Martin Blais
I fast intermittently not because I enjoy being hungry, and not because I think I have discovered a secret metabolic shortcut. What I like most is the simplicity of the rule. Most of the time, my practice looks like a 16:8 schedule: roughly sixteen hours without food and an eating window of about eight hours. […]
Stepping into cold water is still uncomfortable. If it ever becomes completely ordinary, I will probably have to stop presenting myself as some kind of polar warrior and simply admit that I adapted. What keeps me returning is not the fantasy of conquering the cold. It is the encounter with my first reaction. The first […]
Years ago, someone I had met earlier that day offered to send me Reiki remotely. Later that evening, at the agreed time, I felt a distinct wave of warmth move through my body. I could not explain it. I still cannot. That experience did not settle a scientific question or prove the existence of a […]
I have always been attracted to disciplines that make me a beginner again. Russian does that very efficiently. The alphabet changes, the sounds resist familiar habits, grammar reorganizes the sentence and even a small success has to be earned. I do not pretend to be fluent. I am learning, and the distance between those two […]
As an actor, my mind is part of my instrument. It remembers the lines, constructs imaginary circumstances, anticipates problems, judges the last take and occasionally decides to do all of this at the same time. Meditation is how I learn not to believe every thought simply because it arrived with confidence. The first opening My […]
For several years, I have been building and refining what I call my Daily Morning Ritual. Nothing mystical and nothing particularly glamorous: a few practices that help me begin the day deliberately rather than being immediately pulled into reaction. Heart coherence has become one of the quietest parts of that ritual and one of the […]
As an actor, my instrument is my whole self, body, mind, attention and whatever emotional weather happens to be moving through me that day. For several years, I have been building and refining a morning routine that helps me check in with that instrument before the outside world starts making demands on it. It is […]