January 2025: Seeds of Synchronicity
Notes on fatherhood, secure attachment, synchronicity, and creative flow.
I’m experimenting with monthly updates to share what’s currently alive in my life, hoping to create more points of connection and synchronicity with you. Here’s what’s moving through me lately:
I’m deeply loving and enjoying fatherhood as a spiritual journey.
Fatherhood continues to be a profound teacher. Even though I only discovered my desire to be a father four years ago during an ayahuasca ceremony, this role has connected me with core aspects of humanity I couldn’t have fathomed otherwise. The number and depth of insights I’ve been exploring in my recent writings on The New Parent Story I Wasn’t Told and The Art of Being Held: My First 100 Days of Fatherhood have astounded me. I’m so happy to be on this journey — fatherhood suits me really well.
We’re currently on a two-week journey visiting extended family on both coasts. It’s our first time flying with Ember, and I’m proud for how we’re crushing it on maintaining a regulated nervous system amidst chaos and change. Even during a 14-hour door-to-door trip with a delayed cross-country flight, we remained grounded despite the exhaustion. I can feel how all our nomadic travels, our local excursions with our little one, and our practices with aware parenting all contribute to the ease we’re feeling.
I’m seeing more and more things through the lens of secure attachment to life.
While mainstream psychology focuses on secure attachment in relationships, I’m discovering that our attachment patterns reflect something broader – our fundamental orientation toward life itself. When we shift focus from intimate relationships to our relationship with all of life, we access deeper healing potential. It’s no longer about making individual relationships work, but about healing the parts within us that prevent secure attachment to life as a whole. I’m so grateful to have a partner who’s on this journey of awakening with me.
This understanding bridges my long-held belief that unconditional love is our default state with the concept of unconditional trust in life. The closer we move toward both unconditional love and trust, the more securely we can attach to whatever life brings our way, rather than being anxious or avoidant toward it.
I’m intentionally exploring synchronicity as a way to more deeply engage with the universe.
Over the new year,
shared a tweet talking about tracking synchronicity as carefully as we track our triggering moments.Ever since my Emotional Resolution training, I’ve become both relentless and adept at noticing triggers as guides to patterns blocking freedom and love, but I’d never given much thought about tracking synchronicities. In a tea meditation, I felt into how closed my system felt toward synchronicity — inbound messages and emails felt like “work” rather than the universe reaching out to connect. I could see how this perpetuated a reality that I needed to do and figure out things on my own and how it limited the sense of magic I felt in life.
Since then, I’ve read a book on synchronicity called The Celestine Prophecy, that of course a friend synchronistically was reading and recommended the same day I began this inquiry. I’m learning to see my default dismissal of inbound requests as patterns to examine, embracing the possibility that every interaction carries a message worth understanding — and challenging myself to see them.
I’m embracing cooking as a spiritual practice, teaching me how to connect with creativity.
My experience of being the household chef has completely shifted ever since I’ve become a father. And it’s provided a powerful somatic reference point for how I want to relate to my creative self and creative energy.
In the kitchen, I follow creative sparks with minimal second-guessing, deeply connected to my joy. While I learn from cookbooks, I prefer letting intuition and my senses guide me. I feel excited for what I cook. It tastes delicious and nourishing. And I’m excited to present and share what I make with loved ones.
The other day, I felt a desire to make teriyaki salmon, but couldn’t use the teriyaki sauce in our fridge because of my wife’s post-birth sensitivity to garlic. The first thought wasn’t “I guess I’ll have to make something else.” Instead, it was “I’ll just make my own garlic-free teriyaki sauce.” The thought surprised me in its simplicity and directness — there was a fearless and unstoppable quality to it.
I want all my creative work to have that same fearless connection to joy, intuition, and presence. In the past, work ideas would come from a less rooted place higher up in my body. They involved more figuring out, more thought, more second guessing. There’s more focus on the outcome than on the process. Sometimes, I’ll work on something because I think I should and notice myself feeling drained. I’m on the brink of changing all that.
I’m rebuilding my men’s group into what I truly want it to be.
When my Boulder men’s group shrank to three members, I saw an opportunity to redesign the group as we recruited new members.
“What’s the men’s group that would make you 10x more excited, devoted, and alive to participate?” I asked everyone.
It was part leadership, part desire — with limited time as a father, I wanted to feel stoked to be attending the group every two weeks. Already, the group energy is shifting in a beautiful way. I’m really proud in how I’ve been showing up as a sword of truth — in shaping the group and recruiting new men into the group who are deeply committed to facing life and cutting through the bullshit stories that stand in the way of that. I can feel a new fierce energy emerging, and I’m excited to dance with it.
I’m exploring video-making as my cooking-adjacent container for creative work.
One aspect of the cooking experience that I love is that after some amount of time in the kitchen, what I make gets shared with people, and I get direct feedback. There’s a felt sense of making direct contact with reality. I don’t just cook and cook and never serve what I make.
And it’s tapped into a yearning for a similar type of feedback loop in creative work. Other than in online courses I’ve taught, my preferred mode of creative output has been writing. Now, I’m beginning to explore videos on social media as a container to make more direct contact with reality.
The “what” that I’m creating almost matters less than the experience of “how” right now. I want the embodied sense of making content to feel as close to cooking as possible — following joy, excitement, fearlessness, presence, delight in sharing. Anything that falls short of that is a subconscious pattern that I want to examine.
If you’re curious, here are a few videos on fatherhood I recorded recently.