I’ve been spending the last few weeks of summer at the beach in Halkidiki and have made a daily ritual of swimming in the ocean each morning. While the water here is typically known to be gentle and serene, it recently has been much more turbulent and unsettled. I’ve had to adjust my swimming technique to navigate the rocky waves and trust in my bo…

We won't find truth outside of us. There's no system, no organized set of teachings, no framework of thinking that will lead us to truth. Ultimately, the only place where we find truth is within ourselves. Reading passages from Jiddu Krishnamurti's Total Freedom reminded me once again of this big adventure that awaits each of us: to seek within our…

I’ve been having so many intense, vivid dreams lately - so intense that I feel tired and unsettled even after waking up. I knew these dreams were trying to tell me something about myself that I couldn’t see with open eyes during the day, but I didn’t feel like analyzing them or dealing with them in the moment. But one of the dreams that I couldn’t …

I’ve been reading Demons by Dostoyevsky and there are two small anecdotes from the book that immediately resonated with me—two topics that many of us as humans deal with throughout our lives. The first is the impulsive act of judging others too quickly and the arrogance we must overcome to give one another a fair chance. The second is the lost abil…

Today I want to share with you one of my favorite books of all time, The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky. I loved the experience of reading this book so deeply that I already can’t wait to read it again. It does a wonderful job of portraying many major life themes in a profoundly delightful way. I found so much beauty and wisdom contained within …

Rather than feeling present and peaceful, I felt fragmented and frustrated in recent weeks. My nights were filled with uneasy sleep and weird dreams. And in the course of the days, I struggled with confounding urges: When I worked, I wanted to take a break. When I took a break, my mind kept thinking about work. And the same was true for other areas…

I recently finished listening through about a hundred mini recordings from my week in total darkness, which was a very intense experience to relive. While reflecting on my dark retreat and the time since then, I’ve realized it’s been a very challenging and intense 3 months for me post-darkness. I also didn’t anticipate how different coming out of t…

This topic is something we’ve touched on previously but it’s a theme that keeps popping up for me. It’s the notion of “you are not above this”. I keep finding myself in situations where a thought or feeling arises that I’m not comfortable with and my first instinct is to reject it. I think to myself, I’m above this, I’ve evolved beyond this feeling…

We all know life is full of ups and downs, yet it’s so easy for us to get frustrated and torture ourselves when the pendulum of life suddenly swings from blissed out harmony to chaos and struggle. We must remember that life is a wheel that keeps spinning. These moments and feelings, both good and bad, aren’t constant. The sooner we can fully unders…

Great joy overcame me one day before the end of my dark retreat: I was about to go back into the world. Tomorrow I would see my children, embrace them, give them all my love, and receive theirs. An almost ecstatic bliss enveloped me, and I wanted to cherish this state as much as possible. But then another realization dawned on me: blissing out on a…

There’s a quote by Byron Katie that’s been stuck in my mind. It reads, “Don’t be spiritual, be honest instead. It’s very painful to pretend yourself beyond your true evolution.” I love it because it ties back to this inner work journey I’ve been on of going deeper within my own psyche and emotions and learning to be fully present and in the moment.…

I recently came back to a book I read many years ago called Loving What Is by Byron Katie. She has a really great self-inquiry method called The Work that I’ve been putting into practice daily for the last couple of weeks. It’s a very simple 4-question framework that is so practical and pragmatic that anyone can do it. In this episode I’m breaking …

I've been pondering a quote lately from my favorite Dostoevsky book, The Brothers Karamazov, which reads, "we ought to treat everyone like little children, and most importantly ourselves." It got me thinking about the way we are with our children - how loving, patient, lighthearted and encouraging we are when we're parenting these tiny little human…

When I was 18 all I wanted to be was successful, which at that time to me just meant rich. I pictured myself with the fancy car, expensive apartment and crushing it as a business man like Gordon Gecko in Wolf on Wall Street. But something I’ve been reflecting on lately is how glad I am that plans I had for my life when I was younger didn’t work out…

Ever wake up and think of all the things you gotta do, and it just destroys you? I can't tell you how many times I woke up feeling miserable because of everything I'd have to tackle on that day. In my younger years, it would actually make me cancel everything and fall into a depression. Later I learned to willpower my way through my responsibilitie…

Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth", wrote Dostoyevsky. And the longer I live, the more I realize this to be accurate. So many of life's problems boil down to struggles with truth. It's not just the lies we tell others: It's mostly the lies we tell ourselves, the truths we'd rather avert our eyes from. In short, it's the lies t…

How often in life are we hurrying from one task to another on any given day? Or rushing hastily to reach the next big milestone ahead of us? I've been pondering this recently and had the realization that when we are in a hurry to do something, it's usually because there is an underlying fear of never getting there. We must remember that it's only b…

I've experienced love in so many new ways over the past year, have deepened and widened my relationship with and understanding of love so much—I was almost tempted to call this episode "The Power of Love", like a cheesy pop song. In this episode, I share some of these experiences, and how they moved me in sometimes unforeseen ways. Shownotes: https…

Spending a week in complete darkness would be an intense experience. That I knew. What I didn’t anticipate was how intense it would be to come out of the darkness. In fact, re-entering normal life was an even wilder adventure than the dark retreat itself, and it profoundly changed the way I view the world. In this episode, I share how coming back i…

Darkness has illuminated my inner world. With nothing to see outside of me, I began to see things clear within: fears I didn’t know I grappled with. My complicated relationship with love. Mysterious light visions. While I shared the physical aspects of my dark retreat experience in episode 144, in this episode I focus on the emotional and psycholog…

I recently attended a dark retreat. I was in complete and utter darkness, alone, for an entire week. It was one of the most intense things I've ever done and I haven't really shared much about it with anyone until now. In this episode, I will share the physical experiences of living in true darkness for five days, how my experience evolved as the w…

Recently I spent a week in complete darkness at a dark retreat. And very soon, I was faced with something I didn't expect: Anxiety. I wasn't even halfway through my first day of darkness, and out-of-control anxious thoughts kept appearing, and I had no idea how I'd make it through a week of darkness. Until eventually I realized what the cause of al…

I’ve been pondering a story for the last couple of days that I want to share with you. It’s a story I first heard at an ashram a few months ago about a young monk, a tiger and a barking dog. While it didn’t really move me at first, it’s been recently popping up in my mind, so in this episode I’m dissecting the metaphors and exploring it’s many mean…

I just spent a week at a darkness retreat - all day and night for an entire week, I was alone in a room in complete darkness. It was a very intense experience - it felt like climbing Mount Everest with your mind. I knew returning to “normal” life after would be an adjustment, particularly since the work week ahead was going to be a very challenging…

An important point that I need to keep remembering is that it’s truly a miracle how adaptable we are. The capacity of a human being to heal and transform and overcome obstacles is tremendous. We are always healing, fixing and overcoming. We need to remember that no matter what difficult situations or feelings we’re experiencing, we aren’t alone - m…

How much of who you are in this very moment can you fully see and accept? It’s one of the hardest questions that life asks of us every day. In this episode, I discuss the human experience of how different situations bring out feelings that are already deep within us and the courage needed to seek out the underlying meaning contained within our own …

I’ve been spending my mornings lately reading “The Essential Rumi”. I find his writing to be so beautiful, touching, creative and poetic and I’ve really enjoyed starting my days with reading his words. One of the poems in this collection that has had a profound impact on me is “After the Meditation”. I’ve been stuck on it for the last week, re-read…

It’s been a very large part of my personality to define my self worth and the value I add to the world through what I’ve accomplished in a day. But I’ve learned that no matter how many to-do items I cross off my list, there’s never a sense of completion. I’m now embracing the art form of non-doing. Non-doing isn’t the physical act of literally doin…

There’s a part of me that’s resurfaced recently that I haven’t had to face in months. It’s the part of me that is relentless in downplaying every single thing that I do - the inner voice that’s constantly whispering in my ear “you are not enough”. This feeling is like quicksand; the faster I try to overcome it by filling my day with more actions an…

Since moving back to Europe, I’ve noticed how much the conversations around me involve other people that aren’t in the room. Something about this is off to me—gossip isn’t something I consume or surround myself with. I don’t like it or find any value in it. But as I started reflecting and thinking about it more, it dawned on me that there are layer…

Where you do your inner work matters. Spiritual trips like retreats, yoga and meditation are vacations. The real inner work is done in the every day life - in your house, with your family and especially with those people in your life who are the most inconvenient. The ones that get under your skin and expose your inner wounds are your spiritual tea…

This concept is something we’ve discussed in previous episodes, but there’s more to this idea that I want to dig deeper into. It’s the notion that there are two sides to the same coin - that what we hate about others, we embody within ourselves. In this episode, I share a few different stories and anecdotes about my mother and her life that helped …

“Shut the fuck up and do it anyways” used to be my mantra. I lived my life in such a disciplined, pragmatic way, which was great for producing results but I was so out of touch with my own thoughts and feelings that it was creating a negative impact in my life. I realized there is tyranny in practicality. I’m not saying there’s no use in being prag…

You can’t be upset with others and at peace with yourself at the same time. Whatever negative thoughts you observe about someone else or the world around you is a direct projection and reflection of something you’re dealing with within yourself. I've been practicing this for years, and yet, it's still challenging to live this truth daily. We’ve tal…

For the last 2 to 3 months I’ve been pondering the concept of mystics and the idea of mysticism. To me, a mystic is someone that is placing the mystery of life at the center of their being. As someone who has lived so pragmatically for many years of my life, I found this concept to be wildly exciting, adventurous, and beautiful. I previously lived …

I had an interesting experience recently at 4AM one morning where my hands turned into a tree. Not literally, of course, but they felt heavier, thicker, and larger than they really are. To me this was a symbolic display of how I was feeling recently with my two young sons. I had been constantly on the go and trying to be super dad 100% of the time …

I recently had such a stressful dream that when I woke up, the feelings of worry, anxiety and guilt within my dream continued to linger long after I was awake. Typically when I have these little negative thought clouds, I’m able to effortlessly puff them away and return to a sunny state of mind. But I knew this dream was trying to tell me something…

For the past month I’ve been doing a daily practice of asking myself one specific question multiple times a day. It’s a very simple question and it isn’t some magical, life-changing technique, but it has been extremely illuminating in helping me identify certain patterns in my life. The question is “what is your true intention in this very moment?”…

I’ve been genuinely excited about returning to Germany - getting the chance to hug my children and see my mother, my brothers, my friends and loved ones. I had a moment of clarity when thinking about this upcoming reunion, and while it sounds cliche, I realized that every day is a gift. It’s not a given that I’ll make it to Germany. Tomorrow is nev…

I recently did a five day water fast, with 4 days of juice fasting (2 leading up to and 2 after the water fast). In this episode, I share how I prepared myself for the fast, what I experienced, and what I learned about my relationship with food and life simply by withholding food for a week. Shownotes: https://steliefti.com/ep125 Connect with me: h…

This episode is a deeply personal one in which I discuss my relationship and experience with God. Even talking about it now is still something I’m getting comfortable with. The way I experience God specifically is tricky business—it’s partially a science, partially an art. I’ve been instilling certain practices into my daily life to help nourish th…

As I was meditating recently, I had a realization - something I already knew, but was shifted into crystal clear focus for me. It was a beautiful moment that further clarified my tremendous gratitude and love for books and reading. One of the most amazing experiences to me with reading is that you get to enter new worlds through different human bei…

I've spent a good amount of time over the past 2 years working on the anger that I thought I didn't have. And for the most part, I thought that I was good by now—I felt I had a good relationship with my anger. Until something unexpected happened: I got angry, and I hid it (even from myself). And then my jaw started to get painfully tense again, and…

Listen to your heart. Get in touch with your body. Trust your intuition. All of these are easier said than done, because they require something from the mind it doesn't like to do: relinquish control. The mind always wants to run the show, and it won't hesitate for a moment to pretend to be all these different parts of ourselves, putting on the cos…

I recently had an experience where I came close to what I believe enlightenment might feel like. This happened a few days after attending a silent retreat and going on a walk in nature—the intense state of pure love I experienced I'm now playfully going to be referring to as "englowment". It was a beautifully terrifying experience that was almost t…

Silence is an essential element of inner work. But in modern life, it's pretty much as rare as a precious metal. It's so easy to always be distracted, constantly consuming some kind of information or entertainment, engaging in some activity—we've got infinite ways to keep our minds busy. You have to consciously create silence in your life. Silence …

This is part of a conversation we've had in August of 2020, where we discussed the courage it takes to share your weaknesses. Many people think that I don't care what other people think about me—but nothing could be further from the truth. For most of my life, I cared deeply about impressing others, and I got very good at hiding my own struggles an…

Recently I've been experimenting a lot with timing: changing not so much what I do, not really adjusting my habits, but simply being more mindful of when I do these things. And I found that even doing the exact same thing can have an immensely different impact on my life just because of when I do it. Shownotes: https://steliefti.com/ep117/ Connect …

There's a German word I really love: Bewunderung. It's commonly translate as 'admiration', but that doesn't quite capture the full meaning of the word. In this episode, I talk about the art of keeping and cultivating a sense of wonder about life, and the people in your life. Shownotes: https://steliefti.com/ep116/ Connect with me: https://steliefti…

I've now been studying Internal Family Systems (IFS) for a long time, and it's taught me so much about myself that I decided to take an online course on it. But I don't really want to learn more about IFS to know IFS. I want to learn more about IFS so I can use it for my own inner work. And so rather than mastering the theory of more aspects of IFS…