Answering Your Questions Pt.2

How do you embody your relationships? What values do you carry for intimate partner relationships?

• ‘Embody your relationships’ is tricky wording—what do you mean? There’s something good here that I wish I understood better.
• I’ll admit off the bat: I don’t consider myself ‘good’ at relationships (yet); personal, intimate, professional, or otherwise. I’m not sure many people would disagree with that either. It’s all too easy for me to withdraw into the peace and art of my life, thought, practice, work, and writing. Historically, I haven’t been great at keeping in touch with people, and I’m not overly expressive/emotional in direct conversation.
• It’s not about relationships per se. It’s a matter of intent, integrity, and embodiment across your entire life. ‘How you do anything is how you do everything.’ You say you love this person–do you act like it? Do you value honesty? Be honest in your relationship. A relationship is the perfect training ground. A messy, beautiful, fluid dance. Are you holding yourself back from life… from your partner? You embody your relationships by bringing yourself deeper into life. ‘The Way of the Superior Man’ is a great place to start.
• Values I carry for relationships: shared vision, overlapping and complementary values, fierce playfulness, passionate seriousness, a burning desire for love, challenge, exploration, integrity, and service. Emotional maturity, doesn’t track high on the Dark Triad, and the ability to have difficult conversations.

What is your favourite way to get out of a funk / lethargic states that persist?

• Depends on the timeline. I’ve been in 10-year funks (seriously, being a teenager/young adult was hard), 10-month depressive windows, 10-day struggles (‘in the mud’ as I call it), 10-second frustration fits.

Here are some things you can mix, match, and stack that often work for me:

• Acute Physiological State Change: 3+ min cold shower, 30+ minute walk, 4x rounds wim hof style breathwork, 1 hour hard workout/yoga. These are reliable, healthy, generally safe, and potent. Cold showers usually do the trick. Never underestimate how much a mental/emotional funk can be resolved through physiology.
• Environmental Changes: If I’m in a multi-day funk, superficial physical changes often work. Shaving my beard/deep ‘grooming’ session, or cleaning/redecorating a room/home. That small, visible, tangible moment of progress, change, and forward momentum unblocks a lot of stagnant energy. It lets me see clearly that ‘something has changed’ and take that energy to whatever I need to do.
• Heavy Music: nothing fancy. Heavy music hits some part of me that always works. Sadness, anger, confusion, pain, overwhelm, doesn’t matter. American Metal (Lamb of God, All That Remains) and Heavy Dubstep (the Canadian OG's Excision, Datsik, and Downlink) always put me back on the straight and narrow.
• Stop F*cking Avoiding the Feeling: Most of our lives are a distraction from heavy emotion. Admittedly, I’m close to an expert at avoiding feelings. Social media, overworking, and learning/studying—all have been convenient distractions from tough feelings. Stop running. Turn around. Face it head-on. Turn off all technology, sit in front of a blank page, and write. If you don’t want to write, sit in silence. Sit until you’re bored. Sit and sit and sit, write and write and write until something opens. Then you can work with it, feel it, and facilitate its passing.
• And of course, Deeper Interventions: psychedelic ceremony, plant medicine or meditation retreats, moving countries, joining (or leaving) a job, getting a tattoo. Chronic heaviness is telling you that it’s time for something new. Not just a new change, a new chapter. Perhaps, in major cases, an entire second book in the series of your life. A new identity. A new place. A new people. I’ve moved countries. I’ve gotten new jobs. I’ve built new experiences. I’ve tried weird and major health interventions (raw vegan to carnivore). Sometimes you need a system-level reboot if the above options don’t work. That’s okay! We should welcome these; they are truly life-changing.

More often than not, if I’ve been in the mud for a few days and getting frustrated, my single day go-to looks like: 

1. Give myself permission to stop attempting to work/do anything for the rest of the day.
2. Put on my favourite metal/music playlist.
3. Clean my home.
4. Take a cold shower, shave, cut nails, do laundry, 50 pushups, and put on clothes I love.
5. More often than not, I come out of that feeling at least ready to re-engage. I’ve rested, danced, gotten a clean house, feel new/fresh in my body, maybe had a good meal, and have brought a little more order to the chaos.

What is your preferred way to buy Bitcoin while maintaining ownership of private keys? Do you use a hardware wallet?

• The short answer is: I use BullBTC to buy, which requires self-custody addresses (they cannot hold your BTC, at a technical level), so I generate them on my Coldcard, and my purchases go straight into cold storage. Easy.
• My setup is not what I would recommend for people just getting started. I’ve been at this a long time.
• My current setup is a Coldcard (BTC-only hardware wallet), connected to Sparrow (software interface), linked to my node (Umbrel), and I buy on BullBitcoin (BTC-only non-custodial exchange in Canada).
• One of the cardinal axioms in Bitcoin is “Not your keys, not your coins.” This is not a joke. All the stories of people getting wrecked are because they held their crypto on exchanges (these are nothing more than IOU statements), the exchange gets hacked or collapses, and they lose everything.
• A good place to start is a software wallet (I worked for Exodus for a bit; they make great software). Self-custody because you hold your keys, but it’s a little more risky because it’s on your computer (connected to the internet).
• If you’re going to store significant wealth (relative to your financial situation) in crypto, you need a hardware wallet. Trezor is amazing (and has a BTC-only option), Coldcard is BTC-only, Canadian, and incredible, Ledger is dubious, and there are several others.
• At a certain level of wealth (both % of your net worth and total $ value), you should set up a multi-signature wallet. This is nuclear-grade security, where you need 2/3 or 3/5 signatures from different wallets to move funds. You get multiple wallets from multiple providers, and can distribute them geographically, etc. This is hardcore mode.
• Only Canadians can use BullBTC, for Americans, I would say: River (BTC-only exchange) or Strike (BTC-only but more focused on the lightning network, not as easy for cold storage). I stand behind all 3 of those orgs completely, and I’ve done deep dives into all of them.
• To start, I’d say try Exodus to get a feel for managing your keys. When you’re ready to play with hardware wallets: Trezor if you have other coins, Coldcard if you are BTC-only. Trezor is more user-friendly, while Coldcard x Sparrow has more functionality/features.

What is your favourite way to rekindle creative momentum?

• Write! Write write write write write.
• I write all the time. I journal ~daily. I have ~3 dozen drafts/notes/pieces-in-progress at any given moment.
• Freestyle writing has always been the answer for me. The pen is my sword, the blank page my greatest ally and deepest adversary. I get excited about the adventure ahead when staring at a blank page, cursor blinking, waiting for the Muse to appear.
• My writing is almost a direct thermometer of my creative momentum at any time. When things are HARD, I’m quiet. When things are flowing, I could publish 2 full pieces a day.
• If I don’t know what I want to talk about, I get very still, very quiet, and start watching for the places my mind goes first. If it’s bubbling up out of the ether, something is there to be explored.
• Do new things! Go walk around a mall. Take a pottery class. Go speed dating. Anything. Everything. Break the pattern! ‘The Artist's Way’ is great for this.

Other options: 

• Space. Real, long, space. Creativity needs breathing room. Long walks. Rambling conversations.
• Tea. It’s very rare that I sit down for a tea ritual and don’t walk away with an idea or two.
• Freedom to fail. Removing the pressure from making it flawless gives you real room to explore and push the edges.
• Making it for me. I’m kind of a weirdo. I think a lot of us here are. (That’s why I love you and appreciate you reading this.) I don’t mean that negatively. I don’t think my work has mass appeal, nor do I make it for that. I make things for myself. I am always the end user, the ideal customer, and the muse. 100-Day discipline challenges, ketamine therapy programs, wild and wonderful medicine retreats, obscure and nerdy essays. Just make it for yourself. What do YOU want to exist in the world? Do that. That question spawns a ton of creative possibilities.
• Genuine curiosity. Integrate the idea that your curiosity is uniquely yours, and that it will take you somewhere good. Ideas and creative possibilities are endless following that.

What fears are you still battling and would like to bring more warrior energy to?

• What a phenomenal question. Thank you!
• Vulnerability, Intimacy, Expression. The reason I write so much is that I’m fairly reserved in person. I’m quiet and patient. I’m not great at expressing feelings (positive or negative). I don’t share a lot about my personal life (if you read the 200+ pieces here, very few talk about Eric the individual). I’d love to bring more courage to this, and I’ve been working on it.
• Art & Creativity. I’m ~4 months into this ‘semi-sabbatical’ right now, and having all kinds of an artistic/poetic awakening. I’ve always viewed writing as my creative outlet, but even my writing remains methodical, technical, and philosophical. I think part of me is still scared of attempting (& being bad at!) the ‘classic arts’ like music, poetry, painting. Some part of me is calling for it, though.
• Mastery. I’m torn between loving life and wanting to learn and study everything, and feeling frustrated that I haven’t mastered something specific. It’s a tough one. At this moment, a part of me yearns for deep mastery, and that requires saying no to everything else. That requires some warrior spirit. Even as I write this, a dozen things pop up that I would like to master: BJJ, writing, tea ceremony, yoga, plant medicine/psychedelic work, and a musical instrument. I think the ‘fear’ here is a form of FOMO: picking one thing to master requires saying no, and I could be missing out.
• Success. I think many people, myself included, fear success perhaps more than they fear failure. Success changes a lot. It changes how people relate to you, how they see you, the responsibilities you have, what you do for work, and the opportunities/options you have. It changes your life, and change is often scary, even if it’s positive. I have some fear or hesitation around success. There’s also a deep hipster-esque part of me that simply loves the underground, the fringe, and I myself want to stay in those spaces.
• Happiness. Similarly, I have some fear(?) of happiness in some way. As if being happy in the present will ‘take me off my game’ or I haven’t ‘done enough to earn it yet’ or ‘people will call me out as an imposter’. There’s a real Warrior spirit you can bring to happiness, spirituality, reality—a fierce desire, and an active practice, to gratitude and celebration in each moment.

I’ll release one final Q&A before starting my 8-month apprenticeship. Let’s make ‘em weird.

Hit me with the best you’ve got.

Talk soon,
EB.