Dan Bartlett: coach, writer, engineer & founder

Please read me!

I’ve published something new every day for the last 100 days.

Impatience is on my mind a lot since I came back from retreat.

Meditation can be boiled down to two things: revelation and reverence.

We usually reserve the term objectification for the process of sexually objectifying a person.

Many diverse worldviews can be boiled down to variations of the following statement: “This is shit, but…” This is shit, but there’s a perfect heaven coming next (Religion) This is shit, but I can accumulate enough status or wealth to make it bearable (Mat…

Another barrier to meaning is the idea that it only exists inside of human heads, and that we need to project it over the world.

One enemy of meaning is an over-reliance on one mode of knowing.

I’ve been thinking more about legacy after listening to an inspiring talk a couple of weeks back.

(Read Part 1 and Part 2 first.)

We often find tension in the body.

(Read Part 1 first.)

My first memories of physical education involve a girl called Claire.

A good day for me is built atop three pillars: meditation, movement, and writing.

I spend an enormous amount of time thinking about consciousness and wisdom, whilst engaging in practices that help me clarify my own experience.

In the far-reaching conversation between John Vervaeke, Iain McGilchrist and Daniel Schmachtenberger, Iain makes the following point, which I’ll paraphrase: We need to notice the things that draw us from the front, not just the things that push us from be…

One benefit of growing mental health awareness is our ability to communicate, to ourselves and others, what we’re feeling with less social inhibition.

3 years ago, I was in a bad place.

I’ve run 6 ultramarathons and I often get questions about them.

Yesterday, I ran my first ultra in nearly 5 years.

Many people come to coaching in search of impact.

Lots of people I support each week struggle, in one way or another, with difficult thoughts.

In my late 20s, I was struggling with anxiety.

Yesterday’s post was free-written.

I was listening to James Low on the Waking Up app, as I walked to the shop today.

As a coach, you hear the word purpose rather a lot.

Acceptance is often mistaken for resignation.

Having published so much recently, I’ve been thinking about my voice.

Every now and then, something pops up on HackerNews that you did not expect to pop up on HackerNews.

People seek out spirituality and other esoteric disciplines to find the deepest truths about human nature.

Practices which cultivate wisdom often have a solemn air about them.

Full-contact living is a contemplative, first-personal attitude that is centred around practice—the repeated return to what matters.

When I was growing up, we used to poke fun at a moralising certainty that was the purview of stuffy conservatives on the Right.

When you want to grow a plant, you don’t crack the seed open and yank out its leaves.

In one of Oliver Burkeman’s talks on the Waking Up app, he discusses the idea of being best friends with yourself.1 He explores why, for many people, this term is more powerful than self-compassion or self-love, which can evoke a certain kind of New Age n…

Practice changes how we attend to the world and what we see.

“I am the same kind of moron as the rest of you, it’s the method that does the work, for me as well as for you.”

Yesterday, I wrote that: I’d love to pretend I’m reporting from a place of enlightened awareness, but the truth is that 90% of whatever wisdom you might find here was stumbled upon through crisis and catastrophe.

Full-Contact Living is explicitly ambitious.

I grew up discontent with much of the story I was told about human beings and the cosmos.

I have spent my life constructing a big picture in my head.

Derek Sivers once wrote that if you’re a writer who’s not regularly releasing your writings, you’re actually journalling.

In his talk, Already Free, Adyashanti highlights the way we fixate through an amusing example.

This morning I naturally woke up, excited, at about 4am.

Now that I have a presence on multiple internet platforms, I am continually trying to figure out where to say what I want to say.

The choice we make of how we dispose our consciousness is the ultimate creative act: it renders the world what it is.

Words have always been important to me.

Eckhart Tolle offers an interesting pointer in one of his books.

I’m standing on a frozen lake at 5,400 metres, halfway across the Cho La pass.

The brain, as Lisa Feldman Barrett shows, is a prediction machine—forever forecasting and assembling from educated guesses.