Introducing ‘Balance in Flow: An Invitation to Expansive Spiritual Unfolding’

... And The Process of Writing in Public: Disrupting to the Non-fiction Authoring Process

What can you expect from ‘Balance in Flow’?

Balance in Flow is a book about spirituality for those looking to understand spirituality as a part of their concrete day to day life. So many people in my generation have decided not to engage with or discuss their spirituality because of disagreements with the top-down dogma of religion or thinking that spirituality is reserved for the hippies at music festivals, pious monks and woo-woo aunties. Put simply, being a spiritual person is being a person on a journey to better understand their belonging in the universe by aligning their actions and relationships with their purpose. In other words, everyone, at their core, is a spiritual person. A book like this merely invites you to consider ancient wisdom and universal perspectives along your spiritual journey. 

My intention with this book is to shape the wisdom of the wonderful constellation of teachers I’ve had the privilege of witnessing (through yoga and other domain) into a book about the process of unfolding your spirituality. The lessons in this book will be abstract enough for universal appeal, but generally steeped in yoga tradition. Unlike many yoga books out there, I will seek to organize the chapters of this book around common English words and concepts and how different themes from yoga philosophy pertain to those concepts. For example our first chapter is about “strength” and contains a section on how understanding the chakras pertains to cultivating strength. As necessary, each chapter will provide brief, digestible introductions to yoga philosophy concepts, as well as continued reading recommendations for further study when a particular topic inspires you. Each chapter will include an assortment of self-reflection questions, some actionable physical and mental practices to bring into your life. I will also seek to highlight teachers I’ve had the pleasure of knowing personally and connect you to where you can learn more from them. You can expect links to yoga teachers you can engage with, songs from contemporary artists, podcast episodes and other invitations to engage with other voices on topics that are resonating with you. An inextricable part of the spiritual journey is that it is a collective journey and it’s important to me to connect you to as many wise voices as I can.

Who is Jake Ferriero?

My story, like many others, is one of charging forth through adversity. My battles have been major depressive episodes, chronic pain, traumatic injury, rejection, and loss. Through this adversity I’ve cultivated a reputation of groundedness, positivity, empathy and pragmatism. I am a yoga teacher in Portland, a Software Engineer by day, life-long big brother, and now an author. In previous eras, I was a D1 track athlete, a kinesiology researcher, a cyclist, an engineer at Google, a children’s tennis coach, a guitar teacher, and Catholic retreat leader. While I have taken on, and shed, many identities, what remains eternally constant in my life is a fascination with moving the body, an innate spiritual calling, an inherited love of teaching, and an analytical approach to creating progress. I am not a monk, or person who lived in an ashram, nor a holy person in any way. I am a person who lives in an American city, works as a normal job and has made a commitment to continual spiritual unfolding within the context of life under the pressures and influences that come with our capitalist western culture. 

In my early 20s I found myself rejecting spirituality when I left the dogma of the Catholic church. This led to years of feeling disconnected, hopeless, purposeless and a joyless pursuit of dollars, approval, and titles on paper. I rediscovered my spirituality through my physical experience in yoga, and continuously unfolding my inner world and understanding its place in the union of all things. Coming back to my study and practice of yoga has truly saved me from self-destruction.

The purpose of my practice and teaching is to learn alongside my students how to find contentment in cultivating the conditions to desirable outcomes provided by the universe. We do this by gracefully accepting support, paying attention to nuance, doing hard things on purpose, leaning in and letting go.

Who is This Book For?

This is not a book from an enlightened or healed being; it will not lead you to depths of what a spiritual practice has to offer, but seeks to peak your curiosity to unfold the first layers into your spiritual experience. This book is for people like me who have become disconnected from their purpose and place in the universe, discouraged by the frameworks religion has provided, and looking for digestible chunks to absorb, rather than 100s of pages to tackle at once.

My hope is to reach readers who view spirituality as some far out concept that is separate from their daily lives, or some top-down dogmatic moral code or religion, or perhaps as a distraction they don’t have time for. I hope to offer a voice for changing this perspective to an understanding that the spiritual experience is a constant layer to our day to day lives. We will talk about strength, health and sickness, relationships & communication, effort and ease, navigating transitions, sexuality and desire, pursuit of goals, routine, boredom, freedom, pain, anxiety, joy, and death. These are the fabric of day to day experience that all humans have a lived understanding. When mindfully examined, these common experiences can provide more universal understanding and belonging. This book is perfect for yoga teachers who are looking to bring in philosophical themes to their classes, yoga practitioners seeking to understand how to connect their physical practice to something deeper, or non-yoga practitioners curious about the spiritual side of yoga.

More Invitations

Let’s Take it to Our Mats

For those local to Portland, I hope you will join my in-person yoga classes which will be themed on the content of each bi-weekly installment of this book. You can check out my schedule at CorePower Yoga here.

Show your Support and Join the Conversation

It’s my hope to dedicate more and more of my life to conversations like these, teaching yoga and helping people on their spiritual healing journeys. Please consider supporting me with a paid $5/ month subscription, you will get to participate in the conversation by commenting on posts, as well as a bi-weekly book club (available on Zoom or in-person for Portland locals). I hope that you will help shape the direction and quality of this work as it comes out. For this intro post comments are open to all for free! Let me know what excites you about this kind of text and what sort of things you hope to learn!

Stay Tuned!

The first chapter ‘Strength: Methodically Expanding the Domain in Which You Feel Safe by Doing the Hard Things; A Foundation for the Spiritual Journey’ drops in two weeks!

Take what serves you, leave the rest! Unsubscribe at any time!

(P.S. If you want to hear more about how this book will be released, and how you might do the same, scroll below the buttons!)

The Process of Writing in Public: Disrupting to the Non-fiction Authoring Process

This is an exciting new experiment in the process of authoring a non-fiction book. The concept is simple: write a book where each part of the process is done “in the open”. The goal is to build a community discussion on the text as it evolves. To be explicit (and a bit cheeky), the process is “author-itarian”. There will be a channel for on-going input and discussion from the community but the author is the owner, curator and decision maker for the content. The internet has been a platform for short-form authors publishing in the form of blogging. This is merely the next evolution of that process in support of longer-form writing. I hope that writing a book in this way will inspire others to do so in a similar fashion, or connect me to those who have already done so! This process has been greatly inspired by Kelsey Hightower’s inspiring career of learning in public.

Addressing the Pain of Authors and Readers

The biggest challenges facing new authors (well, me anyway) are: accountability to continue making forward progress, and publishing. The irony is that most readers don’t just read long form writing cover to cover, but rather maybe they read a chapter or so a week (of course there are more avid readers, but you get the gist). With an instagram-eroded attention span, many reading audiences are left desiring more bite size pieces to digest.

However, there are plenty of concepts too large for bullets in a caption or just a few pages in a single blog post.

This approach addresses the author’s accountability problem by creating ongoing commitment to your audience to generate “the next chapter” and the publishing problem by getting the work out there iteratively (plus proof of audience, more on this later). Any chapter could be revised at any time. In this way, we are continuously delivering content and continuously integrating that content with the audience. When the author feels the larger body of work is complete, they can compile it into a book published through more traditional means for posterity (and of course revenue). The engagement with this community of bleeding edge readers can be used as evidence for a publisher for the market that the book can reach. For the readers, they get content as it’s hot off the press, and can “join the conversation” as the text is evolving, instead of on social media well after the book has been published. Similar to a weekly episodic TV show, readers can be paced by the rate of publishing to be “in sync” with each other which allows for more conversation between readers, both in person or online. How much easier would your book club be if it met every week to talk about a chapter instead of every month for a whole book?

A Note on Community

Be kind, and direct in your feedback. Readers should challenge the ideas presented, and call for the work to be better in any way, but let’s not personally attack the humans writing, let’s stay focused on ideas. If you think the author is an idiot, stop engaging with the content, it’s easy to unsubscribe at any time, no conversation is advanced through name calling or personal attacks. If you’re angered by something in the  writing, that probably means it’s at least adjacent to a truly meaningful idea and thus a seed for a rich conversation. There’s often shared values on either side of a disagreement, see if you can underscore a shared value that’s under-represented in the text.

How to get started

1. Choose a topic and write your introduction chapter and publish it.

   1. (Optional) write an outline to give you topics for where you are going, the end goal is a cohesive body of work and a roadmap will help you stay focused, rather than writing a blog series without intention. 

   2. (Optional) set yourself up for consistency by writing a few chapters ahead in case life gets in the way that might cause you to miss a weekly installation.

2. Choose a publishing cadence and commit to it publicly by marketing yourself to your audience: announcing your publishing cadence on social media, mailing lists, etc.

3. Choose a monetization model. Will you offer a few chapters for free? Pay per chapter? Subscription? Pay Per Series?

If this is a good idea why haven’t people done it? They do! For fiction.

Like many disruptions in the past this is mostly taking a technology or process from one domain and applying it to another. In this case, the hop isn’t that far. For fiction writers there is Radish and wattpad. However, this sort of approach could serve a non-fiction community of authors and readers, as well. 

Using the right existing tools!

Originally, my software engineering, startup mindset thought about creating a whole product to provide a platform for this process, getting funding, selling that, etc. But ultimately, this way of thinking is clouded by attachment to the way of living that has provided my comforts so far, but not cultivated a sense of contentment or fulfillment. My goal is not to spend more time in the software space in addition to my day job. My goal is to invest more time writing my next chapter (always commit to the bit, even when it’s cheesy). I will be leveraging this wonderful existing mailing list / blogging platform Substack for this experiment in publishing a book about yoga philosophy / ideology.