Creative Status is a podcast about using creativity as a vehicle for improving your life by deconstructing ego, integrating the shadow self, and designing and manifesting a real life. Every episode explores how the creative process can help you GROW REAL by moving towards wholeness in yourself by making the unconscious conscious.

In this episode of Creative Status, I had a deep conversation about the process of TRANSFORMATION with kundalini yoga teacher and life coach Chris Kalbfleisch.

If you don’t know, Kundalini is the most ancient form of yoga and is a technology for merging your nature with the transcendent/divinity so you can reclaim your natural connection to WHOLENESS. This place of wholeness is where creativity takes place and comes from and so this is a ridiculously powerful approach to transforming your life.

The way that the Kundalini energy is often described is as a coiled serpent resting dormant at the bottom of your spine. When you awaken this serpent it goes from your root chakra (connected to the earth) and the bottom of your spine and shoots up to your crown (connected to divinity).

We cover loads of ground in this conversation but here’s some themes:

-Kundalini itself and what it is

-The journey from fragmentation to wholeness

-How the ego gets in the way of our growth and how we can better manage it

-The different paths to awakening the kundalini and how we can navigate it

-Abundance verus scarcity and how it feeds into this ‘stuff’

-Loads more

This is a really powerful conversation for anybody who is interested in transformation and some of the practical and time-tested ways to change your life.

Listen using the embedded player above or check it out on any podcast platform!

Thanks for checking it out and stay real,

Oli

(Scroll down for full show transcript)

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Episode Links:

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Chris’s email: chris@theway-healing.com

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Show Transcript: Kundalini & Creative Transformation

Intro

Oli Anderson: Oh hi there, Oli Anderson here, you’re listening to Creative Status, this is a podcast about using the creative process to transform your life and ultimately the main lesson that we seem to keep uncovering is that if you trust life and you go with it and you get out of your own way then the only transformation that any of us can go through is from a state of being fragmented and disconnected to a state of wholeness.

That ultimately just means that we’re connected to ourselves, connected to other people and connected to life on the deepest possible level. If you’re new to the podcast, welcome. Every episode I interview some amazing inspiring people that have something amazing and inspiring to say about life itself and the creative process.

My view and my understanding of all this now is that because we’re talking about what’s real and what’s universal and applies to all of our lives we can come into this from all kinds of different angles and we can learn to understand it more deeply and more intricately through the nuances of people’s experiences, the theoretical stuff that they use to make sense of life and all that kind of thing. There’s some deep deep learning in today’s interview which is an interview with Chris Kalbfleisch who is a Kundalini yoga teacher.

If you don’t know Kundalini yoga is the most ancient form of yoga. It goes all the way back to the Vedas which are ancient texts basically and the Kundalini itself is often described as being a serpent that is coiled up at the bottom of our spines and if we go through a process of ultimately reconnecting to ourselves in a strategic way, working up our body through the chakra system then we can awaken this energy that is within us and ultimately be more connected and ready to transform our lives by knowing deeply with deep awareness who we are, what life is all about and what we want to do with it.

That might have been a terrible way of describing Kundalini yoga but luckily in the interview you’re going to get some amazing stuff from Chris who can tell you properly because that’s his whole thing. But ultimately this is a conversation about transformation: what transformation is, how it shows up, how we can ride with it, how we can ensure that the transformations we take ourselves through are real and what to expect along the way plus a load of other amazing things. So I’m going to stop rambling but here’s the actual interview.

Chris thank you so much for your time, everybody else I’m sure you’re going to get some cool stuff out of this so thanks for listening and hope you enjoy it.

Here’s the interview, boom.

Interview

Oli Anderson: Oh hi there Chris, thank you so much for joining me today on Creative Status. You’re a Kundalini yoga teacher which is super cool.

Kundalini is something that’s fascinated me for a while and I feel like I might have picked up a lot of misconceptions around what it is so it’s good to actually talk to somebody who knows what they’re on about.

Before I start asking you six million different questions do you want to just introduce yourself, tell people a bit more about what you do and also what you want to get out of this conversation.

Chris Kalbfleisch: Yeah thanks Oli, thanks for having me be here. I’m very very excited to be spending this time with you. Yeah so I am a Kundalini yoga teacher as well as a transformational life coach and as we get into the discussion we’ll see how those two things go together because Kundalini itself is all about transformation.

An interesting story about how I came across Kundalini, an interesting story about how it found me and I’m looking forward to getting and exploring all that stuff with you and in terms of stuff that you know we could cover that’s really interesting.

This idea of tapping into our infinite creative potential which is ultimately the objective of the Kundalini yoga practice to tap into that infinite creative potential that we all have in us so looking forward to this.

Oli Anderson: That’s amazing so just to dive right into this maybe we need to start with a simple definition of what Kundalini is so there’s two things I’ve heard about Kundalini, maybe you can test my assumptions.

So the first thing I’ve heard is that it’s the most ancient form of yoga so if you go back to the you know the the Upanishads and all these old books I don’t know if it’s literally the Upanishads but the older Vedas and things like that Kundalini yoga is mentioned in there but the other thing that I’ve heard which a lot of people might have heard that are listening to this is that Kundalini is a serpent that is coiled up at the base of your spine and if you go through the right sequence or follow the right process of doing what you need to do you can awaken this serpent and it’s going to shoot up your spine go through your chakras and then you’re going to be enlightened or something like that.

Is that what we’re talking about or is there more to it or less to it like how would you kind of dice it?

Chirs Kalbfleisch: Yeah. So Kundalini yoga is a technology. It is a technology of human consciousness. And when they’re talking about yoga in the Upanishads or in the Vedas, they are referring to loosely Raja yoga or Kundalini yoga. What Kundalini does effectively is it takes all the aspects of all the various forms of yoga. It packages them together in, you know, as we describe it as a technology that’s meant to be the fastest path to enlightenment one can achieve. And I think I’ve heard it said, whether this is true or not, it’s folklore that, you know, one year of Kundalini yoga is the equivalent of 10 years of Hatha yoga in terms of what it does to you spiritually.

It incorporates, go ahead.

Oli Anderson: Sorry, so I was just going to say, I think you were about to answer it, but what’s the main difference, would you say, between Kundalini and the other kinds of yoga, the other schools?

Chirs Kalbfleisch: Kundalini, I think, brings all the all the pieces of those schools together. So it takes the it takes bits that together then codifies them in such a way that it has this effect of moving energy quickly through your body. So it’ll have the, you know, the asana positions, the pranayama breath work, the meditation, the japa, the repetition of sounds, and other various forms that will show up and all these other types of yoga, putting them all together with the objective of being the fastest path to enlightenment.

And they used to call it the householder yoga in that you didn’t necessarily have to, you know, leave the village and go off in the jungle for 10 years to find enlightenment. You could carry on in the real world, do Kundalini yoga, and that could also be a path to enlightenment.

Oli: Wow. So I suppose that the obvious question now then is, when we say enlightenment in this context, what exactly are we talking about? Like, what are we aiming for, if we’re aiming for enlightenment?

Chris: Yeah, so it goes to the first question, one of the second question you asked about that coiled serpent that they talk about in Kundalini. And so that, I get that allegory or analogy of the serpent is that, you know, in our, just above our sacrum, down what’s called the lower triangle of our chakras, those first three chakras, there’s this energy, and we call it the Kundalini energy, and we can amortify it as a serpent, that it lies dormant in there, but it’s all of our, I guess, our potential, all of our divine energy that sits dormant in there, and it’s waiting to be released.

And how it gets released is by clearing the blockages throughout our body, throughout our chakra systems, and allow that energy to rise up from the lower chakras, all the way up through the seven chakra system, out the crown. And through that process, we gain a new perspective and a new understanding of what ultimate reality is. And so effectively, you can say enlightenment is potentially having some of the veils of illusion, they call it, torn down about the world we live in, and to tap into something that has greater meaning to it. And that’s the process of enlightenment.

And, you know, I think one or two people throughout history have gotten truly light, light, which is like the Buddha or, or Christ, and the rest of us are just somewhere on this path.

Oli: Yeah. So one thing that I’m always talking about on this podcast is that the creative process is ultimately two things, which are the same thing. So it’s the journey of making the unconscious conscious. But as we do that, we go from a state of fragmentation to wholeness.

Fragmentation is ultimately when we’re caught up in our minds, we caught up in an identity that is just built of conceptual knowledge and ideas, where we’re holding back and hesitating because of our conditioning and all this kind of stuff. And we pick up a version of ourselves, which is very limited at the levels of what we allow ourselves to perceive, but also the way that we interpret life and our ability to kind of respond to it and move with it. What you’re saying about the Kundalini is very similar. So ultimately, what you seem to be saying is as the Kundalini awakens, it travels up our spine.

We basically push through a lot of these fragmentary blocks and barriers so that we can become more whole and reconnect to what was there all the time. Is that a fair way to say it?

Chris: Yeah, I think so. And I’ll state it in slightly different terms is that we are man, man and woman are conditioned being. So we’re born these blank slates with the supercomputer attached to us, which is our psyche and our brain. And we have a bunch of rules and ways to live programmed into us in order to survive. And depending on where we’re born into, what family, what country, what dynamic, we have to develop an ego or persona to survive that because we’re helpless.

And the only way to get to adulthood is to create a set of rules to keep us safe. We then identify with those as that’s who we are. But in fact, that was just basically some type of a program that was dropped into us an operating system to get us to the point where we could then move on, shed it like a snake sheds its skin, and figure out what our true identity is.

What Kundalini Yoga does is And this has certainly been my experience with it, is our mind is a very, very powerful thing. It traps us into this identity, and it’s hard for the mind itself to break out of this identity. We can all read books in the Buddha, and we can intellectualize it, but for whatever reason, that’s often not powerful enough to break that whole the mind has on it, that you’re so-and-so a person that you have these traits, and this is who you are.

That’s really ingrained in us. What Kundalini Yoga does is it’s almost a bottom-up procedure to break the patternering and conditionings of the minds. And how it actually works is, you know, I think it’s beyond our understanding of science right now, but through the movements of the body, through the repetition of sound, through using our breath a certain way, and through meditation, the patterns and the hold that the mind has on us weakens enough that then the mind can be turned on itself to try to let go of all these attachments to our identity.

Oli: I think exactly what you just said is how life kind of works in general. So people are born and they’re in this state of wholeness, but as we go through our early years and through, you know, early teenage years as well, we become conditioned and we pick up this identity which is ultimately a reaction to what we’ve been through and what we think we may need to survive again in the future. And exactly like you said, we become so attached to it that it blinds us to the actual truth of life. It causes friction between us and reality, that friction, consent and frustration.

You can make people miserable the more they cling to it. And this Kundalini thing, ultimately, like you’ve said, it’s technology that is a shortcut to returning to the natural state of wholeness that we’re all ultimately supposed to be in. So I guess the question is, how does the Kundalini awakening kind of happen? Because I’ve heard it can happen in two main ways. One, you know, you can put yourself through a rigorous process of doing Kundalini every day for like however many years you need to do it. But sometimes it just happens organically as well.

Is that right? So you might be, I don’t know, walking down the street one day, going to the supermarket as a way, and then boom, you have this Kundalini thing. What’s happening in that situation if that is something that happens? And how can people kind of navigate that when it does occur?

Chris: Yeah, and that’s a great question. And, you know, those are the bookmarks of the two paths.

The one is you learn about Kundalini, you want enlightenment, so you head off and you start a daily practice of Kundalini yoga, and then over time, hopefully, you get there. I mean, who knows? Others, it’s more of a spontaneous thing.

And I can certainly speak to my own experience there is, as I look back at it now, I did have this spontaneous Kundalini awakening. You know, if four years ago, I’m just, you know, I’m turning 53 today, but four or five years ago in my late 40s, I’m working a job in finance. I’ve got this standard life with the picket fence and coaching sports for my kids and all that stuff.

And suddenly out of nowhere, you know, my life, if I take a look at what my goals were in life, you know, 20 years before, I’m a 10 out of 10 on achieving all the stuff I’ve learned. I wanted about a 10 out of 10 on the scoreboard of society. Inside, I’m starting to feel like a zero. I have no idea what’s happening, but life’s, you know, everything around me is a losing meaning. It doesn’t make any sense to me. I don’t understand why I’m going to work to do this stuff.

Nothing’s fitting anymore. And what I realized is I had this, I was starting to have this spontaneous Kundalini awakening that was, it’s hard to describe where it came from. And I was, you know, searching for meaning of what was happening to me and I ended up going away to a wellness place in the United States. And I came across a psychic that was there was also, it turns out, was a Kundalini yoga teacher. And she looked at me and almost immediately she says, you know, I can tell you’re going through something really, really traumatic. Your life’s going to be about to be turned upside down. You have no idea about what’s coming, but just trust you’re going to be okay. But you literally, when you get back to Vancouver, you have to start doing Kundalini yoga tomorrow.

That’s going to be the answer for you. And I, here’s, I was a guy that’s never done yoga before at this stage, let alone have any idea what Kundalini yoga was. But I did it.

So I had nothing to lose and I needed the answer. So I got back to Vancouver, looked up where I could take Kundalini yoga, found a place close to me. And I went to this yoga class where it wasn’t what I expected. I come into this room and there’s this chanting music on, the teacher has a turban on.

It looks like the island of misfit toys. Like it’s not what at all what I was expecting from yoga. And so I sit down and do this thing. And after at the end of this hour and a half class, I have had the most emotional experience I’ve ever had in my life. Like it’s like a bolt of energy had gone up my spine. I’m tears are rolling down my face and my heart feels wide open for the first time ever. And that, that was my, how my journey of becoming a Kundalini yoga teacher started from this something’s going wrong in my life. I can feel this awakening of the energy in me spontaneously to then applying this technology and rapidly increasing it.

Oli: Wow. Like what you just said is so powerful because one thing that I think kind of defines the modern human experience is that so many people are detached from themselves and detached from reality and detached from wholeness because they’re chasing goals that aren’t really their goals. They’re chasing goals of the ego.

Basically they’re trying to design a life around the kind of conditioning that we were talking about earlier. And when that happens, I suppose as you get a bit older, you reach this kind of crunch point where everything seems fine on the outside, but inside this kind of avoid like a restless feeling where the real you just needs to come up from the shadows to the surface.

And I think like I’ve never really been this connection before, but like ultimately the Kundalini is like. like when coal is getting crushed and there’s so much pressure, it just creates a diamond and it’s a similar kind of thing like the ego stuff living in this unreal way that you were talking about. It eventually puts so much pressure that the real self deep within has to just kind of surge up to the surface and maybe I’m romanticizing it a bit, but do you think there is something there?

So ultimately if there’s enough pressure in your life and you avoid yourself for long enough then something is going to happen to you that basically causes your real self to surface again and at the start of that journey it might seem like your life has been destroyed or that something is going wrong, but really if you can trust the process it’s just about reaching balance again, returning to where you were supposed to be.

Chris: I think that’s a good way to put it, returning to where you’re supposed to be. I think throughout our lives we basically have our authentic self or just call it the self, trying to rise and trying to eviscerate the ego which is only supposed to be their temporarily forced.

We haven’t shed our skin. I think our whole life that’s the process that’s happening within us and I think for me anyways, I think for some people it can be the death of the loved one, it can be some type of intense suffering and what my path was it’s like I think I achieved everything I wanted to from an ego standpoint. All the stuff that I was told or program by society that said hey this is going to make you happy if you have this much money, the house, this kind of stuff, that’s going to be happy and I get there and it wasn’t true. I’m miserable. There’s no purpose in my life. If I can’t see myself going on and doing this anymore.

I started to go into deep depression, alcohol and drugs become part of my story there as I fall into addiction because I’m trying to cope with these internal feelings that I don’t really know how to express anywhere. This is this concept of the dark night of the soul that happens where how I would envision is basically the self’s trying to rise and the ego knows its days are numbered so the ego begins to fight for its life.

The ego wants to hold on and so actually the ego identity tries to strengthen itself further so whatever character flaws and defects someone has at that time they get amplified and that’s why the bottom comes so hard and fast and furious right before you have this spiritual awakening.

Oli: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s a case of what goes up and must come down and the ego like you said, I see it as though the ego is constantly in a battle with the shadow self. So when we’re younger and we basically start getting conditioned and we become ashamed of the real self and all that kind of stuff, we send all these different parts of ourselves into hiding but those parts that we send into hiding into the shadow territory, that’s what I call it, they never go anywhere they’re real.

And so when we start living out this socially conditioned, socially programmed life in an unreal inauthentic way, we’re just creating more and more mental tension and it takes so much energy and so much strength to maintain that illusion of the ego being the real version of us because like you said, it’s just an idea, it’s not real, it’s just something that we have kind of created as a filter to keep surviving in the way that we think we need to survive.

It’s not reality itself and so the more we cling to the ego and the more it tells us that we need it because we’ve identified with it, the more vociferously all those emotions are going to start screaming out to us and I think that’s why you said when you went to your Kundalini class for the first time, it was very emotional, you kind of broke down in tears and all that kind of stuff because you just returned to that version of yourself and you kind of accepted it again. So this is getting us onto I guess the transformational part of the conversation. So how has all this stuff taught you about or shown you how transformation works in general for human beings?

And I know that’s a really broad question, but have you learned anything about the structure of just the transformation process for anybody, I guess is the question.

Chris: Yeah, it’s that. We’re right over the target right now as we talk about this stuff where we have this egoic shell on us and it’s got many, many layers to it like an onion and right in the middle of it is like you imagine a heart shape, which is itself. The transformation is so much about letting go of the structure of the ego to just let what’s already there emerge. There’s nothing to become, there’s nowhere to go to. It’s a process of letting go of all the rap we’ve put on this stuff.

When I talk to people about transformation really at the basic stage or people are even interested in it, I ask the question of can you remember a time when you decided that what made sense for your life was to go to school for 20 years, then work for 45 years making widgets and maybe taking a vacation every two weeks so that one day you could potentially retire with the money you saved and relax. I don’t know who actually chose that. I don’t know who’s actually chosen that making widgets and climbing mountains and collecting stuff was the meaning of life. Most people when you start talking about it, it gets them thinking about it, hey, maybe there’s a different way to live my life. It’s hard because the whole world appears to be focused on that first thing.

That’s the way we do it and there’s no other way. Transformation is that process of starting to let all of that go and find that there’s a completely different way to live our lives and we’re meant to be living our lives a different way that will bring far more purpose and meaning and happiness into it.

Oli: So do you think that the natural way of living is kind of predetermined or is the natural way? of returning to something where, you know, we have not infinite, but way more choice than we may have originally been led to believe. Do you know what I mean?

Because sometimes when we’re talking about this stuff as coaches or healers or whatever, it sounds like a lot of the time some people are saying right it’s all predetermined and if you can just let go of your social conditioning, you can return to the path that you’re supposed to be on but that path is your path and there’s nothing you can do. But then the other way of looking at it is okay, you can let go of all the conditioning and blah blah blah blah blah and then you can choose pretty much whatever path you want as long as it’s real and it’s not aligned with the ego stuff.

Which camp would you say you’re in if you’re in one?

Chris: I think I would describe it as that, you know, one of my main teachers who’s not around anymore is Yogi Baajan who brought Kundalini yoga to North America and he has a saying is that happiness is a birthright. All we need to do is claim it and I think our purpose is to alternately be happy and there may be a divine setup and this sort of feels right to me that there’s this idea that we come into this incarnation with a plan that there’s going to be something that happens to us somewhere along the line that creates enough trauma or friction in our life that wakes us up and then we continue our real journey.

That sort of feels right to me but once that happens then it’s about, you know, as you as you talked about all of our conditioning that we have on us and all of our limits are effectively self-imposed. We’ve created this structure around ourselves and these limits to make ourselves feel safe but what it’s done is it simply limited our ability to live life to the fullest and potentially and I can’t speak for everyone but for myself it was actually cutting me off for true happiness and of all the spiritual systems I’ve studied and I’ve studied a lot of them and my own experience the only true route to happiness for me is to be in selfless service to others to be useful to be helpful because when I do that I think what’s happening is I’m understanding that I’m not separate from you. I’m not separate from anyone.

We’re all part of this wholeness and when I go into a service for someone and expect nothing back in return my subconscious is understanding that I understand it and then I’m in a place of joy and happiness.

Oli: Wow. That makes perfect sense to me as well because the main problem in life for anybody is the ego like you said and the ego is the idea that we’re all independent, we’re all separate, that what we do doesn’t affect other people and blah, blah, blah, blah but on a deep level as well the ego is the idea that you don’t need to trust life and you don’t need to trust other people because it’s all up to you like you’re not flowing with life, you’re forcing life through your identity and all of the things that your identity tells you you need to do to reach the goals that your identity is set for you and if you can break free of all that stuff that we’re talking about the ego stuff and all the myriad layers that make it up then you have to kind of submit or surrender or whatever you want to use to the bigger flow of life which is that wholeness.

And if you do that then you’re always going to be connected to other people and so part of the process of transformation I’ve seen in my life and in the lives of other people I’ve worked with whatever is that they go through this process we’re talking about they deconstruct the ego, the integrate the shadow and then they start building a life for themselves that’s real but the only way they can do that is by building something that is going to offer value to other people so it’s no longer just about them you know been in the moment and been hedonistic or any of that stuff it’s about using the gifts they’ve uncovered to help other people uncover their gifts or something like that.

Chris: Yeah I think that’s absolutely right the egoic mindset and we this is part of growing up as we have this egoic mindset it’s all about lack and scarcity there’s not enough and I have to I have to go and accumulate and I have to get more and I have to be different in order to do that and I have to win and I have to achieve and even once we get that we go into fear that it’s going to be taken away because it’s a scarcity mindset which is it’s not true the truth is we are constantly in so much abundance and the surrender part of that and it’s very very hard is to surrender to this idea that I’m going to be given everything I need I have everything I need right now I’m perfect and whole as I am and what I should be doing is working with others helping others and that’s you know the best way to to experience the fullness of abundance is to give because whatever I give I get back tenfold.

Oli: Yeah yeah yeah because ultimately the world is a mirror of what’s going on inside of us right and obviously if we give we can circumvent some of our programming and etc what you just said is really like really interesting to me and quite powerful so you basically said like the natural state which we can become aware of if we kind of wake up or wake the Kundalini up and all that kind of stuff the natural state is abundance and ultimately if we can just trust and go with life our needs will be met pretty much always and things will work out and so on and so forth.

What is it that makes that so hard because if you think about it it’s kind of a paradox like all of our needs are met we can become aware of that but But the hurdle we have to overcome to kind of tune into that is just letting go and trusting. And this podcast always ends up coming back to that, that word trust, because ultimately all we can do is trust the process. But it takes strength to receive, if that makes sense.

So what is going on there, would you say, if that’s not too nuanced?

Chris: No, it’s back to our conditioning. We’ve been so conditioned that that’s not true, that there is an abundance. From the day we go to school, we’re conditioned that we have to have the best marks to be anything, that we have to be good at sports to be important, that we have to do all these things in order to get something in life. And if we don’t get good marks and have a good job, we’re going to be poor and homeless because that’s the story we’re told. And we have all these fears of these awful things happening to us, even though they’ve never happened to us, but we see it on the news, we hear stories about it, and our egoic mind, which I don’t want to be too hard on the ego.

The ego is here to protect us and get us from being a child to an adult. And we have to thank it for creating enough fear for us not to die. But at some stage, we have to let it go. But the problem is, if we take that ego on to adulthood, it’s constantly trying to protect us. The only mandate of the ego is survival, nothing else.

There’s no happiness involved in the ego. It’s a survival mechanism. And so it’s so hard to overcome those lifelong patterns and limiting beliefs and fears that the ego has put around us to keep us safe. We have to surrender to the fact that, you know what, I am safe.

It’s going to be okay.

Oli: Do you think there’s a, there’s kind of a bodily or biological element to the ego as well? So, if we go back to the wholeness fragmentation thing, I think the reason that we tend to perceive and interpret everything as being fragmented is because our bodies are fragmented.

They’re made of molecules and all this kind of stuff. And so ultimately, the apparatus we’ve got, our brains, ultimately, are projecting a fragmented way of being out into the world. And then it is reflected back at us.

And we think that is reality. And so part of the Kundalini transformation you’re talking about is kind of transcending that. Like it’s not, it’s not just about being in the body. It’s almost going transcending the body. Again, I keep using that same word, but is that a good way to say it?

Like, is that right?

Chris: Yeah, we’re really much in the same wavelength. I always just, my thought process is just take me to this place of the illusion of what our body actually is. We’ve created this construct that this solid matter and we’re separate and everything’s individual. But the reality is, and quantum mechanics has finally caught up to Kundalini yoga. Let’s be clear, the yogis knew this thousands of years ago is that everything in the universe is simply vibration. It’s vibration, it’s light, it’s sound, but we’re all a vibrational frequency.

All our body is just vibration. Everything around us is vibration and our consciousness, the consciousness of the universe gives it the form we see. And from a real simple, you know, yogic perspective, what’s happening when we do our work to drop the ego and to connect with the self is we’re changing our vibrational frequency.

The ego likes to dwell in fear, guilt, shame, grief, things like that. These are all aspects or frequencies that have lower vibrational frequencies. Frequency attracts frequency.

We’re in that place, our life is going to attract the vibration we’re putting out. So I think addiction is the most extreme example of it. People in addiction are in the constant vibration of shame, fear and guilt. And as they go further and further in our addiction, you look at their lives.

It is surrounded by shame, fear and guilt. That’s what their life becomes. And then you look at people who have become enlightened and they raise their vibration to that of love and peace. And you look at their lives.

They are now surrounded by that aspect of their lives. So at the heart of it all, these practices are about raising our vibrational frequency, letting go of fear, letting go of disbelief, letting go of our limiting beliefs so we can vibrate from a different place of love, peace and joy. And with time, with the leg, we begin to attract all of that into our lives.

And all the things that vibrate at different frequencies will slowly leave our life. And that’s abundance. That’s how abundance works from a quantum mechanics perspective.

Oli: This is how I’ve experienced it in my life as well. So the law of attraction, ultimately, it’s like a boomerang, isn’t it? So what you put out there is what’s going to come back. And if you have… People make it really complicated, but I think it’s exactly what you just said.

If you can work on your inner state so that you feel peace, you feel wholeness, ultimately, that feeling of realness, then that is what you’re going to get back. And so all these people are dancing through hoops and doing crystals under the moon and stuff like that.

They’re using those rituals as a way of getting into that feeling. But actually, you can manifest or whatever word you want to use, tap into abundance just by realizing that it is you, if that makes sense. And so the Kundalini thing, Again, it’s about rewiring people to their natural state, I suppose, of health and abundance and all these kind of things. And it’s just about removing all the trappings of the world. Is that a way to say it? The problem really is the world and our attachment to it.

Chris: Yeah, like 100%. And you can do all this work of trying to open yourself up to to enlightenment or to love through crystals and rituals and things like that. But if you haven’t let go of the attachment to the world, nothing will change. So it’s this idea that I’ll use it as an example. So I want to have a life of abundance, I’m going to surrender to abundance. But if I have a view or an idea of what abundance looks like in terms of a certain amount of money or a certain lifestyle, I’m just in the ego still.

I’m just attached to an outcome. And the real spiritual secret of abundance is you have no attachment to what that is. The universe is going to give you what makes you happy and what brings you joy.

And that’s where abundance comes from. You don’t know what brings you joy or what brings you happy because your mind is egoic. Your mind is going to always try to gravitate towards the things that the egoic self had equated with happiness through your programming. And that’s the hardest part to let go of is that I can honestly say now that money, title, fame, all that stuff, it doesn’t bring me happiness.

I know this for sure. And so maybe it’s easier for me to let go of that as an idea of something to strive for. For folks who haven’t had that yet, it’s a harder attachment to let go of because it’s almost like, well, maybe I’ll give that a try first.

Maybe it’ll bring me some happiness before letting go of that idea.

Oli: Yeah. I think as well, there’s a thing around, there’s a difference between the symbols of abundance or the symbols of happiness or the symbols of whatever and the underlying process. And the difference between those things is the difference between inner and outer. So a simple example is like a tree, like a tree grows fruit. So you look at the fruit on the tree, the fruit is not the abundance itself. The fruit is a symbol of this underlying process of abundance that is always working.

And so, you know, if you pick that fruit, you don’t actually have to do anything else to get more fruit on the tree, if that makes sense. And the reason is that there’s stuff always going on. It’s a process that is constantly unfolding, is wholeness, constantly moving and ebbing and flowing and undulating. And when you go through these kind of transformations that you’re talking about with Kundalini or just life transformation in general, it’s always the same structure, really, which is that you’re taking your attention away from the surface, from the fruit, and you’re tuning in to the underlying current of wholeness or whatever you want to call it, which is what actually leads to the fruit. And you can apply that to life as well.

I don’t know if that’s too convoluted of a metaphor, but do you see what I’m saying? Like, is that valid?

Chris: No, that’s not convoluted at all.

I think that’s exactly right. It’s, yeah, there’s the fruits of, you know, you harvest what you sow. And so what you sow is what’s important.

It’s your quality of your thinking, your quality of your words, your quality of the actions. That’s who you are in the moment. And the stuff that comes as a result of that are just the fruits of all of that. But your quality of life is only experienced in the present moment. The past is a bunch of electrical signals to the brain.

The future is just a series of present moments. The only thing that’s real is right now. And the only thing that’s real in the present moment is the quality of your thoughts and quality of your emotions. And so that’s the place that if we can bring our attention there and be in the present moment and let go of fear of the future and grief from the past, we can find that abundance because it’s in the now. Yeah.

Oli: And it’s always, always them. Like, if we’re not connected to it, then we’ve distorted our view of reality, basically, either with the ego resistance or just ego distortion in general, because the way we perceive things, emotional reasoning and all that kind of stuff. What you said about, you know, you have is what you saw, you reap what you saw. There’s a similar quote from the Bible where it says something like, a corrupt tree brings forth bad fruit. And it’s the same kind of thing. Like, when you said that, it reminded me of it. So in relation to Kundalini and all the things we talked about in terms of transformation, how does that fit into it?

The idea that in the present moment, if we’re having a bad time or life currently sucks, this idea that a corrupt tree brings forth bad fruit, does it link to all these things we’ve been saying?

Chris: Yeah. Like, at the end of the day, I think it’s quite simple. The only, we have no control over, you know, the outer universe. The only thing we can control ultimately is the quality of the vibrational frequency that we’re emitting into this universal quantum field that pulls everything back into us. And so that rotten fruit is if we’re going to sit in fear, guilt and shame and wishing I had this and being mad at that person holding resentments, that’s the fruit that our tree is going to grow.

If we can do the work to transform all that and to be in gratitude, love everyone unconditionally, forgive unconditionally, the fruit that’s going to come off our tree eventually is going to be beautiful and nourishing. And I honestly believe it’s as simple as that, what is the work we need to do to maximize our vibrational frequency and live in this place of unconditional love? Because that’s fully in our control.

Everything else is out of our control. And once we fully understand that, the whole enlightenment process is what are the quality of my thoughts and what can I do today to transform the quality of those thoughts, whether it be a yoga practice, some meditation, maybe I maybe get into service and help somebody out or maybe do some spiritual reading. But what can I do to maximize the quality of my thoughts? The rest will just come.

Oli: 100%. So as within so without all that kind of stuff. You just mentioned some really practical things that people can do. But just to kind of summarize what we’re saying, I guess, and to make this a little bit more practical, if somebody is listening to this and they currently, you know, they look at their life and there’s bad fruit everywhere.

I was saying that in scare quotes, but if there’s bad fruit everywhere, what can they do to start kind of shifting the picture in terms of, you know, transforming their lives in the way that you’re talking about?

Chris: Right? It’s, you know, there’s this, there’s this picture that’s showing up my mind right now as you asked that question. And there’s these two interlapping circles like a Venn diagram. The first circle is surrender.

And the second circle is a discipline and where the intersect is flow. And the first thing is to have the willingness and the willingness to try to surrender. And, you know, surrender is hard. It doesn’t come naturally because our ego doesn’t want to surrender. Our ego wants to win. So you need a discipline.

What discipline can I bring to this? And it’s, you know, there’s one view from the top of the mountain. I believe this, but there’s an infinite number of paths up the mountain. It’s each individual. So what can someone add to their discipline to try to break down these patterns of the ego? It well, it can be a Kundalini yoga practice. It can be any kind of yoga practice for that matter. It can be meditation. It can be journaling. Um, it can be prayer. Uh, it can be chanting, but it’s something that you say, listen, I want to change my life.

And the only way I’m going to change my life is through some sort of a daily practice or sadhana. And it’s the most important thing in my life. So I’m going to make it my number one priority.

I’m going to set my alarm early and I’m going to get up and I’m going to do this our practice every day before I start my day. And that’s where transformation will begin to take root. And it’s not overnight, but you know, you give that for something like that, 40 days, you will start to see some material changes. You give it 90 days, bigger changes. And you do that for a year.

Your whole life will be different. And it’s, it’s as simple as that, but that’s hard. Yeah.

Oli: Yeah. It’s so true. It’s that continuous action. And then I suppose there’s also the extra level of making sure that actions you take are inspired actions. So we don’t want to just become one of these people that’s doing things for the sake of doing things like a human doing. We need to put our being into the doing.

And I think that’s why the surrender part is so important because then you’re, you are connected to something bigger than just you. Yeah, I’m going to stop talking because I feel like I could open a whole new kind of worms and just keep going for another six hours or something. We’ve covered a lot in a short time, but have you, have you got any final words to sum all this up? Like, yeah, just how would you kind of sum everything up?

And can you also let people know where they can find you as well if they want to check out your website and that kind of thing?

Chris: Yeah, absolutely. I guess I would sum it up is that all of us, we’re, I mean, we’re ultimately all part of this wholeness and all part of the one. We’re all the same.

There’s no real differences. We all have an infinite creative potential that resides inside us to transcend, transcend all of our limiting beliefs and to tap into our divine nature and to live under grace and have the ultimate amount of happiness in our life. But it actually takes work to overcome the ego conditioning that we’ve all been placed under by the virtue of being human beings. And that requires a willingness and a desire to want to change it. Most importantly, a discipline to do something on a repeated basis every day. And that’s the real hard part. You can get yourself into that place of discipline.

I can guarantee you, you won’t be disappointed. And my own story was life hit me so hard and I wanted to change so badly. You know, I walk the walk I’m talking about for seven months straight. I got up at 340 AM, had a cold shower and then did a two and a half hour prayer, yoga and meditation practice for seven months and I changed my entire life. And so I know it can be done and others have done it. I wasn’t the first.

I was following the path of people before me, but we have this power within us to live much happier and much more fulfilling lives.

Oli: Amazing. Chris, thank you.

Chris: You can get a hold of me at the way healing and it’s the website is www. thewayalloneword-healing .com and my email address is chris@theway-healing.com.

Oli: Thank you. I’ll share that link in your email in the show notes. But Chris, thank you so much for this. I think I understand the Kundalini thing way more now and you’ve given me some fresh insight and everything.

So I really appreciate your time and happy birthday as well.

Chris: That’s right. Right. Thanks so much, Oli. And yeah, the time just flew there. I really enjoyed that conversation and look forward to chatting some more in the future.

Creative Status is a podcast about using creativity as a vehicle for improving your life by deconstructing ego, integrating the shadow self, and designing and manifesting a real life. Every episode explores how the creative process can help you GROW REAL by moving towards wholeness in yourself by making the unconscious conscious.

In this episode of Creative Status, I had the pleasure of interviewing Shadi Sadeghi, a certified life coach specialising in Jungian Psychology. With over 15 years of personal development experience, Shadi empowers men and women worldwide to live more authentic and fulfilling lives.

Shadi’s coaching method combines the wisdom of Carl Jung, eastern philosophy, and social neuroscience to guide individuals towards self-discovery and personal growth. In our conversation, we explored the fascinating intersection of Jungian psychology and creativity.

This was a really powerful conversation and Shadi offered practical insights on navigating major life transitions and finding inspiration from different cultures and perspectives.

We also explored the transformative power of creativity in personal growth and self-expression. Shadi shared strategies for overcoming creative blocks and fostering a mindset of experimentation and curiosity.

Throughout the episode, Shadi’s passion for helping individuals lead more purpose-driven lives shone through. Her holistic approach to coaching, informed by her deep understanding of Jungian psychology, left listeners inspired and equipped with practical tools to unlock their creative potential.

Join us in this thought-provoking conversation as we explore the rich connections between Jungian psychology, self-discovery, and the boundless realm of creativity.

Listen using the embedded player above or go to your favourite podcast platform and search for Creative Status!

Thanks for checking it out and stay real,

Oli Anderson

(Scroll down for the show transcript)

—————————–

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Show Transcript: A Jungian Approach to Creative Empowerment

Show Intro

Oli Anderson: Oh hi there, Oli Anderson here, you’re listening to Creative Status. If you don’t know, this is the first time you’ve found the podcast. Well, this is a place where we talk about using the creative process as a vehicle for bringing more realness into our lives.

Realness means that we’re connected to our true values, our true intentions, and we’re taking the next obvious steps towards wholeness and connection rather than holding back with all of the unreal thoughts that our ego puts in the path before us, all of the mental blocks, the emotional blocks and all that kind of stuff.

If you don’t know, my name is Oli Anderson, like I already said, but I’m a Creative Performance Coach, which means I help people to kind of implement a lot of these ideas in their lives and their business. You can learn more about me on my website, olianderson.co .uk.

Every episode of Creative Status, I interview somebody who has something interesting to say about life based on their background or the work that they do. And then we try and look at how this relates to the creative process and to wholeness in general. My belief is that we’re all dealing with the same reality, but we look at it from slightly different vantage points.

And if we can understand that, then we can basically learn how to go deeper into life from absolutely anybody. Today’s interview is with a Jungian life coach called Shadi Sadeghi. She has loads of amazing stuff to say about Carl Jung and her own work that she’s done, her own interpretations and twists that she’s put onto the things that she does to help people to kind of move towards individuation, which is the Jungian term, if you don’t know for basically moving towards wholeness and self-actualization.

Loads of amazing stuff, loads of insight. I personally love Carl Jung anyway. I think he’s basically right about everything.

Like he was just kind of a genius. And ultimately, this is just a really powerful conversation. If you want to learn more about his work, if you want to learn more about life itself. So Shadi, thank you so much for your time. Everyone else, thanks for listening. Here’s the interview. I’ll see you again next Monday for another episode of Creative Status.Boom.

Interview

Oli Anderson: Oh, hi there Shadi. Thank you so much for joining me today on this episode of Creative Status. You are a follower, shall we say, of somebody that I really admire, Carl Jung.

You use his work and your own work. So I’m sure we’re going to talk about that in a moment. But before we do, would you just like to introduce yourself, tell people what you’re all about and also what you want to get out of this conversation that we’re about to indulge in?

Shadi Sadeghi: Sure. Thanks, Oli.

Thanks for having me. Yes, not only am I a fan of Carl Jung, I am a certified Jungian life coach. So I actually have had over 15 years of personal development experience. Read all the books, all the self-help, personal development books, you name it, I’ve heard of it. But really, I think, and I’ve done the therapy thing. I, you know, I’ve gone through that. And then I think what really just completely changed my life was getting a Jungian life coach myself and then becoming certified and then realizing that I want to help bring people to the light, so to speak, myself.

Oli Anderson: Wow. So I suppose the obvious question there is, what is it about Carl Jung’s work that kind of appeals to you so much? Like, personally, I think he’s right about nearly everything. But what was it about the Jungian stuff that kind of clicked for you?

Shadi Sadeghi: You know, I think what clicked for me is, so because I had really read all the books, I’d done the therapy, I’d listened to every webinar, podcast, you name it. And I think that, like you said, I think Jung just gets, is like the source of, you know, and it’s a psychological basis, right?

It’s a psychological theory of how human, the human psyche develops and the stages in which it develops. So it was almost like a guide map, like a roadmap for me. And understanding why I do the things I do or why I did the things I did and why I would get stuck in certain patterns and not be able to go towards what I wanted.

And I just, to me, you know, you read about law of attraction, manifestation and like all these woo woo things, which are also part of our reality, which are part of, you know, the world we live in, the universe we live in. But I think Jung was a more practical, modern approach to that. And that’s what really resonated for me.

Yeah. So for people that are familiar with his work, so people that are listening, how would you describe, I suppose, the short version of that kind of playbook that you just described for the psyche? I know that’s a really big question, but like, what is the short version of the pathway he talked about?

So essentially what Yang uncovered in you know through he was a psychiatrist and a psychologist so he started to see patterns with his his patients and and then he also started to implement sort of an approach to to breaking those patterns in his own life and he discovered that ultimately everyone is on this path to self actualization and he called that path individuation. And individuation is essentially the what I like to say it’s the western modern world word for enlightenment so becoming a whole essentially becoming more of your potential and your true self.

Oli Anderson: Brilliant so now you’re talking my language because one of my favorite words is wholeness so the main premise of this whole podcast is that the creative process is a journey of going from a fragmented state to a state of more wholeness and that can actually apply to anything so if you use that way of describing it or defining it anything can be a creative process – the way that you drive your car the way that you talk to other people you can create opportunities in your life for bringing more wholeness into your own experience and the way that you relate to other people.

So one thing that I’m always talking about in relation to that is that as we go from fragmentation to wholeness we have to make the unconscious conscious which is that is literally a Carl Jung quote verbatim there’s a famous thing that he said he says until you discover the unconscious it will you know rule your life whatever it is and you’ll call it God and ultimately the unconscious is basically driving everything that we do and until we become aware of that and allow it to become conscious then we’re always going to be fragmented and divided and blah blah blah blah and that is not going to allow us to get the results that we want to from life.

So that was a very long-winded way of saying that but what do you have to say about that just before we dive in?

Shadi Sadeghi: Yeah that’s exactly it I mean not only not only is it it’s yes it’s creating our life but it’s because we are acting from that fragmented place so majority of people think that they form an identity which is it is the natural process of growing up that you form an identity I am you know a a good student I’m an introvert I am a lawyer a doctor whatever I’m a good daughter and so with that you know identity comes a whole host of actions and habits and patterns that you have decided is going to help you survive and so so the what doesn’t help you survive or what is you know socially unacceptable or inappropriate based on your childhood you push away into your unconscious and so that’s how we become fragmented and then we go through our life just creating from that you know just that part it’s like a piece of who we are it’s not the totality of who we are in a lot of our gifts and talents and potential and fulfillment and happiness is in our unconscious so like you said it the more that we become conscious and aware then we can actually choose who we want to become and what kind of life we want to create and then that is what creates massive shifts in our lives.

Oli Anderson: Yeah so is it fair to say then that individuation is just about raising our awareness so that we can accept ourselves more and then we can take better actions in life because if we go through that process of moving towards wholeness we find a solid foundation on which to build our lives instead of just building it according to this unreal identity that we might have picked up in childhood or wherever we picked it up and then filtered everything that we do through that and so actually it’s just about reconfiguring the way that we relate to ourselves so that we can have a better relationship with life.

Shadi Sadeghi:100 % yeah that’s it that’s exactly it.

Oli Anderson: So what is it that causes us to attach to an unreal identity in the first place like I know it’s kind of a broad question and it’ll be slightly different for everybody but what is that causes people to kind of go into hiding originally anyway so that they even need to go through this process – like if it’s such a natural process why are so many of us not aligned with that all the time anyway?

Shadi Sadeghi: Yeah so two parts to that so the first part is I think that it is a natural process but I also think that modern society has been set up in a way unfortunately so that most people don’t typically advance from a certain stage of the individuation process so that’s that’s where they kind of get stuck and I mean you can define that now as like quote-unquote midlife crisis and I think that when you look at ancient cultures traditions even you know um old times as they say um there were certain there were certain traditions and practices in place that almost were like helping the individual step into the next phase of their development.

So you know a lot of um I think a lot of you know Native American tribes they had it was like the village raised the children um they they helped them to become men and women earlier on and I think and to stay true to themselves not to say that you know back then they weren’t split or fragmented or they didn’t you know form unconscious that is I think that is the right that is the human experience no matter what that is part of the experience but we often get stuck in a stage of development wow and then I forget what was the first part of your question too you said something else

Oli Anderson: So ultimately just why is it that we become fragmented in a way that way yes yeah okay yeah.

Shadhi Sadeghi: Yeah, so like I said, we become, I think we become fragmented, essentially it’s based on multiple factors. So DNA and genetics, you cannot ignore that. There are certain, as they say, a loaded gun, right, if there is a certain type of cancer that is in your lineage, it’s been passed down. That is, that’s epigenetics.

We inherit that, right? And then there is your actual childhood experience within your family structure, within your community, within society, you know, on a smaller scale and then at a larger scale. And then there’s the culture that you grow up in as well.

All of these are different factors that shape an individual’s experience of what is it okay for me to be so that I can survive in this moment. And it’s very subtle, very knee jerk, very much, you know, we often imitate or replicate one of our parents. And so that’s why, you know, generational influence is so impactful, because we’re often learning from a parent, we’re learning how to love, we’re learning how to make money from immediately, initially from our caretakers. And then it can be reinforced or perpetuated by our school system, by our culture, by our friends, our, you know, the job that we end up getting into. And so it can be, it becomes stronger and stronger, that ego form, you know, develops and becomes stronger and stronger.

Oli: Yeah. Like, I always look at the ego as basically been the world internalized. So we pick up all these external ideas, and we take them on board has been true. But then eventually we start to identify with them as well. And so our identity becomes outside in instead of inside out. And when we end up putting ourselves in that situation, that’s when we end up becoming incredibly fragmented, because we’re just owning parts of ourselves that are socially acceptable.

And so that means that we’re going to disown a bunch of parts, which are very real and very necessary, and they’re never going to go anywhere. But we create a version of ourselves where those parts are kind of out of sight, out of mind. That’s when we end up getting the shadow itself. So I think we should explore that in a minute. But I want to backtrack a little bit to what you were just saying about how society ultimately either supports our development and journey towards wholeness, or it kind of causes us to hold back or to remain in a kind of a rested state of development or whatever, where we’re basically in a bubble.

We’re stuck. So when you were talking about the tribes and everything like that, like the Native Americans or, you know, all of these kind of ancient cultures, they used to have rights of passage, didn’t they? So the famous example is, you know, once a boy reached puberty or whatever he was, he was going to be a man. They take him out to go hunting and, you know, he might wander off into the desert or whatever by himself and he’d have some kind of experience where, you know, he might figure out what his spirit animal is or something like that.

But the point is those rituals would be built into the culture and they would actually support the journey from one stage of development to the next. Because basically once they came back from that rite of passage, they were no longer in the realm of childhood. They were like actual adults, they were men. They understood more about life and reality and all that kind of stuff.

So do you think, and I’m making a big assumption, but do you think based on the fact that those kind of rites of passage are not as common in our society now than they may have maybe once were, do you think that we’re kind of living in a bubble where we’re actually hiding from some of the harsher realities of life, I guess, and that is causing us to not be as whole as we can be because you have to face the dark stuff, you know, like if you go out hunting and all that kind of stuff, you have to face the dark stuff in order to become whole basically. So is there something that like I’m kind of making it too broad, but what do you think?

Shadi: Interesting. You know, it’s funny you use the word bubble, but to me like a bubble feels safe and protective. And yes, and I get that element of it, what you’re implying is sort of people are shielded from facing their fears or fully accepting these aspects of themselves as they’re growing up. I mean, you know, going through puberty, going through, you know, teenager years, et cetera, et cetera into adulthood. But to me, I feel like because modern society is lacking those community safeguards to evolve and to make mistakes or to face their fears, you know, whatever those ritualistic practices are, those traditions are, it’s almost like people are flailing, like kids are flailing.

And so especially with technology, what do they look to, they look to because they don’t have the community elder or the tribe, you know, the tribe elder mentor, they look to social media, they look to celebrities, pro athletes, they look to if you’re lucky, you have an honor uncle that you admire, you know, or an elder in your family or your culture. But I think that they’re actually, they’re, they’re, they’re flailing. That’s it’s like, it’s not a bubble, it’s so much it’s like, they’re going through, we are inevitably going to go through struggles and challenges in, you know, in different chapters of our lives and different phases of development in our lives.

But there’s just no one. And their parents are also, they have the same experience, right? When you look back like one, two, three, four generations back. So it’s like the flailing are, are raising more flailing in children or, and it’s inadvertent, you know, it’s, I’m not, I’m not, I’m not criticizing parents, parents are parenting is the hardest one in the hardest job. It is the hardest job, I think, on the planet. And they’re doing the best that they can. But I think that society also, like society is reflecting the individual, right?

So when, when you see large communities in a unable to fess up to their mistakes or their shortcomings or whatever their shame or anything like that then Individuals also will do the same. They will not face aspects of themselves that they are either Afraid of or ashamed of and that is those shadow aspects that you talk about Yeah, so they just stay in the unconscious the unconscious mind and it just sort of gets bigger and bigger and bigger until one day It is just no longer sustainable And then boom you got the midlife crisis.

Oli: Like I think the a simple way to look at it is Exactly like you said so if if one generation becomes disconnected from reality for whatever reason and they They’re basically taking themselves off of the path Collectively towards moving to hope towards wholeness, which means facing all of the dark stuff about life, you know death That we’re gonna make mistakes blah blah blah blah blah all these things that trigger our shame if we try and live in a way that Puts that keeps it at arm’s length then ultimately we are creating a collective ego that is going to be passed on to the next generation and then the next generation and the next generation…society is just other people isn’t and so if the people are unreal IE they’re not moving towards owners if they’re unreal as individuals then the society as a whole is gonna be unreal as well.

Something I’m always saying is if you put real in you get real out if you put unreal in you get unreal out and what because society has kind of been built by people who are disconnected from meaning or truth for whatever reason in general obviously not everybody is disconnected in this way then society ends up reflecting up so can we say that You’ve kind of just said it right on an individual level if you avoid the truth for too long then eventually something is gonna happen because it’s not sustainable and the truth is gonna come sweeping back into your life we’ll have a midlife crisis.

So, you know, you’ll hit rock bottom and ultimately when that happens, I always think it’s because your unconscious drives Your unconscious drive to be real and to move towards homeless is basically reconfiguring your life so that you go back on the right path. So that happens with individuals But is it likely that that is either going to happen or is in the or is in the process of happening with? With you know society as a whole so we’re taking it in a totally different direction but what do you think?

Shadi: I mean Look around -what’s happening right now? 2020 I think that we are as a as a collective Listen young game theory says and this is this is also very much aligned with Ancient religions Buddhism Hinduism. We are all connected. So in Jungian psychology there is something called the unconscious Collective the there’s the personal which is on an individual level, which is just my unconscious my shadow and then the deeper you go then there’s the the archetypal world That is the next stage of individuation and then the next stage after that is the collective unconscious Are we are all connected?

So whhat we are seeing in society at a large is reflecting our internal conflict and so I think that I think that this is an incredible time in history in in the development of Humankind and I I know that sounds very trite or or I don’t want to downplay people’s struggles and what’s happening in the world but Absolutely, I think that what what we are seeing is Many people especially since 2020 are Whether they like it or not whether they’re conscious of it or not are facing their shadow Yeah, and going through that and so on an individual basis. I mean just look at Statistically look at the mental health numbers as well But you know, it’s it’s going to reflect in it and the many people call this the dark night of the soul and this is a process in which One you know one must go through at one point in their life many points actually in their life And so the way that I this is why I feel like young Ian coaching is so helpful is because it’s expected that you’re going to go through That but we want to be more conscious and aware And instead of having as I call it the cosmic bus kind of drag you Towards your wholeness It’s you know, it’s important to be more conscious and aware of of going towards it instead of you know one day just Waking up and you know blowing up your life.

Oli: Yeah, yeah, yeah, so if you live in the right way or in a real way you’re Constantly evolving and expanding and responding to the wholeness in yourself and then the wholeness in life but if you don’t live in that way, well, the alternative is that you’re unreal, which means that you’re clinging to the filter of the ego as if that’s true, but the ego only exists in order to Help you survive what you think you’ve already been through. Okay. That’s a good thing but also it exists to keep the shadow itself at bay.

This is how I see it the ego and the shadow are always in constant conflict, but the the ego is ultimately a product of conscious mind and the shadow is a product of or is the thing that drives or kind of fuels the unconscious mind. And so individually I found like in my own life and like working with people in my own coaching practice sometimes when we’re going through that dark night of the soul in fact not sometimes always if we’re going through the dark night of the soul it means that we have reached the end of the line when it comes to the current version of our of our ego.

We’re holding on to an idea that is devoid of meaning and is not actually getting us the results that we need in reality. And so the dark night of the soul is basically a call to wake the fuck up is saying look now is the time for you to raise your awareness and to reconfigure your belief system so you can start flowing with reality again.

And people resist because obviously if you let go of the ego then the shadow is going to come swimming up to the surface then you’re gonna have to feel the shame the guilt the trauma that you’ve been hiding from and all the disowned parts you’re gonna have to make friends with them again blah blah blah.

If you keep resisting you get to the point where you become self-destructive like you might end up getting an addiction you might start making really bad choices you know as a way of escaping this reality that is calling to you but that self-destruction is actually self-resurrection and so that’s the worst case scenario is that you don’t listen you’ll destroy yourself but actually that process of self-destruction is so that the real you can rise again to the surface and I suppose that is potentially happening collectively as well because what you said the collective unconscious there’s a shadow there there’s things that we’ve disowned about humanity as a whole but we have to own them and face them because they’re real.

Real always works so I suppose the question is what do you think about that?

Shadi: I just got goosebumps. Yeah you hit it.

Oli: Yeah thank you. What do you think about the whole self-destruction thing but also we were talking before the call about this idea of like shadow language or you call it mirror work which is the idea that you know the unconscious stuff is always there it’s always screaming from beneath the surface of what we think we know at the level of the ego the conscious mind blah blah blah but if we can learn to listen we can avoid having to hit rock bottom and go through that self-destruction self-resurrection process and to start flowing with like awareness and acceptance and then inspired actually as I always say it so what would you say about all that and I know there’s probably loads that you can see.

Shadi: Yeah so two parts again I want to go back to what you were just saying with really what society is going through what the collective is going through I think that do you follow Gabor Mate at all? Are you familiar with him?

Oli: I think I heard him on a podcast or something but I haven’t read his books or anything.

Shadi: Yeah so I think I believe he’s a psychologist he’s a Canadian he’s a Hungarian Canadian psychologist actually. Yeah he’s Hungarian and he has exploded like in the last year and he talks to this very much and I think he is actually he may be a psychiatrist I think he’s from in the medical field because he is the first of his kind that is getting a platform at the scale where he is very vocally talking about this concept of you know he talks specifically about trauma and addictions and that self destructive behavior and that it is a protective mechanism it’s not that people are willfully choosing to do drugs or you know numb themselves it is a protective mechanism which as you described it is the ego it is the ego trying to keep the shadow at bay and I call the ego the overprotective bouncer like the overprotective bouncer at the door and it it wants your best interest it’s protective and then so he you know if he had surface like I would say even two years ago I don’t think the world would have been ready for him and I think that that just goes to show that people are going through enough struggles where they’re beginning to this is resonating for them what he’s speaking to what we’re speaking to really is is more resonating for people because they’re ready for it and so that was what I wanted to say and then the damn you asked such great questions Oli I missed the second part the last part of the question which I wanted to get back to.

Oli: I might be wrong but basically it was about the self destruction is self resurrection thing so what we’re saying is the ego yeah me too but okay so the ego is a protective device that’s true right but the thing is it causes us to protect ourselves so much that we start forcing life instead of flowing with it and the second part of the question was about the shadow language or the the mirror stuff so I think we end up in so busy forcing life that we become blind to all of these kind of these whispers shall we say or these signs yeah that the shadow is throwing us and so is there something there where we can learn to listen to that stuff so we can avoid hitting rock bottom and having to…

Shadi: Yeah, that was it I remember now yeah so so really the secret is, and this is easier said than done, I mean this is essentially shadow work is to see everything that is coming up in your reality, in your life as feedback. And it is, so it is mirroring your internal belief system and your unconscious mind.

So reality is mind, that’s like what I always say, your reality is your mind is reflecting your mind. And I know that’s oversimplifying it and it’s not that easy, it’s super hard because ultimately that means owning your shit and it means that you are accountable for everything that’s showing up in your life and that’s coming into your life. And I don’t mean to say, you know, because people are like, what about if you get cancer?

What about if like an accident happens or something like that? Yes, of course those things happen or going to happen in life, right? But how you respond to it is going to create your life, is going to create your reality. And how you respond is dictated by unresolved unconscious aspects.

Oli: But there is also an element where we can go totally crazy and off the charts and say that we do attract everything that comes into our experience. And obviously if life sucks right now, if you’re at the start of this individuation process and you’re really fragmented and you’re stuck in a victim mindset and blah blah blah blah, here in somebody say you attract everything in your life is going to be very offensive because obviously you don’t want to admit that all these bad things are down to you at some level. But ultimately, it goes back to what I was saying earlier, if you put unreal in, you get unreal out. If you put real in, you get real out, right?

And so if you’re at the start of this journey of moving from fragmentation to wholeness, the void within you between the shadow self and the ego that you’re putting out to the world, that is going to be, there’s going to be a big gap basically, there’s going to be a big chasm. And if that chasm is there, you’re going to have emotional turbulence of some kind, because there’s no way that you can’t, because that gap between the ego and the shadow needs to be as narrow as possible in order for you to feel whole within yourself. And if you can feel whole within yourself, then your inner state means that you’re going to be putting out wholeness into the world, you’re going to be putting real out there.

And so you’re more likely to get real back. And even on the most basic level, if you don’t want to sound like a lunatic, you could just say that if you’re fragmented within yourself, you’re going to make fragmented choices, which is going to cause fragmented things to come into your life. Yes, mixed messages.

Yeah, exactly, right? And so you could say that probably, and this is a question for you, instead of me running and raving, but could you say that, you know, if somebody has a lot of friction in their life, so things are constantly going wrong, you know, mistakes have constantly been made, relationships have fractured, and there’s tension and drama and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. If life is like that, that is a sign, I would say, that you have to do some inner work, even if it’s just learning to set healthy boundaries or something like that.

But your external state always reflects what’s going on inside of you. Is that true? 1000%. Yeah.

So, yeah. So what are some of the things then that we can look out for? So what kind of things might be happening in our life that we can take as a sign to, you know, get our shit together, basically? And then how do we go about doing that?

Shadi: Oof. All right, so we’re going, we’re going the tough love route with on this, on this episode.

All right. For those who are experiencing a lot of conflict, drama, friction, like always, you know, nothing works out for me, nothing, you know, why does this keep happening to me? I honestly, the very first integral step of change is accepting responsibility for how are you contributing to all of these things in your life? And how are, you know, how might you, number one, how might you, not even how might you be contributing, but I think that I don’t like to say this, but you know, the victim mentality, because the victim mentality is necessary as well.

I think that that is a protective mechanism. And I honor that aspect of the individual psyche. But I think that as soon as I sense myself feeling like XYZ is happening to me, that is a telltale sign. I’m giving my power away to something outside of me. And I’m not owning my, my responsibility for my life. And so if we are in a toxic relationship, for example, I’m not saying that the other person is not toxic, or I’m not saying that the circumstances are, are not, you know, you’re up against a wall, you know, of course you are, but you’re also complicit.

And I think that that’s the piece that is integral to change is in really arming yourself with that knowledge that I’m in control. I get to, you know, yes, I’m choosing to stay in a toxic relationship or situation, you know, if could be work, and I’m complicit. And that’s still a choice. The alternative may not be a comfortable choice, but you always have the power to choose.

Oli: Choice is so important. Like the choice thing, if you can get to that place where you can make real choices, i.e. you’re coming from a place of wholeness within yourself, then it means that you have gone through some kind of a process of raising awareness of all this stuff. The problem is for a lot of people that they’re kind of running on autopilot, like the ego stuff. It’s kind of like a program that’s just running in their minds based on, you know, what we’ve been saying about the shadow and the ego, and then need to survive whatever it is that they’ve already been through and to avoid situations like that again in the future.

But the thing is, if we’re running on autopilot like that, then we are just going to attract more drama and more bullshit because anytime that drama and bullshit comes into our lives, we’re going to react to it based on that programming. And so there’s an element, I think, where we need to dissolve the shame and maybe guilt and to some extent trauma but we need to dissolve the shame that is causing us or people in general, people who are suffering from this problem, we need to dissolve the shame that is causing them to rely on the autopilot rather than their feeling of realness or the connection to wholeness that is their real state because once you come from that real place, the place of wholeness, all of that drama and all of that toxicity and all of those things that can happen when we’ve been unreal, it kind of just dissolves

It gets neutralized because as soon as the unreal stuff meets the real intention within whoever it is that we’re talking about, then it’s basically seen to be unreal and it has no power and so it’s only us being unreal that gives power to other unreal situations if that makes sense and the way out of that is to stop being driven by shame I found to dissolve the shame so that you can let the ego kind of lose its power to some extent and you can start coming from that real place.

If that makes sense.

Shadi: Can I interject real quick? I hear you and you can’t dissolve shame so the thing is what people do is they integrate it because nobody likes to feel shame, nobody likes to face shame so we avoid it. We numb ourselves, we distract ourselves and if you imagine a scenario if you’re public speaking and in a moment you forget what you’re about to say, I think it’s very instinctive for someone to feel like you your palms get sweaty and in that moment we squash it.

That is the autopilot reaction so that is how we’ve been conditioned. It doesn’t feel good, we don’t like to feel shame so it is automatic instinct to just squash it and push it away and whatever you’re pushing away, whatever you’re resisting is going to persist so you’re going to create more, you’re going to create more experiences of shame because you’re avoiding it so what you actually want to do is bring light to it, you want to sit with it, you want to integrate it and you want to observe why it’s coming up and why it’s so bad.

Why is the ego defending a feeling? It’s just a feeling in the body, it’s uncomfortable, it doesn’t feel great but the sooner you actually just sit with it or honor it or see it and observe it for what it is then it dissipates. Then it subsides and then you start to see, oh wow, that’s not a big deal actually. That’s when the resistance subsides as well and it just becomes more state of flow and that’s really part of the individuation process. It is integrating these uncomfortable emotions.

Oli: Yeah, 100%. That’s actually what I mean by shame dissolving. Shame driven is exactly what you said. People who are shame driven, they try to resist it and like Carl Jung said, what you resist persists and so it just causes the problem to get worse but in relation to all this stuff that we’ve been talking about, ego is the thing, it’s basically the glue that holds the ego together. Shame is the glue that holds the ego together because the fear of feeling that shame is what causes people to run around like headless chickens on autopilot to keep it at bay and shame dissolving I would say is where you accept that it’s a real thing.

Okay, you feel it but by feeling it and staring it right in the face, that’s when it kind of disappears. You realize that it has no power over you because shame that drives you and controls you is always an ego thing because it’s always about judgment and the ego is ultimately the illusion of judgment and so when you step away from that and put yourself back on path to wholeness then you can kind of step back and come from that real place where all of these things like the drama and the bullshit and the toxicity that we’re talking about, those things they rest on the ego having a hold over somebody basically and so if you can step away from one you can step away from the other but the only way to do it is to kind of ride through the shame or to integrate or to face it whatever word you want to use which means that you can bring the shadow self to the surface as well and then that gap we were talking about between the ego and the shadow gets narrower and narrower and then we’ll make better choices in life ultimately because it’s all kinda linked.

Shadi:It also releases sort of this repressed energy because feelings are usually it’s energy so it’s creative energy, it’s energy to be free and when you integrate these repressed aspects when you really release them it’s like letting them out of Pandora’s box it opens up this energy to create something new something outside of that shame pattern or I think anxiety is another one that just came to me I think it’s so prevalent right now across society as I say this there’s a siren in the background and I think that people’s struggles with anxiety is because they’re they’re resisting it it’s like it has a hold on them because they’re so resistant to just letting it surface and sitting with it and becoming aware of it and what and then the more you become aware of it then the more you start to see how it’s been a defense tactic implemented from a really early age.

Sometimes often from a very small experience or it could be a trauma it doesn’t even have to be a massive trauma it could be from anything experience you had with a parent or a caregiver and then your body kicks into that fight, flight, freeze or fond response and then as you grow up the mind doesn’t know the difference between that experience from childhood and your boss chastising you or something you know something that could seem very trivial but then your nervous system kicks in with that same response because it immediately associates it with that childhood experience that conditioned response and so the sooner you just so it was planted there a long time ago it is just a defense mechanism so the sooner you actually just just sit with it and give it what it needs, which sometimes is just the chance to be seen and heard. It’s just a part of us. It’s this energy that just wants to be acknowledged. Then the sooner it’s released and then you can start to see like, holy cow, like I’ve been doing this unconsciously.

I’ve been doing this without recognizing it in certain situations.

Oli: Yeah. Do you think we could say that that release is ultimately the return to reality or wholeness, whatever word we’re going to use? I think a lot of the issues we’re talking about, so anxiety, depression, blah, blah, blah, all these things that can show up in people’s lives, they’re symptoms of being detached from reality in some sense. I know reality kind of has a bad reputation. If you say get real, it can sometimes mean give up on your dreams or whatever, but getting real, being real actually means putting yourself in alignment with wholeness.

And any time you start to believe things that take you away from that because of the programming, the scripts, the assumptions you picked up in childhood, blah, blah, blah. If you start believing that stuff and it’s unreal, it just adds unnecessary tension to your experience. That tension is what we call anxiety, depression, blah, blah, blah, toxicity in relationships.

It’s just all the same thing, which is something that is causing us to move towards unreality rather than reality. We’ve covered a lot, but to wrap all this up, could we say that the release of that tension that you were just talking about is just the return to wholeness or whatever we want to say?

Shadi: Yeah, the way I see it is it’s radical acceptance. Radical acceptance is returning to your wholeness.

We are born whole, and I mean in spiritual concepts and theory, you can say we’re born light, we’re born love and light. Then through our conditioning, it’s like these veils just get layered and layered and layered on top, which is the tension that you describe. It’s this resistance to what is. It’s almost like we’re in denial of reality, of the truth of who we are.

And then the more you start to become aware and more conscious and integrate those repressed aspects of yourself, you are lifting those veils and returning to the truth of who you are, which is a being of love and light and accepting. So what does that mean? That means accepting that at any moment, if I feel like crap, okay, I’m going to accept this reality that I feel like crap right now. I’m going to sit with it, and I’m going to accept I feel like crap right now, and then it subsides even much faster.

It’s incredible. I mean, a lot of my clients are like, wow, just sitting with it sometimes like, I’m like, holy cow, it just went away. And the more you accept whoever and whatever you are, or whatever your reality is, even if it’s not true, the sooner you accept it in that moment. Yes, my boss and I don’t get along, or yes, I am in a bad marriage. The sooner you accept that and you accept how you’re showing up in response to that and owning it, then you are returning to yourself, your homeless.

Oli: Love it. And it goes full circle because actually at the start of the conversation, we were saying, you know, if you’ve got all this stuff going on inside where you become fragmented, then ultimately, you start making choices about your life that are motivated by the ego stuff only. And if you start making those choices, then obviously your life is going to become unreal. And so if you accept everything no matter what, then obviously you’re going to accept reality.

But if you accept reality, it’s a shortcut to accepting yourself as well. And if you have exactly exceptions of yourself, that gap between the ego and the shadow and between, you know, you and everything else is going to become narrower and narrower and narrower. And that’s when life is going to move in the direction that it needs to, not that you think it should because of all your programming and so on and so forth. So we’ve been talking quite a long time.

It’s gone quick. I always say that, but it’s always true. Have you got any final words to sum up everything that we talked about? No pressure because we talked about a lot of stuff. But how would you know we covered a lot? Yeah, but how would you sum up this conversation? And also, can you tell people where they can learn more about you and your coaching and all that kind of stuff?

Shadi: Yeah, sure. So I mean, I know it sounds really simple yet poignant, but like we are, we are in, we’re in the driver’s seat. That’s ultimately, and I’ve said, I say this over and over again, and I think a lot of people sort of feel helpless or powerless in whatever situation they’re in, but rest assured you are, you are in the driver’s seat of your life at any moment.

And you know, the sooner that we can take ownership of that, the sooner we can create change towards a desired outcome or desired reality or what we really truly want that is aligned with our wholeness and who we are. And then so you can find me on Instagram. My handle is at thislifefulfiled, f-u-l-f-i-l-l-e-d. And I offer a complimentary consult session with anyone who’s interested, curious about my work. And I do, I am taking one-on-one clients right now at the moment. And you can email me, you can DM me on Instagram or if you’re not on Instagram, you can email me. My name, my first name is spelled S-H-A-D-I.

And my email address is shadi@intuit-coaching.com.

Oli: Perfect. So I’ll share all your links and everything in the show notes. But Shadi, thank you so much for coming on here and sharing all this stuff. It’s been really awesome to hear about it. So really appreciate it.

Shadi:Thank you, Oli. It was so fun talking with you. We could talk about this forever.

Oli: Yeah, that’s the thing. I think I can keep going for like another few hours. I’ll save you for though!

Creative Status is a podcast about using creativity as a vehicle for improving your life by deconstructing ego, integrating the shadow self, and designing and manifesting a real life. Every episode explores how the creative process can help you GROW REAL by moving towards wholeness in yourself by making the unconscious conscious.

This episode of Creative Status is an amazing conversation about shame and ego death with coach Kalyca Zarich.

If you’ve listened to the podcast before then you’ll have definitely heard some ranting and raving about the EGO – it was about time we dived into looking at the mechanics of killing this darned thing so we can live a REAL life.

Actually, “Ego Death” is kind of a myth because you CAN’T KILL SOMETHING UNREAL. All you can do is to allow your ideas about it to evolve so you can keep evolving into wholeness.

“Shame” is another topic that pops up loads in these conversations because – in my opinion – shame is the main driving force that causes people to hide from themselves and to erect barriers between themselves and themselves (i.e. pick up false ideas of EGO).

Once we understand our relationship with our own shame and learn to master it then we can start to free ourselves from ego and its unhealthy hold over us because we can LEAN back into our REALNESS instead of shrinking from it.

This was a really great conversation about some of the misconceptions we tend to have around these ideas and also what we can DO to start improving our lives.

I really appreciated Kalyca’s energy and the way that she was able to be so candid whilst talking about things that are often difficult to talk about.

This is a very ‘human’ conversation that will make you more human if you implement some of the insight it gives you.

Listen using the embedded player above or on your favourite podcast platform!

(Scroll down for full show transcript)

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Episode Links:

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Kalyca on Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/kalycajinzarich/⁠

Creative Status Links:

The Creative Performance Transformation Lab: ⁠⁠⁠olianderson.co.uk/creativeperformance⁠⁠⁠

Follow me on Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠instagram.com/olijanderson⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

My YouTube channel: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠youtube.com/olianderson⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Get my books on Amazon: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠amazon.com/author/oli⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

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Show Transcript: Ego Death, Shame, & Creativity

INTRO

Oli Anderson: Oh hi there, Oli Anderson here, you’re listening to Creative Status.

This is a podcast if you don’t know about using the creative process as a vehicle for moving towards realness or wholeness or healing or connection or whatever word you want to use.

My name is Oli Anderson, like I just said, I’m a creative performance coach. I help people to bring realness into their lives and business. Most of what I talk about is based off the stuff in my books, Personal Revolutions, the Short Costs and Realness, and Shadow Life.

Every episode of Creative Status, I basically interview somebody about creativity, realness, connection, all the things I just mentioned, and I try to understand the philosophical and psychological implications of all this stuff to show that it has real world practical value and to show you how you can kind of implement this stuff in your own life without it sounding like a bunch of gobbledygook. Today’s interview is with an amazing business coach called Kaleeka Zarik.

The interview itself though has nothing really to do with the business coaching stuff. We actually talk about some of the underlying emotional stuff that can get in the way of our journey towards wholeness that can cause us to become fragmented.

We ultimately dive quite deep into shame, trauma, how it shows up, what it looks like in our lives, how it causes the ego to basically restrict our experience of ourselves and of life, and what we can do about it. So, Kalyca, thank you so much because you shared quite a lot of your own experience in this conversation, which was a really brave thing to do. You really candid, really open, really honest, and I got some amazing insight from it. Everybody else, thank you so much for listening to the podcast.

Please leave a review somewhere. If this helps you in any way, that’s going to help other people find it and help them too. And of course, it’s going to allow me to be rich and famous because my podcast is going to be more popular.

But yeah, there’ll be another episode of Creative Status next Monday. Hope you enjoyed this conversation. I really did.

Kalyca, thanks again. Everybody else. Here we go. Boom.

INTERVIEW

Oli Anderson: Oh, hi there, Kalcya. Thank you so much for joining me today on this episode of Creative Status. I have a suspicion, as I always do, to be honest, that this is going to be a kind of deep conversation about some very meaningful things.

I suppose I have to say that. But ultimately, we’re going to be exploring a lot of ideas to do with shame, how shame shows up in people’s lives, how it holds them back, and how it ultimately causes them to create a false version of themselves that they can identify with, which limits what’s possible in their lives. So that’s me throwing some expectations of the conversation out there.

Before we get into it, do you just feel like introducing yourself, telling people what you do, and also letting us know what you personally want to get from this conversation?

Kalyca Zarich: Of course, yeah. I mean, first and foremost, I’m really grateful for this opportunity to be here with you today, and to share some of the things that I’ve been working through over the past, gosh, 33 years. That’s how old I am.

So yeah, I’m Kalyca. I actually live in the United States. I live in Colorado.

I’ve lived here my whole life. I love the mountains. I love exploring, adventure. I’m a and yeah, I’ve really been on a deep journey of healing.

Like so many of us or all of us, I guess, experienced a lot of trauma, grief, loss, and just trying to make sense out of my existence here on earth.

Oli Anderson: Wow. I love mountains and stuff too. So I’m a little bit jealous they’re in Colorado. But yeah, one thing that comes up a lot in this podcast is a little line that I just I’m always throwing out, which is that the main issues in our lives are shame, guilt, and trauma.

If we as human beings have like unresolved shame, guilt or trauma in the most extreme cases, then ultimately what happens is, is that we find ourselves becoming fragmented and then we go into hiding. Fragmentation is kind of bad – it sucks, because ultimately it goes against the natural drive that we all have towards wholeness.

So we’re going to dive into that a little bit more deeply, I’m assuming than I normally do, because I normally just end up throwing it out there and running and raving about it. Of those three things though, shame, guilt, and trauma, just to get this conversation like opened up and going a bit. I have found that in most people’s lives, shame is the thing that kind of screws them up most commonly.

It might not screw them up more than trauma, but in general, I have found that there are two kinds of people out there in the world. There’s shame driven people and the shame dissolving people. That basically means that everybody has some kind of shame that they’ve picked up as they’ve been going through life.

But you can relate to it in two ways. If you’re shame driven, that’s when you end up going into hiding and the shame is dictating nearly everything that you do and causing you to filter your life through the ego. If you’re shame dissolving, that’s when you kind of wake up and you put yourself on some kind of a healing path and it can be different for everybody, but that path is basically dissolving the shame by taking you back to wholeness.

Wholeness just means connection to yourself, connection to others and connection to the world. So that’s just me framing how I see all this stuff, but to open it up, what do you think about that idea that there are quite a lot of people out there running around and they’re just being driven by their own shame, maybe in many cases without even knowing?

Kalyca Zarich: Oh, it is so profoundly true based on my experience. I mean, yeah, speaking with you for the first time when we met about a month ago, I was so relieved to hear you speak of these things because you have a very profound way of explaining the things that I’ve felt and the things that I’ve kind of gone through.

I think I spent, gosh, so much of my life being shame driven. Truly in a state of survival, survival mode to the extreme. And I think I look back on that period and having kind of transitioned now into dissolving and moving towards wholeness. I think I do have regrets about spending so much time in that shame cycle is kind of what it feels like. And the other thought I have is that, I think for so long I blamed the trauma.

Like I pointed to the trauma being like, this is the problem. And it wasn’t until I started to move through the process of healing that I recognized and I can recognize now that it was shame all along that was really removing me from my true self.

Oli Anderson: Yeah, so ultimately that’s what it all boils down to in my view, like when we move to our wholeness, dissolve and all that stuff we just said, when we do that, it puts us on the path to being reconnected ultimately to the real version of ourselves.

Realness is what I call it. When we get to that place, that’s when everything kind of clicks. Like we feel amazing, we got energy because we’re not weighing ourselves down with all these negative thoughts or whatever it is. We’re just flowing with life instead of forcing it. One of the reasons that shame is so kind of screwed up is because it causes shame driven people to become control freaks.

That’s what I found. Like I used to be like this to be honest and like I’ve seen it with people that I work with now they become control freaks because when we got all this shame bubbling away beneath the surface, we need to control the external world so that it doesn’t trigger that shame basically. And so that means we’ll try and, I don’t want to use the word manipulate but we’ll try and control people to act in certain ways. We’ll try and change other people.

We’ll try and change the world. We externalize everything ultimately so that we don’t turn inwards and then face that shame in the short term so that we can start dissolving it. So I guess the question is, does that align with your experience? And to open it up even more, what was it that you started doing to go from that shame driven place to like this shame dissolving path you put yourself on towards, wholeness or realness and that kind of thing?

Kalyca Zarich: Oh my gosh, yeah, such a deep question. So I guess it would be helpful to share part of the experience that definitely resulted in me going into a mode of hyper control. So I was sexually assaulted when I was 14 and I actually was not able to speak those words or share that with anyone until I was in my mid 20s.

So immediately after it happened, I went into, I kind of internalized everything. I didn’t know where to turn, I didn’t know what to do but the biggest thing was that I 100 % blamed myself. I think the only way I could reconcile what had happened was to place blame. And for me, the easiest way to do that was to, I guess it’s a control thing already emerging but to tell myself that it was entirely my fault and that I had put myself in that position. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I was hanging out with people I shouldn’t have been and that just created an immediate shame cycle, right? As you can imagine. And I buried it. It buried it as deep as I possibly could and I tried to convince myself that it never happened. And I think that was because I couldn’t handle the shame of that experience because that’s where I took it.

And then from there, I think that really did set the stage. Everything you’re saying is so true to my experience because I think that carrying that shame of that experience and not sharing it with anyone, not feeling safe, really kind of moved me into living into the identity of a victim. Like that’s an identity that I carried with me forever.

And then the other part, the control part, it actually manifested itself later as obsessive, compulsive behaviors. I struggled with an eating disorder. That being a huge part of the control where I was suffering so much internally that starting to attach to external behaviors and external validation was part of the cycle, right?

I remember… I’m thinking like actually having the thought like, oh, this is something I can control. Like I need to focus all of my time and effort on this.

And you know, in hindsight, it’s like, it makes sense as a coping mechanism because then I distracted myself so much with those behaviors that I didn’t have to feel any of the shame or feel less of the shame, right?

Oli Anderson: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. Like, so obviously thank you for sharing your personal experience, because it’s kind of like a, I don’t want to use the word extreme, but it’s a serious example of the kind of thing that we’re talking about.

So it allows us to see the structure of how this works because I’ve found like, even people who have not necessarily experienced something to that degree, still have this stuff going on in their lives, and it causes them to hold back and to distract themselves and to try and control things in the way that we’ve just said, so that they don’t grow into the real version of themselves.

But basically it, shame ends up putting some kind of a block between what is going on inside us and needs to come to the surface and the process of allowing that to happen. And no matter who we are, it’s only by allowing that kind of unconscious stuff to become conscious that we can heal and keep growing and expanding in the way that we need to. And so what you’ve shared is like, it’s like not a textbook version, but it shows really clearly what people are kind of dealing with.

So let’s break it down a little bit, right? So in your case, you ended up kind of coping with this, and we have to remember as well, like the ego stuff that we’re talking about, the identity stuff that we talk about, it is a survival thing, right? So your way of dealing with the situation was to kind of shut down a little bit, to go into victim mode, and that was your way of avoiding these feelings, which in the short term, would no doubt have fucking soaked, but the healing was always gonna be on the other side of letting that stuff go where it needs to go. So I always think people either become victims, or they become like heroes when they go through something like this, but both of those things are totally unreal. So in the case of the victim, they basically end up blaming everything that’s happened on external forces and that kind of thing, or they end up blaming themselves, but then directing that outwards. The heroes on the other hand, they basically end up becoming too callous almost, like they shut down their feelings, and they think they can just handle everything in life, that it’s gonna throw at them, and they basically avoid their feelings by acting as though they were stronger than they are.

So that was a very long-winded way of saying that. The victim kind of identifies with their weakness that they think they’ve perceived in themselves. The heroes, whatever you wanna call them, they end up identifying with the kind of false strength that isn’t there, but in both cases, it’s about avoiding the feelings. So how did you get over the victim thing? And like, how do you see the whole victim thing now? Because even, we’re saying all this, but there’s a lot of controversy to some extent, around saying the victim mindset is unreal, and it shouldn’t exist, and we should take responsibility, and keep growing, and dissolving our shame, and blah, blah, blah.

And at the end of the day, like if you got sexually assaulted, that’s an awful thing to happen. And so we could say, in some ways, you’re a victim of that, but what is the fine line, I guess, between acknowledging that, yes, something bad did happen, but you’re not a victim, if that question even makes sense.

Kalyca Zarich: Oh yeah, yeah, it does. It’s interesting that you kind of presented that, because I think, for me, I had layers of both, the hero and the victim. I think the victim identity was much more overt, like it was a little bit more hidden.

And I think, so I guess really what happened was, about, gosh, I guess it was 2021, I experienced a full-blown ego death, and I had actually been working with a coach, for like a year and a half leading up to that point, and I think she had just been expanding me so much, and giving me a container and a space to let a lot of my pain and shame out, and know that I was still okay, that it sort of triggered this whole ego death process.

So I think the thing that I think about with shedding that, I feel like it’s shedding the victim identity is what I went through. Through that process of expanding, I was able to recognize that, I am not that event. I am not even a product, really, of the circumstances that I’ve survived. There’s so much more depth to who I truly am, right?

And yeah, so I guess that was really one of the turning points for me, although I really don’t think that would have been possible without me sort of feeling like enough’s enough, and being willing and vulnerable, and able to start opening up to people, and start asking for help.

Oli: Yeah, no, that’s amazing.

Like, I think that’s quite common. So when people are going through these transformational journeys, they eventually reach a point where they’re like, right, this breaking point, basically, enough is enough, because they realize that the way they’re doing things or the way they’ve been going about life in general is unreal, something like that.

They realize they need to make some changes at a fundamental level and that’s when basically they’ve reached the end of the line of that current version of the identity because if you find yourself at breaking point, I believe it’s because the identity is not as fluid as it needs to be, if that makes sense.

Like if you keep a static image of yourself and you take it out into the world or out into reality, eventually you’re going to have to break and you’re going to have to go through some kind of ego death or something like that. So let’s talk about that if that’s cool. Like when you go through this whole experience with ego death and everything, what exactly do you mean by that?

Because personally, I don’t think we can kill the ego and I know it’s just a language thing, but like I think we can step back from it and then we can see like where it’s been kind of screwing us up or whatever. But in your case, like what was going on there? Like what happened specifically?

Kalyca: Yeah. So I guess a little bit more background on the circumstances leading up to that point. And then I’d love to share what it felt like because I think that will give it more, it’ll make it easier to understand.

So, you know, I mentioned that I kind of did both coping, I took on both methods of coping the hero. And the way that looked was really the control thing. It was a lot of self punishment. I went into a like a deep state of self punishment.

So along with struggling through the like control externalization with the eating disorder, I got heavily into running. That was sort of a escape for me, a release. In many ways, very healing. I kind of think about it as a double edged sword, because it did provide me with a lot of healing and experiences that I would not trade for the world.

I honestly don’t even know how I would have survived that period if it weren’t for having an outlet like that. But the hero part, the control part was like, I am tough. I am strong.

I’m taking on a second. Nothing can kill me. I’m unstoppable. And that felt good because it kind of gave me my power pack in a way, right? But I did become very obsessive and compulsive with that behavior. Because I think people can relate to this, if you’re struggling with shame, you want more of what makes you feel okay. Even though like, you are not fully living into your true self and real authenticity, but it’s like, oh, this makes me feel more okay. So I’m like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

After this, right? So that’s sort of what running turned into. And in 2021, for the first time ever, I’d gotten into ultra running and trail races. And I’d done, gosh, 13 or 14 races up until that point.

And I, for the first time ever, was not able to finish a race. And that was a crushing, devastating blow to me. And that just opened my eyes so much to the fact of like, wait a second, like, why am I, why am I, why am I finding my value in this external thing?

It was truly a wake up moment for me because the fact that it was such a crushing blow, like I came out of that experience. And I was like, okay, it shouldn’t feel like this. I do this because supposedly I enjoy it and it’s fun and it’s adventure and it’s challenging your limits and all of those things. But like, it had become my identity. Like, I do hard to fit. That’s who I am.

Oli: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So sorry. I was just going to say that I can relate to this so hard, because I used to kind of be like that with my workouts for the same reason. So like, I, you know, I went through a shame driven period. And like, the way that I would compensate for those feelings, I would just work out all the time, or I go do crazy like hikes and things like that.

And I became so rigid with my routine around that stuff that I actually started missing out on life. Like, basically, if there was something, some social thing going on, I’d be turning it down because I was going to go do my workout and that kind of thing.

And, you know, I’m still regimented and I’m still healthy. But now, that is not my identity. Do you know what I mean? Like, I’m more fluid with it. And I think when people are shame driven, instead of shame dissolving, basically, they become obsessive in the way that we’re talking about, they become outcome dependent, they need certain outcomes like winning the race or getting the business deal or whatever, to make the shame stay at bay.

It becomes like an addiction almost. And so in your story example that you shared where you didn’t win that race. Basically, that’s when you realize you were being outcome dependent instead of outcome independent. Your self worth was invested basically in getting the, you know, winning the race, finishing the race. And that is how people end up living when they’re shame driven. That’s another perfect example of what we were talking about.

So anyway, sorry I interrupted you when you were going on.

Kalyca: Yeah, no, you are so spot on. Like that is exactly how I spend so much of my time. And in all honesty, it actually feels really good to have this conversation with you and to, you know, under to realize or re recognize that it is such a profoundly common experience that a lot of us aren’t really talking about, right?

Oli: Yeah, it’s amazing. Like I see it so frequently like with people that come come for coaching, like this distinction between outcome dependent and outcome independence. It’s one of the things that once you understand it, it can basically change your life.

And like, I don’t mean that in an exaggerated way. Like once you get it, and you see that you’re acting in this outcome dependent way, and you step back from that, that’s when you can start dissolving the shame. And all it ultimately means is why I said like, you basically choose some goal or some external activity to keep the shame at bay. And there’s the fundamental mistake that you making there is that the shame needs to go anyway, because as soon as you take a look at it, or you share it, we’ll get on to that in a second.

As soon as you look it in the eye, that’s when it starts dissolving. It’s all these crazy activities that we get involved in where we’re running around like headless chickens trying to escape from it, that keep its power over us. I would say I don’t know if you remember these, these things in Super Mario Brothers, but I use it as an example. There’s these ghosts in Super Mario Brothers, I used to play it when I was a kid. And like, as soon as you turn you, you try and run away from the ghost, it chases after you.

But when you look at it, it pauses and its power is gone. It’s the same with shame. And these shame driven people who are basically ruling the world, if you look at them, they’re constantly running around trying to keep it at bay. But actually, as soon as you face it, and you start making that choice towards whole nurse that we were talking about, that’s when it starts to fade away and you can kind of freeze. So, so yeah, I’ll stop ranting but is there anything there that you want to add or whatever?

Kalyca: Yes, I was smiling, you can’t see my face, but I was smiling when you were mentioning that because it resonates so much. And I think it’s a great visual. For me, a couple of things come to mind. Number one is, you know, running from the ghost, it feels like you’re a slave, right?

It feels like you’re being chased, or you’re chasing after something. And what I found with that is no finish line, no accolade, no achievement ever made me feel joy, not real joy. It wasn’t until I shed a lot of that, which I will be honest, was very, very painful to go through.

You know, I’m anyone who’s experienced something like that, it really felt like I was being broken open, like I was being broke in a part, like broken down into this like micro dust of myself, not sure if I would ever rebuild. But the crazy thing is like when you can escape from that shame cycle where you’re chasing after something, or you feel like you’re being chased.

That’s where you find true joy and true freedom.

Oli: Yes, 100%. Yeah. And the reason that you find joy and freedom and all that is because you find wholeness, you find the real version of you, your realness, which is always connected to everything else. And you’re in the flow, blah, blah, blah, you’re not forcing life.

Like, when you just described, you know, the lifestyle you’re living, you know, you’re constantly looking for another acola accolades, you’re trying to win a medal, whatever it is. When you’re running around like that, you are basically in survival mode, right?

So this is the thing like the shame, it basically sends us into survival mode. And so we start instinctually running around doing all the things that the shame is driving us to do. Because we think if we don’t do these things, so if we don’t run the race, if we don’t do blah, blah, blah, blah, we think if we don’t do that, then something awful is going to happen.

We think we’re not going to survive basically. And when we’re in that state, it’s not us that is making our decisions, we are not in the driving seat, the ego, the survival instinct, which is there for a reason, but isn’t aligned with reality necessarily, that is leading the way. And so we’re constantly following, you know, these, these promptings and dictates from within us that are not us.

And it just adds tension because it’s not real. And so when you reach that breaking point, or when you wake up, you literally do have to rebuild yourself. But ultimately, what you’re doing is you’re just removing the power that all of these, you know, survivalist, egotistical, whatever you want to call them, promptings have over you, and you take power over your own life.

So basically, I’m saying is when you’ve been shame driven, you’re actually, like the word suggested, driven, you’ve been pushed towards things without even stopping to think or ask why. And then when you wake up, that’s when you can start, you know, moving towards realness and wholeness and all that kind of stuff.

Kalyca: Yeah, definitely. And like, I think, you know, a lot of people, they see the, the goal is like, Oh, I want to be more present in my life, right?

Like, I think that’s a common expression. And I that resonates with me so much, because I feel like when I was in those periods, or that long period of time, I really did miss out on the world around me. I missed like you said, with your experience, I missed out on relationships and time with family members that I can’t get back. And so many things that, you know, your life is just like whizzing by you and you’re so focused on survival that you do miss out on being present.

But I do think that like, in some ways, it almost feels like being present is not the actual goal. For me, it’s like detaching from your shame and all the things that have warped your sense of self, right?

And in a lot of ways, connecting to something greater, like for me, there has been a spiritual journey there of like, connecting to what I believe is God and like, connecting with others. And there is a lot of power and freedom in that waking up period. But it’s not as simple as like, Oh, I just need to be more present in my life.

It’s like, no, I actually need to go through something where I shed this false identity.

Oli:  Yeah, yeah. Like that is 6 billion percent how I see it as well.  So when you go through this process of, you know, going from shame driven to shame dissolving, the ending, the end state of the dissolution process, if you want to call it that, is that you realize your identity does not exist in any way, shape or form, basically.

And so your ego, your sense of, you know, who you are as, you know, in terms of labels and contingencies, like the version of you that’s a runner or has a certain job or whatever, all that stuff kind of dissolves. And then it is between you and something bigger than yourself.

So yeah, you can call it God or the universe or all these different words that people use. It becomes about learning to surrender to the flow of life itself, because life, you know, it takes you where you want to go and you can, you know, choose a vision and a direction and you can mold your life. But even to, you know, get the things that you want and to achieve certain things that are real coming from a real place, you have to give yourself to something bigger than just you.

And actually what I’ve learned, and I’m so glad you brought this into the conversation about the higher thing that you end up having to, you know, transcend yourself and kind of work with, what I’ve learned is that all of these shame driven people, they need the ego because they’re actually scared to make that connection to the higher thing.

Like the ego, the false sense of identity is basically the illusion that it’s all up to you, that you are totally in control of your life, that you are totally separate, you’re totally independent, all you know, you’re fragmented basically. And the shame is the only thing that keeps all of those illusions in place. But because of what you were saying, like people don’t want to take that plunge into, you know, looking at the ghost or sharing these feelings that they’ve got, because people don’t want to make that leap and feel shit in the short term as they like bring those unresolved emotions to the surface.

Well, they just spend their whole lives explaining away and justifying the shame that has imprisoned them in the in the in the first place, if that even makes sense.

So I know I’m rambling, but basically what I’m saying is shame is basically our attempts to argue for the state of disconnection that has messed us up in the first place. Something like that.

Kalyca;  Oh, yeah. Absolutely. That rings so true. I yeah, I think that’s such a profound like conversation to have.

And even if it’s just bringing it into people’s awareness. One of the thoughts I had that I actually worked through with my coach during the process of kind of waking back up was actually a very deep distrust in in God, if you will. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All the universe or there was a very intense distrust that I had. And I had been like, there was really a fracture there that I had to work through. And, you know, again, I don’t think I would have had the courage or the awareness to do that without having a coach and having someone that was an effective participant in it, right?

Like, to rebuild that trust. I think, again, it goes back to something I mentioned in the very beginning where it was like, you know, I blamed the trauma or I blamed what had happened to me. I was angry in a lot of ways and disenchanted and thought like, there’s no way there could be something greater than than me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Wow. If so, why would this have happened, right? Or why would people have died?

Or why, you know, like all these. But I think that’s the interesting thing with that is that that is more of the same thinking, right?

Oli: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Like, basically, you’ve introduced one of my favorite words since this conversation, which is trust. So, you know, this is a podcast about the creative process, but how basically everything is a creative process. It’s about us going from a state of disconnection to a state of connection. And in order to be able to ride through that process in whatever form it shows up in our lives, it takes trust.

You know, it’s a cliche, right? In self-help circles or whatever, spiritually trust the process. But when it comes to reality and having a real life, you have to trust.

And like one of the biggest problems I see, like with whoever I’m working with in general, is that if they’re not getting the results they want from life, if they don’t feel good in general, they’ve got all this emotional shame driven stuff going on that we’re talking about, they don’t trust. And you know, it’s not their fault. Blame isn’t anything to do with it. And actually, we should talk about the blame thing a bit more because it’s related to the trust thing.

But basically, if you have a lot of shame in yourself, you end up being a control freak in the way that we’re talking about. And when you’re a control freak, you think that everything is up to you.

Basically, that’s the abridged version, right? And when you’re in that state, that’s when you start forcing everything through your own plans, through your own understanding. But like we said, life is way bigger than just us. And so if you’re everything you’re trying to do is fueled by you believing that the end point of your existence is your ego and the things that it shows you through your perceptions and interpretations then you skip that stage of realizing that there is something higher and you can call it God you can call it whatever but even just at a very simple level none of us understand everything none of us can control everything like it’s just the way life is whether you’re believing God or not nobody can control everything, right?

And so there’s always going to be uncertainty there’s always going to be doubt there’s always going to be you know questions that can’t be answered and the trust thing is about just navigating that and riding through it and so if you don’t have you know the awareness that is allowing you to be shame dissolving instead of shame driven you won’t get the results because you can’t trust and so that brings us back to the blame thing because you know another part of life that we can’t escape so along with uncertainty and doubt and all those things I mentioned.

Aanother thing that is going to happen to all of us eventually is that just bad things happen like things happen that go against our original plan for our lives so in my case like I had some like serious health issues and when they occurred I went through exactly what you’re just talking about with blame and all that kind of stuff I’m like you know whose fault is this is it because this happened when I was a kid or you know like you can blame God you can blame whatever it is right you try and blame things in retrospect.

Like this health stuff I’m on about it happened like 15 years ago at the time it was just the worst possible thing that could have happened right but in retrospect it turned out it is the best thing that could have happened when I was going through it I didn’t think that at all like it was just a nightmare but as I got to the other side it was actually a blessing because it woke me up to so many things about life it showed me my own strengths it showed me who I really am it just cut out so much bullshit that I had picked up because it’s been shame driven.

When I went into that process so the question is is there a link that you found between the blame thing and the trust thing because actually you know when these bad things happens we start looking for blame purely because we’re not ready to trust the process yet but what I am learning in my life is that you can always trust the person like literally always like trust is the key so I’ve thrown loads of stuff at you there but like what do you think about that?

Kalyca: Yeah, you know what what came up really strong when you said that was the blame thing is more of an that you’re externalizing it right you’re trying to make sense of it by finding you know something outside of yourself where I honestly feel like the trust thing is from deep within like it almost feels like it’s at the core of who you are and for me the experience has felt like learning to trust myself so that I could be present in my body so that I could open up that channel to again what I believe is God or the universe energy.

Like I don’t I like the trust was almost like the gateway of like first I had to trust me then I could trust something greater than me I had to trust other people like and I don’t think the experience I don’t think I would have ever come out of it if I wasn’t able to have that trust I think I would have stayed in the cycle of external validation, external achievement, external blame.

Oli:  Yeah 100 and you know 100 million percent like the people I’ve seen that remain stuck they can’t trust in the way that you said like and at the end of the day like it is up to to us and our you know the way that we relate to ourselves and the way that we can find the strength or not to ride through those emotions the shame and the guilt and the trauma blah blah blah.

Llike it’s unfortunate if people are stuck, of course, but the only way out is just almost the law of life it seems the only way out is to trust and it’s exactly what you just said like I found this myself like first of all we have to trust ourselves and then when we trust ourselves we can let go to you know God or whatever and that ultimately I have found explains why people end up holding back and hesitating and been stuck in their minds as a product of all the shame driven stuff that we’re saying.

So let’s just take the case of uncertainty for example right I found you know uncertainty is just part of life like I said earlier you’re gonna have to ride it out and so if you want to basically achieve something in life or you want to get to where you know you can get or you feel that you’re called to go let’s say you are gonna have to ride through uncertainty but if you’re shame driven and you got too much stuff going on you’ll start projecting forward in your mind with all these what if kind of thoughts like what if this happens what if that happens blah blah blah blah blah.

You’d make yourself so anxious with these what if questions that you won’t even get started but the only reason people ask themselves those questions is because they don’t trust themselves. Like, actually, if you trust yourself no matter what well those what if questions just go right out the window it doesn’t matter because you can replace it with it another statement which is “no matter what does happen you’ll be able to handle it” – like you’ll figure something out because you trust yourself so once you got to that stage you can also, like you said, see that okay the only way I’m gonna be able to trust myself is to let go of the ego stuff I have to let go of my identity.

I know that I’m gonna change I know that this journey is gonna you know teach me lessons and help me become the next version of myself and that always involves wholeness and God and all the things you’re talking about.

But we have basically covered a shitload of things, pardon my French, in this short conversation. I feel like I could go for like hours and hours. Like you’ve uncovered so many of the things that I just love talking about.

And it’s amazing that you’ve shared your experience and shown that, you know, this isn’t just theoretical stuff. This is stuff that applies to everybody, basically. So I suppose to wrap this all up. Could you give some final words of wisdom, I guess, to sum up the conversation?

But is there also something tangible that people can do, like actions that they can take, to kind of start moving in the direction that we’re talking about? And also, can you let people know where they can find you and everything as well, if they wanna talk to you about anything, or just connect or whatever else you might have to offer?

Kalyca: Yeah, I would love to. You know, it almost feels like magic or like fortuitous, right, because if the thing I’ll say is that this conversation would have never been possible if I wouldn’t have woken up, right? Like, and I think the beauty of it, like what you’re talking about, what is available to people is what truly feels like magic, because opportunities will present themselves in your life.

Like you said, if you’re not trusting of yourself or something greater than you, then you’re less likely to embark on those journeys, right, those roads, those doors that open, you’re less likely to go through them. So, I mean, again, I’m just very grateful that, despite the things that have happened to me, it’s not about that.

It is about something greater. And I firmly believe that based on the experience I’ve had. And the other thing that I want to say is that that level of realness that you talk about is available to everyone. And it may not be a pretty road to get there full disclosure, but it’s possible. And a couple of things I think that were big turning points for me, definitely what we already mentioned of being able to start trusting myself again and to feel more empowered that I deserved more than I was giving myself or allowing myself to have. But then also just being open to the magic of the universe or the opportunities that God puts in your life.

I wouldn’t have met my coach, or maybe I would have met her, but I would have been closed off to her. And that was such a transformational endeavor for me. So I think that the lesson there is like, if you’ve been going on your journey by yourself and white-knuckling it and trying to grit your teeth and figure it out on your own, I can promise that it is so much better and easier when you can open up and trust someone else to help you. The healing journey just expands in ways you would never ever expect when you can let someone else in.

Yeah, that being like all the turning points I can reflect back on were when I was able to open up and let someone else in. I think that’s the tangible. That’s the tangible take away.

Oli: Share things and trust the process of that as well. Like basically what you just said, it just shows how important the trusting is. And you write like ultimately once you can start trusting life, the trust shows you does basically.

I know it sounds weird. The trust shows you the does, but then it opens the doors as well. And then if you can trust yourself to go through them, that’s when life starts to be real again. And I love how you said that realness is available to everybody because it just is, because we’re already real.

It’s the shame and things like that that make us think we’re not or that disconnect us from it. So I can feel myself, I’m getting worked up again. I’m going to start ranting so I’m going to reel that in. But can you tell people where they can find you if they want to connect with you? Or… like I found you, you’ve got a really cool Facebook group that I found you in. That’s how we started talking. I don’t know if you want to, I don’t know if you want to share that, share that, but basically, yeah, where can people find you?

Kalyca: Of course, yeah. So I do have, you can find me on Facebook, Kalyca Jen Zarek. You can find me on Instagram, same thing at Kalyca Jen Zarek. And then you can also join my Facebook group, especially if you’re someone who’s into creating an impact for others. I actually help entrepreneurs who are in the high impact digital space. So my Facebook group is called the Entrepreneurs Edge, Multiply Your Impact. And I would love to connect with anybody and further this conversation.

I’ve, like I’ve already mentioned, I think opening up has opened tons of doors. So I’m here for it.

Oli: That’s awesome. I really love that thing about the doors opening so I’m going to be thinking about that probably all day. But, Kalyca, thank you so much for coming on here and sharing your personal experience, and allyour insight. It’s been really awesome and I really appreciate it. So thank you again.

Kalyca: Thank you for the opportunity. You are truly wonderful and I’m so grateful that we met. Thank you.

Creative Status is a podcast about using creativity as a vehicle for improving your life by deconstructing ego, integrating the shadow self, and designing and manifesting a real life. Every episode explores how the creative process can help you GROW REAL by moving towards wholeness in yourself by making the unconscious conscious.

In this episode of CREATIVE STATUS, I had one of the best conversations I’ve ever had in my life…

This was a really potent and free-flowing conversation about the creative boundlessness of the creative spirit with Kamau Akabueze – founder of the Alien School.

I first discovered Kamau on another podcast (Fukken Feelings) where he was sharing his creative philosophy which is built around the idea that “EVERYTHING IS A CREATIVE ACT”.

When I heard him utter these magical words, I knew that I had to invite him on Creative Status to explore this philosophy even more and to explore some of the intricacies of the journey to returning to the creative spirit by choosing wholeness over fragmentation and sticking ourselves on the path to growing real.

What I really loved about this conversation was the organic energy that unfolded and built upon itself – Kamau is also truly gifted at explaining some of the potentially complex ideas around this ‘stuff’ in an incredibly REAL and human way whilst also transmitting his message with presence and pure energy.

There’s loads of amazing ‘stuff’ in this episode about creativity as a whole, wholeness (or “GOOP”) itself, and some practical, potent insight about how to live a real life by connecting to your creative spirit. This is ultimately about UNIVERSAL TRUTH in relation to the creative journey into being an even more creative being than you already are (by unlearning rather than learning).

If you want to learn more about yourself whilst getting at your own energy so you can express more of it in the world, then this is a great episode for you to go deeper into life.

Here’s a quote from the Alien School MISSION page to encapsulate where we’re going:

We are here to bring clarity to creativity.We are here to love creation.We are in love with creation in all of its forms.

Kamau, thanks so much for your time and wisdom – everybody else, thanks for listening.

Listen on the embedded player above or on any podcast player!

(Scroll down for show transcript)

—————————–

Leave a voice message to share your thoughts and to be (maybe) featured on future episodes of the podcast: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠anchor.fm/creativestatus ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Episode Links:

The Alien School Website: ⁠https://thealienschool.com/⁠

Kamau Akabueze on LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/thekza/⁠

Creative Status Links:

The Creative Performance Transformation Lab: ⁠⁠olianderson.co.uk/creativeperformance⁠⁠

Follow me on Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠instagram.com/olijanderson⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

My YouTube channel: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠youtube.com/olianderson⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Get my books on Amazon: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠amazon.com/author/oli⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

7-Day Personality Transplant System Shock for Realness and Life Purpose: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠olianderson.co.uk/systemshock⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Free one hour creative workshop to take your creative brand or project to the next level:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠olianderson.co.uk/creativeworkshop⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Free 90-Day Journal Challenge: ⁠⁠⁠⁠olianderson.co.uk/journal⁠⁠⁠⁠

The Law of Attraction for Realness (mini-course): ⁠⁠⁠⁠olianderson.co.uk/lawofattraction⁠

Show Transcript: The Boundless Spirit of Creative Goop Bumps

Intro

Oli Anderson: Oh hi there, Oli Anderson here, you’re listening to Creative Status, this is a podcast about using your creativity to become more real.

More real means that you are basically making a choice to move towards wholeness and connection instead of fragmentation and ego and the illusion of separation and all of the things that keep you from flowing and growing and expanding with life in a way that feels life enhancing.

Every episode of the show, I, Oli Anderson, if you don’t know, a creative performance coach who helps people to implement these ideas in their life and business. Every episode I interview somebody who is inspiring or who has some insight to share about being a human, being creative and being real. Today’s interview is with Kamau Akabueze, he is the founder of the alien school based in NYC.

He basically helps people to tune into their own creative spirit and I first came across his work on another podcast and I got in touch with him because I was just so impressed with this whole vibe and all of the amazing things they had to say. Long story short, that led to this interview that you’re about to listen to.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that this is one of the best conversations I’ve ever had in my life. There was so much good energy, there was so much insight, there was so much humor in places and just amazing stuff going on that kind of embodies a lot of the ideas that I’m trying to tap into in my own life and with the realness philosophy that I’m always espousing here on this podcast and everywhere else.

So that’s the introduction, you’re in for a treat. Kamau, thank you so much for giving me your time and all your energy in this conversation. Everybody else, hope this hits the sweet spot and that you get something out of it and I’ll see you again next week for another episode of Creative Status.Boom.

Interview

Oli Anderson: Oh, hi there Kamau, thank you so much for joining me today on this episode of Creative Status. I first came across your work when I heard you on another podcast. You said something that made me instantly want to reach out and connect with you, which was that everything is a creative act. That’s something that I’m super interested in and it’s what this podcast is about.

We’re probably going to use that in a few minutes to start picking these things to pieces, but before I start asking you a million and three questions, would you like to just introduce yourself, tell people what you’re all about and let us know what you want to get out of this conversation as well?

Kamau Akabueze: Oh yeah, I really appreciate the invitation to the show that you’ve created. I’ve purposely held back from listening to previous episodes because I really wanted to just digest this conversation as it is. So I really appreciate the invitation to the show.

So…(coughs) excuse me, the open forum that we have here. My name is Kamau, Kamau Akabueze. I am a teacher and a guide. I help people with uplifting their creative spirit through a platform I’ve created called The Alien School, which is truly here to uplift the creative spirit in all of its forms.

I really love being around creativity and have loved that throughout my career on one hand. And what I found was that that really is my vocation in life and much more than the jobs that I’ve had held, the titles that I’ve held, working with and amplifying and igniting the creative spirit really is what I love to do. So that’s why you saw me talking about the same thing on another podcast.

Oli Anderson:Yeah, you’re definitely a man after my own heart. When you talk about the creative spirit, let’s just dive right into it. So what does that mean to you? So what exactly is the creative spirit and how do people get in touch with it, I suppose?

Kamau Akabueze: Yeah, I mean, we’ve gotten in touch with it for eons. That’s why we’re here. Our interest in creation is manifested in so many ways, right? It’s manifested in the most arcane and basic ways as creating life.

So humans get together, they mix their goop together, and they create life. Okay. Yeah, that’s a very romantic way to say it. You know what I mean? It’s just, it’s what it is, right?

Oli Anderson: Yeah, yeah.

Kamau Akabueze: It’s our goop together, and it creates life. It is, and it’s powerful.

That’s it. Like, this is simplicity of it. And so we’ve always been interested in creating and in what we could do. We probably didn’t know that if we grouped that, we created a life. We didn’t know that until we’re like, What if I put this in there? And that we got that, right? I mean, it’s a beautiful thing.

Oli Anderson: Right. It’s a happy little accident.

Kamau Akabueze: Happy, happy, happy little accident, right? . And that has led to other needs to create, right? And so there is just an inherent creative nature within us that is born of our curiosity and satisfied through our curiosity. And everything that we do is a matter of creation, everything that we do.

When we create space, everything, we create space in our lungs, when we breathe, when we create a home for our children to live in through our acts in the world, everything we do is a creative act. And so when we take more responsibility for that, there’s a lot more fun to be had with it.

Oli Anderson: Wow. So So, you know, we’ve only been talking a few minutes and there’s already loads of different directions we can move in. Ultimately what we’re saying, the creative spirit actually, and it’s something I believe as well, it’s our nature.

So if you are living in a way that is life enhancing, in a way that is going to connect you to your own nature as a human being, then creativity is something that is intrinsically linked to that. And I suppose we could say that, you know, helping people to kind of tap into their creative spirit is ultimately about helping them let go of all of the illusions they might have picked up, all of the weight that they’re carrying unnecessarily that stops them from embracing that nature.

So if that’s true, yeah. So what do you think it is that is causing a lot of people to become disconnected from that creative nature that we all have anyway, they become blind to it, it seems?

Kamau Akabueze: It’s, this is a difficult answer, quite frankly, Oli. Because of the spectrum of experience that we all go through. We are the snowflakes that we admire in the winter.

Oli: Wow.

Kamau: We truly are. And that originality of our design and originality of our experience is going to give us an original experience each and every one of us, each and every one of us. So it’s difficult to say it’s this and that. What is true, though, is that we all are experiencing some level of boundary or limitation. Yes. Yeah. That we have an opportunity through this life to push past.

Every single one of us faces some level of boundary or limitation in the world that we see in front of us.

Oli: Yes. 100%. So normally when I’m running and raving about this topic, I try and break it down into either fragmentation or wholeness. And that can also be seen as either unreal or real. So my experience in my own life and my working with coaching clients, however, it’s shown me that in 100 % of cases, the solution to most of our creative and personal problems is to start moving towards wholeness in whatever way we can find to do in our lives.

Even though we are all totally different and we’re dealing with different blocks, different fragmentation, different situations and scenarios in our lives, the path to wholeness is always the path we need to walk on in order to kind of realign with our nature and then to get all of the benefits of boundlessness that comes with that.

So I suppose my question for you is, you know, have you seen anything similar in the work that you’re doing? Like you’re helping people ultimately to kind of reconfigure, I guess, the relationship with the limitations that we all have so that they can kind of transcend them or something like that and become more real. And in that realness is the kind of boundlessness that I know you’re very passionate about.

Kamau: Yeah. Well, the realness is to get back to where you started.

The realness is the removal of the ore in the equation of consideration of fragmentation or wholeness.

When you remove that, we see the oneness. The oneness is just clear.

There is no ore to it. Right? . We all came from the goop. Whatever the goop was, we came from the goop. Yeah.

It’s just there isn’t any other fact. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah. But there is no other fact.

We all came from the goop. Right?

And just to be clear, goop has not sponsored this show. It’s just a way that I talk about life. Yeah.

It is ever changing and ever growing for. . And so when you remove that ore, it challenges you to see every other person as a product of the goop.. It’s about… And see the hologram of our unity. Yes.

See it as… see us as a collective entity here to experience a collective universe. That’s super dope. Wow.

Oli: Wow. Yeah. It’s about becoming aware of the goop basically. Awareness, but also acceptance of the goop. I’m always talking about three stages: Awareness, Acceptance and Action. Awareness means ultimately we’re becoming awake if you want to use that word.

It’s a bit overused. But anyway, you become awake to the natural laws that apply to all of us. So like cause and effect, the movement towards wholeness, the drive towards wholeness, all that stuff. When you become aware of the goop, that’s when you start to feel truly alive. And if you accept the goop and then start playing with the goop and molding it and shaping it in what you need your life to be so you can further express wholeness in the world, then that is basically the next level.

So if you agree with that, how can we go through that process, I guess? How can we start to be more aware of the goop in our lives? How can we accept it?

Because if we’ve been conditioned by society and by our own ego and all the bullshit that we pick up, it can be hard to accept the goop. But also how can we play with it? Play with the boundless goop, I guess.

So we can actually enjoy our lives and all that stuff. Wow.

Kamau: Well, I mean, look, it’s just, it’s so fun because it’s so good. The removal of these things that limit us, right? You’re asking right now, how can we start to play with the goop? You are the goop.

We are the goop. The goop is all around us. Every material element in front of us is the goop. And so we’ve got this awesome organic playground.

This awesome organic playground, right? We’ve learned all the basics, right? In school, we’ve learned all the basics. We’ve learned that everything is energy. In no, there was no other term in there. Everything is energy.

We have all learned that at some point. And if not, just Google it and listen to some nerdy math person talk about it. Listen to some cosmic astrological person talk about it. Listen to some geometrists talk about it.

Everything is energy. We all know it. It’s all there.

If we want to know about that, we can Google it and find out about it. Nothing is hidden in those terms. So everything is energy. And we have the opportunity in every act to create good energy, to create positive energy, to create positive life force into this world. Every act, if we take the responsibility and if we take the responsibility, what we will see is much more clearly the playground that’s before us. And that’s not to say that you can just run your hands together in front of you and make a billion dollars. No, no.

However, however, if you put forth the effort that’s been prescribed by people who have done it, very simply, with the thought in mind that you’re gonna get there, you will get there.

Oli: Yeah. There’s a lot of power in that word that you’ve shared, responsibility, because I’ve found occasionally when I talk about wholeness and everything and some of the ramifications of that, ultimately, if you align yourself with that and you start flowing with it, you have to be open to kind of transcending your ideas about yourself and realizing that the power the power you have in your own life involves kind of surrendering some of that power to something bigger.

And when you do that, that’s when you get kind of synchronicities or whatever and things will start working out, but only if you take responsibility for shaping the goop and also understanding that holding the goop in your own hands, I’ve never said the word goop so many times in like a shot.

Better, holding the goop in your own hands. It comes with a lot of responsibility. So it’s not just some airy, fairy kind of, you know, full shitty thing. It actually involves a paradox of sorts. Like the paradox is that in order to get what you want from the goop, you kind of have to give yourself to it which takes strength, something like that. Takes strength, yes.

Yes, yes. Yeah, so the question for you is, goop is such a perfect word for this because ultimately goop, it sums up what the wholeness is. Like it’s kind of nebulous, it’s indistinct, but at the same time, you can get a lot of clarity from it. So the question is anyway, sorry, what kind of qualities do we need in order to work with the goop? So taking responsibility is definitely one of them, I think. But what other goop-like qualities do we need to work on developing so we can live in this creative way that you’re talking about?

Kamau: Yeah, that’s where values come in, right? That’s where values come in. They’ve been a part of our lives for a very, very long time. You know, probably coming into our existence. The challenge has become the value placed on the past, meaning objectification in a certain way.

Let’s just call it that. If your value rests in the possession of a thing, you are placing your value in the past. Now it is a beautifully, it might be a beautifully designed thing, right? And that beautiful design inspired you to put some value on that, inspired you to want to have that thing. Now that inspiration also might be your creative spirit, like that’s really beautiful, but what if? Or that’s a really beautiful home for this thing that I’m working towards or working on, right?

Like to remove the possession alone as the value and look at what that actually signifies in your life as you progress towards something bigger. Yeah, yeah. Right? Now you can get stuck in that objectification. You can get stuck in holding that thing and that thing becomes essentially the vibration that you live at.

If you maintain a higher vibration that you’re always in that, you’re always acknowledging that there is another place to go, that there’s more to be seen, more to do, more to achieve for us.

Oli: Yeah, yeah, there’s a There’s a pretty famous quote by Osho of what you just I can’t remember it a bit. Um, but basically it says something like “Love is is like the way that you can treat a flower”.

So if you don’t love it, you’re gonna pick it basically But if you really love the flower, you’re just gonna appreciate the flower for being where it is and I think it’s –  I said that very badly – but anyway as soon as we pick the flower,  as soon as we pick it that’s when we’ve gone into this non goopy realm of existence where it becomes about it becomes about concepts basically more than the flow and the flux.

I always think we’re either forcing life, which is ultimately where we’re living in this realm where we’ve picked the flower because we’ve given it some conceptual meaning and that meaning is supposed to reflect back onto ourselves when we do that it takes us out of the other way of being so the opposite of forcing which is flowing and when we’re flowing and we’re moving and we constantly expanding then we’re moving with the goop again which is more wholeness.

So yeah, I have found you know with all these conversations about about creativity and stuff or just coaching people the thing that causes people to stop flowing and to stop forcing is almost always their need to identify with something false basically they create a false a false identity for themselves which usually is a product of two things one their emotional stuff So like shame guilt trauma was whatever’s going on beneath the surface that they haven’t faced yet and two Social conditioning and that kind of stuff and when people give into those things they become very un-goopy and End up living as ideas rather than experiences.

So is there anything there?

Kamau: Well, let’s go back to to again what you articulated was really beautiful about the pick another flower, right? And this is where what we refer to as artists where they do an incredible job In their creative process that we don’t necessarily do day to day in the acknowledgement of the gifts that we have in front of us so the picking of the flower well, you might have picked that flower as a Observation of the beauty of life and that was just that and that’s a beautiful observation and you might continue on the path and you may can see you to give love back to the beauty of the earth as you celebrate the beauty of the flower that you have in your hand that is that’s a beautiful act, right? Yeah, yeah, you you’re still in the celebration of life You’re not just removing your life from this process. You’re in the celebration of life.

Wow. It’s there for us to be played with right now the other side of that is You may pick that flower to then put that into a bouquet to give to somebody And that act may have been the spark of a very beginning of a beautiful relationship or The continuation of something or just now well when we go back and Honor the earth for giving us that flower Instead of just acknowledging What we were the feeling we were trying to manifest Mmm-hmm.

We complete the cycle when we go back to the source and thank the source Yeah, it’s completing the cycle. Thank you for the opportunity Thank you for what you provided so that x y z gratitude, right? That’s the gratitude in the lack It’s not just recycling objects, but it’s recycling love. It’s recycling good energy recycling good feeling Yeah, yeah, yeah into the atmosphere You know what I mean? So so that recycling of goodness back and that’s what I talk about artists in the way You know, they’re offered their channel because they are giving Some respect to nature and what is offered them.

Yeah, right? They’re creating alongside nature Wow, right? We’re only removing and not honoring nature and not rethinking how can we best honor? this massive giant ball of Goodness that we’re floating on You know, we’ve got to honor it. You know, because it’s given so much to eat no matter how bad we treat this rock Yeah, yeah, it’s back to us.

Oli: Wow. Yeah Again, it kind of comes back to the you’re either forcing things or you’re flowing and I’ve never thought of it like that What you just said is so true and important like if you think about it The best art or the best or the most real creations, let’s say they’re part of the flow. It’s almost like you said it’s channeling the flow from one place to another so the the artist or the creator they find something real inside themselves through the process of creating whatever it is and then the end result of that process allows other people to find a channel back into the the goop or the wholeness or the boundlessness and instead of it instead of it being about just independence and things been separate if that makes sense it’s all about creating a system within the wider system of nature and everything where things continue to flow and evolve and grow in the way that they need to It’s like it’s like building a canal or something does that make sense?

Kamau: Yes, yeah, it’s not and it’s not that difficult. You see going back to the same spot where you pick the flowers from or going back to the your place that you got got the flowers from and giving thanks to that person and them them giving thanks back, you know, to where they source it from somebody at some point giving, giving and returning and reciprocating energy, right? Even if it is just, hey, earth, thank you for that flower. Thank you. Right? Thank you. Hey, cat, hey, hey earth, hey life. Thank you for that cow that led to that created that purse. Yeah, you know what I mean?

Or think of that cow that led to the person thinking whatever they thought along the way to turn the cow skin into what it turned into. Thank you for the process. Thank you for growth. Yeah, for experimentation.

Thank you for curiosity about what we can do with all the beautiful things that we’re offering.

Oli: Yeah, yeah. And it’s showing that ultimately, because of the boundlessness of the goop, everything is connected. And if you can understand that, as you go through the process of creating whatever you’re creating, it’s going to heighten whatever you’re doing.

So can we say, ultimately, the difference between, you know, moving towards wholeness and going in the other direction, whatever that is, it comes down to our intentions. And if we can approach the creative process or life itself, or anything actually, because like you’ve said right at the start, everything is a creative act.

You can heighten your life by basically checking in with your intentions, expressing gratitude and all this kind of stuff, but making sure that whatever you’re doing, it’s coming from a place of wholeness instead of fragmentation, or from the goop instead of, you know, whatever the opposite of goop is.

Kamau: The simplicity of appreciation. It does not take a lot of energy from our systems to appreciate a person, a thing, you know, that the process of creation that brought us to where we are, to look back at our lives, to look at our experiences, look at the people in our lives that have propelled us to the moment that we’re in.

Right, to say, I appreciate what you were going through that helped me get to here, even if what you were going through was a very challenging thing that challenged my existence, that challenged my perception of who I am. I am here right now.

And I have more to do.

Oli: Do you think ultimately, what we’re talking about is very simple. It’s the most simple thing in the world, because it’s just about removing, like you said, actually, the status like it’s about removing all of the nonsense and bullshit and conditioning, whatever you want to call it, that we is removing all the stuff that we’ve picked up that adds unnecessarily complexity and friction to this natural flow anyway.

And actually, we’re just ultimately talking about returning to what is, which is about as simple as it gets ultimately.

Kamau: Softening, softening into the goop, like softening into, you know, he’s like, truly softening into the goop. Everything does not need your opinion.

Right, this is this is where we are from a, from a communication standpoint, right? Everything does not need your opinion, because if that is the case, and that’s kind of all there is, are just opinions, but not a real observation of the truth. And observing the truth in where you are is not a difficult act.

Forgiveness, the forgiveness of yourself, of your own acts, of your past, of the people in your past, it is not easy until you also see your parent, your friend, your child, your boss, your co worker, your priest, your neighborhood, the economy as byproducts of a collective experience that we’re in together. Yeah. Yeah.

Right. And that everyone’s experience is challenged. Everyone’s experience is challenged, we’re challenged by our limitations, we’re challenged by our boundaries.

But what we want, and what we think we have, what we think we want, and why we think we want it, all those things create limitations. Yeah, all of them. Yeah.

Oli: Yeah. And also, we could add an extra level where we become attached to those limitations. And we think that that is who we are. We start to label ourselves, yeah, we start to label ourselves with those limitations. We identify with them ultimately. And then that creates this extra matrix or web of opinions about the truth that are actually a mask for our blind spots, if that makes sense.

And we can spend our whole lives basically fighting to uphold our illusions. And that stops us kind of flowing and moving with the goop, whether you said. One question that arose for me when you say no, that is where does trust come into this?

So I find that the main obstacle for most people of returning to the goop or whatever, is learning to trust the goop and what you just said about opinions is a big part of that because if human beings are we’re not omniscient are we we’re never going to know everything our interpretations of life are always going to be limited and our perceptions of life are always going to be limited so there’s always going to be a bit of a disjunct between the way that we live and perceive our way through life or navigate our way through life and the way that life actually is in truth and so in order to transcend that boundary of you know the limitations of our understanding basically it reaches the point where it all comes down to trust.

We have to find a way to trust the goop more than we trust ourselves and I think that’s where a lot of people kind of struggle so where does the trust thing come into all this in your I guess philosophy or view?

Kamau: Yeah I had to learn to trust my own experience and that’s really where that’s really where trust came in right and I think we all have incredible intuition we all have a good sense of what is good for us and what is not good for us we have a pretty good sense of what is good for ourselves collectively and what is good for others I feel like there’s at least a sense of that even if it’s buried or deep within we have a sense of it.

I went through an experience in my life where I was treating other people in my life poorly I was not considerate of who they were of the love that they were offering me of the effort they were putting into their relationship with me of not trusting that we were all works in progress and that there was progress to be had and even if it didn’t look like with the way I wanted it to look in the moment that it had the potential to get there well if I released from my opinions of what was… well now the beauty of that is I still had those experiences and they propelled me to an awakening to my own behavior.

And that awakening to my own behavior allowed me to see the ways I mistreated my opportunities to group ways I mistreated my opportunities to send some positive energy force forward and appreciate the potential of where we were yeah even through the challenges appreciate the potential of where we were instead of judging the current state as not acceptable yeah yeah not what I wanted to be because look man you me the people that we’re talking to we’ve got incredible imaginations human beings have an incredible imaginations and our imaginations can fixate yeah our imaginations can fixate on the image or the style or the behavior of a thing that we want that we think would make our lives better but again that thinking is still just our imagination.

Oli: Yeah yeah and it can turn into picking the flower as well instead of just appreciating it what you’ve said is super important so if we get caught up in our opinions and everything like you said we ultimately end up being lost within our own minds but our minds are a product of how ready we are to face the goop ultimately right and when we project our mind out into the world it seems like everything is static so we take things at face value but ultimately when we take things at face value in that way we are removing ourselves from the flow so the example you just gave is about potential if I just you know if you look at the people in your life and you know you’re going through a bad experience with them for whatever reason this drama or discontent in that particular time if you look at them and the face value of the situation is what you see then you’re actually you’re not in touch with your goop and you’re not in touch with their goop and so the situation will never heal it will never move forward towards its true potential which is wholeness and so what you seem to be saying is that when we get in touch with our own goopiness wholeness whatever it makes it so much easier to keep flowing which we’ve already said a lot of times now but also it makes it easier to flow into wholeness or whatever word you want to use with other people so it’s there’s something there I feel like we can elaborate on that a little bit maybe.

Kamau: Now there’s something used there and you know it goes back to it goes back to what we were talking about in terms of relationships and again I’ll use my own story as material here because it was offered to be for material for this dialogue right when we lose that connection with our own the beauty of our group the beauty of it yeah right then like the beauty of our organism I mean just think about the fact that our heart yeah so this is a ramble here but our hearts they can’t see what’s external our hearts don’t see what’s external to us well we send our heart the signals that is then pumping through our bodies we send our brain signals through our experience that they’re pumping through our body that is gorgeous it’s beautiful what’s happening inside of us it’s beautiful is happening inside more than we start to appreciate what’s happening inside of us the activity in the group there’s 10 billion miles of DNA in every human body 10 million 10 billion miles well Yeah, you start to appreciate the beauty of your own group in whatever form that it is You stop externalizing this thing right and what I had externalized was a few things The completion wholeness I was trying to find wholeness outside of myself. I’m a whole being I was trying to find in my Relationships someone to complete you know Jeremy Guire. I think I whatever movie what you complete me, right? Look for somebody to complete me. I am whole. Yeah, I am whole. Yeah, if I’m looking externally for somebody to complete me I Am missing the key factor in the equation of one plus one Yeah, I have to be one first.

Oli: Yes, like actually I always say one plus one is one like if you like if you understand the goopiness one plus one is one. Yeah, yes Yes, yeah.

Kamau: So an externalizing completion I was looking outside of myself for completion and externalizing, you know my my fear of not being complete. When I felt dissatisfied or incomplete in a relationship I then started to seek out other relationships that I thought would complete me because I was not honoring my own wholeness that’s when we start to mistreat others Yeah, we’re not honoring our own wholeness and not trusting in the flow not trusting in the potential Yeah, yeah, and my career Well up it you know up to up to the creation of the alien school my career was always about the appreciation of potential In talent and opportunity in a brand idea That’s what I was always tuned into was potential.

And I can see that in all these other things but I wasn’t even seeing it in myself. I wasn’t seeing it in In the relationships that I had attracted. I wasn’t seeing it I was thinking it needed to be something else because of all those external factors like love looks like this Love feels like this, you know, if you know, you think of any movie or R &B song or TV show It’s like love looks like this.

Yeah. Nah, love feels love feels like hold this. Yes love feels like hold this And when you are tuned into your wholeness and you tuned into your own energy and your own completion then You can actually accept others energy Yes, what it is.

Yes for what they’re going through and not judge it, I appreciate the potential of what they bring to your life.

Oli: Yeah, yeah Yeah, and that reminds me of what we were saying. I don’t know 20 minutes ago or something about the realesst creations become like a channel for the flow. Like it becomes like you’re directing the river – you’re building something that is going to send the river from one place to another place where it needs to go I’m like if you go through the process that you you’ve experienced Where you end up letting go of the fragments and you get in touch with your wholeness again Then you can become a channel for allowing the other people that come into your life to feel wholeness as well Ultimately, so you become like a conduit or whatever you want to call it.

Kamau: See everything is energy everything.

Oli: Yeah, yeah, and when you when you get it you realize it was there the whole time so one time one one thing you said earlier Which is that you are the goop and I just want to bring that back up again because if you know I realized as we’re going through this or as I’m talking about goop I’m making it sound like goop is something that you have like you have the goop.

But actually I am the goop you are the goop so I suppose to kind of start wrapping all this up because we’ve actually covered loads in a very short amount of time It’s been amazing. Well, like if we’re gonna wrap all this up how can people start to go through that transition I guess from Trying to have the goop or trying to find something that is gonna give them this feeling of wholeness or You know some external thing whatever is how can they make the shift? To seeing that they are the goop like what kind of practical things I guess can they do?

Generally of course because it’s a bit different for everyone, but what can they do? To feel and experience what you’re talking about this boundlessness … of the goop.

Kamau: Yeah As I said earlier I do believe there is a simplicity to that So I’ll offer the simple just the simplistic side to it and then some some processes, right? Acceptance Acceptance is the simple the simple beginning It’s the simple beginning of Appreciation for what you are who you are where you are is The acknowledgement well, you know, I am I am here.

Mm-hmm. I am here Right. I’m here.

Just I am here is a very like centering embodying practice of your wholeness in your moment the need for nothing else but you In the place that you are in the moment. I am here here Despite everything that I’ve experienced and it because of everything that I’ve experienced Wow, I am here Yeah The second step in that is okay, where do I? Go from here

Where can we? Wow, from here if I am here Yeah, yeah, right because it starts to set Pathway towards an intention and I’m gonna I’m gonna come back to intention. Yeah, I’m gonna come back to it Because it really is the button But establishing that pathway to intention. Wow. Wow. My grandfather, my grandmother, my mother, my father were all activists. And when I think back to the hallmark of the era of activism, cultural activism, there’s one keynote that’s out there. That I have a dream speech is the keynote that we are all conditioned to receive and understand.

What we actually need to receive and understand by sitting in ourselves, recognizing that we are here in the moment that we’re in, is that we are living the dream. Yeah. When you break down the context of that speech, we are living it. Wow. We are living it in progress.

Wow. It may not look like each of us wants it to look individually, but collectively, we are living the dream. And it’s beautiful to see if you can open your eyes and accept it, accept it, and accept that the progress that we want to see in life takes a long time, takes a lot of effort, takes a lot of commitment, takes a lot of pain, takes death. Yeah. It takes death. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

But it also takes living. Yeah. Wow.

And when we know that everything does not happen in a single lifetime, but we are all on this collective journey forward, we can appreciate the lifetime that we are in so much more. Yeah. And I said I’d come back to intention. I said I’d come back to intention. Mm-hmm.

If you, and I got to give mad props to my brother, Hawaii Mike, a beautiful alchemist, friend of mine, so much love and respect to Hawaii Mike. He tapped me in to the definition of intention, just the, if you Google intention in the dictionary, online, anywhere. The second definition is a medical definition.

It’s the healing process of a wound. Wow. Wow.

The healing process of a wound and the beauty of that. Wow. The beauty of that is its ambiguity. Mm-hmm. It’s not a, it doesn’t say a physical wound. Mm-hmm. So that could be an emotional wound. Mm-hmm. That could be a mental wound. Wow.

That could be a physical wound. Mm-hmm. But the intention that we apply to our own progress. Yeah.

Heals our wounds. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And if we accept that. Mm-hmm. And accept that that takes time and effort and trust as you talked about. Mm-hmm.

That’s where trust really comes in. Yeah. Yeah. It’s trusting the process. Yeah.

As so many sages have said, trust the process. Yeah. Yeah. You are here. Yeah.

Where do you go from here?

Oli: Wow. Like honestly, I just got goosebumps when you were saying that. And like. Oh, I got goosebumps. What did I? I got GOOPbumps.

Goofbumps. But it’s not true. Like the true intentions are the ones that are going to heal your wounds, basically. The wound is fragmentation.

That is what the wound is. I like it. Yes.

And you go to what’s holding us or the goop and then you become alive again because you’re healed. Wow. Yes.

Kamau: Um, the other, the other practical step in there is potentially if one is so inclined is to come and learn more about The Alien School where we do this work.

Oli: Yeah. Yeah. Well, this is a good segue into that part of the show. So where can people, you know, find you online? Like, where can they learn about The Alien School?

If they want to talk next with you and all that stuff, like, why do they need to know?

Kamau: Yeah. I mean, the Alien School is something I’ll be doing for the rest of my life is a commitment I’ve made to uplift and create a spirit to helping folks like you really see the opportunity that we have in front of us to create an incredibly beautiful world and create incredibly beautiful relationships and create outstanding art and continue our involvement in the creative process, our involvement in this grand creative process that we are in. Yeah.

You can find Alien School at thealienschool.com, not just alien school, but “the alien school” spelled exactly where you spell all those words.

Oli: Well, I’ll share that in the show notes.

Kamau: Appreciate you.

Oli: Yeah. Like, honestly, this has been so awesome. I feel like I could talk to you for another 24 hours at least. Let’s, let’s wrap it up.

But honestly, Kamau. This has been sick. Thank you so much for like your time today and coming on and sharing all this amazing insight in a super short amount of time.

Kamau: It’s been really, really amazing. So I do have this has been a super healing conversation for me, my brother. I appreciate you offering this space.

I hope that everybody who who listens, you know, in and tunes into our vibe and this conversation. Take some time really to appreciate how beautiful you are. Start with accepting your own beauty.

Oli: I think this conversation you’ve channeled the flow in the way that we were talking about. So thank you again.It’s been amazing. Thank you so much.

Kamau: Thank you so much. Peace. Peace. Thank you.

Creative Status is a podcast about using creativity as a vehicle for improving your life by deconstructing ego, integrating the shadow self, and designing and manifesting a real life.

Every episode explores how the creative process can help you GROW REAL by moving towards wholeness in yourself by making the unconscious conscious.

In this episode of Creative Status, I had an amazing conversation about DEATH (one of my favourite topics) with Myrthe Peters  – a doula who helps people to go through transitions in life and specialises in helping people to ride the reality waves towards death when they know its imminent.

Death is such an important thing to talk about and reflect on from time-to-time because it reminds us what REAL LIFE is and allows us to make real choices about our time, energy, and attention.

This is a pretty invigorating conversation that will hopefully help you get some fresh perspective and to recharge your passion for truth so that you can go out there and really live it.

Thanks a bunch,

Oli

Listen using the embedded player above or go to any podcast platform!

(Scroll down for show transcript)!

—————————–

Leave a voice message to share your thoughts and to be (maybe) featured on future episodes of the podcast: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠anchor.fm/creativestatus ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Episode Links:

Myrthe’s services: ⁠https://www.fullcircledoula.org/myservices

Myrthe on Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/myrthe.peters/

Creative Status Links:

Book a call to work with me to see if I can help you reach your goals:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ go.oncehub.com/olianderson⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

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My YouTube channel: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠youtube.com/olianderson⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Get my books on Amazon: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠amazon.com/author/oli⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

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The Law of Attraction for Realness (mini-course): ⁠⁠olianderson.co.uk/lawofattraction

Show Transcript: The Creative Art of Dying

Intro

Oli Anderson: Oh hi there, Oli Anderson here, you’re listening to Creative Status. This is a podcast about using your creativity as a vehicle for growing more real, allowing the true version of who you are to come to the surface so you can express something true in the world. If you don’t know, my name is Oli Anderson, I’m a Creative Performance Coach, which means I help people to bring more realness into their life and business.

That’s enough of a rambling introduction. Today’s episode of Creative Status is an interview with Myrthe Peters. She is a doula.

If you don’t know, a doula is somebody that helps people through life transitions. In the case of Myrta, we’re talking about the transition of death, dropping dead, demising, things being done and dusted. It’s a very real conversation about one of my favourite topics, which is death.

The reason that it’s one of my favourite topics is because if you can appreciate the fact that we’re all going to die one day, then it allows you to step back from any static ideas that might be causing you to hesitate in life. It allows you to appreciate that your time, energy and attention are the most important things that you have.

And it can serve as fuel for speeding up the process of making the unreal real so you can live a life that’s actually true to you and in an expression of the things that you care about, your true values and intentions. So that’s enough of an intro. Here’s the actual interview. Myrta, thank you so much for your time and everybody else.

Hope you get some good shit out of this and that it helps you live a better life. Here we go.

Interview

Oli Anderson: Oh, hi there, Myrthe.

Thank you so much for joining me today on Creative Status. You are super obsessed with one of my favourite topics of all time, which is death. And I’m hoping that we’re about to have a kind of free flowing, enjoyable conversation about what many people fear more than anything else.

But before we do that, do you feel like introducing yourself, letting people know what you do? And also, could you share what you’d like to get from this conversation as a whole?

Myrthe Peters: Thank you so much for having me here, Oli. It is really awesome to have this opportunity to speak about this topic that both of us really enjoy delving into. So yeah, my name is Myrta, and I work in the end of life space as a doula.

A doula is someone who offers practical, emotional, and spiritual support during significant transitions in life. And my area of focus is the end of life. That is obviously a very broad spectrum.

And I’m sure that we will get to know more about the different facets of that later on in our conversation. And besides that, I also work as a psychedelic facilitator. I mean, you work with psilocybin and using psilocybin as a way to access our grief and to also become familiar with death is hugely powerful. And yeah, it’s a real privilege to be working in this space.

Oli Anderson: Yeah, like, can you imagine that’s, even though, you know, a lot of people think death is depressing and everything, it’s also, I would assume, very intimate the way that you end up relating to people.

Because obviously a lot of the, you know, the things they’ve been hiding their whole lives are probably going to come to the surface, either with the mushroom stuff or just the fact that death is imminent and coming towards them. What are some of the benefits that you personally get of being a doula? Like, what do you enjoy about it?

Myrthe Peters: I really enjoy being in a space where there is an opportunity to explore the deeper emotions. For me, allowing emotions and embracing all of those as part of who we are is where all these golden nuggets lie in terms of how we live our lives, what aligns, what doesn’t, what is truth, what isn’t. And during the, when we talk about death, it’s all about that, right?

Because when we look at an end, it requires us to examine what is still unfinished. So, to be able to do that with people is really, really profound. And as you said, it’s intimate, it’s very intimate.

Yeah, lots of beautiful stuff can come from that. And it’s also really hard and that’s probably also what most people associate death with. It’s hard, it’s challenging, it’s painful and it’s all of that. But there is also this really intimate and beautiful side to it that allows for deeper connections between people and for old wounds to be healed.

Oli Anderson: Wow. I think what I find so amazing and fascinating about the whole death thing is kind of what you just alluded to. So, death always answers the question, what is the truth? What is real? And like in my work, which, you know, I do a lot of coaching and stuff like that, but it’s all about realness, which just means finding something that is real about ourselves and the world and reality.

And I have found that death and accepting death is one of the quickest doorways into understanding all that. Because, you know, there’s so much bullshit in the world, right? Like people will argue about pretty much anything, but one thing that we all agree on, let’s say 99.9 % of people agree on, because there’s always somebody that disagrees, we all agree that death is coming.

And in this form that we found ourselves in currently as individuals, it’s going to end no matter what. And as soon as you accept that, and you open up to it, it’s like life just, it gets turned on, the volume goes up, the intensity is a lot higher than it was, purely because you’ve introduced the truth. And so, is there something there around that? That actually what you’re doing, Yeah, you’re helping people with these transitions and you’re helping them to come to terms with the fact that they’re going to die and bloody, blah, all the emotions that brings up. But ultimately, are you just guiding people back to a relationship with the truth?

Myrthe Peters: 100 % and I love how you explain it. I love how you said when we come to the acceptance of the inevitability of our lives.

That is what turns up these buttons and makes us live more freely. It’s so very true because when we enter that space of something is final and it’s very final, right? Which is incredibly hard for the mind to grasp because the mind is not meant to be dealing with finality of events. But this is the most final event that we will ever encounter.

All of us will. So there’s going to have to be that point where we go, all right, let’s sit down and look at this. Let’s be with this. Let’s explore what we want this to look like. What do we want this to feel like?

Who do we want to have present? What kind of senses do we want to bring in? Grief is also a huge part of this. We can talk about, or this sounds really as if we’re only talking about death in the sense of physical death. Our physical mortality. However, it extends way beyond that because so many other things of us die. It’s old identities, it’s relationships, it’s the ending of specific life cycles. Our skin dies, our eyes die.

So it’s all of that. Death is constantly around us. I believe the more familiar we get with death and dying and grief and loss before we have to. The more profound it could be when it’s really there. And I would know this obviously until I get to that point myself.

But from the work I’ve been doing, I can see how much fuller my life is becoming. Because ultimately, we are all on this journey and our search for truth or transformation or whatever you want to call it. It’s just different names for I think the same thing. But yeah, they all go hand in hand and exploring it beyond the physical death is also a really big part of it.

Oli Anderson: Yeah, I think what it boils down to is there’s a false dichotomy which is life and death. They’re not separate things. It’s all one process.

It’s all the creative flow. Reality is constantly moving, it’s constantly undulating and flowing and expanding and blah blah blah. And the only thing that stops human beings as individuals from flowing with that is what I consider to be the only true death.

I’m saying that in scare quotes and that is the ego. As soon as you attach to a static self image that ultimately causes you to resist this flow of life and death that is constantly moving around us. As soon as you attach to that, that’s when you start to have problems in life ultimately, right? And so what you’re talking about is guiding people back to that truth ultimately, which is the truth of flux. Stasis is an illusion basically and as soon as you buy into it, then you’re going to have a bad time. And so even though I’m assuming a lot of your work as a doula is with people who are approaching the end of their lives quite quickly, all of the lessons that you guide them through in order to reach a state of acceptance, it applies to everybody else as well.

Because no matter who you are and how close death may be or may not be, it’s the same basic laws of life, which is that that flow is always guiding you towards that state of unknown finality that you’re talking about. So I guess the question is, what lessons have you learned by working with people at the very end of their lives that are applicable at all stages of life?

So I won’t put words in your mouth, but what do you think about that?

Myrthe Peters: So what I think about that is that the most or the biggest regrets for people at the end of their lives, they are the first one is that people have been scared too long to live their truth, to live their authentic selves.

So really attaching to the ego and to status and to performance and to societal structures that may not really have resonated with them. So that’s one. The other one is mending relationships late. So being stubborn and wanting to be right about something, not having the courage to apologize and losing time basically. Losing time, meaningful time for connection.

Oli: Yeah, that’s ultimately what it all boils down to. And I was kind of going to say that. So the reason that I have personally found death to be such a powerful thought in my life is, first of all, I just think it’s cool to go around talking about death. It makes me seem really edgy and everything.

But the other thing is that it makes me value my time. So I think I told you, we had a chat before the actual podcast recording and like, there was a period in my life where I was being very morbid. Like I went through some personal stuff and I was just waking up every day and I was thinking about death. I’m like, oh, I’m going to die one day. But that actually became a very empowering thing because instead of sitting around feeling miserable and like getting into a victim mindset and all that kind of stuff. the facts that I knew I was going to die one day did two things.

One, it made me really, really present. Like I can’t think about death and not just exist in the present moment because I know that I’m flowing towards it in the way that we were talking about. It puts us into that flow. But the second thing, it made me value my own time and my own energy and the choices that I made with those things. And for me, now, you know, not 100 % of the time because I’m just a flawed human being, believe it or not. But most of the time, I am aware of the choices that I’m making and what I want to do with my life.

So every day, you know, I always say to myself, I’m trying to make the choice towards wholeness rather than fragmentation. But knowing that time is precious makes that so much easier because everything has an opportunity cost. So why do you think most of us do not live in that way? So time is precious for all of us. But there’s something going on psychologically and maybe even spiritually or whatever that causes us not to value our own lives, basically, in our own time.

Myrthe: I believe that part of that is fear, fear for the unknown, fear for the innovative in why can I not pronounce this word now for the finality of it.

And it can come with a little with some dread, right? All the preparations that we really would benefit from looking into the avoidance of feelings around there. So many people are very uncomfortable with intense feelings. So they believe that when they just don’t deal with it right now, it won’t be there. And then obviously, when it comes knocking, it’s going to be way more intense because if not practice, they’ve not practiced being in that space of extreme vulnerability when holding holding space for the people around us who are going through a process or the process?

Oli: Do you think it’s possible to overcome the fear of death? Like, when we say we’re scared of death, okay, we say we’re scared of the unknown and we’re scared of the inevitable and all these things. But what are we really scared of? Like, do you think it’s deeper than that? Like, I like people are always talking about how we’re all afraid of uncertainty and we hate getting out of our comfort zones. But what are we really afraid of? Like, when that’s happening?

Myrthe: I think we are scared of life because when we look at death, we have to look at our lives.

Oli: Yes. Yeah. And it’s holding a mirror up to us. It’s showing us who we really are and what human beings really are.

And it’s showing us what’s real. And so I think if people have that fear, they only have it because they haven’t accepted the realness of themselves. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, I know what you mean.

Myrthe: And I want to add to that. That with acknowledging or sitting with that fear with looking at what is actually scaring them from their lives or, you know, in their space in the here and the now, they don’t do that because it would mean that they have to make changes. And that takes work, that takes energy, that takes time, that takes effort.

Oli: I think there’s an element as well where I personally think you can’t lose anything real. So, you know, I’ve said a million and three times now on this podcast, and I’ve probably said it to you before, but like, human beings just have a natural drive towards wholeness, like we’re constantly moving and expanding towards wholeness.

That’s the natural state. But the ego and the identities that we carry are made of fragments, they’re made of concepts, they’re made of ideas, they’re made of fears about things like you’ve said, all these negative fragmentary things that we pick up, they cause us to go into hiding.

And so when we go into hiding, and we become fragmented, we create the ego which keeps the shadow of self at bay, and the truth becomes a threat, even though the truth is the thing that we actually all need, because the truth is wholeness, and that’s what we ultimately want to move toward. And so when we’re in that state, we pick up all of these illusions, and we need these illusions to be the truth, so that we don’t have to face, you know, all of the things that we need to hide from ourselves to keep the ego in place.

I don’t know if I’m making that too convoluted. But when we’re in that state, that’s when we pick up all these ideas that we are not human beings, that we’re something else. And by that all I mean is, you know, human beings in reality are these creatures, they keep flowing, keep expanding, keep evolving, ultimately towards death, where they just return to wholeness completely, and the system of nature that built them and all that kind of thing.

They forget that they’re human in that way, they forget that they don’t think life is what life is, because they only want to look at life and not the dichotomy of life and death, which is really the same thing. So blah, blah, blah, they pick up all these illusions, and the fear of death is actually just the fear of seeing those illusions were never real, if something like that.

And so what’s going on is when people have this fear is, you know, there’s a saying I’m always trying out as well, like what goes up must come down. And if you’ve been up in the air, like I’m cloud nine, hiding out in your illusions for a long time, then the fall back down to earth is a lot harder, basically. So is there something there?

Like I’m talking at you a lot here, I apologize, but is there something going on there that’s actually valid?

Myrthe: Yeah. What I’m also what I would like to explore further actually, is that with this, do we operate or do these beliefs and these behaviors?

Where are they actually coming from? Sometimes I really think about the society that we live in, how we lack a a specific purpose or a meaning in our day to day. Like we get up, we may have breakfast on the fly, we go to work, we sit behind the screen, I’m generalizing now.

We go home, we might go to the gym, we come home, make dinner, watch TV, go to bed, and we do that for a really long time, right? What’s the meaning in that? And how does our society feed us to stay disconnected from a bigger purpose? Because why do we go to work?

We go to work to make a paycheck because the paycheck provides us with a roof over our head, it provides us with food on our plates. So it’s kind of like this way of living that we can’t really escape, but maybe so many more people would like to, but they just are so stuck in this rut because there is no other option for them to see or to act upon.

So this ego gets… That status is maintained that way. So it’s more of a systemic fear that’s instilled upon us, more so than a human being one.

Oli: Wow, so there’s loads going on there, but I totally agree. But it’s kind of like there’s an interplay between the psychology of the people in the system and the systems that we build. And obviously there’s like socio-economic and political things going on that cause people in the system to have less power over their lives than they would if we had a more real society and all that kind of stuff.

But ultimately, the short version I would say is, society is structured around survival. It’s only about surviving. And when people are in that survival mentality, two things happen. One, it’s fear-based and scarcity-based.

And two, it’s fragmented. It’s basically a collective version of the individual ego. So the ego of individuals, I think, is created as a denial of what life actually is. So what we’re saying about everything, it been in flux and death, been an inevitable thing that happens and all that kind of stuff.

Society is built around the same fears, actually. And so when we deny the truth about life, which is that we are all gonna die and that actually there’s nothing to be afraid of, like I really believe that because you can’t lose anything real. Like when I die, like there will be no more Ollie Anderson, but Ollie Anderson is just an idea or anyway, it’s just my identity.

It never existed in the first place. But all of the things that are whole about me are just gonna return to the whole. And so when you understand that, you realize, okay, I’m gonna be here now. I’m gonna basically live my best life if I can by choosing a purpose that is aligned with what needs to be expressed from within me.

And when I express that, then I don’t have to worry about life being meaningful because purpose precedes meaning and it will become naturally meaningful. But because society is built around everybody needing to survive because they’re all scared of dying basically, which is a rational thing, I suppose if you live it in the short term.

But anyway, because society is built around that, it’s become a vacuum for purpose and meaning because really the only way that you will find as an individual, the only way you’ll find your true purpose in life is to start by accepting life for what it is.

So if you don’t accept that it’s gonna end one day, then you’re not gonna make the choices with your time, energy and attention like we were talking about. Then you’re not gonna move towards wholeness and then yeah, you’re gonna live like in the rat race ultimately just being told what to do because your life is dictated by external forces which are not reality, God or truth or wholeness or any of that stuff.

Your life is being dictated by the system basically, which is not real. And if the system is built in a survivalist way rather than something that allows you to thrive and be real, then you’re gonna have a bad time. And that’s why if you wanna escape the matrix whatever you wanna say, you have to wake up to the fact that you’re gonna die. And that is the starting point of liberation basically.

Myrthe:  Yeah, I totally agree with that. You put that beautifully.

I would love to hear from you what has been your biggest tool to really live by this other than accepting death.  In terms, how do you do this on a let’s say free basis?

Oli: I think it’s for me personally, I had a kickstart program I went through, let’s call it that. So I had some serious health issues. So I nearly died a few times. And well, I was in a coma and all this kind of stuff. I had a kidney transplant that went wrong.

That’s the short version. And going through that, it just showed me that, first of all, life is precious. Secondly, because I thought I was gonna die in the aftermath of that anyway, I went through this process of, just thinking about all this stuff. And then eventually it went from thinking to actually integrating it.

And then slowly over time, it just affected the choices that I made. Obviously, there’s all these basic things you can do. Like people always say, you know, you should meditate and you should journal and you should go walk in nature and I don’t know, get some crystals or something and just feel one with everything.

And you can do all that stuff. But for me, it came down ultimately to realizing my time is really precious. Like my time is so precious, I am not gonna give it to any bullshit just because that’s what I’ve been told to do. And there was a process actually that I had to go through of reconfiguring my life. Like I had, you know, arguments with people and all kinds of things who wanted me to live in the way that you’re supposed to live. And like actually what I have learned is that, like is what I just said actually, the system we have created does not want you to live your life. The system wants you to basically pay your taxes and then die. That’s ultimately what you’re educated to do if you go through the standard education system and all that stuff. And that is what a lot of people think that they have to do and they’re afraid to go against that programming. And so for me, the practical thing I did was just be stubborn to be honest.

Like initially I was very stubborn, not in a, like I didn’t ruin any relationships or anything, but I was stubborn in the sense of knowing what I wanted, like figuring out my values and then turning them into behaviors and goals and then sticking to it. And it’s not, it hasn’t been easy, like I’ll be honest, like especially in the initial transition, but… But that is ultimately it. Like it’s a test I’ve found. It’s a test of your faith in life. Because like eventually if you live in this way that we’re talking about, your faith is not put in the world. Your faith has to be in something higher.

You can call it, you know, God or saw. So all these different words people use, but you have to find a way to trust that flow. And that process of learning to trust the flow will be slightly different for all of us based on the bullshit that we’re carrying in our minds and that we have to let go of. But it’s always the same path.

So I’m always, you know, I’m a broken record. And sorry, I’m talking loads in this podcast, but it’s about going from fragmentation to wholeness. So it’s just asking yourself, what does wholeness look like in my life?

And you will never find that in the system. You have to find a way to get back on your own path, basically. So it’s figuring out what’s distracting you. And that’s ultimately why the death thing is so important, right? Because death is not a distraction. It shows you where you are distracting yourself.

Yeah.

Myrthe: And it also, this makes me think a lot about psychedelic journeys and how they are such a beautiful gateway into a deeper understanding of our psyche and exploring such a safe way. What our true values are and what is stopping us to live by those values and to, you know, even practice death during journeys. Like it’s possible for us to become very familiar with endings and that can be endings of any kind.

Oli: What are some of the main things that you’ve learned from the work you do with psychedelics? So, yeah.

Myrthe: I have learned that all of us are innocent, actually. We’re all in a way really lonely.

Oli: Wow.

Myrthe: We all experience a particular type of loneliness that is so individual. Yet there is this collective.

Oli: Wow.

Myrthe: When we come together, we all have it. And it’s like, why can we, where is this disconnect coming from?

It’s something that baffles me more and more because the loneliness, like it’s a fucking killer. Like, look at me. No, it’s like, I swear all the time. It really is. Yeah. Also when we meet elderly people and how they get through that final stage of their lives and how loneliness becomes really magnified for many of them.

Oli: Wow.

Myrthe: Because of the way that they live in our white society and nursing homes and less family time and all of that. But really, it’s also very present in our age group. .

I reckon it’s also really present in younger kids. . So where is that disconnect? How is it possible that we find it so hard to join in that and to recognize, hey, we are really all experiencing a feeling that maybe consists of a variation in frequency.

How can we join to bring that frequency into a more, yeah, into a similar range?

Oli:  Wow. I really wasn’t expecting you to say what you just said about loneliness. But it’s kind of blown my mind a little bit. So are you saying this is a societal thing? Like it’s mainly in the West. There’s like everyone’s lonely and disconnected. Or are you saying that’s the human condition?

Like wherever you are, we’re all ultimately alone. Like you want to know, is that what you’re saying?

Myrthe: I am saying that the people who I’ve worked with and I’m working with, they are all experiencing that. And myself included, I have moments where I find it really hard to connect to people around me because I feel misunderstood because I feel like I don’t necessarily fit in.

Like it’s that belonging, that story belonging, where is our place in society? I’d be really interested to explore what this is like for people from different cultures. I have a few ideas because when we say, when we, for example, look at the more traditional communities, there is way more space for the collective for solving issues and challenges as a community. There is space for ritual. There is lots more nature.

Oli: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s what I was thinking. So ultimately human beings are mammals. And if we’re living in accordance with that nature, then obviously we’re going to live in the way you just talked about.

We’re going to have lots of, basically we’re going to have bottom-up societies where people work together, the communities have got stronger bonds than they do in the atomized, alienated, Western industrial society we live in and all these kind of things. And either there’s two possible things that could be going on here. So either the human condition is that even in that best case scenario where we’re living like mammals, even in that case, we’re still kind of alone in the world. Like we might have moments where we feel connected to the other people in our tribe and things like that. But at the end of the day, it’s that thing we all die alone.

So that could be an option. Or maybe like in those tribal societies, like they’re all one with nature and they don’t even really appreciate there’s a big difference between me and you and blah, blah, blah, blah. And this loneliness that you’ve uncovered with the work that you do, is because in the industrial societies basically or in societies that have been informed by the structure of the industrial revolution and blah blah blah well in those societies people basically go into hiding don’t they they lose touch there’s all the stuff we were saying about the rat race they don’t they don’t value their own time because they’re supposed to go work in the factories or whatever it is they get on we that you know existential dread and boredom and all those things and it’s because they don’t know who they are they’re out of touch with themselves or it could be a bit of both so like we are all ultimately alone but we can forget about life if we live in the right way but maybe that’s the distraction so maybe the question here is there’s a thing in there like most religions will say I think I might be spreading this information but I’ve definitely heard this before that like you know we all die alone basically so like at the end of your life you might have people around you on your deathbed but it’s still just you and death or you and life death whatever you want to call it so what you know what do you think is the truth there based on what you’ve seen?

Myrthe: Well actually I wanted to add something to I would just wanted to circle back to the loneliness belonging topic because what also very often comes out of a psychedelic journey when done with purpose and intention obviously is it’s a week it’s an opportunity to reconnect to that oneness yes so yeah depending obviously on what type of medicine you use it can vary a little bit but really it’s this tool to break down the barrier the fragmentation the ego whatever you want to call it… to come closer to our authentic self or in a child or you know the elder within us – however we want to call – it and and there’s also then this magical moment where people can realize that really we are all one.

We are we are also one with whatever is going on beyond us that’s going on beyond our five senses.

Oli: Yeah yeah I personally think that is the ultimate truth like wholeness is reality and part of the reason that people feel so lonely is because you know what we’re saying they live out a pantomime basically they play in the character of the ego which is just all of that you know social conditioning and emotional conditioning to some extent or self-hypnosis in an attempt to keep their own emotional stuff at bay and you know I’m assuming like when people are doing these psychedelics ceremonies and the the ego slips away they see in those moments how they are the cause of their own loneliness how they are how they’re holding themselves back from just connecting with other people and it might be you know the way that they think about themselves the way they you know have prejudice about other people maybe they just have an emotional block like I’ve met people who I won’t name names there’s people in my family like traditionally most of the time they’re very kind of uptight and stoic and everything but if you get a few drinks in them they’ll be opening up and telling everybody how much they love everyone and stuff like that but it’s like you know it you can tell it’s weird for them to do that and I think a lot of the time that it probably just goes back to childhood programming or something like that…

Bbut the main barrier to loneliness is there is no loneliness isn’t not really in reality like in two levels like the level of other human beings there’s 8 billion of us on the planet so really if you had taken active approach to it you can probably find somebody to talk to you right if you’re lonely it might take some work obviously like they’re not just gonna knock on the door you might have to be active but okay but even I think if other human beings aren’t involved if you can connect to that wholeness if you can connect to this flow that we’re talking about it’s impossible you can’t be lonely do you know I mean like if you feel if you feel that well that is you like you connect into the real you but you’re connecting to everything else and that makes me sound like a massive API okay but like you can’t be lonely if you’ve been real because it’s not it’s not about loneliness anymore it’s about solitude do you know I mean there’s a difference?

Myrthe: There’s a difference and the differences it lies also in how we view it that we are looking very at the inner world to fill these voids and to as if we are expecting from our environment to give us the mission or to hype us up to live our true selves it’s not like that like we we are the only ones who can do that for us we put this expectation on the people around us whereas yeah yeah right to do that.

Oli: Yeah yeah yeah 100 % like I actually think loneliness just means that you are a you’re alone somewhere but it’s just you and your ego because you’ve bought into that illusion of status we were talking about so you’re alone and then your ego is saying all these things I should I should be with other people oh this thing that I did ten years ago you know I’m such an asshole whatever it is your ego is just judging you that’s what loneliness is is you sitting there with your ego solitude externally looks like the same thing like to a passive observer like you’re still there by yourself but solitude you’re alone but you with reality you’re in the present moment you’re still moving with reality you’re not holding yourself back with the ego stuff so personally I don’t think loneliness is real I think you know it’s a weird thing to say maybe I’ve never said that in my life but I don’t think loneliness is real I think you can feel lonely but if you are feeling lonely that is a sign that you need to think about death basically because if you think about death you’re gonna realize okay I need to go in this direction not that direction.

Myrthe: Yeah true I have another question for you because I’m curious how you feel about this when we talk about all of this stuff and you know how as in our society there’s not really an opportunity to live by by our truth to explore emotions to show up with all our vulnerability because we are a performance-based driven society so what do you think would happen if we would already introduce very specific work around emotions and vulnerability and having deep meaningful conversations at a very young age. So I’m thinking school, like primary school kids, they, their life could look so different if we allow them to really express themselves.

Yeah. And what do we do? We guide them into tasks where they have to draw within the lines or make like creativity in school. What does that mean? It means that we copy things. It means that we, we have limited, very limited resources.

Most resources they are inside. How is that creativity? I believe that creativity and the, the, or rather the expression of our emotions leads to more creativity.

Yeah. What does creativity bring as well? Means that we get to explore what we want our lives to look like.

Oli: So we can create ourselves. I’m really, I’m really glad that you asked this question because I totally forgot that this podcast was about creativity. So like ultimately the way that I see the creative process is about making the unconscious conscious.

That’s it. Like it can literally be anything, but ultimately it’s about putting yourself in this process we’ve been talking about of being present enough to allow what needs to emerge in life to emerge and to go with it without holding yourself back. And so whether it’s a creative conversation, like a dialogue like we’re doing now, whether you paint in a picture, whether you’re sitting down as a do-ler and you’re guiding somebody back into life so they can accept themselves, all of those things are creative, right? And all that’s going on is we’re making realities or truths that weren’t conscious because they were either out of sight or they were buried beneath the ego stuff.

We’re allowing that to come up to the surface. And the healthiest thing I believe any of us can do no matter how old we are or whatever, the healthiest thing we can do is learn to navigate that process of fragmentation to wholeness of unconscious to conscious in a way that serves us and our vision for whatever we think is going to bring meaning to our lives. And that ultimately is something that we should help children to learn.

Everybody should have those skills basically, right? But the problem is, it’s like we were saying, there’s always talk about reforming the education system and things like that. Everybody agrees that we should reform the education system. Nobody really had a nice time in school.

Nobody really thinks that the current education system is the best version, right? You learn all these facts and figures. You remember them by rote. You do some tests and then you leave and then you never use like 80 % of that information ever again in your life.

So it’s just training you to basically remember things. And because we live in the society, like you said, that is very performance driven, that is very much about ultimately getting results as an employee of a company. The education system, I think, doesn’t want kids to be doing this work that we’re talking about. If all the kids in the world were basically been taught about death and the things we’re talking about, what would they leave the education system doing? They’d leave the education system valuing their own time. Our society is not built around valuing the time of individuals.

It’s actually not. It’s built around property, valuing property, it’s built around valuing profit, all of those things. Personally, I’m not like a communist or anything.

I love capitalism if it’s like in its pure form, where people come up with a good idea and then if it works and it offers enough value to other people, then okay, they make some money from it. But now we’ve got this system where it’s corrupt. People are paying off their mates and everything, blah, blah, blah. And we don’t value the people in the system. It all comes down to what we were saying earlier. The system is designed to kill your creativity.

The system is designed to devalue your time and your life unless you step up and wake up and take your life back into your own hands. And any of us can do that. But personally, I don’t think the education system is the place to do it. I think maybe if you have kids yourself, then yeah, you can teach them this stuff.

I think all kids should learn it. But I don’t think it would be amazing if the education system did do this. But the way society is structured right now, the system is beyond just the education system. So what say we’ve introduced all these things we’re talking about to the education system. Society at large is not yet ready for people like that. So it would be amazing. But it would be revolutionary as well. I don’t know if I’m even making sense now.

I’ve had way too much coffee or something because I’ve ran lots in this podcast, way more than usual.

Myrthe: But it makes sense. And another thought that I’m having in addition to that is it has to start somewhere. I mean, it would be amazing if we have revolutionaries across the range of all ages, right? Yeah, yeah, people standing up and going for it.

Oli: Sorry, you know what it is as well. I’ve thought this before. So ultimately, what we’re talking about is in individual relationships between that being and life itself. Like at the end of the day, it’s between you and the universe, God, whatever word you want to use, right?

Yeah. And as soon as you start introducing things to the education system, or you start creating a movement around things, so you can have a revolution and all this stuff, as soon as you do that, it actually risks turning into dogma basically right because as soon as you say right we’re gonna put education into the we’re gonna put creativity into the education system this is what it’s gonna look like it will become dogmatic and so do you know what I mean and so say that again sorry that it went a bit funny yeah yeah and actually the round no conditions I think right because it’s about the unconditional relationship between you and life and so what I think and what I’ve tried to do it like actually with my some of my works in my book personal revolutions kind of talks about this but anyway at the end of the day it’s about giving individuals the tools to wake themselves up and to take control themselves and I spoke the education system can do way less damage like no question but as soon as you teach this people the same thing on mass you ultimately end up brainwashing people you because you create a culture so it’s about stepping it’s about having a culture that is beyond culture almost but you still need some traditions that are aligned with what we’re saying about nature itself natural laws awareness of you know what mammals need and all this kind of stuff but ultimately it’s a kind of wrap up my little rant it’s about it’s not about movements it’s not about revolutions it’s about waking up one on one and then you don’t need to worry about other people because I if I wake the thing that happens a lot in it like people wake up and then they try and wake everybody else up in the same way but the way that I wake up the way that I might have woken up to death and all this stuff we’re talking about real illness is a totally different path to you so if I say right well you need to meditate and then you need to just whatever I’ve said in the conversation you need to I can’t remember what I said but you know I went through this process of like basically been a bit stubborn and all this stuff that worked for me your way might be totally different like you might I don’t know it goes skip through the forest and like have a big ceremony with people where you’re taking shrooms and you’re all hugging and everything maybe that’s all you need but like the point is is giving people the tools to figure out that for themselves and yeah and I think you know we can have conversations with people and we can guide each other in that way but it’s just helping people to see themselves whatever that looks like I don’t know if I’m even making sense I’m gonna stop there.

Myrthe: yeah I think what I also hear in that is we have this individual accountability right and we can inspire each other by doing that yes yes exactly not yeah yeah yeah I think that’s the short version of what I get from from that.

Oli: Yeah so if you wake up and you do your own thing and you don’t judge other people you’re letting other people do the same thing and this is conditions we can create I guess that allow that to happen but anyway thank you thank you for interviewing me on your podcast – we’ve had a long conversation – how how would you sum all this up?

Like obviously we started talking about death we’ve gone down this rabbit hole and now basically we’ve shown I think or started to kind of question whether you know society is life-enhancing or not and it seems like it might not be… but how would you sum all this up have you got any final words wisdom and where can people find you on the internet if they want to get in touch with you?

Myrthe: Final words of wisdom wow the bit of pressure there…

Oli: FINAL

Myrthe: Yes I really invite people to start exploring this topic when they are not in a crisis yet wow so that it’s safe that it can be gentle that you can get familiar with it when you don’t have a time pressure brings us back to the value of time so that you can choose what you do with your time your time goes to what your time goes to have you sorry yeah go.

Oli: I was just gonna say have you got any like are there any exercises or something like that you know if someone’s made it this far into the podcast yeah is there anything that they could do like literally do to start acting on this?

Myrthe: Yeah totally totally and I would love to connect with people for this I host monthly gatherings to talk about the topics in a very to do this way and there’s small and intimate settings I do them in person and I do them online wow so I have that group and there’s also a practice of death meditation which can sound maybe a little bit weird but it is incredible it’s an incredible tool to become familiar with the process of the dying of the physical body wow and that gives a lot of comfort and understanding and that has been shown to also really give people this renewed sense for life.

Oli: So how do you do that you just meditate but you you know you think about how you’re going to die and everything?

Myrthe: Yeah so it’s a visualization process.

Oli: Wow okay so that’s two two quite powerful things so if people want to go to one of your you know dialogue group workshop things how do they do it?

Myrthe: Yeah um that’s a really good question I usually announce my groups through my newsletter and on Instagram right and my Instagram handle is at myrthepeters.com and I run a meetup group as well but I will make sure that you get the links to to all of that so that people can connect if they if they feel like and obviously one-to-one is also possible if it seems like a little bit overwhelming to show up in a group setting.

Oli: Wow well I’ll I’ll share all those links and everything in the show notes but this has this has been a really awesome conversation like obviously we gotta be carried away maybe but uh yeah that’s given me a lot to think about before I drop dead in a few years whatever it’s gonna be.

Myrthe: So thank you for that and uh having me it’s been a real real pleasure.

Creative Status is a podcast about using creativity as a vehicle for improving your life by deconstructing ego, integrating the shadow self, and designing and manifesting a real life. Every episode explores how the creative process can help you GROW REAL by moving towards wholeness in yourself by making the unconscious conscious.

In this episode of Creative Status, I talk to a good friend of mine who has loads of amazing things to say about the ego and how it can show up in our lives: Sara Sherwani. Sara is a coach, podcaster, and designer who is also the founder of the Egoless Design Thinking project (EDT).

EDT is a a design methodlogy that helps designers to figure out some of their blindspots and see how their ego ‘stuff’ gets in the way of creative problem solving, team work, and the creative process of building something that people really care about and get value from.

This being the case, I really wanted to talk to her about what this ‘ego’ thing really is, what we can do about it, and how we can improve our relationship with it in order to live the best possible life and keep growing real. We cover tons of amazing things in this conversation so if you wanna figure out some ego ‘stuff’ and get more creative this is a really great place to get started!

Listen using the embedded player above or go to any podcast platform!

(Scroll down for show transcript)!

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Show Transcript: Expanding Your Mind is Your Greatest Treasure

Intro

Oli Anderson: Oh, hi there, Oli Anderson here. You’re listening to Creative Status. If this is the first time you’ve found a podcast, then welcome. This is a place where we talk about and explore how the creative process can be used as a vehicle for growing more real.

Growing more real just means that we are finding a way to move towards wholeness, that we’re not allowing ourselves to be held back by all of the fragmented ideas and limiting beliefs that we carry within our relationship with ourselves, that we are allowing the stuff, the emotional stuff that we need to face to grow, to come up to the surface through our creative projects, and that we can design a life that we actually care about and want to live because we’re bold enough to make a choice for ourselves and for the real stuff, our real values and intentions.

Anyway, don’t get me ranting and raving about all that. For those of you who have already listened to the podcast and you’ve come back, thank you so much. Really appreciate it. If you want to leave a review somewhere, then I would also appreciate that because that helps people to find the podcast. If you want to subscribe to this as well and you haven’t, then that means you’re not going to miss out on future episodes because why would you want to miss out on something like this? Come on now.

Anyway, today’s episode is an interview with Sara Shawani, who is a friend of mine. She is a designer, but she has an amazing project called Egoless Design Thinking, where she helps designers to basically figure out how their ego stuff and the emotions and all of the crap going on beneath the surface that led to the creation of the ego, how all that stuff is getting in the way of them solving problems, working with teams, getting better results and designing things of real value for the people that are going to use them.

Because one of my favorite words as a human being is ego, something that I always talk about, as you will know, if you have listened to this podcast already or read my book, Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness, which is basically just about how the ego is not real. If you have become familiar with my stuff, you’ll know that I love that word.

And so that is why I decided that I should have a recorded conversation, a focused conversation about all of the ego stuff with Sara Shawani. So this is a very energetic, free-flowing exploration of what the ego means, how it can hold you back, how it gets in the way, what it even is, how you can recognize it, blah, blah, blah.

There’s loads of cool stuff that you’re about to hear. Hopefully it’s going to help you and add some value as you’re on your own journey to go into wherever it is that you’re going. Sarah, thank you so much for giving me your time and letting me ask you all these questions. Everybody else, hope you enjoy the interview and I’ll see you again next Monday for another episode of Creative Status.

Interview

Oli Anderson: Oh, hi there, Sarah.

How are you today? Thank you so much for joining me today on this episode of Creative Status. You and I share some very similar interests in relation to design and how design can shape the world and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but also the ego. It’s been said before on this podcast that ego is probably my favorite word because I fling it out there every two seconds.

And so I thought it would be interesting to talk to you about the ego and what you think it is and what you can learn from it, blah, blah, blah, blah. But before we get onto that, do you feel like introducing yourself and telling people what you do, who you are, what you’re all about, and anything else that you want to fling us?

Sara Sherwani: Absolutely. Hi, Oli. You and I have had a very, very deep and interesting relationship, I think, over the last many, many months. And it’s been a pleasure to get to know you and to get to this point where we’re actually jumping on a podcast together.

Oli Anderson: That’s amazing. The feeling is mutual, though. I must tell you.

Sara Sherwani: But I guess for the people that haven’t heard my dulcet tones before, I am, yeah, I guess my name is Sarah Shirawani and I am a coach. I am a designer. I have worked in the world of designing tech products and services for like neuro-linguistic programming, so NLP, which is a study of like the mind and speech.

And I’ve learned a little bit about hypnotherapy along the way. And I use some of that to help the client side of work with across my sort of career. So when it comes to the ego, I feel like I’ve definitely done my homework. And it sort of led me to create a course that I designed called Ego List Design Thinking, which was, I guess, my take on how your ego plays a role in what you design, what you create, and actually the position at which you create from can be derived from your own perception of reality.

Oli Anderson: Wow. So basically, based on what you’ve said, you are very well equipped for me to start asking you all of these questions about ego, what it is, how it shows up in people’s lives, how it holds us back, how it affects the world, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So to get started, I always say to keep it simple, that everything boils down to either wholeness and connection or fragmentation. Wholeness is real.

It’s reality. It’s just the idea that everything is just one big relationship, having a relationship with yourself. And if you can tune into that relationship and flow with it and keep growing and expanding, then you’ll feel good and you’ll probably get what you want from life.

The thing that stops us flowing in that way is the ego, which is just some idea that we’ve picked up that is ultimately the opposite of reality. That’s another thing I love saying, that ego is the opposite of reality, because it fragments our experience of the whole. So as a starting point, this conversation, does any of that even make sense to you? Is it bullshit?

And what do you think about it?

Sara Sherwani: Well, I think the idea of the ego is something that is totally necessary for us to make sense of because it helps us make sense of the world in terms of duality, which is the idea that is the mind can basically only comprehend between two sort of levers or two aspects of itself. So for you to understand what’s high, you need to understand what’s low, for you to understand what’s wide, you need to understand what’s thin.

And so the ego is part of that barometer, that measure stick that helps you recognize a little bit about where your fears are. So the way I always see it is the ego is the part of you that is driven by the spirit of fear or self-preservation. And essentially, I mean, I got that from Marianne Williamson book, where she talks about a return to love and it’s all about the ego and how the ego is in relation to the aspect of God.

And I think when you talk about wholeness, it’s probably connected to that idea of there being this kind of cosmic energy that essentially is the creator. And that energy essentially drives our understanding of what it feels like to be genuinely connected to your spirit.

And I think the ego is one of those things where ultimately this world is full of challenges, is full of things that might make us feel like we fear our reality, but there’s something really special that we can tap into with this idea of wholeness, I think, which is trusting in your ability to be a creator and being that force that could essentially channel that kind of creativity that I think God really put us here to do.

Oli Anderson: Yeah, wow. So ultimately, that’s exactly how it’s here.

So there’s all these different words that we can use for the same experience. The experience is that connection to wholeness. Some people call it divinity, some people call it God, some people call it sauce, whatever it is.

It’s all the same thing. And actually, when you are connected to that, which you are at all times, but when you’re aware of that connection, that’s when you’re in the best space for creating something real, either creating the real version of yourself, creating a real life, creating some real projects. And the only barrier to that in most cases are the mental blocks that come from what we’re calling the ego.

So how can we define the ego a little bit more clearly? Because yeah, we’re agreeing, okay, yeah, it’s about understanding that there’s something inside the human experience that is there to help us survive. It’s fragmented because it’s ultimately about our body. It comes from the body, I think, the ego.

It’s fragmented because our bodies are fragmented, so we can’t experience the whole all at once, unless we have a peak experience where we transcend the limits of our body for just a tiny moment. But anyway, what are some common ways, common ways do you think that the ego shows up in people’s lives? Like how do we know when we’re actually dealing with the ego and not something that is real, if that even makes sense?

Sara Sherwani: Well, I think it essentially rears its head almost in many real world conversations, whether it’s, am I gonna look good today or is my health good? Or what do I wear that’s gonna make me feel like I fit in? And there’s things around how to connect with people and feeling like you’re not good enough in that sense.

I think the ego is essentially the part of you that does manifest that I’m not good enough thought within your sort of mind stream. And it’s just constantly reinforced really through media, through like general conversations through culture. If you’re in the matrix, it sort of leads itself into you being constantly surrounded by power games.

And it’s power games about who’s essentially speaking the loudest, who’s being more recognized, who’s playing the game so to speak. And all of that, I think is where the ego sort of manifests. And it’s one of those things where in today’s world it’s very, very difficult, I think, to stay away from it.

Oli Anderson: Yeah, yeah. Like actually what you’re talking about in a way is the difference between scarcity and abundance. So when we connected to a wholeness in the way that we’ve been talking about, obviously there is only abundance.

Like that wholeness is ultimately where everything comes from and it’s real, it’s whole. So obviously you can’t add to it, you can’t take away from it, blah, blah, blah, blah. But here in the world, because of the way we perceive things because of our bodies and the egos and all the stuff you’ve said, we look at everything as though it’s scarce when it actually isn’t. So in relation to power, we think that, if one person has power, then it takes away from our power.

Or we think that if one person is successful, it takes away from our success or whatever it is. And that comes back again to what you were saying about duality to some extent. So the ego ultimately is just dualistic thinking projected out into the world. And it’s making us think that life is more scarce than it actually is, something like that. And then all of these little power games and dynamics and these strange phenomenon that arise in our lives because of the ego ultimately go back to that. So what is, well, if you agree with that, what is the solution if there is one?

Sara Sherwani: What is the solution? Well, I do think that the first thing that comes to mind when it comes to learning about the ego is that sense of self-awareness. We just talked a little bit around the sort of power games. And when we’re talking about where power is in relation to how we see our reality, we have to actually understand that. when it comes to work or when it comes to even going to get your groceries from the shop, right?

There’s an element of power that plays with the people that you’re interacting with, with certain people who might not want to engage with you for whatever reason. There’s, you’ve got to have a level of self-awareness about your own ego and where some of that work lies. And so there’s so much out there about self-awareness and how you can tap deeper into yourself.

And I think the like meditation is definitely one of those things I’ve been meditating for years and years and years. And for me, that kind of quiet space where you get to hear your inner thoughts and make sense of these thoughts in relation to what reality is. You can start to do some self-work and self-questioning about whether your assumptions of reality are true or not. And I think the ego is basically the, it’s there to create the fantasies. It’s there to create like a misconception of what reality truly is.

Oli: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that’s what I mean when I say that the ego is the opposite of reality. That’s what I mean. You’re so true. Sorry.

Sara: No, because you’re on the money. It’s just getting to that point where you can actually hear your inner self to the point where you have enough awareness and enough understanding of what it is and how it rules you. Whether it comes to the first seven years of your life, because those first seven years is essentially when your ego gets formed.

It’s a collection of those experiences, whether with your parents, with your friends, with your teachers, in fact, that actually show you a model of reality. That model of reality is constantly reinforcing your perspective of what the ego is and what it means to you. If you saw people around you in a hustle state or being in a scarcity state where they feel like they have to keep going and they don’t have enough, that is going to be ingrained in your psyche on some level.

And you have the ability and also a part of you has the responsibility to start to unpack that. Because if we’re going to be moving away from the kind of reality where we’re just stuck in this merry-go-round or this sort of rat race, then we’re never really going to evolve into our truest and highest potential. And I think we do have a responsibility to learn about ourselves in that way so we can show up in authentic power rather than this falsified power where there’s competing games to see the kind of alpha in the room.

When actually the true alpha is your own spirit and your connection to something beyond.

Oli: Yeah. Okay. So there are so many things that I can try to unpack now based on all this amazing stuff you’ve just shared. Let me try and break it down. So the first thing is what you’re saying about this kind of animalistic subtext that exists between people.

And that is so true. So like obviously with mammals, human beings, a lot of the egotistical things that occur between people in the way that we interact, especially around the kind of power dynamics you mentioned and scarcity beliefs people have around power. A lot of that stuff comes down to the fact that we’re animals.

And at some level, our bodies are constantly comparing the other people around us in relation to who might be an alpha in that particular group or who might have the most power just in terms of physical strength and all those kind of things. And that stuff is always going on beneath the surface and it affects the way that we think. And a lot of the time people don’t even realize that’s going on. So it happens around power, but it happens around sex as well. Like there’s all kinds of subtext between people that is constantly affecting the way that they interact without even knowing about it. So until you become aware of that kind of stuff, you’re always going to be running around on autopilot and you’re going to have that stuff going on along with all the other autopilot programming that the ego puts inside you.

So again, first of all, I want to ask if you agree with that. But then after that, I want to follow the path of awareness and to look at whether or not awareness is just part of the journey. Because I found in my own life, I’m working with clients, awareness is good. It’s the first step. My whole coaching thing starts with that awareness acceptance action.

Awareness is about deconstructing the ego. But if you only do the awareness stuff and you become aware of the animalistic stuff I’m on about and the way that the ego shows up in all these different ways. If you’re only aware of it, but you don’t make changes because of that, then it actually can give you more problems because you end up procrastinating or whatever it is.

Or you’re just so overwhelmed that you don’t know what to do or you feel disconnected from the world. So the two questions are, one, what do you think about this animalistic subtext thing I’m on about? And two, is awareness of these kind of things enough or do we need more?

And if we do need more, what do we need?

Sara: So the animalistic thing is kind of an interesting one, right? Because we do have that prehistoric brain that essentially rules us. And there’s the ideas about how we have a like 10 % of our conscious of our mind is in its conscious state when we’re awake.

So there’s 90 % of what we’re doing, what we’re thinking, how we’re breathing, how we’re standing, how we’re walking that lives in the pre context of our subconscious mind. And so I think a big part of the subconscious mind where a lot of the ego I think resides does live in that kind of place of, is it safe for me to continue? Am I included? Do I feel connected?

And these basically relate to really old neuro pathways within your brain that like kick off like dopamine, serotonin, all those kind of chemicals. And so… I think there’s a part of us that exists where we strive for structure, we strive for connection and we strive for building and growing together. I think that’s an innate human need.

But I do think that there’s ways in which we can start to rewire the ways in which our mind sees the world because maybe it doesn’t always have to mean that I have to give up my needs for other people. Maybe it doesn’t always have to mean that I need to stay in a toxic and abusive relationship.

Maybe it doesn’t always have to mean that I need to deal with a boss that essentially doesn’t really respect me or want to kind of move me forward and is in itself interest. And these kind of situations bring out your inner fears and those inner fears of well, will I be able to go somewhere else? Will I think on a deep intrinsic level, we do want that sense of belonging and that sense of enjoyment.

And I highly recommend people check out some of the work by Caroline Miss where she talks a little bit about how the ego essentially manifests itself. And she speaks about archetypes and how there are different roles that the ego might play to essentially get us to either sabotage ourselves or to be in victimhood about ourselves or to potentially be someone who looks for attention in different kind of ways. And so that understanding of how the ego kind of shows up in different scenarios, whether you play on your kind of faults or whether you are someone who just gets drawn into other people who might be in a more of a power-leaning state.

These are all parts of yourself that you can start to rediscover through the sense of archetypes or these kind of characters that we all play. Because everything that we’re doing and things that we are, the way that we portray ourselves, are based on models that we would have seen on TV, in films, on radio, or just kind of connections that we’ve had. So we’ve got to really start to unpack the stories that are building the characters that we’re showing up as.

Oli: Yeah, that’s amazing. And it’s all interconnected. So there’s this animalistic stuff that we’re talking about that’s driving people unconsciously, like we’re driven by those basic animal needs for belonging, to procreate, blah, blah, blah.

Obviously, that’s all amazing. Like, actually, we need to accept it and embrace it, but we need to be in control of it. If we don’t accept it and embrace it, then there’s going to be no human beings.

So obviously, we need it. But the issue, if you want to call it an issue, is that when we’re not getting what we feel like we need from life, that’s when we lapse into creating this ego, this unreal version of ourselves.

And we use the ego to try and meet the needs that we’re not getting, if that makes sense. So let’s take the example of we have this biological need for belonging. If we feel like we’re not getting that sense of belonging, like we haven’t found our tribe or whatever, that we have that unconscious belief you talked about that I am not good enough, then we basically, we’re driven by shame.

And when we’re driven by shame, that’s when we disown certain parts of ourselves, we create the ego version consciously or unconsciously. And then we take that ego version out into the world.

But because we’re interacting as the ego, not our real selves, that’s when it creates all these kind of dramas that you’re talking about. It creates drama from people being victims. It creates drama from people trying to rescue other people. It creates drama from people being persecutors, all these different things. But when we’re acting out those dramas, it’s purely because we’re trying to get the needs met that the ego is ironically preventing us from meeting, if that makes sense.

So for example, if we feel unconsciously that we don’t belong, that’s when we might start playing the victim or we might start creating other dramatic situations in our lives, purely so we can feel a sense of connection with people through the drama. And so if you can understand that, and those archetypes that you’re playing, you can understand or reverse engineer what your ego is actually trying to meet in a strange roundabout way.

Sara: Yeah, I hear that. I think I once heard a story about a woman who essentially kind of went off into the forest and she said that she kind of didn’t want to connect with anyone. She wanted to kind of live a recluse life. And she went through a level of therapy and she started to discover that actually the reason why she shuts down connection is actually because she’s been self sabotaging to towards actually real connection. And what she really wanted was to have that connection, but ultimately there was a sense of just not feeling connected enough or good enough to be able to realize that.

And that was part of her challenges that she was essentially lying to herself that she didn’t need anyone or didn’t want to connect with anyone, what actually had in mind as told, just didn’t want any like, couldn’t deal with the idea of being rejected again.

Masked this persona and that’s part of what the ego does. It makes you create these characters. And this is why we’re talking about archetypes as a sort of loose subject into the ego, because this is how the ego essentially manifests itself through these characters. And I think as you get older as well, I think the characters tend to change or develop and then get a little bit more ingrained.

And I think it’s really important to keep on your toes about the person that you’re showing up as and the person that you really want to be, because it just takes one move, like day by day, one move in one direction, one move in a kind of that same direction day by day, where these kind of actions become habits and these habits then start to form your character and show up out. you’ve got to be really mindful because the minute you take off your foot off the gas, even just for a few moments, what feels like a few moments, and like a disassociated state, I feel like that’s when, you know, you start to get smacked in the face and the universe kind of says, well, you thought that you were trying to be spiritual and all that, but actually, this is the person that you’re showing up as.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that’s when you start to wake up and be like, okay, actually, my life needs to go in a very different direction.

Oli: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that’s another interesting thing. So a lot of the time, I’ve found, like when I’m coaching people, blah, blah, blah, like, I find that people, they try to show up in the world as a certain version of themselves in order to heal themselves and to be more real and, yeah, yeah, no.

But actually, because they haven’t done the work, the version that they’re trying to show up as is has been chosen by the ego. And so actually, it just ends up perpetuating the problem.

So is there a way around that? Like, how do we know that what we’re aiming for is actually something real? And it’s not just a continuation of the ego and all this bullshit that we’re trying to do. I’m trying to overcome transcend.

Sara: Hmm. I personally think that you’ve got to get still enough to really hear your inner desire, and whichever way that your desire sort of shows or demonstrates a will within itself, you’ve got to follow it because at the end of the day, there may be lessons there that you can learn. Yeah. And sometimes it’s such a cliche saying, but it’s so fucking true. At the end of the day, nobody knows.

I don’t think anybody knows. I genuinely feel that you have to go down the road and you learn your lessons along the way that are right for you. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And you’ll only know until you try to actually walk the path.

Oli: Yeah, this is the thing. So all of these conversations, almost always, are every day. Every coaching session I have, or every coaching relationship always eventually comes down to what you’ve just said ultimately, which is it’s about trust. You have to trust the process. You have to trust life.

You have to trust God, wholeness, whatever word you want to use. It always comes down to that. And actually, the ego is almost always people looking for reasons not to trust unconsciously. They have picked up some belief that you can’t trust yourself and you can’t trust life. And so they create this ego version of themselves. And only if you get that trust, can you start to evolve in the way that we actually need and want to you, which is the evolution towards wholeness is what I call it.

So we’ve said a few times now that it comes down to this first step of awareness. You become aware of the ego. You realize that it’s causing drama in your life. It’s causing friction, frustration, misery.

It’s stopping you getting the results you want. All these things we’ve kind of talked about or alluded to. But to go back to the question I asked maybe 10 minutes ago to me, the awareness stage is just the first step.

Right? That’s what I found because there’s so many spiritual people out there or people on these healing journeys or whatever language one is. There’s so many people out there. They have these awakenings or they become aware. But then they just end up being so open minded that their brains fall out and they just don’t know what to do anymore. They’ve got no direction or they become overwhelmed because they feel like they’re really aware and awake. But they look at the world around them and there’s all these kind of automatons walking around these zombies.

You know, and they just don’t feel connected to the world anymore. So that is not what you would expect this awakening to lead to, right? And it doesn’t actually, I don’t think it does, but for a lot of people they think that’s it. Okay, I’m aware now and that’s it. All my problems are solved. But what comes after that, do you think?

Sara: I think it comes down to learning ways in which you can start to regulate yourself and get to the point where awareness then becomes a seed for action. Or a seed for change. And so that sort of relates to what other kind of forms or things that you can do to actually turn awareness into tangible, real, actionable changes that you can see in your life. And I think part of that can be working with others, working with a coach, working with a mentor, working as part of like a mentoring group. Because there’s no better way, in my opinion, from the work that I’ve done.

Yes, I’ve done loads of journaling, but journaling is just you reflecting on your own inner self from just your vantage point. And so you kind of get surprised, I think, when you’re working with a coach, in that they can see things in you and the way that you’re showing up in the world in different ways than you’ve even seen within yourself. So having almost that mirror, but a mirror that’s coming from a completely different perspective can teach you so much more in the reflection that you have about who you are and how you’re showing up in the world.

Because there’s no better feedback than from someone who’s actually receiving you and your raw, honest, most vulnerable self. So I think that’s one method. But to truly get regulated, it’s the hard work of being able to get your thoughts out there and starting to pick out, okay, what are the belief systems that need to change here? What are the underlying values that I have that’s actually driving my behavior and making me create this kind of maybe false world or false reality?

Like you’ve got to really peel back the layers of what are the pillars or the scaffolding building blocks that are actually creating your model of reality so that you can get to a point of more internal sort of regulation. Because the more you can actually start to manage the trigger, the trigger points are naturally going to happen. It’s normal like families, a big trigger point, a relationship might be a big trigger point.

These are the things that are tapping into your internal sense of self. And when you kind of make sense of how you see yourself, how you view how other people see you, and actually get into unpacking and relearning from maybe unresolved sort of trauma, you’ll start to see more regulation in the way that you show up for work or the way you show up in your finances, the way you show up with your relationship with yourself, because you’ve done that work to relearn essentially your own sort of inner patterns.

And that relearning process sometimes requires going to courses, learning about holistic health, maybe it’s doing like a journaling program, maybe you join a master mind, you’ve got to take yourself out of your comfort zone, learn these lessons about yourself, and start to implement really solid habits that can actually get you to reflect and really look at the kind of person that you’re showing up as.

Oli: I love the idea of self-regulation and I think ultimately what you’re regulating is your relationship with reality, or wholeness or whatever you want to call it. And ultimately, it comes down to the idea that the ego, once again, is blocking your emotional relationship with yourself from flowing in the way that it needs to.

So I always talk about this, but like I always think that the ego and the shadow self are in kind of constant conflict. So the way that it works is short version, like we’re born and everything’s basically all right, but then something happens, like you said in the first seven years, where we become ashamed of who we really are.

And so when we become ashamed, or we made to feel guilty or in the worst cases, we get trauma, that’s when we start hiding parts of ourselves. We hide them in the shadow territory, but they never go anywhere. But in order to hide these parts, we basically put the mask of the ego which is a version of us without these parts, with the disowned parts kind of sent into hiding. And as we go through life, the ego basically is just an attempt to keep these emotions and disowned parts at bay, no matter what. But because they’re real, they never go anywhere.

And so they’re constantly screaming from beneath the surface of our life for our attention to bring us back home. And when we start regulating in the way that you’re talking about, instead of having this emotional stuff kind of scream from beneath the surface, we basically find a way to kind of, you know, it’s like a pressure valve almost, we’re letting the pressure out a bit more evenly. And so these emotions can start to be integrated. And as they’re integrated, we become more whole within ourselves. And then, because we’re less fragmented, we’re putting something real into life.

And so we’re more likely to get something real out of it. And so that regulation phase is really important, because that’s when we ultimately, we learn to accept who we truly are, we learn to accept what life really is, but we’re kind of doing it in a controlled way. So the question for you there is, you know, how do you think this underlying emotional stuff into plays with the ego, but how does it affect our lives as a whole, if it’s just unresolved or however you want to describe it?

Sara: Well, for me, one thing I actually talk about a lot is there’s a bit of a problem, I think, in the business world, especially, in that people are relying on thinking in boxes, thinking in sort of numbers, thinking in straight lines, rather than actually driving themselves to really thinking expressions or thinking empathy orientated sort of ways and actually driving more emphasis on your intuition. And your intuition is seems to be this mystical thing that people have put in a box somewhere and said, oh no, that can’t be real.

And I think that there’s a real disconnect that people are experiencing because of the nature of reality and because of this kind of drive towards logic, where you’re missing a huge part of tapping into the realness that comes from your unconscious and allowing of what it knows to be right and what you innately know to be wrong. And I think part of the journey of getting to a point where you can actually unpack and almost not beat the ego, because I think the ego is one of those things where it’s not necessarily good or bad, it’s a natural part of yourself. And we all have one, and it’s there to serve a purpose. But it’s also there to highlight that there’s actually another form of intelligence that lives within you. And that form of intelligence exists in a way that the ego can’t exactly comprehend. And you’ve kind of got to get to a point where you recognize that your inner self has all the answers that it could possibly need to get to the point of resolving this.

And it sounds like a cop out. But when I do my hypnotherapies, for example, and I’ve worked with clients who’ve had like severe anxieties, they’ve had panic attacks, I’ve worked with people with PTSD, and OCD and that kind of vibe. And what I often find is within those sessions, the more emphasis that you can play on someone really trusting their inner self and allowing their inner self to come through with the answers to whatever problem is presenting, it’s an amazing miracle start to happen when you allow the subconscious mind to come through. And when you’re in a state of hypnotherapy, for example, where there’s no distraction from the outside world, there’s nothing you can be really comparing yourself to other than the pictures that are showing up or the sounds that are showing up within your inner mind.

It’s a really safe place for you to actually see your inner self. start to listen, go deep within and actually trust what’s coming from within you. And I understand that a lot of this sounds woo woo garglar, but until you go down the journey of of tapping into your inner self in that way, it will then start to make a lot more sense. And I do think there’s ways that you can make this come to light like journaling. There’s lots of really cool self discovery journals that are out there. And I think they can play quite a big part in starting to understand that inner self. And of course, there’s aspects of philosophy that you can always dive into like, I don’t know, Socrates or even people like Rumi, because I’ve always found philosophy in poetry is like ways that tend to inspire my inner self about my model of reality because of the questions that are asked.

Oli: I’ve actually got a free journaling thing on my website.  So it’s my website, olianderson.co.uk/journal, it’s got loads of prompts for that kind of thing.

But anyway, the interesting point you made there, again, like anything comes back to the wholeness fragmentation thing. So you’re right, there are two basic kinds of intelligence that we all have access to. I don’t think it’s woo woo, I think it’s just it’s real, right?

Like the unconscious mind, it where our intuition comes from is connected to wholeness at all times. And the ego is a product of the conscious mind basically and the body. And it just thinks in very linear, intellectual, conceptual, fragmented ways. And it’s because it’s a product of fragmented bodies trying to understand the world in a fragmented way. And it turns that back onto the animal or the creature that is using that that system to make sense of life.

So basically, it’s a fragmented way of making sense of things, which tries to make sense of itself in the same way, which is very convoluted sentence, maybe that’s my ego trying to be too clever or something. But anyway, the intuition is just ultimately about connecting back to wholeness.

And when you can do that, that’s when you get the answers that you actually need, because you are going to be taking it outside to some extent what you already think you know, because if you try and understand everything just through the conscious mind, you’re not going to bring anything new into the equation, because the conscious mind is just made up of what you already think you already know.

And so you have to be open to something bigger again than just yourself, it always comes back to that same theme. And I guess again, that goes back to the trust thing. But anyway, do you think, and I think I already know the answer because you kind of mentioned it a little bit, but there’s all this stuff out there, where people say, you know, I went through an ego death, I’m going to kill my ego, my ego will not bother me anymore, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Is that even possible? Because I personally think that’s a huge misconception. And if think if you’re trying to kill your ego and be like really enlightened or whatever, that is actually ego, if you set that up as your goal. But what do you think about that? Just to kind of bring this all together, maybe like, can you kill your ego? Or is that bullshit?

Sara: Hmm. Well, I feel that in my experience, there’s definitely evolutions that I’ve experienced where I feel like the old version of me has died, and like a new version has reemerged. And I’m, I can call that a bit of an ego death, but essentially, it’s just a reinvention of your model or your sense of self. And I think that does happen for all of us. And I think throughout our lives, we’re going to constantly go through these reinventions, these moments where we actually lose that part of our old self.

And again, in a funny way, that can often be driven by the ego, even though it’s kind of death of sorts in that like, even when you become a parent, right, there’s a common thing where people kind of say, well, the old person that I thought that I was is just no longer anymore because of my responsibilities.

Or, you know, if you make big steps to get married, again, that kind of commitment can create a death of sorts. Or if you lose people that are close to you, these essentially shape and affect your model of identity and therefore your model of reality. And so I think the life will constantly throw different versions of this ego death at you, but it’s not a one time thing that occurs.

It will constantly happen. And you’ll constantly have to navigate finding new versions of yourself and actually tapping into your inner creativity, your inner sense of wholeness as you describe it, so that whatever this new reality is that you want to create, it’s embodied with the person that you feel like you want should and be kind of become.

So I kind of think that an ego death is one of those things where you’re going to go through changes, you’re going to go through transformations, and you’ll you will lose a part of your identity is how you navigate that and have that sense of awareness within yourself to mitigate some of those challenges because your old part of yourself was there to be and to serve its own sort of purpose. And this new aspect, whatever this is going to be and however it emerges, is also a part of you that you might want to nurture or rediscover in its own way.

And it deserves your time, it deserves your effort. There’s no greater work than the work that you do with yourself because how you show up and the person that you choose to be, manifest in your community, the people that you interact with, your work colleagues, your family, your friends, your partner, your kids, all of that kind of plays on your sense of self. And you’ve got to work hard to realize what that who that person is that’s going to be showing up tomorrow next week, because we all entirely want to make those changes. I think it’s the it’s the victim, it’s the saboteur, it’s the rescuer. These are the kind of characters within us that kind of fight to keep their place. And so sometimes death of your old self can be a really, really good thing and should be so welcome.

Oli: I think the way that I like to think of it is it’s like a spiral and so you can’t kill the ego in my view because it’s not real. It’s just a it’s a misconception. It’s just an idea that we treat as been real but actually it’s just a filter for reality. It’s nothing real and like as we go through these spirals we learn more and more and more about what’s real about us and so as we go through these changes and we evolve and we let go of one filter i.e. one identity and we replace it with another we still have some kind of an ego because you know we’re always going to have that filter because we always have these fragmented bodies but it becomes something that affects us less and less and less if we trust the process and go with it.

Because as we go through those spirals we let go of fragmentation basically and we just get more and more whole or more and more connected to the wholeness that’s already there as we shed our skin it’s like a snake shedding its skin something like that and ultimately if you can go through that process in a real way and you have the trust to do it then in general you’ll get to that place you were talking about where the ego isn’t affecting your life as much and what you put into your life is going to be a reflection of that so we’ve covered a lot of…

Sara: I’m almost visualizing like dna and how dna sort of spirals as you’re just talking where you kind of traverse through like the different kind of codes that represent i guess who you are and it is it is a you are a constantly evolving piece of work…

Oli: Yeah yeah thank you but it’s because your relationship with reality is constantly evolving like actually you know “Oli Anderson” or “Sara Sherwani” these they’re just concepts out other than we’ve picked up but the experience if you’re doing it right keeps getting deeper and deeper and deeper and then you feel more and more alive until obviously you just die and then nothing matters anyway.

So.. we’ve covered a lot of ground like a lot – I always say that but we actually have – like it’s been a short conversation really 45 minutes we’ve covered loads of stuff how would you sum up all of these things that we’ve been talking about and have you got any final words of wisdom I suppose?

And where can people find you if they want to talk about any of this stuff or learn more about Egoless Design and those kind of thing?

Sara: I’d summarize this conversation as first of all truly enlightening from the perspective of these concepts can never get old because they’re so universal and they’re so essential to how we see ourselves and there will never be any time lost when you’re focusing on who you are and how you show up in the world because it’s these sort of power dynamics that we are constantly interacting with that show us who we are and who we can be and i think there’s no greater work than that and so for me the i guess words of wisdom would be listening to podcasts like this spending time really on your personal development and hearing those stories that show you different perspectives will always be the work that will greatest treasure in my opinion so i would say keep keep at it and you will always start to see that the way in which you see yourself can be more connected to the spirit of wholeness and that spirit of realness as you continue to evolve and i’ve i kind of took that approach in the way that the ego is seen and how you kind of see your ego with design thinking and how you can actually use your sense of self to develop more empathetic more intuitive driven um tech products and services and that’s why um i created that so i would be more than happy to connect with people listening to this and answer any questions i can be found on linkedin and i also have a medium page with a bunch of articles that are written that will hopefully contribute to this body of work that is the ego that we are all contributing to.

Oli: Amazing so i’ll share all your links and stuff in in the show notes i’m so happy that you said this stuff is universal because that’s how i always think about these ideas.

Like, I believe that any human being that has ever existed could learn about these ideas about the ego versus reality and it would add value or have some practical application to their lives because ultimately that idea of ego reality or fragmentation wholeness that is the only issue that anyone is really really dealing with and if you can understand that and trust the process of moving towards wholeness then in general life is just um fucking amazing…

So Sara Sherwani thank you so much for coming on here that was uh I was a bit nervous about talking to you i gotta be honest but i think you were it was amazing so thank you very much.

Sara: Thank you for having me that was actually really really fun so I enjoyed it.

Oli: Thank you and I’ll talk to you again soon but thank you, Sara Sherwani!

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
-Carl Jung

Becoming ‘aware’ or waking up is always the first stage of a transformational journey.

The most important thing that we can become AWARE of is the unconsious programming that’s preventing us from ACCEPTING ourselves and life and which causes us to ACT in an unreal way.

If you want to change your life PERMANENTLY and RAPIDLY then you need to dig deep inside yourself and figure out where you’re motivated by something that’s not ‘You’.

We all have this ‘stuff’ but until we face it and see it for what it is we will be slaves to NOTHING.

In this episode of Creative Status, I had an amazing conversation with Michelle Sinclair from the Real Healing Institute.

Michelle is an author (check out her book The Way to Peace) and subconscious healer who uses hypnosis and spiritual teachings to help people deal with emotional blocks, figure out where their beliefs are keeping from divinity, and to find their true gifts so they can live REAL lives.

I’ve wanted to talk to somebody about all the unconscious ‘stuff’ for a while and so Michelle was somebody I knew would have a ton of amazing insight to share…

A major theme that keeps coming up on this show is that the creative process is the process of “making the unconscious conscious” (to quote Carl Jung)… Michelle explored this with me as well as a bunch of other amazing insights that will help you to be more creative and live a better life.

Some gems:

💎 Why doing the deeper work of hypnotherapy or coaching (depending on the coaching methodology) can get you better results than psychotherapy

💎 How people get blocked in the first place

💎 How we can reverse engineer our current situation to figure out what’s going on inside ourselves (or other people)

💎 How to live with divinity and keep flowing towards wholeness

💎 Loads more

Check it out if you’re ready for an energising, no BS conversation, about being real and using your creativity as a vehicle for becoming even more real.

Check it out using the player above or hit play on any podcast platform!

(Scroll down for show transcript)!

—————————–

Leave a voice message to share your thoughts and to be (maybe) featured on future episodes of the podcast: ⁠⁠⁠⁠anchor.fm/creativestatus ⁠⁠⁠⁠

Episode Links:

Learn more about The Real Healing Institute and Michelle’s work: ⁠https://therealhealinginstitute.com/⁠

Michelle’s Youtube Channel: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@therealhealinginstitute/⁠

Michelle on Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/therealhealinginstitute/⁠

Creative Status Links:

Book a call to work with me to see if I can help you reach your goals:⁠⁠⁠⁠ go.oncehub.com/olianderson⁠⁠⁠⁠

Follow me on Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠instagram.com/olijanderson⁠⁠⁠⁠

My YouTube channel: ⁠⁠⁠⁠youtube.com/olianderson⁠⁠⁠⁠

Get my books on Amazon: ⁠⁠⁠⁠amazon.com/author/oli⁠⁠⁠⁠

7-Day Personality Transplant System Shock for Realness and Life Purpose: ⁠⁠⁠⁠olianderson.co.uk/systemshock⁠⁠⁠⁠

Free one hour creative workshop to take your creative brand or project to the next level:⁠⁠⁠ ⁠olianderson.co.uk/creativeworkshop⁠

Free 90-Day Journal Challenge: olianderson.co.uk/journal

The Law of Attraction for Realness (mini-course): olianderson.co.uk/lawofattraction

Show Transcript: The Inner Freedom Formula for Creativity

Intro

Oli Anderson: Oh hi there, Oli Anderson here, you’re listening to Creative Status. If you’re new to the podcast, this is a bullshit free zone where you can kind of meet many of your philosophical, spiritual, emotional and other kinds of needs I suppose, or at least get insight that might help you figure out a thing or two.

If you’ve listened to the podcast before and you’re brave enough to have returned, well thank you very much for that, appreciate it. This episode is an interview with Michelle Sinclair, one of my favorite people on the whole internet. She is a subconscious healer, chooses hypnotherapy in her business, the Real Healing Institute, and basically she helps people to find inner freedom.

She has a thing called the inner freedom formula which helps people to do that. It’s a three-step process where you can look at your emotional stuff, then you can look at your beliefs, then you can start designing a life that you want and going out there and manifesting and doing all those amazing things that people can do.

This is a open, honest conversation that you’re about to hear. Basically we just get into the workings of the subconscious mind, how people get blocked in the first place, what they can do about their blocks, how they can get flowing and growing and moving again. There’s loads of really good insight in here. I wanted to do an episode about the unconscious stuff for a long time.

Well I say a long time, the podcast has only been around for a while, but anyway I really wanted to talk to somebody who knows their stuff about the unconscious mind because if you have listened to the podcast before, you know I’m always saying that ultimately the creative process is about making the unconscious conscious and so I thought I’d better talk to somebody who knows what they’re on about. So Michelle, thank you so much for coming on here and giving me all your insight and for sharing your energy and all that kind of stuff.

Everybody else, hope you enjoy the episodes. If you get something out of it then please leave a review somewhere if you can be asked to do that. That makes it easier for other people to find the podcast so that would be awesome if anyone does feel like doing that.

If you have any ideas for guests and things like that then send me a DM on Instagram or somewhere at @olijanderson. But anyway, here’s the interview. Hope you enjoy it.

Thank you so much. Boom.

Interview

Oli Anderson: Oh hi there Michelle.

Michelle Sinclair: Hello.

Oli Anderson: Thank you so much for joining me today on this episode of Creative Status. Obviously the listeners might not know this but we have had many conversations that have not been recorded. I think this is the first one that we recorded so we’re going to have to watch what we say – we don’t want to end up in jail or anything.

But before I get into asking you a bunch of questions about your work as a hypnotherapist and a healer and a philosopher and a spiritual weirdo, if you don’t mind me saying, would you like to introduce yourself? Do you want to tell us who you are, what you do, what you stand for and what you want to get out of this conversation?

Michelle Sinclair: Sure. I’m Michelle Sinclair and I own the Real Healing Institute which is basically a subconscious healing program. What I do is I take my clients, they come to me with problems like anxiety or depression or past trauma, things like that. We very quickly and very easily resolve these issues using subconscious healing. What I do is different than what it would be like if you were to go to a counselor or a therapist.

I’m working only with the subconscious mind. I take my clients back and have them follow these feelings that they have that they don’t want to have and find where they come from, heal it and then they have success. They don’t need these coping tools and mechanisms to deal with it. They just don’t have their issues anymore.

Real healing that goes on and it’s very rapid.

Oli Anderson: Wow. That’s the main reason I wanted to talk to you on this podcast, the subconscious stuff. A theme that comes up over and over again on this podcast which is about the creative process is that living a real life, being a real human being, moving towards wholeness and connection to ourselves and all this stuff, it’s ultimately about making the unconscious or the subconscious conscious something that we’re aware of.

A lot of people are out there, they’re running around, they’ve got all these problems in life, anxiety, depression, maybe they’ve got creative blocks, they feel stuck, blah blah blah, they’ve got all this stuff going on and it’s almost always because they’re denying something unconsciously.

They might not be aware of it, obviously, that’s why it’s unconscious. Yeah, very true. Yeah, but those things going on down there seem to cause most of the issues in our lives and also the good things as well if we can embrace them.

So I suppose the first question just to open this up is where do these unconscious blocks come from in your philosophy or in your view?

Michelle Sinclair: Well, it totally depends. It’s different for everybody. So I have had people regress back to infancy, so that is what I use is hypnosis regression.

I do that in 97 % of my clients. So some people will regress back to infancy. They might have been left in their crib when they were a baby and maybe their parents were just using the cry it out technique, which I did with my own kids.

I didn’t know these things back then. And you know they felt like oh nobody’s coming and it you know that made them feel a certain way like That they weren’t love a ball or that they weren’t safe or you know something along those lines.

Sometimes people will regress back to the womb to you know, maybe their mother was having stress, maybe she consumed something that harmed them when they were in the womb but typically it will be you know bullying that happened in school It might be the house that you grew up in maybe your parents were not, you know, loving you how they should have been or or something along those lines and once in a while typically in children it will be a past life that mice that might pop up.

I didn’t actually used to believe in them tell I’ve seen it so many times with my work that I think it’s undeniable or else it’s you know your DNA passed down through your ancestry or whatever that is. I don’t know but sometimes that’ll pop up in kids but one thing I’ve noticed is that, you know, people really claim these things as their own like they’ll say  “oh, it’s my anxiety my depression cuz they’ve never you know not known that in their life, but it really isn’t them you know, it’s something that happened and it’s not who they are.

Oli Anderson: Wow. Yeah, so no matter what the unconscious block is is caused by it’s almost always a case I found of something external being internalized and then they basically hypnotize themselves with these external messages over and over and over Again until like you said they think it’s them they think that they’re the source of the problem when actually it’s just their attachment ot all of that stuff which perpetuates the problem something like that.

Michelle Sinclair: Uh-huh. Even something like saying you have an addictive personality you know, I know people really claim that because they’re like oh, well, I quit this one thing and now I do this other thing I know from my own personal experience that that’s not the case once you’ve healed everything that’s in there that addictive personality that you believed was you doesn’t exist anymore so I think almost everything actually, I believe everything is all subconscious everything that we’re doing in our life, you know the choices that you make in a day they’re still dictated by the program that’s running in your subconscious mind.

Oli: Yeah…So can people get rid of this program completely or will it always be kind of affecting them to some extent?

Michelle: You can get rid of it, you know, it takes some effort So I have what I’ve been using here lately is I have an assessment that’s on my website. And so you’re basically going through all of the emotions you’d be going through, you know fear guilt shame anger resentment blah blah blah everything it’s all on there and then we go through we follow all of these things back and heal them.

So, you know, we might be going to 50 places, you know, it might be more than that it might be less than that where these original scars or sam scars began because you know, nothing comes into our life until it comes into our consciousness and so we’re going back to the initial place where it came into our consciousness and healing it, you know.

Oli: Yeah so I always look at everything in terms of either wholeness or fragmentation.  So I think that the real natural state of a human being is that we are whole basically we connected to ourselves. We connected to other people in the world We connected to reality itself and that feeling of wholeness is what makes us feel truly alive and a lot of these blocks that we pick up in our earlier years they ultimately just cause us to be fragmented because we end up disowning parts of ourselves or denying certain feelings or trying to hide from them whatever it is we become fragmented and that fragmentation leads to us leads us to create a kind of false identity for ourselves so you kind of alluded to this a bit like, you know, we’ll say that I’m just somebody who has anxiety and just somebody has depression I have an addictive personality. I’m just a certain way.

Basically. We we attached to a certain image of ourselves Why do you think? We need to cling to that image if it’s not real so do you see what I’m saying?

Michelle: Yeah, I think that we just play that character, you know, like this So if you you know, you think about who you were 10 years ago Probably very different than you are now and it’s really it’s almost like a character that you were playing at the time nut when you’re unaware that that’s what’s going on or when you’re in it at that time, you know, there’s, first of all, you’re not being thoughtful about your life You know, you’re not putting any thought into maybe this isn’t me well, but once you become aware of What’s really going on then it becomes a choice you get to choose like, okay?

Well We say all these things about ourselves. Well, you can start saying something new and you can choose what you want that to be.

Oli: Wow, so we can create ourselves we can create our lives and so what you’re talking about is the creative process that this podcast is always kind of ranting and raving about when we face the unconscious and we’re aware of the role that is playing in our lives and we work with it instead of against it Then we have more choice over our lives we have more choice over who we are more choice over our emotions and ultimately it comes down to the way that we tweak our belief system.

Would you would you say that?

Michelle: Yeah, I would say when you become aware of the vibration that you’re operating in, so the state that you’re going through your day, and when you realize that that actually matters, then you can consciously choose to, okay, I’m not going to indulge in these lower vibrational thoughts. And so you know what I mean by that, but for people listening that don’t know, you know, let’s say that you’re, you want revenge or you’re feeling guilt or you’re feeling fear about something, you know, just notice how that physically feels in your body and notice what it does to your energy when you shift to a belief like that or to a thought like that.

And our thoughts are just energy. So when you realize, oh, this is a choice, I don’t need to think about these ridiculous things that aren’t true and that are fear based and that are depleting my energy. And you choose to think about other things, everything in your life just changes.

Oli: Yeah, this is something that I’ve found in my own life. And like with the lives of my clients, people I’ve worked with, I always say, if you put something real into your life, you’ll get something real out. And if you put in unreal things in, you’ll get unreal stuff out. And so if you’re, if you’re making that choice for fragmentation, you’re constantly, you know, giving into all these kinds of negative emotions, anger, guilt, shame, all the different things, the different ways this can show up, then that is going to affect the choices you make, like I’ve said, and your life is going to eventually be a reflection of those choices.

So if somebody’s, you know, stuck in life, or they do feel like they’re in one of those low energy places, there’s a lot of frustration in their lives, a lot of restlessness, a lot of misery, maybe, and all those kind of things. What’s a process that they can go through to start kind of evolving beyond that? So I know you’ve got this thing that IFF, maybe now’s a good time to bring that in.

But what steps can they take, like tangible steps?

Michelle: So, yes, the IFF is the Inner Freedom Formula. So that’s the program that I use. So we begin by assessing the emotional state. So like I had said before, you know, there’s that assessment on my website, it’s got, I don’t know, probably 25 or 30 things on it. So you basically identify, like, okay, maybe I guess I am a little bit depressed, okay, maybe I am a little anxious, and you actually, when you’re, you know, doing this, and you’re seeing for yourself, like, oh, I guess there are these areas, all of those areas that are showing up are depleting your energy. So we start by subconsciously healing those things. Because once you’ve gone back, and you’ve, and you’ve healed something, you don’t got to keep going back and healing that thing.

You know, it’s, it’s good now. And so we start with that, then we go to the belief shifting. So by that, I mean, you know, do you expect negative things to happen in your life? Because when you expect them to happen, they are going to happen. So we change these expectations and these subconscious beliefs that most people don’t even know that they have.

So like, for example, let’s say somebody seems to have a problem that other people don’t have, like, oh, I have a problem making friends, or I have a problem with people at work, there will be some type of subconscious belief that is attracting that to them through these expectations that they have. So so then we heal the beliefs that are there. And then we move on to the freedom stage.

And so these steps, you know, that I’m talking about, they do not take very long, because it is rapid healing hypnosis is proven scientifically to be the fastest way to change the neural pathways in your brain. And so as we change these things, we then move on to the freedom part, which is really just connecting with the divine. So basically, at that point, we have removed all of the barriers that are there that have kept you separated from this divine flow. And so then we get into that freedom, which is really just raising your vibration, connecting you with the divine. And that is where you really begin to actually see things change in your life.

Oli: So this is really interesting. So what your your final stage of freedom is ultimately what I’m talking about when I talk about wholeness is you’ve returned to your natural state, you’ve integrated all the things that you need to integrate. And because of that, there are less barriers between you and life. And so you can actually flow in the direction that you need to flow in to live the life that you want to live, basically.

And when I’m coaching people, I go through a three step process as well. The first one is deconstructing the ego. So ultimately, raising awareness of how our identity is holding us back from the truth.

That’s the abridged version, raising awareness. Then once we’ve done that, the second stage is to start facing the shadow self, which is about acceptance ultimately, acceptance of yourself, acceptance of the world, the way that it works and acceptance of reality. When you’ve done that, you can get on to the last stage, which is about building or manifesting a real life, where you can actually go out there and start doing the things that you want to do being the person you want to be and having the things that you want to have. The problem is that a lot of people, they leap right to the last stage. So they’ll try and build a life for themselves before they’ve done the emotional work or before they’ve filled their beliefs. And then they won’t get the results that they want. Because ultimately, it’s the same I’m always throwing out, they’re rearranging the furniture on the Titanic, whilst it keeps sinking. And unless you do that emotional work and look at your beliefs, you’re just wasting your time because everything you’re doing is going to be unreal. So two questions there for you.

So the first question is normally, when people try to heal themselves, when they realise there’s a problem, they’ll go and do something like talking therapy, which has been shown to be quite ineffective, like it takes hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of sessions with a psychotherapist to maybe get some results. So they’ll try and do something like that. Why doesn’t that work? Or why is it not as effective as going straight to the fundamental problem, which is the unconscious?

Michelle: I think because they’re just completely unaware. So you know, many of my clients have absolutely no idea that the area that we regress back to ever affected them, they maybe consciously don’t even remember it.

And so you could talk for years about it. And if you’re not healing the root of the problem there, it’s just always going to be there running in the background. So I honestly believe that the only effective way is the subconscious way. Yes, there is definitely, you know, sometimes you’ll hear something and it’ll, you know, spark change in your mind. But I believe that subconscious healing is, well, it’s the best way. I’ve seen it, you know, and I’ve had friends that are counselors and they’re like, oh, it’s just so draining, you know, it’s so hard to listen to these people’s things and you keep coming back. I’m like, that is not the case for me because they come to me and they feel better when they leave.

Oli: Yeah, yeah. There’s a thing in like the world of psychotherapy and all those kind of talking professions, it’s called compassion fatigue, where they basically burn themselves out. They get so tired of just going around in circles with people and just hearing the same old shit day in and day out without things actually changing. And I think it’s because they’re only dealing with the level of the conscious mind, like you’re saying.

So they’re just, you know, they’re looking at all this stuff, all these interpretations that people have about their past already. Basically, they’re trying to use the problem, which is the conscious mind and the way that it’s been constructed because of all these emotional blocks and everything. They’re trying to use the conscious mind, the problem of the conscious mind to solve the problem of the conscious mind.

So they’re not going to get anywhere. So when you do this subconscious healing, we should probably point out, you don’t just talk about it. Like it’s you’re giving people an experience of something they haven’t previously had. Is that a fair way to say it?

So can you just walk us through that process a bit? So it’s not just talking about it.

Michelle: No, so I follow the feelings that are there.

So so here’s here’s another interesting thing. So let’s say that you have depression or anxiety, something like that. So if you were to think about that, if you were to bring it up, you physically can feel it in your body. So, you know, some people might feel it. Oh, I feel it in my wrist and my ribs or my knees and my feet or my chest or my stuff, wherever they feel it. So the interesting thing about this is that if you let that continue on, if you don’t deal with that, that place that you’re feeling that in your body is depleting your energy. So anytime that you’re feeling that there, it’s, you know, taking away from the whole energy that should be there in that part of your body.

So eventually, you know, you’re going to end up with, you know, physical issues in these particular places. So what we do, you know, I get people nice and relaxed. It’s a very enjoyable experience, although it can be emotional. But, you know, we’re in and out of there in about an hour and a half. And so we get nice and relaxed.

Then I have them bring these feelings up once they’re in this, the proper state. So it’s the theta state. So you go in and out of this several times throughout the day. It’s a completely natural state. You know, people hear the word hypnosis and they’re like, Oh, that’s crazy. And it’s really not, you know, you, you go in it when you’re driving down the highway and you find yourself zoning out and you realize like, Oh man, I’m not even paying attention. That’s called highway hypnosis.

So you’re probably, yeah, coming up with some creative ideas while you’re driving and not really paying attention. And your brain just slipped into the theta state. So we get into this state and we follow those physical feelings back. So whatever the emotion is that’s attached to that physical feeling, we follow it back. And so once you go back, you know, you’re just really in your memories. Your subconscious mind holds every memory you’ve ever had. You know, it remembers what your closet looked like when you were a little kid and what toys you would have had in there.

It remembers everything. So we follow these feelings back and, you know, we see what that younger version of you needed. And then we heal it and we always heal it with love because every problem that we have in our life comes from a belief that we’re not lovable.

So all these fears, all of these, everything that comes up is all just the, the root of it is a belief of I’m not lovable. So we heal it with love. And so as we do this, you physically can feel the relief in your body and you just can feel the energy shift and change. And then we follow these feelings forward into the future and see that, you know, they’re not there anymore. And so when we’re done a session, immediately, you know, you feel better. Some people are tired.

Some people are energized. It just totally depends on the person. But you just feel better. You feel like a weight has been lifted off your shoulders. Lots of people tell me they can breathe deeper. They just feel lighter. Colors look brighter.

Really, you know, things just look different.

Oli: Yeah, it makes sense because actually when people are in this fragmented state where they feel like, you know, they need healing for whatever reason, because they, you know, whatever reason, when they’re in that state, they’re stuck in their head. But by the end of a session like this, they’re actually back in their bodies. And this is something I’ve found many times now, like just talking to people in general, people who have the most problems in life spend too much time in their heads.

Like it’s kind of an obvious cliched thing. But by bringing them back to their bodies, you bring in them back to reality. And that reminds me, actually, when you were talking, it reminded me of something that I read in a manual you sent me. So you co-authored a hypnosis manual.

you sent me to check out. There was a line in there which kind of blew my mind a little bit. It said that I can’t remember verbatim in the exact words. It was something like, hypnosis is just contact with the real you, something like that. And I thought that was really powerful and it also kind of changed my paradigm around hypnosis because before I read that I just seen all these movies and stuff where you think that people you know you can hypnotize me to do all these terrible things that they don’t want to do or to pretend to be like I know like chickens or whatever.

But actually the premise in this manual was that right when you get hypnotized it just puts you in touch with the real version of who you are and basically the hypnotherapist will guide you into doing things but you’ll only do them if it’s really what you want to do. And so actually that process is so powerful because it’s putting people back in touch with the real version of who they are and actually for me in the work I do that is what the creative process is as well. Like if you want to create something of value or you want to just enjoy your life in a creative way you need to get in touch with your realness with the real you.

And so actually maybe we can say that the difference between this kind of subconscious work that you’re doing and things like psychotherapy is that hypnotherapy basically you’re giving people an experience of the real version of who they are which they can take out into the rest of their lives and because like I said earlier real in real out is the way to get results well obviously that’s going to be very beneficial but in comparison psychotherapy you’re going into one of those sessions more often than not nothing against psychotherapists if anyone’s listening in they are psychotherapists.

But anyway you go in into these sessions and you’re feeling unreal okay but all you’re doing in those sessions is talking about the unreal version of yourself you’re just talking about all the reasons you’re unreal how you became unreal you’re talking about it in an unreal way because you’re only looking at the symptoms rearranging the furniture on the Titanic and you’re not going deeper into being able to experience your real version of yourself.

So one of these approaches is very real but the other one is actually quite unreal if you think about it and to me this is just validation that real always works it’s the way to go. So before I ask more questions what do you think about all that stuff I just said in terms of hypnosis puts you in touch with the real version of you?

Michelle: It well it really puts you in control so you know we’re basically always out of control when we’re not in that mind so like willpower would be a good example so let’s say somebody you know has they don’t want to eat a whole box of cookies but yet they do it anyways so they’re out of control and what you can do using the subconscious mind is take control back because your conscious mind is like oh I’m not gonna do that and your subconscious mind is like yeah you are we’ve always done that so we’re just gonna keep on doing it.

So the two minds are fighting each other and so basically when you go on the subconscious you are then choosing you’re putting yourself back in control and you’re making the subconscious agree with what you consciously wants and so you’re gaining control back so you know people think oh I don’t want to be out of control you know in a hypnosis session or have someone else controlling me –  it is totally not that at all that’s just a misconception.

Iit’s it’s the opposite of that you are then gaining control, of course, like anything, like drugs they can be used for good or evil or whatever you want so maybe there is some bad guys out there using it for bad things but that’s definitely not the way that I operate or any of my colleagues operate you know we’re truly helping people.

Oli: Yeah, but you could be evil if you wanted to be… So with what you’re saying about the you know the conscious mind you can use that to take control of your life if it’s aligned with what with what’s going on in the subconscious do you think there’s an element as well where if people are disconnected so they’re out of alignment between the unconscious and the conscious then the conscious mind is gonna be taking them in a direction that they don’t want to go in as also and that’s not obviously that is impacted by the subconscious stuff but it’s also so like the things that they’re aware of on a day-to-day basis they’re not they’re limited in their capacity for taking them where they want to be –  does that make sense?

Michelle: Oh, totally yeah I think it’s just awareness come total awareness when you realize that you actually can take control and that the things that are happening in your life aren’t you’re not the victim to them you’re creating them through your beliefs and through the way that you feel when you realize that you are not the victim but the creator then you know you can take control you can make different choices yeah but until you’re aware of that you you’re just unaware of that you just have no idea you’re going through life and just thinking oh this thing happened and that thing happened and you’re taking it at face value rather than realizing like oh okay I I maybe created this so what can I do to change that so doesn’t keep happening.

Oli: Hmmm, there’s a famous quote by Carl Jung where he says basically until you discover the unconscious mind it’s just gonna rule your whole life and you know you’ll call it God or you’ll call it whatever but that basically the day you discover that it is your unconscious mind which is affecting your conscious awareness and all of the choices you make according to that until you discover that your life’s just gonna be chaos basically because it’s not gonna be your life it’s gonna be a condition of all those external things that we picked up that you were talking about at the start – the bullies the parents society itself – blah blah blah – so how can people speed up the process, I guess, of becoming more in touch with their unconscious mind?

So obviously they can book a session with someone like you, but if someone’s just listening to this and they’re starting to think, “wow, okay, maybe I need to dive a little deeper than I’m currently doing and I need to figure out what’s going on down there”, what are some practical things they can start doing, maybe?

Michelle: Well, one thing they could do, you know, if somebody wants to do some work for free is I have my YouTube channel and it’s got the Mental Cleanse Series on there.

And so this is a series that’s got 36 videos in it and it basically walks people through the mother wound, the father wound, sadness, anger, frustration, all, a ton, you know, there’s 36 videos in this. So they can start going through that because the process that I use in there is all subconscious. So most things that you would find on YouTube that’s hypnosis is just direct suggestions.

So this is, you know, somebody getting you nice and relaxed, putting you in the Theta state and then just telling you things and you’re going to agree with them or you’re not. Whereas what I am doing is different than that. We’re actually changing the energy that’s there. We’re regressing back. We’re going to these things and then I’m having you heal them.

So, you know, even things like that, if people just took some time out of their day to like for personal growth, they could start to, you know, work on themselves and see where these things are coming from and they will notice a change happen in their life.

Oli: Wow. So where do people find those videos? What’s your YouTube?

Michelle: It’s called the Real Healing Institute.

Oli: Right.

Michelle: And that series is the Mental Cleanse series.

Oli: And so I’ll share that in the show notes. OK, brilliant. So they can do that. Are there any other kind of things that people can do?

Michelle; They can start doing self-hypnosis. They can do meditation, you know, even just journaling. Because journaling is subconscious.

I know that you have that awesome journal that you’ve put out there that’s really great. And so that is all subconscious. Anytime that you’re writing from your hands, it is it is subconscious. So, you know, somebody could even take, let’s say that they’ve been ruminating about something, which is a pretty common thing to happen. If someone’s been ruminating about something, just writing it down because it gets it out subconsciously. It gets it out and then you don’t need to keep thinking about it.

And I would say, you know, I know, so there’s Esther Hicks and she talks about, you know, raising your vibration. And if something’s bothering you, just don’t think about it, which I somewhat agree with. But at the same time, I think that we need to heal these things.

And then once we’ve healed them, then we can live in that state. But if there’s things that are unresolved, your mind is always going to try to pull you back to them. Or it’s going to keep repeating them in your life, right? You you’re in an abusive relationship, you’re going to keep that’s just going to keep happening until you actually heal it.

Oli: So yeah, yeah, this is actually a perfect segue into the next question that I wanted to ask you. So if people, you know, they do have these unconscious things that they need to work on, then almost always there’s going to be signs in their life. Like you said, the same patterns repeating in relationships or the same scenarios and issues that are going to keep popping up.

There are things that are going to keep happening that you can almost reverse engineer by looking at them and analyzing them, telling them what they need to work on, basically.

So the question was going to be like, if our unconscious life, sorry, unconscious experience is dictating our life, can we look at the current state of our life, the way things are, and we can kind of reverse engineer what’s going on inside of ourselves or even inside of other people?

Michelle: Absolutely. So, you know, I really believe in reaping and sowing.

I’ve seen it. I’ve had this enlightening experience and was just showing all kinds of amazing things. So what I mean by that is that everything, absolutely everything that we’re doing, the thoughts that we have, the choices that we make and the actions that we take are all dictating our current circumstances. So similar to karma, you know, but most people don’t take into account their thoughts, which your thoughts are energy.

You know, that’s why you could sit at home, physically do nothing all day and be completely exhausted depending on what you’re thinking about, you know, thoughts burn calories, they take energy. So if you were to look at your current life and truly be honest with yourself, you know, the current circumstances that you’re in are essentially your own faults. You’ve created them, you know, you weren’t aware.

You’re just unaware of these things. But the things that you’re experiencing come from your fears, come from the beliefs that you hold, come from things that you’ve done in the past that are now coming back to you. But the biggest thing is it comes from your thoughts and your fears and your beliefs because fears are very powerful emotions. And as you’re putting those out into the world through the law of cause and effect, which we know is true, it comes back to you. And, you know, so the more you worry, the more you have to worry about.

Oli: Yeah, it’s so true. I’ve experienced this as well. I’ve seen it in people’s lives. Basically, you know, the law of attraction is real in that sense.

If you just look at it at the most simple basic level of choice, like we’ve alluded to many times throughout this conversation now, if you have all this unconscious stuff going on that is going to affect your beliefs, then that is going to affect the choices that you make. And those choices over time are going to affect the state of your life because it’s going to affect what you think is possible. It’s going to affect the actions that you take or don’t take. And all of that builds up to the current status quo of your life, whatever that is right now.

Now, obviously, when people first become aware of this, if they’re in that victim mindset that you kind of talked about, then that seems very offensive because if life sucks and you’re in that victim place, you don’t want to actually acknowledge that maybe it’s your choices that have created that life for you. Like I had this in my own life, like years and years and years ago before I started becoming more aware of all these things.

But actually, when you learn that you have this choice and that you can take responsibility for your life just by changing your focus ultimately. And if we look at what we’re saying, basically the short version is your unconscious mind dictates your focus and your focus will affect your life. It’ll affect what you do, what you get, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But at first, that can seem quite daunting and it can seem unfair. But when you wake up to it, it’s actually a very powerful thing because it shows you that you do have so much power over your life. You can choose things that your inner state basically can affect your outer state.

The only thing is that I’ve noticed as well, sometimes there’s a bit of a lag, isn’t there? So let’s say I might wake up tomorrow and I become aware of my unconscious blocks. I start making changes. Reality is not going to change straight away. Probably it’s going to take a few months or whatever for things to catch up with my inner state as I make those incremental choices and using the lower cause and effects, like you said, start being the cause of better effects in my life, basically. So that was a ramble and a rant at you but what do you think about all that?

Michelle: Yeah, that’s totally true. So that’s kind of the difference between true change. So when people realize and they’re like, oh, no, I’m in a good state now.

Why aren’t these good things happening? Well, if you truly changed and you were truly in that good state, then you wouldn’t want to revert back to the old way because you’re not seeing results right away because you would feel so good that you’re like, OK, no, I’m just going to keep this up no matter what because I feel better so my life is better. So that’s why the subconscious can drag you back because that’s just what it does to the easy way, but it isn’t the easy way.

It’s just the old way because if it was easy, it would feel good. But it can drag you back in there when you don’t see results. You know, then you get that frustration and whatnot, which is why what I’m working with people, we do that assessment. OK, so let’s just make sure all these things are in the clear and keep them in the clear until we see results.

Oli: Yeah, that’s that’s a really important point.  And it’s another it’s more validation that you kind of have to do this in order. You have to work on the emotional stuff. You have to sort your beliefs out. And then you start kind of building the life that you want.

Or, you know, in my way of doing it, awareness, acceptance, action, like if you don’t take the steps in the right order, then you end up being one of these people that is basically trying to fake it until they make it. But because they’re faking it, there’s a gap between, you know, the inner state and what’s actually been projected outside, if that makes sense, because it’s fake.

And if you fake it, well, obviously it’s not going to work. And so actually what you need to do, if you’re not getting the results that you want is to go deeper. It’s always a sign that you need to go deeper and, you know, heal this unconscious stuff that you’re talking about. And then when you’ve done that, you’ll know that it’s done because, you know, whether reality starts changing or not, like you said, you’re going to feel good anyway, so you don’t care.

And paradoxically, when you don’t care about changing things, that’s when things are more likely to change in the way that you want them to.

Michelle: Totally. Yeah. Yeah. You’re not putting resistance out anymore or like, because even that feeling of, ooh, I really want this, you know, feel the tension. There’s tension that’s in that feeling of wanting because it’s saying, you know, I don’t, I don’t have it.

So when you get to that point of not even wanting anymore, that’s when you know that you’re, you’re free because you’re like, oh, I’m good. If it happens, it happens. Yeah. You just don’t really care.

Then you’re there.

Oli: Yeah. Basically, I always look at it as though we’re either forcing things or we are really flowing. And ultimately it comes down to that whether you just said tension, we’re either adding tension, which is always ego stuff.

For whatever reason, we’re basically using our identity to force life because we normally try to force away emotions that we don’t want to feel shame, guilt and trauma, blah, blah, blah. Or if we’re not forcing, we’re flowing. We’re releasing the tension by basically responding from one moment to the next, moving with life.

And that can only happen if there are no unconscious blocks. Do you think on a deeper level? So a lot of this conversation has been about how the unconscious is almost, it’s just what’s going on inside of us. But do you think there is a deeper, deeper level where when you, um, basically heal yourself or you connect to wholeness in the way that we’re talking about.

So you, you don’t have any unconscious blocks and the unconscious is just doing what it needs to do. Then you’re more connected to life itself or the universe of God or what, you know, whatever word people want to use. Is there a deeper level? So eventually it’s not just about our relationship with ourselves, but our relationship with everything?

Michelle: Mm hmm. Which, uh, well, I’ve experienced from, um, that enlightening experience that I had last summer, that the deepest level is that absolutely everything is made of love. It’s all connected.

Um, And when you can jump into that flow of love, which you know, I believe it’s in everything. It’s in all the space that’s around us. So you know, in every cell, there’s that bit of space. Well, that’s, that’s the place where it resides. It’s in the air that’s pressing up against our bodies. It’s in everything. And when you get into that space, when you get into that flow, then, you know, it changes and you can manifest like instantly.

It’s instant, the manifestations that you, that you get. So, you know, I’ll give you an example of that when I, um, I was up at my cabin when I had this experience and I would go for walks every day out in the nature.

So beautiful up there. And I was imagining that I was actually sprinkling blueberry seeds as I would walk down this path. And I could, you know, I could just, I was in this like aura of light.

It was just amazing. So I’m imagining, you know, I’m sprinkling these seeds and I go down to the store and I talked to the guy there. And I said, you know, we’re going to have more blueberries than we’ve ever had this year. So then, uh, a couple months later, I go back up and this is after it should have been blueberry season. But I’m walking down this path where I would go every day and it was completely blue, like completely blue.

It was unbelievable how much was there. So, you know, I had no doubt. I used my words because I, I knew that this was the case. So I told someone, um, you know, and I used my words, which are vibration. It created this through actually visualizing, sprinkling these seeds and just knowing, you know, that I’m so loved that, of course, this is going to be the outcome.

And then I saw it. So it took maybe two months. I think that was the end of August and I was there in June. Um, when it took two months to actually see this, but I was so excited to go. I was like, oh, I can’t wait to go see all those blueberries. And of course they were there.

Wow. And when you get to that state, you know, you speak it and it happens.

Oli: And I think the key thing there is, is that’s like you, you’ve literally just said, is that state, the inner state of wholeness is, it’s the most creative place you can be.

Maybe that’s ultimately the, you know, the conclusion of, of this path we put ourselves on with this conversation. But when you’re in that inner state of wholeness, of real nurse, whatever you want to call it, that’s when the best stuff is going to pop up for you to create in the world. Whether it’s like in an artistic way or in your business or in your life itself or with yourself. That wholeness is the source of all creativity, basically. And I suppose if you’re forcing life through the ego, you’re forcing the creative process through the ego.

That’s the only thing ultimately that stops you from creating the things that you want, either artistically or in any other way. And the way ultimately to allow yourself to get to that place more is to figure out your unconscious blocks and to get them out of the way. And to use the creative process as well. Actually, you can do that to be able to be better at that.

But anyway, to get rid of the unconscious blocks and to get in that place and then to start doing the things that really matter to you. So maybe that sums all this up. But have you got any final words to kind of, you know, sum up this conversation? We’ve covered a lot, like in a short time, like a lot, a lot, actually. But could you just sum it up, tell us some final words of wisdom and also let people know where they can find you online so they can follow up on anything they want to.

Michelle: Well, so I want to talk about here creativity and love. So you will know this, you’ll see this, right? Let’s say that you go to a bakery and they just, they got the best stuff ever. Well, they’re doing it with love.

That’s why it’s so good. You see an artist’s painting and it just like draws you in so much is because they’re doing it from love. And so these people who are doing this at some point probably had to work through a fear, like, oh, I’m afraid to open this bakery. What if it doesn’t work? Oh, I’m afraid to put my art out there.

What if it doesn’t work? So when they’ve released those subconscious blocks that have been blocking their creativity and then they can do that, you know, gift for the world that they were here to create, you know, it positively affects everybody. In the whole world, because who doesn’t want delicious baking and beautiful art? You know, I do.

Yeah, yeah, so true. So people can find me at therealhealinginstitute.com. And basically all of my social media has the same has the same name, the Real Healing Institute. I’m on Facebook. I’m on Instagram.

I’m on YouTube. And they can go to my website. There’s a free assessment under the IFF.

And so you can fill it out and you can see these places. And so this is just the emotional assessment. There is one for beliefs as well. But we start out with the emotional assessment. They can go there and they can see the areas that they can start to work on. So they can, you know, if they want to have private sessions with me, of course they can do that. But they can also, you know, go to YouTube and start working on some of those videos in the Mental Clones series. And, you know, see those numbers on the assessment change.

But these things do happen quite rapidly. So I suggest for people to actually write down, you know, where you’re at on this assessment and keep it for yourself so that you can see like, wow, you know, I’ll have clients that’ll, you know, they’ll come to me. Their anxiety and depression will be at an eight out of 10 or this or that. And within, you know, two sessions, it’s all the way gone. But because it’s subconscious, you don’t even realize just the effects of it because it’s just your life now and it just feels great.

And you don’t remember how bad it used to be. So it’s good to keep track so that you can see your progress.

Oli: It’s evidence, basically. So I’ll share all that stuff in the show notes. But Michelle, this has been awesome.

So thank you so much for coming on in. I don’t think we are going to get to jail. So that’s awesome.

Michelle: Yeah. Hope not yet.

Oli: Thanks again. Okay.

Michelle: Yeah. Thanks so much. All right. Bye. Yeah.

Intuition is WHOLENESS returning you to wholeness 👇

Your intuition is always guiding you and letting you know what steps you need to take in order to get where you truly need to go (reality/wholeness).

The problem is that we get so caught up in the distractions of the world and with the distortitions and resistance of our EGOS that we block the signals constantly being sent our way and our lives get sent into a state of disarray.

The creative process and life itself are both just vehicles for this same journey (from fragmentation to wholeness).

This applies to all of us and if you can learn to understand this and work with it – instead of against it – then your whole life will become REAL.

In this episode of Creative Status, I had an effervescent, energetic, sparkling conversation about INTUTION with Haley Hoover (aka the Sparkling Hippie).

Haley is a business success coach and intuitive artist who uses the things she’s learned from the creative process to help people get where they need to be in life. A lot of her work focuses on helping people tap into their INTUITION and that was the main theme of this conversation.

We explored this from a ton of different angles and got a sh*t load of insight in a pretty short amount of time…

Here’s some gems from the conversation:

💎 How intuition is linked to creativity and authenticity at all times

💎 How there’s a big cloud of creativity floating up there in the ether you can receive from any time you like

💎 What intuition is and how it’s linked to wholeness

💎 How understanding all this ‘stuff’ about intuition can help you have better relationships with others

💎 How ultimately it always boils down to TRUST and this can be the biggest game-changer in your life

💎 Practical ways you can act on all of this philosophical stuff to make your life better

💎 Loads more

This was a really powerful, punch-packing conversation that will energise you and hopefully get you moving and grooving with your own intuitive gifts. Check it out and get in touch if you have any questions (or even want to he a guest).

Stay real,

Oli Anderson

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Show Transcript: Sparkling, Intuition, & Wholeness

Intro

Oli Anderson: Oh hi there, Oli Anderson here, you’re listening to Creative Status. This is a podcast about using your creativity to improve your life. We look at all kinds of philosophical and psychological and dare I even say spiritual topics related to the creative process and how that can help us to be more real or whole as human beings.

If you don’t know, if this is the first time you found the podcast, then welcome. My name is Oli Anderson. I am a creative performance coach. I help people to increase their realness in life and business. Realness is a concept that I’ve been talking about for years.

If you want to know more about that, then keep listening to the podcast or you can check out my book Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness, which is on Amazon and all those places. Each episode of the podcast, I interview somebody about, well, life and creativity through the lens of whatever it is that they do. The main lesson so far has been that the creative process can literally be anything because everything we do is creative as human beings.

And it’s not about what we do so much as how we do it. Today’s interview is with a lady who is a coach and a creative person herself. Her name is Hailey Hoover. She is known online as the sparkling hippie. And there’s a lot of sparkling effervescent energy within this podcast episode.

It’s quite an energizing conversation. We cover all kinds of things related to human growth, wholeness, of course, because that’s one of my favorite words. If you don’t know, I think that we’re constantly moving towards wholeness. That’s what makes us real. Ultimately, though, the theme of the conversation is intuition.

What intuition is, how we can tune into it, how we can use intuition to improve our lives, how intuition allows us to have better relationships with other people, how it puts us on this path towards wholeness, blah, blah, loads of amazing stuff in this conversation about intuition. So Hailey Hoover, sparkling hippie, thank you so much for giving me your time and letting me ask you all these questions. Everybody else, hope you really enjoyed the conversation, get some value out of it. And I’ll see you next Monday for another episode of Creative Status. In the meantime, take it easy, and here we go.

Interview

Oli Anderson: Boom. Oh, hi there, Haley. Thank you so much for joining me today on this episode of Creative Status. You are known online as the sparkling hippie, which is an awesome pseudonym.

Before we get into asking you a bunch of questions about creativity and intuition, do you feel like introducing yourself and telling people why you are known as the sparkling hippie, if you want to do that? And also, let us know what you’re hoping to get out of this conversation as a whole.

Haley Hoover: Yeah, absolutely. Good, great starter questions already. I did a lot of compliments on the, my business name, the Sparkling Hippie, but I don’t always get out where it came from, so I appreciate that. Yeah, basically it kind of just was dropped in.

We’ll talk about intuition and creativity as we get going, but it felt like it was just dropped into me more than a decade ago. I was hanging out with some friends and someone said, you know, I’ve always been an artist, I’ve always painted.

And they said, well, what would you name your gallery? And just like in an instant, I was like, oh, the sparkling hippie. And I was like, where did that come from?

And shortly after I was like, you know, I really like that. It fits the essence of what I had a blog and that would become my business. And it just kind of fits the essence of all of my work, which is this, if you think about the hippies of the 60s and 70s, they were very free spirited. They were very opening up to new ways of spirituality. They were breaking a lot of cultural norms. The fashion was colorful for the first time. There was a whole tie-in to just authenticity, being who you really are, especially coming out of the 50s where it was very cookie cutter, right?

Oli Anderson: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Haley Hoover: And so, yeah, so really the essence of everything I do goes back to that is just that freedom to be who you really are, whether it’s in business or in my artwork, or I do corporate art events. And that’s the same thing, that it all goes back to that essence of just being the true authentic version of yourself. So, yeah. So that’s a perfect name for you then, basically. And it’s actually, it’s really interesting that that name just kind of popped up from your unconscious or from the ether or wherever it came from.

And it is so perfect for what you’re doing. When you think about that, that moment where someone asked you that question and it just popped up, how do you explain that now? Seeing as we’re about to talk about intuition and that seems like it was a very intuitive thing. Like where might it have come from, I suppose is the question. I mean, I can’t take credit for it.

I feel like ideas are given to us if we’re open to them. And I mean, we were literally out of bar having drinks when someone asked me that. So I wasn’t in like, I hadn’t just meditated or I wasn’t thinking about business names. It just was like, oh yeah, that sounds fun. And I think a lot of times with tuition and creativity, it just comes up when you’re having fun. And it’s on the tail end of just having a good time and being open to whoever or whatever drops these things down to us.

Oli Anderson: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like I think a big part of the intuitive creative process, whatever you wanna call it, is that when these things pop up, we are open to receiving them and we don’t just explain them away. And I think a lot of the time, people kind of distort or end up resisting their intuition without even knowing it because these ideas are always just been given to us.

They’re always popping up if we’re open to receive. But a lot of the time, we might just try and explain them away or we try and rationalize them or we overanalyze and that kind of stuff. So just to open this up a little bit, let’s go to this idea that you’ve just shared, which is that these ideas are basically given to us from somewhere. Some people might say that’s the unconscious. Some people might say it’s like a higher power or whatever. The first part of the question, I guess, is where do you think they do come from if that’s not asking you to repeat yourself a little?

And secondly, how can we be more open to receiving these kind of things and tapping into our intuition?

Haley Hoover: Yeah, yeah. So I’m like you, I’ve heard it called a million different things. I often just for simplicity, refer to it as “the Big Creativity Cloud in the Sky”. Because I think you can very easily get into, I think creativity is very intertwined with spirituality. So then you might say it comes from God or it might comes from, I don’t know. I like to say the creativity cloud in the sky because it’s neutral. I think we can all picture a cloud, but there’s clearly something up there or out there or in here or wherever. Yeah.

That feeds us, right? Because I think when we have those moments of insight or just aha moments, it’s definitely dropped in or revealed maybe even a better word. It’s not like, oh, I found it. Because I think it’s kind of like you said, the tendency is to use our brain to get there. And we’re in the logical mindset, especially in Western culture, right? Like everything’s logical and everything has to compute, make sense. And I always like to tell people, creativity and intuition, it actually begins when we get out of the mind space and get into the body. So this is why a lot of times you’ll have insights when you’re first waking up in the morning or in the middle of the night or in the shower. It’s when the mind relaxes, then your body opens up to receive. And so I always say, you asked how can we get into that?

I think one of the best ways is to just move. If you’re stuck on your desk and you’re slouched and your head hurts, because you’re thinking so hard, get up, do some hip circles, do some yoga stretches. We carry a lot of creativity in our hips actually. So just kind of letting those relax, letting your hips open up. But anything, on walks, I go for a walk daily and some of my best ideas come when I’m walking. Cause again, you’re in the body, out of the mind.

So that’s what I thought on that.

Oli Anderson: Yeah, I love everything you just said and I totally agree with it. So for me, The reason that a lot of people struggle with creativity and intuition is because they’re too caught up in their heads, like you just said. They’re trying to process everything rationally.

They’re trying to force everything through the assumptions that they already carry, through their ego, through the ideas they already have, blah, blah, blah. And when you try and force everything through what you already think you know, then you can’t flow with life and what it has to teach you. And so when you do get in your body, like you’re doing yoga or going for a walk or you’re dancing around your living room, like a maniac, whatever it is, that gets you out of your head.

And then you’re in this place you were talking about where you’re kind of ready to receive. So for me, that dichotomy, either forcing or flowing comes back to another theme that runs throughout the podcast and all these things I’ve run about everywhere, I’ve run about things, which is either wholeness or fragmentation. So fragmentation is just this kind of illusory state of disconnection that we have because of the way we identify and see ourselves as being separate from everything else.

Wholeness is the natural state of being connected to everything and you know, the big cloud in the sky and spirituality and all these things. When we’re fragmented, that’s when we try and force everything because we get attached to this state of fragmentation.

Wholeness is when we’re actually flowing with our natural drives towards a sense of connection with everything else. And so in terms of intuition and the big cloud in the sky, is it fair to say that the more we align ourselves with this drive that we all have towards wholeness, the more we can tune into our intuition and discover or find or whatever word you want to use, these things that are waiting basically to be expressed in the world.

So it’s a big question maybe.

Haley Hoover: Yes, yeah. I fully agree with that.

Oh, yeah. No, I think, I think that’s why, you know, yoga is so valuable for me personally and for a lot of others. Because you are, it’s getting out of your ego mind and getting out of the dichotomy and just connecting to something bigger.

And I love that. You know, I think so many religions and people try to put a name on, you know, what are we connecting to? We need to name it. We need to put it in a box.

We need to capture it. And I think there’s something really beautiful, not that that’s bad, but I think there’s something really beautiful about just accepting it as this mystery and just accepting it as something that you want to connect with. And that, you know, you’re going to be more supportive if you connect to it.

You’re going to be more whole, more yourself. And it doesn’t have to make sense. It doesn’t have to have a label. There’s a million ways to connect to it, but it is, it is, I think an essential part of our human existence.

Oli Anderson: Yeah. Wow. So there’s a few things there that have like cracked this open for me. So the first thing is like, I love yoga as well. Like yoga is one of the most important things in my life. And the reason it’s so important is at the end of a yoga session, you get this feeling of dissolution. So, you know, you’re lining corpse pose and you just kind of melt away like your senses turn inwards and all that ego bullshit and fragmentation, it kind of, it just melts away.

You see that it’s nothing. And in that moment, you are connected or reconnected to the flow and that flow, the whole, whatever you want to call it, that is probably one of the most real experiences you can get as a human being, if not the most real experience. And yoga is not the only way into it.

There’s a, you know, there’s billions of ways. But for me, yoga is the thing that does it. But what you realize in that moment of dissolution at the end of the session, or even as you go through the sessions, to be honest, is that it’s not about making conceptual sense of life. It’s not about putting a label on everything because all those labels and concepts, they disappear in that moment. And so it’s just about feeling and being connected to that the flow itself, which it’s you and its life.

There’s no distinction between the two in those moments. And so what you just said about labels and people trying to make sense of everything is so true. Like, actually, all you need to know is that tuning into wholeness and the intuition, whatever you want to call it, it works. But you can only get there by trusting life.

That’s how I found it. Like, you have to trust because, you know, we’re so used to trying to conceptualize everything and rationalize everything and blah, blah, blah. That actually is kind of a lack of trust. And it’s unreal in that sense. And so trust and intuition are kind of inherently linked. So is there anything I don’t know that you might want to add to that?

Haley Hoover: Yeah, no, totally. I was actually, I teach abstract art as a form of personal development. I do workshops and stuff around that.

And one of the biggest themes is trust. And it’s actually really fascinating to see, you know, I’ll say, Okay, you know, grab some pain and smear it on, or scribble around. And more times than not, people really have this like deer in a headlights look, they’re like, Well, what do you mean?

Like, how do you how do you want me to scribble it on there? How you know what color should and there’s this big There’s this big moment of watching people, oh, like break free of just overanalyzing, overthinking, comparing what other people are doing, right? It’s not going to be perfect. Wearing about being perfect, that’s a big one too.

And if they can move past that, there’s so much freedom that, gosh, even just taking a Sharpie and scribbling, I’ve seen people cry from that because we’re so conditioned, I think by society and how we’re raised, all of these things that we’re conditioned to not make a mistake. And we’re conditioned that if you’re going to do art, it needs to be supreme. It needs to be perfect. And if it’s not perfect, you’re not creative or you’re not an artist.

So you have all these people walking around being told and believing that they’re not creative or they’re not, oh, I just don’t have that. Well, actually, we’re all born with it. And it’s just as you’ve said, it’s an essential piece of being human. And all it takes is trusting yourself and trusting this flow, this something that’s bigger than you to move through you. And a lot of it’s getting out of the way, just letting it move through you. And so we’re bringing it back to like abstract art, just mirroring it on the page and letting it be enough, not judging it, not, again, not having to label it or understand it, but letting, practicing letting that trust muscle lead and letting that, that ambiguity just be what it is.

Because I don’t think, you know, we’re never going to understand truly what creativity or intuition or spirituality or any of this is. But that doesn’t mean it’s not important. It’s essential. And I think it’s highly important. And I think a lot of people miss out on that because they can’t explain it. So they reject it. You know, and I think it’s exactly what you’re saying. It’s all about trust at the end of the day.

Oli: Yeah. Where do you think this need to explain everything comes from? So I know that’s a big question.

But what is the, what are the mechanics of that? Because it’s true. So many people, it seems, are just control freaks. They’re trying to control every little detail of their lives. They’re trying to force everything through their egos and through the plans that they’ve come up with because the ego and blah, blah, blah.

And they’re living in a way in general that is the exact opposite of what you just said about this process of creating abstract art. But that process, because it involves letting go and trust and all these things, that’s very real.

And so the way that a lot of people are living is actually very unreal, which is causing then a lot of issues, probably, because you need reality to feel good, I think, in terms of if you say that reality is wholeness. So in general, what kind of things do you think are causing people to, you know, lean towards control, freakery and trying to explain everything and blah, blah, blah, blah.

Haley: Yeah, I think fear, fear is definitely at the root of it. I actually was doing a very deep journaling session the other day with myself and I was reflecting on like sometimes in my life where I felt most rejected and it’s always around the topic we’re on. I’ve had some big rejection on my beliefs for spirituality and creativity. And I came to realize that, you know, people reject what they don’t understand.

And that doesn’t necessarily mean they were rejecting me. But people reject what they don’t understand or what they don’t know because it’s scary. It’s scary to them. You know, and I think there’s no doubt that, you know, religion is like one of the number one reasons for war all throughout history, because people have opposing sides, but no one actually understands what’s going on. We have big beliefs, but it’s if you don’t understand it, anything new is to be feared.

AI is big in the news right now. And people, you know, oh gosh, that’s scary. Well, it is exciting. It’s also scary because we don’t know anything that’s unknown or that we can’t put in a box is scary because people are going, they’re coming from their, their ego mind, their logic mind.

Yeah. And once again, you can’t, you can’t access your or understand creativity or intuition from that, from that part of the mind, maybe a little like there’s a little science out there, but ultimately it’s an experience in your body. And in Western culture, you know, we’re taught, you know, stay in the mind. We kind of push our emotions aside.

We push our, our body aside even, you know, we have horrible, especially here in America, horrible eating habits and all that. And yet that’s the divinity. The our divinity is in our emotions. It’s in our mind too, but it’s in our body and our emotions and our mind. And so again, you know, the, the body holds a lot of fear too.

So it’s, it’s doing things like walking or yoga or even making art and, and just doing these things that help you release that fear slowly over time and embrace that trust muscle and, um, yeah. And, and just try to trust it. I mean, that’s kind of the whole, that’s why this is such a great conversation, right? Cause you can’t actually ever explain it. It’s, you have to experience it.

Oli: Yeah. That’s, that’s it. It’s a leap of faith because you can spend your whole life explaining it to people and only if they, you know, kind of try it out for themselves and start taking these steps following, will they experience it?

And they’re like, “Oh, okay. This is actually how life is.”

Do you know what I mean? It’s not just something that you, this in your head. When you were talking, it reminded me of, um, you know, the, the Jesus thing where he says, the truth will set you free. I always think the truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off and it will make you.

And the reason for that is that the reason for that is. Because the truth obviously shows you where you’ve been fooling yourself. It shows you where your identity is not real, where your identity is just a cage basically for all of these emotions like shame and guilt and trauma that you want to hide from yourself.

Even though on the other side of those things you just have this flow and this bliss and all the things that we’re talking about. So do you think some of the resistance to kind of going with the flow and doing these things like abstract out or whatever it is where there’s no conceptual sense is because people are actually scared of the truth.

That’s how I see these days. I think the creative process, if you’re going with it and you’re trusting the process, it’s going to reveal things about you and life that your identity is not necessarily ready for. I think we’re always ready for it, the real version of us because that’s wholeness and blah blah blah. But the identity that is keeping us from wholeness is not ready for that. And I think that the fear ultimately that you’re talking about is the fear of the truth always.

Haley: Yeah, no, I think you’re spot on. Yeah, and I think people aren’t always ready to face the truth. Some of the workshops I lead, oftentimes we start with, we get into our bodies and then we do some journaling to get into the emotions and then we move into the art piece that we’re doing.

And a lot of times, I’ll ask a question in the journaling like, what’s your biggest fear or something like that? And some people are open to it, they dive right in, they have big emotional breakthroughs, stuff comes up and out. And then there’s always a couple that, my biggest fear is cheese or something, and you can tell they’re just not willing to go there.

Yes, yeah. And I think then you kind of get into this whole, every soul’s on their own journey and if they’re not ready, they’re not ready. But I do believe we all have a choice. We can choose to ignore the truth of who we are or we can dive right in and look it in the face. And it is scary and it is hard and you will probably face rejection and just all sorts of stuff. But I also believe that’s why you’re here.

You’re not here to just be stagnant, you’re here to grow and become the person you are meant to become. So again, it goes back to the essence of the sparkling hippie.

Oli: So yeah, yeah. And in terms of that, you know, expanding and growing and becoming the version of you that you’re supposed to be or that you could be or however you want to say it.

Again, it comes back to two things that we’ve talked about. So the first thing is that this real stuff is just out there already in the big cloud in the sky or wherever, waiting to be discovered and to be brought into, you know, material existence or whatever you want to call it.

The second thing is that the process of allowing that to happen involves trust. So when we were talking earlier about, you know, the very start of the conversation about, you know, how these ideas are just out there ready to be received and so on and so forth.

Do you think that applies to the real or realest version of ourselves as well?

Haley: Yes. Yeah.

Oli: So yeah, what do you think about that?

Haley: Yeah, I haven’t quite like pulled it down, speaking of creativity, but I always get this like it’s like a fuzzy, it’s coming, but it’s like a fuzzy triangle in my mind of authenticity, creativity and intuition.

I believe one points to the other. I believe they can, you know, if you focus on creativity, you’re going to enhance your intuition. You’re also going to enhance your authenticity. If you focus on intuition, you know, the same vice versa, you’re going to enhance your creativity, you’re going to enhance your authenticity. So they all three go together.

They’re all three. In my opinion, it’s what we’re here to do. If you’re not being your full authentic self, are you really being? No, you’re a facade. You’re fake.

The opposite of authenticity is fake. And I just feel like so many people just walk around with these masks and these layers. And sometimes they’re so thick, I don’t think they even realize who they are for themselves, you know, and probably not. And it’s a lifelong journey.

But, you know, I believe that when we, you know, tune in to intuition, creativity, that wholeness, it’s all connected, like just tuning into that place where the mind stops and you can just. just be or feel or whatever. That’s where these layers start to melt off and you start to find your true essence, which is the most magnetic form of who you are and who you’re meant to be.

And again, we can talk about things like fear gets in the way and I think over analyzing, overthinking, we often cut off that flow with the mind. And yet what we’re really searching for, the answer to what we’re really wanting, it’s below the mind, it’s all there.

I mean, I don’t know. I get very passionate about this as you can tell.

Oli: Yeah, yeah, you meet me too, this is awesome. So it’s the real path is always there. This is how I see it. The real path is just the path towards wholeness.

Whatever you can do in a given moment that is gonna be moving you towards wholeness, that is real and whatever’s gonna lead you the other direction to fragmentation, disconnection, separation, blah, blah, blah, that’s unreal. And you’re right, like a lot of people, they go through this process of basically becoming shame driven for whatever reason by life. So the people who normally get the blame are parents or teachers or society.

Whatever it is, some external body will make people feel ashamed and when they’re ashamed, they start to disown the parts of themselves that have become shamed. And so once that’s happened, that’s when they put the mask on. And for a lot of people, they start to believe that they are the mask and they wear the mask for so long that they forget that they’re wearing it. And that ultimately blocks them from this natural drive towards wholeness.

So it creates the shadow self and all this kind of stuff. And it ultimately just causes all kinds of issues. The more we cling to it. But the real self never goes anywhere. This is what I believe.

I think what’s real is always real. You can’t add to it. You can’t subtract from it. Infinity times infinity is still infinity. Infinity take away infinity is still infinity. Wholeness is just always there no matter what.

And it’s about the way that we perceive life and ourselves, ourselves, the world in reality and the way that we’re attached to those perceptions and how they distort our interpretation of what’s possible in life and what life even is and blah, blah, blah.

So that’s me rambling about that. But the question was gonna be, even though that real path never goes anyway, do you think that this process of discoverability we talked about earlier in the conversation always means that we’ll discover the same thing?

So this is kind of a weird question maybe, but ultimately what I’m saying is, when we are in this process of discovering our real selves, are we bound by just one expression of that in a kind of deterministic way, predetermined way, or are there a kind of infinite ways for each of us that that real self can be expressed?

I don’t know if that’s too much of a curve ball, but do you see what I’m saying?

Haley: Yeah, I think if you’re looking at like a soul on the soul level, it’s just as you said at first, who you are is who you are, period. And I think the soul of who you are does not change that. And that’s the piece of us that’s connected to each other, to whole, all, right, everything.

Yeah, 100 % 100. Yeah, and that being said, that piece is always what we can connect to and what we can find, but we’re also human beings, and we’re here in the earthly form, and we do have personality traits, and our backgrounds, and our culture, and how we are raised, and our experiences, all of those very much come into play, and they’re not bad. I feel like a lot of times in spirituality, we just tend to almost feel like, oh yeah, all of those things are bad, ego is bad.

Well, it can be, but we need the ego as well, because that is our personality selves, and that informs the expression of the soul. So kind of a, it was a very interesting question you asked, but I think you’re always gonna get back to, I think all of us, if we connect to wholeness, we’re gonna find the same thing, right?

We’re gonna find the essence of what it is to be alive, but we can each do that in different ways, like we already said, it might be through yoga, sometimes for me it’s through art, other times it’s through a walk, and what comes out of seeking that wholeness is gonna be different for everyone, and it’s gonna be different for any one person at any given different times in their life, it’ll be different experiences you’re going through, so yeah, yeah. I kind of, I don’t know if I answered your question, but that’s fine.

Oli: Yeah, yeah, it’s perfect, it’s perfect.

So I 100 % agree, so wholeness is just wholeness, right? Like, obviously that’s maybe too simplistic a way of saying it, but wholeness has to be the same for everyone, because it’s just whole, so you can’t, you know, you can’t change it basically, because it is what it is, but when we’re here in these human bodies, living out these human lives, and we’ve got all these different contingent things going on, like you said, culture and things we’ve been through, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, it ultimately just means that we’re all expressing the same thing to different degrees and in different ways, and every person that you meet basically is just a different experience or a different path back into the same thing.

And I think, you know, the people we bring into our lives, we kind of attract them. based on what we’re currently going through, like in terms of our own fragmentation and the patterns we’re working through and blah, blah, blah. And we will kind of find people or bring people that are gonna allow us and who we are gonna allow to move towards more wholeness.

If we can go with the trust and the process that we mentioned, if we don’t go with the trust and we resist, that’s when we kind of get these toxic relationships where people are just feeding each other’s egos and their own egos and at least the drama and blah, blah, blah. But the trusting ultimately is about allowing ourselves and the people in our lives to move towards this wholeness and to express it in the way that they need to.

So we’ve gone on a bit of a tangent, I guess, but in terms of intuition and all that kind of stuff, how does intuition help us to have better relationships, not just with ourselves, which is mainly what we’ve been talking about, but I guess with other people as well in the world around us, in relation to all this stuff about wholeness and everything.

Haley: Yeah. I mean, how doesn’t it make everything better? I’m like, oh, there’s just so many reasons. Yeah, well, I think that your intuition, in my opinion, is higher guidance. It’s guidance from a 360 degree view where maybe your mind and your earthly experiences may only be like a 45 degree view.

So I think anytime you’re bringing the voice of God or whatever you wanna call it, intuition, anytime you’re bringing that into play, you’re going to, if you trust it, if you trust it, you open yourself up to much greater opportunities, much greater fulfillment, I think bringing that into relationships. I mean, I don’t know, it’s almost allowing you to think through the lens of God or wholeness. And a lot of times from that perspective, you see people with a lot more empathy or a lot more compassion.

You can also just see things with a lot more perspective. And that intuition, that gut knowing or that instinct, those things are gonna only serve you to protect you, to guide you, to make everything better. I think it’s our number one skill as humans. I think it’s our biggest superpower and it’s waste if you’re not tapping into it.

Because I think it’s absolutely our highest skill as humans.

Oli: I love what you just said. So far, I guess the main theme of this conversation has been like, if we can trust life and trust our intuition and move towards wholeness and blah, blah, blah, then the real version of who we are is gonna get a chance to emerge.

But actually, like you just said, you can apply this to relationships with other people. And so if we’re taking the assumption or accepting the truth that we as individuals are completely whole at all times and we can keep moving towards that, then actually when we look at other people and we see other people, we can see them in the same way. So if I’m always whole, so are you. If I’m always whole, so is, I don’t know, whoever’s some person that might be annoying me on a day to day basis.

But like that annoyance only really persists. This hypothetical annoyance, I’m not thinking of anyone, but this annoyance only really exists because I am not seeing them as being whole. I’m not seeing them as being real. And I’m not trusting that whatever is going on is actually allowing the real version of them to be discovered or to emerge as well. Because for every human being on the planet, that process is always unfolding. And if you can remember that and see things through that lens, like you just said, through the eyes of wholeness or God or whatever, you see people clearly and you see life clearly and you see yourself clearly.

And it’s that whole thing that the truth will set you free and you can keep moving and flowing and doing what you need to do. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So many good themes are there. Yeah, I suppose the underlying theme of all this is the trust thing. So just to kind of bring all this together, because obviously we’ve pulled apart a lot of different threads here and they’re all interlinked and connected, but the trust thing seems to me at least to be the guiding force or whatever you wanna call it. So how can people, I guess, become more trusting if they’re finding it hard to kind of trust the process of life and all the things we talked about?

Maybe they’re contrary. What are some practical things, I guess, so that this comes a bit more down to earth? What are some practical things that people can do based on your work and what you’ve learned to develop that trust and kind of flowing this way we’re talking about?

Haley: I think that’s a great question. What came to mind was, at first, was just, oh, intuitive expression.

Well, what does that mean? A lot of different practical things to bring that down even further. Turn on some music and dance and just let it move through you, not counting steps, not doing a TikTok routine, but just letting the melodies move through you and letting your body respond as it wants to.

That’s going to help develop that trust muscle. Also, I mean, taking, it sounds simple and silly, but please try it. Take a Sharpie and scribble on paper. Just letting things be messy and trusting that your hand’s going to go where it needs to go. You could also do your non-dominant hand. Put the marker in your non-dominant hand and just let it slowly meander around the page.

That’s a good trust muscle. I mean, I’ve got all sorts of art exercises that I could share, but I feel like those two are very, very simple. And then one more I would throw in that I know anyone and everyone can do, and that’s journaling. Journaling is a huge, huge practice of mine, and I recommend it to everyone.

I think everyone should keep a journal. But again, not approaching it with, oh, did I spell that right? Is my grammar right? Is my handwriting okay? Will someone read this? But letting all of that go and letting this notebook become your sacred place for authentic expression and not judging yourself, and it takes time.

You’re not just going to be in the first day of your journal and be fine, but letting it just be your place where you dump. What are you feeling? What are you thinking?

What are you worried about? Just dumping it out on the page? I feel like that is such a great, just a healthy process for one, but also over time, if you get up every morning and write for even 15 minutes and just let, pour things out, let it come out of you. Guarantee you within a month you will be receiving insight, you will receive guidance, you’ll be, oh, more self-aware, surprised. I’ve journaled almost every morning for years and years and years, and it never ceases to surprise me.

It continues to allow me to trust myself and to trust the flow of life. So there’s my practical tools. Scribbling, what did I say? Journaling and intuitive movement, just letting music move you. Those are three very, very practical tips.

Oli: Yeah, yeah. I love it. I love that you mentioned judgment as well, because really, judgment is the main problem, right? The reason people don’t trust is because they’re judging. The reason people try and force everything is because they’re judging.

Blah, blah, blah. Judgment is the issue. And so if you can create some container in your life to just get out of that state of judgment and to just experience life in the present moment as it is in your body and so ahead, then obviously that trust muscle is going to get stronger and stronger and stronger, and then you can get all these benefits that we’ve been alluding to in this powerful conversation.

We’ve been talking for 40 minutes, which is the time we set aside. Have you got any final words to sum all of this up? And obviously it’s a lot to sum up. We got a lot out of this conversation, actually at a short time. But yeah, if you were going to sum it up, how would you do that?

And I feel kind of relieved that I don’t have to sum it up, so thank you for that. And also, can you let people know where they can find you? Haley, who is the sparkling hippie? Pretty please.

Oli: Yeah. I’ll take the easy one first. So where to find me? I am at the sparkling hippie. Hippie is H-I-P-P-I-E.

Some people do use the Y, I don’t. But I’m on Instagram pretty active there. My website is the sparkling hippie.com, but I would love to connect with you all. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. I agree. It was a very powerful conversation. So I would love to hear just what comes up for you, what questions you have.

Feel free to reach out. And to sum it all up, I think at risk of sounding very sure of myself, which I am, though, I truly believe that all of your life’s problems, stress, strain, shame, guilt, trauma, all of your life’s problems can be solved by learning to trust your intuition and leaning into the unknown, surrendering to it.

It’s such a beautiful, abstract thing. And yet I think so many of our problems come because we’re disconnected from that or we’re afraid of it or whatever. So I would just encourage you, sweet listener, to maybe just try one of these very practical things that we’ve talked about, maybe just lean in and even just dip your toe in.

And I guarantee you’ll find some relief and some fulfillment there. So that’s how I would sum it up.

Oli: That was awesome. So Haley, thank you so much for coming on here and sharing all this stuff.

Haley: Thank you so much for having me, Oli. It’s been a real pleasure today.

Oli: It’s been awesome. Thank you so much.

Shiny Object Syndrome distracts you from what’s REAL 👇

The objects that often ‘shine’ the most for us are the one’s that call to us because of our unconscious fears, needs, and desires.

When you think about it like this, it speaks buckets that human beings find themselves to be so shiny and interesting – so much so that our ideas about ourselves often DISTANCE us from nature itself and prevent us from living REAL lives of expansion and growth towards WHOLENESS.

The ‘cure’ for Shiny Object Syndrome always starts with the same thing: AWARENESS.

When we do the inner work to become more aware, we can put ourselves on the path to truly accepting ourselves, and then taking inspired action in the world (instead of only being ‘inspired’ BY it).

In this episode of Creative Status, I get deep into it with Michaell Magrutsche, an artist, podcaster, author, and coach who believes that AWARENESS TRUMPS ALL and that the main cause of problems in our lives is a being caught up in systems and concepts that distort our awarness of human-nature and nature itself.

If you’ve listened to the show before or read any of my ‘stuff’ (like my book Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness) then you’ll know these themes are right up my street because I also believe that treating the ‘world’ (system) as reality itself is a massive source of friction, frustration, and misery in our lives!

Despite our agreement, there was also some disgreement in this conversation which led to some really creative dialogue and back-and-forth as we tried to find some common ground.

This was really a very powerful conversation – not just in WHAT we discussed but also HOW we went about it.

We cover loads of ground and this episode is a little longer than average:

-Ego transcendence

-Systems and the limits of the world in general

-How the systems infilitrate our thinking and way of being

-How the creative process truly is the way into realness

-TONS of other things

Listen on any podcast player or use the embedded player above!

(Scroll down for the show transcript)

You can also find Creative Status on these platforms:

Amazon: https://music.amazon.co.uk/podcasts/8c189584-a4d4-40dc-8fa8-d5d65c87e30a/creative-status-deconstruct-ego-integrate-the-shadow-manifest-a-real-life

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/creative-status-deconstruct-ego-integrate-the-shadow/id1644549055

Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84MmUxZTE3OC9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw

Listen Notes:
https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/creative-status-deconstruct-ego-integrate-J9jaAUkeDFQ/

Pocket Casts: https://pca.st/jjwhsddu

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6UG491sXbZv6fUKIMVrIT6

Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/show/creative-status–the-practical-philosophy—psychology-of-creativity

 

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Leave a voice message to share your thoughts and to be (maybe) featured on future episodes of the podcast: anchor.fm/creativestatus

Episode Links:

Michaell’s Website: michaellm.com

Michaell on Instagram: instagram.com/thesmartofart

Creative Status Links:

Book a call to work with me

Free creative workshops to level up your life.

Free one hour creative workshop to take you brand or project to the next level.

Follow me on Instagram

My YouTube channel

Get my books on Amazon

Show Transcript (Beta Version):

Show Intro:

Oli Anderson: Oh, hi there.

Oli Anderson here. You’re listening to Creative Status. If you don’t know, this is a podcast about using the creative process as a vehicle for becoming more real. My job, if you want to call it a job, is coaching and I’m also an author and I help people to become more real in either life or business. Being more real in this context just means that they are moving towards wholeness, whatever that means to them.

That doesn’t mean that we can just cherry pick anything because wholeness ultimately comes with the feeling of expansion, of growth, of flow, and it means that we’re not forcing life through the conceptual bullshit basically that we’ve picked up and being conditioned with by the world. Today’s interview is with a guy called Michael Magrutsche. He is a very interesting guy. He’s an author. He’s a podcaster. He’s an artist.

And one of the things that he’s really interested in is how the systems that we build, aka the world, which is another way of describing these systems, how the systems that we build either allow us to be real or to be unreal. Now, this conversation is probably a very good example of a dialogue more than just a debate or a discussion. We didn’t agree with each other at all times. It was a little bit cagey, shall we say at times, but it was a really amazing conversation. And towards the end of it, we kind of came into some kind of synthesis of our ideas and we sort of came to an agreement, I think.

Either way, there’s tons of insight in here. I had a really good time going through this process with Michael. And I hope that you enjoy listening to it. Michael, thank you so much for your time. Everybody else, thanks for listening. And if you enjoyed the show, please leave a review somewhere or send me a DM about future guests. If you want to be a guest yourself as well, you can put yourself forward. We can have a quick conversation.

Either way, thank you so much. And here we go.

Interview:

Oli Anderson: Oh, hi there, Michael. Thank you so much for joining me today on this episode of Creative Status. We have had some very philosophical explorations already in our short time together here on Planet Earth. Before we expand upon all the stuff that we’ve been talking about here on the podcast, would you like to introduce yourself and tell people who you are, obviously, but also what you’re all about, what you do, and what you want to get from this conversation that we’re about to dive into?

Michaell Magrutsche: Hi, Oli. My name is Michael Magrutsche.

I was born in Vienna, Austria. And I was a sick child and then went to school and hit the wall because I was nervous. I have dyslexia and dysgraphia.

And then when I was 30, because art always saved me, it brought me always to the life is worth living. And I am not educated because I had to repeat three grades and I just couldn’t. I’m still very nervous. And I want to say that as a background that people don’t freak out if they don’t have a degree, I’m nothing in this system. So I have zero education. I’m totally self taught. And I still, with all that stuff, I still worked with Robin Evans, who did The Godfather, co-produced with him.

I did was City Arts Commission of Newport Beach. I wrote five books. So I can’t read books, but I can write them. So that’s basically what I’m all about. So what I found by not fitting into systems is what interests you that that and I’m also in the arts.

And I’m actually, you know, my systemic explanation of what I do is multidisciplinary artists, plus creativity awareness educator. So I basically don’t have steps to tell you or what to do. You just listen to this program and you make up your own mind. I believe with that.

Oli Anderson: Okay. So just so people kind of understand what you what you actually do on a kind of day to day basis. What is it that you are, you know, currently doing as a vocation or a calling or a job, whatever you want to call it. When you say that you’re self taught, what are you like a self taught? What?

Michaell Magrutsche: I don’t understand the question.

Oli Anderson: Basically, what do you do for a living? Like what you said you’re self-taught, you don’t have an education and all this kind of stuff. What? What did you, you know, as an autodidact or whatever? What did you teach yourself?

Michaell Magrutsche: So obviously, there’s nothing to do with systems, but I am in the system of restaurant hospitality, guest relationships. Yep. Meaning, whoever hires me, make sure I am the representation of the house.

Okay. So I represent the house, the hotel, the restaurant, whatever. And in this actually consult. And also I learn it’s all about human business. It’s on and human business.

I have no problems. I’m like a master in dancing with humans.

Oli Anderson: Yeah, brilliant. And that’s actually going to be the main theme of this conversation, I think, human business. So I’m just going to dive right into it. So a lot of your work in your books and all these kinds of things is about systems and the way that our creativity as a species has caused us to build systems that are not necessarily the best systems for human beings and human nature.

Now, this is something that I’m really interested in as well. So one of my books, Personal Revolutions is basically about this idea that the world and reality are separate things. But the problem is that a lot of the time human beings take the world, which is just something that human beings have designed based on all of their assumptions and emotional stuff and blah, something that human beings have designed as a response to reality. We take that at face value and we treat it as being something that’s true. And that causes all kinds of problems. So just to get the conversation going, I guess, how do you see that gap between the world and reality if there is one?

And I know that’s a huge question, but just take it.

Michaell Magrutsche:  Not for me. I have… No, not at all, because I can’t tell you linearly what happened. So basically, after generation of system conditioning, so what is a system? A system is a bigger thing than a tribe. A tribe is still organic.

It’s probably, they say the best system is a tribe is 150. That is scientifically proven. I don’t know if that’s true, but that’s everybody comes to the same conclusion. What’s most efficient and nature is all about efficiency. So the most efficiency is parts of 150 people.

You have a doctor, you have a lawyer, you have all these people in there and they treat themselves well. When we created systems, when a tribe became too big, because we had DNA driven to procreate till 28, I think we are driven. We’re not wanting kids, but we feel we’re wanting kids. And so we do that. And then also we have DNA driven, which I tell you, this is all what science says, but I’m taking it with a grain of salt.

But it makes sense. So DNA driven also that we are inclusive. So if I want to see my power by myself, I can’t see it very hard to see. If I interact with you, you are a reflection of my power and I’m a reflection of your power. So just that people, you know what? You want to see power, it’s not a billion dollars. That is manipulation. That is system manipulation. But you want to see power that’s like JFK.

It’s things they have and it’s humans reacting to you. It’s Churchill. Even though he was system relevant, these people, But there was more than it was the human person, the human, you know, if the person is good or bad, if you judge Gershaw is good or bad or JFK, it doesn’t matter. But the response of humanity, that’s why they were so powerful. They were not just powerful in the system, they just could dance with human. That’s, let’s say that. So I don’t think that’s a good or bad, it’s just a good dance, you know, you can be a cop leader, you know, and that doesn’t help. So anyway, so we are driven to that.

So that was the first thing. What we misunderstand over generations, once we created those systems, those systems have always, by the way, I want to make that point clear. I’m not against system at all. Systems are always good because they have good intentions at the beginning. But the reason why systems get out of hand is every system is not created by nature, created by man-made systems, created by us.

And they are creations by us. And they all systems are based on financial principles. Otherwise, they can’t self-sustain. Humans can self-sustain.

They go into nature, they pick something, they eat something, they are creative and get a habitat or whatever, live in a cave and then come out and build a house. You know, it’s just, we have the creativity to create our habitat. But that doesn’t mean it is our habitat. So we create basically shelter, but that’s not our habitat. Our habitat is nature. And we have not more than another species of nature.

And I told you that before, the eagle sees really well, the dolphin swims really well. We have that, our distinction is that we can be self-aware and that we can create. In the self-awareness, we need that self-awareness to create. And we are limitless creator. But you know, an ant is limitless whatever. And you know, an elk ant is limitless whatever.

So everybody has a specific function in nature. And we forgot that because we got the symptoms, you know, there’s the, what is the shiny object syndrome?

Oli Anderson: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Do you think? So, go ahead. Go ahead.

Oli Anderson: So, do you think that these days, there’s a lot of kind of discontent? There’s kind of an understatement. You know, everyone seems to think that the world has gone mad.

The resources are running out that politics is more divided than ever before. That there’s more depression, there’s more anxiety, that men are not men, women are not women. Nobody really knows what it means to be human or any of this stuff. People are just so confused more than ever before, it seems.

Obviously, I haven’t been alive at any other time in human history, but that’s how it seems. People are just complaining all the time. Is that a symptom of this kind of thing that you’re talking about?

Or is it?

Michaell Magrutsche: Yeah, there’s a symptom of believing that system is our habitat. Actually, nobody would ever say, you know, I’m a child of a system, because systems don’t create humans. But, whenever you last heard that we are a species of nature, because it’s kind of degrading to humans.

That’s an ego shit. How can nature, we have to figure out how water comes up a tree on the, on the yards. We have to figure it out. I mean, science doesn’t replicate. We would replicate that. We haven’t. So we, we exploit nature. Not that it’s not a bad thing.

It’s just a stumbling. So, so as I’m making it, anything bad or good, there is no better good. We’re doing things that don’t work. And we want to say the arrogance to say we have to save nature in that for all the people that want to save nature. There is such an arrogance in it.

Or an absolute non-awareness. Because if you’re aware, if we were aware, we would save, we would exploit nature, but we would save that part of nature that is responsible for our survival. Go ahead.

Go ahead.

Oli Anderson: So let’s take it back to what you just said about the financial principles, basically been the main motivation for these unreal unnatural systems that we build. So obviously, one of the main values we could say of the capitalistic system we have, this caused a lot of problems is profit for the sake of profit.

Let’s just say for the sake of simplicity. And that causes organizations to keep plowing forward, no matter what, for their staff to be kind of dehumanized for people to spend their whole lives working in jobs that they can’t stand and then they retire for a few years and drop dead. That ultimately is fueled by these kind of financial principles that you seem to be referring to, if I understand you right. What is it though that has caused us to want to believe in these financial principles more than nature or reality in itself? Because ultimately the system is a choice, isn’t it?

So why have we chosen the unreal stuff more than the real stuff? Do you think?

Michaell Magrutsche: It comes slowly. Like the most wonderful thing is the financial system. What a great innovation. See, I am a fan of initial systems. I’m not a fan where the system goes once we get used to it, because we just get numb and say, okay, that’s how it is. And also, I need to really say that on the other side of systems are humans that also have to feed their five kids. So it’s not the five kids that are hit by the system and don’t get healthcare.

It’s also the five kids that have to create a system that whatever they do their job, whatever their leader says. There’s a new prime minister and he gets a new tax system. And trust me, those are not rich people that make the new tax systems.

Those are hard workers that are just having a great ability to work with numbers. They create a new tax system and they say, well, where do you go? Okay, we do things this way. And so you’ve got to see the big picture of that, the contextual thing, that on one side we waste our life force to create this tax system. On the other way, we use our life force to circumvent the tax system.

I mean, the more life energy wasted cannot be. This is insane. And there’s problems you can’t blame anybody. You can’t blame systems. You can’t blame other people. You can’t blame the, it’s an awareness thing.

If nobody goes to war, there is no war. It is a consciousness thing. It’s nobody to blame because blame is just propelling the shit we are in.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So if you blame Tony Blair or whatever, you blame anybody for any of all your futures and all whatever happens now or Boris or whatever. It’s not helping. You feel in the second better. That’s systemic too. You feel in the second them because you vent your frustration.

But in real, it’s a short time system thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It doesn’t have you, you lack awareness and awareness is to see the whole. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, 100 % agree.

Oli Anderson: So I think. I think the answer to the question I was just asking about why have we chosen this system is exactly what you just said is because we have chosen it unconsciously. A few minutes ago you said basically it’s all ego shit, right? Ultimately the ego is just the opposite of reality, that’s how I see it, and the ego is just living in an unconscious way instead of a conscious way where you have awareness of wholeness basically.

Reality is wholeness, the ego is fragmentation and when people are operating on autopilot they end up in the ego and then they create all of these fragmented systems that we now have. And so the solution if there is one is for people to start raising awareness of themselves and their connection to wholeness and to start building systems around that knowing rather than all the conceptual knowledge that is currently informing the systems that we’ve got. The problem is you can’t have any kind of a movement, you can’t have any kind of a cause, you can’t have any kind of a religion or dogma or any of that stuff, it’s just something that people can do individually one on one because it’s about our relationship with life itself and that’s where things get complicated.

So to throw you a curveball maybe, what could a system look like maybe that was aligned with nature but that was I suppose life enhancing in the way that we’re talking about, allowing people to find a connection to wholeness and then do something with that collectively as well individually. If that’s even possible, I don’t know if it is.

Michaell Magrutsche: At least possible, of course it is. Everything is possible, we can imagine it, we can put it in reality and this is my next book, the one that I finish right now is about systems, what we’re talking about right now but the next one is about solutions. How we can create a system that is not system-adapt, so the system keeps being alive statically, but a humanist that adapt, systems that a humanist adapt that constantly that have safety measures in, for example that a disturbed human being that for whatever luck or whatever reason comes into the system, takes the system over and creates a war. So that we need to create systems, systems are great but first of all comes the awareness.

So for example you asked me about the financial system, financial system is great, you have a chicken, I have a hammer, neither from us needs a chicken or a hammer, I can use money, what a brilliant thing to sell my chicken or hammer and then we can buy whatever we want to buy.

That is brilliant, that is so creative. But when money, when the system of money which is another manmade system makes money with itself from the system, meaning like AI, now it can systemize a human function, we have forgotten that people love their jobs, some people do love their jobs. Now other people hate their jobs. So now we hope that AI is the solution that we love our jobs but the job loving has nothing to do with the duties of the job, it’s the awareness of how you do with him.

I love to go to work every day, that’s not a day I don’t like to go to work because I meet humans, I meet fresh humans, new humans, I have interaction, it doesn’t matter if I feel sick or not, I love to go to work, that is not depending on the job, that is dependent on my perception of what I perceive in that job and getting to the right job, where can I contribute to humanity, not where can I contribute to systems.

And so until 50 I hit the wall, hit the wall, hit the wall, till I found out, oh, you know, I’m nervous and all this stuff, so what am I good at? Art and art creating, art understanding, art understanding the creation process, not the history, not the product, but the creation process and I’m really good with humans, that took me 50 years to get there. So because I was like everybody else, there’s no exception, nobody’s better, was system conditioned over generation and my parents taught me that crap.

And so the rarest is first.

Oli Anderson: Yeah, it always has to start with awareness and I think that’s where the creativity thing comes in, but I always think the next step after awareness is acceptance of ourselves, reality and like what is possible in the world itself. But there is something in the current system that is blocking both of those steps. So normally for me, it goes awareness, acceptance and action. So you get the awareness, then you accept what you need to accept, then you can take actual action that is going to get you where you need to be.

If the system allowed that to unfold as a natural process, then I think a lot more people would be happier and they would be able to live lives where they’re moving towards wholeness and they’re doing all the kind of things that we’re talking about. But because the world is not real, it’s just a bunch of ideas, it’s a bunch of fears, it’s a bunch of assumptions. And because those assumptions and fears and all that stuff are informed by people’s unreal relationships with themselves, that they pick up from their parents and that they reinforce through self-agnosis and all that kind of stuff, things just keep getting worse and worse. And even in the best possible scenarios for systems like in pure capitalism, for example, which I love, it could be, yeah, you have an idea, you work really hard at it, you take personal responsibility, you do what you need to do and then you created something of value for the market, so you transcend yourself in that process, blah, blah, blah.

That’s all awesome. The problem is the system always becomes corrupt when ego is involved. So for example, bailing out the banks is kind of corruption in a way, depending on your definition, nepotism and things like that. People don’t allow the natural systems or the most possible natural systems to flow in the way that they could. There’s always ego, bullshit getting in the way. So how can we deal with that, do you think? If that even makes sense, what I’m saying?

Michaell Magrutsche: No, Oli, it was really great what you said, because you’re doing what everybody else does. You teeter-totter between systems and human relevance.

You tetter-totter in that. And I cannot be fixed by systems. Every human problem that a system created or systems created, depression, mind stuff, anything. Do you think you can create racism that was created by systems?

Genderism was created by systems, sexual things was created by systems, religions. Do you think you can fix that with political correctness, need to, life’s matter? Do you really, who is in their mind? And what the perception of that is, is what I see in this whole thing, what I just saw with you is people are so unaware that they blame the system.

They think they actually believe that a system that got them in there, to be racist in the first place, to be, to put down women and say, woman, where’s anything, go behind the stove and cook for your man. They now have a system solution for a human, we are way too intricate humans. Systems that are so limited can fix us. That’s a problem with systems.

They are very limited. A doll is a doll. When you create it, you cannot ask the doll, hey, who should I marry?

What stock should I invest? The doll cannot answer that. You can imagine it says that, but you can’t, there is something about a living being that is godly. I’m not religious or anything, but it is above our comprehension.

Otherwise, we would crank out humans out of any old coal mines. You know what I mean? So, there is something godly and we have no respect for it. I mean, what you said, thank you for Tito Tartar, because this is giving us this conversation. It’s our system. I guarantee you, 90 % of our problems would be gone tomorrow if people were, if I could wave a wand and say, be aware.

Because it’s awareness. You don’t need steps. You don’t need linear steps. First, I gotta do this. Then I gotta do this. No, just shift. You just change.

And that is the key to separate system relevance or dynamics to human relevance and demand. Where’s your problem coming? You have not a problem. You make it a human problem because you should have shelter and food. Every human should have that because that’s by nature given. You live every animal in the nature has. I mean, if we don’t screw it up, every animal in nature has food.

Every animal in nature has food. Everybody should have that because financial principles, which is a great system again makes a imbalance. And you know our so we using our third superpower of adaptability. We use that third superpower for adaptability to adapt to a system and that’s where breaks down. Instead of, you know, using adaptability and say, okay, it starts raining. I’m going to go and get a shelter.

We buy something or we do something and then it rains and then it’s too much water and we don’t know what to do. You know, we forgot that I mean, this is how to engage with somebody. Yeah, do you know that dating industry, I’m just saying it. They found out, you know, we have like 15 years dating and just $2 billion industry. That’s a human thing.

You just go to another person and friend them. Right. Now we pay for that.

We pay for human function, because the system needs to work and then it makes it easier and it makes it easier to not use the system will do everything. It’s not a bad thing. I don’t want to talk to this like a person. It’s we have been uncons, become unconscious that because on the other side of the system say, okay, how can I make that easier to date through an app?

How can I get that better? And now everybody dates and now they find out that the dating, you know, they, the system show you only the one that work and not the one that don’t work. Like in everything they show, you know, they talk about Elon Musk to talk about Jeff Bezos, talk about the viral videos.

And there’s only 1 % a half of one of 1 % are those icons that we follow. So now they found out, you know what, I’ve dated the younger generation, I’ve dated 10 years on an app. I don’t know how to engage anybody. And if I do, I get a black lives matter me too.

You know, I take a risk to be human. Yeah, that’s all. That’s what you see. Awareness thing.

Oli Anderson: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the only thing you can be aware of is reality, ultimately, right? And the only thing you can accept is reality. And when you can get to that stage, What is reality? What is reality? I don’t understand what is reality? Reality is just wholeness. It’s wholeness. It is what it is. It doesn’t change all of this.

Michaell Magrutsche: Oh, you mean effect on your life. So whatever it is, is okay. So this is, yeah, you accept it. You don’t judge it. You don’t, you don’t really. Yeah, you can’t judge it. Yeah, it’s beyond judgment, beyond duality, all that kind of stuff. And ultimately, that comes down to chaos.

Oli Anderson: That’s basically it, right? Reality is way beyond our fragmented understanding, our conceptual understanding. And that understanding is what informs the systems that we build, because ultimately, we’re afraid of chaos. We’re afraid to go into the unknown. We’re afraid that, you know, things might go wrong. We have scarcity mindsets. We think we’re going to run out of food or resources, whatever it is.

And so because of all that, we build these systems of kind of false order in order to kind of protect ourselves from all of the uncomfortable feelings that come from that. And actually what you were saying about problems a few minutes ago is totally true. Most problems can only exist within the context of the system or within the world or within the ego.

Because the ego, like I’ve said earlier on, is the opposite of reality. It’s the opposite of wholeness. And actually, because wholeness, like we just said, reality is beyond good and bad, it’s beyond duality and all that stuff. There are actually zero problems in reality.

And so our ego and the world, or egos in the world, they ultimately keep us in a state of perceiving problems that don’t need to exist. And that’s when you get all these extra problems emerging, like all the things you said, like the gender stuff and identity stuff and racism, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All of that stuff exists within the system for two reasons, I think.

One, because people are afraid of chaos so they latch onto very controlled senses of identity to keep their emotional stuff at bay. But also, it basically keeps people in a state where they’re fighting over limited perceptions of power. Ultimately, in the systems that we create, power becomes a limited resource. Instead of people just having the abundance of power that they have in reality itself, if that makes sense.

And so all of these little battles, these power struggles are what leads to a lot of this stuff that we’re seeing, I think.

Michaell Magrutsche: No, no, no, no. You are completely, I wouldn’t say anything wrong. I’m saying you still teeter-tottering between system and human. So you see that as a, instead of saying, hey, we created it, we can uncreate it. We’re the gods of system. There’s nobody, and the ego is, the system obviously has conditioned over generation our ego. Our ego is not a bad thing. You know who you are. I can say, oh, all you’re an idiot. But you know who you are. I am, you know, there’s two people that are not much in the ego anymore.

They have harness there. Obviously, I can get in the ego anytime, but I’ve know that. And you can know that too. So ego is basically a thing that is amplified through system lies. You wouldn’t be an ego if you’re aware. People that are unaware are in an ego, meaning when you get fed, when you get fed by the system through other humans, because they need to make money, that it should be sunny every day.

If it is not, we sell you a Ferrari, a pill or a face job. I always say that same example, because I want that to get in the oven, Echola. That’s a lie. Because everything is constantly changing.

That’s not spiritual. That is, we constantly change. When you have a partner, if we will have this conversation is different than we had when we had the other conversation. So we constantly change.

We constantly get more aware. Even in prison, you change if you want or not. And you die every night when you sleep. And then you wake up again. So when people change, it can’t be sunny every day. Because when you grow, which is the is the instinct that humans have, even if they get a sickness, if they go go be on the street, that is a way of growing that your spirit needs or your awareness needs, whatever that is. You hit reality.

You hit other people that are also growing. So it’s never safe. Life is never safe. The only safe is being now, is you right now. I don’t care if I have to be bills. I don’t care if I have to be the dog. I have another meeting in two hours.

I don’t care about that. I could go into that mind construct, but then I’m lost of the moment. And, and when I’m lost of the moment, I go into ego. Because I think about future and past and mind construct. The mind cannot save you. That is another thing is that, oh, we make you mindful.

We make you all the coaching. Look at this. No, we can’t. Well, we can be good.

That’s a mind construct. What is this person when I look at you first as a, oh, the English guy. If you are a woman, I said, Oh, he’s here. He’s a woman. She’s a woman.

Oh, she’s another race than I am. That’s how we start navigating. And so this is another human. This is me.

Let’s see what we do. Like in podcasts. That’s why I see podcasts as a wonderful, because you never knew the person before and you prove to the world that people that don’t know each other can make immense. You know, you don’t have to have the best friend to have a good conversation. You can have a conversation like this.

We don’t know each other. You know, it’s just, and we’re making something great out of it. And the financial principles is one thing we need to be aware of. So not everybody can be Elon Musk. Elon Musk is one of one.

There’s 8 billion people on this earth. Everybody has a different fingerprint. Everybody has a different iris. Everybody has a different DNA. So there is no normal. But for some reason, because we’re adaptable, we think there is a normal. No system ever saying what is to be a normal co-worker.

What is it that be a normal CEO? Nobody can say that. They always say what you can’t do, but they never say what it is. Yeah. So it’s confusing there too. So this is the second line.

That is, if I can do it, you can do it. Such a bullshit. I’ve never heard. I’ve never heard a bigger bullshit than this because my neurodiversity, I’m not the victim or anything. I just don’t fit into the system that way because I’m on the bell curve on the tails of a bell curve that I’m flawed.

Nature doesn’t make mistakes. You have life. That’s the proof that you’re worthy. You don’t need to think about God or anything else.

You have life in nature. You’re worthy. Not your better. You’re not worth it. You’re not better, worse. You’re worthy. And that’s all that all that all come. You just fit your puzzle piece in humanity, not in systems. I’m important because I’ve kind of found my puzzle piece, but it took me so long. Yeah. In humanity, I don’t care if I fit into the system or not.

Doesn’t matter. I have to abide by the system, by laws and whatever, but I don’t mind fitting into the system.

Oli Anderson: The question is, how do we build systems that are human-shaped? We actually need both. It’s a false dichotomy to say, right? It’s either reality or the world.

We need a world that is supportive of human nature and reality. That means it understands this gap between the ego or the mental constructs that we have and how that seems to operate. So for brevity, we can say that the ego is just the illusion of status. It’s the illusion that things stay the same, that reality doesn’t keep moving. It’s the illusion that we can control everything. It’s the illusion that order is the natural state rather than chaos and all these things.

And when we build a system around that because of our own fears and everything, that’s when we actually end up with an unreal world. But that doesn’t mean that all systems by default have to be unreal. If the system is fluid, the system is flexible, the system embraces the ability that we have to adapt and all that kind of stuff.

We can actually not, we won’t need to tell or any of that stuff. We can build a system that is human-shaped and life-enhancing. And that means it understands or is based on assumptions that the ego is only ever a temporary thing. It’s the best version of ourselves that we have come up with in order to survive whatever we’ve been through. But that doesn’t mean it’s who we actually are. And so the system doesn’t need to reinforce egos. It can help people to kind of move beyond them and to transcend themselves. But that means probably having a certain set of values that encourages people to keep creating in healthy ways, to keep moving towards wholeness, to transcend themselves, to give instead of take all these different things that it could entail. But it doesn’t have to be one or the other.

We could have systems ultimately that allow us to kind of replicate nature, maybe not 100%, but more closely than we are doing now.

Michaell Magrutsche: One of the words that doesn’t exist in human. I just want to point that out to you. One or the other is it’s a system thing. There’s one and two, you know, one and zero, right? It’s not.

That’s a system that is a system definition. All is, there is no normal. There is not either or because we’re eight million people that are all different. So the delusion that we’re all the same is another lie. We are not the same. We’re not all the same.

Oli Anderson: That’s obviously incorrect. But there are natural laws and principles that apply to all of us, no matter what. So yeah, maybe you got, you might have purple hair and I might have blue hair, whatever. You might like, I don’t know, Woody Allen films or something. And I like watching action films, like all of those contingent surface level details. And the scenery of our lives is different. But the underlying structure of the human experience is the same.

Michaell Magrutsche: Like gravity.

Oli Anderson: Yeah, like gravity. We both have to deal to gravity. We both, we both have to be aware, but see long enough in the system that we constantly changing.

Michaell Magrutsche: Yeah, yeah. I’m changing. Yeah, yeah. I probably change 100 times in this conversation. You know what I mean?

Oli Anderson: That yeah, yeah, of course. But that constant change is one of the natural laws that we need to be aware of. And so if the current system is built on the idea that people don’t really change after the, you know, the age of 21 or whatever, that is a pure bullshit system. If we act like we’re going to live forever and that property and things like that are more important than the time that we have, because time is the most precious thing we have. That is a bullshit system.

Michaell Magrutsche: If we forget the law of cause and effect, system lie, it becomes a system lie. Yeah. Yeah.

Oli Anderson: Yeah. And so what I’m saying is, if we understand those natural laws and we have awareness of those things, and we build a system around that, that is going to be the, the best approximation of a system that is human-shaped. It’s not an ego driven system. It’s a system that is fluid and moves towards wholeness and all that kind of stuff or is aligned with wholeness, rather than just been some response or reaction to life and chaos based on our inability to face it because we need our egos to stay the same.

Michaell Magrutsche: Something like that. I would, I would, I would go away from the ego because ego is a, is something that is system amplified. And it’s almost changing ourselves as human that we have an ego. You know what I mean?

Yeah. We are unaware. It’s all about our awareness because you can’t, you can’t blame Boris, what he did. You can’t blame anybody.

You can’t, but you can’t because he’s unaware, because if he was aware, he wouldn’t be like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So if, if I know, I mean, I mean, the 15 people were educated people, system people, decided over 11 million Jews to be killed, 15 people. Do you think they were aware?

Oli Anderson: No, they can’t have been.

Michaell Magrutsche: I’m just saying you, you, the more unaware you be in the more gruesome you are, do you think the people say, I’m going into the war and I’m going to die?

That’s okay. Because I have a system ideal that I have to do it for country. You don’t even know, but you do it for the people. So a warrior in a tribe is to make the tribe feel safe to protect them from animals or whatever comes, you know, that is a warrior.

It’s not a warrior to sacrifice your life. Yeah. Yeah. That is a completely system-evented human, how humans be supposed to be in systems. Yeah.

Yeah. That’s why they’re honored with medals and everybody says on veterans day, you know, but in really, yeah, you see this perverted is completely perverted because nobody wants to shoot another father, you know, that has three kids and he doesn’t even know that he’s not in the human essence. And that’s an unawareness. We get to get wacky in our brains to do inhumane things because we believe over generation, that is the right thing to do.

And it’s always missing. That’s the right thing to do.

Oli Anderson: It becomes down to how the system basically brain washes, as I guess, into seeing certain things has been moral or immoral. And now we react to that.

But I think there’s an extra level. It’s not just the system reinforcing the identity. That does play a massive part the world’s saying oh you should do this you should do that and he gets repeated over and over again And of course the system often wants people to be unaware because they’re easier to control that way and it goes.

Michaell Magrutsche: I don’t believe that – they are in a position where they make a lot of money and they don’t want to lose it. It’s all a fear-based.

It’s all fear-based. Let’s say and then redo healthcare. Yeah, and I see I’m running out of money and that that affects my job so I will do everything to survive Survival, you know, you always do self-survival if you’re pushing in a corner The nicest person is an asshole, you know that becomes it comes a beast And the problem is that that this imbalance of financial principles Always gets money to the more not from the asshole people But by by default where more money is that’s where money flows It’s it’s also you cannot play monopoly without paper money You cannot start playing the game. So when you are born in poverty You have to do kind of a really strong hustle to make it If you’re born into wealth and privilege You can can do it. How? What determines wealth and privilege and poverty is the financial system And the financial system is basically flawed. It’s perfect. For example, you and I said before But it is flawed because it creates imbalance and in nature the most power Is balance everything but nature always balance and harmony.

Yeah, yeah Balance and harmony has no Has no bearing on financial systems.

Oli Anderson: Hmm. Well, what I was gonna say is There’s the external stuff that comes from the world okay, that affects how people see themselves and what they decide to do and what they think is possible and blah blah blah but There’s that extra element of their relationship with themselves So for example, you could have two people that are born in poverty One of them could be blaming Boris Johnson or Tony Blair or whoever the hell for their their impoverished condition The other one is going to take responsibility for themselves basically and say right it’s up to me.

I’m going to do this. The person who is taking responsibility for their own life Is pretty much guaranteed to make more progress than the person who’s just blaming everybody And the only difference really between them is their emotional relationship with themselves – so the first person who’s blaming everyone their emotional relationship ultimately is causing them to like beat themselves up to be sluggish to think there’s no hope and all that kind of stuff .

Obviously, you can’t blame them for being that way but the other person who’s taking more responsibility is more likely to be able to change things in the system for themselves and the only difference between them really is the choice between unreal and real if you’re blaming everybody like we said you’re getting caught up in the illusion of duality and value judgments and blah blah. And if you if you’re taking the other approach while you’ve been a bit more real you say right This is the situation. I’m aware of it.

I accept it this is what I’m going to try and do and so It’s not just the system. It’s like our Our relationship with ourselves if the ego is involved I know you you know, we see the ego differently, but if the if the ego is involved there is another system inside ourselves that we have to fight and it’s not purely externally sourced – it is basically our internal Emotional stuff. So shame, guilt, trauma or all those kind of things.

They’re affecting How we even get started in the first place?

Michaell Magrutsche: Exactly. So so very good that you said that last sentence because it is not given that you you have the choice you have the choice, but you’re not aware that you have to choice.

Yeah. Yeah psychology 101 teaches that there were two sons of alcoholic And the one is the total copy of the father. The other one is the one of the greatest lawyers in new york and I said Why are you You know, uh, why? You know, why are you the way you are when look at your brother? And they say because and both say the same answer because my father was an alcoholic It it is I had no choice.

My father was an alcoholic. So what I’m saying is that We need the unawareness Of the because there’s a lot of people that that are in my position that have have a life thing. They’re dead They haven’t lived they have gotten themselves into drugs Have to go if you don’t look at any minority it doesn’t fit into system and I could have ended up on drugs dead You know giving up being a victim And I tell you I have no I must say that because people think the system says, oh, you can just choose Bullshit, I didn’t choose that that happened to me that I my spirits is very strong That is a part of me. But if I had a weaker spirit I would have been dead And and that’s why I say we have to it’s not forgiving. It’s we have to understand The the preciousness of life Yeah, and that it is that it is not just oh systemic you can you can make a choice a mindset Fuck mindsets Because I’m sorry a mindset or mindset mindset this mindset is leadership coaching that people don’t even know what a leader is Hmm, you know, look at how much leadership coaching you have but It’s insane.

What’s the What is the difference in your opinion between Having a strong spirit and having a weak spirit like what’s the missing thing you’re born with If you wouldn’t know that if I would you know, it just happened Hmm You you are you know, you experience this life as a weak spirit or is a lot a strong spirit and hopefully in this life you can because you you’re a part of nature Grow from that because we’re always changing a weak spirit can a strong spirit a strong spirit Has become a weak spirit. You know that when they go into a strong spirit with the system He blows up. He goes into his ego your favorite word and and and and and then He you know systems He kills himself or whatever It’s just I mean and there’s no Tony Bourdain.

It’s the best example. There’s a guy that grew up Very low, you know, not his a middle class and then And I exploded he got everything he wanted and you know, he was honest in that what he wanted to achieve He got that and then he off himself Yeah, because it’s it’s it’s it’s What you imagine? Systemically you fit in Is irrelevant. Hmm. You gotta be you Yeah, that’s what it all about. You gotta be you you gotta find you in a human context not In a system context and that is the problem why we get lost because we try to find ourselves in a system context.

Oli Anderson: Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. We look for ourselves in the world The world is unreal anyway And that just causes us to be more detached from our spirit or the real part of ourselves I I personally think I think and I’ve experienced what is real within us is always real and so I kind of disagree that we you know, we’re just born with a weak spirit or a strong spirit I think we all have a strong spirit all the time, but the problem is some of us because of our life experience we get conditioned to believe that that spirit is is dwindled or that the flame has gone out or whatever you want to say.

But actually that is just the state of disconnection that we have learned ultimately and and it’s partly because of the system, it’s partly because of our families, it’s partly because of all the bullshit that we hypnotize ourselves with and the the beliefs that we pick up and the stories we tell ourselves all that stuff All of those things.

Michaell Magrutsche: No, no, no going going Because then you would say it’s my fault That I because I was a sick child. I couldn’t fit into any system.

You say it’s my fault that I got strong bullshit I had no idea I had no idea That I had absolutely no idea That I will survive over Anything I lived in the moment because I had to because I couldn’t breathe I was always in the most forced in the moment. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I was planning things or whatever And you are If you say everybody’s the same your system, that’s a system answer. Nobody’s the same. Nobody has a strong set everybody’s unique.

Oli Anderson: Yeah, we’ve been you you already agreed though, right? So So, reality ultimately is just wholeness.

That’s it, right? And so that applies to the reality of those as individuals as well. So the expression of that wholeness is obviously different. We have different bodies, we have different life experiences, blah, blah, blah. But the wholeness is wholeness, it’s always the same. There’s no escaping that.

And you can’t lose it. And so yeah, maybe you get sick or something and you’re having a bad day. Personally, in my own life, I’ve been really sick as well and it actually woke me up, it raised my awareness so that I can see this side of myself, this real whole connection that was there all along. And it’s not about saying that, if people are disconnected from that wholeness, then there’s something wrong with them. It’s just a thing.

Michaell Magrutsche:No, no, no, that is the right thing.

That’s the right thing. We are all connected to the wholeness. Yeah, yeah. Remembering that helps us. But so if we can tell young people, like you and I, the old guys, can tell young people, is you are, this is why I always say, know your species of nature. Have an animal that you talk to or interact with that you can’t just say, hey, clean the dishes. Learn, because you hone your, a pet, hones your senses. You know? So you’re a part of nature and never forget that. And in the system, we all play monopoly. That’s fine. We all agree that we play on that monopoly thing, but you are a part of nature and your wholeness, you find through the nature because nature is perfect.

It is perfect. It doesn’t have to, oh, we have now 2000 elephants more. It doesn’t, like I said, the lion doesn’t go on this thing. I say, okay, I have to kill every gazelle and on this savanna because I need some food tomorrow. That’s a mind construct that an animal doesn’t have.

Yeah, yeah. He kills it, eats it, and then an hour later, a gazelle is like whatever, five yards from him and grazing. Because the gazelle is in touch with the lion, that he’s full.

So he’s not a threat to her or him. So it’s our natural ways. We have everything, but to be in the human habitat, believing that the human habitat is a system because we are born in a hospital, we are baptized, we are in school, that’s conditioning. They tell you, and because you learn what it is to be from zero to seven, you learn to be what is to be human. And then from seven, you learn how to interact with a bigger family than your family.

You get taught the wrong things because you get in condition for financial, for the system. Where are we going to put Oli? I don’t know. Oh, he’s gonna be a steel worker. Okay, and that program you do a steel worker because we need steel workers.

That you wanna be an artist, that you wanna be a writer, that you wanna be a podcast. I don’t see.

Oli Anderson: Yeah, and that’s it. The system is designed according to what the economy needs and blah, blah, blah. And you either become aware of that and you wake up or you’re done and then you have this restless feeling inside of your whole life because the real version of you, that wholeness never got an expression. That’s ultimately, I guess, what we say. We’ve been talking for nearly an hour.

It’s flown by. Have you got any final words to sum up this conversation? Like, obviously we’ve been all over the place.

Michaell Magrutsche: I have a question that just came to me is that, what is, I don’t even know how to verbalize it, but help me with this.

I say, what is it? What is the justification that we are a part of nature? If you, I mean, you can’t disagree we are not a part of nature, right? So we are part of nature.

Nature is perfect. Why do people not have a shelter and enough food to eat when we throw almost two thirds of food away? What is the human experience? I’m not carrying off the system explanation.

What is the human explanation? Why we should have people dying poverty? Because right now it doesn’t matter. The billionaire as well as the beggar all worry about money.

They both worry about the same thing, money. The beggar to get it, the millionaires to lose it, not to live his life anyway. So what is the human reason? Why there should not people, how every human being should have enough food, a shelter? I’m not saying a castle. I’m saying enough shelter, you can shelter.

They can choose to find himself in work or find himself where to fit in. You don’t have that choice anymore. You get today when you go in school, you don’t even know how to survive.

You’re growing up with the efficiency. And financial principle is conditioning. It’s always not enough.

Every quarter you need to make more, more better. And that’s not natural either. That is not natural. So my question is, what is the human explanation? Why not every human being should have food and shelter?And medical care.

Oli Anderson: Like, obviously, I’ve got some ideas I could throw out there. I don’t know if you…

Michaell Magrutsche:Throw it, throw it.

Oli Anderson: It’s ultimately… Like I’m trying to keep this simple. Obviously there’s the idea that scarcity is part of nature, right? Nature actually is not scarce in any way.

Michaell Magrutsche:No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You show me where scarcity is in nature.

Oli Anderson:  That’s what I’m saying. Yeah, yeah, like nature is abundant, right? The system makes scarcity a thing so that’s caused people to have more fear around these kinds of things. But the other thing I think in nature, it’s not all up to us.

This is the thing, right? In nature, we are interdependent. It’s about other beings, tribal creatures working together, all this kind of stuff. It’s about the relationship between us and life. And the relationship between you and life means, again, you have to take my favorite word out of the equation.

You have to take your ego out of the equation. If you want to acquire food or shelter or whatever, there is an element of… I don’t want to say coincidence, but there are certain elements that you cannot control. It’s up to fate or destiny in a way for you to be able to acquire the things that you need to acquire. And in nature, you either keep acquiring those things, so it seems like fate is on your side, or you don’t acquire those things, and then you eventually die. But if you keep getting the things because of this abundance that you’re tapped into, then you have to see that it is not just up to you.

You might come up with a plan: I’m gonna go out and I’m gonna hunt a saber-toothed tiger, whatever it is. But that plan is just the best plan that you have currently been able to come up with because of your ego, ultimately, and what you think is gonna happen then. So the more attached you are to that plan, the more your ego is involved. But actually, when you get out there and you start living a real life and you become attached to nature again, or attuned to nature, sorry, not attached, you realize that you can’t do it that way. That is scarcity thinking again, thinking that it’s totally up to you, that you are the only one in control of your life. And so I think the reason so many people in poverty and so on and so forth is because we have bought into this systemic bullshit thing that it’s up to us and nobody else when actually it’s about life or God or the universe or whatever you wanna call it, it’s way bigger than just one person being in control of that.

And so I would say it’s something to do with that and I don’t know if that’s opening a can of worms.

Michaell Magrutsche: No, no we are not built to to being scarcity you know the only fear you should have is when thesabre tooth is in front of your cave or you almost get hit by a bus. The fear is that’s why it’s an alarmist and now we have 90 % system say 90 % in the fears and this is why I said at the beginning and I’ll fix the system problem with the system solution. You and I have to talk to each other yeah to become aware if you and I wouldn’t have talked to each other because we both became very much aware of it second superpower dialogue human dialogue not system dialogue I’m right you’re wrong you know so so we that’s the second first creativity dialogue second third out of the ability wow and if we so we need to we need to be you said it we need to be aware and we need to be aware that we’re built for inclusion we’re not yeah versus…

Oli Anderson: One one final thing I want to throw in there is this idea of trust so earlier on when I was ranting about you know the world versus reality I said something like ultimately reality wholeness from our limited human vantage point is chaos it we it’s about uncertainty and you know we don’t we can’t understand every little step in the chain of cause and effect so we don’t have all of the information things don’t make sense sometimes even though in in nature in reality everything is perfect it doesn’t always seem that way when we’re not aware yeah yeah exactly and so the missing ingredient really between the world and reality is trust that’s why I think right when you’ve been real when you understand about wholeness and you’ve got this awareness that we’re talking about even though you don’t you know you’re not on mission you don’t understand everything you can conceptually at least you still have the trust that things are gonna work out you trust the chaos of nature you trust the chaos of life you trust the chaos of wholeness the system is not built around that kind of trust the system in general is built as a reaction to not trusting life and so you try to control it at every level and you can’t do that and when you build a system like that and it goes you know from one generation to the next people just become less and less trusting of life itself and that’s what causes all these causes a lot of these issues that we’ve been kind of alluding to.

Michaell Magrutsche: I would exchange the two words I would say trust is awareness because you can’t trust ever if you’re not aware yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah okay and I was chased chaos with uncertainty chaos is a system word both assistant words trust trust us because we give you insurance there are system words you need to also do a vernacular to human I’m gonna write in this book that I’m that that’s coming out I’m gonna do all the vernacular because when I hear chaos I cringe when I hear trust I cringe because that’s a both systemic they’re not they’re not they’re not human trust you it’s easy for me to trust if I’m aware this is gonna happen or this is like if I trust gravity that’s the thing I’m aware of gravity yeah and if I chaos means oh it’s so tainted that’s so stem so systemically trained that chaos it’s like who wants to be chaos digitalism in chaos in harmony yeah it’s uncertain though see and that’s also the word the ego you know because it’s so you have an echo if you are the master of everybody if you adapt your vernacular to human versus system even this see I mean this is great that you are that way because we become aware shit we use the wrong words or you know we use better words boom and all of a sudden it works so hang on to the human because you are human and you are aware of human is the power so human relevance is it.

Oli Anderson: We could go on for a long time but like ultimately though there’s there’s a reality shaped way of doing things and there’s a you know like an anthropocentric way of doing things where we say that it’s the human beings at the end of the line that is still and it’s in it’s an almost I keep using the word because I always I think this word work it’s an egotistical way of doing it like saying that it’s all about humanism or be human-shaped or that you know everything needs to be filtered through the lens of the human animal and the way they perceive and understand things that is it’s still bullshit is bullshit – like actually it’s about understanding the human nature so that you can kind of experience something more than that to the greatest extent possible and I know that sounds like a bit of a paradox but it’s about understanding that the universe does not revolve around human beings.

Like human beings are amazing and we’re part of nature as a system or whatever word you want to use but if we think that everything has to be under human volition or human control that’s when we we end up screwing ourselves over… it’s about knowing the shining object syndrome…

Michaell Magrutsche: Exactly that’s it we built London like we must be kings you know we built New York we must be godlike…

Oli Anderson: Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah it’s ego again it’s bullshit that’s why I wanted to say earlier so when you mentioned the shiny objects in drum earlier actually the shiniest objects to human beings right now in this day and age is human beings and it we’re looking at it yeah yeah but we’re not that shiny and we’re not that special we’re not that interesting we’re all amazing and we can have amazing lives and do amazing things but perfect that way of thinking just fuck it’ll fuck your life up basically and so it’s about transcending that and giving your life to something bigger and it can be anything like some people you can they give their lives to God you give your life to nature the universe – it can be certain values – it doesn’t matter you need to find something bigger, give it to that, and then the system won’t affect you as much because the system is bigger than any human and human and never and human beings aren’t shit anyway so like if you first you give to the system then to humanity then something bigger and that’s only you know what that is so yeah that’s my little rant about that… how how how are we gonna finish this conversation?

Michaell Magrutsche: Seeing systems don’t work without humans and humans work without systems even though we have a hard time to work without system yeah but nothing nothing works without human no sales no – I mean I see it in restaurants – people have their concept and whatever I said you’re always dependent you can have the best food you can have the best waiters you have the best chef you have everybody… if the server doesn’t put a spoon in something or doesn’t do, you know, drops at you or is drunk all this stuff thing and the guest relationship is also human so humans define you the experience so it’s not about the best chef and whatever it’s about the whole experience – always the whole.

So the team the waiters is exactly as much the dishwasher is exactly as much worth then then the manager and the money giver you have to create the inclusion of the team and have a horizontal conversation everybody knows anyway that is the owner you don’t need to… but you have to function as a team when we function as a team like you and I right now we’re wrapping it up right so that’s it’s always said together it’s never a oh all you’re an idiot you don’t know you know it’s just it’s just everything just isyeah so thank you, Oli, and and you can reach me on Michael M.com Michael with two L’s Michael M.com and we can do this anytime.

Oli Anderson: Awesome. I’ll share your link in the show notes but yeah thank you for this conversation you’ve given me a lot to think about hopefully a vice versa, baby, and yeah absolutely absolutely awesome yeah all right well I’ll talk to you again 100 % sometimes too yeah thanks y’all appreciate it you