On Death, Sleep & Resilience | April Newsletter
Welcome to the second edition of the Learn with Ivo Newsletter! Yaaay!
It’s been a beautifully full month of practice, creativity, and life. I hope you enjoy what I’ve been exploring, making, and reflecting on!
✨ Something by Ivo
My latest creative work: reflections on fatherhood and life, meditation teachings, guided meditations, and dharma talks.
It’s been an amazing—and creative—month. I’m really happy that I managed to implement the idea of sustaining my focus on family and practice, while, as a byproduct, working on learnwithivo.com and creating things I hope are both enjoyable and helpful to others.
Over the past six weeks, I’ve been focusing on death meditation, so several of the new materials are related to that:
- A practical overview of different approaches to death meditation:
👉 Death Meditation - A practice guide for those interested in trying it themselves:
👉 Practice Inspiration – Death Meditation - Two simplified versions of The Nine Contemplations of Atisha with more space for reflection (no recording yet, just text):
👉 The Nine Contemplations - A short piece inspired by those contemplations:
👉 Loving and Living Fully: Why Only the Process Matters - And, I’ve added a few more episodes from my 2022 travels:
👉 Travel Stories
🛠️ Something to Use
A helpful tool or resource I recommend.
💤 Toolkit for Sleep
👉 Huberman Lab – Toolkit for Sleep
A list of 12 short, powerful tips to improve your sleep. I keep coming back to this page and often recommend it to others. I highly suggest reading it and picking a few tips to try.
“Sleep is THE foundation of our mental and physical health and performance in all endeavors.”
💡 Something to Reflect On
Content that inspired me.
🎧 Buddha at the Gas Pump: #452 – Ken Wilber
This is one of the pieces of content that has truly shaped how I think about personal and spiritual growth.
Ken Wilber introduces several key dimensions of development:
- Waking up – Awakening (what most spiritual traditions aim for)
- Cleaning up – Shadow work (often psychotherapy; My own focus here is through being part of the ManKind Project)
- Growing up – Psychological and developmental maturity
- Showing up – Being of service in the world
🧘 Something on Meditation
Meditation-related inspiration.
This time, I want to share three things with you:
🧑🤝🧑 Rosemary and Steve Weissman’s Meditation Retreats
Sign-ups are open again!
I did their retreat at Waldhaus last summer and it was incredibly powerful. You can really feel their 35+ years of teaching experience and how they’ve refined the retreat over time.
👉 Retreat Schedule
Over New Year, I (loosely) joined their Old Students' Wise Reflections Retreat, and since then, I’ve been deeply engaged with the materials.
🎥 Lucy Hone TEDx – “The Three Secrets of Resilient People”
This TEDx Talk offers three powerful and practical strategies to increase resilience (and who wouldn’t want that?). For me, it beautifully highlights the value of meditation.
Her three points:
- Recognizing that adversity is part of life – cultivated through wise reflection, especially on suffering and death, and through compassion practice.
- Choosing where to focus your attention – clearly supported by attention training 😄
- Asking “Is what I’m doing helping or harming me?” – cultivated through mindfulness training, which strengthens the interplay between attention and awareness.
📚 Culadasa – What Is Enlightenment and Why Should I Care?
A seven-part talk series from the author of The Mind Illuminated, including a handout.
If you're looking for something deeper, this is for you.
🎵 Something Beautiful
A quote, poem, or other beautiful piece.
🎶Satsang – I Am
This song has been one of my absolute favorites—I think ever since my first meditation course with Mark in 2018. There’s so much wisdom packed into it—enjoy!
- 👉 Listen to the song
- 👉 Lyrics
- 👉 Want to watch it without ads? Try the Brave browser (see March newsletter).
Thank you for reading and best wishes!
Ivo
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