2024: Year of the Decalcified Heart

The "year of sustainability" morphed into something truly remarkable

A spectacular failure

This was supposed to be the year of sustainability, but from the start it wasn't.

Instead of carving out space for downtime, I doomed myself before I began by promising two brand new cohorts that had to be built from scratch, along with keeping our current offerings for Linking your Thinking.

It was all part of putting together our annual program Knowledge Accelerator™. I have mixed feelings about it. I feel accomplished. It was a huge success for everyone going through it. We delivered the goods. I'm proud of the content (and the transformations it supported). But it took a lot out of me and the the rest of the team. It soaked up all my extra bandwidth. I only made 10 Youtube videos the whole year, I wasn't able to do proactively reach out to fellow creators and collaborate on things, progress on the book languished, and for long stretches of time, my email inbox looked like a post-apocalyptic hellscape.

But maybe, because of exactly that, the last half of the year took me into new frontiers of inner work, wildly outside of my comfort zone, and perhaps the hardest work I've ever had to face. While 2024 was supposed to be the year of sustainability, it unexpectedly morphed into something truly remarkable the year of a decalcified heart.

Quick Highlights

• Created two brand new cohorts—Notemaking Mastery and Writing Original Works—which complete the LYT training program to help people master thinking and writing with linked notes.

• Overbooked myself, leading to burnout, leading to me question what I was avoiding, leading to a fascinating new frontier of personal growth in mature masculinity, spirituality, emotions, and relationships.

• Regained fuller access to my heart through a combination of personal retreats, psychedelics, personal therapy, couples therapy, and the most important part: the unglamorous drudgery of everyday inner work.

• Spent quality time with family throughout the year, traveling multiple times to Montana, Colorado, and NYC.

• Carved out more time for hobbies and interests, like picking up the guitar for the first time ever, enjoying a video game for the first time in 14 years, playing with Tarot and other oracle decks, and getting to know my body better through a combination of bodywork, mobility exercises, ice baths, and saunas.

• Connected with many amazing minds through LYT, traveling to summits, and going to retreats. Two and a half years ago, I had few connections in the creatorverse. Today, I have a wealth of connections, and more than a couple handfuls that are meaningfully intimate.

Top Takeaways

While those are some quick highlights, what follows is the more personal part.

I overbooked myself

Like I already wrote, I greatly overbooked myself this year, for the entire year, before the year even began. It was the undercurrent of the year, leading to the lows—but also setting up the highs.

My archetypes were out of balance

In June, after a grueling stretch that included imagining, creating, and delivering the amazing cohort course Writing Original Works, I got sick. I cancelled the travel I had planned and instead went on a deeply needed personal retreat.

I felt called include one book on my trip: King Warrior Magician Lover. It became the most impactful book I read this year (here's the exact audio version I listened to on YouTube). KWML explores the concept of the mature masculine psyche through the lens of the four archetypes named in the title.

I soon realized that my King, my Warrior, and my Lover archetypes were out of balance, and the frameworks in the book gave me the clarity I needed to work on them. Six months later, as I review my notes from that retreat, I'm wowed at the growth I've made in each of the archetypes.

Therapy gave me a language

A month after my personal retreat in June, I started therapy for the first time ever, seeking out a Jungian analytical therapist—someone who would be familiar with, or at least receptive to, archetypes like King, Warrior, Magician, Lover. Luckily I found a good one, and therapy continued to support all the inner work I was doing.

But it did more. Therapy gave me a language. I realize that for most of my life, I have been lacking much of the language of the soul, the heart, and the gut. I firmly believe that expanding one's language empowers oneself, and this year I feel so grateful that I'm becoming equipped with the languaging tools to better process, interpret, and communicate things in the domain of emotions, relationships, and of spiritual matters.

Therapy felt so important that we bravely started couples therapy as well, which has been some of the most difficult but rewarding work I've had to do in my entire life.

I experienced plant medicine

I wasn't planning to mention psychedelics here. I don't mind people knowing that I have experience with them now. It's more about the responsibility that comes from mentioning them. If a person raves about the euphoria, or cheapens their experience by choosing to talk about a click-baity dream-like vision they had, or doesn't talk about the need to ensure these medicines are experienced in a safe, secure, and nurturing space—then from my perspective, they are unwittingly doing a disservice to the medicines they are talking about.

My first experience with a plant medicine was last October. It can't be put into words—it is, by its very nature indescribable—but I do want to say it was in an extremely safe and nurturing space with people of all ages and with the most amazing guide.

To shorten (and cheapen) the first experience, it was a system shock. Everything changed, everything suddenly made sense, and yet, everything was the same. My day-to-day reality wasn’t too much different (this is an important point I’ll come back to). But even when the experience felt like decades ago as opposed to months ago, and even when I felt sad to have lost the lingering feelings of connectedness to that experience, it continued to work on deeper levels, shading my perspectives, interactions, and choices throughout the year.

It influenced my decision to go on my personal retreat in June and how I reflected as I was there. It opened my openness to explore previously taboo territories. Such as Carl Jung. Such as therapy.

Just to be clear, not everyone needs plant medicines. As I learned in Psychedelics and Individuation: Essays by Jungian Analysts, Jung wasn’t a fan of psychedelics, seeing them as a shortcut to the hard-earned work of therapy. There is truth to that. Plant medicine can rapidly unpeel a person. If the person isn’t ready for that, or doesn’t have a nurturing group, or doesn’t have tools to try to integrate learnings from the spiritual world into the physical world—then the probabilities of having mostly positive outcomes will lessen. Interestingly enough, for Jung, psychedelics were a shortcut that bypassed the hard-earned work of therapy; but for me, they were a shortcut to therapy! Hahaha, I think he would crack a smile at that.

(Since I’m going down this path, why not keep going...)

My heart decalcified

Like a pilgrimage, I returned to a similar plant medicine ceremony this October, less excited and more scared. Scared because, through introspection and therapy, I had a lot of difficult issues to tackle and I was afraid of what would surface.

My intentions on the first two days were simply to “let the body be the guide.”

To mentally prepare myself I drew cards from an alchemy deck beforehand to help jostle out reflections for each of the chakra points. Uhh, what the heck did I just write. I have to note, I’m new to all of this stuff. Alchemy decks? Chakras? Who am I?!! If it's strange to you, as it still is for me, just think of these things as ways to get yourself thinking in different perspectives, like a deck of creativity cards.

Before I drew a card for my heart chakra, I read the description for it, "the heart chakra illuminates the quiet yet potent whispers of the soul." Hmm, whispers of the soul….okay. Then I drew the card called "Lightening" (not lightning). Lightening is often perceived as a good thing, where a material ascends toward perfection through becoming lighter while gaining strength. But it can also represent the facade of perfection. As a material hardens, it can calcify. Oh my! A question struck me. Had my heart calcified? Maybe that's why I couldn't reach it in the first two days.

So on the third and final day, my intention was clear: “let the heart show the way.”

Yet, halfway through that session, it wasn’t happening. I couldn’t access my heart, so I gave up trying. I had to admit to myself that it just wasn't going to happen. Instead, I went back to my renewed connection with my body, letting it be the guide once more. Then, at one point I was intensely digging my fingers into the back of my knee where the insertion point of the hamstring attaches, like a seasoned pro, yet having never done anything remotely similar, when then, like a bolt of lightning—I realized the source and solution to my most pressing trauma and burst into tears of empathy for the pain I caused in myself and others...but they were also tears of joy because I had finally regained access to my heart.

My first ceremony with plant medicine took me out of the cave. My second ceremony equipped me to navigate it. Now I know the goal, however impossible: To integrate the experiences in the ceremony with the experiences of everyday life. To integrate the mystical with the mundane. The divine with the drudgery.

Anyways, how’s the weather, lol.

I paid my debts

I'm not talking about financial debts here. For 13 years, I was telling myself a lie. It doesn't matter what the lie was about. It matters that for 13 years I was burying it, ignoring it, trying to smother it from existence. But through all the inner work—the retreats, the therapy, the hard conversations, the medicine—I came to realize I had to unbury the lie. I had to talk about it. And I had to be emotionally available for what would come after. What came after has been painful, hurtful, exhausting, overwhelming, and cathartic—again and again and again.

We all know what they say about lies, that they build and get worse over time. But I always just thought that meant, you'd lie, then lie about the lie, and so on. I didn't realize that some lies go against your soul and are done at terrible costs—especially because the costs are not immediately apparent. I had no idea what my lie had done to my psyche and soul over the years, but the costs were great. As was said in the show Chernobyl:

Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later that debt is paid.

Being on the other side of such a thing, I write this as a friend for anyone who might need to hear it.

I protected that which mattered most

I want to say something really important here. Inner work is only inward naval gazing if we don't put any of it into practice. At the end of the year, I was able to witness my inner work paying off in a way that deeply nurtured my soul. We went on a special retreat some friends were putting on, but upon getting there, the terrain was so unexpectedly steep and dangerous in the rain, that my partner (coming off an injury) wasn't able to make it downslope to the main location.

I really wanted to experience the retreat and I didn't want to let down my friends either. So my partner said I should go without her. And maybe, I'm not too proud to say, the Nick of Old would have. But not this Nick. We stayed together, as a unit, hiked back, and graciously left in the morning to protect the sanctity of the experience for everyone else.

I wasn't ashamed at leaving, I was proud of it, beaming about it, because I knew, deep down, that I acted in alignment with my soul, that I leveled up as a man, and that I protected that which mattered most.

Beyond the Mind's Walls

The human instrument is the most wondrous thing, if we listen to it. For the longest time, I've been cut off from my body, specifically my heart and gut. A lot of scars built up around my heart. A lot of steel-plated armor. A lot of mistakes too painful to revisit. A lot of it over a decade ago.

But finally, that which has calcified has dissolved. It's kind of embarrassing to say but my mind was so active and so dominant and so afraid that it blocked out my heart and gut. My body never stopped giving signals though, I had just stopped listening. It's been here the whole time, showing the way.

I could write a book about this, and someday I hope to. It'll be the sequel to Linking Your Thinking, called Amateur's Quest. But in the meantime, I just want to thank my body for protecting me when the pain of the world was too great. For holding onto pains and traumas of which I had little to no awareness. Now, when possible, like when I found myself digging like crazy into the back of my hamstring, I can say to my body, "you can let go now. I'm here. It's okay. You can let go now." And it can release whatever it’s been holding onto because it knows it’s in good hands now.

This has all helped me realize something on a deeper level this year: Linking Your Thinking isn't just about connecting ideas, it's also about connecting the head to the heart and everything beyond.

It's linking your thinking with the rest of the world.

Because when you do that, you are never lost.

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Due to the unexpected length of this review, I'll save any previews of 2025 for another time. If anything resonated with you, I'd love to hear from you in the the comments.