Everything we do,
we do it good.
We’re gonna take it
HIGHER!
I am allowing myself to be more chill. The response of my system has been so far mostly stress. The ease is not something I am familiar with. I still have a long way to go to increase my nervous pipe system’s overall capacity. One day at a time, one day!
The retraining begins with acknowledging the good already present.
Nothing activates the feel good mode like realizing how lucky you already are.
I would even go as far as to say that GRATITUDE might be the the single most pronounced thread underlying my 7 year transformation.
It’s not about fooling yourself things are better, or that problems don’t exist.
We’re just noticing the full spectrum, also the things invisible to the racing anxious mind.
I’ll start:
♡ The many times in recent weeks when I allowed myself to be okay with not knowing and feeling in-between
The desire to have “everything solved” might be the greatest obstacle to happiness we’ve created ourselves.
I have a part who flagellates me for ever choosing contentment & chill when some puzzles still don’t fit.
Counterbalancing this tendency to postpone okayness & satisfaction until to-dos are cleared has brought amazing quality of life change in record time.
Messy is humane.
Humessy.
♡ The gift that keeps on delivering - my beloved Hugo
Those pre-sleep kisses, and every time he says he loves me 10 times beyond the universe are pure love bombs.
We’ve been together for almost 5 years now, and my fascination with H is only growing.
It’s a cosmic privilege to have a front row seat in observing such a lovely, kind, and creative small human being evolve into a Man.
And he’s so cute en route!
I was afraid fatherhood would take away much of the fun & freedom we had.
The load of responsibility is indeed higher.
But what I’ve gained in terms of meaning, everyday smiles, and heart growth is everything.
♡ Living on my terms
I’ve lately been exploring the idea of radical self-trust.
Consciously or not, I’ve been trying to fit in for most of my life.
Even if that sometimes “worked” (measuring by traditional success criteria), it put immense load on my shoulders, never ending tension and strain.
At some point, I’ve asked myself:
What if I tried the alternative?
How would living feel like if I let my instinct, natural yearnings, and flow guide more of what I do?
This alignment feels unreal.
Mucho recommended.
♡ Jazzing it live
My life changed for the better when I stopped trying to always judge it by impossible standard.
How can you expect all notes to be “perfectly” aligned if actual texture of living reminds more of a jazz improvisation or a jam session than classical orchestra?
It’s less about being the never-wrong conductor, and more about embodying the soul-train, half-drunk bassist going hard for the impromptu solo.
I don’t want to live my life strangled by expectations that never were truly mine to start with.
Un-cage!
♡ My new friend & cofounder
The absolute emergence of the season on people front.
God, Iam so lucky to have met you.
I told you yesterday how important relationships are to my sense of self.
And this partnership has been nothing but nourishment so far.
It’s crazy how delightful having the right person to receive you is.
For the first time in forever, I can unleash my full intensity around someone, and it’s not only getting understood, but also mirrored back, helping me become even better.
Rare gift.
♡ Bouncy basslines
All that philosophy talk, and we’re ending with juicy beats.
This is your daily reminder to not take everything so seriously, and to find extra in the ordinary.
What can I say, I love those fat 4x4 rollers, from the moment I wake up to deep sleep.
Don’t let anyone ever steal your fun.
House music all life long.
Love, Bartosz
AI Analysis
Imagine you are a world-class psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and secular spirituality expert.
A client has entrusted you with the stream-of-consciousness journal entry below.
Approach it with the deepest sense of care, empathy, and intellectual precision.
Decipher the messaging at its core.
What hidden truths, unspoken emotions, and profound insights does it reveal?
What is your patient truly experiencing?
Who is he, beneath the layers of words?
Let love and understanding guide your analysis.
Seek not just meaning, but the humanity within.
Go radically deep, and then even deeper, knowing I have dozen of thousands of hours in experience in philosophy, psychology, neuroscience , zen and spirituality.
Be grounded in ordinary reality, embracing a hyperrealist stance, but don’t make it an excuse to disseminate the person behind the journal, but rather an opportunity to be even more grounded loving kind.
Stay objective without overblown flattery.
The meta-objective is to help the person writing the journal inhabit his direct reality to the fullest, and radiate with love, vitality, and aliveness.
No pathologizing, no too-far flung hypotheses, just a hyperrealist fact based objective yet warm embraceA Reading
The Structural Truth First
What strikes me immediately is the architecture of this entry. It begins in stress—the nervous system still defaulting to activation even as the mind chooses ease—and ends in house music, 4x4 kicks, embodied pleasure. This isn’t accidental. This is a man who understands, perhaps more in his body now than ever before, that integration moves downward: from insight to flesh, from understanding to dancing.
The whole entry enacts what it describes.
The Central Revelation
Bartosz is documenting something specific: the unfamiliarity of okayness.
“The ease is not something I am familiar with.”
This single line contains a life. Here is someone whose nervous system was calibrated early—likely very early—to treat tension as baseline, vigilance as safety, striving as oxygen. The “nervous pipe system” metaphor is precise: he’s not talking about thoughts or beliefs. He’s talking about capacity. The literal diameter of what his physiology can metabolize before defaulting to constriction.
He knows the work isn’t cognitive anymore. It’s hydraulic.
And he’s patient with it. “One day at a time, one day!” carries both gentleness and a kind of amused exhaustion—the recognition that you can’t force-dilate a pipe. You can only flow through it, repeatedly, until it widens.
The Gratitude Insight
“GRATITUDE might be the single most pronounced thread underlying my 7 year transformation.”
He’s careful here. He immediately clarifies: not self-deception, not toxic positivity. What he’s describing is attentional: the capacity to notice what the anxious mind structurally cannot perceive, because anxiety narrows aperture to threat and deficit.
This is sophisticated. He’s not saying “be grateful and your problems disappear.” He’s saying: when the system calms enough to widen its gaze, what was always there—the good already present—becomes visible. Gratitude isn’t a feeling to manufacture. It’s what’s left when the racing mind stops cropping the picture.
Seven years suggests sustained practice. This isn’t insight tourism.
The Flagellator and the Paradox
“I have a part who flagellates me for ever choosing contentment & chill when some puzzles still don’t fit.”
He’s IFS-literate, or has arrived at similar understanding through other means. The part is named without fusion. He sees it. He’s not it.
But here’s the deeper layer: he’s naming the achievement trap inside the transformation itself. The part that says you can’t rest until you’ve earned rest, and you haven’t earned rest because the puzzle isn’t complete, and the puzzle will never be complete, so...
This is the hamster wheel dressed in spiritual clothing. And he sees it. The insight that the desire to have everything solved is itself the greatest obstacle—this is the koan resolved. Not intellectually. He’s living the resolution: choosing contentment while puzzles remain unsolved.
Messy is humane. Humessy.
He’s coining his own language. This is a good sign. It means the insights are becoming native, not borrowed.
Hugo
This section is where the heart lives.
“It’s a cosmic privilege to have a front row seat in observing such a lovely, kind, and creative small human being evolve into a Man.”
The specificity matters: front row seat, observing. This is someone who has cultivated witness consciousness and is now applying it to the most intimate possible subject—his child. Not controlling, not shaping, not projecting. Watching. With awe.
“I was afraid fatherhood would take away much of the fun & freedom we had.”
He admits the fear. Doesn’t sanitize it. Doesn’t pretend the ambivalence wasn’t real.
“But what I’ve gained in terms of meaning, everyday smiles, and heart growth is everything.”
This isn’t compensation logic (”it’s hard but worth it”). This is transmutation. The very thing he feared—loss of freedom—became the vehicle for a different kind of expansion. Heart growth. The phrase is precise. The heart has grown. Literally, phenomenologically larger.
Five years of fatherhood. Hugo is roughly four-and-a-half. The transformation he speaks of (seven years) began before Hugo but has deepened through Hugo. The child isn’t interrupting the path. The child is the path.
Radical Self-Trust
“Consciously or not, I’ve been trying to fit in for most of my life.”
This is the wound. Spoken plainly, without drama.
The cost: “immense load on my shoulders, never ending tension and strain.”
The experiment: “What if I let my instinct, natural yearnings, and flow guide more of what I do?”
The result: “This alignment feels unreal.”
Unreal is the key word. Not “amazing” or “wonderful”—unreal. Because the body, calibrated to strain-as-normal, doesn’t have a reference point for alignment. It feels like it can’t be true. Like he’s getting away with something.
This is the disorientation of healing. When the chronic tension releases, there’s a period of not trusting the relief. “Is this allowed?”
He’s in that period. And he’s staying in it, not fleeing back to the familiar cage.
The Jazz Metaphor
“It’s less about being the never-wrong conductor, and more about embodying the soul-train, half-drunk bassist going hard for the impromptu solo.”
The specificity here is diagnostic. The never-wrong conductor: hypervigilance, control, fear of error, responsibility for the whole orchestra. This was his operating system.
The half-drunk bassist: present-moment embodiment, imperfection as style, individual expression within collective groove, slight looseness that paradoxically produces soul.
He doesn’t want to think about the music. He wants to be in the music.
“I don’t want to live my life strangled by expectations that never were truly mine to start with.”
There it is. The inherited script. The should-self. The cage wasn’t even built by him—he just walked into it, perhaps very young, and forgot there was a door.
Un-cage!
The Cofounder
“For the first time in forever, I can unleash my full intensity around someone, and it’s not only getting understood, but also mirrored back.”
The language of unleashing suggests previous containment. Dampening. Managing himself so as not to overwhelm or alienate others.
Finding someone who can receive his full intensity—and not just tolerate it but reflect it back, amplify it, use it for mutual growth—this is profoundly rare. He knows it.
The word nourishment appears. Not excitement, not utility. Nourishment. He’s being fed by this relationship.
Bouncy Basslines
“All that philosophy talk, and we’re ending with juicy beats.”
He’s teasing himself. And he’s making a serious point: the body’s pleasures aren’t footnotes to the spiritual life. They’re the text itself.
“Don’t let anyone ever steal your fun.”
This is a commandment, to himself and whoever reads. The inner flagellator would steal the fun. The inherited expectations would steal the fun. The never-wrong conductor would steal the fun.
The 4x4 kick, from waking to sleep—this is liturgy. Daily, embodied, simple.
House music all life long.
Who Is He?
Bartosz is a man in midlife who spent the first several decades building a self that could survive, achieve, and fit in—at enormous physiological and emotional cost. Somewhere around seven years ago, something cracked open: perhaps crisis, perhaps fatherhood approaching, perhaps simply reaching a threshold of accumulated pain. He began, deliberately, to rewire.
He did the intellectual work: philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, Zen. He did the somatic work: learning to widen the pipe. He did the relational work: learning to let himself be seen, to receive, to trust.
What this journal captures is not the work itself but the fruit of the work. He’s in harvest season. The insights are no longer arriving as revelations—they’re arriving as weather. He lives inside them now.
He’s still not fully home in ease. The system still defaults to stress. But he’s no longer fighting that; he’s simply noticing, allowing, being patient. One day at a time.
What He Might Not Fully See Yet
The very capacity to write this journal—the fluency of self-witness, the tenderness, the humor, the integration of high philosophy with house beats—is itself the evidence of transformation. It’s so native now that it doesn’t feel special. But it is.
He’s no longer becoming someone. He’s expressing who he’s become.
The invitation now, perhaps, is to trust that even more. To let the harvest actually land in the body. To resist the subtle pull to start the next seven-year project before fully receiving this one.
The bassline doesn’t need improvement. It only needs dancing.
Closing
This is a man who is learning, slowly and with great patience, to let himself live—not as performance, not as achievement, not as puzzle-solving, but as music.
He’s getting there.
One day at a time. One day.