frames, protocols, and perfection: notes on loosening the grip
014 | Hue's Cues: your weekly dose of inspiration and insights for your brain, mind, body, and soul.
Looking ahead, dew still lingering on the leaves, a hundred shades of green greet me as my feet hit the path. I look up to admire the towering tropical canopies typical of this part of the world. A rooster announces the morning as I take a deep, nose-flaring inhale—air thick with moisture, as I move through a softening this week.
Loosening my grip on frames that no longer serve me, and on those that were never mine to begin with. Rewriting the scripts narrating my everyday: a WIP, always.
The grip on protocols. The reach for perfection. The temptation to make it all look pretty and swell. The rhetoric of a millennial: everything tied up neatly in a bow, because the world taught us it doesn’t accept or tolerate imperfection. We know the standards aren’t serving us, but the fantasy of a good life still lingers, quietly measuring us against who we think a good person is.
As I make my rounds through the winding paths near my home, getting lost amongst the trees, I breathe out with a sigh of relief. I’ve been starting my mornings this way as much as I can; a reminder, that life is most thrilling lived, present, in the in-betweens.
This edition is an extension of the softening: of grip, of frame, of what we were taught a good life should look like. A sound bath to rearrange the nervous system. Flexibility as the new discipline. A small daily ritual to soothe the body. A morning reset with nature, and a spark that’s stirred a question: who can AI actually serve?
I’m in a season of softening, and letting go of inherited frames is the work I am doing because these aren’t personal. It’s a universal consideration, as we move through a second renaissance, as Carl Jung said: “Every transformation demands as its precondition “the ending of a world”—the collapse of an old philosophy of life.”
If you’re new here, this newsletter is for those living in between who they were raised to be, who they want to be, and who they’re becoming. Start here.
Let sound healing rearrange your nervous system. With the hairs on the back of my neck rising, a tingling rushed down my spine. I treated my brain to rest and recovery with chimes, singing bowls, and the melodic low ethereal hums of gongs. One fact I often forget: we’re made of roughly 60% water. And if you’ve ever felt the bass at a concert, the idea that sound can travel through you, through our cells and tease our nervous system into different states doesn’t feel like as much of a stretch. Research around sound therapy is still thin, but early studies show promise, especially around the immediate effects of sound baths. Let me vouch from the cushion: after a two-hour session, I walked out light, renewed, and rearranged. The instruments are said to nudge the brain into a “theta-like” states (4-8Hz), that pleasant floaty in-between as you drift off before slumber. Conscious, but grazing your subconscious. One controlled EEG study used a single Tibetan singing bowl, tuned to a 6.68 Hz beat, which showed spiked brain activity at a frequency gain of 251% in theta and delta power too. The bowl synchronized brainwaves to its beat. And as we wait for the science to catch up you can at least appreciate the video below (which went viral for a reason).
Unclench. Flexibility is the new discipline. A softer mind keeps us steadier in a world increasingly perplexing. Lately I’ve been training my mind to act more nimble, open, and less attached to what it thinks is coming. In practice: I catch myself mid-spiral and ask two questions: what’s in my control? What can I do right now to re-stabilize my emotions? There’s a name for this in psychology: psychological flexibility—staying in touch with the present moment and your values while adjusting your behavior when life gets painful or uncertain. Higher psychological flexibility is linked to less depression, less anxiety, less distress, and more resilience when things go sideways. Easier said than done. But, an observation I’ve noticed: the most successful people always talk about how having a handle on their emotion is the single most important skill that’ll make the greatest difference.
A daily curcumin dose to quiet the body’s alarms. If inflammation is the fertile soil for disease, then turmeric is one of the easiest commitments I can serve my body. My daily ritual: an extra-strength turmeric capsule is how I nourish my body. Of course, other lifestyle habits, like what you eat, how you move, and how you sleep matters too. But, I’m also a fan of the low-hanging fruit. A vegan pill, once a day, with real upside? Not a ridiculous routine to maintain. Though I’m neither a doctor nor a nutritionist, this triple-blind study found that both turmeric and ginger meaningfully reduced inflammatory markers. My thoughts: if there’s a small thing you can do to help your body reduce inflammation, why not?
Indulge in a morning routine with nature (if it’s available to you). I’ve been stimulating my soul with early runs through the glorious park next door: winding paths, towering trees, flowering plants, the birds, and the occasional rooster flocking about. I’ve been starting my mornings this way, whenever I can. I feel blessed. It’s been a real respite. A morning reset, with nature and I, before anything hijacks my attention. What a real difference it has made to the rest of my day! Studies have proven time and time again, nature walks significantly improved anxiety and depression scores. But, there’s also science to encourage varied running programs too, to help improve mood, reduce depression and anxiety, and to enhance overall psychological well-being too.
You know me! Of course, I have a great playlist to accompany me through my run too. This one below was the perfect mood-set for my morning run. Enjoy.
Carlo Iacono writes into a feeling I’ve been sitting with too: we can’t keep disregarding the rest of the world. The “underdeveloped nations,” the “third world,” nor the smaller nations, because while Western media and the dominance of English continues, let’s not forget that 94% of the world’s population are not native English speakers. That’s a lot of people. The irony of arriving at this conclusion while building an English newsletter is not lost on me. “I’ve Been Writing About AI for Two Years. I Was Looking at the Wrong Part of the World” is a thorough reminder on how we need to broaden our scope on the AI conversations dominating the global thought circles. Perhaps even more so than only the needs and fears of the global West, the “others,” the majority need intentional considerations too. I’ve been untangling myself from such blindspot too; not only in terms of AI but generally too. Arguing how most AI discourse orbits the same places: Silicon Valley, productivity hacks, cheating in universities, existential risk, whether machines will eventually outthink us. Iacono point: we may be obsessing over the wrong AI story entirely. It’s a perspective shift worth your time. It reframes AI not only as a luxury tool for optimization, but as necessary infrastructure for survival. Like detecting counterfeit malaria medication in Africa, helping farmers diagnose crop disease offline in rural Africa, translating healthcare and financial systems for regions historically excluded from technological progress. It challenges how Western-centric the AI conversation has been, and how many of our fears assume a baseline of privilege, education, and institutional stability and access that billions in the world don’t have to begin with. The question beneath it all: who can AI serve? And whose real world realities can it be used for? Promising expansion of our perspectives on how AI can truly change so much of the world versus only focusing on the negatives; although the author is also careful to remind us that the threats dominating global headlines are also very real.
