come alive, life is captivating
019 | Hue's Cues: your weekly dose of inspiration and insights for your brain, mind, body, and soul.
find your rhythm,
relieve yourself of the systems,
your intuition is always calling,
fire up your wisdoms,
indulge in your freedoms,
that kingdom within is waiting,
creating, dictating, repeating,
stimulating, resonating, reacting,
celebrating,
the high tides of contemplating.
come alive,
save your strides,
life is captivating.
And this week, by coincidence, each small action highlights the value of wonder: that abundant, overwhelming feeling of admiration and delight, and the quiet rewards of lingering in awe over the handful of simple pleasures I happily encountered this week.
What has been the highlight of your week so far?
Train your brain to do hard things, even when the outcome is unknown, when nothing is guaranteed, and fear is what’s gripping you. One line, I read recently, stayed with me: on the other side of fear is usually what you needed to do all along. I’d also add: on the other side of fear is growth. I almost wrote potential growth. But there is nothing potential about moving through fear. Each time you cross something that scares you, however small or large, you’re teaching your brain to recalibrate it’s oldest alarm—it’s fight-or-flight reflex that so easily freezes you and keeps you from the life you want. Recent research even shows that specific visual-thalamic pathways can relearn to suppress automatic escape responses when an instinctive threat turns out to be safe. We abandon a lot of life this way: dreams, openings, the version of reality you actually want. I often return to one memory: standing at the edge of Aling-Aling waterfall in Bali one summer, starring down at the drop centimeters beyond my toes, as I negotiated with my fear of heights. It took some minutes before I finally leapt, but I’ll never forget the wild relief of doing the thing my brain was nervously processing. The thrill, the adrenaline. I return to that memory often as a metaphor whenever life presents a challenge to overcome. Should I stay, or should I leap?
Nourish the mind with calming sounds. The real thing always outperform its imitation, but on a recent night: hours rolling around awake, sleep refusing to arrive, I went looking for something, anything to settle me down. Insomnia isn’t ever a common occurrence. Especially with Laurie Taylor Thinking Allowed on BBC’s or Rick Rubin reading The Creative Act: A Way of Being soothing me to sleep. As research suggests that familiar, calming audio can become a conditioned cue for sleep, shortening the time it takes to drift. Though it’s never a guarantee, like the case those nights. Unfortunately, that night, neither helped. In desperation, I nearly reached for melatonin. Instead, I resorted to one last attempt: a playlist of Tibetan singing bowls, curated here by April Nowack (I don’t know who you are, but I appreciate you). Several small studies suggest that Tibetan and Himalayan singing bowls can can reliably induce deep relaxation, ease anxiety, and shift brain and heart rhythms into a more restful state; a proven and natural intervention to coax the nervous system out of its nighttime alertness. I woke up pleased with myself; no sleep aids ingested.
Stimulate your body with new sensations. I am flatfooted, with a bunion that’s tilting further right, so the sensation I’ve been reintroducing my body lately is focused on one of the its more neglected regions: my feet. Said aloud, it sounds almost too obvious: of course we should pay attention to the needs of our feet, the only two parts that hold our entire body upright. Miraculous really. And yet, foot health remains a relatively niche consideration, my naiveté included. What we forget is how alive our feet are meant to be. Each sole contains thousands of nerve endings and dense touch receptors, sending a constant stream of information to the brain about pressure, texture, and balance. Modern footwear, sadly, especially narrow heels or tapered shoes compress the toes, dulls the sensory feedback, and is strongly linked with bunions and other structural changes over time.
Feed yourself with flavors you grew up with, to create rest and recovery for the soul. On a trip home, I always seek meals filled with my usual suspects, and chief among them, breakfasts as my culture knows it: a savory bowl of chicken porridge. Though I confess, I skimped on most of the porridge and filled my bowl mostly with gloriously golden aromatic turmeric chicken stock, eggs, shredded chicken, vegetables, and a spoonful of sambal (Indonesian chili paste that makes every bite taste like home). Because before sugary cereals entered the breakfast table, the world ate something savory. Fun fact: cold cereal is largely an American marketer’s invention who turned processed grains into a “lighter” ready-made breakfast and then sold the idea hard. Forming breakfast habits globally until today. Studies on comfort food and food-evoked nostalgia suggests that these familiar flavors don’t just taste good; they can ease loneliness and stress by pulling us back into fond memories and relationships. Sometimes it’s also a way back to the parts of yourself you might have lost touch with. It’s also a small act of honoring the past that’s shaped the person you are, and the one you’re still becoming.
On Hakeem Oluseyi, the astrophysicist and cosmologist storyteller. There’s an irony and a particular kind of pleasure in not fully understanding someone explain one of humanity’s most complex subjects, and listening to the whole near half-hour explanation anyway. So I’ll admit it: I’m sharing this not because I understood every word, and I won’t pretend to grasp even a handful of the concepts he speaks of. But what I missed in understanding, I made up in fascination. Listening close, feeling inspired at every beat. Because Hakeem Olusyi is an astrophysicist and cosmologist with a rare talent: the ability to make a conversation about quantum physics sound like your next greatest mystery novel. He’s piqued my interest. More than the topic itself, it’s his passion that jumps off the screen, and it’s what’s inspired me most this week. I was awe-struck by his passion.
“In the toughest moments, if you’re not too emotional, if you find a way to take some distance, you might find the opportunities because they’re always there.” — Patrick Mouratoglou