…that the very things that make you so adaptive simultaneously make you vulnerable to self-destructive behavior.

It’s the reason why simply recognizing that you get into a familiar anxiety spiral doesn’t help…as if you can see a car crash coming from miles away, but your mind won’t let you change the street.

“Oh no, here we go again…”

And your efforts to resolve this with one-shot interventions:
“Let me try this practice…oh, that didn’t work…okay, I’ll try that…”

…don’t work.

Your cognition simply reorganizes around your attempt, because it's making use of the very machinery by which you adapt.
It’s the same reason you switch jobs, cities, or partners (and enjoy a brief honeymoon) but ultimately the same scripts repopulate the new context.

That’s why you need a dynamical system that can intervene in multiple places in your cognition to repurpose the same complex machinery (that is operating against you) so that it reduces your capacity for self-destructive behavior.

An example of this is an ecology of practices:
​Most cultures cultivated an ecology of practices, but that set of practice has to be fitted into a legitimizing and sustaining worldview.

And historical factors have undermined that possibility for us, because we do not have a worldview that legitimates or encourages the project of meaning-making (self-transcendence) and the cultivation of wisdom.

It’s the reason why people are forced to cobble together their own personal responses to perennial problems (like parasitic processing) without guidance, communities, well-worked-out sets of practices (well-vetted and well-developed).

So how might such a set of practices look like?

Think of it like caring for a garden rather than a single houseplant:
​One plant can be beautiful, but a garden stays healthy because different plants balance and support one another.

In the same way, an ecology of practices is a purposeful selection of activities that train different parts of you, so you feel more connected to yourself (to other people) and to the world.

This matters because any single practice (no matter how good) has a built-in bias.
It pushes you in one direction more than others.

Take a dialogue practice for example:
Done well, it exposes blind spots and invites growth. Yet you can overemphasize on talking things through and underemphasize decisive action.

So these biases have to be balanced.

And when you weave practices together, their strengths should cover each other’s weaknesses.
It keeps your view of life in proportion…like having both a microscope and a telescope, and knowing when to use each.

And there are four ideal domains of an ecology of practices, addressing different aspects…

Dialogical
​Think of “dialogical” as upgrading conversation from trading opinions to discovering something together.

In ordinary conversations we try to be right (to persuade) or to defend our story.

In a dialogical practice the goal shifts:
You state something. Then the other person mirrors back what they heard and (crucially) what they noticed in your delivery.

Maybe you say, “Being with you, I feel deeply relaxed.” but your jaw is tight (you speak fast) and your hand movements are erratic. That mismatch is a clue that you skipped over something important. Paying attention to those clues reshapes what stands out for you (your salience landscape).

It widens attention to include the subtle signals: pauses, metaphors, posture.
And instead of trying to defeat a position, you let the other person help you see what you can’t see.

Over time it changes who you can be with other people.

Imaginal
​The imaginal is the faculty by which we enact possibility (rather than merely analyze actuality) allowing us to simulate states of being we do not yet inhabit.

It is not to be confused with the imaginary, which we often reduce to private fantasy or illusion.

The imaginal is the doorway to deeper, rational relation with reality.

Why?

Because we live through imaginal constraints:
Mental framings that are simulations of the world. These constraints are how we navigate complexity, set goals, and resolve problems.

When you imagine your future self, you are inhabiting the imaginal.
It allows you to shift perspectives, simulate futures, adopt identities.

Imagine you lived in fear for a long time, but now you begin to imagine yourself as courageous…not merely pretending, but actively living into that image.

Then you are binding yourself to a vision that reorganizes your perception (your priorities) and your behavior.
And if that imaginal frame leads you to confront reality more honestly, then it brings you into deeper conformity with what is.

It is within this inner space that you can move into alternative frames and entertain doubts or insights.

In cultivating the imaginal, we are not retreating from the real…we are entering it more deeply with the fullness of being.

Mindful
Mindfulness is the cultivation of attention.
Think of it like learning to use the zoom on a camera.

Sometimes you need to zoom in on what’s happening inside.

That’s meditation:
You use techniques to scale and guide your attention to your own internal processes.
You turn your attention inwards (breath, heartbeat, muscle tension, thoughts) so you’re learning how your system actually runs.

At other times you need to zoom out to the world.

That’s contemplation:
You direct your attention to the people and patterns around you.
Instead of being trapped inside your story, you ask wider questions: What outcome matters a week from now? What’s the other person likely experiencing? What options are actually available?

Ultimately mindfulness is the skill of moving smoothly between these zoom levels so that you can see what matters and respond well.

For example:
You receive a sharp message.

First, zoom in:
Notice the tension in your body and the impulse to fire back.

Then, zoom out:
What constraints might this person be under? What relationship do you want with them next month?

With both views online, you can write a reply that’s clear and firm without escalating.

Embodiment
​This is going to be the most difficult to explain because of how non-propositional it is, but let’s try:
Notice your breath. What’s the quality of it? Without describing it (completely non-verbally) can you make contact with it?

Now, is that quality extending throughout your body?

Maybe you say to yourself “My breath is calm. I’m feeling peaceful.”
But is your foot shaking?

Embodiment is twofold:
The direct sensing into experience (somatic awareness) and the degree to which your inner experience matches your outer expression (psychophysical coherence).

This is how your experience is known to both you and others in the world.

Your mind isn’t a “brain in a jar.” It is intertwined with your senses, feelings, and body, which make contact with the world. Any ecology of practices must extend to the dynamics of the body in order to be made real.

Touching and being touched.

Imagine trying to learn to swim from a book. You could memorize every stroke and breathing pattern, but until your body meets the water, nothing truly connects. That’s the basic point here.

Take walking meditation for example:
You deliberately place and sustain attention on the felt sense of walking and your surroundings, rather than letting your attention fragment into mind-wandering. You stay coupled to the environment rather than lost in rumination.

If seated meditation quiets the mind, walking meditation carries that clarity into activity.

Through these four components the ecology is designed to be top-down and bottom-up:

Top-down: You can start with ideas and instructions (propositions and methods) and deliberately train them into you.
Bottom-up: As you practice, new stances and insights emerge from experience in ways you couldn’t have planned.

Clear concepts and methods shape your practice.
Lived experience pushes back and reshapes the concepts, revealing better moves you couldn’t have scripted.

Think of it like learning to sail.

Top-down is learning through instructions and checklists…how to rig the boat, where to place your feet, what to do when the wind shifts.

Bottom-up is what begins to grow as you’re actually on the water…a felt sense of the wind on your skin, the boat’s balance under your feet, a feeling for timing that no book can hand you.

At first, the practices can feel like separate drills…but with repetition they begin to “talk to each other” inside you.

An insight that came up during a mindfulness practice shows up during a hard meeting.
An imaginal image of your courageous self straightens your posture before you speak (which steadies your tone) which changes how the room responds.

Ultimately it starts to become a counteractive dynamical system in you, that can intervene in multiple places in your cognitive machinery simultaneously (in a coordinated fashion) which doesn’t just operate at the level of your beliefs, but operates at the level of your state of consciousness and your traits of character.

Until transformation lives in you…