> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://sooul-naked.ghost.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Internal vs External Friction 🔥 - URL: https://sooul-naked.ghost.io/internal-vs-external-friction/ - Published: 2026-09-08T11:04:52.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-19T11:22:17.000Z - Author: Madia Journal [Audio Version Part 1](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PPpi13dtJ5GRGDM12CJLHvaSkaI066Zj/view?usp=drivesdk&ref=sooul-naked.ghost.io) *LuLu and Max separate two forces often confused in spiritual language: an internally smooth system may be exactly what lets a person meet greater external resistance, rather than float through an easy life.* **The Paved Path** **Max:** And we’re live with LuLu B. **LuLu:** Hello. **Max:** Say what you’re saying. **LuLu:** The conversation is about why we, as modern humans, seem to believe that a life lived in alignment would also equate to a frictionless and ease-filled experience. The analogy that came to my mind is: that is true when you’re walking a path that many people have walked before you. When you’re a fragment of God repeating some other path that has already been lived. You’re literally walking on a paved path. People walk that path all the time. That destination has been reached many, many times. That’s a *frictionless existence.* That’s a frictionless journey. But when you’re going somewhere that no one has ever gone before, or becoming something that no one has ever become before, you’re literally in the jungle, in the bush, with a machete, hacking a path out—literally carving a path out for yourself. That is **one hundred percent resistance.** It’s one hundred percent friction. **Resistance Makes the Body** **LuLu:** If I think about the body, I’m inclined to believe that if resistance is the thing that strengthens muscle and strengthens bones, and frictionlessness is what atrophies muscles—and therefore the body—then life works in a similar way. Higher resistance is actually what fortifies a soul and a being, and causes it to be more complex and more diverse and greater. That makes sense to me. If we think of the universe as being this empty space, a frictionless space, and then man and life comes—life fundamentally came as resistance. It is friction against the thing. That’s what it is fundamentally. Some people call it a flaw, or it’s even eating the apple, or whatever. It is a mark against a plain sheet of paper. That mark is the writing. It’s a mark against something that is highly improbable, or impossible. The likelihood of this planet and humanity and the plants and the animals and the way that it is, is highly improbable—borderline impossible—and here it is because of maximum resistance. Like the void exploding itself. Like the Big Bang is maximum resistance. That’s what explosion is: **maximum friction into combustion.** And that’s what a star is as well. **Ease Has Been Travelled Before** **LuLu:** I’m really curious about how we came to this place in the modern world, but also in modern spirituality. This is the main teaching being offered by modern spiritual coaches and teachers and guides: *alignment equals ease and frictionlessness.* I think the truer interpretation is that ease is always available. **Ease is always available.** But know that if you are on a path of ease, it has been travelled before. I think maybe the miscommunication is something about how mind is meant to be frictionless. But that doesn’t mean body is meant to exist in frictionlessness, because if that were true, then resistance wouldn’t strengthen and enliven and make the body more well. Everything is *microcosm and macrocosm.* Everything in life shows us how life is meant to be. **A Smooth Engine Pulls More** **Max:** And I think, to add into that, there’s this aspect: frictionlessness is an internal state. When a machine runs well, it runs with low friction. But a low-friction machine is designed to do heavy tasks. That’s the idea. You want a tractor with low internal friction, but that means it can pull bigger external weight. It can plough a deeper field. That’s the idea. I can pull a truck and pull more weight if it has better frictionlessness inside. But if you use something that has low friction inside to do low-friction outsides—it depends on your goal—but you’re probably just driving around in circles in an Italian sports car. If you have a Ferrari and you just have low internal friction and low external friction, you’re probably just driving in circles. Where if you have **high external friction**—really high—maybe you’re driving it \[unclear\] or something like this. That’s the idea. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/46/2b/462b34fc-fc80-4b5a-a731-0855c98fe810/content/images/2026/09/IMG_1055.jpeg) --- **High External, Low Internal Friction — Part 2** *LuLu and Max contrast the nineteenth-century explorer with the modern comfort-seeker: one meets enormous outer resistance with inner coherence; the other may live softly outside while fighting constantly within. The question is not merely what is difficult—but whether the difficulty builds the body and returns something to the collective.* [Audio Version Part 2](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1R4dMOhcgvwuJaU4wCyyqAuaPZrJsVoiv/view?usp=drivesdk&ref=sooul-naked.ghost.io) **The Explorer and the Comfortable Human** **LuLu:** Max and I were talking about the types of adventures written in the 1800s—the explorations that happened in the 1800s. I had this thought: I wonder, in a person who is trekking into the South Pole or something, and living at that level of risk and danger and intensity and aliveness, what is activating in the body versus a modern human who lives repetition and frictionlessness and comfort? If anything, they have maximum internal friction—maximum mental friction. Always fighting with themselves, debating with themselves, lack of clarity. That’s what mental friction is: **lack of clarity.** I’m wondering: what is enlivened in the body through maximum friction, and what atrophies? These two different types of humans—an 1800s explorer versus a modern human—it’s like, *what have we lost?* **A Charged Body Wants a Harder World** **Max:** I think she’s referencing low internal friction with high external friction, compared to high internal friction and low external friction—and the compare-and-contrast of what those two things mean. What does that look like? How does that affect the body? I think we all know the answer. I think it was celebrated back then: people who are struggling want more ease. This is a well-known thing. People who are not struggling do not want ease. A high-performing sports star does not want to play against easy opponents. They want challenge. If they’re in that same league but they’re low-performing, they want easier opponents. That’s the idea. Lydia and I happen to have charged our bodies up a lot. We eat right, move right, think right—blah, blah, blah—and so now we have the potency where we want more external friction. We’ve made our internal friction really good. Our organs work well, our glands work well, bones work well, et cetera, thankfully. Our internal guidance system—what everyone calls divine guidance or something—all of that is relatively frictionless. So we want higher external friction. We want hard adventures and hard clients, et cetera, et cetera. We want to find challenge. And I think this is not just physical. If we’re not doing high-level skiing or dirt biking or something—which is also high external friction—the difference is that those things usually break down the body. We want to do things that build up the body. We don’t want to spend our internal friction on a downward investment. We want to spend it on things that are an **upward investment.** That’s very different. When we’re not doing contact sports, we’re going on adventures that build our body. We’re using exploration as exercise, the weight as load-bearing, et cetera, et cetera. Does that make sense? **Aliveness That Gives Something Back** **LuLu:** I think it’s the reason people do high-risk sports: they’re looking for aliveness. They want to simulate the experience of intensity and aliveness. I think the difference between the adventurers and explorers of the 1800s was that they were trying to discover things to bring back for humanity. They were trying to discover resources. It came from a place of giving back to the entire world, not to be thrilled. Those explorers weren’t going out on those adventures only to have a thrill. A thrill is going to a horror film and having a bunch of adrenaline and cortisol pumped through your body, and having some kind of internal experience of, *“Whoa, I just almost died and something really scary happened.”* It doesn’t give anything back to your community. It can’t. I think a lot of these high-risk sports are the same thing. They’re inherently selfish, right? So that’s something to think about when we’re doing something that is externally at very high friction: *what does it offer?* How does it cause our bodies to become more alive and more resilient, and turn on more genius and potential of the human being? Also, **what insight does it offer back to the collective?** ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/46/2b/462b34fc-fc80-4b5a-a731-0855c98fe810/content/images/2026/09/att.mGqqvs-Q0XNowMBqyUR44EhInLj-J8f0FJ3RSXyvUiE.jpeg) **Pushing Man Forward** **Max:** For people that aren’t aware of these explorers in the 1800s, there used to be this idea of: *“Let’s push man forward.”* It’s sort of been diluted in the world. The people who are high-performing—anything, generally; I shouldn’t say high-performing, but people who are leaders in the industry—are trying to move humanity forward. If that’s robotics, electronics, farming, agriculture, whatever: they were trying to move things forward. That type of person is distinctly different from someone who’s not trying to move the thing forward. For example, Elon Musk is trying to move things forward, as an example. The good, bad, ugly doesn’t make a difference. Whereas someone who works at AT&T maybe sort of isn’t. They’re stuck in a system based on generating income for themselves. It’s not: *“You only move forward if it generates income, if it’s to your benefit,”* versus benefiting everyone. It’s strange. An entry-level engineer, you could say, wouldn’t necessarily be looking to benefit. You can feel these people. You can feel the difference between someone who’s really wanting to push—like what we’re doing right now. You can feel this in what we’re doing. We want to push the edges constantly, trying to push the edge of what is constantly, and make it available to people. When you do that, that is another edge being pushed, and it makes it much harder. It’s very easy to have these downloads in your room by yourself and go, *“Wow, I’m amazing,”* or, *“This is amazing.”* It’s much different when people are reading it and giving you feedback. That’s a different level of challenge. It’s like a mountain climber who climbs a mountain. Fine—that’s one level of challenge. It might be super tough. But when you’re a mountain climber climbing a mountain and five hundred people are sitting there watching you, it’s a different thing. They’re watching how you move. They’re telling you what rope to use, what food you’re eating, what time of day. They’re watching everything. And it creates just more aliveness, versus if you’re climbing alone and no one’s watching. There’s just less aliveness, potential. That’s this thing that we’re doing. We’re trying to have the most aliveness from our individual experiences—which were very alive before meeting—and now through you. **Returning Technology to the Body** **LuLu:** I think, for me, part of the way I find it valuable to move the collective forward is to reverse this thing of externalising power outside of our bodies—externalising technology outside of ourselves—and reigniting it back into the body. An example I’ve given before is to start using our internal GPS system and intuition, versus constantly having to use the GPS on our phones or something. It reawakens a capacity that already exists inside of us. A lot of the people I feel are, in a way, moving things forward, are moving things forward in a way that incapacitates the human technology, in a weird way. Again, it’s one of those things: it can be a good thing, it can be a bad thing. There’s probably a balance somewhere. But a train, for example, in one way moves things forward for society, but it disempowers the human body. It atrophies the human body. So something interesting for me is guiding a different way of living that reignites all of the locked potentials that exist inside of us. It’s like a new idea of what it is to be an enlivened human. And an enlivened human to me is not somebody who…