You are sitting at a cafe in Saigon.

You spend your time projecting your attention on objects that are “outside” of you, such as the infinite flow of motorbikes passing by the street. As if the “outer world” starts on the outer surface of your eyes. You are constantly pretending to be in charge of your life and you are bending your experience with your will. You pretend that things happen because you work towards them. Life is here to serve you. Everything is okay, you can destroy forests, control people, move your attention, set an intention, and attract so much wealth that you wonder why people from poor countries are just lazy asses.

Since you have so much wealth and your main problem in life is the broken glass of your brand-new iPhone, you decide to go for mindfulness training. Because you need to be more aligned and more grounded since your yoga teacher told you so. During your training, you are invited to go “inside”. You start to pay attention to your body sensations. It’s okay, you have plenty of time anyway and you are already a top scorer on Candy Crush anyway. You can order your food and get it delivered, Amazon has finally listened to Ronny Chieng’s advice and created Amazon Prime Now: your order is placed in your hand the very moment you click on “purchase”. So why not spare a bit of time feeling the sun on your skin, or the water on your hands, or how you feel?

Should you be very adventurous and own a Tesla that you don’t even need to drive, you might have decided to go for craniosacral training. Maybe even a biodynamic one, where people talk about tides, Stillness, energy, chakras, and embryology. The real shit! That’s a lovely training that costs an arm and where people usually ask you to come back for like 9 phases or more. The vocabulary is complex, it sounds very serious. The problem is that most people are experts in the vocabulary. Very few have experienced a single thing they are talking about. Especially the teachers by the way. But hey, why not bend life to your will by using a bit of new age?

People talk. They love it. They write books, they have blogs like mine. They present themselves as experts. It is lovely and it attracts rich people who have enough money to fix the broken glass of their new iPhones so they can charge a lot and prove that they can attract wealth. It’s okay, why not after all? Some people like football, others go to craniosacral training.

But who knows, maybe, one day, as you’re sitting at another cafe in Saigon, you’ll suddenly realize that the very idea of inside/outside is the only thing that maintains the sensation of inside/outside. Maybe, instead of trying to control your attention or to bend life with your will, you’ll just decide to do the scariest shit in your life. You’ll just decide to see what happens if you give up on this inside/outside idea for a second.

Read carefully here, I didn’t say that you’ll feel the outside + the inside. I said that maybe you’ll see all that as a whole. No more separation. At first, it could be a bit hectic, even more than when you try to control everything. If you are an osteopath you would call that “the cranial wave”. Sounds fancy, you could probably make a few bucks selling books about it.

If you just stay like that, without giving it a name, maybe you’ll notice that your attention is being brought places, and the way it starts to move/be moved could maybe make you think of a fluid movement. Here, you would call it the fluid tide. Don’t forget to sell books about it.

Imagine if you are crazy enough to wait a little longer even though nobody’s told you to do that. Your attention that was first very narrow, very precise might start to become a bit wider. It’s not fluid anymore, more like a gas, more like the humidity that you can feel in the air while walking in Vietnam. Fast fast, you need to give it a name! let’s call it the long tide! Yeah, say it’s potent so people will want to work with it and bend it to their will again!

The question that could arise here is where does all that take place? In a “space”. An open one maybe. Maybe, after the long tide, something will stop. No more manifestation for a while, only the space that doesn’t feel empty. A bit like in deep sleep. That’s usually where you’ll lose many people who will start to tell you stuff like “I am not real”, or “life is an illusion”. Welcome to the world of non-dual gurus! Enter the field of Dynamic Stillness.

What a great idea it would be to apply all that while treating a patient! Not the patient/you, but a whole, and suddenly seeing people describing you all the phases we just talked about. Again, time for you to sell something here. Maybe a biodynamic training, so you can make sure to talk about all that to people who dream about it but couldn’t feel their toes if they’d knocked them on a piece of furniture.

Meanwhile, just outside of the cafe, the lady in the street selling you a delicious bo bun is a frecking master who experiences all that permanently. She experiences it so much, it is so normal for her that she wouldn’t even think about talking about it, because to her it’s just life, and she’s busy living it. You would have recognized her as a master, but you were busy writing your book. Life can wait, I guess, wealth can’t.

Love,
Jules

PS: I wonder what happens if you wait again and again in dynamic stillness. I’m kidding! I’ve been doing all that constantly for the past 13 years. I just don’t talk about it because it’s so normal that I don’t really see the point. Maybe I should sell food in front of the cafe?