What is a Good Life? #168
What It Means to Be Fully Alive with Joel Monk
Hello and welcome to What is a Good Life? A project exploring the big questions around how we live and what actually matters.
This week, I’m reflecting on my conversation with Joel Monk, Co-Founder of Coaches Rising and podcast host, where we explore the journey from spiritual bypassing to embodiment and what it actually means to feel safe, okay, and enough. It’s for anyone on a path of dropping deeper into their own humanity and body.
If this project resonates with you, thank you for being here – and if you’d like to support it, consider a paid subscription, sharing, or subscribing.
Take care, Mark
1. My Weekly Reflection
In our chasing of exalted states, sensational lifestyles, I sense we are missing the good life that is already here.
In this week’s conversation with Joel Monk, he shared his path from experiencing a sense of dread, even after years of meditating, to feeling a much deeper and consistent sense of well-being.
It arose after a dark night of the soul experience that led him down the path of embodiment and cultivating greater sensitivity and intimacy with life.
He listed off words like safe, ok, enough, and at home in his body, to paint his present picture.
When I heard him say these words it gave me a flutter of emotion, as I recognised their significance in my own life. I laughed that when people start their own journey with meditation or personal-development, these words would hardly be inspiring.
We want to be enlightened, conscious, confident, in some sort of loud and impactful way. But I sense Joel and I are becoming more aware of how full this life already is.
Yesterday was the dreariest day you could imagine in Berlin.
As I walked with my daughter and dog in the morning, puddles were forming on the street.
I had posted over a week ago about an experiment of sitting silently for an hour in an amphitheatre in my local park. A lot of people had suggested they were interested but I created neither an event nor a reminder.
If they’d come they’d come I thought.
Given the rain and the visible puffs warm exhales were making in cold air, I assumed nobody would come.
I made my sign anyhow, “Silent Sitting 12-1pm” with a marker on cardboard, put on a raincoat, and off I went.
I picked a spot in the middle of the amphitheatre and thought this is a beginning for this project. Not surprisingly, I was alone. The park was also sparse with passerby.
And for the first ten minutes I just sat there on my own in the spitting rain and noticed my own thoughts and the park around me.
Some inspiration for an exhibition I am creating for an event in Athens came to mind. Some reflections on my life and family. I sat contentedly, rather pleased I had showed up.
Then a man arrived on his bike and parked it next to mine. I had not met him before, but it was clear that he was here to participate. We exchanged a warm smile and nod and then he sat down a few metres to my left.
Two men in an empty cold and grey amphitheatre sitting on cold stones.
No words were exchanged but I instantly felt a warmth between us. It shifted my experience to something now shared.
Over the next thirty minutes I just sat there and noticed. Some works with machinery were taking place near by that ebbed and flowed. Bird song could be heard too whenever it stopped.
Birds dancing in small groups from tree to tree caused awe. Really looking at the small number of passerby in detail did too.
Occasionally sharing smiles with my silent partner.
Until two friends arrived with around fifteen minutes to go. We smiled and they quietly took their place a few metres to the right of me.
I offered them some of the cardboard I was sitting on. I was momentarily thankful to my wife for suggesting the cardboard as I felt the temperature drop with a layer of it now gone.
I sat smiling, looking out, contemplating the absurdity of this idea as the four of us sat there. I felt totally at home while glancing through the increasing drizzle.
When the hour was over I had a warm hug with this man I never met and my two friends. We chatted briefly and went our separate ways as the rain picked up.
How full and enough it all felt.
2. This Week’s Questions
What does it mean to you to be fully alive?
What are you discounting that is fundamental to your own good life that is already here?
Work With Me
Good Life Coaching — a space of presence for individuals navigating questions of direction, meaning, and what needs attention now.
Senior Leadership Facilitation - Helping your team have the conversations that connect and move the business.
Thanks for reading What is a Good Life?
3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast
4. Full Episode - What It Means to Feel Fully Alive with Joel Monk - What is a Good Life? #168
Listen to or watch the full conversation with Joel Monk below.
About Me
I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.