Happy 2024 - Wish Stillness upon you

Ritesh Bawri

01 Jan 2024 — 3 min read

BreatheAgain

2024 is here. Happy New Year! I wish all of you a healthy year filled with 3.15 billion milliseconds of joy and stillness.

"Stillness is a the silence you experience in which the mind is free from the worry of thoughts and distractions, allowing one to enjoy the present moment. Whatever that moment may bring."

Among the many lessons I learnt in 2023, enjoying the moment with stillness has easily been my greatest lesson.

Life, as I have learned from interacting with thousands of you, is not easy. Not for me, not for you. There are better and worse moments, sure. But only a privileged few said they had the perfect life.

So my quest has been to learn to enjoy whatever life throws at me with stillness. The journey has taken me down the rabbit hole of neuroscience, philosophy, Buddhism, medical science, and brain elasticity.

It has taken me on a journey to understand the very definition of what it means to be conscious, or what reality is.

Who, for example, is trying to be still? Is there anyone inside?

I hope to publish my book on what I found in 2024.

The basics do not change. Nutrition, Exercise, Sleep, Breathing, Meditation, and Toxicity. Please focus on getting the basics right before you find fancy juices, superfoods or magic cures.

Your body cares far more about survival than it does about the movie playing in your head, what ever that movie might be.

I met Verne Harnish, the founder of EO, this year. He taught me one of the most powerful lessons of my life. He said, "A football game without a scoreboard would be no fun. In fact, you need the score to be on display at all times for the game to make any sense."

Build your health scoreboard. It cuts out the bullshit.

Our minds love to play games and interpret reality. Last night wasn't really that bad, was it?

I gave my son a basic watch to track his metrics. Overnight his interest in how often he ran, swam or walked changed. Forever.

When you measure, you know the truth.

So my New Year gift to all of you is free access to the Breathe Again app tracker. On the app, we can help you connect any device (Apple, Garmin, Polar, etc.), add any bloodwork data, and create a score for how healthy you are. We call it VitalStream. Reply to this article with a yes if you want access.

By the way, do get your annual health check up. I got mine done and thankfully got great results nine years running. Here is a short note on how and what I track.

Consistency was the next lesson I learned. For example, I have known about the benefits of exercise for a while. Yet some days I could climb mountains; other days, walking a mile seemed like a chore. So I focused on consistency.

I did not miss a single day. I just showed up, no matter what.

I started the year with a lazy 1-mile walk at 22 minutes. My peak was 22 miles of cycling in 74 minutes. I exercised for five minutes some days and three hours other days. But I did.

Finally, I discovered God. No, she did not show up next to my bed in a flash of light, though it would have been kind of cool if she did.

I discovered God through the power of language. I realized the world that we attempt to understand is the construct of language. If we use optimistic, positive language, it gives us the ability to believe.