Brian Johnson reflects on Anders Olson's dedication to breathing mastery, including selling his house to fund his studies. Johnson connects this heroic commitment to ideas from Robert Greene and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi about pursuing your calling and practicing conscious breathing.
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Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another Optimize plus one. This morning I was working on my note on Anders Olson's great book the Power of youf Breath. I wrapped it up by featuring the hero's journey he had to embark on to dedicate his life to studying breathing so he could share his life changing wisdom with us. Now it's easy to take someone's wisdom for granted, so I like to pause and reflect on the heroic courage it always takes to do anything great. So I featured this passage in the final idea for the note. I quote, without a doubt the most valuable thing I have done for my health and quality of life is to improve my breathing habits. The main lesson I learned from practicing the conscious breathing method is that I choose to be true to myself more often. To be brave enough to look inward and learn about myself in depth is the most amazing journey I've ever been on and it's a journey I wish everyone could experience. He continues by saying, My colleague Cecilia Salmi and I held the first conscious breathing course in the spring of 2010. One person came, two people came for our next course. Despite the modest interest in the beginning, there was never any doubt in my mind that this was what I was supposed to do. My current courses have hundreds of participants, but during those early times I had to sell my house in order to be able to afford to continue educating myself about breathing techniques and to develop the conscious breathing method. End quote. I smiled as I read that story about one person showing up at his first event and the fact that he sold his house to continue studying. Pause and think about that for a moment. And as I personally reflected on that level of clarity on and commitment to one's purpose in life, Robert Greene's mastery, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's creativity, and Stephen Cope's book the great work of your life all came to mind. By the way, check out all those notes. If you haven't yet, or if you feel so inspired, reread them. I think you'll love them as much as I did. Rereading each of them again. I don't know how many times I've read them, but each time I get something out of it. Seriously. Wow. I could copy and paste each of those notes in their entirety here, but alas, that would make this a plus 303. So I'll go with one wisdom gem from each note. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi tells us creative persons differ from one another in a variety of ways, but in one respect. They are unanimous. They all love what they do. It is not the hope of achieving fame or making money that drives them. Rather, it is the opportunity to do the work that they enjoy doing. Stephen Koch tells us, I quote, having first named and claimed our Dharma, we next begin to systematically organize all of our life's energies around our calling. Robert Greene tells us, no good can ever come from deviating from the path that you were destined to follow. Today's +1. How about you? Are you on your heroic quest? Here's to rocking it one breath at a time today.
