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Geoffe's avatar

I’ve been flirting with the idea that the biohacking you describe at the beginning of this intro—the plunges and saunas and stuff—can sometimes be the Western New Age version of the first limbs of Ashtanga Yoga (yamas niyamas asanas and pranayama) or the early steps of the Eightfold Path (Right Action) or Sila (morality). These are the steps that focus on watching what you eat, what you say, how you express sexually, whether you are behaving in alignment with your values..:

Biohacking is like an ethical precept about the way to purify your material body so you can detoxify the container that social programming and inevitably imperfect upbringing pollutes.

Then, as you say, you shift to focusing on Consciousness Evolution (see what I did there?), which is represented as meditative practices in both Yoga and Buddhism, but can also be any of the other wonderfully woo stuff that is explored in this publication.

It’s like we need to build up prana in stages, starting with the gross and getting more subtle (or starting with dense vibration and getting higher, in other words.)

Kindness as a biohack fits into this perfectly! Thanks for expanding/validating my thinking. Theres a reason Right Speech was taught by Buddha and yogis attempt to embody Satya and Aparigaha—truthfulness and generosity, as I understand them.

This is already super long, but as a final thought: in the monastic cultures that those eastern traditions evolved in, you’d be REQUIRED to go through all the purification stuff before developing a sitting practice. That western householders skip to the end or reduce spirituality to meditation reduces these practices efficacy.

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Dr Nia D Thomas's avatar

I absolutely believe that our thoughts impact our physical and mental health. I’ve experienced people who’ve talked themselves into poor health and people whose disposition has kept them healthier.

I’m also talking more about the needs I’m hearing about in the workplace. We’re demanding two ends of the spectrum: artificial intelligence and emotional intelligence. The further we travel towards AI, the further we’re going to need to travel in the other direction to balance it out with EI

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