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We enter a new chapter
in one of two ways:
life strips away what
we thought we knew,
and we wake up
in an unknown world
we feel the call to
a new kind of adventure,
and we choose to follow it.
Initiation can feel
like free-falling,
like cracking open,
or dissolving;
like drowning,
like a nightmare,
or like waking up.
To fully cross the threshold of our own rebirth
(and not stay stuck inside a bardo
of unfinished dying)
requires a level of surrender,
humility,
courage,
faith,
letting go,
and openness to annihilation
that few of us are taught.
No one can walk the path of initiation for you.
But others who have been broken open
can walk it beside you,
And help you keep your eyes
on each next step,
And, when it finally appears—
On the light.
In stepping into a new chapter by choice,
the greatest challenge we face is
inherited contentment.
We have learned to accept:
As inevitable parts of being human.
But we live in a time with access
to the greatest transformational technologies
from every continent
and recorded epoch.
Fed by these wisdom streams,
we can cultivate a life of
continuous presence,
deep fulfillment,
resilient peace,
extraordinary intimacy,
and every-deepening service
to the world we love.
“Through my work with David, I have completely transformed my life from one of anxiety, stress, tension, and overwhelm into one of clarity, equanimity, relaxation, balance, and delight.The level of fulfillment, and of effortless effectiveness, is truly beyond anything I could have dreamed of before. I am forever grateful.”
It is my honor to serve as a guide
to seekers who are ready to find.
David Adam Burns is a producer, writer, and coach based in Austin, Texas. He works one-on-one and online; clients and colleagues know him as David Adam Burns, David Burns, and Dave Burns. He has been teaching meditation since 2011, facilitating and coaching since 2015, and producing mythic art since 2023.
Coaching with David Adam Burns is for people entering a new chapter — by initiation, or by choice. The work draws on meditation, concentration practice, ritual, somatic and emotional skill, and the study of consistency, clarity, and courage. Enquiries: d@davidadamburns.com
In 2022 he co-founded The Mysteries, an Austin-based artists’ collective dedicated to giving a voice to the ineffable. Its current offering is Earthsong, a mythic musical for the modern world — original musical theater built on myth, made and staged in Austin, TX.
As a coach, David has taught as faculty for multiple coach training programs, including Third Wave,’s psychedelic integration coach and practitioner training.
He has spoken on the Coaches Rising with Joel Monk and the Psychedelic Podcast with Paul Austin.
One-on-one coaching with David Adam Burns, for those entering a new chapter — by initiation, or by choice. Austin, Texas and online.
Essays on clarity, consistency, courage, making, moderation, and meditation.
The Mysteries, an Austin-based artists’ collective, and Earthsong, a mythic musical for the modern world.
David Adam Burns
Enneagram
3
Myers–Briggs
INFJ
Culture Index
philosopher
Strengths
presence
discipline
care
historical weaknesses
vulnerability
rainy day prep
texting
Mission
bridging the best of the old and the new
Plant ally
Work
teaching meditation since 2011
facilitating & coaching since 2015
producing mythic art since 2023
Favorite teachers
meditation
leadership
intimacy
ritual
inquiry
skill
emotion
habits
cognition
attention
martial arts
movement
vitality
longevity
men’s work
bodywork
balance
love
spheres of care
Goddess, sing a spark of simple
splitting into parts and spreading
open so the dark can slowly
grow to know its face,
broken like a heart, blood
brimming, overflowing into form,
made of heartache
and the hardening of space
The Ancient Greek word for poet, poetes, means "maker."
This etymology tells a story:
Something about poetry reflects the essence of "making"—
—of creatorship—
—with a particular clarity.
This means that if we want to create anything—
—Art, wealth, family, community, a fulfilling life—
Perhaps the secrets of poetry can help show us how.
"What feels true in my heart is a full conscious uncoupling."
I remember the feeling of receiving this text from my wife of 6 years the way I remember the first time a kickboxer kicked me in the liver.
A liver kick takes a second, sometimes a few seconds, to sink in. And then it feels like a bomb explodes through your viscera, and your spirit breaks.
I read the text again, and again, and break it down word by word until the relief of certainty numbs the pain for a brief dull moment.
Then memories of the last 6 years rush into my head with a pressure that builds until I know without a glimmer of a doubt that the only way out is to kill myself.
I scan my mind for the location of a pistol. I don't own one. I think of the nearest bridge I could jump off, like a friend of mine did.
I find it in my mind. I imagine running there. It would take about 10 minutes.
Imagining myself 10 minutes from now opens some kind of valve in my head. Pressurized vapor hisses out.
I realize that all of this will pass,
Including me.
I climb into bed and turn the lights off.
Listen: empty echoes
of an ever-elder emptiness
are blending as they enter in
to end their own embrace,
embers of an older order
ornamented over
by the holding of an almost perfect
paradox in place
When Nothing cracked to birth the universe, we gave up perfection for beauty.
Every act of creation mirrors this sacrifice.
Poetry in particular—the art of the word made beautiful—bleeds beauty from the wound of broken symmetry.
We find the only perfect symmetry in zero. Nothing but Nothing reflects itself perfectly across every dimension.
The weaving of rhythm and rhyme, meaning and time, draws its breath, line by line, from the death of potential and the decay of silence,
Just as the birth of a new life demands the blood of a dream.
The day my marriage dies, a story keeps me from killing myself:
This too shall pass.
But as I lie in bed, hiding, my grip starts to slip. My mind can't stop running.
If everything I thought I knew could vanish so completely—
If every story that I've told about my life could prove to be a lie—
How can I trust this one,
This story of impermanence,
The belief that this suffering will end?
Maybe hell is real.
Maybe it does go on forever.
Maybe I've arrived.
I watch the bottom of my own mind fall out as trust in any thought dissolves,
And doubt blossoms into psychosis:
A naked emperor, telling tall tales in the shards and hollows of a broken heart,
Tales of a young boy laughing and pointing, covered in ichor,
Screaming at a false king crucified by vanity before a sneering, weeping, non-existent crowd.
Cracked like the metal
of a breastplate forged
by the cunning and the craft
of the last of the kings
Cracked, like the yellow
of an old ring poured
in the blast of the bellows
of the blacksmith, sing—
If you've ever yearned for something out of reach—
A lover,
A sense of certainty in your path,
A peace that finally lasts—
You've touched the heart of poetry.
Poetry captures in words what words can't capture.
This means it has to do what it cannot do.
The basic meaning of poetry rests on an impossibility.
And this impossibility, this fundamental demand to accomplish something miraculous, reveals something about the nature of all human experience.
Because everything we feel, hear, see, taste, imagine—
All of it is poetry:
A desperate work of holy symbols,
A story told of something far more vast, and terrible, than any story could ever tell;
A song of mystery, cried into the dark.
Our perception consists of a failed miracle.
And at the heart of this failure we find the same impossible longing that gives birth to literal poetry:
The longing for symbols to transcend the symbolic,
The craving to touch, and know, and merge with something real and true beyond perception's limits.
This yearning IS our creative power.
And our capacity to create flows directly from our willingness to be torn apart by it.
I wake up to autumn light.
The echoes of my madness are fading into birdsong.
Soon I find my feet on grass. The ground feels soft and true.
I feel as if a spell has lifted.
The piece of electric living mud I call my body moves, and leaves a trail of stories in its wake.
I don't know who I am, or why I'm here.
But the earth is singing.
And, somehow,
The song seems simple,
Like the song of a nightingale in a great old forest.
The autumn feels like spring.
simple
like that spark that split
to open up beginnings,
like our longing come to be a way
belonging never will,
sprouting like the seeds of "when,"
a sometime we remember,
spreading, growing, dying, leaving,
singing songs of staying still
The humans who tap into their full creative power—
The poets of life itself, the dream-smiths and conscious co-authors of this strange and wondrous song—
Become transparent.
Not transparent in the sense of continuously narrating the details of their internal experience to everyone around them—
But transparent in the sense of clear.
In other words:
Creating means letting the heart of existence shine, unobstructed, through the aperture of the self.
And a few specific stories obstruct this clarity more than anything else.
#1 — "I exist."
Believing firmly in the story called "the self" erects the greatest obstacle to our natural creative power.
We don't have to dig deep to understand why:
The self serves as the aperture we aim to make transparent, and believing in its reality makes it opaque.
The people most tapped into life's creative power hold their idea of a "self" the most lightly—
And so, paradoxically, as a self, they create the greatest ripples through the fabric of inter-being.
We soften this story through active wonder.
#2 — "I don't exist."
While some consider this view more "spiritually advanced" than the first,
Holding it causes a cascade of dissociation and nihilism.
Neither of those qualities deepens our access to creative power.
If firmly existing makes our window-to-the-creative-source opaque from within,
Firmly not-existing paints over it.
We clear this story by feeling fully, as both a body and a heart.
#3 — "I can have what I truly want."
This story blocks our connection to the eternal longing of existence.
Longing hopes for the hopeless.
So holding hopelessness at bay, with a story like this, freezes over the profound creative power inherent in our longing.
We melt through this story by engaging with tragic beauty.
This includes the practice of Existential Kink, as well as giving ourselves over fully to heartbreaking art.
#4 — "I cannot have what I truly want."
This story blocks our creative power in exactly the same way as its opposite.
Dropping fully into our longing requires letting go not only of hope—
But also of hopelessness.
Stories of existential hopelessness or hope both disconnect us from the metaphysically visceral wound at the center of Being.
Tapping into the creative power of Being itself means becoming deeply intimate with this wound.
And we clear the way to that intimacy through the courage of innocence.
I hold my newborn son in my hands.
His tiny face rests at peace in the glow of candlelight.
He looks both stunningly human, for something so small, and also extremely alien for something so human.
It's been a few hours since Megan birthed him, in a tub in our bedroom, and ten months since the early miscarriage of our first pregnancy.
I remember the heartbreak of the miscarriage, and the feeling of holding Megan through the downwards-pushing waves in her belly, so similar to the early stages of this birth;
I remember our burial ritual at the roots of a tree, at a crossroads in the woods behind our home,
And the blood-red flowers that sprang up there on the next full moon.
These memories illuminate this moment with my son as much as the candlelight. I remember that we should probably name this baby.
Megan walks back in from the bathroom, tender and glowing with wonder.
"What about Gabriel?"
The little alien munchkin squirms.
"Yes. Gabriel."
Soon he sinks into his mother's warmth.
What a poem he is, I hear.
What a beautiful, breathing poem.
Simple, like that spark that split
to open
new
beginnings,like a poem come to be a way
our longing never can,
sprouting like the seeds of "when,"
a sometime we remember,
spreading, growing,
dying, leaving,
singing songs of "I still am."
Active wonder,
Embodied feeling,
Courageous innocence,
And surrender into tragic beauty—
I don't think these practices will ever lead to true mastery in creatorship,
Because I think true mastery may, for us, lie forever just out of reach.
But if we want to live fully,
Possessed by the yearning of life itself,
Face to face with mystery—
Pulled forward by longing,
Animated by death,
And ever-more transparent to whatever lies beneath this crumbling poem—
I think that this is how it starts:
Choosing, in the face of all our dream-shattering limitations,
To aim with all our heart for that which we can never touch;
Choosing to trust in that which can't be trusted,
And to forget, again, how much it hurts to love;
Choosing—
—in the words of an old mentor, now dead, who I never got to fully thank before he died—
To love anyway.
3 specific forms of clarity have had an outsized impact on my life.
1. Clarity of vantage point
2. Clarity of priority
3. Clarity of inquiry
1. Clarity of vantage point
Your vantage point, or “view,” is your basis of operation: where “you” are coming from, as a direct experience rather than a concept.
For instance:
Right now you may have a sense of being “located” somewhere behind your eyes, looking out at the screen.
Or: you may have a sense of being located throughout your entire body, sensing the rest of life through the shifting sensations of a physical self.
Or: you may have a sense of being a timeless field of open awareness, within which all phenomena arise and pass away.
These are just three of many possible vantage points.
And, as a general rule:
A clearer vantage point = a deeper vantage point
A deeper vantage point = deeper peace.
Most of us have experienced at least momentary deepenings of our vantage point (sometimes called “view” for short)—
Moments in nature, meditation, breathwork, psychedelics—
And know that the beautiful emotional states that often accompany these shifts dissipate. And, for most of us, the deeper view dissipates as well.
And while the disappearance of the emotional state is inevitable, the disappearance of the view is not.
You can absolutely maintain the deepest views in daily life. And doing so grants a kind of untouchability, because the peace that accompanies these deeper views isn’t a fleeting emotion: it’s a kind of completeness inherent in the view itself.
I’ve seen people go from constant low-grade suffering, wrapped up in a shallow sense of “where they’re coming from”, to lives of resting continuously in “the peace that surpasseth all understanding” in less than two years.
I see no reason not to hold this standard for ourselves.
2. Clarity of priority
Some people recommend holding only one clear priority at a time.
I love the elegance of that practice, but I think it misses something:
Namely, the fact that being human means having your heart torn apart.
Every minute you spend working takes a minute from your family. Every hour you spend working out takes an hour away from the art you want to create before you die. Every moment contains sacrifice.
I think becoming intimate with the sacrifice inherent in human life equips us to live more skillfully. And deliberately holding more than one priority helps deepen this intimacy.
I have also experienced the distracted, shallow kind of life that results from trying to hold too many priorities at once.
As a result: I think that 2 is generally the perfect number to hold.
If you feel that you absolutely must hold more, you should definitely hold just 2.
If you feel that holding just 2 is no problem for you, you can go as high as 3.
Once you’ve clarified these priorities, the most foolproof way to enact them is to make them the first things you do each day.
At the time of writing this, my priorities are:
My family
The Mysteries
My community (friends & clients)
So those are the first three things I attend to every day, from 3:30am – 11:30am.
As a result, all three flourish, and I get to experience the particular flavor of fulfillment that results only from consistent alignment between conscious priorities and action.
I used to think that living this way would be hard.
I’ve found the opposite. Living with this kind of aligned simplicity is notably easier than any other way of life I’ve tried.
3. Clarity of inquiry
At any given time, a question exists whose answer would illuminate the way to deeper flourishing.
If you think you don’t know what that question is, then that question is:
What’s the most important question in my life right now?
If you spend 30 focused minutes reflecting on this question every day—or the questions that it eventually gives birth to—you will watch your thinking mind transform from a ruminating distractor into a devoted creative ally, and the apparently insoluble problems in your life burn away in the refracted light of concentrated wonder.
Bringing it together
Clarify your vantage point through daily meditative practice in a tradition focused on depth of view;
Clarify your top 2–3 priorities, and attend to them daily before you do anything else;
Clarify the most important question in your life, and spend time asking it every day;
And you will watch your life begin to transform in ways your old self would not believe are possible.
In the 11 years I’ve spent coaching, I’ve gotten a behind-the-curtain peek at a lot of human, all-too-human lives.
The #1 skill I’ve seen set those who flourish apart from those who don’t is the skill of consistency.
Below are what I believe to be the most important aspects of this skill.
1. Shamelessness
If you attack yourself for moments of inconsistency, you will take longer to return to consistency. Shame reinforces avoidance.
It’s ok that you missed a day. Don’t make it mean anything about yourself. Just relax and return. Consistency is the macro-version of meditative concentration practice, zoomed out to the point where your entire life is the meditation.
2. Do it first
The later in the day, the more distraction;
The more distractions, the harder it is to be consistent;
Therefore the easiest way to do something consistently is to do it first.
3. Antifragile reflection
If your life includes rhythmic reflections that transform every failure into greater resilience, every lapse in consistency will increase your consistency long-term.
The simplest system for this has four steps:
1. Every day, track whether you attend to your top priority;
2. Every week, look at how many times you didn’t;
3. For every time you didn’t, ask why;
4. For every why, ask how you can protect against it in the future.
A more rigorous system is:
1. Plan out every minute of your week in your calendar, with as many recurring daily events as possible;
2. Either follow what the calendar says, or change what it says to reflect what you actually did;
3. Compare what happened to what you predicted would happen every week;
4. For every deviation, change either the recurring calendar or some aspect of your life. (If you find out you’re going to bed later than planned, then either change your bedtime in the calendar or begin setting a wind-down alarm.)
Both of these systems derive their power from simple awareness.
You have a natural desire to live with alignment and skill. Everyone does.
Your desire simply needs a practice of awareness to refine its expression.
You need courage to live well,
Courage requires concentration,
And concentration is a skill.
If you feel a clear call in your heart to go to the gym, but some sort of resistance stops you, that resistance is a form of fear.
(Some part of you feels afraid that going there will be worse than staying home.)
This means that the sensation of fear is distracting you from aligned action.
Concentration cuts through distraction. If you can maintain steady attention on going to the gym for longer than the sensation of resistance persists, you will go to the gym.
Many tools exist for breaking or creating habits. But when it comes to:
(a) the little moments of courage that topple the first domino of behavior change,
and (b) the big moments of courage that help us cross a threshold into a new chapter of life,
I have never found any skill that makes a bigger difference than concentration.
The best guide for developing concentration I know of is the Elephant Path, as taught by the late meditation teacher and psychologist Daniel Brown.
Pointing Out the Great Way contains basic instructions for it (along with many other detailed elements of Tibetan Buddhist meditation).
The Elephant Path contains much more detailed instructions for teaching it to specific age groups.
Developing this skill gives you almost mystical powers in others’ eyes.
More importantly, it gives you the lived experience of integrity.
And, most importantly, it gives others the fruits of your courageous actions.
I cannot recommend developing this skill highly enough.
“Cowardice… is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination.”
— Ernest Hemingway
“That vice has often proved an emancipator of the mind, is one of the most humiliating, but, at the same time, one of the most unquestionable facts in history.”
— William Lecky
“Yippee-ki-yay, motherf***er.”
— Detective Lieutenant John McClane
A fighter wins by attacking and defending successfully.
You attack by extending, and defend by keeping compact:
You punch by moving your hand away from your face, but you protect against a punch by holding your hand at your face.
And so every fighter faces this problem:
You must attack well and defend well,
And attacking and defending well are mutually exclusive.
You will never defeat this problem. A novice sparring for the first time and a professional fighter face it just as intensely.
On a certain level the thing that separates an expert from an amateur—in fighting, or any other domain—is simply their level of familiarity with impossible problems.
That familiarity grows through a process like this:
1. You face an impossible problem;
2. You are forced to find a workable solution in action;
3. The problem retorts by showing your solution’s incompleteness;
4. You answer that retort;
And this process goes on, forever.
Concretely, in the early stages of boxing, this looks like:
You throw a jab;
You immediately get punched in the face.
(Because as soon as your hand leaves your chin it’s no longer protecting you.)
So you learn to raise your lead shoulder, so that your chin on that side is still protected when your hand extends.
Awesome. Now you’re safe.
So you throw a jab, knowing that your chin is protected.
You are then hit with a counterpunch directly in the spleen, because your entire abdomen is now exposed.
And so on.
All skill development consists of this kind of dialogue with reality, resulting in ever-greater refinement of understanding, driven by the relentless permanence of at least one problem at the skill’s core.
This means that every expert—from Mike Tyson to Jacqueline DuPre—is a kind of philosopher. They have dialogued with the essence of their domain for long enough to understand it deeply, and the depth of that understanding gives birth to unparalleled performance.
All skill is philosophical in nature; mastery consists of domain-specific, philosophical nuance born of dialogue with the essence of a craft.
Or, maybe that’s way too complicated a way to approach life.
Maybe all you need to win fights is to train harder than everyone else.
Maybe all you need to create a happy marriage is to love and cherish your spouse relentlessly, and all that’s needed to succeed in business is to talk to enough people and get rejected enough times.
When David Goggins broke the world record for most pullups done in 24 hours, his entire strategy seems to have consisted of “do things I don’t want to do.”
This Nike-slogan-based model of reality might be true. It might even be truer than the whole philosophically-oriented model mapped out above.
Because if you approach any discipline as a philosophical experience—one where success results from developing understanding, refinement, optimization, subtlety, and skillful nuance—you will neglect a fundamental aspect of the human soul.
Namely: its strength.
Strength of soul is the trait responsible for courage, endurance, relentlessness, and grit. It is the ability to choose the difficult over the easy. And—unfortunately, for the more cognitively inclined among us—it is not an analytical matter.
The main opponent of soul-strength is craft.
Craft refers the aspect of the soul connected with analysis, technique, philosophy and system-refinement.
It also leads to short-cuts, avoidance, laziness and cowardice.
If you were to split these two elements of the soul apart and represent each as a human being, they would look like this:
One is strong, diligent, courageous, common-sensical, honest;
The other is intelligent, thoughtfully nuanced, prudent, tactful, and gracious.
Or, you might describe them (equally accurately) like this:
One is foolish, simplistic, angry, energy-wasting, dogmatic, and tactless;
The other is lazy, cowardly, deceitful, two-faced, manipulative and weak.
And the tricky but inescapable question is:
Which would you rather be?
The English language includes rich expressions of both these elements of the soul: it consists of a combination of short, rough Germanic words and almost algorithmically constructed, multisyllabic Latinate ones.
A: “Delusional”
B: “Crazed”
A: “Domicile”
B: “House”
A: “Questionable with a view to the contemporarily prevalent paradigms of morality”
B: “Wrong.”
We can all feel the difference between these terms, and between the different people who would use each.
And, at the same time—no English writer can choose between these two flavors, any more than a spouse could choose to be married to only one of their partner’s parentally inherited personalities. Jane Austen can’t avoid Germanic words any more than Hemingway can avoid Latinate ones.
Nor would either of them want to, because they’re both world-class artists. It’s not hard to see the value and aesthetic need for each. Of course every verbal artist leans in a particular direction—as does each of their characters—but it would be both foolish and impossible to use only one purely.
It is similarly impossible for any athlete to choose between soul-strength and craft. We recognize some fighters, like George St-Pierre, primarily for their tactical prowess and technical mastery, but we would be insane to claim that GSP lacked strength of soul.
You need grit to train tactics, and tactics are the only possible thing grit can flow through effectively.
Still: there are samurai, and there are vikings. There are brilliant con artists like Debbie Ocean, and simple, beautifully relentless souls like Dory the tang fish.
And, to take things a bit farther back, there is Odysseus and there is Achilles.
The two epics of Homer center around two very distinct heroes.
The Iliad focuses on the brutally honest Achilles—the greatest and most spirited warrior among the Achaeans.
The Odyssey focuses on Odysseus, “the man of twists and turns”—the wiliest tactician on either side of the war.
Achilles wins some serious glory through his martial valor, but also dies young. And the most famous account of his death is Paris killing him with an arrow.
In other words—the softest and most cowardly character in Homer kills him with that era’s most cowardly weapon. Somehow cowardice defeats the greatest warrior of all time.
Odysseus, by contrast, not only survives the Trojan war, but almost single-handedly wins it.
...but Odysseus also takes longer to return home than anyone else when the war is done. His voyage is cursed by the same twists and turns his mind is blessed with.
And though Odysseus is a good friend of Achilles’, Achilles reproaches him very directly in the Iliad:
After Odysseus gives a speech trying to persuade the sulking Achilles to rejoin the fighting, Achilles says he “hates like the gates of death the man who says one thing and hides another in his heart.”
Though a deep friendship runs between the two archetypes, so does a great enmity, apparently centered—from the perspective of Courage—around the deceitful aspect of tact or Craft.
(We don’t know from this passage what Craft’s critique of Courage would be, because Craft tactfully keeps it quiet.)
The relationship between these two heroes mirrors a relationship inside each of us. Our spirited side—the side that holds the no-BS wisdom of “just-do-it”-ness—is a kind of permanent frenemy of our tactical, analytical, and philosophic side.
And, as each of Homer’s epics shows, each side runs the risk of a specific type of tragedy. Odysseus’ voyage home is delayed by ten years, and Achilles dies young and allows countless compatriots to die, including his beloved Patroclus.
Most of us don’t risk tragedies quite this intense. But every day that we practice craftless courage or cowardly craft we risk subtler but all-too-real versions of them. Putting our nose to the grindstone without ever examining what we’re really doing ensures a wasted life. Getting lost in rabbit holes of performance optimization research and productivity hacks guarantees that we are not out there actually doing things.
Perhaps we could avoid these microtragedies if we could somehow unify strength of soul with craft in daily life. But to truly unify them would mean dissolving the tension between them, and it’s not clear that doing so is any more possible, or desirable, than dissolving the tension between two people in love.
To summarize from the philosophical perspective:
One of the permanent problems of life is the tension between discipline and intellection, and to master life means to dialogue with that problem at a greater and greater depth, allowing the dialogue to progressively refine our understanding of the subtle interplay between their mutual exclusivity and mutual necessity.
Or, maybe more honestly, we should say that doing hard things is more important than thinking, and that it’s also fine to think, so long as you’re not doing it to justify laziness.
I have a natural preference for the former stance, which means that the latter is my most important medicine. As a more innately Odyssean soul I will always need Achillean friends to keep me in check, and disciplined habits to keep me grounded.
And I will always suspect that those friends are making things a little harder than they have to be, and that my structured routines can be optimized just a bit more to suit the needs of each day.
On a more zoomed out scale, the world today is blazing with technological innovation—the ambitious child of craft—and so humanity as a whole runs the same risk as Odysseus, of losing our way home.
A collective return to a simpler way is likely no more possible than eradicating all Latinate words from our vocabulary would be.
But the medicine of simplicity and strength is still clearly needed—just as a habitual overthinker needs to befriend all the disciplined martial artists they can.
This article wouldn’t be complete without a shoutout to the extraordinarily Achillean Michael Holt, the friend who taught me that when you extend a jab without protecting your chin you will immediately get punched in the face. My study of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu in the years since has not been driven exclusively by the desire to one day get him back.
My college years consisted of alternating periods of multi-month manic drug binges and determined attempts to get my life in order.
The drugs included, at different times: amphetamines, cocaine, oxycodone, cannabis, ecstasy, ketamine, recreational psychedelics, palm-fulls of prescription medications, “bath salts," and, of course, plenty of cigarettes and Keystone light.
Every time I tried re-committing to sobriety, I’d grab onto some specific modality to try to fix my brain and life:
Mindfulness, powerlifting, herbal medicine, religion, cold exposure, chakra meditations, philosophy, counseling…
Each of these pursuits dominated a different period of attempted abstinence, as a kind of replacement for whatever drug I’d been hooked on previously.
Those periods of abstinence did not last long. None of the modalities was, for me, sufficient to hold my life together. And the sisyphean experience of committing to living well, immersing in a method to help do so, and then rapidly slipping back into an even worse addictive spiral felt like it didn’t portend particularly positively for the years of life that lay ahead.
The story of how drug addiction eventually disappeared from my life I will save for another day. But the experience described above is what first caused me to become fascinated with the question of why some humans suck at abstaining from what they know is terrible for them, and at doing what they know is best;
And, more importantly, the question of what to do about it.
The Ancient Greeks had a word for the capacity to choose the good over the pleasant:
enkrateia
This trait seems like the cornerstone of a life well-lived. And it many ways, I believe it is.
But far more desirable than being able to choose the good over the pleasant would be experiencing the best behavior as the most pleasant—and not having to choose at all.
In other words: enkrateia may be helpful, even crucial—but it is also compensatory for something deeper. Self-control is, in the best case, merely a stepping stone; and when we treat it as the final destination, we tend to provoke a plethora of nasty downstream consequences.
One is that we begin to fetishize struggle. If we access greater self-control through the most common approach—developing pride in our identity as someone who can do difficult things—then we will start seeking out unnecessarily difficult paths to accomplish our aims in order to maintain that identity.
Another consequence of solely practicing enkrateia is that we never get to the root of the reason for the disconnect between our intentions and inclinations, and so miss the opportunity to bridge that disconnect and move towards living beautifully without effort.
And finally, and maybe most famously, techniques for self-control that work in the short term can cause a springback proportional to the difficulty of the action. The binge/starve cycle with eating is the best-known version of this: many people can successfully restrict their eating for a week; very few can do so without then snapping back into even greater gluttony.
That said—the experience of not practicing enkrateia tends to go even more poorly. Many of us know the cascading effects on sleep quality, productivity, and eventually mental and physical health that result from unrestricted Netflix marathons.
So if practicing enkrateia is problematic, and its absence is even more problematic…
Wow exactly are we supposed to live?
One Ancient Greek in particular—my personal favorite, Xenophon—uses another word for the ideal alternative to enkrateia.
sophrosyne.
Different writers use the word in different ways: translators often render it as “soundness," “moderation,” or sanity.” In its purest sense it means harmony of body and soul.
Complete sophrosyne would entail enjoying only what was good for you—and therefore effortlessly choosing the best actions, always.
Assuming you’re committed to living well, it would entail complete alignment between commitment and craving.
Some people seem to naturally possess more of this capacity. They’re simply uninterested in smoking cigarettes, and if they do try smoking they find it gross.
But for those of us who aren’t blessed with an innately sensible disposition—how exactly are we supposed to move towards having one? Are we permanently stuck choosing between self-destructive downward spirals and white-knuckled deprivation?
Building new habits through the temporary employment of skillful enkrateia seems like the most obvious method for moving towards sophrosyne, since habit and desire are naturally linked.
But even if employing enkrateia skillfully in the long-term weren’t tricky (for the reasons discussed above), you only have to talk to one of the many, many chronic relapsers in addiction recovery programs to realize that dishabituation alone is a flimsy structure.
When exposed to the wrong combination of emotions and environment, the structure of mere habits collapses—and no one is in complete control of either environment or emotion.
Developing the resiliency associated with genuine sophrosyne requires more than rehabituation. It requires somehow changing what we’re attracted to in the first place.
During one of my periods of attempted sobriety in college, I began to research healthy eating. This period didn’t last long, but some of the nutritional beliefs I absorbed stuck with me.
They stuck with me, however, only as beliefs. Any time I tried to adhere to a strict set of dietary guidelines, I would last at most a week or two before coming to my senses in front of pastry crumbs and pizza crumbs in the dining hall.
This was the case until the year after I graduated.
That year my relationship to eating changed completely and permanently. I started to eat cleanly and moderately, consistently, with almost zero experience of choice.
This was not an experience I was used to—with anything, really. I’d had an addictive and undisciplined personality since I was 6, when I would sneak into the kitchen cabinets to eat sugar out of a jar with a spoon. Being able to trust myself to reliably make the “right choice"—even if only in this single domain—shook my entire sense of how human life worked.
The shift occurred as the result of a 6-month experiment.
The experiment was this:
I could eat whatever I wanted...
So long as I paid attention to how I felt—before, during, and after.
That was it.
There was no rule that if I felt bad after eating something, I should no longer eat that food.
All I had to do was notice.
As you might expect, I initially devoured a good amount of hyperpalatable garbage, having finally freed myself of the rules for healthy eating I’d tried to hold.
Then after eating, say, an entire pizza, I would generally feel a wave of guilt, followed by a wave of relief as I remembered that the decision to do so had been sanctioned by a level-headed “past David,” rather than merely resulting from present David’s momentary weakness.
I would then—undistracted by the usual post-binge shame spirals—proceed to feel the immediate physical experience that generally follows consuming an entire pizza.
Many people have some specific food they happened to get food poisoning from as a child, and to this day they can’t stand the taste.
This is not a conscious lesson that they learned. They don’t think “this mac and cheese reminds me of the time I got food poisoning at age 7 from a similar dish, and as a result I’m going to deliberately summon the feeling of repugnance.” They just don’t like or want mac and cheese.
The problem with this type of scenario is that the change in cravings is connected to the food itself only by accident. But it would be pretty incredible if this type of conditioning could happen not accidentally, but in direct correlation with the healthiness of specific foods.
And, it turns out... it can. All that’s required is opening the gate of awareness to sensory information.
In the case of childhood food poisoning, the experience we had was so intense that we were unable to filter it out with inattention. (And, the “gating” quality of attention develops more with age, so children are more susceptible to learning through mere exposure.)
But adults can tap into the exact same mechanism, using the subtler but causal effects of specific foods—from the foggy micro-irritation of full-body inflammation after eating refined sugar, to the smooth and clear pervasive warmth after drinking bone broth—through the simple application of conscious attention.
Our bodies are constantly telling us how they feel. If we listen to them after eating terribly, we stop wanting to eat terribly.
After six months of eating whatever I wanted, with no restrictions, just paying attention to how I felt, and making no conscious decisions based on that data—pizza cravings became non-existent.
The reason this approach worked is the same reason that I have no idea what the opening lyrics of my phone alarm's song say.
It’s been the same song for over two years. The song is “Mul Mantra,” by Snatam Kaur. I made it my alarm because my partner liked it, and had begun gently hinting that a deadmau5 beat drop was not her favorite way to start each day.
This means that I heard the song’s opening lines over seven hundred times.
When I say I don’t know what the lyrics are, I don’t just mean that I don’t know their meaning. I mean I’m unable to even replicate the sounds of the words after the first five syllables.
Repeated exposure as an adult does not produce learning. One of the incredible defining features of the adult human mind is its capacity to filter information. This allows for many benefits—one of them being the ability to learn from specific things rapidly, rather than from all of existence slowly.
The flip side of this benefit is that if we treat a certain repetitive sliver of experience as unimportant, and don’t actively open up the gate of our awareness, we will never learn from that experience no matter how many times it happens.
This means that, in a certain way, our chief responsibility as adults is choosing what parts of experience we’d like to learn from. In action this means choosing where to place our attention.
The ripening of a soul from enkrateia towards sophrosyne is nothing more than a specific type of learning. It doesn’t occur inevitably through experience, because we ignore most of our experience.
What it requires, more than anything else, is one specific type of discipline—a kind of foundational enkrateia. Namely: the commitment to place attention on what counts.
With this one simple mode of discipline—the discipline of deliberate awareness—the need for harsh and dubious lifelong attempts at self-control gradually, and naturally, melts away.
And we begin to live life, not in cycles of conscious tyranny and instinctive revolution, but in stable harmony.
When it comes to eating food—behavior that has an immediate, or near-immediate, impact on sensations in the body—ripening towards sophrosyne can occur primarily through the awareness of physical sensations.
But there are other “problem activities” that have a fairly mild impact on physiology in the short term. These include anything involving a screen.
Your body doesn’t feel that different after scrolling through social media—at least not as different as it feels after eating a Crunchwrap Supreme from Taco Bell.
This means that physiological awareness is not usually sufficient for sophrosynic evolution in such domains. A different type of awareness is needed.
For behaviors whose impact is primarily temporal, like social media consumption or Netflix use, this can mean awareness of time spent, developed by tracking minutes devoted to different activities throughout the day.
For financial behavior, this can be awareness of income and expenditures, developed by rhythmically tracking both.
It’s possible to get incredibly detailed and technological with these types of awareness practices. Biometric tracking devices allow you to see the impact on sleep quality of different behaviors, such as alcohol consumption and meal timing.
Apps like Tiller automatically generate categorized spending reports.
You can develop intensive daily review procedures where you track mood, test cognitive function, and correlate the information to different behaviors.
Some people like that level of detail. And, none of that complexity or tech is needed for the soul to move towards sophrosyne.
Simply feeling sensations and journaling on each day will produce breathtaking changes over time in the ability to choose well without force.
The body and mind want desperately to learn what’s best for them. The only reason they don’t is that we block their access to the information they need for that learning to happen.
The single key to shifting from a life of inner warfare to one of naturally aligned action is to remove our cognitive blocks to the information that matters. So long as we are alive, good intention is already present. All it needs to express itself is clarity.
The most consistent block to this kind of behavioral awareness has, for me, always been the same thing that used to get in the way of apologizing gracefully to people who are angry with me.
When someone shares critical feedback, and you either defend yourself or collapse in shame, you’re extremely unlikely to absorb any of their feedback’s wisdom.
To be truly present with someone, and to feel in your heart the impact of your mistakes, is initially more frightening than inhabiting the well-worn grooves of either defensive excuses or emotional self-abuse. But this kind of presence is the only thing that results in the clean absorption of the emotional information at hand, which is the simplest possible path towards refining the infinitely complex art form of relational behavior.
All of this is equally true when it comes to your relationship with your own body and mind.
It is initially less comfortable to feel your post-cheesecake physiology than to hide from those sensations in either shame or internal justification. And of course you will feel a wave of shock, disappointment, or guilt when you take your first honest look at the number of minutes logged on social media weekly.
But truly learning from something requires being fully present with it—and presence is impossible if you lose yourself in justification or shame.
You might think that there's a limit to this approach. Maybe there is—but I have never encountered one.
With cigarettes, which studies have found to be at least as addictive as heroin: a scientist named Dr. Judson Brewer developed a system to support quitting that consists almost entirely of having people pay attention to their direct experience during and after the cigarette. At the time of writing this, his approach had outperformed literally every other known method.
Trusting the bodymind to improve its accuracy through the simple act of awareness, without coercion, feels counterintuitive—particularly when we’ve watched ourselves fail to meet our ideals again and again, with each failure driving deeper the idea that our souls are untrustworthy and must be carefully managed in order to avoid a domino chain of degeneracy.
But over time, watching your soul progressively and effortlessly refine its instinctive discernment through nothing more than eyes-open clarity begins to dissolve that cynicism.
Trust grows. Hypervigilance softens. Truly nourishing foods begin to taste delicious.
Bedtimes become more regular. The bone-deep satisfaction of good books becomes more compelling than the cloying novelty of Netflix. And fresh clean air starts to smell infinitely better than a cigarette ever could.
The discipline of deliberate awareness is not in itself easier than other forms of discipline. The monks who hold it as their central aim are some of the most hardcore badasses on the planet.
But it’s the form of discipline that, over time, begins to make the need for discipline obsolete. It is the type of enkrateia that most simultaneously honors the wisdom of enjoyment and the wisdom of excellence.
We all intuit that living well means both savoring life fully as well as doing difficult things. The discipline of awareness brings the two together.
And, perhaps best of all:
Almost every night, we get to binge on its opposite.
In 2022 I co-founded The Mysteries,
an Austin-based artists’ collective
dedicated to giving a voice to the ineffable.
Our current offering is Earthsong,
a mythic musical for the modern world.
Our son, Gabriel Adam Burns, was born in January of 2026,
at home in our bedroom, in a warm tub,
to music, by candlelight—
to Megan Rose, my beloved partner,
co-parent, and mother of our world,
Supported by Sophie Kruip, who plays a role in our lives
that I know no word for—our dearest adult, housemate,
and Gabriel’s “Dia,” his third primary caretaker.
Gabriel is held and supported
by an extraordinary community of local aunties & uncles:
Sam Bottner
Joe & Serenity Carr
Kait Chenowith
Jessie Curtis
Courtney Davis
Meghan Dwyer
Max Efremov
Sophia Efremov
Jenia Espe
Jade Fusco
Jeff Harris
Ladaun Jackson
Leslie Katrice
Kari Kinkead
Fae La Rose
Brave Legend
Shirley Mackey
Julia Nunes
Rachel Penticuff
Brian Robertson
Emily Rose
Eric Salwan
Brittany Taylor
Scott & Melanie Wild
Bridgette Wolleat
Emma Zeck
As well as very happy grandparents, when they get to visit.
Without this depth and breadth of support, it’s impossible to imagine our life as new parents,
or Gabriel’s as a new little man.
We are beyond grateful to get to co-weave such a tapestry.
Along with some of these dear friends, we are in the process of evaluating land to purchase within a half hour of Austin, to begin building a small regenerative village.
If curious about the possibility of joining this community project, reach out to d@davidadamburns.com.