Era 20 - Toronto post-Jhourney retreat (the 5 Ms)

Parent page - My Eras (index)

Previous era - Era 19 - Arriving in Toronto

After exhausting my Scott Pilgrim enthusiasm, and hanging out with the Toronto tpot-adjacent group a bunch, I started to remember what I had known when I left Life Itself at the end of Era 17 - “Life Itself” intentional community → Kensho (lol at all these links, this website is getting a bit mad) → “oh shit, I’ve healed enough, I kinda don’t like talking about this kinda stuff any more”

I had a call with Sasha Chapin and realised that I’d built my life around “healing” and the whole Post-rationalist journey and I now felt “healed” enough and as such was still showing up in spaces that I was no longer intrinsically motivated to show up in

So then I had a like “ahh, ok, my life was built around ‘healing’ for the last 2 years, now what new life do I want?”

(I’m now back to a place of “there’s still lots of great wisdom and people in the Post-rationalist journey but at the time I was feeling very much like I wanted to move past it and stop being so into this stuff)

I got really into the idea of the 4 Jungian masculine archetypes from the book “King, Warrior, Lover, Magician” and started doing a daily gratitude & accountability call with my friend Rob, and I came up with the 5 Ms for what to do with my 29th year (I turned 28 on the final day of the Jhourney meditation retreat I did, where I hit jhana 2 and had a great & difficult time, it was awesome)

As is a very recurring pattern with me, I was like “oh yeah, I’m gonna do these 5 Ms for a whole year!”, and ended up pivoting pretty damn quickly

The 5 Ms were:

1. Music → learning Ableton
2. Martial Arts → cycling to Brazilian Jiu Jitsu ~4 times a week
3. Money → finding ways to diversify income
4. Merriment → it’s good to have fun!!
5. Meditation → keep a meditation practice post-Jhourney retreat
   The 5 Ms

I absolutely loveddddd BJJ; I’d never done a martial art before, and I loved the learning progression, going like 4+ times a week and taking it really seriously, the competitive element (getting beat by someone in one session and then training and coming back and whooping their ass, hell yeah), studying at home (I kept a BJJ journal of like “ok I got into this position and it was good but I didn’t know how to submit from there” etc)

But after maybe a month, there was a sense of “if I want to get good at music, I need to take it more seriously”. Like, there’s the essentialism thing of doing as little as possible. So for my last month in Toronto I pretty much stayed in my (very nice) sublet, made music for as many hours as possible (terrible music, but I learned the fundamentals of Ableton), cooked, and went to the gym. It was a really awesome month

I definitely want to return to BJJ one day

In this final ~2 month time in Toronto I lived in this little zone:

My sublet was a gorgeous place right by Wychwood Barns, which turns out to be an absolute Scott Pilgrim hotspot. Within walking distance there’s Scott’s apartment, the Barns (which is where they fight Roxy), the Wychwood library (where he sees Ramona for the first time), Hillcrest Park (where Scott and Ramona go on their first date), Knives’ school, and you can easily cycle to Casa Loma. It really felt like destiny living there lol. Very much like “oh, you can just do unhinged stuff like this that your soul calls you to”, lol

I’d cycle down this hill to get to BJJ

Go here to do my food shop

Do this to get an in-person burrito

And that was pretty much my life, lmao. I was learning Ableton in my apartment and having a great time 😎

Next era - Era 21 - Making music & youtube videos at my mum’s