Applied Phenomenology 101

Some thoughts:

• Applied Phenomenology is the study and practice of applying all received types of insight in service of improving our felt experience
• The most valuable part of the framing is that it allocates attention to actively (offensively) immunize us against values-level capture by phenomenology-adjacent insight spaces - meditation, self-therapy, neuroscience, and other modalities
• To skillfully integrate available methods and wisdom, but with a clear understanding that all pieces and learnings are subservient to the overarching goal of improving wellbeing, rather than valuable on their own - avoid "meditating to get better at meditation"
• To learn to extract intuitions, insights, models from egregores without becoming burdened by their cultures, dogmas, and traditions (related to mimetic/informational immune system skills)
• The continuous top-down question is "we want happiness and effectiveness"; the bottom-up execution loop is "explore, experiment, integrate"
• Be very skeptical of ideas that suggest "there's a given technique/method that will just work if you follow it closely enough" - even if the semantic description is accurate to the author's experience the somatic nuances and mental moves behind the words usually don't translate directly from the teacher to the receiver; it takes a lot of experimentation for the insight to take root
• Increasingly notice the gap between "knowing" and actually being able to live an insight
• Personal exploration (of our own experience) always remains the most important aspect, especially at the beginning - because received insights can easily mislead us as our language is still detached from our somatic "operating system". We need to prioritize our own trailheads until we reduce the error rate of communication between the layers