Armor, Over & Over and Anonymous Tibetan
December 14, 2025
8 min read
•
Newsletter
{Body}
Fascia as armor
When you constantly anticipate disaster—replaying worst-case scenarios, catastrophizing potential outcomes, bracing for imagined threats—your body responds as though the danger is real. Your muscles contract reflexively to protect against impacts that never come.
Your body can't afford to keep muscles actively contracted 24/7—that requires enormous energy. So it develops a more efficient solution: it restructures its fascia (webbing that wraps around every muscle, organ, nerve, and blood vessel in your body—a three-dimensional net permeating your entire structure) to build semi-permanent armor around your chronically tense areas.
This is why people carry tension in remarkably consistent patterns—raised shoulders, forward head posture, compressed chest, tight hips. These aren't just muscular habits; they're fascial adaptations that have solidified over years of unconscious bracing against perceived danger from the mind.
Below are some practices that will help you de-armor this fascia.
{Mind}
Why do I keep thinking the same thoughts over and over again?
In my saner moments, when I see clearly the ideas populating in my mind, I am flabbergasted at how maniacal and rampant my ego is on particular topics.
For instance: women. The mind will not stop talking about them and making plans to achieve certain outcomes with them. Layers upon layers upon layers of these fantasies are laid so thick as to be effectively impossible to see through.
It’s like…I realize these thought patterns are creating unnecessary suffering (for everyone involved). And I see they are just conditioned responses based on conditioned preferences. And I even pray fervently to Spirit to correct my perception, stating repeatedly ‘I want to be free from this madness. Please…I want to be free from this madness.‘
And yet, I can’t stop thinking about it! It won’t shut the f*ck up! The same thoughts just keep bulldozing in again and again, despite my wisdom.
Allow me to turn this into a therapy session for myself:
Ethan, my brother. Relax. Compulsive thinking is natural—the mind evolved to cognize just as the heart evolved to thump. It’s not personal. What you are experiencing is the karmic fruits of having consumed a lot of content growing up, that’s all.
Keep in mind that these patterns are woven in deep; billions of years of survival mindset are sculpted into your genome. They aren’t designed to be released in a day. Just keep doing everything you’re doing—meditating, praying, being honest with what’s present. It will lift as all things do.
Oh, and word of advice: continue separating yourself from social media and podcasts. The landscape is too toxic, the algorithm too inchoate, the mind too fragile, the creators too immature. You would be better off just reading the ancient texts and pouring yourself into more stillness.
If this is something you struggle with, too, consider meditating with me below…
{Soul}
You feel a vibration in your pocket from your phone, but when you pick it up you find that no notifications actually occurred. Was that vibration real or not real?
You have a shockingly vivid nightmare about your partner dying, but wake up with them by your side. Was that dream real or not real?
Anything that the mind conjures up—objectively accurate or laughably delusional—can be considered real because the body reacts to it. Fantasies produce “real” world consequences: adrenaline dumps, behavior changes, emotional turbulence.
But reactions to thoughts don’t make those things really real. They just make them persuasive.
The next logical question is obvious: if I'm having constant thoughts about myself, does that mean I am really real? Or am I real in the same way a coiled rope appears to be a snake—a convincing illusion that dissolves upon closer examination?
December 7, 2025
Previous
Not Yet Available
Next
