Dharma Sprints
Dharma is an organism’s teleology.
The acorn’s teleology is to become an oak.
Your teleology is to become whatever it is that lurks within you.
Humans appear to be the only known organism that can stunt their own dharma.
Conjecture: learning how to attune to your dharma, and participating in it’s unfolding, is the great task of our lives. Committing to this process will cultivate a mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual resiliency that one day soon modern psychology will find revolutionary (and therefore controversial).
Conjecture: the best place to start in this process of attuning to your dharma is to train our capacity for sustained attention.
This is what a dharma sprint it; the fundamental practice for developing sustained attention for modern people navigating The Shimmer. See: The Shimmer: Part 1 & The Shimmer: Part 2
The Form
- Decide on the one thing you feel is the ‘next right action’ to focus on.
- Choose the duration
- Define the constraints
- Once the timer is set; you either do the activity, or you meditate (I do classic vipassana)
- When done; do a quick review. Be honest.
That’s it.
What you don’t do is task switch.
If your dharma sprint is to finish an essay; you don’t check your phone during the sprint.
Or your email / social media / betting sites / sports sites / etc.
Examples
Going on a walk
- Dharma Sprint: Go walk for 90 minutes
- Constraints: spotify or notes app; nothing else
Process emails
- Get to inbox zero
- Two 99 minute sprints with 30 minute breaks between
- Follow Processing Email Checklist
- Spend 12 minutes writing a review; this was difficult and I learned
Connecting with people you love
- From 6pm until sleep, I’m going to be phoneless while with my family
- Constraints: Phone on DND, in the drawer until tomorrow
- Use a notecard throughout the night to note how many times I felt the urge to go get my phone
Writing a book
- Everyday, first thing in the morning, I will do at least a 20 minute dharma sprint writing my 1st draft
- Constraint: I cannot miss two days in a row. If I do, this signals to me something is off and needs my attention
- Everyday, at the end of the day, I spend 10 minutes reviewing that day; highlighting what I think aided me, and what inhibited me. Then recommit for tomorrow.
The first level of Dharma Sprints is to cultivate sustained attention.
Eventually, a knack for noticing what ought to be done during your dharma sprints start to become more clear.
We call these ‘Death Cookies,’ and they’re the sacred twin to the dharma sprint.
When we pair these two together, our teleos starts to notice and begins to stir.
Death Cookies
Phil Stutz is a genius. He is a magician with many, many spells. His grimoire is a stack of notecards.
His spell we’ll be talking about today is called Death Cookies.
Death Cookies are a frame Stutz gives all of his clients. It goes something roughly like this:
We all know what it feels like to know what ought to be done next, but ignore it.
You know you need to have that conversation.
You know you need to get your bloodwork done.
You know the affair you’re having needs to end.
You know the addiction your hiding needs confessing.
These are death cookies.
But so are;
You know you need to face your taxes.
You know you need to face your credit card debt.
You know you need to lose weight (not for vanity but for your health).
You know it’s time to go to the dentist.
These are death cookies.
But so are;
You know you’re a writer, that their is book in you, and no amount of success at work will cover that seed trying to break open.
You know you’re called to help animals, or an ecological biosphere and now amount of fame or followers will satiated you until you start getting your hands in the earth.
The key here is this quality of the knowing.
Stutz believes, as do I, that you have what for ease of understanding, we can call a Soul.
Your soul wants you to become what you could be.
You also have a voice Stutz calls Part X.
Part X is trying to keep you from becoming what you could be (because it’s uncomfortable; because the universe requires the tension of opposite for novelty to emerge?)
Whatever the reason may be; soul doctors from all ages have observed these two primary voices.
Death Cookies are quests the soul offers the player.
When we get the call, but refuse the call, the ‘death’ in ‘death cookie’ starts.
Stutz frames it this way:
Speed is a Force. The longer you go between receiving the ping of knowing and doing the fkn thing, the more life-force you lose.
You lose life force because your self-trust begins to erode.
Your self-respect begins to slip.
The good news, and why they’re ‘cookies’ is two-fold:
Examples
Before I understood death cookies, something happened on the day I normally edited my podcast (this was 2014 and I had to do all the editing myself). I didn’t edit that day. Before missing this day to edit, I had recorded and released a podcast episode every week for the last two months or so. Somehow, I ended up going three weeks without releasing a podcast after that skipped editing day. Throughout those weeks, I became progressively more and more blocked. I couldn’t write, I was having a hard time focusing at work, and I was slipping on my diet and sleep hygiene.
Hindsight is weird, but I don’t remember ever noticing the skipped podcast editing as a problem.
One day, without any particular motivation, I decided to finally do it.
I remember enjoying the edit. It took maybe 100 minutes total to complete.
The reason I remember this is because of what happened after I completed this seemingly mundane task.
A torrent of creative writing and ideas for my life and business came through me the next few days.
It was profound and it’s etch’d in my memory.
When you finally eat the death cookie, you get back all the life force it took + more.
There’s neuroanatomical science supporting our claim here (check out Huberman and Goggins podcast).
Dharma Sprint Death Cookies
A Dharma Sprint Death Cookie is when the task of the sprint is to eat the death cookie.
It’s when you commit to do something you have resistance to, but you know it’s the thing to do.
Death Cookies can be as small as doing the dishes and as big as the plot of a hollywood drama.
The articles in this section are notes from a guy trying to keep the thread of his Dharma while navigating The Shimmer via Dharma Sprint Death Cookies