The SHN #16: What I've Been Up To

Welcome back to The Synergetic Health Newsletter! 

Today I will update you on my life and practices.

After that I’ll share some fun stuff like an affordable cold plunge idea, how to make gelatin ground beef, and more.

Joe Burt

What I’ve Been Up To

This Newsletter

Crafting this newsletter has become a medium for exploration and expression, a platform to share insights, discoveries, and the occasional spark of inspiration. It has allowed me to dig deeper into the fertile soil of health, wellness, and spirituality.

In this digital age, where every click and scroll can feel fleeting, I'm immensely grateful for the opportunity to engage with you on a deeper level. I know some of these letters get a little lengthy, but hopefully each one gives you something to take away.

And so, as I continue this voyage alongside you, I want to express my gratitude for your presence, your engagement, and your willingness to explore these realms with me. Writing this newsletter has been a source of joy, and it is your companionship on this journey that makes it all the more meaningful.

The following quote was taken from James Clear’s 3-2-1 Newsletter, the second most popular newsletter sent out on Thursday’s:

"My approach is to empower, not to prescribe. I'm not interested in telling you which habits you should build or which choices you should make. You know what works for your life and circumstances better than I ever could. Instead, I want to equip and empower you with ideas and strategies so you can make your own choices and do the things you want to do. I'll give you the hammer, you decide where to drive the nail."

I can freely admit that in the past, especially in my role as a personal trainer, I too often fell into the prescription side of the equation. It took me awhile to learn that that is not the way people adapt and grow. Hopefully the things I share act as seeds, you can decide which ones to water.

Lifestyle Redesign

I’m shaking things up.

For the past 38+ years I’ve had a place to call home. A place where all my precious “stuff” held residence. That changes in October as I’ll be living on the road for the foreseeable future.

The process of detaching from my possessions wasn’t easy to start, but has become more liberating the more things I let go of. I began by looking for justifications to keep something, now I am looking for any explanation to let something go.

There are many reasons that I’ve decided to do this, but simply I feel called to completely exit my comfort zone and intentionally put myself into situations where I must adapt and grow.

It isn’t a decision I made intellectually, by listing out the pros and cons, although I could rationalize it that way. Instead, I feel myself being pulled forward by something I cannot resist.

This embrace of uncertainty and discomfort runs contrary to the default path that many of us choose and I’m completely at peace with that. It involves having faith, becoming more alive, facing my fears, and figuring out how I’m meant to serve.

I’m fortunate to be in a position to follow this inner calling and I’m looking forward to this adventure with wide eyes and an open mind.

For those curious, I’ll be spending the foreseeable future in Puerto Rico, Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, and whatever other Latin American countries call my name. Hopefully after that I can make it to Southeast Asia, living in countries like Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia.

"Life begins at the end of your comfort zone." - Neale Donald Walsch

Social Media and News Fast

I recently completed a two-week fast from social media, news, and from looking at the stock market. The first few days were a bit challenging, with typical withdrawal-like symptoms. Then the itch for another cheap dopamine hit completely fell away, which led to an enhanced peace of mind.

After two weeks, when I “broke” my fast, I almost felt dirty scrolling on my previously beloved Twitter feed. In the week since it’s been completed, I’d estimate my time spent on all social media/news/stocks/etc is down 75% or more. No guarantee that I don’t slip back into old habits, but the realizations that came from this fast will not die easy.

Of course I would recommend this to anyone who self-reports having an issue with over scrolling, if nothing else than for the knowledge of how using your time on social media steals your peace.

Learning Spanish

In middle school, I finished Spanish 1, then I got removed from my Spanish 2 class because of behavioral issues. My freshman year, they started me in Spanish 3 before quickly realizing I needed to return to Spanish 1, where my academic language career culminated.

Since then, I’ve made half-hearted attempts at learning Spanish with Duolingo, Rosetta Stone, and other methods. But now, on the heels of an extended journey through Latin America, I’m making a more concerted effort to reach a conversational level.

The platform I’m using is Baselang, which is similar to Italki, and offers 1-on-1 sessions where you can either follow along with their curriculum or practice conversation or basically whatever you want to do with your teacher, via zoom. It’s $149 month for unlimited sessions ($1 for first week), which can be an incredible deal if you have the time to do it.

I supplement this with watching TV in Spanish (just finished all of Breaking Bad), using apps like Anki and Duolingo, and trying to “think” in Spanish throughout my day.

Side note on my Baselang experience. A majority of my teachers are younger and come from countries like Peru, Venezuela, Colombia, and Argentina. They all have incredibly demanding work or work/school schedules, often working seven days a week with deficient sleep.

When I mentioned that I ate “cinco juevos” for breakfast that morning, one teacher told me how her family of four in Venezuela would share two eggs for breakfast just a few years ago. Other teachers are working ten hour days without air conditioning with temps upwards of 100 degrees.

Despite their relative poverty compared to us in America, they are laughing, smiling, and optimistic. They have incredibly tight familial relationships and have lots of love for their home countries. It’s been humbling having these interactions on a daily basis.

Reading

I have been keeping up my strong reading habit. Here are some of the books I’ve read recently:

The Way to Love: Anthony De Mello

“Everywhere in the world people are in search of love, for everyone is convinced that love alone can save the world, love alone can make life meaningful and worth living. But how very few understand what love really is, and how it arises in the human heart. It is so frequently equated with good feelings toward others, with benevolence or nonviolence or service. But these things in themselves are not love. Love springs from awareness. It is only inasmuch as you see someone as he or she really is here and now and not as they are in your memory or your desire or in your imagination or projection that you can truly love them, otherwise it is not the person that you love but the idea that you have formed of this person, or this person as the object of your desire not as he or she is in themselves.”

Vagabonding: Rolf Potts

“The more we associate experience with cash value, the more we think that money is what we need to live. And the more we associate money with life, the more we convince ourselves that we’re too poor to buy our freedom.”

The End of Your World: Adyashanti

“The only way to know that we’ve seen into the true nature of something is that the story we’re telling ourselves releases. It is not only seen to be illusion; it is felt to be illusion. Our illusions– the beliefs we hold on to– are the very doorways to our freedom. We simply have to enter through them, without grasping or pushing away. ”

Fluent in 3 Months: Benny Lewis

“Constant conversation practice is the core of what I would recommend to people with a spoken-communication focus in their language, as opposed to those who are learning a language to pass an exam or to read it well. All of your study attempts should be about making that next spoken session a little bit better.”

The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success: Deepak Chopra

“Attention energizes, and intention transforms. Whatever you put your attention on will grow stronger in your life. Whatever you take your attention away from will wither, disintegrate, and disappear. Intention, on the other hand, triggers transformation of energy and information. Intention organizes its own fulfillment. “

The Four Agreements: Don Miguel Ruiz

“The only reason you suffer is because you choose to suffer. If you look at your life you will find many excuses to suffer, but a good reason to suffer you will not find. The same is true for happiness. The only reason you are happy is because you choose to be happy. Happiness is a choice, and so is suffering.”

Living Now: Joel Goldsmith

“The barriers to our spiritual progress are our hopes, ambitions, and desires, even when they are good. Some of us cannot release the quest for health, and others cannot release the seeking for rent, food, clothing, or companionship. Always one of these lacks or desires is the thing that we feel must be solved first.”

The Art of Pilgrimage: Phil Cousineau

“The purpose of the pilgrimage is to make life more meaningful. Through sacred travel, individuals can find the path to the divine, the ultimate source of life.”

Awakening Intuition: Frances Vaughan

“Much energy is usually directed toward manipulation and control of the external environment and of other people. If you withdraw that energy from the external world and turn it inward to self-observation, you can discover how to transform your experience by changing not your external circumstances, but your state of consciousness.”

How to Travel the World on $50 a Day: Matt Kepnes

“I firmly believe that travel is not expensive. My own personal motto is ‘Travel cheaper, longer, and better.’ As I’ve traveled, I’ve come to realize that you can have a first-class travel experience on an economy-class budget as long as you are flexible and think outside the box.”

Perfect Brilliant Stillness: David Carse

"Trying, caring, longing, desiring, having beliefs, having opinions, needing to defend those positions, needing anything at all; none of these are your original nature, your true being. All these are learned, conditioned behaviors, hypnosis to keep you asleep in the dream."

Pointers from Nisargadatta Maharaj: Ramesh Balsekar

“Once you realize that there is nothing in this world that you can or need call your own, you will look at it from the outside, as you look at a play on the stage or a movie on the screen, admiring and enjoying, perhaps suffering, but deep down, quite unmoved.”

What to Do When It’s Your Turn: Seth Godin

“The best gift requires little of the recipient. The giver doesn’t say “I worked hard to bring you this gift; you must love it, use it, embrace it. You must be grateful to me in recompense for how much I put into this gift. This gift controls you.

Of course not. The best gift is accompanied by, “here, I made this. Do with it as you will.”

Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment: Thaddeus Golas

“The solution to all our push-pull tensions is to treat everyone, every being you recognize to be alive, as equal to yourself.”

My “Spiritual” Practice

For quite a while now, I’ve kept up a twice daily meditation schedule. For 15-30 minutes upon waking and before sleep I drop into a meditation. I don’t have a specific style I do each time and usually I will mix it up depending on what I feel called to do.

Outside of meditation, I try to pay close attention to anything that pops into my consciousness that is undesirable or uncomfortable. This could come in the form of negative thinking, anxiety, unwelcome physical sensations, negative emotions, or anything unpleasant really.

Each time something like this comes up, I try my best to completely allow its appearance, not trying to bottle it up or push it away. I let it have its time in the spotlight and realize its temporary nature. This permission and a self-forgiveness for these “unwanted” appearances allows them to be transmuted in your consciousness, lessening their ability to hijack you in the present and in the future.

For example, say you get a piece of bad news. Usually this is accompanied by strong negative physical sensations and a host of negative thinking. This is normal. How you respond to this will determine how you react to bad news in the future.

You can allow these sensations and thoughts to consume you, driving you into a vicious cycle of suffering. Or you can fully feel and accept these appearances in consciousness as temporary and fleeting, giving them space to express but not allowing your Self to get carried out to sea with them.

One person can respond to a piece of bad news with acceptance and grace, while another person can respond to this same piece of news with rage.

The news itself is not the cause of the rage, it’s how it is responded to internally.

A practice you can consider is each time you feel something unpleasant arise, usually in the form of thoughts, emotions, sensations, etc; observe that with as full, nonjudgmental awareness as possible. From there, you will have the ability to choose love and forgiveness or to choose suffering.

Another way you can view these experiences, perceptions, emotions, and thoughts is as “harvestable” material. When challenging or uncomfortable situations arise, you can see these as opportunities to grow, heal, and awaken. Just the willingness to look deeply at these appearances with acceptance and forgiveness is all that is necessary to transmute fear into love.

I also continue to read a fair bit of spiritual material and watch Youtube clips because it helps to keep me in a “spiritual” consciousness. But the majority of the work is done in the real world, moment-to-moment, like in the process of harvesting.

Eventually, things outside of yourself begin to have less and less power over you. Not that the appearances themselves disappear, but they are able to be seen clearly without the distortion of your conditioning, beliefs, opinions, preferences, thoughts, etc.

The Physical

I’m still experimenting with implementing a lot of the bioenergetic “diet” principles popularized by Ray Peat. I’ve enjoyed this because I’m liberally eating fruit, dairy, OJ, gelatin, eggs, grass fed beef, oysters, potatoes, ice cream, and more. I’ve definitely been eating more calories and my weight has remained stable and my energy has been great.

I’ve scaled way back on chicken, turkey, pork consumption. Also have limited nuts (except macadamia), seeds, grains, and all processed foods. I’ve talked about all this in the past few newsletters.

I’m still working my circadian biology everyday. That starts with getting early morning sunlight, includes getting 30-60 minutes of full-body midday sunlight, catching the sunrise, and protecting myself from artificial light at night. The lowest-cost, highest-benefit tool for health is (IMO) optimizing your circadian health and ensuring adequate sun exposure.

I continue to average 10k+ steps a day. It’s strange to say that walking is possibly my favorite activity, but it is. If there’s anything that you currently do inside (work calls, etc) that can be done on a walk, you have a golden opportunity to get more steps in.

Will always be keeping up with strength training/lifting weights. Scaled back to around 3 days a week of full body workouts and upping the intensity of each a little bit. Currently not doing much cardio unless you count walking but I’m looking to add sprints into my regimen.

To stay mobile, aligned, and to keep my joints happy, I do 10-15 minutes a day of mobility type work, mostly inspired by Zac Cupples and Ben Patrick.

Some things I wish I did more of include: breathwork, yoga, Qigong/Tai chi, swimming, tennis/pickleball, and anything physical really that is done with other people.

Don’t You Work?

Not at the moment!

Over the past year, since relocating to Austin, I've chosen a path without consistent income. While it may feel uncomfortable at times, it's a deliberate choice I’m making, one that can last for several years if necessary, and I'm still only in year one.

I recognize that my approach may seem unconventional. It certainly helps that I don't have a mortgage, a family to support, a car, or college debt. These are all individual choices, each working for some and not for others.

Letting go of the notion that I must always have steady income has been my biggest challenge. However, I've contemplated the worst-case scenario extensively. In my current trajectory, my lowest point would involve depleting my savings and taking up work as a personal trainer or driving for Uber, while maintaining a simple lifestyle.

With this as my worst-case scenario, I find solace in knowing that even if I don't discover a more preferable path, I can always return to the lifestyle I embraced during my early and mid-20s. Those years, despite limited income, were some of the most enjoyable times of my life.

I may not have a traditional job, but I've gained something far more valuable: the freedom to live life on my own terms.

Sometimes, the bravest choice is to let go of what society expects and follow your own unique journey, wherever it may lead. For me, this choice is void of fear and instead is one of faith that my future path is currently being prepared for me.

Consider this thought-provoking paragraph from The Pathless Path:

“It might surprise you that in Greece, during the time of Aristotle more than 2,000 years ago, work was simply considered a necessary evil. The prime aim of life according to philosophers was “Eudaimonia,” which translates literally as “happiness,” but is better expressed as “flourishing.” In Aristotles’ words, “the more contemplation, the more happiness there is in a life.” Contemplating one’s place in the universe was seen as one of the most worthwhile things to do and at minimum, more important than the “money-making life,” which Aristotle described as “something quite contrary to nature…. for it is merely useful as a means to something else.””

I’m not exactly sure at what stage we flipped the script and turned into a society that puts work at the forefront of our lives, but fortunately the individual has the right to choose how to approach their work-life balance. For me, for now, I choose to live like Aristotle.

An Affordable Cold Plunge Approach

I’ve yet to jump on this wellness craze but this seems like an easy-ish and affordable way to try this without dropping $5,000:

Twitter Thread of the Week

*Adding gelatin to your diet is a very wise decision if you are consuming a lot of muscle meats. It balances out the amino acid profile.

The Steps of Self-Inquiry Into Who You Really Are

Total Meat Intake Associated With Life Expectancy: Many people look at the people living in Blue Zones and have a takeaway that eating less meat is the answer to increased longevity. In 2021, a study discovered that the consumption of meat is linked to increased life expectancy in 175 different countries. This association remained significant even after accounting for factors such as education and GDP.

Circadian Medicine- A Critical Strategy for Cardiac Care: “In patients with an acute myocardial infarction, disrupted circadian rhythms during the initial days in the cardiac intensive care unit, caused by factors such as noise, excessive night-time light and frequent patient–staff interactions, can have devastating effects on cardiac repair and long-term prognosis.” This article highlights the importance of incorporating “circadian medicine” into clinical practice.

That will do it for this time! Hopefully you got some value out of it. If you have any questions/comments/things you’d like to learn more about please don’t hesitate to reach out.

If you know anyone who loves learning about these types of topics, send them this link!

To read all past newsletters, go here.