#56 - Steve March | Why Self-Improvement Fails

Tamara Andreas is an international transformational seminar leader and co-author of the book, Core Transformation: Reaching the Wellspring Within. It’s a parts work method that allows you to access the deep emotional states you’ve been hoping your biggest goals will give you.I spoke with her sister and co-author Connirae Andreas last year. In this episode, Tamara does a live demo where she coaches me on a personal issue.Resources:* Microbook on Core Transformation Get full access to The Metagame at themetagame.substack.com/subscribe

Steve is a coach and the founder of Aletheia Unfolding. His work integrates things like developmental psychology, contemplative practice and neo-Reichian somatic work into a psychospiritual approach to transformation.We discuss how self-improvement presupposes self-deficiency, which leads to mixed results (e.g. have you kept your new year’s resolutions?).What happens if instead, you start with the assumption that you are innately whole? What if Life itself transforms us when we let it? Get full access to The Metagame at themetagame.substack.com/subscribe

Aaron is an entrepreneur, writer, and coach. He famously founded one of the first legal psilocybin retreats and has spent over a decade navigating inner and outer frontiers. He works with founders and leaders, writes about inner work, psychedelics, and contemplative practice, and curates referrals to trusted practitioners and resources.In this episode we discuss the process of “going upstream” to the root of your patterns and speculate on why different inner work modalities are effective.Here’s Aaron’s excellent article on the same topic. Get full access to The Metagame at themetagame.substack.com/subscribe

Jessica is the first American-born woman to graduate as an Ayurvedic Physician and practice independently. She studied for 8 years in India completing Bachelor of Āyurvedic Medicine and Surgery (BAMS). She’s also the founder of myayu.com and has been healing many of my friends.In this overview, we discuss what western medicine misses, archetypal ways of knowing, personal empiricism, the doshas and some counter-intuitive Ayurvedic practices. Get full access to The Metagame at themetagame.substack.com/subscribe

Guy is an independent researcher, author, Emergent Ventures Fellow, and hands-down the most prolific/insightful shit-poster I know on twitter. If you’ve been around long enough, you’ll know him as “Rival Voices”.Among many things, he’s an expert on Adversarial Epistemology: finding truth in an environment designed to deceive you. You can learn more from his book Alignment Gone Strange. Get full access to The Metagame at themetagame.substack.com/subscribe

Kati Devaney is a neuroscientist and meditation teacher with over 25 years of practice. She earned her PhD in 2018 using fMRI to study attention and prediction updating in experienced Vipassana meditators and completed a postdoc at Harvard Medical School. She’s now the Chief Scientific Officer at the Consciousness Foundation, co-founded the Berkeley Alembic and the SF Dharma Collective, advises Jhourney on the neuroscience of jhana, and has been quoted on the brain and meditation in The Atlantic, National Geographic, and TIME.In this episode we talk about weird stuff like cessation, jhanas, and non-duality. We also explore how the brain quietly constructs your sense of reality moment-to-moment, and how to (re)start a meditation practice. Get full access to The Metagame at themetagame.substack.com/subscribe

Elena Lake is a bodyworker and former mathematician. After studying math, CS, and physics at MIT and two years doing ML at Meta, she left tech to study touch. When her early massage sessions started producing results she couldn't explain, she trained across Esalen, craniosacral, fascia, ScarWork, BoneWork, and visceral manipulation. In 2024 she developed her own modality: Regenerative Touch. Elena now sees billionaire clients, teaches tactile anatomy classes, and writes on Substack.In this episode we talk about her path from MIT to massage school, how to take care of yourself, what it’s like to see fascia with your hands, and some of the weirder aspects at the frontier of bodywork. Get full access to The Metagame at themetagame.substack.com/subscribe

Alex Olshonsky is a coach, somatic therapist, and writer. After a polysubstance addiction nearly killed him during his Silicon Valley years at Twitter, Salesforce, and Slack, he found freedom in somatic psychology and contemplative practice. He now coaches founders and people in recovery, co-founded the psychedelic-assisted addiction nonprofit Natura Care, and writes the Substack Deep Fix.In this highly practical episode, we talk about his life a “professional drug addict” and his beautiful article You’re probably addicted to thinking. Get full access to The Metagame at themetagame.substack.com/subscribe

Richard Ngo is one of a handful of people who've worked on AGI safety at both DeepMind and OpenAI. After three years as a futurist on OpenAI's Governance team, he left to pursue independent research on coalitions, virtue ethics, and the foundations of cooperation. He’s also a science fiction author (The Gentle Romance: Stories of AI and Humanity) and writes at Mind the Future.We talk about virtue ethics, egregores, academic fraud, memeplexes, cooperation, parts-work, and what it was like to work with Sam Altman. Get full access to The Metagame at themetagame.substack.com/subscribe

"Nothing human makes it out of the near future." - Nick LandMatt Southey is a leading expert on the philosophy of Nick Land with a PhD in Religion from Rice University. He is also the founding editor of The Latecomer, an online magazine which publishes essays on the long-term future.Matt's excellent piece on "A Brief History of Accelerationism" can be found here. Get full access to The Metagame at themetagame.substack.com/subscribe