I built my dream home gym this year, but there’s a problem: I haven’t taken a rest day in 117 days, and my sense of self is no longer mentally anchored.
Fleshy, not cognitive.
Overly-embodied, underly-minded: my mind feels like a dormant volcano, thoughts and narratives no longer erupting into awareness.
After a lifetime of living inside or above my head, going daily with fitness has rewarded me the experience of feeling what it’s like to be primarily centred in the embodied- and athletic-side of my existence rather than the academic- or floating-head concept of myself.
It’s not that I wasn’t active before building my gym - I’ve lifted three or four times per week for over a decade - but I never saw the need to go daily. Rest days were king, apparently, and I dared not disturb the demon of ‘overtraining’ - this is what I was taught, and blindly believed without consideration for its implications.
In the pursuit of higher consciousness, we see largely-dissociative practices like reading and meditation being encouraged, sometimes for hours per day, and yet we overlook the sanctification of consciousness within our flesh - we read and meditate everyday, why not stretch, lift and move with intention a few hours per day too?
Daily being the key word.
Everyday - balance your stagnant screentime.
Many of us live and act from our heads - that’s not news, it’s ubiquitous in how we present ourselves both offline and online.
Think about ‘YouTube Jordan’ for a moment: he is an entity of words and ideas; always holding up psychology books in the ever-consistent conditions of the inner work library; Jordan only exists from the chest up - does he even have legs, what about his belly and his back-side, where is the total human?
To not get lost in my YouTube persona, I previously used social media only between Thursday and Sunday. Three years of internet boundaries, but the last 100 days of athletic digital persona have fundamentally shifted my self-concept.
To wrap up this post and give you the short-summary, here’s the top three things that happened to me from immersing myself in daily stories and embodied persona creation:
1. Posting your life on social media is fun if you have a fun life, and you can use social media to inspire others to have more fun too. After posting 300+ YouTube videos focused on books and theories, I’ve enjoyed sharing the non-academic side of myself on Instagram via workout montages - it’s rewarding to romanticise your fitness, and it’s been wholesome to see how some of my students have started doing the same, or so I’ve been told.
2. Fascinatingly, I found that being chronically online and posting everyday reinforced my short-term thinking and made me feel more present on a day-by-day sense. On the positive side, sharing my daily flow made me feel more present and less projected into the future; on the negative side, I’ve become diminished in my previously robust skills for delayed gratification and long-term strategic planning.
3. Daily uploading reinforces your digital persona, it extends your sense of self through the screen, this also has both positive and negative consequences. On the positive side, being visible and available has been very good for business and my social life; on the other hand, it’s created a sense of disconnect from my previously grounded sense of offline privacy, which matters a lot to me, hence my previous routine for taking 3/4 days offline every week.
That’s everything, really.
It’s a mixed bag: some gains, some losses.
I’m more embodied, more present; less cognitive, less capable of strategy and delayed gratification over the instant reward of physical movement and going for a nature walk.
Despite initially not wanting to post my everyday life, I learned how to be visible and, eventually, how to love being seen - it’s fair to say that going daily on social media made me a more social person, but now I’m seeking something entirely different.
For the sake of building The School Of Self Integration, and reawakening my dormant intellect, I’m now going to make a sudden shift in the opposite direction for the first time in six years.
No more stories: the inwards turn.
Offline time: I’ll be back in 21-100 days.
Sanctify your flesh,
Jordan
P. S. Am I quitting YouTube? No. New videos every other Thursday for a few months while I go offline and prioritise filming the next 300+ lessons for The Self Integration School, which opens to the public on April 10th. Check the pinned comment for a sneak peek at my signature 104-book curriculum.
Jordan Thornton - Inner Work
I built my dream home gym this year, but there’s a problem: I haven’t taken a rest day in 117 days, and my sense of self is no longer mentally anchored.
Fleshy, not cognitive.
Overly-embodied, underly-minded: my mind feels like a dormant volcano, thoughts and narratives no longer erupting into awareness.
After a lifetime of living inside or above my head, going daily with fitness has rewarded me the experience of feeling what it’s like to be primarily centred in the embodied- and athletic-side of my existence rather than the academic- or floating-head concept of myself.
It’s not that I wasn’t active before building my gym - I’ve lifted three or four times per week for over a decade - but I never saw the need to go daily. Rest days were king, apparently, and I dared not disturb the demon of ‘overtraining’ - this is what I was taught, and blindly believed without consideration for its implications.
In the pursuit of higher consciousness, we see largely-dissociative practices like reading and meditation being encouraged, sometimes for hours per day, and yet we overlook the sanctification of consciousness within our flesh - we read and meditate everyday, why not stretch, lift and move with intention a few hours per day too?
Daily being the key word.
Everyday - balance your stagnant screentime.
Many of us live and act from our heads - that’s not news, it’s ubiquitous in how we present ourselves both offline and online.
Think about ‘YouTube Jordan’ for a moment: he is an entity of words and ideas; always holding up psychology books in the ever-consistent conditions of the inner work library; Jordan only exists from the chest up - does he even have legs, what about his belly and his back-side, where is the total human?
To not get lost in my YouTube persona, I previously used social media only between Thursday and Sunday. Three years of internet boundaries, but the last 100 days of athletic digital persona have fundamentally shifted my self-concept.
To wrap up this post and give you the short-summary, here’s the top three things that happened to me from immersing myself in daily stories and embodied persona creation:
1. Posting your life on social media is fun if you have a fun life, and you can use social media to inspire others to have more fun too. After posting 300+ YouTube videos focused on books and theories, I’ve enjoyed sharing the non-academic side of myself on Instagram via workout montages - it’s rewarding to romanticise your fitness, and it’s been wholesome to see how some of my students have started doing the same, or so I’ve been told.
2. Fascinatingly, I found that being chronically online and posting everyday reinforced my short-term thinking and made me feel more present on a day-by-day sense. On the positive side, sharing my daily flow made me feel more present and less projected into the future; on the negative side, I’ve become diminished in my previously robust skills for delayed gratification and long-term strategic planning.
3. Daily uploading reinforces your digital persona, it extends your sense of self through the screen, this also has both positive and negative consequences. On the positive side, being visible and available has been very good for business and my social life; on the other hand, it’s created a sense of disconnect from my previously grounded sense of offline privacy, which matters a lot to me, hence my previous routine for taking 3/4 days offline every week.
That’s everything, really.
It’s a mixed bag: some gains, some losses.
I’m more embodied, more present; less cognitive, less capable of strategy and delayed gratification over the instant reward of physical movement and going for a nature walk.
Despite initially not wanting to post my everyday life, I learned how to be visible and, eventually, how to love being seen - it’s fair to say that going daily on social media made me a more social person, but now I’m seeking something entirely different.
For the sake of building The School Of Self Integration, and reawakening my dormant intellect, I’m now going to make a sudden shift in the opposite direction for the first time in six years.
No more stories: the inwards turn.
Offline time: I’ll be back in 21-100 days.
Sanctify your flesh,
Jordan
P. S. Am I quitting YouTube? No. New videos every other Thursday for a few months while I go offline and prioritise filming the next 300+ lessons for The Self Integration School, which opens to the public on April 10th. Check the pinned comment for a sneak peek at my signature 104-book curriculum.
1 month ago | [YT] | 195