Blood & Ink: Bottom-Up Evolution

Nothing changes if nothing changes…

This line is tattooed across my mental landscape.

It’s the essence of integration.

If you want to change your life, change the life you live.

• What do you eat? How do you eat?
• How do you speak? What do you speak about?
• Where do your time, energy, and attention flow?
• Who do you surround yourself with?
• What environment do you live in?

This is one of the deeply problematic traps I see many people fall into in the psychedelic and plant medicine communities.

Wishful, childish dream-hopes that ‘the medicine’ will change everything. You go on your 6-hour ordeal and life auto-magically restructures itself around your latest fleeting dreams.

What medicine work does exceptionally well is cultivate an inspired energetic state within you, that hopefully you can work with as a limitless reservoir of inspiration, aspiration, and perspiration to go back home and make the real changes with as much ease, playfulness, and vital passion as possible.

Another line reminds us, “God helps those who help themselves.”

If you’re not willing to do the work and make the changes, why would the medicine show up for that?

But do not abandon all hope, ye who enter this path… for deep in the cave of this realization there is a golden treasure waiting for you:

If you want to change your life, change parts of your life.

Too often, we wait for some far-flung epiphany of great inspiration, the mythical tsunami wave of motivation, or great moments of sudden vivid clarity. All that does is abandon our agency.

Evolution happens bottom-up.

• Set your alarm 5 minutes earlier each week. After 3 months, you’re an hour earlier. After a year, you’re in the 5 am club with clean energy.
• Take a 5-minute walk each day. You’ll like it so much that eventually you’ll do more. Somehow—secretly—there will come a day when you regularly take long walks, with no idea how the time in your calendar appeared.
• Give 1 person an authentic compliment each week. Before you know it, you’re a happier person, and all your important relationships are one level deeper and more loving.
• Do 1 pushup a day. Suddenly, you’ve got a consistent 20-minute daily workout routine going, with no real idea how it happened.

But what’s important is that on the other side of these impossibly small changes that took root into regular patterns, you’ve now: become a morning person, prioritize recovery and time in nature, are a good friend and have meaningful relationships, and are fit and take care of your health.

Massive, identity-level transformations, lovingly grown from the small seeds of daily intentional action.

It’s not fancy, but fortunately, it’s not rocket science.

Nothing changes if nothing changes. But everything changes if everything changes.

No hurry, no pause. Small changes, compounding effects, massive evolution.

Let’s get to it, you’ve got this.
EB.