Practice Session #23

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Intro.

CK: Okay. Here we go.

Heyo! I’m CK, and you’re listening to Practice. I’m your functional systems integrator, and this is my podcast where practice is not just the theme of this show, but the whole purpose behind it. I’m using this platform to practice podcasting as well as speaking in general, while espousing half thoughts and providing unsolicited advice.

As always, I’m fortunate to be joined by my practice partner and partner in life: Pam.

Pam: Hey, that’s me.

CK: Pam is also my pattern awareness manager, and every week we talk about my progress with this practice, along with other lifestyle practices, as well as theories and ideas behind the virtues of practice itself.

Our conversations are unscripted and unedited. We’re really doing this on the fly. So don’t hold me responsible for what I say here.

Make sure to check out my show notes where I’ll provide some fact-checking, self-psychoanalysis, and comments on things I could have done better. You may find this and more information about Practice at ForcesOfEqual.com.

Today, we’re recording on August 2nd, 2020, and this is our 23rd practice session.

It’s crazy that it’s August .

That is crazy. So let’s go ahead and check in with our physical and mental status.

Today, I took all of my supplements in the protocol – and instead of going through them every week, I’ll just say what I did differently. So today I took everything – molecular hydrogen, ketone esters… I didn’t take salts, but, um, I didn’t participate in our Sunday run either because I’m still working on my injured foot and toes…

And right now I am sipping on my morning smoothie, which I also combined with a cold brew coffee…

Pam: it tastes terrible.

CK: I think it tastes delicious, but… but my morning smoothie, I don’t know Pam doesn’t like that to begin with, so…

I think.

Peanut

Pam: spinach are not a good combo.

CK: I will have to disagre disagree, but

Pam: You also like how ketones taste.

CK: I mean, I don’t know if I like it per se, but, uh, I don’t know. It’s hard to say I enjoy the. Variations of flavors that I get to experience. So, yeah. My week physically has gone. Okay. I’m still dealing with the toe and foot injury that I suffered last week. during my trail run So I didn’t get out to the trails this past week, but I’m dealing with it and I feel okay. And I’m getting. Through it. So we’ll see how it goes. Uh, mentally I feel really good.

I made a lot of progress. I’m in the sweet spot of the wave and I’m in a really good mind space right now. So what about you, Pam? How’s your week?

Pam: I too, am dealing with some various physical issues. I’ve got a shoulder injury due to some poor movement patterns. And I also have an s-i ligament issue that I’ve had for years but it flared up recently. So that’s been kind of bothering me and then a hip flexor thing from increasing my running mileage. But I went to the chiropractor on Friday and they.

Did some soft tissue work and worked it out. So hopefully it will get better over the next week or so. Um, I did go out for the Sunday run. I did mile solo, which was a challenge because I don’t have any idea how to pace myself and I’m supposed to go faster on the miles. So normally I run with you at about 8:54 to 8:56 per mile.

And I did 9:06 today on my own for my first time pacing, on my own. So not bad.

CK: Pretty awesome.

Pam: I’m happy with that.

CK: Yeah

So I guess in terms of my sleeping for the week, I’m still transitioning off my summer nap schedule. So I didn’t take any naps over the past week, but I haven’t been sleeping as much total my daily total hasn’t been as much as it has been with the naps and I’m basically still sleep- sticking with the similar sleep schedule, just minus the naps.

So I’m getting a little less sleep and I’ve been on a little, I’ve had a little thing going on in the past couple of days in terms of staying up late. And I don’t know what it is, but I’m just going with the flow and not trying to force anything And I probably could. Do myself a favor by getting to bed earlier. But I mean, my mind’s been racing this past week and I’ve been crunching a lot of things. So maybe that’s why I haven’t been able to fall asleep or it’s also the full, there’s a full moon tomorrow. So I don’t know if that’s affecting my sleep.

I’ve haven’t really. Gone too deep into moon cycles and something that I’ve actually been interested in is the 13 moon calendar, but I haven’t really dived too deep into that yet. And there isn’t really too much out there, especially in terms of relating it to current functional health sciences and stuff like that.

But I mean, it’s a pretty far out concept to combine, I guess. But yeah, it’s something I’m interested in, in something I’ve kind of been observing here and there, but I don’t know. Maybe it’s the moon. Maybe it’s just the projects that I’m working on right now. But I’ve been going to bed later than usual and still getting up around the same time.

A little I’ve been sleeping in a little bit, but. Definitely haven’t been getting as much sleep as I have been throughout my summer nap time, but I feel okay. I I’m feeling a little tired right now and probably more tired than usual when I’m recording, but I think I’m mitigating it with all the supplements that I’ve been taking and the cold brew smoothing mix that I’m drinking right now.

So. Yeah, I think tonigh uh well today’s going to be interesting. Cause Sundays nights are usually when I tend to stay up late. So my initial thought was that I probably would get to bed early and have a good night of sleep tonight, but we’ll see how that goes. So should we get into our first segment?

Pam: Let’s do it

CK: All right.

This is my podcasting segment where I talk about my process with this practice of podcasting and this past week. Well, I think we can combine the podcasting segment with the freetalking segment because the past couple of weeks I’ve been hinting at covering paedomorphosis and form versus function.

And those two concepts are very tightly related. To me anyway, in my mind. And I think I can use them to go over the podcasting process that I’ve been going through this past week. So what is paedomorphosis

Pam: I hope you weren’t asking me.

CK: Yeah. I was just kind of throwing that out into the ether and

Pam: That’s the chapter title.

CK: Yeah. So is- does anything come up for you right off the bat? When I say paedomorphosis

Pam: Uh, only because we have spoken about it a few times. Um, but I think it has to do with, um, like evolution, like going back in phases to…

CK: Yeah.

Pam: Adjust? I’m not sure…

CK: Yeah. I know we talked about this before. So the thing is, my initial thought when I hear the word “paedomorphosis” is the word “pedophile,” which, I mean, the prefix is related. The “paedo-” prefix means like a juvenile state or like a youthful state. So with pedophiles, they have some sort of dysfunctional attraction to juvenile humans or children in that sense. So, I mean, that’s probably not a great example.

Pam: We are not talking about that.

CK: Yeah. So, but we’re not talking about pedophilia, which- I don’t know-

Okay. So maybe we’ll go on a tangent already, but okay. We go- this might get weird, but there- I don’t know… This just popped into my mind that with the pedophilia, I want to distinguish between pedophiles and child abuse, because you can be a pedophile without abusing children.

Pedophilia is a dysfunction or like a mental dysfunction (“disorder” was the exact word I was looking for here) of some sort where you fall into this line of thinking or attraction to children, but you don’t necessarily have to act on those. So there’s pedophiles out there that never abused children. So I want to, I just want to clear that up that pedophilia in itself is not such like a it’s socially wrong thing.

It’s the act of child abuse…

Pam: I think the idea is still wrong, socially wrong. People would never say that it is socially acceptable to have attraction to children.

CK: Yeah, of course. And I don’t know. There that can get nuanced and There’s a lot that can go into that. And I don’t know if I want to talk about all that or if I know enough or if I can wrap my head around it enough right now, but I just want to clear up that. People can have pedophilia or suffer from pedophilia, but not be a criminal or a criminal or, or, you know, they’re not. Yeah. I mean, it’s pretty nuanced I, uh, I’m getting myself into trouble trying to

Pam: Yeah, maybe we should leave with this tangent and get back to what you were talking about.

CK: Yeah. Okay. So, anyway, I mean, the point in the beginning was to give you the notion that this is a juvenile or youthful concept. So paedomorphosis is the concept that you have to morph back to a juvenile or youthful state. Or not, not that you have to, but it’s the concept of moving back to this state in order to regenerate into a better state or a more beneficial state or so in terms of like animals, there’s some animals in our animal kingdom that can regenerate limbs.

Or like, you know, some lizards can regenerate their tails or their legs. And this is a method of paedomorphosis where, you know, if something happens to get cut off, let’s say a lizard gets its tail cut off er Somehow it reverts back to this paedomorphic state where the cells. And other functions of the body, they revert to this juvenile or more youthful state.

So it can regenerate it’s limbs or tail or whatever was cut off. So before it could regenerate, it has to revert to this paedomorphic state in humans. Obviously we don’t have this regeneration of limbs in our evolution, but we actually have something that is paedomorphic So if I ask you. If you can think of anything in humans that regenerates like this paedomorphic idea in lizards, can you think of anything?

Pam: Um, I, I like fingernails and hair and stuff are not like this. Right.

CK: No, I mean, it, no cause I mean you can slice them, you know, cut them down, but it’s not, it’s just a continual growth process. It’s not regenerating.

Pam: Oh, is it liver? Your liver, does it do it?

CK: interesting. Yeah, I’m not sure that’s a, that’s a really good point. Cause you can basically lose like half or even two thirds of your liver and have it grow back to almost full or to a hundred percent. So yeah, I’m actually not sure about that. I’d have to look into that if that’s actually a paedomorphic function.

Pam: are you thinking of stem cells then?

CK: Yes. So. In terms of humans when it comes to paedomorphosis stem cells are probably the closest thing aside. From okay. So why let me explain why stem cells are the closest thing, because Pam, as you probably know, and this is why you brought them up is because stem cells are kind of like the basic foundational cells to build all the cells in your body.

All the different specialized cells. So stem cells are foundational and generalized It’s the base. And then the rest of the cells in your body are formed from these, this base of the stem cell into more specialized cells, for whatever function it needs to perform in your body. So, and that is. The basic idea of paedomorphosis but in humans, it’s a little different because if you lose some sort of, some sort of cell function, or if you lose like, you know, a finger or something like that, your stem cells, aren’t going to be able to regenerate your finger.

So it’s not as evolved or as. I mean, that process isn’t as evolved as it is in a lizard, but in humans, this regenerative process, that’s similar to regenerating like a limb, like a finger or a tail in lizards is existent in our brains. Yeah. So if we lose like a part of our brain, then that part necessarily won’t regenerate.

As it was before, but other parts of our brains will regenerate or maybe not regenerate per se, but adapt and build up to replace the function of the, of the part of the brain that was lost. So this is the human paedomorphic function. And it’s interesting to think that. Humans have this function for the brain.

Whereas other lower class animals have these kinds of functions for physical features Or I mean, the brain is physical, but more, um, non-neuronal features. So yeah. Humans have this regenerative feature for their cognitive abilities. Whereas other animals may have a regenerative feature for their physical or movement uh kinesthetic abilities. So that’s paedomorphosis is the concept of reverting back to a juvenile or youthful state in order to regenerat and. The main point or the beneficial portion of paedomorphosis is to go back to a youthful state. So you can regenerate into something better, better than you were before. So you don’t necessarily want to repeat the generative process or the evolution that you went through before.

You want to take the information that you learned before, and. Revert into paedomorphosis and then regenerate into a better version using or utilizing the information that you had before. So this kind of goes into, I mean, it goes into a lot of things. Like we, as humans, we tend to go about our lives and develop these habits and routines and.

Eventually fall into a more mindless mode where we’re just following our routines and our habits. And we just continue down this path. And if we don’t think about what we’re doing or what goes into it or how we’re ending up in certain routines and developing certain tendencies, we might lose sight of.the our efficiency and the effective effectiveness of what we’re doing. So that’s why it’s important to be mindful of the processes that we’re taking on. And coming out of that, we can look back and see. Or determine if what we’re doing is the most beneficial to us. So how I’m relating to what I’ve been going through with podcasting is this past week I’ve been working on my computer.

So I’ve mentioned my computer before and how I’ve been working on my workflow and finding out all these different things that I didn’t think about before when dealing with software, like audio software and all this new music, production software, and stuff like that. So I just got a new or new to me, desktop PC a couple of weeks ago, or maybe.

About a month or two ago. by now and I’m pretty sure we’ve talked about this before on the podcast, me getting this new equipment. And it was because, you know, I was running into issues because I was running off a laptop. Before, which I thought was fine. And when I originally got the laptop, it was top of line and it had everything that I needed, but I wasn’t doing all this stuff with the podcasting and audio and music at the time.

So once I started doing that, I was running into issues with the computer performance and I. Actually had a desktop before that I was using, but that ended up failing and it’s an older desktop. I believe I got it like in 2011 or something and I’ve upgraded it. I’ve been iterating it upon it over the years, but it finally failed.

And then I went with the laptop for a while because it was adequate and it was. Uh, some of it, some parts of it was even, you know, faster and more efficient than the desktop. So I thought that’d be fine. But then I started running into issues with that, and I ended up with this new desktop PC, or it’s actually used, but it’s new to me.

And it’s the specs are. A lot better than the old desktop PC. And so I thought, you know, this is going to be more than enough for what I need. And so I got that set up and had that running for awhile. And the more I got into things and the more I learn about the software that I’m picking up, the more issues that I’ve been dealing with.

And so like the past two weeks really I’ve been. Basically troubleshooting. Like the majority of my work has been troubleshooting and the it, I mean, if you listen back to the past couple of weeks, you may have heard some frustration about my troubleshooting experiences and how I have to go through all this.

And, you know, I’m always trying to hit that peak of the wave like I mentioned the past couple of weeks and I have that optimism bias where, you know, I want things to always go according to plan and whatnot, but then, you know, where does that leave? Troubleshooting? How do you factor in troubleshooting into your plans?

Because these are things that you don’t know aren’t going to come up and you don’t realize that they’re going to come up and I didn’t. Expect to have to be dealing with it for the majority of my time. And it got to the point where any time I wanted to do something with music production, I, you know, I had to start up the program or the software.

And once I got it up and running it wasn’t working, and I wasn’t either getting my audio inputs, the audio wasn’t getting like, inputted right, or I couldn’t hear the output. So I would have to fiddle with the settings and then restart and see if that worked and maybe go through that cycle multiple times.

And it’s 20 minutes or half an hour before I can get started with what I wanted to get started with. And sometimes it might- I might not have to go through all that troubleshooting and I could get it started up right away. And most of the time, it’s the exact same settings, you know, and I can’t figure out why it’s not working the way it’s supposed to.

So it’s those kinds of frustrations that I’ve been dealing with with the past couple of weeks. And so this past week I upgraded my computer again, the desktop PC – the new-to-me, desktop PC that I got a few months ago. And so rather than continuing on this path of trying to figure out what’s going on with the software, when I’m trying to start it up and troubleshooting, which is a routine that I started to get used to because that’s what I was doing and that’s what I had the resources to do.

And so I started getting into the habit of troubleshooting basically. And then it got to the point where I felt like I wasn’t doing some things because it was in the back of my mind that I would have to troubleshoot or I might have to troubleshoot.

So then it got to the point where I was losing interest in doing some of these things, because I didn’t want to troubleshoot, you know,

Pam: You don’t want to deal with it.

CK: Yeah. So instead of the joy of producing and playing with music and playing with the audio and stuff like tha- It became associated with troubleshooting and doing like- I felt like I was- the thing is I had felt like I was doing nothing.

Like I was getting nothing done, whereas that time could have – and in my mind should have – been used to do the actual music production and music creation, so, okay. Okay. There’s a couple of points that I want to get to with this. So I still want to get to the paedomorphosis or still want to cover paedomorphosis And, uh, okay. Now I just lost my train of thought. So anyway, in terms of paedomorphosis What I did was I had to revert. So I had to go back and figure out where the bottlenecks were in my process. And this is the thing with our coaching concepts or my coaching concept that I’m trying to develop the framework for in terms of progress is you want to find the sources of friction.

And you want to find where you can add forces or power or energy. So, you know, in terms of progress, there’s the side of where you want to add the forces or, you know, add concepts or strategies or methodologies in order to boost your processes. And on the other side, you want to remove the friction or bottlenecks or obstacles that are causing hindrances to your progress. And so in terms of removing friction, you want to revert to that paedomorphic state. And so I kind of basically cleaned up the computer and got everything. Down to the basics and the foundations of what I needed and what I knew, what was necessary and just kind of, and I mean, this is, was my mindset before, too, but it was, but this time it’s kind of more like a spring cleaning process per se, rather than the initial process.

But I figured out what I needed foundationally. And so that was the process of reverting to that paedomorphic that youthful juvenile state, where I can build it back up to a better performing machine. So I basically stripped everything down, cleaned everything up on the computer and then added an SSD drive.

So before it had just a regular hard disc drive. And now I added an SSD, which totally sped everything up. And now I have the hard drive as a separate storage drive, and I had previously edit other upgrades in terms of Ram memory. And. I don’t remember if I added anything else, but that Ram memory that I added on previously helped.

But now that I, so that was. A iterative evolution was the Ram that I added before. But now that I went paedomorphic and went back to the foundation and replaced the foundation with a better foundation in terms of the SSD. Now that ran that I added before is even better. It’s there’s a boost from that, from just adding it before to reverting and now having it added in So does that make sense?

Pam: Yeah.

CK: I’m kind of getting in the weeds here, but the point is that I had to revert to a different juvenile or. Youthful foundational state and then added stuff on top of that in order to evolve and make things more efficient and more effective.

And so that is the concept of pedal Morphosis. It’s the concept of, instead of. Continually adding things on and evolving your routines and habits. It’s taking a step back. It’s the, basically the concept of taking one step back to move two steps forward. So I think that’s the point that I wanted to get across with that.

Did that come out Okay?

Pam: Makes sense.

CK: Cool. Cool. So Holy cow, we’re at half an hour already. So, yeah, that’s- I’m glad I got that out of the way. I still can talk about form versus function. Maybe that’s something we can continue this conversation on with next week.

So other than that, do you have anything else that you want to add for this week?

Pam: I don’t think so. I was just laughing because I scripted it an episode of Not Bad Advice this morning, that was all about pattern awareness and noticing when you’re doing things that seem right, but they’re actually causing problems and stripping those out and going back to before that and starting again.

So it was really funny that you finally talked about paedomorphosis today right after I had done that we must’ve been on the same wavelength.

CK: That’s cool. But I also have- I’ve also had additional thoughts about waves this past week that I may want to cover in an upcoming session. But I- I’ve had a lot of creative ideation over the past week. And I think it might’ve been a function of missing my beach day and my trail running day. So I didn’t have like those meditative times to get into my default mode network or whatever brain state in order to think and reflect.

So I think maybe I was kind of doing that more during other times over the past week. And so I had, like, a different creative ideation process going on. But, yeah, I have a different- or maybe more nuanced idea of waves and some more stuff I can talk about with form versus function.

So maybe we’ll get into those and continue this discussion next week. So yeah, we’ll leave it there for now this week. So thanks for joining us again. And if this was your first time. Check us out at ForcesOfEqual.com. We have some information there and I know I have some things I have to work on to get out that I mentioned the past couple of weeks, but it- or it’s all part of the process and I’m working on those.

So hopefully we’ll see how my workflow goes this week with the whole paedomorphic evolution that I went through this past week. So, we’ll leave it there. Before we leave off, Pam, where can people find you?

Pam: You can find me on Twitter where I’m @pamela_lund.

CK: And you might be able to find me on Twitter @cKdisco. So thanks for joining us this week and hope you come back next week and keep on practicing.

Too-da-loo!