April 2026: "The Feng Shui of the Mind"
Hey y’all,
Here’s the Austin B. Sweeney newsletter coming in hot for the month of April. I put these out once a month to keep you updated on upcoming shows, what I’m listening to, general musings, lyric breakdowns, and much more! I hope this newsletter will provide value for you, if for no other reason than it may introduce you to music you haven’t heard before!
Let’s quit wasting time here and jump into it, here’s what I’ve been listening to in the last month:
Song: “Soul Remedy” – KBong & Johnny Cosmic
Album: “Sticky Fingers” – The Rolling Stones
Artist: KBong & Johnny Cosmic
I’ve got a new live album, “BE HERE NOW (Live in the PNW)”, recorded at The Artichoke in Portland, OR coming out May 1st, so mark your calendars! Pre-saves begin April 24th, and if you could pre-save, that helps a ton.
I’ll follow up and send y’all a special link for pre-saves on April 24th.
My new EP, “WAGON” is available NOW everywhere you get your music. If you really want to support me and buy the actual albums, you can buy them here
Also, if you want to read any past newsletters, click here
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The Feng Shui of the Mind
It’s 5 in the morning as I write this from a cabin in Prescott, AZ. It’s still very dark out and I can hear a steady gobble-gobble from the turkeys that frequent this area. Laura and I went out for groceries yesterday, and as we came around the corner where the cabin is, there were 20 large turkeys just milling about like they own the place.
This is our friend’s cabin that they’re graciously letting us use in exchange for taking photos and video and getting their VRBO cabin listing and social media up and running. It’s called the State 48 Retreat if you’re curious. You can look it up here on Facebook and Instagram. I’d highly recommend renting it as it’s a beautiful spot – full of turkeys.
Anyway…
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the mind and its relation to how each of us sees the world.
Or, to put it another way, our state of mind is what colors our reality. This isn’t new information to you, I’m sure, but it never hurts to be reminded. It’s funny, as I go about my life, I’ll discover new information and come to large epiphanies that I think will be life-altering from there on out. Most of the time though, they aren’t. Maybe they would be if I could stay in that frame of mind continuously, but as it often happens, life gets in the way, and I forget the monumental lessons I thought would change everything.
It reminds me of something I read from Ram Dass. He used to spend a lot of time in India. They’d take LSD, meditate, sit with the great Buddhist and Hindu teachers, and explore their mind and its relationship with their reality. For them, it was beautiful and something to strive for – that higher level of consciousness and one-ness with all living things that results from psychedelic use and meditation. One of the things Ram Dass (who began life as Harvard professor Richard Alpert) was most interested in was how to remain in that state all the time.
That state was more than just being super high, although I realize how much it sounds like that. There’s a strange calm that washes over you in that state. You’re fully present. You realize that the entire world going on around you cannot be tamed – as we often think that it can – and we’re simply along for the ride. All the deadlines, bills, accidents, health concerns, etc. cannot be reasoned with (especially in that state), and that we just have to let go. It’s a very liberating realization. Peace washes over you and you reconcile with that part of yourself that tends to worry about every last thing. You’re able to look at it with a more loving gaze and accept that it’s the price of admission of being human.
Then you laugh your ass off at the absurdity of it all.
Then the high wears off and you settle back into your body. “Reality” sets back in.
Well, Ram Dass wanted to see if he could stay in that space all the time. The loving, peaceful, present, unbothered space.
Ultimately, after years of experimenting, he realized something that I’ll paraphrase here: “Anybody can be present, loving, and one-with-everything while sitting in a monk’s temple in the Himalayas. The real test is whether you can attain that while you’re sitting in traffic.”
Insights like that are what fascinate me.
I’ve noticed that most of the people who are strenuously looking for inner peace by any means necessary are often the most unhappy. They read all the self-help books about inner transformation, they meditate for a week straight at a silent meditation retreat, or they go down to South America to drink Ayuhuasca from a shaman and blow their minds (and puke their guts out) in a humid hut full of other unhappy, sweaty people.
This is where I make the caveat that I think that psychedelics, when taken properly, still do have the ability to be incredibly healing and life-affirming. They can crack open your soul that may have been mired in darkness for years and finally be the thing that allows some light to enter. That’s still a beautiful thing.
Nevertheless, Ram Dass’s point was that if you can’t attain some presence and some peace on a random Tuesday, then your fancyboy philosophy ain’t worth shit.
Again, I’m paraphrasing.
The same thing can be said of church-going people. On Sunday morning when folks leave after the church service, they’re feeling pretty good about themselves. The pastor said some nice words, the worship team facilitated a musical communion with God, and the potluck afterwards had fried chicken. What a day. Who wouldn’t leave feeling great? But as we all know, by the next Sunday – after a week of “life happening” – it was back again for another round of spiritual hygiene.
Which is fine. That’s life, I suppose. Learning and unlearning. Climbing the mountain, attaining the goal, descending the mountain, reveling in the attainment, realizing it wasn’t the answer, and ultimately finding a new mountain to climb, almost immediately forgetting that the answers aren’t at the top of the next mountain either. And yet, we climb.
The endless pursuit of peace.
However, the endless pursuit of peace seems at odds with the ultimate goal.
Endlessly pursuing something implies two things:
1. It’s strenuous. Peace shouldn’t require strain.
2. Pursuing implies that you’re chasing something you don’t have. If you’re always in pursuit, well, you’re not ever going to enjoy the thing you claim to want.
I figure that peace isn’t something you chase down.
If anything, I’m starting to wonder if peace is chasing us, and since we’re always running at full speed, we don’t slow down enough for peace to finally catch up with us.
Here’s another caveat: it’s tough to slow down, of course. To participate properly in life requires a lot of effort, which is also a good thing. As much as we all want to slow down and take it easy, human beings are wired towards the need to attain goals. I find a lot of joy in working hard. I like working towards a goal and I have a tremendous amount of respect for those who work hard.
Growing up, everything was about who put in the most hours that week on the farm. I remember working 115 hours one week during the marionberry harvest and being pretty proud of that fact. My dad didn’t let me enjoy that for very long though as he decided to rebut my achievement by telling me that he did 122 hours one week during the hazelnut harvest the previous year. Classic dad.
So… we’ve established that hard work is important. Let’s circle back to slowing down.
Here’s a video that explains it better than I can.
This needs to be coupled with unplugging a lot more as well though. I don’t think we can properly slow down and get grounded back in our bodies if our brains are constantly being stimulated. More people are reporting having anxiety than in days past by a huge margin. What’s the other thing that everybody’s engaged in that didn’t use to exist? Smartphones.
One of the biggest pieces of advice for anxiety-prone people (that is, people who live in their heads), is to do activities to get back in their bodies. Walking, jogging, yoga, snowboarding, paddleboarding, etc. To engage in physical activities is to rejoin the world and take a break from the world you’ve created inside of your head. This is a good practice, especially if you are an anxious person.
What is happening when you scroll on your phone? You’re engaging with the algorithm that syncs up with your brain. It knows exactly what you want to see. For example, the algorithms are so sophisticated now that they often will start advertising pregnancy products to women before the women even know they’re pregnant. Don’t believe me? Check out “The Power of Habit” by Charles Duhigg, there’s a whole chapter about online advertising predicting our behavior before we are even aware of it. It’s freaky.
With the advent of AI technology, those prediction models and algorithms have only gotten more sophisticated. When the two political parties talk about each other being in their own ‘echo chamber’, they’re not wrong. However, it’s not just a political echo chamber. Everyone’s phone is their own personal echo chamber for their precise interests.
There are a few (a scant few) upsides to this. I’ve discovered a lot of good music because of algorithmic recommendations. Hard to argue with that.
However, it’s also tough to argue that being on your phone all the time doesn’t induce a journey into one’s own mind. Everything you read or watch gets filtered through and processed by your brain.
You see something, you then think about that thing, you then consider telling someone else that thing, then you consider how they might respond to that thing, etc. and on and on and on the infinite spiral goes.
It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from the comedian-philosopher, Duncan Trussell: “Some poor, phoneless fool is probably sitting next to a waterfall somewhere, totally unaware of how angry and scared he’s supposed to be.”
I know this feels like I’m just talking about all the death, destruction and horror you can find on your phone – car crashes, political violence, boy band reunions, etc. – but honestly, I think it can apply to anything and everything on your phone. Though we may always be in our heads in some capacity, we can temper our habitual default of filling the silent moments with a quick phone-check. The more you can avoid it, the better, as far as I’m concerned. Instead, find those activities that make you lose all sense of time because you’re so engrossed in the task at hand.
Which brings me to my final point, try as we might to attain a little respite here and there, we can’t entirely escape being in our heads. That’s where we live. We can do activities to bring us into our bodies, but we still experience those things through our perception.
Therefore, if we must live in our heads, it’s our duty to make it a decent place to occupy. To ‘beautify the space’, as it were. The feng shui of the mind.
This means slowing down.
I don’t spend time on social media hardly at all. I “post and ghost”, as they say.
An unfortunate thing about being a musician is the necessity of social media for my career. Social media is advertising, and I can’t get people out to shows if I can’t tell people about it. And I can’t grow my audience if I don’t post every day. However, I don’t hang around scrolling after I’ve posted a video or an announcement.
I am stuck within my mind, as we all are. Therefore, I should do what I can to beautify the space. I no longer pay attention to the news – I’ve gotten caught in that trap many times. Everything on the news is announcing the end of the world, until the end of the world doesn’t happen. Then the next week it’s something new that they announce with the same doom, and then nothing happens again. The cycle repeats weekly, if not daily. It’s like an end-of-days cult runs our media complex. Even if they were correct that the “big one” is really coming this time, what the hell am I going to do about it? Nothing. There’s nothing that can be done, even if I am – as they say – “well-informed”. So, I don’t pay attention to the news anymore. That got a big chunk of clutter out of my mental living space.
I listen to fewer podcasts. This one might be more specific to my generation. I love podcasts. After years and years of being on the road, podcasts became my go-to. It’s tiring to pick new music (or listen to old favorites) every single day, podcasts are made anew each day. So, I listened to them a lot. They have podcasts on every subject, which can be very interesting and extremely addicting. Here’s the thing about podcasts though, you’re now marinating in someone else’s brain for a while, which now fuses their outlook with yours. You begin to subconsciously disconnect from your own intuition after spending enough hours listening to someone else’s.
I still listen to a lot of music, which, I think, is where I draw the line. Yes, I think it’s good to spend time in silence when you can, however, my wife would call me a liar if I said that this is something I’m striving for. I don’t love silence – my wife does. I love music. I love crafting a mood with a well-placed album or playlist.
Music is a mood-altering drug and I’m an addict. But hey, the first step is admitting it.
However, in the interest of beautifying my mind’s landscape, I don’t tend to listen to a lot of sad, depressing music. I like Jimmy Buffett. I like early-00’s Pop Punk. I like Yacht Rock. I like 90s Country. I like Reggae. I like “Take It Easy” by The Eagles. This is not to disparage sad music. It can be incredibly cathartic and it certainly has its place and has helped many, many people. I just found, personally, that marinating in that sadness just made me identify with being sad.
I could go on and on, but there’s way too much nuance in different genres of music to delve into.
If we’re going to live in our heads until the day we die, and our outlook determines our quality of life and our perception of happiness, it might be worth an audit of our daily habits and our daily media consumption to determine if those things we let into our heads are brightening our outlook or dragging us down. Are we rushing through each day to check off every item on our to-do list? As if rushing through it even saves us more than a small percentage of time, plus it generally results in shoddier work that we sped through in the interest of simply getting the task done.
Some of the (self-reported) happiest people in the world live below the poverty line. We live in the greatest country on earth with access to everything we’ve ever wanted at the click of a button and yet the (self-reported) depression rate keeps rising. Maybe our priorities are out of whack. Maybe it’s because our outlook is focused on the wrong things.
Not to mention our patience level has plummeted. Remember when you had to wait 6-8 weeks for a package you ordered out of a catalog? That idea is absurd now. If we don’t have it within the next twenty minutes, people lose their minds. I’m convinced that level of convenience makes us weaker and more unsettled. So, maybe it’s time to actively put the brakes on ourselves. It’s not necessarily a fun edict, but it’s got to be healthier. Just like going to the gym is objectively tougher – but healthier – than sitting on the couch, deliberately choosing activities that are slow and make you work for the reward is likely healthier and more contributive to a calm nervous system.
Slow down. Breathe. Sit on the porch. Read. Listen to actual records. Do a puzzle. Take a long, lazy drive. Drink in the sunshine.
Beautify the space in your mind, it’s the only place you’re ever going to live.
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P.S. Big news in the Sweeney household (camper-hold?), my wife Laura is pregnant! She’s due in late September, so our plans have changed a little bit (understatement of the year…) for the rest of 2026. Next newsletter will bring y’all up to speed on all the new developments. See y’all in a month!
Also, come out to a show! I need to sell merch to keep this family in the lap of luxury…
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Here are the shows that are coming up in the month of April. I might book another couple in AZ, so keep your eyes peeled on my socials.
· 4/3 – Old County Inn, 6-9pm (Pine, AZ)
· 4/4 – Old County Inn, 6-9pm (Pine, AZ)
· 4/10 – Dutchman’s Country BBQ (FULL BAND!), 6-9pm (Apache Junction, AZ)
· 4/11 – Tucson Folk Festival (Telles Stage), noon-12:30 (Tucson, AZ)
· 4/11 – Back Alley BBQ, 7-10 (Chandler, AZ)
· 4/17 – Valley Taproom, 7-10 (Queen Creek, AZ)
· 4/24 – Rockbar (FULL BAND!) w/ JT Sheets Band & Jourdan Rolland, 7pm (Scottsdale, AZ)
· 4/25 – Rooster’s Country (FULL BAND!) for Rooster’s Fest 2026, 2-3:45pm, (Mesa, AZ)
· 4/26 – Mandy’s Wine Bar, noon-3pm (Maricopa, AZ)
Stoked to see y’all soon.
Austin
Listen now!
https://open.spotify.com/artist/433eTr5V5LEv1VtP1ejbkt?si=Jlzl5oz8RvulN-ocxrGqyg
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