I’m in Peru these days… but I’ll never forget my 6+ years in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
🥤 Iced long blacks at Ristr8to in Chiang Mai with Reverend Rob
💃 Ladyboy cabaret shows at the Night Bazaar by the Ping River
💆♂️ Massages for 6 bucks a pop (happy ending not included – that’s an optional upsell)
🍿 Movies at the cinema also for 6 bucks a pop (along with the most comfortable cinema seats I’ve ever sat in).
⛰ Golden free days with James and Vic (we’d hike up Doi Suthep in the morning, get lost following waterfalls and barely-visible trails, and then hike down around sunset… sometimes running late and being forced to “bush bash” in the dark for the last 30 mins because we lost the trail)
Oh how I love you Thailand.
🏍 One of my favourite things to do in Thailand was ride a motorbike through the mountains.
Around the Samoeng Loop.
Out to Naan and back.
Up to the caves at Chiang Dao.
The lookout at Mon Jam.
Dirt bikes to Pai (one of my favourite trips).
The Mae Hong Son loop.
Phayao.
Doi Inthanon (the tallest mountain in Thailand and some of the best roads in the country for caning it on the bike).
So. many. epic. rides 🤘
Dangerously fun too 😍
Thinking about it now makes me want to go back.
The tricky thing with long trips like this – especially the dirt bike trip we took to Pai – is you need a really good map (and if you’re using your phone, you also need signal so Google Maps works 🤷♂️).
If the map’s wrong or you’ve got no signal on your phone, you get lost… usually in the middle of nowhere with no town in sight. Most of the time, there’s no people nearby either.
It’s fine if it’s early in the day and you’ve got time to backtrack… but if the sun’s almost at the horizon and you’re tired, beat up and ready to stop for a beer and a bed, it’s a pain in the ass. Sometimes you never even make it to your destination.
Our bodies and minds work like this too.
If you have the right map, dealing with shit – whether it’s anxiety, depression, OCD, insomnia, digestive problems, etc – is fairly straightforward. You know what to do, where to go and who to talk to.
But if you’ve got the wrong map, good luck trying to fix the problem. More often than not, you’ll just go around in circles, burn tons of energy but never get anywhere interesting.
Meditation?
It’s a map. A way of orienting yourself to your mind.
The question is… is it a good map?
To answer that… just look around and see if it’s gotten you to where you want to go.
Meditation’s big promise is that it calms your mind.
Did it do that for you?
Or are you still mostly stuck in your head?
Sure, when you meditate you might be fine… but I’m talking about the day-to-day. Because if you still find yourself thinking a lot during the day, meditation hasn’t fulfilled its promise.
And if it hasn’t fulfilled its promise, then it’s not a great map. It’s incomplete at best. Dangerously misleading at worst.
Gratitude lists, talk therapy, journaling, life coaching, breath work and so on. All of these tools comes with implied maps. Maps that guide people in how to fix certain issues. Maps that orient people to the world and themselves.
The problem is…
Most of these maps SUCK 👎
I know beacuse I’ve used them.
And while they sometimes made me feel better for a moment, they never got me to where I wanted to go.
Then I discovered the nervous system approach to healing. That’s when I realized the problem wasn’t me. It was the shitty maps I’d been stuck with.
In my experience, the nervous system map beats everything else by a 278 mile long shot.
If meditation and all the other popular self-help tools are outdated paper maps from the 1970s, the nervous system approach is Google Maps:
More precise. More detailed. Easier to use. AND it’s also more portable. You can literally do it anywhere, anytime. No meditation cushion or $49 Moleskin journal needed.
So –
Whether your chosen map is meditation, journaling, gratitude lists or something else, if it’s not getting you to where you want to go, it’s time to try a new map.
That’s where Rageheart comes in.
If you’re feeling an impulse (Rage 9) to try a different map… a far more effective and therefore more POWERFUL map… come join me inside Rageheart when it opens on Dec 15.
If you’re already a member and feeling that beastly impulse, hit the Sign In link on the page below and use the map to unleash your beast:
https://www.rageheart.co/app/
John Wood