronia, Victoria

      I’ve tried lots of things to make my presentations better. I’ve read countless books and articles about narrative, storytelling and communication. I’ve learned about frameworks like The Pyramid Principle and I’ve attended Dale Carnegie courses to improve my public speaking. I’ve even spent hours poring over famous keynote speeches frame by frame, trying to figure out what made them great.

      But nothing really helped. Even when I thought I got things right, my presentations still weren’t explaining, informing or persuading anyone.

      More recently I’ve come to realize the problem wasn’t the advice, feedback, frameworks or PowerPoint templates. It was how I was using them.

      For example, I’ve often received feedback that I speak too fast. I need to speak slowly. Good advice. But I’d misunderstand it. I’d speak slowly because I thought that’s what would sound good, or would make me look good or simply because that’s what other good speakers did. 

      I’d also try out things that I saw in other presentations that looked good. I’d create a slide with only one sentence on it. It looked bold and dramatic. But there was no thinking or intent. I did it because I’d seen others do it. With every decision I made like this, I’d wind up with a series of slides that didn’t really make sense together. 

      I was putting together presentations like cooking without ever stopping to taste or question a particular method or ingredient. I’d remind myself to add salt without learning or understanding that one adds it to food to balance and bring out the flavor. 

      Rather than figuring out the perfect font size, I’d have been better off asking myself what my audience were actually interested in, or why my slide-deck was even needed in the first place. Even though just thinking about your audience can increase anxiety, they are the reason for your presentation and it helps to bring them into sharper focus.

      This focus helps you when you are deciding on both the content and style. It’s not to say that craft and polish don’t matter. They do. But before I start nudging around rectangles, I have to keep reminding myself to ask ‘why?’. Am I making myself more clear? Does this benefit my audience? And 99% of the time it doesn’t.

      When we edit, we consciously shape what others will hear, see and hopefully understand. Here’s actor/director Jesse Eisenberg answering a question about how he edited his film A Real Pain.

      I feel the tone is created by the characters, and Kieran’s character is this relentless character. He’s driving the whole movie, and he’s a guy who doesn’t give you a break. I just wanted that feeling to be part of the movie. So when we were cutting the movie, it felt like: What are the characters doing in this scene? How are they driving the movie? It was 99% driven by Kieran, except one scene where Kieran’s not in — at the dinner table in the restaurant — where the camera suddenly slows down, and now the scene’s about David. But for the most part, it’s just: how are the characters driving this?

      I recognize the irony in me sharing advice about presentations. I’m living proof that reading stuff like this won’t help. More information won’t make you question, reflect and recognize what’s getting in the way of clear communication.

      For me, my concern over looking good excluded more important inputs like how the audience was feeling and what they were interested in. I’d forgotten the reason why I was presenting what I was presenting.

      Until we can answer those sorts of questions, or admit that we aren’t asking them and just trying to look good, we will struggle to bridge the gap between what we say and what people actually hear.

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    5. Working well with others

      September 4, 2025 @ 11:47am – Melbourne, Australia

      “A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.”
      — David Foster Wallace

      Whether you are making shoes, advertisements about shoes or shoe-making software, it’s likely the work is getting done in a group or a team.

      Since 2020, this way of working has become especially important. Engineers and designers can no longer reliably chat at a desk or gather around a whiteboard. Those conversations have migrated online to collaborative software, like Miro and Figma.

      If you’re used to working alone, it can be overwhelming to see all this work in progress. Miro boards filled with sticky notes, spaghetti diagrams, screenshots and other design detritus. What used to be private thinking is now facilitated in real-time workshops, with dozens of stakeholders calling in, watching, listening and co-designing together. 

      I resisted this type of collaboration for a long time.

      I was critical of workshops and dismissed them as “UX theatre”. I thought they were inefficient and believed there was better ways to use my time. I didn’t think stakeholder management was my job. I was wary of politics, group think and other barriers to creativity. And when I had no other choice, I turned my criticism inward, lamenting my own facilitation skills or introversion. I thought, maybe I’d like collaboration if I was actually good at it.

      There might have been some truth to these concerns. But what if it was less about collaboration being a mess, and more about my own need to be perfect?

      Anti-teamwork

      A perfectionist is usually defined as someone who has set high standards for themselves or others. At their core, they need to look good and be right. And at first glance, a perfectionist in the team will look like and sound like a normal person. They’ll bring their skills, help out and try to work together. But because of this strong, often unconscious need, they tend to prevent, rather than encourage healthy collaboration.

      Firstly, a perfectionist cares more about how they look, rather than the shared goal of the team. They’ll often lose sight of the overall goal, and instead tend to focus on little things that don’t really make much difference.

      The perfectionist is usually driven by a harsh ‘inner critic’ that nags and nitpicks them hundreds of times before they critique or blame another person. But when they do, harsh criticism will make their team feel judged, shamed and less likely to share ideas. Hypocritically, a perfectionist can’t bear to be criticized.

      A perfectionist thinks they are right. This rigid conviction comes at the cost of creativity, listening and general respect for others. If you believe you are right about something, why listen to someone else? Conviction taken to extremes is behind every totalitarian regime and fundamentalist religion. Due to their predictable righteousness, a perfectionist will struggle to sit with uncertainty, ambiguity without an “irritable reaching for facts and reason.”1

      A perfectionist can’t handle being ordinary. They think in black and white terms; their output is trash that needs to be exceptional. They live in a fantasy world and need to return to reality, where the rest of their team is waiting. Marie-Louise Von Franz connects this attitude with a “sudden-fall” dream, which she says “generally coincide with outer, deep disappointment when one is suddenly faced with naked reality as it is.”2

      Lastly, a perfectionist doesn’t know how to fail. If something doesn’t turn out how they planned, they blame or find ways to avoid responsibility. Without owning (and learning) from these mistakes, they have failed to fail, or what I’m coining inauthentic failing. They’d be better off to “get back up… to celebrate behaving like a human—however imperfectly—and fully embrace the pursuit that you’ve embarked on.”3

      It’s easy to wave off perfectionist tendencies if you’ve got them. I’d filed most of mine under positive sounding interview answers like attention to detail, working too hard or caring a bit too much.

      Collaboration can be chaotic. For a perfectionist, this collaborative world can feel like hell and they naturally want to defend against it viciously. That’s where all the ranting, blaming and burning the midnight oil comes from.

      But rather than blame brainstorming or lame ice-breakers, I would have been better off noticing my own perfectionism – and how it makes collaboration nearly impossible.

      To truly collaborate, and to actually get things done, one must accept the messy Miro board, the antithesis of perfection, the ordinary, imperfect nature of life itself.

      1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_capability ↩︎
      2. Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream: Conversations on Jungian Dream Interpretation ↩︎
      3. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations ↩︎
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    6. In the Beginning, there was Blame

      July 3, 2024 at 11:13am – Dillon Beach, CA

      The man answered, “The woman you put here with me gave me the fruit, and I ate it.”- Genesis 3:12

      Whenever you find yourself in a situation where you might look stupid, wrong, flawed or generally bad, you always have the option to blame. 

      Blame is like a big red button that’s always available to press. When you press this button, it shoots out a red lightning bolt at somebody or something to blame. 

      It feels a bit like dumping rubbish into a bin. It’s mostly habitual and automatic. When we open the lid, it stinks, but once it’s closed, we wipe our hands clean. The trash is going somewhere else and isn’t our problem anymore.

      Man has been blaming things since Adam threw Eve under the bus. No one person, institution or ideology can escape a pointed finger or resist pointing too.

      And although it doesn’t feel nice to be blamed, there’s always a good, noble, righteous reason why someone ‘should’ or ‘shouldn’t’ be blamed for something.

      The Nuts and Bolts of Blame

      Neuroscientist Jill-Bolte Taylor links blame to the left hemisphere, where she suffered a massive stroke, described in A Stroke of Insight and Whole Brain Living.

      “As my left brain became stronger, it seemed natural for me to want to “blame” other people or external events for my feelings or circumstances.”

      Recovered from her stroke, she gained a rare objectivity, and wrote clearly about how it feels when anxiety, shame, guilt, anger or blame overwhelm and possess her consciousness.

      “highly focused as my head feels like it is in a deep cloud …heavy, burdened, or desperate, just as though doomsday has perilously arrived… prickly in my body and tense in my throat… like a pressure cooker that is ready to explode with vehement hostility and blame.”

      These “old pattered responses” become habitual over time and “perfected in …attempts to fend off threats”, but may also get triggered if we have a strong need to hide something, like shame. 

      This is the focus of the book Healing the Shame That Binds You, where author John Bradshaw admits that shame “ruled me like an addiction. I acted it out; I covered it up in subtle and not so subtle ways; I transferred it to my family, my clients and the people I taught.”

      Blame can also be used to strike out against anything we find strange or unpleasant in our environment.

      This dynamic is called projection, described by analyst Joseph Lee as a sort of “magnetic attraction between you and (certain unacknowledged) qualities(s) out in your environment.” Rather than accept these disowned parts of ourselves, we defend against them with criticism and blame.

      Beyond Blame

      This is one of the paradoxes of our life, that familiarity is stronger than comfort – Virginia Satir

      Post-stroke, Jill Bolte Taylor sounded like Marcus Aurelius when she writes “nothing external to me had the power to take away my peace of heart and mind.” Not easy for us mere mortals, but this is the promise of blaming less.

      Without blame, we could go easier on ourselves and others. We could accept responsibility, and stay comfortable with uncertainty and not-knowing. We could learn to speak the truth and say what we want to say, without holding our tongue or venting and complaining. And we could reel in our projections, admit our mistakes and become a more realistic, imperfect human being, warts and all. 

      A world without blame is deeply uncomfortable and painful. But it’s possible, and gives us the chance to see life clearly, as it truly is.

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    7. Police in plain clothes

      August 7, 2025 @ 11:13am – Dart Island, NSW

      A desire to understand is wisdom;
      desiring a result is greed.

      Sayadaw U Tejaniya

      It’s June 20, 2022. As usual, I’d arrived at my therapist’s office in a rush. We talk about feelings. Feelings I’ve had for as long as I could remember. Feeling different. Disconnected. Feeling like a fraud. A deep, disorienting sadness.

      These were sensitive topics for me, but I was trying too hard to do therapy correctly. Asking clever questions. Speaking carefully. Thinking a bit too much. That doesn’t get you very far. It’s not really talk therapy. It’s not even proper talking. The performance prevents anything real to percolate. You’d be literally better off talking to a tree.

      My therapist changed tack. She asked the part of me that was blocking her questions to sit (imaginarily) on a (real) empty chair and tell her why it was acting like that. Why was it so defensive? And what in particular was it protecting?

      When I spoke as that part, which we named The Controller, I repeated the same evasive, critical stance I had taken before. The crucial distinction was that it was now a separate part of me. Before the exercise, I was identified with it. I was it. By naming, placing and conversing with it, it was now a separate part. It had its own form. It had moved from subject, to object.

      Unofficially, this was parts work, usually associated with Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy. In No Bad Parts, Richard C. Schwartz rejects a “mono mind paradigm”, dividing up our interior world into many parts or “little inner beings who are trying their best to keep you safe.” There’s different types of parts, like Protectors, “the parts of us usually running our lives” and Exiles which “we have tried to bury”, burdened with difficult “emotions, beliefs and memories”. There’s also the Self, which is like our mature and ‘spontaneously compassionate’ side, that we all access once other less healthy parts move aside.

      When we talk to, listen to, and gain the trust of these different parts, we can restore peace and order inside us. Exiled parts can emerge from the shadows when we no longer find them disgusting or dangerous. Harsh, defensive parts like an inner critic can relax. By talking to The Controller, I learned a little about what it cares about (identifying threats), but also that it’s tired of this job. This attitude, this protective stance started to sound like an extremely expensive insurance policy, written for imaginary risks.

      Outside a police academy, plainclothes officers whoop and horse around like new graduates. Two run straight at each other and collide, bouncing off unhurt like stuntmen. A policeman tells me they’re practicing to be criminals.
      Dream – August 5, 2025

      No Bad Parts, written by IFS founder Richard C. Schwartz, is a decent, slightly bland introduction to the theory. But like a book about basketball, it’s probably better to start practicing. Schwartz recommends finding an IFS trained therapist, which is a good start, although any mental health practitioner would be able to walk through a similar exercise to mine that I shared.

      Since most people probably don’t have access to a therapist, or the concentration required to sit quietly and listen to themselves, it’s worth experimenting with other approaches. For example, if you have a practice of recording your dreams, you might consider thinking of dream characters as parts. Dreams have no need for conscious visualization or monk-like concentration. All you need is a bit of memory.

      Dreams are naturally vivid and emotive, effortlessly delivery images and potent symbols for you to review each morning. A dream of a meeting with a confused, miserable teenager might be showing you an Exile that you banished years ago for being too embarrassing. A dream of policeman, horsing around in plain clothes might signal the relaxing of a habitually judgmental attitude.

      Parts work uses different language than Jung, but the thought is the same. It doesn’t matter if you recognize a part in a dream or in an empty chair. What matters is getting free of the habitual identification, with the confidence and assurance that “you will never find anything in the unconscious that will not be useful and good when it is made conscious and brought to the right level.”1

      1. Johnson, Robert A. 1989. Inner Work ↩︎
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    8. Light pollution

      July 18, 2025 @ 12:54pm – Melbourne, Australia

      “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.” – Joseph Campbell

      “We have to acknowledge that we hate those things and only those things in the world that we first hate in ourselves.” – Ken Wilber

      If you look up at the night sky in a city, you’ll see a couple of stars. There’s the constellations you’re familiar with, and a few others here and there. You may have seen the sky full of stars, but that’s probably not the sky that you experience most of the time. It’s limited, but it’s your sky. In a similar way, we are habitually identified with a certain type of consciousness, our ego. This is the attitude, thoughts, beliefs, that we have grown up with and grown used to. 

      It’s been developed for good reasons, because an ego helps us to relate with others and get things done in society. But because of how the ego is developed, unconsciously, and in response to stuff that happens in childhood, it is naturally going to be a little bit narrow. As we’ve grown up, we’ve made all these little choices about what is good, what is bad, and so on. It’s been in our interest to try our best, but we’re always operating off limited information. So our personalities end up a bit limited too.

      The ego is missing some stuff. It’s probably over-indexed on certain things, under-cooked in other areas. It’s a house designed with very little oversight. Some of us spent most of the time designing a sleek infinity swimming pool. Others spent a lot of time getting the kitchen right, but forgot to plumb the bathroom. Some rooms are lit up with seductive mood lighting, others have no electricity.

      In this imperfect process, as we double down on the things we believe to be important, we’re also doing a lot of shoving away of the things that are deemed dangerous or difficult, or that don’t particularly help us to navigate the world.

      This stuff becomes what Jung called the Shadow, the “dumping ground for all those characteristics of our personality that we disown”1. Deborah Stewart, of This Jungian Life podcast, describes it as “the underbelly of the ego…that’s hard to look at… hard to feel really connected to…loaded with feelings of disgust, profound discomfort, and a feeling of wanting to push it away.”2

      Although the ego and the shadow have such differing relationships with the conscious mind, they both constrain us. We are constrained by identification with some things and rejection of other things.

      The Constraint of the Ego

      I was collaging with some friends. I hadn’t made a collage in a long time. I thought it would be easy, but I found it very difficult to create a composition that I liked. I was selecting and cutting out images from magazines. I thought I was being clever. I thought I had a good eye and aesthetic. I’m a designer. I should be good at this.

      But I was stuck. I was jiggling around pieces like a jigsaw puzzle. Nothing was fitting together. My friend D saw this and asked what I was doing. I said “I’m trying to move it around so it looks right.” She replied, “What’s right? It’s a collage.” She had a point. What did right mean? And why was that important? Why not just have fun? Why not make something silly, or shocking, or bright turquoise? No, for me, I need to get it right.

      A few pieces of ripped paper shone a bright light on what’s habitual for me, what I identify with. The need to be careful, considerate, aesthetic, minimal. I pick pleasing things. I take care and attention and time. That’s my ego.

      There’s no right way to do a collage, of course. That’s like saying there’s a right way to make a song. And I got more interesting results when I used colors that I don’t normally use, or if I used my left hand, or closed my eyes, or if I ripped things really quickly, or if I ripped instead of using scissors.

      The Constraint of the Shadow

      When I buy something at the supermarket, I don’t make small talk. I place my things down on the counter, my phone bristling ready to pay. I move on as quickly as I can. I want to be efficient. I don’t want unnecessary attention on me. I don’t want to slow down people behind me.

      Now, sometimes, when I need coins for the laundry in my apartment building, I need to ask for change. It’s not possible to move by quietly like usual. I have to stop and say “Hey…” I have to ask someone to do something for me. In a way, I have to admit that I need help, or that I don’t have my life completely organized and together. Those are things that I would rather not look at directly. Things that my habitual side really can’t stand and pretends don’t exist. That’s my shadow.

      And there’s a lot of defense mechanisms when I’m pushed into those shadow areas, even with something simple like asking for change. For some people it’s “hatred, disgust, avoidance, criticism, accusations, attacking.”3 In this case, I’ll get irritated. I’ll try and avoid it. I’ll roll my eyes. I’ll think about finding a machine to do this so I don’t have to think about it again. I’ll feel bad about holding up the line and apologize a lot. 

      Just like the ego constrained my collaging attempts, my shadow also prevents me from spontaneously asking for things. 

      There’s no need to blow up the ego, or to live out your shadow all at once. That would be reckless and dangerous. These functions have been carefully created for practical reasons. But we need to watch them closely. Watch how they shape our behaviour and most importantly how they constrain us into tight spaces.

      We can try to stop squeezing ourselves between our (self-created) likes and dislikes. It’s not comfortable there and never will be. We need room to move. Like Viktor Frankl famously said, “between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” 

      We can look up at the sky and we can say “hey, I kind of know this isn’t the full sky, right? I kind of know that light pollution is blocking some stuff. I know there might be more out there.”

      1. Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche ↩︎
      2. Episode 55 – Identifying & Integrating the Personal Shadow,” This Jungian Life ↩︎
      3. Episode 55 – Identifying & Integrating the Personal Shadow,” This Jungian Life ↩︎
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