I realized this morning as I hosted the 5 a.m. PST Dharma Sprint that I have placed some insane rules around how & what I can claim to be a Death Cookies. ‘
If you’re like, “Ummmm, death cookies??? What the heck is that? Come again.”
Quick explanation -
Phil Stutz, a Psychiatrist, practicing for more than two decades explains what he believes to be soul contracts and the anti- you’s internal battle. He refers to this as Death Cookies vs Part X. We all have both of these parts within us. Part X, he explains is the voice inside of you trying to keep you from becoming what you could be, and Death Cookies are the actions you take that will move the needle forward.
If you haven’t watched the Netflix documentary that Jonah Hill created on Stutz, it’s a great one. Check it out.
I’m realizing that even as I write this, it’s something I do for almost all games in my life. I guess even the game of life itself.
Have you ever played the game Banana-grams???
It’s basically like a looseleaf scrabble.
Anyway, I love it and have these unwritten rules for myself as I play the game. They sound something like this:
If I used a word in the last rounds, I can’t use it again.
3 letter words are not words, I can’t use them.
You get the point. Even crazier is this is just for me, in my own head, alone. My opponent is completely unaware and when I win I feel much more validated & they are probably thinking… “Dude chill, this is just a game.” But for me, I just won in double difficult level.
So this a.m. when I logged in to host a sprint I said, “I’m a lot more nervous to do these a.m. sprints with about 40 of you on here as opposed to the 4 people that show up on Tuesday nights.”
And someone wrote in the chat, “DEATH COOKIE!!!!”
(P.S. if said person is here reading this thank you for the encouragement)
I thought… “This isn’t a death cookie. This is still manageable fear and not much resistance at all.”
And then I realized it…
I have unwritten rules for Death Cookies. 🤦♀️
I have read the description of death cookies many times and yet, here I am giving myself insanely high rules for what I consider an accomplishment of eating something scary.
I’ve said multiple times throughout my life how high my expectations are and one of the main reasons I feel that is because of how high the expectations I put on myself are. And now I’m wondering… if I make the goals feel unattainable, I wonder if that lack of the participation trophy, for even semi-great accomplishments, is what's causing my lack of belief in myself.
Maybe that is why I don’t trust myself enough to eat some fucking death cookies. Maybe this has something to do with the resistance I feel towards doing most anything “hard”.
Things I do consider death cookies:
Things I’ve done -
The 30-day Dharmathon - check done
Restarting my guided journal - check done
Going to summit & staying in a house with new people - check done
Breaking up with someone that didn’t feel right - check done (death pie!)
Things I haven’t been able to convince myself to do -
Setting up & sticking to a business growth & marketing plan
Sticking to a budget (saying no to people & my little princess heart)
Writing a monthly Substack post
Daily meditation
Leave my current career path
Go to the gym
Make a fucking post about things I’ve learned
Get back into dancing
Here’s a wild reflection while writing those down; even the ones I knew were death cookies, I didn’t acknowledge until right in this moment. It would have never occurred to me to write those out and put them on any kind of board for acknowledgment as they feel seemingly small to me.
I have mostly thought of myself as a fight mode defender… not much of a freeze, but I’m seeing right now, that a lot of my reactions to things that feel too hard are not react to them at all, make my standards impossible so that I inevitably fail, or don’t do them so I can’t fail.
So here it is…
A FUCKING DEATH COOKIE!!!
I am sharing my experience with the endless game I am playing with myself. No one else up there in my mind but me and anti-me and I’ve been letting anti-me win a lot! But not today MF. Today I am exposing my game within this game of life in hopes that if you are out there reading this realizing that you're also giving yourself impossible, unreachable standards, it’s ok to call yourself out and tell that part of you to sit down while you shine a little bit today!
If you got up & showed up for yourself today, you did it! Congratulate yourself and maybe next time a harder task comes up, you’ll have a bit of a track record to prove that you do accomplish things all the time!
In case you are also wondering what a Dharma Sprint is:
A group meets on Zoom. Each person picks one task they will work on during the sprint. Then we start a timer for 90 minutes. (could be less but no less than 30 minutes) During that time, everyone commits to work on one task or meditates. When the timer goes off a couple of people in the group share what their experience was like. If they got distracted or hit a wall of resistance or the time flew by and they were able to complete more than expected. Then we part ways.
The beauty of a Dharma Sprint even though, just sitting on mute in a zoom for 2 hours sounds “weird” is that the accountability of other people doing something similar, at the same time as you and not being able to walk away or get distracted from the task at hand, actually creates some kind of unexplainable magic! It’s like a collective energy that invokes vulnerability and safety from people you may or may not have ever even met.
If you’re interested in holding yourself accountable to a task or project, think about Dharma sprinting with a group of your friends once a week or check out the:
https://www.skool.com/lucid-university
There are a ton of us working on different things in this group daily with different times to hop in and get some seriously focused work done.
I even host on Tuesdays!!!
Cheers to you eating some of your own Death Cookies this week too!
DEATH COOKIE 🍪 nom nom nom