Oli Anderson

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Show Transcript

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.

What that means is probably different to all of you. The creative process, how we have to deconstruct our egos, raise awareness, how we have to accept ourselves unconditionally and whatever the creative process brings up, how we have to take inspired action once we’ve been through that process and figured out some stuff. And on the podcast I basically interview people about that and related topics. This episode is an interview with Anjl Rodee.

Anjl has a company called Brushcapades, where she goes out into organisations and she puts on workshops and that kind of thing, helping people to use the creative process through painting and that kind of thing to get out of their heads a little bit, stop holding back, figure out what’s really going on inside them, be vulnerable and to really share something that’s real with other people and a whole bunch of other things. So if you take that into account, she’s a perfect guest for this show because ultimately she understands the whole thing that we’re ranting and raving about over here.

And she has some amazing things to say about it. There’s some stuff in here that she said about vulnerability that was really powerful I think. There’s so many misconceptions that people have out there about what it means to be vulnerable.

Ultimately, they seem to think that it’s just about pouring your guts all over the floor and playing with them in front of people. But actually there’s a real approach which means that we’re accepting that we feel a certain way and we’re sharing that when it’s relevant and necessary to do so but we’re growing through it, we’re not letting it hold us back. Ultimately just sharing where we are. So anyway that’s the thing that came up. All kinds of cool things about how we can use the creative process to be more human, more creative, more flowing, more growing. Yada yada yada.

I’m going to stop ranting and raving and let you just listen to the interview. But if you get some value from this, please leave a review or something or send me a DM and let me know who else might be a good guest. Angel, thank you so much for your time and everybody else.

Enjoy the episode. Here we go.

Interview

Oli Anderson: Oh hi there Anjl. Thank you so much for joining me today on Creative Status. You’re a terribly artistic person with a lot of energy. I can sense that. So we’re going to talk about creativity today because that’s what this podcast is about and I think we’re going to be exploring that in relation to stress.

Before we get on to all that, do you just feel like introducing yourself, telling people who you are, what you’re all about and what you want to get from this conversation? If anything.

Anjl Rodee: Every day. Every day I feel like doing that. So yes, my name is Angel Rodee and I have a company called Barushcapades and I basically teach about the importance of creativity to teams, corporate teams all over the world actually. So through the medium of painting and drawing, but it’s pretty much a lesson about how important creativity is.

Oli Anderson: Wow. So one thing that always pops up on this podcast or one little thing that I always like to ramble about anyway is that creativity isn’t just about painting pictures or taking photos and all that kind of stuff. Obviously you work in that area, but do you find that creativity itself is much bigger than that kind of thing? And if so, how would you describe that to people?

Anjl Rodee: The way that I’ve heard creativity defined is making something out of nothing.

So you know, that could be bread, that could be a sweater that is knit, that could be a perfect circle of stones on the ground. Really? Because that wasn’t there before. We’re the only living creature that makes things out of nothing just to do it, not because we need a nest or to impress a mate.

And it’s really inherent to what we are as a creature. So I always tell everybody, go back to your LinkedIn and after whatever it is you do for your occupation, put back slash artist. I don’t think anyone’s taken me up on it, but I’m pushing, I’m pushing it.

Oli Anderson: I might try that after this.Let’s see how it goes.

Anjl Rodee: It feels like a lofty word. It feels like if you say you’re an artist, that either means you’ve got stuff in galleries, or you’re sleeping on your girlfriend’s couch.Yes, maybe both. But it feels like a weird, lofty word that’s hard to own. Doesn’t it?

Oli: Yeah, I think so. There’s so many connotations, or there’s just so much loaded stuff with that word. And I think This is where this conversation might open up a little bit now. I think it’s because a lot of the time we filter what we need art to be through the ego and how we want to see ourselves.

And so there becomes all these kind of pretentious ideas about what it actually means to be an artist, create art and blah, blah, blah. But actually real art, I would say, and I don’t know if you agree, goes back to what you just said, which is that it’s just about making something out of nothing. And when you go through that process of making something out of nothing, actually, even though you’re making something out of nothing, that’s something ends up revealing something to you about yourself.

And if you do it right, that helps other people to understand themselves a little bit better as well. Now that’s maybe pretentious.

Anjl: Yeah.Yeah. So you can’t not create like yourself. There’s a piece of you in whatever it is you just did. And I think that that maybe is inherently scary and people because they realize that even if they don’t know it, they know it.You know, you’re revealing a little bit of yourself, but that little bit of vulnerability is what draws people to you.

Oli: And I think a lot of the time, this underlying revelation of the self or whatever you want to call it, this aspect of the creative process is what causes people to have creative blocks and things like that. Because a lot of the time people actually don’t want their real selves to emerge. They’ve reached the end of, you know, one current incarnation of their identity or whatever, they’re trying to cling to it. And so they don’t want that process to unfold. And actually what I’m learning is that process is not just about, you know, painting pictures and all this stuff. Like I just said, it can be literally anything. You can, it can be a yoga session.

It can be walking through the park. Anything where you are becoming more present and aware within yourself and within life is the creative process. And it’s always unfolding. It’s constantly moving us towards wholeness, because that’s what we’re here to do. I think it’s just to keep growing and evolving and expanding and blah, blah, blah, blah.

And so that is the creative process. And so just to end this little ramble and bring it onto the stress thing. I think that most stress in our lives is when we are living in a way that kind of blocks that natural unfolding towards wholeness. So it can be like psychological barriers that we erect or the identity stuff that we cling to.

That stops us flowing. It can be doing things physically, I guess, where we’re pushing ourselves too much or we’re not doing enough. And all these different things take us out of balance with reality and these natural processes. And that’s what causes stress in our lives. So I don’t know if that’s aligned with what you think about all this stuff.

But if we’re just going to open up the stress thing, what do you think?

Anjl: Yeah, don’t you think that you, we count in what we’ve made something that wasn’t there before? If you have a new idea or a new mindset today that you didn’t have yesterday, that’s something you created.

Oli: So can you elaborate a little bit? What do you mean?

Anjl: When we talk about making a thing, being creative, making something, we think that it involves the pen in the paper or the yoga position or a thing outside of ourselves. But really, you are also your creation.

Every day you make decisions that make you different than you were yesterday. That also counts as creating. Yeah, 100%. It’s a really cool thing to be mindful of that you get to be in charge. You know, if you’re like, oh, I’m so lazy. Well, today I’m not, you know, I’m a new person.

Oli: Yeah, yeah, because most most of the stories we tell ourselves, they’re just our assumptions that we’ve carried over into the present from the past, but they’re not actually real. There’s just concepts in our head. But how do you think that the capacity we have to create ourselves and make choices and all this stuff, how does that fit into the stress thing?Do you think from a creative point of view, if it does? And it’s a curveball question.

Anjl: It is a super curveball question. Let me see if and correct me if I’m off course. But I think that a lot of the stress.

Well, no, I’m going to just go out on a limb and say all of this stress and fear and anxiety that we see as a real thing in the world is actually, just like you said, a little voice inside our head, a thing, a story we tell ourselves. I’ve just as an example, I am taking care of my cousin’s dogs. They live next door, three dogs, taking care of them for eight days. And I was really, really anxious about how me, who just has a cat and have to empty the litter box every few days.

Other than that, she pretty much ignores me to be in charge of animals that need you. Was filled me with a lot of anxiety. And I got a lot of work to do. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to do this.

I’m totally able to do it. So that was that as an anxiety that I built up inside myself. That wasn’t an actual thing. It is a story that I told myself that it was going to be overwhelming.

So I think that, you know, a lot of things that we count of is, that we think of as a stressor, we’re kind of stressing ourselves out because we could also tell ourselves, this is going to be a challenge that I am up for. Then you’re excited about that same thing that’s coming up that could have potentially been a stressor.

Oli: Yeah. Like this is something that I’ve found in my own life. So I think really, like it sounds a bit extreme and some people will obviously disagree, but really there are no problems in life. There are, there are obstacles or challenges and, you know, things happen. But ultimately, if you have a problem that lingers, then it’s something going on in your head.

Ultimately, that you are attached to, because if you realize that there is a problem, your brain is either going to go into solution mode and you’ll find a solution and then you’ll do something about it so you won’t have a problem. Or you’ll eventually realize that it’s not a problem, it’s just part of life and there’s nothing you can do about it, so you just need to accept it. And the problem actually isn’t something external, it’s a lack of acceptance of the truth about life within inside yourself. And again that comes down to the stories we’re telling ourselves. And so when you view things through that lens, that makes it a lot easier to get into this creative flow state.

And again it always comes back to the identity issue. So, ultimately, I think nearly all stress is just, it starts with some mental thing that is just out of alignment with life and the creative process can tap you back into that.

Anjl: Absolutely. And we’re not perfect people. We’re going to get stressed, we’re going to get scared and stuff. But if at some point you can stop yourself and say, hang on, what is another message I can give myself today? Yeah, this thing feels really stressful. But what is a positive thing?

And then just stare at that thing emotionally. Stare at that thing. The issue, the problem gets smaller and smaller. And staring at your solution or your better attitude about it is also good for your self-confidence and your attitude in general. Both things are always true. A negative thing happens, there is a good side to it. There just always is because that’s balance, that’s the in and in of life. You can decide which one you stare at.

You can stare at the scary stuff or you can say, now what is also a good thing that can come from this?

Oli: Yeah. And I suppose in a way the creative challenge there is trying to reframe things, I guess. So you can see the very least you’re going to get a lesson. So you can do something with that if something bad happens. But there’s almost always an opportunity as well. But the thing I found that holds us back is not wanting to keep flowing and keep growing and expanding in the way that I was on about. Because we’re just attached to a certain version of ourselves.

So I guess what we’re saying is that a lot of stress is caused in the mind. Is that true though, do you think? Or am I being a bit too over the top? Because I’m making it sound like you can kind of think yourself out of any stressful situation and then you’ll just be all enlightened and blissed up in everything.

What are the, you know, are there some practical things I might be missing? Do you think?

Anjl: I don’t think so. I think that there is, there may be something to the fact that people just have things going on chemically in their head and they just need a chemical balancing thing. Whether, I’m not saying no to that, but I am saying there is a way to help think your way out of a stress thing. And meditating is one way to get there.

And me personally, maybe it is because I have this Dory the Fish energy that we talked about. When I meditate, Oli, I sit for 15 minutes and I just beat myself up because I can’t shut off my to-do list. But I can draw or I can paint and two hours can go by like the snap of a finger. That is also meditative and that is, that’s meditating with a parting gift, I like to say.

So it’s a way to help train yourself to bring your brain to another place other than the place where it’s gotten itself so worked up that you can’t see beyond the cloud.

Oli: How does, like the, I suppose, literal creative artistic work that you do with people help people to train themselves in that way?

Anjl: It gets you out of your brain without you having to overthink the fact that you are out of your brain. Once you get past the fact that, once you get past the feeling that what you produce on paper needs to be good or needs to be perfect, otherwise I shouldn’t be doing it.

When you think of art as play or as a therapeutic tool or just as a process, rather than I need to make something that looks good, otherwise I’m not good at it, and I shouldn’t be doing it. Take that out of your brain. Just the act of doing is what is so good for you. And sometimes we have to learn how to get out of the critical part of our self. And there’s really no other way around just the doing.

Oli: I think ultimately that is 100 % right. So when I’m coaching people, they often, when they first start working with me, they might be less confident than they want to be, or they’re a bit anxious or whatever, it’s got an inner critic holding them back. And you can’t really talk anybody out of that kind of stuff. All you can do is help them find inspired actions to take that are going to give them evidence that whatever that little narrative in their head is saying is bullshit, basically, is not true. And once they start taking action, and they start seeing the story they’ve been telling themselves is not true, then it slips away quite quickly.

And I think what’s going on there is what you’re saying about when you’re drawing or painting or whatever. They just become present basically. They’re just in the moment, they’re in the flow. And again, it comes back to this process we were talking about, where they’re just moving towards wholeness. Because that little voice, that inner critic, it’s just fragments that we picked up from the past because of our emotional relationship with ourselves. And so once you take action, obviously, you see that’s not true.

Anjl: When we’re six years old, we’re all artists and singers and dancers. And at some point, we decide that our efforts are just bad or wrong or just embarrassing, and we either never do it again, or never do it in front of people.

But it is really inherent to what we are. And when I teach people in a group, one of the benefits of teaching people in a group, like a corporate team, for instance, is when we get partway through the process. And right when I can start to see on people’s faces that they are starting to get disappointed with themselves in what they are doing, I make everybody hold up their art so everybody can see it. And I said, now I want you to look at it. everybody’s thing they’ve got up there.

And then I don’t say anything, but they all start naturally doing this. Oh, John, I love your sky. Oh, Clarissa, that is so cool what you did there. I love how you, that choice you made. And I say to people, do you notice that your brain is doing this? Mine sucks, but everybody else has something so different and so cool and so creative. And then I say, I don’t have a left lobe.

My mom says I qualify for handicapped parking and I am looking into it, but I know that math doesn’t work out. If we’re all thinking ours is the only sucky one, then it can’t be true.

Oli: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Anjl: And then I tell them when I’m working on art, I beat myself up too, but I yelled, I nailed it. I’m nailing this, I nailed that at myself to just kind of remind myself, you know, pen to paper. I am doing the great thing right now. Yeah, and just the action that counts again, like he said.

Oli: Yes. Why do you think most people in a group are telling themselves this story that theirs sucks? Like, where does this come from? Like, it seems to be, you know, like a bit of an emotional pandemic that’s taking place in the world. Everyone thinks that creative work sucks or whatever. Or some people are just compensating and they’re almost too confident potentially. But in general, there seems to be a lack of balance.

I don’t know if I’m making things up, but that’s how it seems.

Anjl: I think like a part of it comes from the fact that they are watching an instructor do it and they feel like if mine doesn’t look exactly like hers, then mine is wrong. And so I remind people, if Andy Warhol and Van Gogh were both on your team and trying to paint like each other, they’d be having aneurysms, but they’re both amazing. And the other thing is, I think social media just doesn’t help because everybody puts their best stuff up there. I’ve been thinking lately, I think I’m gonna start posting my sucky drawings because I’ve got them and I don’t post them. But I think it’s important to see that even somebody who does this for a living, they’re not successful.

My drawing wasn’t successful, but I learned something from it. And so therefore that thing is just as valuable as the ones that really turned out. So I think that’s a part of it too. And then just, when you hit a certain age, somewhere between six and 13, where you just decide that everything you put out is wrong or bad. And like I said, art is inherent. And I think if we met on a tennis court and you hadn’t played tennis before and this was tennis 101, you wouldn’t expect yourself to be good, but that’s what you find with it.

I’ll whack away at it. But art inherently, inherently personal. And I think people, even though they don’t realize that’s their thinking, they’re like, eh, that’s putting myself out there. Don’t know if that way. Yeah, yeah. No, no, that’s not, yeah.

Because you write like- Especially in this age of social media where everybody just puts their best stuff out there. It’s, we just forget that the process is the important thing. Not the stuff that belongs in a gallery wall.

Oli: Wow. Like the interesting thing there is, ultimately what we said right at the start of this conversation is the creative process is ultimately about the process of revealing more of who we really are, our true self. And so the conflict that seems to be going on with a lot of people is they’re creating art or they’re creating creative things that are an expression of who they think they should be rather than who they actually are. And so like you said about Van Gogh and Andy Warhol, like those guys, obviously, they were expressing something that was real inside themselves.

They weren’t trying to be anybody else. And so actually it comes back to that again, which is that if you really want to get the most out of the artistic process or the creative process and be able to create something, I guess, of value, then it has to be an expression of you. So how do we take all the shuds out of it? Because the shuds, I should be like Van Gogh, I should be like whoever, they’re actually causing people stress in a way.

Anjl: Yes, that is true.I think it’s just inherently going to happen. I don’t know if there’s a way to tell people how to do that, but I can tell you from my own experience because I started my career as a commercial artist, excuse me, and as a commercial artist, people would say I want you to draw a car for this ad, do it in this style. So I made a living out of copying styles, right? So when I learn like my favorite art to do now, personal art is urban sketching. I like to go sit in front of a building and make a nice little watercolor and a sketch of it.

And when I was learning how to do that, I found people’s work that I liked, that I admired, and I would copy it. One of my very good friends now is someone I took a class from early on, and his style is very clean and looks like a comic book from when you were a kid. Very clean, strong lines.

And so my early, early urban sketches were very clean and strong lines. I find now it’s even hard for me to do that again because I just naturally, I’m just messy. The brain is messy on the inside. My art’s a little messy on the outside. We’ll say free and playful.

That’s a better way to say messy, right? And so I just naturally, when I stopped looking at his so much, my art is just gonna gravitate toward what I like. If you have a very type A brain, your art is gonna be very clean and type A. If you are playful, your lines are gonna be a little more playful. It’s just gonna get there. The more confidence you have in your structure, not even in your art, but in your process, the more you are gonna come out.

It’s gonna be hard to be structured if your brain doesn’t work in that way. And that’s fine, and that’s awesome. If we all painted the same way, what would you bid on at Sotheby’s like you do? There’s all kinds of stuff out there.

Oli: Yeah, I’m just thinking like, What we were saying about social media and everything and how it’s all curated. Actually, that applies in art galleries and stuff as well. Leonardo da Vinci, everyone’s seen the Mona Lisa or whatever, they think it’s amazing. But he went through so many test runs of just that painting itself and he’s got all these sketches and all this messy stuff that he put out there. Most art or most creative work actually is messy, isn’t it?

Anjl: Yes. 90 % of it and then 10 % the tip of the iceberg is what we show to the world. But the first, there’s a quote by Ernest Hemingway, I think, he said, the first draft of anything is shit.

And like ultimately, that’s just so true because it has to start like that and then you just refine it and then put out there what you think meets the standards. Yes. Each one of Van Gogh’s paintings are painted on top of another painting. There are no less than four paintings underneath every one of his paintings. Picasso, same way. It’s just what they did.

You just get to reuse it on top and on top and that’s okay.

Oli: Wow. And that’s actually, sorry.

Anjl: No, I was just saying that is process.

That is process and something that we need to keep in mind. They weren’t all the Mona Lisa. They weren’t all Starry Night.

Oli: And it applies to life as well because I guess, you know, we all start off quite messy. And then we kind of start to figure ourselves out and then we know to, I don’t know, interact better socially and all that kind of thing. It’s the same underlying process again.

Anjl: It, it reminded me of something you said earlier about vulnerability. I’m also an improv comic and one of the exercises that we do as a, as a group is we all stand in a circle and the medi, the moderator stands in the middle and, and points to everyone and says, what are you afraid of? What are you afraid of? What are you afraid of?

And it starts with the dark spiders, asparagus, whatever. And as you go around and around, it starts to become that my dad never loved me, that I won’t, you know, that I’m a failure because I didn’t finish college and all these things. And you start to realize as you’re listening, the more vulnerable people, vulnerable people get, the more you want to go hug that person and say, me too. I feel that way too. Or I have this other fear that feels like yours.

Let’s have a hug on that. Vulnerability is what attracts people to you, not your perfection. And, and it’s, you know, without looking for someone else to fix you, just to, just being that vulnerable human is your gift. The bravest thing you will do is to put that out there.

Don’t you think? And your art is, is that it’s your vulnerability on paper.

Oli: Do you think avoiding vulnerability for too long just creates more stress?

Anjl: Absolutely. Absolutely. I think that’s where fear and stress are born. Yeah, absolutely.

I will tell you 10 years ago, I moved to Seattle with a relationship from the midway. I moved to the west and the relationship ended tragically and instantaneously five weeks after I moved to Seattle and he was a pilot, no, to self. And he gave me two weeks to find somewhere else to live and I didn’t have a job. So I squatted for a while.

And the having been kind of a fearful person before that, everything I had, everything that I thought defined me, my job, other things that I did were kind of stripped from me in a place where I didn’t have a support system, 2000 miles from my home. And within six months, I had built up a better life than I had before and found bravery that I didn’t have before. And I am so grateful to that guy because had I not been tested and found out that nobody’s going to die today and good things are coming. Oh my gosh, I’m the bravest person on the planet now because of that horrible thing that I really feared and really tried to live safely so that thing wouldn’t happen.

Oli: Wow. So by I suppose being forced to be vulnerable in a sense, you found who you really are basically and I think normally, well always when we find out who we are, we’ve got way more strength than we actually may have originally believed. So on the other side of that fear and vulnerability is normally realness, that’s what I call it. Yeah, so in relation to people avoiding being vulnerable and everything, on the other side of the coin, do you think there’s a misconception around what vulnerability is? And by that, what I mean is it seems like some people in society, they think being vulnerable just means basically pouring their guts out all over the place and then playing with their guts in front of everybody.

Obviously that’s a metaphor, I don’t mean literally, but yeah, what do you think about that? So how do we fine tune this capacity to be vulnerable?

Anjl: Yeah, I think you’re right. People either see vulnerability as the same thing as victimhood or the same thing as weakness. And it is neither.

The vulnerability is not saying, here, fix me. It’s saying, here’s my humanity. He here here’s all of me And that is the difference and and again, that’s the the messages we’re playing in our head, right? because I don’t think and anybody if they are looking at your Authentic vulnerability and saying oh that person is weak that says way more about the viewer than it is about the guy Doesn’t it that’s that’s that’s playing and messages.

He’s giving himself Very little is about us very little in this world is about me Nobody’s walking down the street worrying about whether or not my socks match nobody Nobody’s worrying about you know Whether one of my ears is higher than the other because it is But nobody worries about that but me yeah, that’s my deal.

Oli: Yeah so we were saying like, ultimately, if we avoid been vulnerable it just causes stress if we’re too vulnerable in this unreal way and it lapses into victimhood or whatever that can cause stress as well. So another curve ball question what are some of the barriers to being vulnerable both internally – so in in our relationship with ourselves and then also I guess externally in the world – like what’s stopping people? being as vulnerable as they need to be or as real as they need to be and, you know, living less stressful lives?

Anjl: I think I think when when people are looking for their self-confidence or self-worth to be based on something external then that external thing becomes a shell that is not only keeping the world out.

It’s keeping you in, right? That is that is what I so I so I think if you’re a place of I don’t even want to call it confidence the veneer of confidence maybe right your the thing your safety wall is based on something that isn’t Just inherent if you’ve got a voice inside you saying I’m gonna keep showing you my shiny stuff so that you don’t see the socially unacceptable child that lives within that is that is an issue that and and man how do you crack that without hitting some low point like me? Oh saying squatting and having that shell taken away for me.

Yeah, I don’t have an answer for you there It’s something only you can do I don’t I don’t know that, you know, it’s something you have to do for yourself I think and it’s just so crazy to think but it is true, isn’t it Oli?

It is the voice in your head, so you have complete control in turning that voice off You know in a second you can be like, oh, this is my story now. It doesn’t feel that easy. I know it doesn’t feel that easy Hmm, it’s simple reality. Don’t you think?

Oli: Yeah, 100 % – so I always think there’s two ways to go about this ultimately what we’re talking about is stepping back from ego or identity, or whatever you want to call it, stepping back from this version of ourselves we’ve constructed to deal with all the shame gill and or trauma that we picked up in childhood like you were saying and most people this so for most people this out here right they they they’re born and life is good their kids spontaneous running around free then something normally happens that causes them to feel ashamed of themselves or to feel bad about who they are and then they put a mask on to Hide the parts of themselves that have been shamed.

So let’s say just hypothetically somebody I know kid has a bad temper or something and their parents shame the anger so they send the anger into hiding and then when they grow up they’ve ended up being a people pleaser because they’re totally detached from the angry side of themselves and anger is a healthy emotion like anything else and so that part of them has been disowned it goes into hiding and then they create a false version of themselves like I keep saying to keep that hidden keep it a big and for most people that Version of themselves the ego just ends up being automatic. They’re just going through life on autopilot they might feel avoid inside themselves.

It might feel a bit restless whatever but they don’t know why that is because as far as they’re concerned this mask that they put on is who they are they forgot that they even put a mask on in the first place then two things can happen:

So, one, something ‘bad’ in scare quotes might happen where they hit hit rock bottom. So for you you ended up squatting In my life. I ended up I got a I was ill and it woke me up to all kinds of things basically when you hit rock bottom you can no longer hide from yourself and that’s when you can see like a true vulnerability true realness. You see what’s actually there and you can build on a solid foundation. So actually rock bottom It almost always turns out to be a blessing.

That’s what I found when I thought to people but, ideally, you don’t want to hit rock bottom dude so I think another way that people can wake up is through some kind of you know spiritual practice or whatever you want to call it where you know They’re having these kind of moments that you were talking about actually where they get into the present moment they get into the flow state Maybe they’re meditating doing yoga going for a hike having a peak experience.

Whatever it is there things you can do that instead of you hitting a low point and seeing the truth you kind of experience a high point even if it’s just for a few seconds and you kind of having a epiphany I guess where you can step back and say oh, okay. That’s not me. This mask. I was wearing is just a It’s a construct basically. Yes.

So I don’t know if that feeds into all the stress stuff. But what do you think?

Anjl: Totally agree with that totally totally agree with that. Yeah, the more authentic you live, the easier it is to live. When you’re looking for your self-confidence and your identity and all this stuff to come from outside of you, it just takes a lot of work to seek it out and to build things, to make it stick around.

That’s a lot of work. It’s easier just to be authentic. Vulnerable is just a part of that. We all have it. If anyone says they don’t have it, they’re not being honest with them with themselves.

Oli: Do you think getting our confidence back and all this kind of stuff, learning to accept ourselves again, all these things that people try to do by chasing all this external stuff, actually what we’re really trying to do is just unlearn things. I think in our natural real state, we do accept ourselves completely. We are confident or we can take action that will make us more confident.

A lot of the time, when we’re ultimately stressed because we think we’re not confident enough and ETC, ETC, it’s purely because we’ve forgotten who we are for some reason.

Anjl: Absolutely.

Oli: Whatare some things we can do then, based on your work and what we’ve been saying, to tune back into that or to unlearn and strip away some of this stuff we’ve picked up?

Anjl: That’s where I think art, the creativity making, I call it art. Arting is such a great, if not baby step, it’s at least a step because if you don’t know where to start, putting a brush to canvas or pen to paper and just starting, then you aren’t just connecting.

That movement is connecting you with the inside, but whatever comes out on that paper is you, but it’s disconnected to you a little bit. You can see that little mark there. I love that mark and I’m proud of that mark. It’s a baby step to being able to say that about yourself because if you’re really in a self-deprecating mode, it’s really hard to just turn around and go, oh, but today I’m amazing. No, but this little mark that I made and this little painting I made, it’s amazing.

I did it. It’s amazing and it’s a part of me. To me, it’s such a great baby step to that self-confidence and self-love, which is so hard and self-acceptance. It’s so hard, but so important. You’ve got to start from a place of self-love in order to love well.

If you don’t have self-love and you’re looking for that to come from your friends, from your partner, from your teachers, from your mentors, then as soon as that person is gone, you’re back to zero again. But if you start in a full place and it’s all infinite, it’s just going to reflect rather than fill. Coming from someone else is going to reflect. I just feel like art is such a great place to start the process.

Oli: I love that way of describing it. Let’s say people ask stressed or they’re depressed or they’re feeling anxious or whatever. There isn’t going to be a panacea, is there, where they can just click their fingers or click their heels together and return home from Oz or whatever. It’s a process.

The reason they found themselves being depressed and anxious is because for whatever reason, and it’s not through no thought of their own a lot of time, but they ended up making choices about their identity and the way they see life and so on and so that has made them tell themselves a story that’s led to this state of stress, depression, anxiety, whatever.

The only way back home, so to speak, is to reverse the process, even if it’s just in increments, like you’re saying. You draw a little picture, you get some self-validation, whatever, instead of doing it externally, and you can return step by step, I guess, back home. Sometimes you might have a big epiphany and something amazing happens. I just mentioned stress, sorry, I just mentioned depression and anxiety. How do you think that fits into all this stuff that we’ve been saying, those two things?

Anjl: Again, because art is such a good meditative process. When that big black cloud is over your head, it’s hard to see outside of it. So just using a little color, I still beat myself up when I’m painting too. I still like a lot, that’s not my favorite tree, but I can also say at the same time, well, I nailed it, I nailed that tree, I’m nailing this and I nailed that.

And I do say that all the live long day with the eggs I make in the morning, the paintings I make during the day, and my attempt at meditation later. Nailed it, even though I didn’t. But I can laugh at myself a little bit and move on to the next thing. Or I really did nail the thing and I need to celebrate that. I just walk around and probably tell from my voice, I walk around celebrating everything. And I’m sure I annoy people, but I am

And just I really dig that little vibrating that happens in your body when everyone near a child and your birthday is coming or you’re on your way to your grandma’s house for Christmas. I can invoke that feeling by looking at side my window and noticing just different patterns on the water.

Get me. I’m like, this water is a living thing. It’s amazing. Yeah. Yeah.

And so I love to get myself excited about things and that keeps me in a place where it keeps me out of what might be depressing or whatever. Am I getting off track? No, no. I’ve had some caffeine already today.

Oli: It’s okay. I’ve had loads as well. I’ve been dancing around while you’re talking. But ultimately, I think the theme of this conversation is basically about our inner state.

And like maybe I’m just, I’ve been basically everywhere I’ve been going this week. I’ve been talking about this inner state. The inner state and managing that is basically the most important thing we can do for our lives.

Because ultimately, if your inner state is where it needs to be and it’s real and you can accept yourself and you can flow and you can feel excited about things and all that stuff, then the outer state is eventually going to reflect that to some extent. That’s how I’ve found it. So do you think a way of kind of summarizing everything we’ve talked about is linked to that idea just to throw another curveball at you?

Anjl: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. And if you don’t know how to connect to that inner state because some people haven’t found it yet, put a pen to paper and start making circles and make circles with your breath up, upper half of the circle with your breath in, lower half of the circle with your breath out. And mindful about the pen hitting the paper and the pen leaving the paper.

That will help you connect, connect, connect to the inside. And yes, absolutely. And you are a part of everything. What a powerful spot you’re in. You know, you’re a powerful thing that is. And when you give yourself the power to say, today, I am not a lazy human today.

I am resting up for something really big. Right? Yeah. Looks the same. Different message. Different message. Yeah. And that is okay.

Start the message there and that message will pop up more and more in other areas.

Oli: Yeah, absolutely. I love what you just said about how we’re, you know, we’re basically connected to everything and it’s that’s ultimately for me, what this all boils down to.

So right at the start of this conversation, I was saying the creative process is ultimately about this natural drive that we all have towards wholeness. And it’s always unfolding. Like we’re always, we’re always connected to wholeness anyway, but we just forget it because these stories are telling ourselves. And so as you go through the creative process, you just get better and better and better at connecting to that, which is just always inside you.

And then the more you can focus on that and keep it in mind or keep it in heart, however you want to say it, that’s when you have less stress in your life in general, because you’re not creating friction for yourself. That’s how I see it anyway.

We’ve been talking quite a while. If you were going to sum all of this up and we’ve covered quite a lot really, it’s gone quick. You know, what would your final words of wisdom be? And can you let people know where they can find you as well if they want to check out your art or whatever?

Anjl: Yeah. Yeah. I guess I would sum it up by saying, just nurture yourself and appreciate when you are making things because I think everybody makes things every day and they don’t realize they’re eating doing it, right? From the egg you ate for breakfast in the morning to the notes you scribble for yourself while you are working, that counts as making something. Every thought that you have is something you created.

It’s pretty amazing. And if you one time are able to turn your message from, I didn’t, you know, that wasn’t successful to, nope, I nailed that and I’m going to nail it even better the next time I did it. I did the brave thing. I made a brave shoe choice today, whatever it is. Giggle at it a little bit, but be proud of that.

Wow. And the more negative messages you give yourself, the more you shut yourself off from other people and from the world in general and the more you love yourself, you’re attracting love and you feel a part of everything, even if you don’t see other people during the day. So just be conscious of it.

Be really mindful of everything that you are nailing to do it. Yeah. You can find me on the socials. My name is so very highly Googleable because it is so phonetic. Hi.

My name is Anjl, but I changed the spelling when I was 14 because I thought that the Halo Wings version wasn’t memorable enough in the corner of a painting. Hashtag genius. It not just looks like I can’t spell, but as a business owner, highly Googleable. So A N J L is my how I spell Angel. And my last name is Rody R O D E E. So phonetic.

Yes. And I’m searched that through then Google all my socials come up, but also Brushcapades is the name of my company.

Coincidentally, I made that word up as well. Brushcapades. Wow.

Oli: Another genius moment. I’ll share a link to some of your stuff anyway in the show notes. But Angel has been really interested talking to you. It’s been really good. I can’t believe how quick he’s gone actually. So yes, thank you so much for coming on and sharing all this wisdom.

Anjl: Thank you for having me. This has been so much fun.

Creative Status: Episode 29: Leke Asong: Your Natural State of Health, Freedom, & Vitality

Published on May 1, 2023

Creative Status: Deconstruct ego, integrate the shadow, manifest real life.

Reality is good for your health 👇

Your body-mind is a SYSTEM that’s designed to constantly move towards wholeness and to keep you in the zone so you can do what you need to do with life.

The best thing about this system is that it works by itself – you don’t need to DO anything except to respect it and work with it so it can do what it needs to do.

If you get too lost in the modern world and all of the BS that comes with it then you just end up BLOCKING things and causing problems for yourself.

In this episode of Creative Status, I had the pleasure of interviewing Leke Asong, a practising NHS GP, Functional Medicine Doctor and Wellness Consultant. The interview focused on the health choices that people make, the limitations of the biomedical model, and how we can return to our natural state of vitality and freedom by being real.

Through his personal experience of suffering from poor gut and overall health, Leke came to the realisation that the conventional medical approach did not have all the answers, especially when it comes to chronic disease. This is when he discovered functional medicine, which seeks to find the root cause of disease and treats the whole person, not just the symptoms.

We discussed the limitations of the biomedical model, which focuses solely on diagnosing and treating disease, and does not address the underlying causes of illness. Leke emphasized the importance of taking a holistic approach to health, which includes addressing mental, emotional, and even ‘spiritual’ factors.

Leke also talked about the importance of being real and authentic, and how our societal norms and pressures can lead us to ignore our own needs and desires. He stressed the need to listen to our bodies, and to make choices that support our health and wellbeing.

Overall, this episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in taking a holistic approach to their health and wellbeing, and for those who are looking for alternative approaches to healing. Leke’s insights and expertise provide valuable guidance on how we can live more authentic, healthy, and fulfilling lives.

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

All episodes on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6UG491sXbZv6fUKIMVrIT6

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

Episode Links:

Gut Health Medic: https://www.guthealthmedic.co.uk/

Leke on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/guthealthmedic/

Connect with Leke on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leke-asong-0767b3103/

Creative Status Links:

Free one hour creative workshop to take you brand or project to the next level.

Show Transcript

Intro

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

If this is the first time you’ve discovered this podcast, well welcome. Ultimately, what we talk about over here is how the creative process is about the journey towards wholeness.

That means that we’re growing more real, authentic and true to ourselves and in our relationship with reality by allowing the unconscious to become conscious and ultimately integrating all of the parts of ourselves we may have been hiding from, learning new things that are going to take us closer to the edge of what we currently know and to get new insights about how to be a real human being,basically.

Everybody else, if you’ve heard the podcast already and you’ve returned then thank you for coming back. Hope life is good today and that you’re ready for this interview.

Today I’m talking with Leke Asong. Leke is a GP, that’s a general practitioner here in the UK and ultimately he has a lot of really interesting and amazing things to say about health in general and the way that our attitude of being either real or unreal will affect the choices that we make and the lifestyle that we live and the health that we have or the natural state of health that we’re connected to based on all of those things.

There’s some really interesting stuff in here about the choices that we make as individuals but also there’s a kind of underlying theme about how the health services and health systems in general kind of set us up for picking up a bunch of misconceptions and false ideas about what health really is.

It’s really interesting if you’re somebody like me who has to spend loads of time in hospitals and go in to see doctors and all that kind of stuff because you have some kind of health condition but ultimately if you listen to this conversation it’s hopefully going to motivate you, it’s going to inspire you to make some better choices and you’re going to be able to return or get on the path to returning to if you’re not there, your state of natural vitality and well-being. So Leke, thank you so much for the insights that you’ve shared here.

Everybody else see you next Monday for another episode of Creative Stators. Hope this helps you and thanks so much. Here we go.

Interview:

Oli Anderson: Oh hi there, Leke. Thank you so much for joining me today on this episode of Creative Stators. We’ve had a brief conversation previously where I rambled at you and threw all kinds of wild theories in your direction.

Basically, I think what we’re going to be talking about today is foundational approaches to health and how we can be more creative to some extent but how we can ultimately take a real approach to the way that we live and relate to ourselves at the levels of our health. Before we get on to all that, have you got anything that you would like to say? Would you like to introduce yourself and tell us what you’re all about and what you do?

Leke Asong: Yes, thank you so much, Oli,, for having me on the podcast. My name is Leke, I’m a GP, functional medicine doctor and I’m a specialist. So I’m a sensual agent at GSGP and I also see patients privately through Gut Health Medic, my company, and I use a functional medicine approach meaning is a more holistic or alternative way of looking at health and really focus on chronic disease management, especially the gut and achieving optimal health.

Oli Anderson: One thing that I really liked about your work when I was looking into it is that a lot of what you seem to be doing is helping people to reconfigure their lifestyles so they can return to a more natural way of living or a natural way of relating to themselves. Is that a fair assessment before I start grilling you about that? Is it fair to say you’re just helping people get back to where they should already be?

Leke Asong: Yeah, I’ll say that’s a fair assessment. I think especially when we’re dealing with chronic disease, it’s all about achieving balance and you can’t do that without changing your lifestyle and your eating habits and things like that. So yeah, that’s the main aim.

Oli Anderson: One thing that I like to do when I’m thinking about all these different issues is to simplify it by looking at it in terms of either wholeness or fragmentation. So for me, I think we all have a natural drive towards more wholeness in ourselves and in the way that we relate to the world and at a slightly deeper level in the way that we relate to reality itself, whatever that means to people.

I think with the health thing, if we’re being fragmented, i.e. that we’ve got all kinds of complications and friction in ourselves, then it just ends up causing us to make unreal, unhealthy choices.

So maybe as a springboard to get this conversation to open up a little bit, can we say that a lot of the health issues people seem to have in your experience as a GP comes down to the the choices that they make, but on a slightly deeper level choices that are not necessarily aligned with their actual nature?

I know that’s a kind of big question, but what do you think?

Leke Asong: Yeah, that’s a good question. Yeah, a huge proportion of pathologies or diseases, I would say are lifestyle dependent. I’m talking of chronic disease again.

I mean acute disease are different. But for example, obesity or diabetes, high blood pressure, IBS, things like this, a lot of it depends on our kind of choices we make. And that upsets the body’s natural balance.

And once the body goes out of balance, you get a cascade of symptoms and then that just spirals out of control. And unfortunately, conventional medicine is mainly symptomatic treatment. So once you treat one symptom, the body just readjusts and throws off another symptom. So you end up just chasing symptoms are supposed to fixing the root cause of a problem.

Oli Anderson: Well, this is something that I find really interesting. So this kind of fascination, I guess, that we have with symptoms instead of the fundamental problem, whatever that might be, it kind of feeds into what we’ve been saying about the wholeness fragmentation thing. Because the way that I understand it is the fundamental problem always has something to do with the whole system, seeing the body as a whole system, the mind as a whole system, it’s all connected.

And if we’re just focusing on the symptoms, well, that is obviously a fragmentary approach to dealing with whatever issue that you have. But also, it’s ultimately about the illusion of control as well. Because I think symptoms that they’re easier to control in the short term, like you said, if you’re not dealing with the fundamental problem, you give a pill or whatever it is and one symptom disappears, but something else will pop up elsewhere, because you’re not digging deep enough into what’s actually going on.

So my question is another kind of deep curveball question, maybe, but why do you think our tendency as a culture or as a society or whatever is to deal with the symptoms more than the fundamental problem? Is it like an economic thing? Because it’s, you know, I don’t know, Big Pharma, or whatever it is, just want people popping pills? Or is it because of the way we like to control things and it gives us a sense of control, dealing with the symptoms in such an easy way. What’s going on there where we focus on just the superficial surface level instead of diving a bit deeper?

Leke Asong: Well, yeah, that’s a very good question. I think what the first reason is, I think a cultural one as independent of medicine is just we want quick results, we want things fast. So for example, lots of apps out there and there’s Amazon Prime and people want things now. So they don’t want to wait.

So yes, symptom, symptomatic control is a quick thing, you get quick results, like a quick fix. The second reason is probably in terms of medicine is just the training we get in medical school, we don’t really, as a medical model, we don’t really look at the interrelationship between the various body systems, we do it to a degree, but not beyond a certain point.

So and that leads to even fragmentation in terms of specialties, for example, the neurology, gastroenterology, gynecologist, some of those specialties make sense, but some don’t from the point of view of the body.

And the third reason is just how things are structured. For example, in GPs, consultations are 10 minutes in length. So that automatically forces you to be able to hold you on one thing and get a quick result. Because if, for example, you had a one hour consultation or half an hour, that kind of makes you dig deeper, a bit more.

If you’ve got 10 minutes and you’ve got 40 people to see a day, then you are going to go into the quickest thing in and out. It’s almost like conveyor belt medicine. So and then I think another point would be the education we get as doctors, there’s very little nutritional education in medical school.

So that could be a way to tackle the root cause, but a doctor could say eat healthy or exercise, but that’s not specific enough. You know, what does eat healthy mean? It could just mean anything. So yeah, so to get the quickest result is a quicker symptom, dramatic control, you know, in and out, next person. And like I say, we’ve got 30 or 40 people a day minimum to see as GP.

So you can’t go too deep with one patient. You never finish.

Oli: Wow. So really, it’s just a, it’s almost, it’s a structural problem, but it’s been normalized because we’re just so used to thinking that the symptoms are all we need to deal with. And it’s almost like most people aren’t even aware that the biomedical model and it’s kind of mechanistic approach to kind of fixing people like their, like their cars in a, in a mechanics garage or something, they, they don’t realize that there is a much deeper level. And I suppose could we say that another part of that is that when it comes to their health most people have either been conditioned or they just don’t want to believe that ultimately it’s their responsibility.

Mmaybe I’ve been a bit cynical but the way that the the medical system seems to work is that people have health issues things pop up and because they’re afraid or they just lack knowledge or whatever it is they want to put their trust in some external authority that can just say right take this pill do this intervention and then everything will be fine – wham bamb thank you ma’am – but actually the fundamental problem almost always goes back to their relationship with themselves at some level.

Leke: Absolutely that’s the point I totally forgot to mention because if for example a doctor tried to say look you need to change your lifestyle you need to do this you need to do that a huge proportion of patients are not really interested – I’ve tried that for years and, yeah, many times just failed the one a quick tablet can I just take this tablet and solve the problem so we just love to talk about waiting lists and not enough doctors I think we could double the amount of doctors and the problems will still remain I think like you said it’s really about educating people that it is your responsibility there is a quote that says 80 % of health happens outside the doctor’s office so yeah you need to take care of your body you need to eat well; you need to exercise you need healthy lifestyle; you need to supplement when needed.

Yeah, so once the public realize this then things get easier because you can’t entrust all your health with the doctor that’s just the fundamental fact of it all, unfortunately.

Oli: Do you think in a way this kind of tendency that people have to kind of want to kind of pass all of the responsibility onto the doctor is just a way of avoiding that fundamental issue which there ultimately is our responsibility it’s up to us… and in a strange kind of way the medical system is almost built around distracting people from that fundamental truth?

I don’t know if you have you heard of the drama triangle in transactional analysis?

Leke: No.

Oli: It’s just a it’s quite a simple simple model of just how people interact let’s just say for brevity and it’s just a triangle obviously so there’s three things on there but it has victims rescuers and persecutors and these are all kind of roles that you can fall into and so a lot of the time I think patients end up playing the victim so they’re like oh you know pour me blah blah blah they go see the doctor who’s supposed to rescue them and then out there in the world there’s the the illness which is the persecutor I guess in in this particular drama triangle.

But if the system is built around those kind of interactions then it’s always going to be avoiding the truth to some extent and it seems like, to me at least, that is how the system the medical system for physical health issues but also the mental health system as well seems to be structured… and, in a way, I don’t know if it’s because of funding and all this kind of stuff but to me I think it’s causing problems that people aren’t even necessarily aware of because of the things you just said.

Leke: Very good point so I went to a conference I think about three years ago and there was Dr. Unwin’s the GP as well and he talked a lot about diabetes and reversing diabetes and he mentioned a story how he was told in medical school that diabetes is a progressive and irreversible condition and that tends to be the kind of diagnosis with many chronic diseases medical books they kind of say it’s progressive and irreversible so it’s going to get worse so it’s almost like a negative view of it because if you tell someone’s progressive and irreversible then the control is almost out of their hand because I think that’s the condition I’ve got is progressive and reversible there’s nothing I can’t do about it.

But actually you can do things about it so if doctors think something is progressive and irreversible then they’re transmitting that kind of knowledge to the patient so the patient automatically from day one feels helpless says look I’ve got to look at diabetes it’s going to get worse you know I’m just going to take tablets forever.

But if you tell the patient actually you’ve got diabetes a lot of it depends on what you’re eating I mean it will take type two for example a lot depends on what you’re eating if you exercise you’re going to improve your insulin sensitivity if you eat the right foods you’ll lower your sugar and your diabetes could actually reverse then that’s a different discussion the patient will think, oh wow, I can do something about so it depends on how you tackle it how you look at it that changes everything.

Oli: Yeah well I’ve thought this myself like I’ve had some health issues in the past and I realized that the way the the conversations are usually framed is it’s always about what you can’t do so you can’t eat this anymore you can’t do this you can’t do that it’s all very negative in the way that you’ve just said.

Actually, if you can make the mental shift to focusing on what you still can do, then you’ll realize actually you know whether you’ve got a health issue or not you can still have a lot of control you can still flow with life and do all the things that you want to do or a lot more than they may initially make you believe and so that assumption that is built into the the way that conversations are had and the way that there’s the drama triangle I think a lot of the time it just causes people to identify in a way that is actually bad for their health.

And so I guess that’s a good segue into something I wanted to ask you about it, which is how do you think, and this is another curveball big question, so apologies, but how do you think the way that people identify in general can either have a positive or negative impact on their health and returning to the natural state of vitality and freedom. That’s how you described it on your website. We can all kind of have when we’re aligned with the real version of ourselves.

Identify in terms of in what way, for example. So if you take the drama triangle thing, for example, if you see yourself as being in a completely helpless situation and that you’re all right numbered and you know, and that you’re you just fixed maybe like you don’t have a growth mindset. So you’re just stuck in a certain state.

I think a lot of the time, people are filtering their relationship with their health through an unreal kind of identity. And actually, if you can kind of crack that open and start moving again, then in general, you return to that vitality and freedom. That’s how I’ve experienced it.

Leke: Yeah, I think this kind of in the realm of mindset and mental health. I think things sometimes happen for a reason. And I look at certain things that happen as a character building experience. I think sometimes we have such a negative view in society and we think, oh, you know, all this has happened to me and this has happened to me, you know, helpless. But actually, you could just change it around and say, this is happening to me because I’m moving forward. And that’s why I’m getting these obstacles and need to go around it and not be pulled down by it. And that can make a big impact because the more you start thinking, oh, I’m a victim, then you can end up with depression.

And just feel I’m helpless and things always happen to me all the time. And I was talking to a friend of mine actually a few days ago. And this wasn’t the realm of business, although in a way has some relevance what we’re talking about. And he was saying, in America, you could fail five or six times in business and someone was to hire you. But in England, if you failed once or twice, they’re looking you in a different way. So maybe America, the thing is a go go getting mentality. So if you fail seven times, he’s always going for it.

So he’s a good person to have. But maybe they might think, oh, in England, fail, so it’s not good at it. So is that kind of shift of mindset to say, look, you fail is not a problem, you need to fail to get better. And that’s just how life is.

Oli: Like, I think that’s the bigger issue of the identity thing. So like, reality just works in a certain way. So people are going to fail, for example, that’s one obvious thing that’s going to happen is just part of reality.

It’s not a reflection on people. It’s just something that can happen. Obstacles are going to arise trials, tribulations, blah, blah, blah, people are going to have health issues and all this kind of stuff. But no matter what happens, I think, like you said, you can use it to keep learning, keep growing, keep expanding. And actually, if you want to get a bit spiritual about it, or whatever, you can turn even the most challenging obstacles into something that is going to make you more connected to yourself and more connected to life. So I’m speaking from personal experience in my life, I had like a chronic disease or still good, I had kidney failure.

So I’m on dialysis. And yeah, at first, you know, I went through this whole process of being depressed and everything. But then in the, in the long run, it actually turned out to be a blessing. And I’d, you know, I really mean that in the strongest possible sense, because it just taught me so much about life.

It taught me so much about what I can do, and all these different amazing things that you can learn. And so, for me, I can totally understand what you’re saying when you say that. And I think the culture is kind of against that. So earlier on, when I was saying, you know, the medical system will just tell you, you can’t do this, you can’t do that. That was my experience. As soon as you get a health issue, they start wrapping you in eggshells.

And basically, that’s it, you’re supposed to roll over and just die and have this treatment until you do. But actually, if you focus on what you can do, you can still have an amazing life. And ultimately, the only thing that stopped me from understanding that initially was my identity, because I was holding on to an old version of myself, a conditioned version of myself.

And once I let that go, and was able to rebuild in alignment with what was actually true and start dealing with the fundamental problem, which was my relationship with myself, then, you know, I became happier than ever in my life is amazing, because I was able to move instead of just being caught up in my head. So anyway, that’s me rambling about that. But with the the reality thing, let’s say, let’s let’s open it up to that. And again, this is another curveball. So I’m just throwing all these curveballs at you.

Sorry. But do you think there are kind of Natural laws that we need to be aware of in order to make the most of our health? So one example of a natural law I found is just the law of cause and effect so you know our current state of health is ultimately an effect of the cause of our relationship with ourselves and the what the choices that we make and blah blah blah And if you understand that well, you can make better choices and be a better cause so you get better effects So if people understand that it can make a massive difference to their lives, but is there anything else? Like that that you think people need to be aware of for optimal health sort of thing yeah, just kind of I suppose almost universal kind of things that apply to everybody Everyone okay. I see yeah.

Leke: Yeah. Yeah, definitely are so I would say what three categories which would be nutrition Lifestyle and that would be movements and Supplementation so nutrition I would say everyone’s got to avoid process foods Because they’re full of refined carbohydrates full of Refined vegetable oils and high in sugar. So that’s bad for everyone Lifestyle change we really need to move more You know, it doesn’t have to be exercise could just be moving it could just dance it could be walks So being in connection with nature is so important. So walk in the park or in the nice field or in the forest even is very good for you and Supplementation I think we all have to because modern lifestyles cause nutritional depletion and some of the food needs and not really that good.

So we need to replenish some of the vitamins and minerals we’re missing out and Yeah, you need to be spiritually healthy. I think also having a good Healthy connections are so important during lockdown to people who are really depressed and felt really low So we need to talk to each other meet people go out for Walks in the drinks people is really important. So a sense of communication is so important and I think service to others It’s really really important. We help others. We really help ourselves

Oli: That’s amazing… With the the things you just said -do you think it’s fair to say that a lot of those things are ultimately just about returning to human nature?

So When people talk about, you know, human beings in society these days It’s almost always as though the cultural narrative anyway is that the the nurture comes before the nature but actually the nature – this is just my view – but like I think the nature has to come first and a lot of those things you said like avoiding processed foods and moving your body and Remembering that we’re tribal creatures and we’re mammals and so we need to touch other people and hang out with them and all that kind of stuff And there’s the service thing.

It was kind of linked as well do you think it is ultimately about that like the modern world has Has kind of taken us away from our nature and so that’s caused us to make unhealthy choices and Returning to health is ultimately about returning to nature to some extent?

Leke: Yeah, I think The very nature of our modern lifestyles. Yes has done that. We can use some technology to bridge the gap but For some reason they just makes things worse for example, right?

You could they are friends. I’ve just Talks them on WhatsApp for years and I’ve never really met them But meeting them changes everything for example if you meet them face to face and just have a laugh It’s completely different to just messaging them all the time so yeah in a way technology is caused us to be more distracted as well.

So we’re not living in the moment If you go to a concert for example, you know people who’ve got the smartphone out and they’re just filming it But actually if you just put the smartphone away and enjoy the music enjoy the guitars and the drums It’s a different experience than trying to get the best shot Yeah, so sometimes causes distractions and yeah, I think We’re designed to walk around, you know, e’re designed to sit for long for hours and offices and stuff like that. So yeah, by the very nature of society now we’re kind of moving away from how we’re designed to be .

Oli 100 % – do you think? What you just said about distraction is kind of a good way to understand all of this so in a way the modern world is just in general one big distraction like it’s just the bunch of different Fragments in terms of what we’re saying about wholeness and fragmentation there’s just all these fragments pulling us away from just being present in ourselves and in life so, you know people living said working in sedentary jobs basically sat down all day in front of a computer distracting themselves with spreadsheets they go home.

They sit down distract themselves with Netflix when they communicate with people it’s not face-to-face like you said It’s another kind of digital distraction like all of that stuff ultimately It can be used for good like obviously people need jobs so they can pay the bills and all these kind of things but the way that we go in about things is very unreal, I think and I think also is it’s affecting people’s health, which is probably why chronic disease is going up more than ever and All this kind of stuff depression anxiety Even though, you know the technology is better than ever and we got more medication and all that kind of thing.

Leke: Yeah, I think two months ago, I’ve had two consultations like this where I phoned a gentleman and he says, it’s all right. My problem is sorted. I just realized I was on my smartphone all the time.

It’s a true story. And yeah, no worries about it. All sorted. So you have had two of such consultation. We’re on our phones all the time and we’re distracted and yeah, even some of the ADHD and stuff where the parents bringing the I but it’s got a TV in this room is on the smartphone half the time up the Nintendo thing going on. So yeah, all the time on the screen.

So it’s gonna end up with a problem.

Oli: Yeah, like I’ve spoken to so many people recently that I’ve just self diagnosed themselves with ADHD. Like yeah, like, why do you think that is like everybody not everybody but so many people are just saying right I’ve got ADHD I don’t know if it’s a fashionable thing, or it’s just another way of avoiding responsibility and the way we’re talking about like what do you think’s going on there?

Leke: Yeah, good question. So this every day I get about two or three.

Oli: Wow.

Leke: Six months really. Yeah, it’s like a normal thing now. I think I’ve got a thing about ADHD. The first reason is communication. I mean, if someone goes and says, “Oh, I think I’ve got ADH”D and the doc says, I think you have it.

They might go to the par and talk to their friends friends. Oh, yeah, do you know I think I have it. So people talk amongst each other, then the thing or I think I’m right. So if you go to Google and put all the information in with any disease, anything you look at always seems like something you have.

These algorithms are like, yeah, I think I’ve got a poor blood of disease or you haven’t. So yeah, it’s almost like a bias because you think you have it. So you’re looking for a reason to have it.

So you’re going to end up thinking you have it. The second reason is I think, yeah, people are so distracted and they’re just not disciplined enough. So they’re looking for a reason to explain why they’re not achieving or why they’re not concentrating, why they’re behaving the way they are. So it’s easier for them to say, look, I think it’s because I’ve got this pathology and that’s why I’m reacting with Anna.

Yeah. And the third reason, this is really a weird one, but some it could be like a benefits thing because they get some people get like pips, payments and all this stuff. So yeah, I’ve heard kind of parents looking for diagnosis for the children because, you know, sadly, they’re going to claim and they’re going to get money from the get the diagnosis. Yeah. Monetary purpose, which is, you know, not a good thing at all.

Oli: But wow, like actually, that’s amazing in a way. Like that’s kind of linked to a question I was about to ask you. So with some labels, it’s almost as though we value having a label more than actually been healthy. If you know what I mean?

And so even though you would think that, you know, one of the best feelings in life is been in a natural state of health and having energy and vitality and been free to do what you want.

For some reason, and, you know, we’ve alluded to some of them already, people actually go out there trying to find labels that they can attach to that will actually give them a reason to keep identifying in a way that they’re comfortable with or to justify certain shortcomings or whatever it is that they perceive themselves to have without actually, you know, doing the work, let’s say, of turning inside themselves and cultivating discipline or whatever qualities it is that they need to develop. Is that something that you’ve seen with other labels?

So not just ADHD, but are they, you know, I don’t know if you want to answer this question, but are they things like that seem to happen a lot?

Leke: Yeah, I think, generally speaking, people like labels. So yeah, they could say, I think I have depression or I think I’m depressed or because in a way explains some of the stuff and some people are depressed, don’t get me wrong. I mean, depression is a real diagnosis. But sometimes it could just be live hardship could just be, you know, broken up with your partner, you know, people come in, I’ve broken up my boyfriend or my girlfriend three days ago and think I’m depressed. Well, I try to talk to me, not because it’s just a natural reaction. You are going to feel sad. Yeah, so it’s not depression.

I think social media in a way also propagates it on TikTok and all these apps. Sometimes a certain diagnosis might be fashionable and people want to talk about, you know, my depression and kind of tell their story. And maybe they’re not depressed, but I think is probably the fashionable thing to do. There’s an element of that as well. But sometimes it could be people looking for an answer.

I’ll give you an example. If a patient’s got, let’s say brain fog and aches and pains and unexplained, it’s so-called medically unexplained symptoms and they have all the tests are normal, then the doctor might say you’re depressed because the doctor doesn’t really know the reason. Or the patient might be happy to say, I think I found a reason why I’m feeling this way. Because that way it’s good to have some answer. Because if you had all the tests in the world, seen all the consultants and all of them said, well, there’s nothing wrong with you, then that’s even more in a way frustrating.

Because to say, I’ve seen all the best people and how come this is not wrong with me? But if someone convinced me and said, I think you were depressed, depression can cause aches and pains, depression can cause mood swings or then, oh yeah, I finally found the reason. And that’s why in a way I got into functional medicine because I saw lots of patients like this. Just strange symptoms, they’ve seen all these consultants, all these people and sometimes they just told you you were depressed. But in some cases, very smart or alert patients to say, I don’t think I’m depressed.

I think I’ve got a good family, my work is fine, I’m just not depressed at all. But for years I saw these strange pathologies, I thought, what’s going on with them? And my GP train at the time says, well, they just medically unexplained and some of the consultants just said, see your GP.

So that’s how I ended up down this path. Due to personal reasons as well, but a lot of it was, I just thought there’s got to be a reason why these patients are feeling like someone to find the answer. So I stumbled at functional medicine, that’s how.

Oli: Like in what you’ve just said, there’s so many kind of interesting threads and they’re all kind of related to some of the things you said. Like one thing that’s really interesting there about the labels thing, it goes back to what we were saying about the kind of conversations people are having in the medical system. And so a lot of the time, the conversation is framed by people just not being able to deal with uncertainty.

And so again, that goes back to the laws of reality and how we can navigate just reality itself. And the default state of existing in the world is uncertainty, but the medical system and the conversations that take place there are kind of framed on certainty or the idea of certainty and the truth by authority almost of the doctors and the consultants and all this kind of stuff.

It’s almost like a lot of the time, the patients, when they’re in that kind of victim state, especially they’re looking up for someone to rescue them and they actually need the doctors or the medical team to be completely omniscient, to know everything, to be completely omnipotent and to be able to save them from anything, but that is not actually how life works. I always think if doctors really were omniscient, then nobody would have any health problems because obviously we’d be able to solve them.

And so because we don’t like uncertainty, this thing we’ve said about labels is actually just a way of, it’s almost like putting a bandaid on, it’s giving the illusion of certainty in an uncertain situation. And so once you’ve got that label, you don’t have to ask any more questions, you don’t have to worry as much, but the downside of that is that actually you might not be dealing, like we said, with the fundamental problem, which is probably something to do with either not accepting something that can’t be changed or not accepting that the solution will involve you, looking at yourself. And so all of these things we’re talking about are kind of interlinked and it goes down to the level of the mind-body connection, I suppose, or the emotional relationship that people have with themselves.

Leke: Yeah, very good point, actually, excellent point.

Labeling as well helps in terms of admin insurance, for example. So yeah, you need to know what’s wrong with this patient, can they fly, could they go abroad, could they do this, could they do that? So you need to have a clear black and white diagnosis.

So that’s part of the issue. But you mentioned another point about certainty. Yeah, I think people think doctors are kind of omnipotent, but actually medicines are signs and an art as well.

So I used to think years ago, oh, the problem is just the human body is complex, that’s why nothing’s wrong. But actually my car broke down a few years ago and some mechanic plugged it into the computer. And we got talking and he said, depending on the kind of computer, the faults could be different. So even though the car is like a mechanical thing, you don’t always get the right answer. Even with the computer.

And if you’re caught in the IT department, wherever you’ve worked, sometimes you have to turn it on, turn it off, do this, do that, they’re trying and trying and trying. Even with that, it’s trial and error and we’re not really sure. So the body is even more complex.

So there are gonna be mistakes and things would happen. And the body doesn’t start a machine. So the way your symptoms manifest themselves, in fact, this is where coming back to functional medicine. So a patient could have the label of depression, but the root cause of the depression are different. So for example, if you had a clubbed up liver, for example, and you can’t excrete all the toxins, that could then accumulate in your body and cause depression. What if you have a chronic parasite that causes inflammation in your body and causes brain inflammation, you’d also have depression. So two people have depression, but they have different root causes.

Oli: So that’s another thing. Yeah, and actually it goes back to this idea that the mind body system is all one system, but the medical model, basically, it doesn’t see it as one system. It sees everything as being separate silos, like you said.

So you’ll have one department for your kidney, you’ll have another department for cardiology, whatever it is. is, ETC, ETC, everything is fragmented and looked at in isolation. But actually, you need to look at the whole thing. And the whole thing, actually, is the link between the body and the mind, is the link between the person who has that body and the mind and their society and their, you know, the wider relationships that they have with the universe and all these things.

It’s a very intricate system that is ultimately connected to everything else, I think, because it’s about the wholeness thing. But if we can only look at it through this myopic, fragmented lens of, OK, I’m just going to focus on your kidney or I’m just going to focus on your liver or whatever, then you’re not going to get the best results, I think.

Leke: Yeah, it’s just how doctors are taught. So more and more discovering different ways of healing and that’s really improving now. But yeah, it’s just the way things are.

Oli: Yeah, and obviously that model does work to some extent. Like it keeps people alive and everything. But it’s just it can be harmful potentially to think that it is the best model ever and that we can’t change things and be more holistic.

So basically, we’ve talked a lot about the problems with the medical system and how doomed we all are. But what are some positive changes that people can make in relation to all this stuff?

So if somebody has a health issue or they’ve got medically unexplained symptoms or stuff like that, what are just general things that people can generally do to tweak their lifestyles and start moving towards this natural state that you’re talking about?

Leke: All right, yeah. So I kind of mentioned them before, which were your diet. So avoid protest foods, things like gluten, refined vegetable oils, pasteurized dairy and sugar, things like that.

Lifestyle change, so incorporate movement, walking, dancing, going to the gym, cycling and supplementation. For example, vitamin D, vitamin C, there’s so many supplements. That’s a whole lot of discussion, things like that. But also mastering the art of telling your story to a doctor in a GP for 10 minutes. So there’s an acronym, a mnemonic used by medical students for years, it’s called Socrates. So it’s a way of giving a history in a coherent manner regarding to pain.

So Socrates S stands for sight. So where is the pain? You know, tummy pain.

O stands for onset. When does the pain start? Is it when you’re asleep, when you’re standing, when you’re twisting? Character of the pain, that’s C. Is it sharp, dull? Is it kind of cramping in nature?

R stands for radiation. Does the pain go to your toes, to your left leg, to your head? A stands for associated symptoms. Do you feel nauseous when you get the pain? And T is timing, how long does the pain last?

Does it come in bouts, it’s up? And E is exacerbating symptoms. Does the pain get worse when you lie down or when you bend? And final S is severity on a scale of one to 10. We normally say 10 is childbirth if it’s a woman.

Oli: Well, that’s supposed to be the worst pain, isn’t it, on the planet?

Leke: Yeah, childbirth is supposed to be the worst pain. Or renal kidney stones, apparently, as well.

Oli: Yeah, I’ve heard that as well, actually. But anyway, so what we’re saying with this Socrates acronym is that ultimately, a thing we can learn to do to get around some of these issues we talked about is just learn to communicate more effectively, I guess, or in a more real way.

Leke: Yeah, in a very concise manner.

Oli: Wow. Sorry I got you to repeat yourself there . We’ve been talking quite a while. We’ve covered a lot, obviously. If you were gonna sum up this conversation and give some final words of wisdom to people, what would you say?

And also, when you’ve done that, can you let people know where they can find you online? And that kind of thing.

Leke: Yeah, thank you. So most health happens outside the doctor’s office. So do as much as you can. Your health is within your control. So eat well, exercise, and supplement when needed. And you can find me at guthealthmedic.co.uk, it’s website, or Instagram at guthealthmedic. Or I’m now on TikTok at guthealthmedic.

Oli: Brilliant. So I’ll share all those links in the show notes and all those kind of places. But Leke, thank you so much for coming on and sharing all this information with me and everyone that was listening. And I really appreciate it. It’s been awesome.

Leke: Thank you so much.

Just one last thing. I actually do online courses now. So they’re very short courses on how to boost your immune system, how to stop sugar cravings and how to manage stress to prevent it from kind of consuming your body.

They’re on the website.

Oli: So that’s what did you say? Sorry, guthealthdoctor.

Leke: Guthealthmedic.co .uk.

Oli: Sorry, sorry. So I will share that 6 million percent on the show notes. But yeah, thank you again so much. It’s been really good.

Leke: Thank you.

Creative Status: Episode 28: Rizwan Javaid: The Creative Path from Struggle to Strength

Published on April 24, 2023

Creative Status: Deconstruct ego, integrate the shadow, manifest real life.

If you’re chronically struggling, you need a different view of REALITY 👇

Some people can spend years and years of their lives caught in a negative spiral of unreal thoughts that causes them to HOLD BACK and HESITATE.

Holding back and hesitating always leads to STRUGGLE as the world moves around us but we hold onto the same ideas, thoughts, and beliefs in our head (that caused us to hold back and hesitate in the first place).

This is ALWAYS a product of some unreal emotional and social conditioning that’s caused us to internalise unreal ideas about ourselves, the world, and reality.

These thoughts and beliefs just end up putting an EXTRA LAYER of friction between ourselves and taking action and – depending on how deeply entrenched these thoughts and beliefs are – we can spend most of our time BATTLING OURSELVES instead of living a real life.

We can get therapy, talk about our problems, or develop a self-care routine but eventually we have to listen to our intuition, take inspired ACTION and get out into the world in our REALNESS…this takes a leap of faith and INNER STRENGTH but once we find it there’s no turning back.

In this episode of Creative Status, I had the pleasure of interviewing Rizwan Javaid, the host of the Unleash Your Mindset podcast and the author of the Low Fidelity Newsletter. Rizwan shared his personal journey of self-discovery and growth, highlighting his journey from somebody who struggled with self-doubt, imposter syndrome, and other internal barriers to becoming somebody with mental strength and REALNESS who no longer holds back from life or his potential.

Throughout our conversation, Rizwan discussed the creative path of making the unconscious conscious and creating oneself. He shared his own experiences and the changes he made in his life to become more real and achieve better results. He shares actionable strategies and tips to help you overcome inner struggles and unleash your creative potential.

Some things we covered in this conversation:

Rizwan’s personal journey of self-discovery and growthOvercoming self-doubt, imposter syndrome, and other internal barriers
The creative path of making the unconscious conscious and creating oneselfActionable strategies for unleashing your creative potential
Rizwan’s insights on how to achieve better results by being more authenticOvercoming limiting beliefs, fear, and doubt to achieve success
The importance of developing a resilient mindset to achieve personal and professional growth
The power of vulnerability and self-reflection in personal transformation
Loads more!

Whether you’re an artist, entrepreneur, designer or simply just a human being looking to grow personally and professionally, this episode offers valuable insights on how to overcome the barriers holding you back and achieve the success you desire.

Tune in to discover how to unleash your mindset and realise your full potential with insightful lessons based on real experience and inspired action.

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

(Scroll down if you want to read the show transcript)

All episodes on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6UG491sXbZv6fUKIMVrIT6

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

Episode Links:

Low Fidelity Newsletter: http://www.lowfidelity.io

Unleash Your Mindset Podcast on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3HsPZQvloxImIit74IWEFf

Connect with Rizwan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rizwanjavaid/

Creative Status Links:

Free one hour creative workshop to take you brand or project to the next level.

Show Transcript:

Intro

Oli Anderson: Oh hi there, Oli Anderson here, welcome to Creative Status.

As you can tell, I’m losing my voice, so this is going to be the least rambling introduction I have ever done in my entire life. Today’s episode of Creative Status is an interview with Rizwan Javaid.

Rizwan is a super cool guy, he has a podcast called Unleash Your Mindset which is really good if you’re into these kind of things that we talk about over here. He has a newsletter called Low Fidelity where he shares all his insights about his own personal growth journey and how he’s gone from a person who used to kind of struggle with all kinds of emotional things and negative thoughts and self-leaning beliefs.

I know Rizwan really well, I’ve worked with him over the last year or so. I have seen how by applying the things that he talks about in this interview that’s about to come up, he’s gone from being quite reserved and holding back to being somebody that is putting himself out there, there’s a lot more fearless, a lot more real, he’s getting better results from himself, from his relationships, from life as a whole.

In this interview he talks about that journey and the transformation that he went through, the changes that he made and some of the things that you can do in your own life if you want to stop holding back and you want to get a better grasp of your own mindset so you can be more real, more creative and get out there and live the life that you know you can be living. So Rizwan thank you so much for everything and for coming on here and doing this podcast interview even though I threw some total curveballs at you, just for a change.

Everybody else thank you so much for listening and I really hope you enjoyed this interview as much as I enjoyed asking Rizwan all these questions.

Here we go, thanks a bunch, boom.

Interview

Oli Anderson: Oh hi there Rizwan, thank you so much for joining me today on this episode of Creative Status. We’re basically going to be exploring based on pre-chat and some of the things we’ve talked about previously, exploring the kind of mindset transformation that people can go through as they become more real, they become more creative. Before we get into all that stuff, do you feel like just introducing yourself and letting people know what you’re all about but also telling people what you kind of want to get from this conversation?

Rizwan Javaid: Yeah, hi Oli, thank you first of all for inviting me onto your show and just to give you a little bit of background about me, I am a UX designer by day but I also have, I write a newsletter and have a podcast called Low Fidelity and with it my goal is to help people who may be going through inner struggles and to help them find ways to move past those so that they can reach their potential and so that is my experience as well. I have gone through some inner struggles, through recent years and now having worked on those with the help of Oli- of course and I have been able to move past them, I mean they’re still there but they’re not as loud in my head and they don’t want to prevent me from showing up and doing my best work so that’s a little bit about me.

Oli Anderson: That’s awesome, so one thing that I really love about your podcast is that you bring in so much of your personal experience and the kind of practical lessons that you’ve learned from going through what it is that you kind of took yourself through, you didn’t just go through things, you kind of took yourself through this process. So what I’m interested in is learning about some of the mechanics of that journey that you went through so if you were just going to describe this journey in a kind of big picture view, just to give an overview of it, where did you start would you say and where have you found yourself now in comparison?

Rizwan Javaid: So where I started was I was blocked, I had all these dreams and goals to write and to create a podcast, to create videos and share my ideas with the world but then I would take one step And then all of a sudden, whether it was imposter syndrome or doubt or fear, you know, something would come up in my head and I would abandon whatever I was doing.

And so whether it’s writing a newsletter or, you know, showing up, you know, not having the confidence to show up at work, you know, all those things would just get in the way and I would go back to starting from scratch and I would fall down into this, you know, like you could consider it a downward spiral and I would go down and then, you know, once I hit bottom, then I would slowly work my way back up and then all of a sudden, you know, something would get into my head, some story, and then I would go back down.

So this cycle kept going on and on until, you know, we worked together and I was able to work on those experiences, those inner struggles that I was experiencing and tackle those one by one and realize, you know, just, you know, have strategies in place to tackle them.

And now I have gotten a little bit of a hold on them and I can see them as they come up, but now I don’t let those get in the way so I can show up as who I am, how I want to show up. It has helped me start writing more on a consistent basis and share my ideas and not be afraid and not just, you know, work towards my creative vision that I have of helping others as well.

Oli Anderson: Wow, so in a way, this kind of negative downward spiral that you kept finding yourself in is something that you managed to, I suppose, break the cycle of. You have taken yourself away from those old patterns and the old way of seeing yourself and the old way of thinking. And now you are able to kind of move towards your potential without these things holding you back. But what were the things that you changed specifically?

Like if you were going to, you know, well, you do help other people do this with the low fidelity newsletters and the podcast and all that kind of stuff. But what are some of the building blocks? Are they kind of practical things that you actually implemented and changed to be able to kind of break that cycle?

Rizwan Javaid: Yeah, so for me, it all starts with becoming aware of these thoughts, feelings, emotions as they come up. And so I also started meditating a few years ago, right when the pandemic hit. And that that practice helped me understand that my thoughts are not who I am, or they don’t need to control me. I don’t need to follow every thought that comes into my mind. And that’s easier than done, because we’re, you know, we’ve been in our heads for however long we’ve been alive. So that practice is just, it’s just ingrained in us.

But there is another way where we can see thoughts as, you know, just as they are, they will come and then they will go. And we don’t need to identify with them. They don’t need to define us. If we have a negative thought, we can take a pause and let it let that move and still show up like we want to. So I think awareness was a big step in this, in my transformation.

Oli: Like I see it in the, in the same way, I think awareness is always the first step. And it’s exactly what you just said. So I always think that most of these problems that people are dealing with, in relation to their levels of self acceptance or holding back and hesitating from doing the things they need to do, it’s almost always an identity problem. And they’ve picked up some view of themselves, some image of themselves, which is fixed, which is limited, which blocks their view of opportunities in the world and all that kind of stuff.

And where ultimately, their underlying emotional stuff, usually shame, is just causing them to judge themselves and then to project that out into the world and have the world reflect judgment back at them. Does any of that fit into your experience and what you went through?

Rizwan: Oh yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, just the challenges that I’ve gone through in my life, and I can, I can see, you know, these big pivotal moments that happened and how they led up to me, which showed up as hiding, hiding from, you know, from the world, hiding from my family, friends, hiding, you know, who I am, from myself, even to be able to survive. So, you know, it helped me get through those challenging times, but because those have become the habits now of hiding, I started doing that everywhere. So I would not open up, I would not share my thoughts, share my ideas, I would hold back. And that limited me, both at work and then even in my personal relationship.

And even within, in my family, I was just keeping things to myself. And once I started identifying, you know, these, becoming aware of these behaviors, I actually started journaling and writing every morning. And that helped me, again, take those thoughts that I was having of hiding or, or, you know, not showing up and how I was behaving, and look at those, and start to come up with, look at those objectively and see, you know, what I needed to do to overcome them. So, yeah, meditation and journaling, those two, I think were pivotal exercises to help me in this, tackle these inner struggles.

Oli: I think what you just said about hiding from yourself without necessarily being aware of that until you started doing some of these practices, is so important, because I think so many people, they bring unnecessary friction and frustration and misery and confusion to their lives, by feeling, for some reason, that they need to hide from themselves.

And some people never wake up to that. So, obviously, you’re, you know, you’re blessed that you were able to do the work, to be able to bring yourself back to life. But in relation to, you know, some of the wider issues of this podcast and the creative process, Because I feel like what I’m learning is the creative process is the same thing that you just described, which is that we may be hiding parts of ourselves from ourselves to different degrees of severity. But as we go through these creative journeys of riding through uncertainty as we literally create something like write a book or make videos or even if it’s just something that raises our awareness like meditation or a yoga session in my case, all of those things are ultimately about making the unconscious conscious, the things we’re not aware of, conscious and showing us who we really are.

And then when we’ve been through that process, that’s when we can start to be more real and to get better results and to stop hiding and to see all of these illusions and this bullshit and nonsense that we may have been conditioned with. So maybe I’ve been a bit dramatic, but do you think we could say that this journey you’ve been on has been a creative process in that sense? And actually what you’ve been creating by doing this work is yourself, the real version of you.

Rizwan: Yeah, I think looking back at it, it is a creative process because finding ways to overcome the challenges that I was experiencing with new ways and new ideas, I think that is a creative process. And now I’m in this mindset that to not let the inner voice block my creative ideas or creative vision or any thoughts that I have to express them and not to get out of my own way basically because that’s what has caused a lot of this friction within me. And now that I can open up and share more of my thoughts and trust my intuition, trust my creative creativity and ideas that I have to help others. So basically getting out of my own way and using creativity and trusting it and my intuition and the thoughts that I have instead of blocking them, just letting them out and letting them be known in the world.

Oli: Wow, I really love how you’ve brought up this word trust a few times just there with your answer to the question because ultimately this creative process that we’re talking about and this kind of transformation that you’ve been through and that you’re talking about of stepping out of our own way and riding through uncertainty and all of the things that we have to do and all of the terrain we have to traverse as part of that journey. We can’t actually do it without finding some way of trusting ourselves or trusting life.

And obviously if we have this voice in our head, the inner critique or the imposter syndrome thing, whatever it is, that is going to be a lot harder. So how do you think you managed to trust the process that we’re talking about?

Like how, what are some of the things that you did? What are some of the strategies that you might have implemented? What are some of the uncertainties or obstacles that you might have had to trust your way through?

So that’s a long-winded question, but basically how did you find the trust to get from where you were to where you are now?

Rizwan: I think it was, the big part was getting the help of a coach, getting your help to validate or check my thoughts and to not fall into the old patterns. So it was good to have an external voice to check the inner voice. So I think that was a big, big part of it because otherwise it’s just so easy to fall into what the inner voice keeps telling me, telling us. And the other part was actually taking action on what I wanted to do. So we work on the inner challenges, the inner mental stuff, but it’s also important to take action and taking small action and seeing good results is, it feeds back into itself.

It’s a good cycle to give you confidence. And so as we identified, say for example, the podcast, once I was able to identify what I needed to do, the next step that I needed to do, such as find a guest for the podcast, and I was able to do that, that gave me more confidence to go to the next step and invite them for a talk. And once I was able to do that, I got more confidence.

So just with anything, you know, that’s what I wanted to do. But when you take action and you see good results, you get gain confidence. Or if you don’t, then you adjust and you find another way to approach it. But then the key thing is to take action. And I think doing that helped me get out of my head, get out of those thoughts and see what I’m capable of instead of assuming or imagining or wondering. I can actually take action and see.

So see exactly what is going to happen. So I think that was a key is getting out of my head and doing what I wanted to do. What I said I wanted to do and making progress in there, creating that loop. And I’m an experiential learner. So I need to do things to learn. And so I think that matched how I learned things anyway. So yeah, I think that was the key.

Oli: Wow. So basically then there were two things that helped you trust. One is the getting some external support. I suppose in the earlier stages for many people that is essential because people, they have a tendency to be so locked in their heads that they just need that external objective view, let’s say. But then eventually you did get to a stage where you didn’t necessarily need the external support because you got to a stage where you just did it.

It’s like you’re riding a bike without the stabilizers. And so you can go out there and just do the things that you needed to do and take action. And of course, if you take an action that gives you evidence, like you said, that all of these assumptions and all of these negative things that this inner critic people have to deal with is saying are not founded in any kind of reality. Another thing maybe that has helped you based on what you’ve kind of said was being able to start listening to your intuition and to kind of act on that instead of hesitating and letting the inner voice kind of tell you that your intuition was wrong or that you need to be more rational or more logical or whatever kind of things it might be saying. How does the intuition thing feed into the action thing, would you say? So one thing that I’ve found, like personally and just from working with people is sometimes with the action thing, we can end up just taking action for the sake of taking action. And sometimes that can end up kind of exacerbate in the problem because the actions that we take are not really anything to do with our true values or our true intentions or you know, we become a human doing basically instead of a human being.

And so if we can bring intuition into the equation with all the other things you mentioned like trust and so on and so forth, then we can take inspired action which almost always I’ve found gets even better results and causes this inner critic to kind of step back and dissolve away even more. So what do you think about all that?

Rizwan: Yeah, absolutely. I think intuition is a big part of this process and for me it started off by understanding my values. What do I want? What am I comfortable with? Where do I want to go?

Or how do I want to show up? And what is important for me? So thinking about the values that are important to me, I think that was a big exercise and you know, exercise and self-discovery of turning the lens within. And I was so used to never doing that and never thinking about what I wanted, what is within me, what are my likes, dislikes, it was all focused outward. So I think that was a big step as well to start exploring what do I want, what is important for me. And so I did this exercise of, I think it was James Clair where you identify your five top personal values and core values. So I did, went through that exercise and it took some time with it and usually the same five would come up.

They do change every now and then but the core are the same. So I think that helped, you know, those values connect with the intuition. So when I want to do something and it’s not aligned with my values, then the intuition kind of gives me a warning that this is not something that I’m interested in or something that will help me.

But when there is a match there, I feel like that’s what helps the intuition give me the right signal that this is something that I need to move towards, you know, say for example, because creativity is a core value for me. And so any activity that helps me be more creative or help me improve my creativity and express myself through that, then the intuition supports me and guides me towards that.

Oli: That’s amazing. And so ultimately what we’re saying is like intuition is a kind of inner compass. And if you can find a way to stop externalizing everything like you said and to stop this inner voice that people have from distorting the signal, then it’s almost as though your intuition and this inner compass is always going to give you the feedback and information that you need to make the next obvious step in your life. Is that how you found it? Like it kind of works like that?

Rizwan: Yeah, exactly. I think the intuition is that inner compass that can help us in the decisions we make and the things we want to pursue. But I think the key is to make space for it, to open up to it, to have some quiet time or time just with yourself to be able to listen to that intuition, to listen to that voice.

Because if you’re always outwardly focused and go-go-go and everything, then the intuition is so subtle that you may miss it and you may focus on other things besides your intuition. So yeah, I think there’s just giving it the importance it needs by making space for it and listening to it and listening to the subtle cues that it provides. I think that’s a practice that I’ve started just now and I think that’s something that can be really powerful in helping us go to where we want to go.

Oli: Wow, that is incredibly powerful and actually in terms of the the journey that we’re describing that you’ve been on. So you went from point A to point B, and at point A you were kind of externalizing everything, you were holding back, you had all these negative thoughts and so on going on in your inner experience. And then you managed to go through this process of ultimately stopping those things from distorting your relationship with this inner guidance and so this inner compass that we all have. And so ultimately, by stepping out of your own way, you made space for this intuition, as you just described it, and now you’re becoming, you have become, sorry, a lot more real.

And this is obviously something that I’m super interested in because I’m always talking about being real or unreal and blah, blah, blah. But do you think the main thing that you did to make space for the intuition was just to basically get your sense of identity out of the way.

Obviously you still have a sense of self, but I mean the ideas of Rizwan Javed and what it means to be you, you basically got rid of all that stuff so that you could just allow something that was real to just emerge and speak for itself without having to be encapsulated in ideas and thoughts and all that stuff. I don’t know if that’s too abstract, but do you get what I mean?

Rizwan: Yeah, no, I think I’m getting what you’re getting towards. By knowing myself more, I was able to break free from what I thought expectation is, for example, as a designer, instead of going for the ideal designer or the perfect designer, that picture that I have in my mind, which also caused a lot of inner struggle to going inside and knowing what I want, what are my thoughts and respecting my thoughts and sharing them and opening up the channel from within.

I think that helped me break free from always focusing on perfection or the perfect designer, perfect dad or perfect spouse. All those perfect images of being perfect broke away and I was able to be myself and not worry about how others would perceive me.

Oli: Wow. Why do you think so many people are struggling with these kind of things? And so they have imposter syndrome or they’re people pleases or all these different kind of labels we can give people that are struggling, but where do you think most of this comes from?

Rizwan: That’s a great question. And I actually had both of those labels when I started out. So the wounds are fresh. But I think it starts from the beginning from our childhood, the experiences that we go through, the struggles we go through, the people, our family, our parents, our culture, society, all those things add up. I think culture has a big, heavy hand in it.

Depending on where you’re from, culture could be just all-encompassing and so directive and so controlling of who you need to be, who you should be and all those things. And that could be a whole other episode, but I think those experiences, experiences that we go through add up to all these, you know, what we say, layers that we take on. And as we move into a new phase of our life, sometimes those habits, those behaviors, those thoughts are just hard to let go of because we’ve known them for so long.

Those are our comfort zone, but it takes time, effort, you know, help from an external voice to get, move past those so you can bring your true self out.

Oli: Hmmm. The other thing as well is, like you were saying about values, most people for whatever reason, or not most people, but a lot of people, first of all, they don’t know what their values are, but then secondly, the values that they do think they have, they pick up from the culture that they’re in. So even their values are kind of these externalized, outsourced things that we just kind of pick up through osmosis.

Do you think there’s, this is a curveball kind of question, but do you think there’s human values that the majority of us share when we’ve been real, based on what you’ve learned? So for example, maybe creativity is a value that we all have when we’ve been real, I think, but if there was a list of however many, like what do you think would be on there?

Rizwan: Yeah, I think we all share, you know, in our common, in our humanity, we share the same challenges, the same similar experiences, similar thoughts and struggles.

So, you know, that’s definitely what we have in common. Sorry, I lost my train of thought.

Oli: It’s okay, I totally put you on the spot with that curveball question. So, what I’m trying to dig into is just, So ultimately, we talked about this kind of journey that people go through from point A to point B. And at point A, they kind of unreal, you know, however that shows up for them.

But normally when we’ve been unreal, we kind of locked inside our minds, we’re fragmented, we’re disconnected from our emotions, we’re holding back and hesitating, we’re not expressing ourselves, etc, etc. And that basically involves a certain set of values, if you think about it. So for example, maybe we’re valuing being perfect, just as a simple example.

And so that causes us to hold back from doing the things we really want to say and express, because we’re worried it’s not going to be perfect enough or whatever. But then on the other end of the extreme, when we’ve been real, you know, we’re more spontaneous, because we’re not hesitating, we’re more active instead of passive, we’re more able to kind of be outcome independent to have an abundance mindset instead of a scarcity mindset to go with the flow, to ultimately experience life instead of just living it in the abstract or filtering everything through identity and ideas. And so I guess what I’m trying to just spitball on, let’s say, is what values might we be able to translate into action at that level of realness at the point B?

Rizwan: I think the values would be… Let’s see.

Oli: So you’ve already mentioned, like, creativity, or maybe we can frame it in terms of your experience. So what values do you allow yourself to have now that maybe when you was stuck at point A, kind of hesitating and holding back a bit, you didn’t know that you had?

Rizwan: So the values that that now I focus on are respecting my thoughts and respecting respecting other people’s thoughts, but also respecting my thoughts, they’re just at the same level. So before there was an imbalance before I was outwardly focused, so I was paying more attention to what other people thought felt and needed, and not so much for myself.

So now I’m back at the same level. And so that’s a big part. And creativity, that’s a big value that we have this inner voice or inner creative expression that we can bring out, whatever form that is, to not block it, but to promote, help it come out whatever way it wants to show up. So whether it’s intuition, whether it’s our ideas, or, you know, going with the flow, or not resisting what is within us to come out. So I think, you know, self discovery is a big value for me now is to listen to what I’m thinking, what I’m doing, and to be able to check myself when these thoughts come back in, as they usually do, that now I have this space to be able to not listen to them and still do what I wanted to do.

So not get blocked and still show up as I want to end. You know, the results have been pretty amazing that I’ve seen both at my work in my work and at home. And even others have noticed it that, you know, there’s a there’s a big change in how I’m showing up, which has helped me tremendously.

Oli: I think that what you just said about kind of self respect, ultimately really sums up this transformation. And I think a lot of people that are holding back and hesitating and ETC that are stuck at this point A, one of the reasons that they’re stuck there is because for whatever reason, because of culture or their childhood or any other external thing, that has basically caused them to believe that accepting themselves and respecting themselves is somehow wrong. But actually, I believe that is always nonsense, because when you’ve been real, well, obviously, the only thing you can do with reality is accept it. So you have to accept yourself. And you’re of course going to respect yourself as well with healthy boundaries and all that kind of stuff.

Because you’re going to be saying no to the unreal stuff. And so, you know, we’ve covered a lot as we’ve kind of picked this journey to pieces. But could we summarize the transformation that this creative process of kind of rebuilding yourself has involved? Could we summarize that as just been that like it’s a journey of learning to respect yourself again?

Rizwan: Yeah, I think absolutely. That’s the ultimate direction that we want to be moving towards is self discovery to learn what’s within us, because that’s what we can control, what we can share and share with the world. And that’s how we can make this life interesting and even amazing is to bring what’s within us outside and not keep that back from the world.

Because, you know, we’re unique, we’re individual. And if we don’t share our gifts with the world, then, you know, then, you know, it’s only going to hurt us and nobody else. So I think that’s the that’s the big mission in life is to, you know, go on that journey to learn more about ourselves.

Oli: And actually, the irony of all this is that when you go on that journey and you you know read self-awareness and you see what’s really inside you your true values and your true intentions and all this kind of thing well actually the end result of that process is that you have more to give to the world it’s this idea that you you can’t pour from an empty cup and so as you’ve gone through this process and you’ve kind of stops getting in your own way and you’ve stopped writing off your own ideas and you know the things that you can share with the world have you found that you know you’ve been able to give more you’ve been more expressive of something real and that’s allowed you to give something true to people or do you see what I’m saying.

Rizwan: Yeah, absolutely, I think when now that you know before I was in this mindset of scarcity mindset where everything was you know everything was a competition it was win or lose and you know I need to get mine and you know that type of mentality caused a lot of suffering – you know, at work, at home and once I let go of that to learn more about myself and to share what I could bring to my work to at home I was able to take on the more abundant more of the abundance mindset where I can share more with others.

And it’s not going to take away from me I can help others I can you know I can be happy for other the success other people have and not think that not see it as a negative on myself and and so you know knowing that I have so much to give because I’ve opened up that path opened up the the intuition and the creative creative voice that’s within me has helped me you know just share more and get past a lot of those struggles that I would go go through daily.

Oli: I think that’s one of the most important things people learn when they on this journey so when they stuck at point A and you know they’re kind of locked inside themselves and they’ve been a bit passive and everything they almost always have a scarcity mindset like in fact you you have to have a scarcity mindset to be stuck there and so as you increase awareness in the way that you’re talking about and you become aware of yourself and the world but also how reality is just so abundant then it makes it so much easier to give and express the real you.

Aand so that abundance is you know one of the most important things you can work on I think have you got any practical kind of insights into how people could do that so if they currently stuck in a scarcity mindset what can they do to kind of start moving towards abundance in the way that you’re talking about.

Rizwan: So I found that you know just being grateful for what you have is you know that’s a big way to start moving towards an abundance mindset so just you know a lot of times I remember I would focus on what I didn’t have what others have and what I don’t have and you know getting into that story and you know that causes a lot of a lot of challenges a lot of grief so thinking about what is good in my life even if it’s just once a day to stop and to to see look around and realize just how you know how good we have it we can there’s always something we can be appreciative of a grateful for in our life and so I think that practice will help kind of undo a lot of those comparison thoughts of comparison or I’m not good and they have more than me or you know all those things that come up I think so yeah great gratitude and be grateful for what we have I think that’s a big big step.

Oli: Yeah. You know what that is so important and like I found it to be true my own life and it reminds me of something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently which is that basically in life whatever we focus on grows that’s what we end up getting and so when you were at this you know lower point previously where you know you had a scarcity mindset and you were holding back and all that kind of stuff your thoughts just kept you focusing on all those negative things and if you focus on negative things you get more and more negative things and that’s how these downward spirals open up and then as we start to become aware or we practice becoming aware with you know gratitude journals or whatever gratitude practice we do we start to focus on the good things and that’s when the good things start growing and that’s how we open up a positive spiral did you find that to be the case in your life so basically as you shift your focus things just kind of almost automatically get better for some weird way weird reason?

Rizwan: I think that’s exactly it you know what you focus on you know what they say you create your own reality and you know if you’re focused on the negative you’re going to see negative if you focused on good and being grateful you’re going to bring more of that to your mind and and get away from the negative thoughts that come up. So even distracting yourself from those negative thoughts is helpful. So for example, I go running, that’s a tool I have for when I become too negative or when I’m too distracted. I can use that as a tool to go clear my head and not focus on the negative sides of things. And instead, you know, change my thought patterns to something more positive.

Oli: Like those kind of things, it’s a kind of pattern interrupts. Like for me, I do yoga or I go hiking in the hills and stuff like that. Do you think you can take that to a slightly deeper level? And even though, you know, doing those activities is a distraction from the negative thoughts, they can also remind you of who you really are. So maybe I’m getting too romantic again, but when I’m doing a yoga session, when I’m in the hills and I’m really deep into it, I automatically step out of my own way. So I’m not just filtering everything through my idea about myself. There’s actually no idea about myself in those moments.

I’m just completely present. And I always think that that’s the real me. That when I feel like that, that’s the real me. And that is the feeling I try and bring into the rest of my life. So even though you’re using it as a distraction, do you think it’s actually just showing you who you are when you are being real?

Rizwan: Yeah. Yeah, I think the reason why I go running is to reconnect with myself and reconnect with nature. And so I think, you know, I’ve drawn to that activity because it’s more in line with who I am and it’s closer to me. So I think even though it’s a distraction, you know, I’m drawn to it because I can be myself. I can, like you said, you know, I can show up as myself and not have those thoughts as well. So yeah, I think there’s some connection there.

Oli: Hmm. Like actually, the distraction is all of the negative thoughts and all of the, you know, false things in the world, like let’s just say, I don’t know, the media and all the negativity and all, you know, all these things, that is the distraction. And the real stuff is the true values that are deep down there inside you is the creativity, it’s the flow. It’s who you are when you’re in those moments. So we’ve been talking longer than I thought that we had been talking.

I always do this is my trademark thing to do. But anyway, we’ve covered so much. So we’ve covered this journey that you’ve been on. We covered some of the practical things that you did to kind of break out of these, you know, negative tendencies and these downward spirals and everything.

Have you got any final words of wisdom to sum this all up? And can you also tell people where they can find you and they can listen to your podcast and all those kind of things?

Rizwan: Sure. So I would recommend, you know, just the overall theme is to take some time to get in touch with yourself to learn about yourself, what you like, what you dislike, and turn the lens inwards. I’ve been reading this book. I’ve been going through this book, The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. And that is a great book to help you do just that, to go through these exercises, prompts, writing prompts and to reconnect with yourself. If you haven’t done that in a long time, it’s refreshing to see just how much there is within you that you can share with the world and, you know, have that conversation with yourself.

I think that is key to a lot of the inner struggles that we have. So yeah, I would recommend that to anybody who is looking to find ways to improve. You can find me on LinkedIn. You can find me on Twitter.

But you can also go to lowfidelity.io is where I write. And that’s my newsletter on Substack. And I also have the podcast, which is called Unleash Your Mindset.

And you can find that on Spotify and Apple, Apple Podcasts. So yeah, those are the places to find me. And I’m always up for a conversation and sharing my thoughts and my experiences if anybody needs any kind of help or support.

Oli: Well, Rizwan, I’ll share all those links and everything in the show notes. But thank you so much for coming on here and sharing your journey and the insights that you learned along the way. It’s been a really awesome conversation. So thank you so much.

Rizwan: Yeah, thank you. Thank you for having me. I always have a great conversation with you. It’s insightful and I learn new things. And I really appreciate you sharing the message of being real and showing up for yourself. And so thank you for all the work that you’re doing too.

Oli: Rizwan, thank you so much.

Rizwan: Thanks.

Creative Status: Episode 27: Vince Salzer: The Creative Path to Unconditional Love

Published on April 17, 2023

Creative Status: Deconstruct ego, integrate the shadow, manifest real life.

Riding the reality waves leads to UNCONDITIONAL love 🌊

This is because reality is about WHOLENESS and love is about wholeness.

As the old hippy saying goes:

“God is truth is love”

It’s all WHOLE.

When you can tap into this understanding by letting of ego and integrating shadow then you can start building a REAL life.

Ironically, when you get to this stage you don’t ‘need’ a real life because you already are real – instead you can want things without ‘needing them.

In this episode of Creative Status I had the pleasure of interviewing Vince Salzer (@vincesalzer), a blogger, consultant, and life coach. We delved into his three-step framework for living a real life that he calls The 3 Pillars.

The first pillar is to realise that you are loved. Vince emphasized that this is a crucial step in living a fulfilled life. When you know that you are loved, you will have the confidence to pursue your dreams and live a life without fear.

The second pillar is to learn to love yourself. Vince talked about how many of us struggle with self-doubt and negative self-talk. However, when we learn to love ourselves, we can overcome these limiting beliefs and achieve our goals.

Finally, the third pillar is to find your dream. Vince shared some valuable insights on how to identify and pursue your passion. He also talked about the importance of aligning your actions with the truth of unconditional love to live a purpose-driven life.

We covered a ton of things in this conversation including the link between unconditional love and wholeness, how we can block ourselves from connecting to this, how life isn’t as serious as we make out, how we can learn to want things without wanting them, and how the next step will always reveal itself (even though it’s just a next step and if it doesn’t work out we can find another next step).

Overall, this episode is filled with valuable insights and actionable advice on how to live a real and authentic life. So, sit back, relax, and enjoy this inspiring conversation with Vince Salzer on Creative Status.

Check it out using the player above!

(Or wherever else you listen to podcasts)

All episodes on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6UG491sXbZv6fUKIMVrIT6

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

Episode Links:

Vince’s blog/website: ⁠https://vincesalzer.com/⁠

Vince on Facebook: ⁠https://www.facebook.com/How.to.Find.Your.Dream/⁠

Vince’s YouTube channel: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@vincesalzer9855

Creative Status Links:

Free one hour creative workshop to take you brand or project to the next level.

Show Transcript

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 by basically going through the process of becoming real. What that means is that you deconstruct and get out of your head in the sense of holding back, hesitating, having self-limiting beliefs, that you allow the shadow of self to emerge from the ashes of that ego, and then that you can start flowing, growing, designing a life that you actually want to live.

Instead of just being an automaton that is fueled by impulse, reactivity, instinct, modern intuition, and basically that if you can go through this process of growing real and becoming whole, you’ll feel more connected to other people because you’ll be more connected to yourself, you’ll be more connected to life, and then you can die because that’s what happens to all of us, but you’ll at least have lived a good life or the best possible life.

So anyway, that’s a rambling introduction. My name’s Oli Anderson, if you didn’t know that. I’m a life and business coach. You can call me a creative performance coach, but I’m starting to realize that your job title doesn’t really matter.

I mean, I knew that anyway, but it’s more what you do that counts, and basically I just help people become more real with whatever it is that they’re doing. Anyway, this podcast is an interview with a guy called Vince Salzer.

Vince is a super cool guy. I met him in a group for freedom-loving entrepreneurs, and we got talking because we shared some similar interests and some similar philosophical questions about life and the human experience and what it means to be real, how ultimately it all boils down to unconditional love and truth and blah, blah, blah, all these things that I like talking about, wholeness mainly. So yeah, this interview is going to take you on a bit of a journey. We cover a lot of things.

Vince has a really great system for kind of growing real three-step process. We talk about that. We talk about the barriers that hold us back. We talk about the things we’re going to learn along the way and the path to realness.

Just listen and you’ll find out. But this was a really good one. I really enjoyed this conversation. It was very real. So Vince, thank you to you for coming on here and letting me interview you. Everybody else, hope you enjoyed the conversation and that you get some value from it. If you have any suggestions for future interviewees, then send me an email or DM somewhere.

And other than that, just stay real out there, keeping the flow. And here we go.

Interview

Oli Anderson: Oh, hi there, Vince. Thank you so much for joining me today on this episode of Creative Status. We’ve had some quite deep conversations in the short time that we’ve known each other on the internet and we’ve decided that today we’re going to dive into this stuff a bit more deeply, maybe make some new connections, figure some new stuff out.

Before we get into all that, do you feel like introducing yourself, telling people what you do, what you’re all about, what you want to get from this conversation, anything else really that you want to say?

Vince Salzer: Okay. Yeah, my name is Vince Salzer. I’ve been a blogger for over 10 years, been on a few videos on YouTube, done a lot of stuff on Facebook, talked to multiple thousands of people about their lives and how to make them better. I also recently kind of got what a lot of people are talking about today is what is the nature of reality and is the current one we are in going to sustain itself or is it even real?

And can we think of a better reality? But mostly I’d like to talk about is what I got a few years ago basically through inspiration and that’s where I get all of my stuff that doesn’t come from me. I’m just kind of like the tool and it works through me and I just give it out. So the biggest one is the three steps, the three pillars.

Oli: So we’ll get into the three pillars in a second. So just before we do, tell me a little bit more about the reality thing that you just mentioned because reality is one of my favorite topics. I’m obsessed with what’s real about human beings, how we can be more real, how we can flow and align ourselves with the truth. And I think really that’s all we need to do, uncover the truth and then live it.

And if you can really just do those two things, things tend to work out. But what’s your, I guess the abridged version of your reality philosophy and all that kind of thing?

Vince: Well, I totally agree with you that if you can really figure out what is real, then you can survive and thrive in your environment. My take on that is that what we all think is reality isn’t really real. Reality is what is happening on the inside.

That’s actually the only thing that is real. The rest of it is outside and what we think is outside is just our perception of our inside. And once we know that, then we can just basically create whatever we want on the outside.

Now, we’re not God or the Creator of the universe or some infinite being or whatever you want to call it. There are certain restrictions. I mean, do you want to create a reality where there are no floors and walls?

I mean, not really. I mean, yeah, you could possibly, but I mean, how many people want to do that? So inside of current parameters, then yeah, we can basically create what we want. So long as we realize that it all happens on the inside and that is manifested to the outside. And you can’t just sit there and like meditate all day long and expect things to change on the outside.

But you do need to think about what you want so much and so energetically that you get motivated to actually create that outside reality. And which it’s just a term where there is no such thing as an outside reality. But it’s a manifestation of your interior thing. And that is what you would call reality is the outside part of it.

And we really have to be honest about that too. It’s like, you know, you can say, well, it’s like this and it’s like that. Well, I would say the only thing it’s like is that there are floors and walls and streets and earth. And that’s it. Because those are the boundaries. And you can go on to, you know, millions of different ways that there are boundaries, but really to get down to it. A lot of those things can change too.

Oli: So the way that I like to look at it is that there’s a difference between the world and reality. I think for me, everything basically breaks down into it’s either about wholeness, which is real or it’s about fragments. And the world is just a bunch of fragments. It’s a bunch of ideas that we’ve acted on collectively that have created what we call the world. So even with what you said about walls and roads and all this stuff, all of those things started as a thought in somebody’s head. Basically, any idea does anything that we anything that we mold the world around us with. It originally was a thought in somebody’s head.

And you could say that about anything like actually like a book or whatever. All these things started in someone’s head. And so if the thoughts that we are having are fragmented and disconnected from the truth about life, then the world that we build is going to be an extension of that. And ultimately it goes back to this thing.

I think it’s in the Kite Valley and or something like that. As within so without. And so our inner experience, individually and collectively, shapes what goes on outside of us, because we don’t see the world as we are, as it is, sorry, but as we are, and we don’t experience it as it is, but as we are. And so it all starts with our internal relationship. And I think if people can understand that, then the external world will affect them way less, because they’ll be picking up less social programming, less assumptions, less expectations, all that kind of crap.

But also, they’ll be able to see that they have a lot more choice and a lot more power and a lot more autonomy over their lives. Because all of that external stuff is not just something to take at face value. It’s not a barrier or whatever it may appear to be. It’s just ultimately a reflection of the thoughts we’ve already had or the people before us have already had in the case of the world and social systems and all that kind of thing. And so it can all be changed.

If it came from human beings, it can be changed. So I totally agree with you about the reality stuff. And I’m glad that you’ve brought it up, because I think in relation to your three pillars, that understanding of reality as a foundation is actually essential to making as much sense as possible of the three pillars. So I keep talking about these three pillars.

Do you want to tell us, first of all, what they are and how you’ve kind of used them to help people or how they have helped people?

Oli: Okay. Yeah. Um, it’s kind of like, uh, we go from a way of looking at things to actually getting to the point where we can actually, quote unquote, do something about it. So these are three concrete pillars on actually achieving what you want to manifest. So it first starts with, well, it’s all tied up. Well, the first two steps are tied up with love. And the first step is realized that you are loved. And I could say unconditionally, uh, metaphysically, um, because there is something out there that loves you.

No, no matter what you do. And you know, you can say, why, how do you know it’s because you’re alive. If you didn’t love you, the first thing you did wrong, he’d kill you.

He ate whatever that presents, uh, the quantum vacuum, whatever it is. You didn’t abide by the quote unquote rules. You wouldn’t be here. And so it goes to the most basic, basic, uh, function of yourself. And, and that can be in my coaching, that can be weeks long because people just can’t understand it. Um, they can’t, they can’t even conceptualize of a thing called God. Uh, they don’t realize that maybe their family could love them or, you know, even society or something like that.

They’re just so caught up with the hate that they can’t even realize that they’re loved and you’ve got to realize that you are loved before you can do anything else. So the second step is that you have to, from that realization, you have to kind of say, imagine, or, um, you can actually think about that you love yourself. And everybody says, Oh, I love myself. It says, well, go look in the mirror and say, I love you 10 times and see what comes up in your mind. And don’t give me any, uh, any, uh, crap about, Oh, it says in the back.

I do it all the time and I’ve done it for years. And you know what comes back at me? No, you don’t.

No, you don’t. Look at what you did here. Look at what they did there. Look at this world. I’ll screw it up.

It is, it’s all the excuses. And that’s the second hurdle to overcome is that you’ve got to actually have to begin to be able to look at yourself in the mirror and say, I really do love myself at least a little bit, despite everything else. And you begin to take on God like qualities because God loves you unconditionally, no matter what you did. And realizing that, then you look in the mirror and say, no matter what I did, no matter what happened, I still love myself. And then finally you can get to the third step is called finding your dream.

And that is an ever ongoing process. You never really find your dream because, um, the universe, the universe is always expanding, everything is moving and changing. Even your dream changes. Let’s just say you had a, a crappy material dream of, of, um, buying a house. Well, the first house you got was 800 square feet, uh, and, or 250 meters. No, no, 50 meters or 60 meters or something like that.

Well, now you’ve accomplished it. Well, you keep going and pretty soon, uh, no, I need a 2000 square foot meter, a 200 square square meter, uh, 2000 square foot house. And so your dream is changing all the time and that’s just a material thing. You’re always growing and changing. I, I, uh, got to this level of realizing that I’m loved and then I love myself. So now I have a dream. I get to the next level and my dream gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And so it’s always an evolving, ongoing process where you keep going back to really saying, okay, how do I love myself?

I mean how much am I loved? Okay, then that will go and precipitate the dream and from the dream It will get so real to you that now you can go out and accomplish things Things just open up to you. This is what this is my dream. This is what I’d really love to do And it’s always how do I want to be what do I love to do it’s not what I want to have Because we can all get tied up with the new car and the new house and the new The new girlfriend the new wife, you know all those things. No, no You have to be a certain way before you have those things.

Oli: Yeah, wow, okay, so I think what we need to do is just break these three pillars down one by one But just to make sure I understand the point of them right basically in Life people are always trying to get places.

It seems everyone’s running around like headless chickens. They set goals for themselves But a lot of the time Those goals are not necessarily real or true to who that person really is and it’s because then setting these goals before they’ve done that in a work of realizing that they’re loved or connected to life or whatever language you want to use and they also Have some inner stuff going on where they judging themselves or maybe they I don’t know they caught up in the illusions of duality and all these different things that can happen to people they got false assumptions and so on and so forth and because of that their inner state of being is not really conducive to get the kind of things that they actually want and need from life because they’re living with a kind of inner friction..

..and so these three pillars of realizing that you’re loved loving yourself and then find a direction Basically, just make sure that by the time you get to the goal setting phase or the vision setting phase Whatever people want to call it that you’re actually choosing something that is real and true and authentic to you.

that a fair assessment?

Vince: Yes, yes, very the exactly We can only really achieve our dreams or even have a drink No, no, we can only achieve our dreams or find our dream if we come from a point of Love and you could use a lot of other words But I just use love and a lot of times I start out the whole session with what Realizing that you always do have a dream You are living your dream that you dreamed of Five years ago, whatever before you were born all this stuff you always do live your dream so all you need to do now is Do the steps so you can find the real one that you want and don’t just say well, you know, I Have a dream and it’s out there. No, it’s not it’s right here with you right now And you’re living it you’re dreaming that dream right now.Yeah, so let’s change it.

Oli:Wow, what you said is so true. The problem is that people – they’re dreaming without even knowing that they’re dreaming They’re not consciously using these laws and principles that you’re talking about and so Whether you know whether you’re aware that you’re using the law of attraction or whatever we’re talking about Whatever when I call it or not these natural laws don’t go anywhere.

They’re always working, they’re always operating and so if you’re asleep because you’re lost in the ego and all that kind of stuff You’re just acting out as a consequence of your social programming of self-hypnosis and blah blah blah The law of attraction is still working And so actually what you need to do is wake up and see that you are Kind of in a lucid dream actually and you can play a role in it and by making choices and accepting that you loved and all So if you’re talking about you’re gonna get better results and be able to kind of mold reality in this You know to a higher degree. Obviously you can’t change everything like you said so for example You know these natural laws are just a thing.

I don’t think anyone can ever go against them. So, you know, it’s there They’re the the thing that created us basically, but we can work within the parameters of that So anyway, I’m running and raving. Let’s go through these The three pillars one by one just to give a bit of a mini masterclass, let’s say on Exactly what people can do to start moving down this pathway. So the first one then Realizing that you’re loved You’ve talked about God I Call it wholeness when I’m talking about this some people call it just pure consciousness or whatever there’s all these different words, but they’re all talking about the same thing and Ultimately, it’s this feeling of realness and connection to life and everything else That’s how I normally end up talking about it this feeling of realness is Always there and it’s it’s something that all human beings have probably all living creatures You can’t get rid of it because reality is about wholeness. What’s whole is always complete. It never goes anywhere You can’t add to it.

You can’t take away from it. Blah blah blah It’s just there that feeling of wholeness is is love and all these things There’s a saying I think from the 70s or something or maybe the 60s I think I saw it in like a book about hippies or something. He said God is love is truth It’s all the same thing. These are just words. So anyway, this feeling of realizing that you’re loved, what steps do people need to do in order to kind of experience this thing that we’re talking about the feeling of realness or love from your point of view or God or whatever?

Vince:Yeah, well, it starts Maybe in a metaphysical level, but maybe we can just start on a very practical level. Do you think that your siblings your parents your child And do they love you and then if you’re a normal person to within them Two or three sigmas from from the center if you know anything about probability then yes Your parents love you unless you’ve created Such chaos that they just can’t anymore But they probably still love you but they’re loving you from a long ways away Because you are their progenitor you are their offspring.

They really don’t in a way have any choice It’s built in and that’s the biggest thing, you know, and you can go under that another example is do you love your children? yes for 99.9 % of the normal people not the psychopaths or something else Yes, no matter what they do you love them maybe if they’re on drugs and all this stuff that you can’t have anything to do with them, but you still love them and So that’s just an example of It, you know right down here now we can take that to ultimately just to go on and say God is everything everywhere all at once and so everything is a part of him and so that you’re here and I would say because you’re here and because that is who source is or what source is or God or whatever that means that there must be something good about you.

That you even are here…there must be something there And then we can go yeah, God is unconditional love You can say does somebody create something that it hates Well, no, they’d create it because they want to see it Come into being you don’t build a house because you hate the house you build a house because you love it and so The other way around it’s like okay now after you build a house and maybe it becomes you know a Wait around your neck because of the maintenance you might change your mind a little bit But I don’t I don’t think God is like that because he’s got enough power say oh I created this Didn’t like that part.

So I’ll just kind of let it go, you know, let’s go on creating some other thing So you’re still here. So he hasn’t let go of you So it’s all of these reasons that you have to have Set so deep inside of you That nothing can shake that that you are loved No matter what and that takes a lot of thinking processing – some people call it meditating. I don’t really I don’t really call it that – you just got to sit down and think about Being loved and the more you do it the more you will feel it.

Oli: Do you think… like, obviously, there’s a difference between conditional and unconditional love a lot of the Relationships that we have are conditional Because you have to meet certain conditions or you know if you do too much of an asshole and you want drugs and stuff like you said People disown you which is fair enough the relationships are Conditional but the love in most cases is unconditional because love has to be unconditional and so in relation to what you’re saying maybe there’s an element of This feeling you’re talking about when we meditate and we close our eyes and we strip everything away Wwe we don’t actually have a relationship with that love.

We kind of just We are that love or something like that. Do you know what I mean?

Like it’s It’s stripping away all those conditions and when you strip all those conditions away all those fragments then you just left with the whole which is basically you and God or you and truth or you and source – or whatever word people want to use – that’s all that there actually is and once you’ve tasted that that’s what puts you on this path to being able to love yourself and then actually find a Purpose or a dream or whatever.

Vince: Yeah, definitely. Look, I always look at the other point of it say If you sit and look and just think about it. Well, why don’t you think about the opposite? So if you Just be quiet and everything else. Do you actually feel hate? Do you feel hate that’s coming towards you?

And if you do there’s something really really wrong with you. I Would just have to say that because you need to process that because anybody that can sit Silently and think over a period of time and the only thing they can feel that is coming towards them is hate Well, we need to go and really have some deep stuff going on So most normal people would just sit there and say what do I think about? Well, if I am I say don’t think about anything just see what comes up and always It’s a sense of peace sense of calm, you know Everything quits twirling around so fast my you know my mind doesn’t go all over the place It still does but a little less and a little less and a little less And so that’s the evidence that you are loved because that’s just kind of What happens? It’s almost like the default if you really get into it the default is peace and calm and love Yeah, and you need to do some quote-unquote work.

You need to set some time to in the beginning to do that and pretty soon it doesn’t make any difference what you’re doing. I mean Whatever percentage of the day they were doing something we’re doing without even thinking about it and Underneath we can be thinking one of two things Yeah, what’s gonna happen? You know all this stuff or the other thing is I’m at peace.

I’m at calm, the universe loves me , I am worthy, and that just comes to you because of the whole inner work that you’re doing and that you need to do that so much Before you even transition into the thing is I can love myself And the other part of it is then you’re not lying to yourself that’s the biggest thing is once you start saying I love myself That’s a lie You don’t but it’s not a lie to say that I am loved or it’s less of one if you don’t believe it I mean that is a possibility to be believed and then you have that that basis and then you can move on to loving yourself and that facilitates going out and finding your dream.

Oli: So with that This the first pillow right so accepting that you’re loved so realizing that you love It sounds too simple like if people have not experienced it They’ll dismiss it because it’s too simplistic But what you’re saying is so true the default state of a human being is peace joy flow love all these amazing feelings that you can get and All you really need to do you don’t need to go to See a therapist for the next 20 years and talk about all your mummy and daddy issues , you don’t need to analyse every little problem in your life; you need to sit down or put yourself in a situation that returns you to that default position and doesn’t even need to return you to that default position for, you know, 24/7 24 hours a day seven days a week.

You just need to taste it and once you’ve tasted it It will creep into your life more and more and more until eventually your inner state is a reflection of that and you’ll find yourself not worrying as much you won’t be judging yourself as much your outer world. There’ll be a reflection of an improved inner state. You’ll be setting healthier boundaries and all that kind of stuff. You won’t be wasting your time on meaningless action and activities that aren’t inspired by something true inside of you.

All these things. And it all starts by just sitting down and stripping away all these conditions that we were talking about. When you remove the conditions, it’s just the unconditional truth about who you are. And because it’s unconditional, it’s true.

It’s always there for everybody. And so if people are feeling it, then they basically caught up in the hamster wheel of illusions, thoughts, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so yeah, all people need to do is just feel that feeling a little bit.

And then it makes it way easier to do the other two things, loving yourself and finding direction. So I just rambled at you a little bit again. Sorry. But what do you think about that? That it is actually a very simple thing. But also, how does acknowledging those feelings, the default feelings, as you described them, how does that help you move on to the second stage of loving yourself?

Vince: Yeah, it’s like, it seems easy, but there’s a whole bunch of things going on is that we need to learn how to stop the rambling going on inside of ourselves that’s going to be constantly contradicting what we’re supposedly trying to achieve, the default. We don’t have to try to achieve it.

We just have to quit trying to achieve it because every time we try, we’ll never get there. So it’s all this Buddhist philosophy comes in there too and everything else. But I come at it from a basically Western mindset mindset.

And there’s a couple things in there that you can use. And that is by becoming the observer, you watch yourself think, you watch your mind go nuts. And if that doesn’t help you become the observer of the observer, because your mind will take over the observer, they will direct you off.

And so you start watching your mind trying to be the observer, and you constantly do that, I don’t care, maybe you’re observing yourself, observing yourself a million times by the time you get out of that. And the second thing is remember that we have all lived in through trauma, and then get into whatever. And those are things that really stop us from being in that peaceful place.

And those are big things that we have to overcome all the way through all three steps because it’s the unlayering of an onion, peeling of an onion. There are always be new things that your stupid mind, your ego, whatever it is, always going to bring up and say, see, see, and you got to learn how to say, yeah, yeah, I see it. But it doesn’t really, I’m going to let it go.

It has nothing to do with me the way I’m now. Those are just memories that are playing out in the present. And those are just my perceptions of the way it was. And that wasn’t real. What the way I’m judging it now, I choose to judge it differently now.

And that is just the way it is. And you can go say things to yourself. Those are the things that you’ll always run into. And on your way to feeling loved and loving yourself, remember that these things are always going to happen. And that’s what I help with. You come to that point yourself of realizing that I just guide you to overcome the humps and the hills and the mountains and getting you to get over and get through them and get there. And one day, you’re going to have the epidemic. Now I went through this similar kind of thing. And I’ll give a plug to a guy I really respect and he’s got a thing called LifeWorks University. And it’s really LifeWorks. His name is Don Cohen.

I’ll just give him because I respect him. And we went through months and months and months of figuring out what we really want. And there was like 10 or 12 of us and we all had some time to sit down and go through all these things. And once we got to the end, every time there was a breakthrough by people is they just broke down and started crying. They finally figured out through everything what they wanted. And from that, they were also now to the point saying, I have every reason why I want that, the way I want to be and why I don’t want to be the same way that I have been for the last 15 years. I have a reason to change. I have a reason to change.

I got a path set out for me. And once that’s done, you just kind of go, it’s almost overwhelming. Because now I love myself enough to actually go out and find my dream.

Oli: So just to go back a few steps, I guess, what you were saying about trauma is that you are so true. So I’m always talking about three main emotions that are just causing people’s lives to be screwed up: shame, guilt and trauma.

Trauma is obviously the most extreme. But all of those emotions, shame, guilt and trauma, they basically have the same effect on people, which is that it sends them into hiding and into needing, I suppose, a sense of control and freakery. They need to control life instead of going with life.

And they need to control it to stop these emotions surfacing again. But the end result of that is that they can only hide behind one thing. And the thing they hide behind is the ego stuff. And the ego, as I see it, is basically just the opposite of reality. So anytime we start identifying with ego, we get caught up in illusions, we get caught up in fragmentation, we think we’re separate from everything, we think we’re disconnected and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And all that ultimately means is that it’s prevents us from the first step in your three pillars, which is realizing that we’re loved. If reality is love, wholeness, God, blah, blah, whatever you want to call it. And the only thing that can stop us seeing that is the ego stuff, because the ego just ends up filtering reality through what we think we need to see because of what our shame, guilt and trauma is conditioned us to believe about ourselves.

Then actually, the next step, like you said, in terms of loving yourself is about stripping away and deconstructing all that ego stuff. Or at least that’s how I see it when I’m coaching people. So is that how you would kind of approach that if you’re working with someone is ultimately realizing, okay, the, you know, we’re all loved reality, truth is wholeness, God, blah, blah. The thing that stops you from seeing that is your relationship with yourself, which is always your emotional stuff causing a fake identity, aka the ego. And if you can kind of deal with that symptom, then the rest is ultimately going to fall into place.

Vince: No, I think you’re, I think you’re right. We basically agree on things and probably just use different words really I’ll just give you my focus is that I am focusing people on the love part And already showing them that that is what runs the universe. That’s what made everything go Nobody builds a house house without loving it. Nobody buys a car or builds a car without loving loving it.

So I just focus on love and once you do that you’re kind of Gonna realize that you’re running up against stuff And we deal with those things as we come across them. We don’t focus on the trauma We don’t focus on that. We know there’s trauma. Yeah, it comes from shame fear and guilt I include fear in there Which kind of doesn’t create trauma, but something bad happens to us creates the fear and the shame in the guilt so we have to deal with all of those things as they come up to us and You know, it’s so myriad and so many combinations that it’s really hard to You know come on the come up with a specific thing.

That’s got to be geared to each individual but generally It’s that when you’re thinking about love and you’re getting distracted Remember to watch what you’re getting distracted about what is it saying to you? And then you deal with it by saying by various techniques, but here’s a good one. You just say thank you We’re doing what you’re doing. That’s a basic meditation practice. Thank you for what you’re doing and Okay, you said it you’re fine, okay Now it becomes part of the past comes you can actually say we’re gonna set it over there because it’s in the past So I’ve been dealt with and the other part is Realize it that it happened that it came up and say Thanks, and I let you go So I don’t even have to set it over there.

I could just say thank thank you for bringing it up I realize it and you just let it go Yeah Another technique is you can you can tell your ego. I want to think about positive cool peaceful things about love and Why don’t you go over and deal with all that? Crap that you want to deal with all the bad things in the past you go over there And I’ll even give you stuff to play with over there And so you’re tricking your mind or whatever else you’re just telling your ego and all the bad stuff the trauma to go over there and just be trauma Because I want to be over here in love Well, and so you separate the things out and so there’s you know hundreds of different ways That you can deal with those things and that’s when you get into coaching is that you got a you got a Have all these tools and techniques right at your fingertips and I’ve been studying this for a Probably over 30 years So there’s so many in there that I got thousands and thousands and thousands of them and just one just comes up when When I get what you’re feeling and what you’re saying So why don’t we try this all that in work?

Well try this well, you know, and if you’re at all wanting to Find your dream and feel some love We’ll find one. I always remember I was going to a counselor Long long time ago and I was just being negative and what do you do when you go to a concert? Tell them your problems and You know and it’s like finally he just said you know what? There’s got to be a way through this What? Oh There’s got to be a way through this And that’s all he said and finally I went to myself you idiot Let’s look at the way through it not all the problems.

Yeah, and I call myself an idiot already You know I was in it, but it started a change in me. It started saying okay Let’s look focus on solutions not on problems. Yeah Yeah, yeah problems are as good problems are always going to be there solutions Solutions are the hard part. We think the problems are the hard part.

No Solutions are the hard part because we’re so immersed in the problem We can’t even get the first base on the solution. Yeah, it’s a total 180 and that’s with all the reality That’s the whole thing. I got about reality. What is true about today?

If you look at the last three years Not much Everything’s been a lie every everything that everybody has told us is pretty much a lie and Continues to be so there’s a really good example about your whole life I mean everything you’ve done up to now have pretty much be said a lie unless you’re living in a place of pretty much peace and Even then only the people that want to move to a certain place So they they got to where they are right now kind of believing in themselves. So their Ability is to get to a new place is because they are at a place Where they were their dream took them to But they know that you want to get to a different place. So those are the people gonna gonna want them, you know Listen to you and I and so we’re we have to deal with a little higher I don’t know – I don’t want me to judgment, but somebody who’s got some self-awareness and wants to move.

And it’s but they’re up, but they are all in the problem and not in the solution including me.

Oli: Hmm. Well, I actually think in, in reality, there are no problems like this is the thing and so when you when you’re perceiving problems everywhere is always an ego thing and it’s because I can say this because problems only really exist at the level of judgment. So you’re judging it as either good or bad value judgments and, actually, in reality there is no good or bad because good and bad are just parts of the the path I guess to finding what is actually true or in order to get to reality of the transcend good and bad as well Say and so if you can see that and step back That makes it easier to maintain this feeling of realness and to stay in love with yourself because you’re not judging yourself You’re not judging the problems.

You’re not judging anything, you’re just accepting life and accepting yourself because that’s all you can do with reality and you’re moving forward and you’re expanding and you’re growing. So again, I’m been long-winded but in terms of loving yourself can we summarize that little pillar? I was just saying loving yourself ultimately is about stripping away all of the judgments all of the conditions you’re putting on yourself That stop you from feeling that feeling of realness we were talking about so it’s about acceptance of everything to the greatest extent possible not saying it’s yeah, I think put.

Oli: Yeah, I think that you’re right. I mean, it’s, are there any problems? No, only the ones we let ourselves be into. And it goes back to what is the universe? The universe is love.

That’s all it is. And so the only thing that there is available to us if we really want to accept it is love. So now you’re saying there’s no good or bad. Well, that’s just the outcome of knowing that the universe is love. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, so, but I don’t know, it’s kind of an advanced concept, because everybody’s been steeped in duality and the good and bad and all this stuff.

I don’t know. I, you know, sometimes it’s like, that’s an advanced concept. But really, it is.

And it’s just an outgrowth of realizing that you are loved unconditionally. And it doesn’t make any difference what you do. And who knows, I’ve even written about who knows 30 years later, that what you did is good or bad. Of course, many people say, well, I wouldn’t be the person I was today if I didn’t do all those things.

Well, I don’t know. I wish the 30 years ago, I don’t mean made different decisions because I’d be in a different, probably better place if I made better decisions. So it, it, there is no good or bad, but I think there’s shades, shades of gray in there. I mean, you made a better decision than a worse one, you know, I decided not to get drunk, not to get drunk tonight, or not to take that 10th drink. And that was a better decision.

So it’s, it’s somehow it’s a, a good, better, best thing rather than a good and evil thing. And we can get to that point. Now, it’s easier to love ourselves.

It’s easier to shift that forward. And I like to get down, we start with grand concepts, and then we chunk them down, chunk them down more and to more, and that applies to our daily life and how we can move through it. I always say, I want to help you survive this current reality and thrive in the next one. Because really, I don’t think that this current quote unquote reality that we’re in all its lies can survive. And so I think this is the most important thing that you can do, because our, our world is crashing down upon us.

And the people who aren’t awake, they’re going to go totally insane. When all of a sudden they realized everything that they live for, or even a portion of it, doesn’t make sense. And that’s what happens when you can’t accept it. You can’t accept even the most basic things about your life.

You will literally lose your mind. And we can’t have that happen. We can’t have that happen to even 10 % of the population. It’s going to have disastrous consequences. So this is the most important work anyone can do is keeping people from going insane. And that is by teaching them about loving themselves and achieving their dream. And what you say is reality.

True reality. That will save their very life. And, and I could even say their soul because they might have to make up. They might have to make up in their soul, all these things that they believe they got to have to learn so much more. They’re going to have to start over from zero.

But if we can get them to one, at least they got some further than they would have been by themselves. Because everybody’s going to work. They’re not thinking about anything. They just go home, blah, blah, blah.

They believe everything they hear. No, it’s time we quit doing that.

Oli: Yeah, I think what you said about people going insane, when this particular incarnation of the system collapses, maybe in the next 50 years or something, let’s say, within that timeframe, but anyway, the fact that people can go insane because the system changes shows you how invested people’s identities are in the world that we’ve built. And so earlier on in this conversation, I was banging on about how the world is not reality.

And also that in order to make the most out of your goals or the actions that you take in the world in life, you need to go through this process that I’m always talking about of raising awareness, accepting yourself and then taking action, or in your case of realizing that you’re loved and then loving yourself and then taking the action after doing that.

The only reason people can go insane in this particular instance we’re talking about is because they have been acting and engaging in a world that was designed by people that did not realize they were loved, did not love themselves. And so the world they designed was a reflection of that thought process. Like I said right at the start, like everything starts with the thought in someone’s head.

If that person doing the thinking does not love themselves, then they’re going to design something that is also a reflection of a lack of love. And you just have to look at the world around you to see that, right? And these people who are, you know, we’re making a lot of assumptions, but these people are probably going to go insane is because they will realize that the world they are treating as real is unreal. And that crash from unreality to reality is always a very dramatic and painful process.

It can be a good thing in the long run because once you hit reality, hit rock bottom, then you can start rebuilding in a much more real way. But in general, the start of that process and the start of that slide down from unreality to reality again, it does feel like you’re losing your mind.

But the good news is reality never goes anywhere for anybody. And so everybody can tune back into this feeling of realness and then do something with it in the way that we’re talking about. So anyway, just to bring all this together, can you just tell us a bit more about the finding the dream part and, you know, how it relates to everything else we’ve just said?

Vince: Well, first thing about finding the dream is the words that remember that the dream changes. And the more you evolve and grow and love yourself, your dream will change and always be open to that. Don’t just say, well, I wanted the new car and how I can sit down and relax for the rest of my life.

You do sit down and enjoy the car. You do enjoy the new level of peace and joy and relationships that you have. But always realizing that it is changing and it is growing. And that’s what keeps you alive is constantly finding your dream constantly loving yourself, constantly feeling the love of the universe. And then it’s really, really, oh man, it’s just so hard. When you get to the finding of your dream, it’s like ask yourself the question.

I do this all the time myself. What do I really want? Wow, can you come up with anything concrete?

I mean, other than peace and love and joy. Yeah, okay, all right. But yeah, that’s excellent to work on. And that’s the first thing that you do. But then, you know, you got to get up tomorrow morning and say, what am I going to do? Well, I’m going to feel peace and love and joy.

Well, again, ego is going to get in there. What you’re going to be able to do five minutes. You know, if you’re lucky, I know people can’t even do it for a minute and neither could I. Can’t even do it for a minute. So what are you going to do at the other 23 hours and 59 minutes?

And so you’ve got to come up with some concrete things, a dream that you want to work for. And what is, and what is that joy and peace and love look like in your life? Where would you be? What would you be doing?

What would be the outside circumstances? Would you live in a city? Would you live on a farm?

Would you live in a jungle? And you just have to go over and over and over it until you actually get to the point that, yeah, this is approximately where I want to be. And of course, it will always change. But at least you can get to the point where you kind of say, you know, I could sit in this place for 10 minutes and be totally okay. of it. In the rest of the time, I could be actually what on my computer doing things I love or out there building stuff that I’d love to do or creating a painting, a sculpture, a house, taking care of plants and food and animals. I mean, it just goes anywhere, you know, and you just get all of that stuff and you just pick out what you want and what would make you feel the best.

Oli: Yeah, yeah. I think it’s that simple. Like, what feels good, but not in a hedonistic way where you’re trying to escape from yourself. When you were talking, it reminded me of what you were saying about Buddhist philosophy and all that kind of thing, where as soon as you start trying to heal yourself or you start trying to fix your life or you start trying to do all these different things that people try and do, that is when the problem actually starts. And it’s the same with this in a way.

So if you’ve gone through these stages that you’re talking about of realizing that you’re unconditionally loved, loving yourself because you stopped judging yourself, you accept yourself unconditionally, well, really, when you get to that stage, you don’t need anything to do.

Like, it’s not like adding a Lamborghini or, I don’t know, in my case, like a shiny new guitar or something to my collection of accoutrements I picked up in life, it’s not like adding that stuff is going to make me feel any better or really change anything, because the real stuff is always there, that’s the whole point, right? But you need to do something with your time.

So it’s about choosing things that are going to give you pleasure, they’re going to give you an amazing experience, they’re going to allow you to help other people to express yourself in the right way and help other people on their journeys and all this stuff. The dream part is something that I think you want it, but you don’t really, it doesn’t matter if you get it or not. And so you detach from it, you’re outcome independent. And ironically, having that attitude means you’re more likely to get the things that you want anyway. And you’ll still appreciate them and you’d be grateful for them.

But you realize it’s all just part of the ride. It’s not you. It’s just something that you chosen. And as long as you’re making choices that allow you to keep growing real and expanding and experiencing more wholeness and blah, blah, blah, then it doesn’t matter. But not in a nihilistic way. I would say like nihilism is just the same as spirituality, but nihilism is just saying everything’s empty. So fuck it. Spirituality is saying everything’s full. So fuck it.

Pardon my French. Let’s just do what feels good and do what I need to do. And so for me, once you’ve had that feeling of realness, it all just falls into place and everything else is gravy. I don’t know if that’s how you see it, but that’s it.

Vince: Yeah, absolutely. And to get it in a little more concrete terms is that the dream will dictate what you’re going to do. And what I call it is the next right thing.

So you always bang up against something and when you have your dream, it’s like, okay, the question becomes, so what do I do about it? And it’s only the next right thing. Let’s not get all crazy and all tense about it.

It’s the next right thing. And unfortunately, the universe is going to put something in front of you that you absolutely hate. And you say, I will never do that. And that’s what the universe is going to tell you to do. Unfortunately, in most cases, hopefully not every one, but it’s going to be the thing that you don’t want to do. You might not say that’s the absolute thing I want, but it’s I won’t do this. And so it’s going to ask you absolutely to do that.

And once you keep doing that and keep doing that, it’s going to be, I get better and better. The other thing is the next right thing is only the next right thing until you get, you tell you receive feedback. Then it might not have been the right thing.

But yeah, it was at the time. And so now you change it to the next right thing. You do that till you get feedback.

And then you do the next right thing until you get feedback, change it and you keep going. And that’s how you could just say, you know, I don’t care. Like you said, I don’t care. It’s all the same. All I’m doing is the next right thing waiting for feedback to the next right thing. And there’s no stress. There’s no nothing I’m not judging myself and not judging anybody else. I’m just doing what the universe is asking me to do. You can say the universe, you can say, yeah, you can say the universe or what wells up inside of you or however you experience it.

Oli: Yeah, love it. And if you don’t go through the other steps of realising you’re loved, loving yourself, then you’ll never be able to just live in that way where you’re just doing the next right thing, the next right thing, the next right thing, because you’ll think that everything you do has to be way more significant than it actually is because of your ego stuff and the way it’s invested in it. So wow.

Well, Vince, I think we’ve smashed out your three pillars. We’ve said a lot about them. I think everyone’s got a good understanding of them. And I found this really interesting. Have you got any final words of wisdom to sum this conversation up? We’ve covered loads of stuff. And I don’t know, how would you sum it up or what are your final reflections?

And can you tell people where they can find you as well, please, on the internet?

Vince: Well, here’s what I got is that my system is a what I call a stress free system. We’re not putting any stress on you because we’re just teaching you how to love and accept love. We’re just teaching you how what you’re already dreaming and making it better. We’re not, we’re not putting you under stress. We aren’t you are, of course.

So it’s a stress free system. My blog is at VinceSalzer.com, VinceSalzer.com. I have a Facebook that’s Vince Salzer. It’s my name. I also have a kind of a group called How To Find Your Dream.

So I kind of named that way because it’s actual steps on how to do it. You can join me there. I’m on Twitter at VJSalzer, LinkedIn at VinceSalzer. I mean, you can find me all over the place. And, and those are the main ones, Facebook and my blog. And I’m on Telegram and WhatsApp too. And all under my name, you can find me there. Awesome.

Oli: So I’ll share those details in the show notes so people can click the link or whatever and find you. I love what you said about the stress free system because I think the choices people make to make them feel like the love thing is not real. That’s the only thing that adds tension. It’s the only thing that adds stress.

And so actually by unlearning all this stuff and getting on the real path that you’re talking about, life is a lot less stressful, like a lot less stressful. So anyway, that’s been awesome. Vince, thank you so much for coming on here today and talking about all this stuff. And maybe I’ll get you on again one day.

But I really appreciate your time. It’s been awesome.

Vince: And thank you Oli. I really had a fantastic time. You’re a very good interviewer.

Creative Status: Episode 26: Angela Blanco: The Acquisition of Realness

Published on April 10, 2023

Creative Status: Deconstruct ego, integrate the shadow, manifest real life.

Children don’t JUDGE so they LEARN 👇

Back when I was in Japan, my ability to speak Japanese got so much better when I was drinking sake (or whatever).

Was this because of the magical properties that this drink had or was there something else going on?

Well…as it turned out when I was drinking sake something magical did happen:

I stopped analysing everything and just allowed myself to FLOW.

Without the “inner monitor” watching everything that I did and causing me to hold back I was able to let my brain do what it needed to do and the words started flowing.

These days, I don’t drink very often but I still let things FLOW in the way that they need to (not just with Japanese which, tbh, I forgot most of, but with LIFE itself).

The only real difference is that I TRAINED MYSELF not to worry, doubt, or hold myself back and now I spend a lot of time in the flow state just doing what needs doing and riding those reality waves where I wanna go.

Real life is a LANGUAGE and you can learn to speak it by being REAL with yourself.

In this episode of Creative Status, I have a chat with Angela Blanco (@light.spanish), a professional language tutor and founder of her own online language school.

She shares her philosophy of tapping into your CREATIVE SUPERPOWER and how this has application to life as a whole.

Angela believes that the key to learning a new language is not just in teaching it, but in helping students develop an effective and realistic routine of self-study.

By understanding their intelligence type, whether visual, kinesthetic, or whatever else, students can own their language acquisition process and acquire the language faster – in the process they face themselves and become more REAL so we can call this a creative process.

During the interview, Angela discusses how language learning can benefit mental health, self-improvement, and self-confidence.

If you’re looking to learn a new language, just interested in language acquisition and its benefits, or if you’re simply a curious and open-minded human being that wants to be more REAL then this episode is for you.

Listen on any podcast player or use the embedded player above.

All episodes on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6UG491sXbZv6fUKIMVrIT6

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

Episode Links:

Do the ‘superpower’ test here: ⁠⁠https://www.lightspanish.co.uk/test-english⁠⁠

Angela’s Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/light.spanish/⁠

Angela on LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/angelablancospanish/

Creative Status Links:

Free one hour creative workshop to take you brand or project to the next level.

Show Transcript

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, basically by helping you to figure out a strategy for moving towards wholeness and connection to the wider world and universe around you.

Basically, again that word basically, this involves deconstructing your ego, looking at how your sense of identity is holding you back, looking at what hides behind that sense of identity in the shadow territory, and then integrating all of these different parts of yourself so that you can become whole, start flowing, manifesting, living a real life that you actually want to live where you feel truly that it means something because you’re not bullshitting yourself and holding back behind all kinds of illusions and blah, blah, blah.

Anyway, this podcast episode is an interview with Angela Blanco. Angela is a Spanish tutor. She has her own business where she helps people to acquire the language of Spanish. What we wanted to do in this conversation is basically to explore that from a kind of philosophical point of view, looking at how it relates to all of the realness stuff that we like to talk about on this podcast, how the process of language acquisition is actually a creative process, and what it can tell us about the wider human condition, human nature, how we all have different superpowers and how we can tap into those in order to get the results that we want from life.

So basically what I’m saying is that word again, basically, there is a ton of really interesting stuff here in this conversation. Hope you’re going to get some value out of it. I’m pretty sure you will if this is your bag, baby. So if you listen to it, let me know what you think. Hope it gives you some good stuff. And Angela, thank you so much for coming on and letting me interview you, asking you these questions. And everybody else, see you next Monday for another episode of Creative Status. Keep it real.

Stay in the flow. Boom. Here we go.

Interview

Oli Anderson: Oh, hi there. Angela, thank you so much for joining me today on this episode of Creative Status. We had a brief chat a week or two ago, and it basically revolved around how people can get in touch with their creative superpower as a human being.

So I’m assuming we’re going to talk about a lot of that stuff today. Before we get into it, do you feel like just introducing yourself and letting people know exactly what it is you do and what you’re hoping to get out of this conversation today?

Angela Blanco: Sure. Well, thanks, Oli, for having me on your podcast.

It’s great to be here. My name is Angela Blanco. I am the founder of Light Spanish. We help people from all over the world to become fluent in Spanish.

And yeah, mainly our main desire is to make people feel more comfortable and confident in their own process of learning to speak a foreign language.

Oli Anderson: Wow. So obviously this podcast is about creativity. So where would you say is the main link between the work you do and the creative process? Like what kind of things have you learned through helping other people learn that might be able to help people live a better life in general?

Angela Blanco: Yeah. Well, the fact of being involved with the ability to learn to communicate and to, well, let’s say translate, although translate is not exactly the word because, well, the idea is that your brain is creating ideas and you have to be able to transmit those ideas in a new language. It could be your mother tongue, it could be any language.

So yeah, the fact of working on that process, I think is constantly making you think around these topics of creativity and abilities that can make that process more smooth and nice for people.

Oli Anderson: So just to open it up a bit then, would you say that learning a language is, is it just about remembering things by rote? So remembering what the word dog means in one language and then going through the process of just translating that in your head to the next language or is there something more going on?

Is there something where you have to be more intuitive or where you have to be more, I don’t know, just spontaneous or get out of your own way? Like what is the deeper thing that you might have learned around just language itself by doing the work that you do?

Angela Blanco: That’s a great question. Well, the thing is at the beginning, at the very beginning, it’s something very, I don’t know, basic of what you say, translating information in the tongue that you know, that you speak and the language that you are learning. But of course, that has to, if you want to become fluent, you have to change that because otherwise it’s very, exhausting. I would say that you were spending twice the calories than normally you burned, trying to think in your mother tongue and then translate it into another language and then say it right correctly to the people that would be exhausting.

So just imagine if I were doing that right now, this podcast would take hours, right? So the thing is that the ability to take that information that is given by dictionaries, books, tutors, whatever, and make it yours to make it something that you can transmit, that it becomes that your brain is going to connect your thoughts and your emotions directly to that language. That’s the thing that needs a lot of thinking and a lot of planning and that takes time and that was well, I’m very passionate about this topic. So it’s an amazing thing that happens in your brain and when you’re able to do it, well, it’s amazing, but it happens just through knowing yourself and learning about yourself and how you process information. Something that we don’t learn when we’re at school.

Oli: Yeah, at school they just teach you the words, this is a cat, this is a dog, this is a chair, but actually what you’re talking about is unconscious competence, like you can get to that stage of learning where you’ve integrated so much that the language like you just said, it becomes yours. So it becomes a personal thing and the way that we use language and the choices we make and the style, I guess, in which we speak and make our own, that actually is the highest level ultimately of being articulate with the language, but I suppose you could apply that also to any creative process.

It’s the same journey every time, isn’t it? Like you start with the basic building blocks, like a color palette or certain words or whatever it is, but then as you go deeper into it, it becomes part of you and like part of your experience as a human being and then everything you do with it is a true expression of yourself. So now I’m getting really excited and passionate about things, but thank you.

But do you think that’s, I don’t know, is that a fair thing to say? So basically language is a creative thing, language learning is a creative thing, because like any other creative process, you take in the building blocks, you play around with them a little bit, but then eventually if you keep going, you can get to that stage where it truly becomes part of you, I guess.

Angela: Absolutely, yeah, that’s the case and it’s great that you compare it to art. Well, I play the guitar, so I know kind of the process of getting that music language into yourself and being able to transmit it. And I could say that there’s lots of things in common because of that, creating that connection that is between your emotions and this new code, let’s say, to transmit yourself.

So yeah, I mean, even if you or any listener is not into learning a language, let’s say, I would recommend just to research on that because it’s been, it’s been very interesting, the studies that have been existing around it about how speaking a language, for example, at the beginning makes your personality change a little bit because you are sort of developing your personality through that language and it could make you very rational and, I don’t know, logical at the beginning and it’s more difficult to transmit your feelings.

But I would say from my own experience that over the time, the more you are involved with the language and the more you grow, let’s say, in that language, the more you’re able to transmit your emotions. But both of these are process, so it’s very similar in that aspect to art or to any skill that requires that whole, I don’t know, connection with the skill, with the information.

Oli: Yeah, 100%. A major theme that keeps coming up in this podcast is that the creative process can actually be anything. It’s not just about painting a picture or taking photos or whatever it is, it can literally be anything that helps you to increase awareness of yourself and then allows you to express yourself to a heightened degree, basically. Because as you go through the creative process, you basically, you become a more holistic or whole version of yourself.

And so what you’re saying actually is something I never thought about, but just learning a language is exactly the same process. You start off, you’re in alien territory, you’ve got a right through uncertainty, you’ve got to fill your head with new information in that case. But as you keep moving forward, like I’ve kind of been a broken record, but as you keep moving forward, you and the form that you’re working with, which is language in this case, it becomes one thing, or maybe there’s a slight gap between the words and the person if you want to get philosophical, but ultimately, it becomes an extension of you.

So with that being said, if you agree with it, how do people, you know, what kind of journey in general, would you say, people have to go through to get from that stage of conscious incompetence, I guess, where they know that they’re not very good at something to becoming totally fluent and being able to truly express themselves just without even thinking with complete competence, if that makes sense?

Angela: Yeah, well, that’s the, that’s the one million question.

And there have, there have been lots of theories around it. What is, I mean, not only what happens, but what is the best way to make it happen? I would say that the very beginning, you have this data, right, that is, or sounds, maybe in the form of sounds that you just listen and you say, well, that means something to someone amazing, but for me, it’s just impossible to understand, or letters or in some languages, different alphabets for systems of writing, right? That’s the first approach you have when everything is just that extra information. And the question is how you’re going to acquire it.

How are you going to learn it? There is an aspect of memorizing that information, but also what is going to be more efficient for you to own it, right? So by asking yourself how I’m going to jump from seeing this information, memorizing it, and making it my own. Well, that’s the trick, and that’s what I mainly put more of my energy on.

And that’s why I talk a lot about learning styles as a way to solve that question. And yeah, we name it superpowers because I truly believe that we have that, that our brain has some skills that are stronger, and that that makes us actually very powerful and make us more creative and more able to jump those steps and become fluent in the case of my business. Yeah.

Oli: Yeah. So this is a perfect segue into that, then, the superpowers thing. So can you tell us a little bit more about, you know, your definition of what a superpower is and then maybe give some examples as well?

Angela: Yeah. Well, I use the word superpower. But definitely that has a theory behind. It’s more about the learning styles. That’s something that some psychologists in the past have been studying about how we are, let’s say, wired in a way that make us capable of processing information in an easier way through some income or some input, actually.

So, for example, some people are very good listening, maybe probably the people who is right now listening to this episode, they could be, I don’t know, washing dishes or going for a run or just going to walk. And some of the information that they’re listening to right now is going to stick in the brains and maybe they will be able to repeat it and to talk about it in the future. But not everyone is like that. And despite of being listening on radio, a very famous media system, there is also TV. So some people are more visual and are able to talk about those things easily if they were able to see, to watch what was happening.

So that’s for mentioning just two of them. But of course, we can be talking about musical visual ability to interact with others and learning through the interaction with others or that are more related to movement or more kinesthetic. Some people learn more when they’re able to move or act or apply things in a more physical way. So that’s the sort of what I mean through the superpower, that ability that you have.

And that, intuitively, you know that you have, but you think that you cannot use it for your own advantage because, well, when we’re at the school, we’re just passive, receiving information passively, right? So definitely, we think that maybe that’s not going to work, but we know that we have some abilities. And what we try to do is to motivate people to use those abilities, those superpowers again.

To use them for acquiring information and then for making it, well, to use it properly.

Oli: So the theory is that everybody has some kind of a superpower. And if they can tap into it or figure out what it is, then it’s going to make it easier for them to go down this path we were talking about earlier, where instead of just consciously having to think about everything and using the left brain for everything and just being very rational and logical and all that kind of stuff, they can go down this path towards doing things in a much more spontaneous, free, unconscious way where they’re making their art or their language or whatever it is their own.

So how do people find their superpowers? And does everybody have all of the superpowers? Would you say it’s a differing degree?

Angela: That’s a good question. Well, the way we find them through our way to react to information, as I mentioned, sometimes we see it more evidently. Sometimes we have to be told. Sometimes our friends know better about how we process information and they say, well, I always say this, you know, you’re good at this or you are very good at recommending music.

I don’t know, you have a thing for recommending good music or podcasts or whatever. So sometimes our friends or our family are better at detecting those things. But we know it as well. I think that people know deeply that they have some of those talents or superpowers. And yeah, sometimes we have more than one. I mean, mentioning that list, of course, there are eight different types of intelligences.

That’s how it is named originally. We have different percentages of all of them. So some people have a very high percentage that it goes to visuals. So they’re amazing, for example, with location GPS things or mind mapping or organizing concepts visually. But it doesn’t mean that they’re not good at listening, they’re not good into the, I don’t know, with interpersonal situations. But definitely, I mean, we can have different, different intelligences. We can have different superpowers. And the way to detect it, it could be through a very scientific way that there are some ways as tests and things that you can do.

But also intuitively, we know, we know what we’re good at. Somehow.

Oli: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you think sometimes people might make the mistake of, I guess, overly romanticizing or wanting to have a certain superpower because of how they might, how it makes them, how they think it’s going to make them look or because of their own self image and its desires and all that kind of stuff. And so sometimes people put themselves on the wrong path because they’re choosing things because of their own, I guess, emotional relationship with themselves.

Is that something that might happen?

Angela: Yeah, yeah, there are some intelligences, some superpowers that are more fashionable than others. So to speak, because, well, that’s cool, or in general, because of the way the world works. I would mention one of them that is the logical mathematical intelligence or superpower is considered way more important or way more useful in life. Or at school, we name it, we decide that the intelligent people, we can say, yeah, he or she is intelligent because they’re good at science, because they’re good at maths, because they’re good at chemistry.

I don’t know. So, so yeah, there are some of them that we want to have because our parents or our tutors or professors at uni have told us that those are great. But I think it’s a shame, but yeah, definitely, definitely we have that pressure to be in good quotation marks, intelligent by being good at maths or things like that. So yeah, that’s the one that we unconsciously aspire to, the society.

Oli: Yeah, like when I was asking that question, that’s kind of what I was thinking. So in general, our society in our culture is really only in love with kind of conceptual left brain intelligence that you’re kind of talking about, where everything is ultimately about just being very linear, very results driven, not really about relationships and all that kind of stuff. It’s about facts. It’s about remembering things instead of experiencing things.

All that kind of limited knowledge or that limited approach to knowledge, it stops us from truly expressing ourselves and getting in touch with the realist version of who we are. I think I’m not saying we don’t need that. We obviously need to use our brains.

I think a lot of people try and they rebel against that and say that they just need to be following their hearts all the time and all this kind of stuff. Okay, great. But it’s one piece of the puzzle. And so do you think it’s fair then to say that the education system is super limited in a way still, even in this day and age 2023. Do you think it still has quite a myopic view of what it means to be intelligent, but also to be a human being based on what you’ve learned with, you know, all the things you’re talking about?

Angela: Yeah, well, you mentioned this day and age. The fact is that it hasn’t changed a lot during the last hundreds. So, so yeah, it’s still not working very well. I have this chat with, well, actually, with the people I teach Spanish to and I think the fact that you are in front, let’s say as a tutor that you’re in front of 30 or I don’t know, depending on the country in my country, sometimes 45 people could be in the same classroom.

I don’t know quite well how is it in the UK. But the fact that you have 45 or well 30, let’s say 30 to not to make it too dramatic, but very different, different human beings in front of you, right. And all of them with different experiences with different superpowers, right. And you have this book of information about who knows history or something like that.

You won’t be able to transmit or to guide people to acquire that information, mainly because there is just one possible way. Maybe this traditional way is going to work for some people, some of them. And that’s why sometimes you listen to people who say, actually, I learned that at school and you’re like, okay, I don’t remember anything from school.

Right. So maybe because the way of acquiring knowledge, luckily was similar to the traditional way of learning, right, that we have school. But some others just say like, no, I didn’t, I didn’t learn anything about physics or yes, I did. I memorized that for the exam.

I did my exam and never use it again. That wasn’t meaningful. That wasn’t a meaningful experience to you.

So your brain just playing it, you know, it’s in the short memory section because it wasn’t given to you in the right way. So I advocate for smaller groups or more personal interactions with information and with knowledge or the capacity of being autonomous because that’s the only real way that you’re going to learn. So, so yeah, yeah, I suffer a lot talking about education. But I’m doing my best to not to get too sad.

Oli: Yeah, don’t be upset. It’s okay. We’ll figure it out. So basically what you’re saying, it goes back to what we were saying at the start about making things our own. So in the case of language learning, you can go deeply into the process and eventually it’s not just about the conceptual stuff, the words and how the grammar might work and all these little conceptual rules that we remember. It becomes something that’s deeply embedded within us and becomes part of our experience.

But what you’re saying is that the education system really only focuses on the earliest stages in general terms. It focuses on the earliest stages of that continuum or spectrum where it’s just about the conceptual stuff, the superficial stuff, the things that are easy to kind of, you know, test and analyze and to, you know, give people marks for and all that kind of stuff. But to make it truly meaningful, the education system needs to go deeper into, I suppose, like offering experiences or some kind of experiential understanding where people can actually really embed this knowledge that we’re talking about that they’re learning in their experience of themselves.

So if you agree with that, what are some things that could be done maybe to kind of take people deeper into this kind of thing we’re talking about of unconsciousness competence?

Angela: Yeah, no, no, definitely. I agree with you and what you say. And I think when you mentioned this experience that we have at school for when we learned, well, learned in quotation marks again, to speak a language. Yeah, we just get to the most superficial part of it, where the further the furthest that we go in this process is just to maybe decodify and very strictly the word to decodify some of the things that are being told in a text.

So you say, okay, this one looks a little bit similar to this word in English, so it should mean something like this. So you write it down and you do your best and you try to, yeah, literally decodify what is being told there, but you are not able to use those codes to transmit a new idea. You cannot create, you cannot talk about yourself when you are having a nice beer in the coast of Spain or who knows in Latin America, you are not able to have a chat, right, with a Spanish or with French or with a mandarin or with any language, because you’re just able to decodify.

So you just get to the very basic level of it. It’s like, I don’t know, for the case of musicians, it’s like if you learn to read a score and you know that that’s a C or that’s a B or whatever, but you don’t know how it sounds and you don’t know how to create a new song with it or you don’t know how those notes interact with each other and create a chord. None of those things are being told to school, we just know that, yeah, Gato is cat and yeah, I saw that somewhere and I’m able to decodify it. So yeah, yeah, it’s sad and then you learn that languages are impossible, right? It’s like, I don’t know how people make it because it’s very difficult, I learned nothing at school, I must be bad at it, I should suck at it because definitely I’m not able to do it, I’ve never been able to do it and it’s just because, well, we actually never tried a lot to do.

Oli: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So far we’ve kind of, I suppose, blamed the education system for making people focus on just the conceptual stuff, but in a way, I think a lot of people, they like the conceptual knowledge because it’s easier to control and you can decode if I let you say it, you can rearrange things, you can look things up in a dictionary or whatever, it’s all very, very easy to kind of work with, but in order to, I suppose, become more skilled at using the knowledge you’re picking up in that way – you kind of have to let go of it and that’s when it becomes kind of an inner journey.

I think everything is an inner journey, to be honest, but like in this case, it’s almost like if you don’t have a certain relationship with yourself and you don’t have certain qualities in yourself or that you’re not committed to developing those qualities, then you’re never going to be able to go down this path that we’re talking about from conscious to unconscious competence, if that makes sense.

And yeah, so what kind of, I guess, inner qualities or what kind of inner understanding do people need to get to or develop in order to be able to successfully navigate this path that we’re talking about?

Angela: Yeah, well, I was thinking about what you mentioned about this inner knowledge and that’s definitely the case. I think that’s why some of the words in every language that I’ve been able to speak, one of the words I love is autonomy, because I think that’s the capacity of telling to yourself what you should do, right? What you should be able to do for yourself, you’re responsible of yourself.

So when you’re autonomous, you’re able to own those things and you know that that depends on you. Yes, you’re right, we have been talking about this, the education system and all of it, that the only thing that it has been done to us is to create some misconceptions about what learning is, but it depends on ourselves to detach from that and say, okay, no, that’s not going to happen. Or why do I see, I land everything on the language aspect, but why do I see other people on the street speaking a different language and no, they weren’t born with it or that happened by magic or no, that didn’t happen that way, right? They had to put themselves into that task of learning to do it.

So I can do it as well. There must be a way and I mean talking about misconceptions around this topic, for example, people just say, well, kids are the only ones who are able to speak a foreign language. They are just, I don’t know, they learn because they were small and they’re sponges and they absorb everything. And we give that magical aspect to learning and we just look at it and cite, nostalgically saying, well, just if I would have been able to do it, right? But, well, I can say very fastly that that wasn’t my case.

I learned to speak English when I was already an adult. So it’s possible. It’s possible. And I’ve been working with over 500 students now.

And all of them were adults. I just work with professionals. I just work with adults who want to learn to speak the language and to be fluent for, I don’t know, relationships, traveling, professional development. So I know this possible is just only about what are you ready to do? And how much did you want to learn about yourself?

And how much do you want to try and possibly fail into the process of building your own path to acquire information, acquire the knowledge, acquire the language, and then be confident to speak it. So, yeah. You have to do it.

Oli: Yeah. And it does come back to that word that you’ve shared, “autonomy”, because ultimately it’s up to us and the choices that we make about our relationship with ourselves. And so if people, you know, they have too much shame that they need to work on or if they’re just insecure or whatever it is, then they’re going to be control freaks, basically.

And control freaks almost always need their conscious mind in order to kind of try and shape and mold reality to their expectations and social programming so that they don’t go out of their comfort zone and have to face uncomfortable emotions. And so actually, when you were talking, what I was thinking is whether it’s in learning a language or it’s in the artistic process or just creating things in general or learning a new skill, whatever it is, it’s in learning people’s life. If you’re doing something in life, the conscious mind and the programming that you get and the identity that you pick up because of that, it’s almost like the stabilizers on a bike.

You know, when you’re riding a bike, you’re learning to ride a bike as a kid, you’ve got the stabilizer wheels on the side. Like the conscious mind is like that. But eventually, you have to take those stabilizers off and just go your own way and find your own way to like maintain balance and keep going and all that kind of stuff and ride through uncertainty, basically. And this process that you’re talking about is exactly the same thing. The problem is, people obviously identify with their conscious mind and they identify with all the expectations and all the assumptions and so on and so forth that come with it.

And it holds them back. One thing that I experienced when I was learning a language, I learned Japanese although I’ve forgotten most of it now, but I lived in Japan for four years. That was great. Yeah, so I was getting lessons and everything and it was good. I could remember everything. I was picking up certain words like in the way that you’re talking about, like a neko means cat, for example.

So wow, go me. I can translate and all that kind of stuff. But what I noticed was, if I got really drunk and I was drinking loads of sake or something, my Japanese would be like a million times better. And it’s because the conscious mind was gone. Like I took the stabilizers off thanks to the sake.

And that’s it. I was just really not fluent while I was just going for it. I’d have no problems. I could understand people.

Etc, etc. And the only difference was that my mind and my self judgment and my ability to face uncertainty and be spontaneous had all kind of changed a little bit, but it wasn’t a major thing that changed. I just went from being really attached to my conscious mind and overly thinking about everything to getting further down this path you’re talking about of doing things in a more unconscious way. So first of all, have you experienced that yourself? It sounds like it with the alcohol thing. And if so, why is this a thing? Like what is going on?

Angela: Yeah, yeah. Are you feeling the sake has some hidden power to make people speak languages?

Oli: I think that’s what it is. You should start selling it like with your lessons, your Spanish lesson. I know.

Angela: I’m going to put it on the website.

Oli Yeah, throw some sake in there.

Angela: Yeah, I know what you mean. There’s been lots of jokes around it. Yeah, definitely because when we’re on that state, we don’t care too much about our ego. And I think you have mentioned that in all the episodes that I’ve listened and that your ego sometimes is your biggest enemy.

Oli: Yeah, 100%.

Angela: And that’s exactly the case with that effect that the alcohol can make in your ability to speak another language.

And it’s very theoretically about it. There is at the beginning of your process of learning to speak a language, you have a sort of monitor. This is called monitor exactly. That is telling you to tell you what is right and what is wrong in the language, right? Because consciously you won’t be able to do it yet.

At the beginning you need a little tutor, let’s say in your brain telling you, no, that’s actually not the right word. You should pick this one. Or remember that you see that in that movie? Maybe you should use that word instead of this word.

Whatever. That little, let’s say, angel that is in our brain telling us what to do. But we have to, I say to misstudies, we have to kill that little monitor after a while because it’s not going to love us to move forward. It’s not going to help us to get fluent because it’s all the time passing everything that you are saying into a sort of filter of what is right and wrong.

And that doesn’t help for speaking. You start thinking, and then your brain said, oh my God, we don’t know it. We don’t know it. Or we’re going to do, we’re bad at this. I told you we should have never learned to speak Japanese, for example.

Your brain is starting to get in dramatic and everyone is looking at you and you should be shy or ashamed because of not speaking the language. That’s your ego telling you. And we as adults, we’re not good dealing with that. We don’t want to look weak in front of others.

And cultural aspects is even more complicated. I imagine you know that. So that’s when alcohol could come where your help and help you to. to say deem down, that ego thinking yourself. And you don’t mind, you’re having a good time, you’re having nice food and enjoying, and people smile at you when you say a word is working, so let’s keep doing it. I don’t know what is happening, but this is working. So you have killed, again, that monitor that is not allowing you to move to the next step in the learning process of the language that is, well, to make it unconscious.

It’s still very conscious. I think that’s one of the things. I’m not recommending people to come to a language session or to speak languages, always being drunk. But that helps you to learn about yourself. So imagine that happened to you, Ollie. You realized that you were able to do it, and after that, even without alcohol, you say, well, I were able to do it that night, and I was feeling tired, and I was a little drunk, but I did it, so it means I can do it.

It means I’m able to speak. So yeah, yeah.

Oli: Wow. I love that phrase that you threw in there about killing the monitor. Like, one thing I love trying to do on this podcast is just taking random things that people do and work on, and kind of extrapolate lessons from it into life itself. And actually, what you just said about the inner monitor, some people spend their whole lives living like that, walking around, and they’ve got this monitor in their head, basically judging everything that they do and making them hold back from doing the things that they want to do, and say, oh, this is wrong, this is right.

They’re just obsessed with, I suppose, the correctness of their actions, and because they’re analyzing everything before they do anything, these kind of people just end up hesitating and holding back, judging themselves, and it’s always that ego thing that you mentioned, a lack of self-acceptance and a lack of acceptance of life and just how it works. And if you can kill that monitor in life or in the creative process or in language learning like you’ve shared, you can go down that pathway of conscious to unconscious really very quickly.

The only thing stopping people going down that pathway is themselves, in most cases, and their relationship with themselves and how they see themselves and all that kind of thing. So obviously we’ve used alcohol as an example of a way to kill the monitor, or at least put the monitor to sleep for maybe a few hours, but have you got any, I guess, more salubrious or healthier ways of doing that? Like what are some healthy, practical ways to kill the monitor in life or language learning or anything else, I guess?

Angela: Yeah, yeah, that would be not very professional from ourselves to have it as the conclusion. Well, in worst cases in areas, maybe you need it, use it with cohesion, but yeah, when you’re in daily life situations and you want to kill that monitor or that ego, I think we come back to the same thing, and it’s about mindset.

You have to approach the process of learning anything with the best mindset that you’re going to make mistakes, that you’re going to feel sometimes embarrassed, that is not going to be good. I mean, you’re going to say the wrong word in the wrong place, in the wrong case, and people probably are going to laugh at you.

I mean, I have lots of stories with English about these problems, but it’s going to be fine. It’s just normal. You have to approach life as a kid would, you know? Just like, okay, I did a mistake and kids are always being corrected about what is the right way to speak or the right way to do something, and they don’t mind, they just do it.

And I think that’s the biggest ability. Of course, there is a brain development thing, of course, that plays a role in all of it, but one of the aspects that make children better learners is because they don’t care about making mistakes. And they feel safe about making mistakes.

And I think that’s the trick. If you’re able to find, in any skill that you want to develop, if you’re able to find an environment, play zone where you can make mistakes with someone you’re very comfortable, I mean, I think that sometimes choosing the right music instructor or the right language tutor or whatever is so important because you don’t feel safe. comfortable with everyone to make those mistakes. I think if you’re able to find that plain zone where you are able to make mistakes and laugh at them because yeah, of course, it’s going to be funny, but who cares?

If you’re able to create that, I think you will be able to build that confidence without alcohol, having to drink or yeah.

Oli: Wow, actually it’s so true. You were talking earlier about how a lot of people have this misconception that kids can learn languages because they’re just sponges and they pick information up so freely and all that.

It’s true in a way, but also kids just haven’t developed that inner monotony yet. So they don’t constantly judge everything that they’re doing, they’re not hesitating, they don’t beat themselves up if they make a mistake, like you said, they’re just more real. And I think as we become adults, we can, not always, but we can pick up a lot of this external bullshit basically that just shows up as this inner monitor that just gives us all these reasons to not be who we really are.

I think that inner monitor is always some external judgment that we’ve just hypnotized ourselves with. It’s never like actually us. I think when we’ve been real, we never judge ourselves because when we’re real, you can only accept yourself.

That’s how I see it and that’s how I’ve experienced it. And so it’s just about understanding that that monitor, it doesn’t even need to be alive in the first place. It’s just something we keep alive because of our emotional relationship with ourselves. But then also another interesting thing is, like you said, you can create like a safe environment for learning and playing and growing and doing your own thing. I suppose as kids, those safe environments are just naturally sort of built or constructed for us in general. But as we grow up and become adults, we just don’t set healthy boundaries and we can let people in our lives that are toxic or whatever. And so internally and externally, we can basically make choices to kill anybody or anything that is monitoring us and trying to judge us and make us feel bad. And we can just focus on our own thing. And ideally, that is just going from conscious to unconscious in the things that we learn. So we can make the unconscious conscious.

That was a weird sentence and become more whole. But it’s all about the choices we make and autonomy, basically, that’s the word you used and the mindset stuff. That’s what it comes down to. So that was me rambling. As per usual, I always end up doing that towards the end of these podcasts. But we’ve covered a lot. If you were going to wrap up this conversation, I just summarise everything that we talked about, and the main lessons that I suppose we put out there, or the main insights.

How would you do that? Have you got any final words of wisdom? That’s what I’m asking you.

Angela: Yeah, well, I do like your summary. Definitely. That comment about the differences between children and adults are something I agree a lot on.

What could I mention by the way? I think that autonomy thing that my final thought around it is going to be developed when we learn or we decide to accept that we don’t know exactly quite well how we learned better. How our brain is going to work better. Sometimes that’s why we go to school or an academy or to the university expecting something to happen that they’re going to give us the information we need. And the truth is that not necessarily, that’s not going to happen unless you are able to know yourself and to create that ability to learn.

My invitation for everyone is to be curious about it, to realise that that’s something we can do and create not only for languages, which is the topic that we have, but it could be for anything. And any skill that you want to master once you learn what is the best way to help your brain to process information and to acquire it, you will become autonomous and you will be able to extract information. A little example when you read books, not everyone is good at reading books, right? Some people say, oh, I’ve learned more through books than the university.

And someone would say, not my think, not my think, right? I can’t pass from 10 pages and I’m falling asleep. So that definitely will, it’s a warning alarm instead of feeling bad because some people learn through books and so this is a point of myself, I’m not intelligent enough or whatever. Just think what is going to be the best way for me. Make it a game.

Again, as children, they play and all of it, make it a game. What is going to be the best way for you to do it? And well, that’s mainly what we carry about in our language school and is finding that way and helping our students to create the routine of making the language part of their days based on that. So yeah, that’s how I could summarize it.

Oli: Yeah, I love it. It’s so true. Basically, we’re all different. We can’t compare ourselves to each other really.

There’s no point judging. And no matter who we are, what we’re trying to do, the path of learning and growing is the same. It’s about accepting ourselves more and more by making the unconscious conscious and in relation to the learning stuff that you’re talking about, it’s about getting out of our conscious minds so that we can basically kill this monitor inside of our heads and actually just do what we need to do and just kind of flow with life. So it’s amazing how it’s always the same underlying process for me. It’s a very human thing that you’re talking about. Can you let people know where they can find you?

If they want to learn Spanish or they want to send you an email or go get really drunk with you somewhere, what do they need to do to be able to do that?

Angela: Well, yeah, definitely. Talking about these superpowers, I’ve created a little version because well, of course, the whole test could be a little bit longer.

But I created this little quiz to detect what is your superpower. And well, this is on my website where you can find all my email and all the information as well. So it is lightspanish.co.uk. You go there, you’re able to find all the information about the school. You can contact me there. I have also my Instagram there.

All of it is there. But you can take the test and it’s going to give you the result about what is your brain superpower and how you’re explaining in a funny way, what your brain is good at and what you can do with it. Not only for languages, well, for anything, I mean, it’s going to help you for many, many things.

Oli: Yeah, absolutely. Awesome. You can use it for many things. Well, I think I’ll go do that now and find out what my superpower is.

But everyone else, I’ll share it, I’ll share the link in the show notes. And yeah, you’ve given us lots to think about, I think, in an unconscious way, of course. But Angela, thank you so much for coming on here. It’s been a really good chat. And I hope you enjoyed it too. I did. And I’m going to go get that drink. So thanks a lot.

Angela:That’s great. No, thank you so much again for having me. And it was a pleasure talking with you.

Creative Status: Episode 25: Emily Zorn: The Realness of Food

Published on April 3, 2023

Creative Status: Deconstruct ego, integrate the shadow, manifest real life.

It’s true that you ARE what you eat 👇

If you choose REAL food then you’ll have energy to keep moving and flowing with life and getting where you want to be.

If yoou choose UNREAL food then you’ll generally have less energy, feel sluggish, and be less likely to get where you want to be.

Ultimately, this all comes down to an AWARENESS of the difference between whole and processed foods and the ability to make real CHOICES given our environment and what’s possible for us.

These choices aren’t just impacted by external factors (as the ego often tells us) but by our EMOTIONAL relationship with ourselves and our levels of self-acceptance.

In this episode of Creative Status, I have a conversation with Emily Zorn (@emily_rd_ ), a registered dietitian and health coach who has worked with athletes from the Chicago Cubs, Ohio State University, and the University of Illinois.

Emily shares her passion for helping individuals achieve their health and nutrition goals through personalised coaching that takes into account the physical, emotional, and environmental aspects of eating.

We delve into the topic of REAL and unreal food and how the food choices we make are a reflection of our relationship with ourselves.

Emily explains how real food is nutrient-dense and supports our overall health and well-being, while unreal food provides little to no nutritional value and often leaves us feeling unfulfilled. Ultimately, it comes down to the difference between WHOLENESS or FRAGMENTATION (as per everything else).

Throughout the episode, Emily provides practical tips and strategies for making healthier food choices and developing a positive, real relationship with food.

She emphasises the importance of personalised nutrition and accountability, and how a real relationship with food can make all the difference in achieving your health goals.

Join us for an insightful conversation on how to become the healthiest and happiest version of yourself through focused choices about the food we eat and where it comes from!

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

All episodes on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6UG491sXbZv6fUKIMVrIT6

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 Emily: emilyzorn.com

Emily’s Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠instagram.com/emily_rd_

Creative Status Links:

Free one hour creative workshop to take you brand or project to the next level.

Show Transcript

Intro

Oli Anderson: Oh, hi there! Oli Anderson here, you’re listening to Creative Status, this podcast about using your creativity to improve your life. Today, we are talking about how you can apply all of the things we talk about on this podcast, i.e. growing real, moving towards wholeness, making choices for authenticity and blah blah blah. We’re applying all of that stuff to nutrition and food.

This is an interview with Emily Zorn, who is a life coach and nutritionist, and ultimately, we just decided to pick apart food from the point of view of real nurse and creativity and all these different things. It’s a really interesting conversation, especially if you like food. I’m Emily, thank you so much for coming on here and letting me interview you and everybody else.

I really hope you enjoy this interview and get some insight. Here we go.

Interview

Oli Anderson: Oh, hi there, Emily! Thank you so much for joining me today on this episode of Creative Status. We’re going to talk about, I’m assuming, food, because that’s your thing. Before we get into it, do you feel like introducing yourself and also letting everyone know what you hope to get out of this conversation today?

Emily Zorn: Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for having me. I’m super excited to have this conversation with you today.

Hello, everyone. My name is Emily Zorn, and I’m a registered dietitian and owner of Emily RD Nutrition Coaching. I’m living out in California in the US, and I own a nutrition coaching business. So I started my career off in sports nutrition.

I worked with collegiate and professional athletes for five years, and then I transitioned over into working with a wider variety of people because I’ve really found the need to help people not just with the food, with the nutrition piece, but also how to implement it into their lives and look at people and nutrition holistically. So it’s not just about what you eat, when you eat it, and how much it’s taking into account how you feel about yourself and why you make decisions in your environment, and all of this other stuff.

So what I’m hoping to get out of our conversation today is really just that, just digging deeper into the relationship between a person and themselves and food and how it’s all interconnected, because it really is what I’ve found throughout my six years as a dietitian. It’s super powerful when you’re able to tap into that side of nutrition beyond just this is how many calories you need and what kind of food you need to eat.

Oli Anderson: Wow. One of the main reasons I wanted to talk to you is exactly because all you just said, which is that food is ultimately so interconnected to so many different areas of our lives. For me, living a good life is about living a real life, which just means that you’re not blocking your own expansion and progress towards more wholeness and more connection to yourself and others and you keep growing and flowing and blah blah blah, but food plays a massively important role in that because if we make bad food choices or the wrong food choices, then it can affect our health, it can affect our energy levels, and by extension, that affects everything else that we do. And so I really wanted to just dig into that and to pick it to pieces, because food is one of those things that is connected more than anything else to the natural processes of life itself.

If that makes sense, food obviously comes from the ground, it comes from nature, and so if you get food stuff right, probably you get a lot of other things right as well in your life and the way that it goes.

I don’t know if that sounds too dramatic or over the top, but does that kind of resonate with the kind of way that you see it?

Emily Zorn: Oh, definitely. I mean, definitely not too dramatic as a dietitian food is my life, right? And I’m thinking about it all the time. We all have to, right? What you said about how your connection to food really shows how we’re doing in other areas of our lives.

Well, food is something that all of us need to think about every single day, and it’s just something that fuels us. So if we’re able to get that right, it really is quite a good mirror into the rest of our lives. So I definitely agree with what you’re saying. there.

Oli Anderson: Awesome. So one very simple way that I’ve looked at the food stuff in my own life is in a way that I also look at everything else. So there’s two ways of saying it. You can either say that it’s real versus unreal or slightly more philosophically, you can say that it’s about wholeness or it’s about fragmentation. For me, what we need to do as human beings to live a good life, like I said, is to keep moving towards wholeness.

Wholeness means that we’re connected to ourselves, we’re connected to the world, and we’re connected to reality and nature itself at the deepest possible level for ourselves. And when it comes to food, I think we can basically make a choice between whole foods, which are foods where you look at them and you know what it is, and fragmented foods or processed foods, where you look at it and it’s got all kinds of different chemicals, all kinds of different bullshit in it, and you don’t actually know exactly what you’re eating. And it seems to me that if you’re eating the whole food, then that generally leads to health.

And if you’re eating the fragmented food or the processed food, that leads to low energy and bad health and all that kind of stuff. Maybe that’s too simple, but would you say that it does work on those kind of general principle?

Emily Zorn: No, I love that. I love your discussion around wholeness versus fragmentation, especially as it comes to food. I mean, as you’re saying that the first thing that comes to mind is the difference between grabbing some frozen meal out of the fridge, putting it in the microwave, eating it, and on the other side, to make it very extreme on the other side, going to a farmer’s market, seeing the farmers who grew your food, picking it up, bringing it home, cooking it, it’s just a totally different experience.

And I do want to say we live in this modern society where many people don’t have access to a farmer’s market.

It’s expensive. Maybe we don’t have time to cook like that every day, but it is just good to notice that, hey, there is a difference between having those whole foods, putting your soul and your time into creating a meal, that experience, it goes beyond the food, even if you’re having potatoes, chicken, and carrots, right?

Whether it’s in the frozen microwave, dinner form, or making it yourself, it’s the same macronutrients, it’s the same protein, carbs, fat, calories even, but it’s a different experience. And that’s where food becomes more than just the tangible what it is and can really pull in emotion, mental status, all of that.

So yes, I think that that’s a great way to put it. Also, my personal view on this is if we could eat the whole foods 100 % of the time, that would be amazing, but a lot of us can’t, like I said before, for money reasons, time reasons, whatever it is.

So it’s okay if you aren’t 100%. I often tell people, if we can eat those whole foods and eat healthy 80 % of the time, you’re winning. There’s gonna be times where we’re not perfect and not beating ourselves up and making us feel bad and guilty about ourselves and oh, I’m such a failure, that’s not doing anyone any good. So it’s all about setting the standard for yourself, right? The more whole foods, the better, but some of the not so healthy stuff is okay.

You can still be healthy overall and not be at that 100 % whole food all the time.

Oli: Wow. So this is bringing us onto this idea of the choices that people make. So I agree with you completely. In an ideal world, we’d just be eating whole foods. It would have been fairly freshly killed if it was meat and we were meat eaters.

It wouldn’t have been sat in a freezer or on a shelf for days and days, and that would be the choice that we would make. But obviously, because of all the pressures on our lifestyles or because of our emotional stuff or whatever it is we’ve got going on individually, we can always choose that.

And so do you think there’s something around the way that we make choices and how that reflects on, I guess, what’s going on inside of us emotionally, but also how we might see ourselves and how we might see our lives and the power that we have over it, if that’s not opening up too much?

Emily: No, no, I think that is so important and truly a side of nutrition that as a dietitian, we’re not taught about this stuff in school, at least not here in the US, right? We’re not really encouraged to dive deeper into how do our food choices reflect our lives and why do we make food choices in all of this? And so I’m also a certified life coach and I did that because I saw that this was such an important piece of health and nutrition.

So I definitely have thoughts. Yeah, when we value ourselves and look at ourselves as an asset and something worth taking care of, we do everything we can to make those choices in the environment that we’re in as much as possible that serve us, right? And also there’s another piece to that where when we have that deep connection with ourselves and truly value ourselves and and are able to turn in.

That’s also when we have a better read on what our body is trying to tell us. And that is such a huge part of eating and nutrition. Something I share with people a lot is the scale. It’s called the hunger and fullness scale. And it gives numbers to feelings of hunger and fullness and satisfaction.

And it’s really eye-opening for a lot of people to look at this and realize, oh, I shouldn’t just eat because something is there. What I can do instead is check in and say, am I hungry? How hungry am I? Trying not to get too hungry because that’s when biology just takes over and you wanna eat whatever’s around. Like really playing around with that and learning when our body tells us that it’s hungry, when it tells us that it’s full and what that looks like. Cause it’s very different for each person. So yeah, really having that ability to have that connection with ourselves, love ourselves, trust ourselves.

That’s probably one of the biggest things I see with people is trusting that your body is going to tell you what to do and then you know how to respond and putting yourself in an environment where you’re able to make those healthy choices based on what your body is telling you. So there’s a lot there.

Oli: Yeah, so one thing I was thinking there is, at the start of the conversation, we were talking about the wholeness slash fragmentation thing. So again, to sound like a broker record for me, like everything is about moving towards wholeness.

This podcast is about creativity but it opens up so many other areas of exploration because when you start moving towards wholeness, well, that just brings everything that human beings do into the equation. And so here with food, there’s almost an element of, if you are moving towards wholeness, then you’re kind of in the flow of life and that means that you do trust yourself and that you accept yourself and that you can handle obstacles that pop up along the way and all these kinds of things.

If you can do that and you’re struggling because you’ve got too many emotional and mental blocks that you’re putting in your path, well, that is because you become fragmented within yourself to some extent.

And so if we’ve said that this applies to food as well, there’s whole food, there’s fragmented food and there’s choices that we can make around that, it’s almost like if you can be present with yourself, if you can be present with life, you’re more likely to make choices for the whole foods and if you’re not, you’re fragmented and you’re distracted and you’re constantly trying to hide from yourself or run away from your experience of whatever’s going on inside of you because of shame and guilt and trauma and blah, blah, blah.

That’s when you’re gonna use food as an extension of the fragmentation, which means food becomes a distraction and so you’re not listening to your body, you’re just eating for kind of mind-driven reasons. I don’t know if that was a very long-winded way of saying that but do you see what I’m saying?

Like the choices basically come down to the way that we identify and how present we can allow ourselves to be and there’s almost a presence-based way of approaching food and a distracted way of approaching food.

Emily: Absolutely, 100 % and that’s another big topic that I feel very strongly about is the whole idea of mindful eating, present eating. Just like my example earlier where, you know, the frozen meal versus farmer’s market meal, there’s a big difference between making yourself a plate, sitting down, focusing on it, not listening to anything, not watching TV, not reading anything, just eating your food and paying attention how it feels in your body compared to that same amount of food thrown into a bowl, grab a spoon, sit down on the couch and eat it, right? And that’s just like the, you know, frozen meal versus the farmer’s market meal.

It’s okay to do that. I’m a dietitian, I do this for a living and sometimes that second scenario where I’m sitting in front of the TV eating out of a bowl, that happens. But the ability to recognize that there is a difference between these two experiences even if it’s the exact same food.

So I love how you simplified it there about the presence versus distraction. When we’re able to give ourselves that gift of being present with ourselves, focusing on the meal, and we don’t always have to be by yourself, you know, you’re with a partner, you’re with a friend, you’re with a group of friends, family, whatever it is, but not purposely distracting yourself from what you’re eating or from your environment. And that’s where emotional eating comes in, stress eating comes in. It really is, you know, grabbing a handful of chocolate chips or the whole bag of chocolate chips and just eating that. Like it does give you that initial sense of this is calming.

It’s different for different people, right?

This is very personalized, but it’s either calming or it’s a treat at the end of the day or it makes me feel happier, whatever it is. For a lot of people, that is way easier than sitting with yourself and figuring out, okay, I’m craving chocolate chips, something soothing right now, what could that be that isn’t food? Food is so quick and easy. Even if it makes us feel bad an hour after you eat the whole bag of chocolate chips, in the moment, our body just craves that. Our body and our brain and our emotions, we’re just craving something soothing and that’s easy.

Takes a lot more deep diving into yourself and coaching and all of those sort of things to not only break that habit, but go even deeper and figure out why am I doing this? What am I searching for? What feeling am I searching for from the distracted overeating? And how can I get that in a way that doesn’t involve food?

And how can I use food in the opposite way to be more present and maybe even get those comforting, soothing feelings while being present with myself and eating the whole meal? So it’s a lot going on here. But yeah, I think it’s all very interconnected.

Oli: Wow. Can you talk a little bit more about the emotional eating stuff? So for me, I think in general, people are either shame driven, which means that they end up being one of these kind of mind driven people that I was kind of talking about who end up trying to distract themselves. Or they either kind of shame free or they’re shame dissolving, which means that they may have some underlying shame, but they’re aware of it, they’re accepting it.

They’re not trying to hide from it, basically. But I find that the shame driven people, they’re the ones who end up just doing everything mechanically. It just becomes, you know, like a distraction, like I said, or purely instinctual, purely habitual. And do you think that applies to the emotional eating stuff and the way that people are driven to either eat in a mechanical way or maybe in a more creative way?

Emily: Oh, yeah, really good question. So yeah, when it comes to shame, I think a lot of this has to do with just what people have been fed, pun intended, their whole life about food and what it means. So if we grow up in a household where every time you eat a cookie or a piece of cake, you have someone commenting on like, Oh, you’re so bad, or are you sure you want that?

And comments like that, they get very ingrained in our brain. So if that is, and it doesn’t even have to be in the home, it can simply be from diet culture, or on Instagram, and you’re being fed all these different detox teas, and, you know, do this diet and lose all this weight and quick fixes this and that.

It’s just all around us that eating bad foods makes you a bad person that it’s just bad, bad, bad all around. So then it makes sense when people start eating, you know, they have the shame, but they want the cookies. So they start eating the cookie, and nothing wrong with eating one or two cookies every now and then I’m all for it. But then the whole shame cycle starts as well.

I’m now a bad person because I ate the bad food. So I’ll just keep going. And that’s where it becomes an issue, right? Then it’s I instead of two cookies, I had 12 and then I just grab the bag of chips instead. And then it’s just the shame cycle. And it becomes a habit, right? And if that’s your habit of, you know, I eat clean all day long, and then I have the one cookie and it turns into a whole thing. Then it’s a habit.

So yeah, very, it can be hard to break. But I really think for a lot of people, it’s just the first recognition of, Hey, in all honesty, there’s no good food and bad food. There’s food that makes us feel better.

That’s whole. And then there’s food that’s there, but it doesn’t make us a bad person by eating it. So by allowing us to allowing ourselves to say, Hey, I can have whatever I want, whenever I want, but I check in and recognize that when I eat the healthier foods, I feel way better emotionally and mentally, physically.

This goes back to the trust to that we start trusting ourselves that we will make the right decisions. And then it helps get rid of the shame of bad food I eat it. I am then a bad person.

So I think that’s a first step into this. And, you know, I’m, I’m not a therapist. So I a lot of times when I do meet with clients, it gets to the point where, you know, I make sure that they are seeing a therapist as well, because your life coaching is not therapy. But we can touch into some of these topics as well and recognize that, yeah, the shame and the distractiveness the instinctual just grabbing for something, we can try to loosen that up and break it down and figure out, okay, where’s this coming from and how do we rebuild new habits and new neural pathways into what we want, which is, you know, a more wholesome approach to nutrition and less shame around food.

Oli: Wow. Do you think, like, in general, so obviously, everyone’s different, but do you think you can look at the food habits or the food relationship that somebody has and you can almost reverse engineer those choices that they’re making to basically get a better understanding of what’s going on inside them. I don’t know if that makes sense. Do you know what I mean? Does that even make sense?

Emily: Yeah. Yeah, it does make sense. It’s whether taking a look at how people make choices around nutrition, whether that has a connection to how they are emotionally, mentally at that time.

Yeah, definitely. And again, I don’t want to step outside my scope too much, but I do, I do see that because nutrition has, like I said earlier, it has an effect on all of us. We all need to eat. It’s something we have to do multiple times a day.

So it’s kind of a microcosm of our entire lives, right? If the food is something that we’re fueling our bodies while we’re making the good decisions, we’re taking a step back and saying, how will this meal impact me for the rest of today, the rest of the week?

Having that comfortable and confident feeling around food would definitely translate to, for the most part, a comfortable, confident feeling in other parts of a person’s life, you know, just emotionally, mentally, all of that. So, and then on the other end, if someone, like we talked about earlier, if someone’s using food to distract themselves or to self soothe, there’s a reason for that, right? We’re not just distracting ourselves from nothing. We’re soothing ourselves from nothing.

So this is where food gets very emotional and taking a step back from, this is what you’re eating now and this is what you’re supposed to eat. Like, that’s not the issue. The issue is further below. It’s more of the why and helping a person, not, you know, it’s not my job to talk to someone and say, oh, this is your why.

This is why you’re shamefully and distractedly eating. Like, no, it’s, it’s my job to ask the questions to help them realize for themselves because they, you know, I always tell people I’m an expert in nutrition, but you’re an expert in yourself and your life and your body. So you tell me, I’m just here to ask the questions like you tell me what it is in that situation, like what feelings are coming up for you. And then, like you said, we reverse engineer it and try to get to the real true heart of the matter, like, what, what is off? And how can we correct that to then cascade into not only nutrition, but every other piece of our lives so we can make sure that we’re feeling like we’re on a good place emotionally and mentally, which then can spill over into the physical side as well.

Oli: Wow. Normally when I’m working with people in my coaching practice or when I’m talking about this stuff with people, it almost always boils down to the way that they think and the underlying emotional stuff that is influencing those thoughts.

And I found that the underlying emotional stuff is almost always a combination of shame, guilt, and in the extreme cases trauma. And so maybe this is throwing out a massive curveball, but if you were going to reverse engineer food habits back to those emotions, what might it look like? So we’ve already talked about the shame thing. So if somebody is very shame driven, for example, then they’re going to probably be eating in a distracted way.

They’re going to be very mechanical about the food choices that they make. They might sometimes deny themselves certain things because they’re ashamed of how people might see them, blah, blah, blah. But is there anything around the guilt and the trauma stuff? Maybe. And I know it’s outside of maybe you’re not a therapist and all that stuff like you said, but are there any things that you might have noticed?

Emily: Sure. Yes. And everyone listening, take this with a grain of salt, but with the guilt piece, how I could imagine that playing out is if someone is living constantly feeling guilty about different things in their life, whatever that is, if that’s their their core feeling, then yeah, that would definitely spill over into food.

And you know, maybe a similar way as the shame in that you feel guilty for eating that slice of pizza when you told yourself you were going to not eat carbs all week, whatever it is. So you feel guilty and then that spirals. And when it comes to nutrition, a lot of times it is just. what I see a lot is this spiral where logically people know, you know, honestly, if I have one slice of pizza, I know that’s not gonna throw me off, but it’s something about, yeah, with the guilt, if you have a piece of pizza and then this, the floodgates just open and then it’s like, well, I feel guilty already. This is what I was trying to avoid by not eating carbs. So I’ll just continue to make myself feel worse, guiltier and guiltier by eating more and more.

So that’s what comes to mind with the guilt. And then, you know, trauma, I think that would play more into trying to soothe our feelings that come up from that trauma, whether, you know, it’s seeking safety, comfort, happiness, whatever it is that is missing because of that trauma, food is a quick and easy way to get that in the short term. So for those types of clients, it’s, and if anyone is dealing with trauma, definitely a time where I would refer out to a therapist as well, but with those types of clients, it’s just getting them to see, really dig deep, figure out what the feelings are, and then coming up with new go-to habits that can give them just the same feelings that they get from, you know, a big bag of chips or whatever and also getting to look in the long term, where it could be really tempting and simple and easy to just say, I’m unhappy, I know eating a bag of chips is gonna make me happy, so I’ll do it.

Instead, helping them take a step back and say, how is this, I’m not talking like a one ounce bag, I’m talking like the big bag of chips, how is eating this whole bag going to make me feel in three hours, in a day, in a week, like looking at the big picture? And finding ways to replace that, because we can’t just go from, well, this was my go-to for comfort, now I have nothing, right, so talking about other ways to seek that comfort.

Oli: Wow. What you’re just saying there as well about, you know, kind of thinking about the future, that’s made me think about something I never thought about food choices, but actually it’s kind of obvious, if you value yourself, then probably you’re gonna have some kind of a vision for the future and where you’re going and the kind of person you’re becoming and all that kind of stuff, and that means you are more likely to choose the healthier whole foods, because you’re growing and into wholeness and expanding and all that stuff.

If you don’t have a vision or something for yourself, then you’re just gonna make choices in the short term, and again, that’s gonna be reflected in the food choices, I would assume, where you’re just gonna eat that big bag of chips and you don’t really, you know, you just don’t care what happens, because it doesn’t really matter in your view of yourself. Is that…

Emily: That’s big, yeah. I love that.

Oli: Wow. So if somebody is in that situation then, where, you know, they’re just making these short term choices, it’s all very distraction, and they’re not really that bothered about the health consequences and all that kind of stuff, but maybe deep down, they do wanna make some changes, how can they make a shift from that kind of short term way of seeing things to a kind of longer term relationship with themselves and food by extension?

And just to open that up even more, is there something there around creativity maybe, because obviously, the theme of this podcast, but also ritualizing the food and the relationship with the food?

So the reason I’m bringing rituals into it is because that example you gave earlier about, you know, getting the food from the farmer’s market versus the, you know, microwave dinner, whatever it was, the, it’s the same food, but in a way, the whole approach, the farmer’s market approach, is almost more of a ritual that is bringing us into the present and all of the things that come with that, even if we do have this long term vision.

So that was a very, you know, rambling way of answering, asking that question, but what do you think about all that?

Emily: For sure. So yeah, so from what I understand from the question, it’s how can a person go from the short term, just eating to, you know, feel good in the moment, how can they go from that to having this long term vision and plan and ritualizing the food?

Yeah, no, I love that, with the umbrella of creativity as well. So what I would suggest for a person, and you know, this can be hard to do by yourself. So try it by yourself, but also know there’s lots of coaches out there who specialize in this specific thing as well. So it’s all about, like you said earlier, in the short term, it’s when people have that short term, whatever, I’m just gonna eat this, it doesn’t matter.

You’re lacking the vision, you’re lacking the long term goals. So this is what I do with anyone who’s interested in making nutrition changes. We don’t start by saying, what do you eat? What did you eat today?

You know, tell me everything. No, that’s the last thing we do. The first thing is we talk about that vision.

We say, what is it you want to achieve? What, and it doesn’t have to be, I wanna lose 20 pounds. I wanna gain all this muscle. I wanna do this, I wanna do that.

For some people, it’s just, I wanna live a healthy lifestyle and I wanna feel confident in myself and my choices. Love that. Whatever your vision is, it’s personal. So we talk about what is this vision?

What do you want to achieve? And even then, we don’t start planning. We take another step back and say, okay, how would your life change if you were to achieve this goal?

What would be different? Why is this important to you? Getting down to the why? Because without the why and without the motivation, it’s just, here’s the goal, here’s the plan. And if it were that simple to reach the goal, oh, I’m just gonna dive in and follow the plan, then people, it as a whole would be in a lot better place than we are right now with nutrition and emotions and all of this. So really important that you take a step back and say, why do I want this? How will my life be different?

Get really jazzed, really excited about this future. Visualize it. And this is where the creativity comes in.

Wow. I know we’re not talking about visualization and manifestation, all of that stuff, but there’s really something to be said for. Close your eyes and picture yourself when you’re at this peak of where you want to go. Like what is life gonna be like?

Write all the things down that come to your mind. So then you’re super excited. And that’s when we start talking about the plan.

How are we gonna get you from where you are now to this amazing version of yourself that you have visualized? Yeah, and that’s where dietitian work comes in. But when it comes to like you said, ritualizing food, I think that’s such an important piece of it as well. So that with this plan, we make it something that someone is able to do. We can’t go from I don’t cook at all to now I’m cooking three gourmet meals a day.

Like that’s not gonna work for someone, but making a plan and coming up with a ritual that’s going to work for them and that they’re going to be able to stick with is so important. And this is where again, creativity can come in. It doesn’t have to be boiled chicken and rice and broccoli. I know that’s like the go to and I’m like the ultimate helping meal. Let’s get fun with it.

Like what food do you love and what food do you hate? And let’s make sure that we come up with a plan that’s fun and easy to follow that can get you where you want to go. And then after that, it’s all just a matter of following it. Nutrition doesn’t work even as fast as exercise. Like you could start seeing gains a lot faster with the exercise piece like, oh, I’m able to lift more, I’m able to run farther, all of that. Nutrition takes time. So it’s really just about being patient and ignoring what everyone else is trying to sell you, which is lose 10 pounds in a week, take this pill, whatever. That’s not what it’s about. It’s about coming up with this plan that you can follow forever that suits you, that is getting you to your vision. And then you follow it and you look back a year later and say, oh my gosh, I’m a totally different person. I feel so much better. I’m more confident, all of the things.

So a long-winded answer to your question, but to summarize it, it’s all about coming up with your vision, getting to the why and then creating a plan that is gonna be sustainable and get you to that vision.

Oli: Wow. Do you think we could say that food is kind of the fuel for the vision?

Because obviously- Oh, I love that. If you make- the right choices or the whole choices as we keep saying, then obviously you’re going to have more energy, you’re going to be involved in different journeys or different rituals on the way to wherever your vision is taking you.

So to go back to your example again, there are rituals always involved in the food eating process or the food consumption process, but they’re so different depending on which path you’re putting yourself on. So if you’re in this short term way of seeing yourself and living, the journey you’re going to find yourself on is going to a really kind of antiseptic, empty, horrible kind of vapid environment like a supermarket and there’s all the bright lights and everything and then you go home, you put it in the microwave, you press the buttons and then that’s it.

You stuff your face, you watch TV, you roll over, you go to sleep or there’s the other rituals on the other path where you have to wake up and then you go down to the farmer’s market or wherever it is and you’re selecting specific veg based on how it looks and how it feels in your hand and all that kind of thing and then you go home and you have to be present as you cook it and obviously it’s whole food so it’s going to energise you more and blah, blah, blah.

Maybe I’m romanticising a bit, but those two ways of being, they put you on totally different paths and totally different human experiences and if you choose the second path, which is the path of wholeness as I’m going to call it, then ultimately that becomes fuel for you expanding and growing and becoming this person that you want to become versus just staying the same, which is what you don’t even want to be anyway. If you go back to what you were saying about reverse engineering, the emotional stuff that would lead to you living that kind of a life anyway in the first case.

Emily: I love that. I love that. And what you said about good food being the fuel for you to expand and grow. What that brings me to is changing our view about food and recognising, like I said in the beginning of this episode, whole food from the farmers market, it can tend to be more expensive than the frozen processed stuff, but are you willing to invest in yourself presently and in your future?

If you have this vision for yourself, you want to expand, you want to grow. Why not invest in something that you do multiple times per day? Invest your money, invest your time, invest your focus. I mean, I’m biased, but I can’t think of a better thing to invest your time, money and focus in than the fuel that’s going to help you reach your utmost potential.

Oli: So I’ve never thought of it like that before, but you bang on. Like food ultimately is an investment. It’s like working out. Like I work out like a lot.

I do loads of yoga and push-ups and pull-ups, whatever it is. Like every workout that I’ve done, like if I look back over time, it’s been an investment because those push-ups that I did, you know, 10 years ago, whatever, like I’m still benefiting from them now.

Like if I go hiking or if I’m hanging out with my mates or whatever and I’ve got loads of energy, it’s because those workouts and the investment of my time basically led to that. And actually, it’s exactly the same with food. Like if you are consistently eating healthy food, good food, then you’re going to have more energy and that’s going to allow you to get better results overall in all the other things that you’re doing. It’s going to allow you to keep moving. And so, yeah, food is an investment.

That’s ultimately what I have learned from this conversation.

Emily: I love it. Yeah.

Oli: We’ve said a lot and we’ve actually run out of time, but have you got any final thoughts? Like obviously, we’ve covered quite a lot in a very short amount of time.

We’ve gone all over the place, but it makes a lot of sense. I think everything that you’ve shared and the amazing things that you’re saying. But have you got any final words?

And can you also tell people where they can find you as well? If they want to work with you or talk to you about this stuff?

Emily: Yes, of course. So final words would just be wherever you are, wherever… If these things were saying about, oh gosh, when I eat the one cookie, it then turns into 12.

Or just that loss of control. Wherever you are on your path, know that it’s your own personal path. And don’t look to anyone else for the answers.

Because you have the answers in yourself. And saying that, like coaches can help, dietitians can help. What I mean is don’t look on Instagram and see an influencer who said that they, you know, did keto for four months. And that’s why they look the way they do. Maybe that worked for them.

Figure out what works for you. Right? Everything is very personalized. And the more we can take the shame and guilt out of food, the better off you’re going to be. That’s the shame and guilt is not helping anyone in the long term.

So that’s what I would say. Everyone’s unique. Every body is unique and everyone needs a different approach. And then places where you can find me. So I am on Instagram and my handle is Emily underscore R.D. underscore.

I also have a podcast. It’s called RDS versus BS. So registered dietitians versus BS. And we talk about everything intermittent fasting, keto, paleo, supplements, all sorts of stuff.

And break it down into what’s legit and what’s BS. So that’s on Apple podcast, Spotify, all the platforms. And then lastly, I also have my website. So Emily Zorn.com. It’s Z O R N. And I have all of, you know, bunch of information on there about working with me free intro sessions. I have a course that I just published a couple of months ago.

So definitely check that out. But Oli, I want to thank you so much for having me on this podcast. It’s really been a pleasure speaking with you.

Oli: Well, Emily, it’s been a pleasure hearing all this stuff.

I’ll put all your links and everything in the show notes so people can find them easily. But yeah, I think this idea that, you know, we’ve basically led everything towards of this food, been the fuel for our vision or our creativity and all that kind of stuff is so important.

So hopefully you’ve inspired people to make some better choices. But yeah, thank you once again, I’m going to go to McDonald’s now and I’m sure you are too.

Emily: Yeah, I’m glad I inspired you. Thanks again.

Oli: Thank you so much.

Creative Status: Episode 24: Priestess Francesca: The Creative Alchemy of Sex

Published on March 27, 2023

Creative Status: Deconstruct ego, integrate the shadow, manifest real life.

Let’s talk about SEX, baby!

Sex is a great example of the natural CREATIVE PROCESS that is always unfolding in our lives and that we’re either riding with or blocking because of our own EGO ‘stuff’.

Ultimately, life for all human beings is a journey from FRAGMENTATION to WHOLENESS.

Sex is an area where this is most clearly demonstrated.

In this episode of Creative Status, we explore the powerful potential of sexual healing and embodiment with Priestess Francesca, an erotic activist, sexual revolutionary, and advocate for collective liberation through erotic embodiment of all forms.

Francesca shares her expertise as a trusted professional sex worker for seekers, revolutionaries, creatives, and innovators on a healing, growth, and transformation journey who are seeking to ALECHMIZE their experience and grow real.

We discuss the underlying mechanics of sexuality and creation in the human experience, and how de-shamifying unique expressions of erotic desires is an integral part of healing, coherency, and authenticity.

In other words, we look at how “sex isn’t something that you HAVE, but something that you ARE” and that if you’re on a mission to grow real and move towards wholeness (as we all are – whether we know it or not) then removing ego from your sexuality is a massive part of the journey.

We cover loads of ‘stuff’ in this episode:

-Sex (duh!)

-How sex can allow us to move towards wholeness

-Masculine/Feminine polarity

-Kinks

-Attraction

-LOADS MORE

Through her work, Francesca champions the importance of sexual healing and embodiment as powerful tools for individual and collective liberation. We dive deep into these topics and explore the transformative potential of embracing our unique sexual desires and experiences.

Tune in to learn more about the power of sexual healing and embodiment, and how they can move us towards the creative human experience of GROWING real and moving towards wholeness!

Listen using the player above or go to wherever you get your podcasts!

All episodes on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6UG491sXbZv6fUKIMVrIT6

(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 Priestess Francesca: ⁠bio.site/priestessfrancesca⁠

Join the School of Erotic Mysteries: ⁠sex-life-liberation.passion.io/learn/products/135986/lessons/2269899⁠

*Creative Status Listeners Special!Use code “Creative Juices” when you register for The School of Erotic Mysteries to receive an exclusive discount and free bonuses valued at $222 (1:1 virtual time with Francesca) – just for listeners of this show!

Francesca’s Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠instagram.com/priestessfrancesca1

Creative Status Links:

Free one hour creative workshop to take you brand or project to the next level.

Show Transcript

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. I am a life and business coach, and I call myself a creative performance coach, because I help people to tap into their creativity so they can be more whole and do something that’s actually real with that wholeness once they’ve found it to express it.

This podcast is ultimately about that journey, the journey from fragmentation to wholeness, which means that we get out of our egos, we look into the depths of ourselves and bring the shadow self to the surface.

And then we can go out there and start living a life that’s actually real and aligned with our true values and intentions. This podcast episode is an interview with a sexual healer called Priestess Francesca. It’s a very, very open and candid conversation about the creative process of sexual relationships and sexuality itself. Francesca is a sexual healer.

She’s a revolutionist, if that’s the right word, a revolutionary sexual revolutionary. And ultimately she is trying to raise awareness of how the stuff that we all carry around sex is often preventing us from moving towards being a coherent version of who we truly are or in the language that I use, a holistic whole version that’s connected to reality.

We cover all kinds of stuff in this conversation to do with sex and creation and the human experience. We talk about masculine and feminine polarity. We talk about the kinks that people have, why they have those kinks, how the sexual process, which is a weird way of saying it, but that’s how I keep saying it, is ultimately about moving towards intimacy in our relationship with ourselves and relationship with others, how we just attract ultimately what we need because there is a process of alchemization that is always unfolding.

If you’ve listened to the podcast before, that’s basically the process of the unconscious becoming conscious to quote Carl Jung and sex, creativity, yoga, all these things which allow us to become more present and ultimately to raise awareness are all ultimately about that alchemization process. So this is a really interesting conversation that you’re about to listen to.

If you’re not into sexual stuff and you don’t like talking about it or listening to people talking about it, then it’s probably not the episode for you. But anyway, if you’re going to listen, you’re going to get a lot of value. It’s a very real conversation. Francesca, thank you so much for coming on here and just been so open and candid and sharing all your wisdom. Everybody else, thanks for listening and there’ll be another episode of Creative Status next Monday.

But here we go.

Interview:

Oli Anderson: Oh, hi there, Priestess Francesca. Thank you for joining me today on this episode of Creative Status. You have got a project that you work on called the School of Erotic Mysteries and you help people with their sexual stuff.

I suppose that’s a fair way to say it. We’re going to look in this conversation at the links between what you’ve learned working in that area and the creative process as a whole. But before I start asking you a ton of questions, do you want to introduce yourself and tell people how you became Priestess Francesca working in this area?

Priestess Francesca: Thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited to have such a juicy conversation today.

So I consider myself an erotic activist, a sexual revolutionary, and I work with people one-on-one in person and then through my group containers with the School of Erotic Mysteries to decolonize our approach to the erotic, to the sexual, and to allow humans to infuse their erotic nature into everything they do in this lifetime.

Oli Anderson: Wow. So it’s just nothing major really. It sounds really boring and… Casual, super casual.

Priestess Francesca: Yeah, super casual.

Oli Anderson You probably don’t get anything out of doing that. So one thing that you said to me last time we had a chat, obviously not recorded, was how people live, how we live as a species is a reflection of how we have sex. There was another quote that I threw out, I think, in that conversation by a guy called Erich Fromm.

He said, sex isn’t something that you have, it’s something that you are. And I think that applies to the creative process as well. So the way that we create things, the way that we get engaged in the creative process is a reflection of how we actually live and who we are. So if we were going to just unpack that to open up this conversation, what do you mean specifically when you say that?

Priestess Francesca: One of the biggest with casualties in the sexual space is having a form of goal orientation.

And I think this tether is really nicely to the creative process, right? But if we stay with the sex stuff for a second, right, we go in, we’ve been indoctrinated under this notion that I’m going to make out with someone and then I’m going to go to second base and then maybe I’ll go to third base and then I’ll have an orgasm and then I’ll pee and take a nap, right?

There’s this like linear progression of how we’ve been taught to have sex and it’s the same exact thing over and over again. And you can kind of see that, oh, that’s also how the majority of humans live, right?

I go to school, I get a degree, then I get a job, then I get a savings account, and I get married and I have kids and then I die. It’s very similar. So part of the decolonized approach is to remove any goal orientation in the bedroom with your partner with sex. And when you approach sexuality without any agenda, all of a sudden, magic unfolds this beautiful arena of expression and connection and divine intervention, you know, usually will come in. And that’s where the beauty way really lives.

How do you live in a beautiful way? Well, if you’re not having sex in that kind of way, how could you ever expect to approach your life? Sex is the foundation of how we were created to be. It’s at the root of us. And so if this really like fundamental foundational piece about being a human has been captured and is being controlled under this indoctrinated mindset, how could you ever live freely?

How could you ever expect to live freely in the rest of your world?

Oli Anderson: Wow, so something that comes up a lot in this podcast and in conversations I have with people when I’m coaching is this idea of outcome independence. And that’s basically what you’re saying. The idea that if you really want to live life, okay, you have a basic goal or a basic direction to move in, but you’re not so attached to that outcome that it distracts you from actually been in the moment and making the most of what’s going on right there in front of you.

And so if you apply that to what you just said about sex, if people are so rigid about following these steps of getting from one base to another, then it becomes more of a mental thing than an actual physical or emotional or intimate thing itself. And I think that applies to the creative process as well, like you just said.

So if people are trying to create something, like write a book or whatever, and they go into it purely with all these mental ideas, then they just end up blocking the real experience of learning and evolving and expanding and all that kind of stuff. So is that ultimately, you know, how you see it and what you’re saying?

Priestess Francesca: Absolutely, because where the mind will come in is it will drape you in all of these shoulds.

It’ll and it begins to blind you in all of these shoulds. And I usually say, like, if someone came to me when I was younger and put a laundry list of things that I could be when I grow up, and they put sex worker on there and was like, you’re going to help people shed all of the shame around their most taboo fantasies. I’d be like, no, thank you. I, that is not what I want to be doing, right? But it was through the very deep listening being really embodied in my life to say, Oh, this is what’s unfolding in front of me.

This is what I will create now. And I have no idea, you know, most of the time what’s going to happen when I’m in connection with another and if that’s where the beauty ends up really like blooming and flourishing when you when you aren’t draped in these shoulds shoulds get really in the way.

Oli: It’s ultimately it’s about it’s a process of discovery in a way and you can apply it to relationships with other people like you’re saying, or, you know, sexual experiences, but also it applies to life.

So if you’ve got this, this mind driven approach to life, where you think you’ve got it all figured out and you’re going to follow certain steps, then ultimately you just end up blocking what is truly possible for you or who you actually are, the discovery of who you really are. And so getting out of our heads is actually one of the best things that we can do. And so a lot of the things that really make a difference in our life, I think, are just the things that allow us to transcend ourselves in that way.

So for me, my, you know, sex, yoga, going for a hike, all these things have the same end result, which is that we expand our ideas about ourselves by getting out of our minds for a little while, and then having a taste of what’s actually real. So my question for you around that is you mentioned shame. One thing that I found, again, when I’m coaching people or, you know, just talking to people in general, is that the more shame they have that is unresolved, the more shame driven they are, the more of a control freak they become.

And when they buy into that kind of control freakery to keep the shame at bay, that’s when they end up in this kind of person you’re talking about, where it’s very outcome dependent, very goal orientated, very, you know, results driven, and they need a plan and all that kind of stuff. So is there something here about control freakery and, you know, how people live and have sex and create things?

Francesca: Yeah, I will usually tether shame to seeking of validation. So very often we’re taught from a really young age that you are not good enough. enough.

Period. When you’re first in elementary school and you don’t get the greatest grades or maybe your art project doesn’t look the same as everybody else’s, you’re taught even in the safest place in society, supposed to be our schools, you’re taught you’re not good enough. And so you’re constantly seeking validation and the right way to do something which kills it kills every authentic expression of life. So exactly what you’re saying around shame, like the shame that we harbor is rooted in seeking a validation and it’s a very long walk for someone to walk through the world, not seeking others validation.

It’s a really tricky place to be. And it happens in waves over and over again. It’s not it’s never a walk that we’re done walking, you know, that’s not a check and I’m done. I’ve shed all of my shame in life. It comes again and again, because you’re always put into situations where critics will come up and everyone’s going to dump their own shit onto you because that other people will dump their shame onto you as you begin living authentically, because it agitates the chains, I call them the chains of shame, that they still have on. And they don’t like it when people are living really authentic lives because it reflects back at them the way that they’re still inchained.

Oli: 100%. So the way that I also see it is, as we get shamed by the education system or our parents or whoever it is, we end up creating a false version of ourselves to live as, which you can call the ego or whatever you want to call it. And we create that version in order to keep the shame that we feel at bay and try to live without it.

But the consequence of doing that is that whatever was shamed, whether it’s certain emotions or certain characteristics about us or whatever, good and bad, those things end up getting disowned basically and sent into the shadow territory, that’s why I always call it. And so if we’re living in that state and we’re trying to keep those disowned parts at bay no matter what, that’s when we end up lapsing into this kind of control free career as well.

Because anything that we don’t control can end up bringing the shame to our attention and then we have to face ourselves and grow through it or just get triggered or whatever. And so if people are living like that with a lot of disowned parts of themselves, then when they’re creating things or they’re having sex or they’re doing anything else real that brings the unconscious to the conscious awareness, then they have to go about it in a very controlled way.

And so is there something there that sex can be used in a way to bring the shadow self or the shadow stuff to the surface in either a controlled way or an uncontrolled way depending on the person?

Francesca: Yeah, yeah, so many things there. I have so many things I want to say to all of this.

One of the places where I will see shame compounding is around any, any taboo fantasy. And I want to name that taboo fantasies can be anything really, because every part of our sexuality in this society is draped in shame, anything. So if having too much sex, having not enough sex, those are pathologized, right? You could be wrong for either one of those.

Without even a taboo fantasy associated it, the narrative can make you wrong for either of those. So you’re shamed in that way. Saying, I dance and I play in the kink world a lot. And the amount of shame that is carried from these fantasies, I absolutely see that shame spilling over into how they’re living authentic lives. Through the de-shamification of this very fundamental part of us that there is no right way, there is no wrong way to do this rooted practice of being a human, aka the erotic, the sex, it will begin to unburden a human from all of the other places they’re holding shame in their life.

It’s almost like, you know, if you spill your body as the root as a tree and your sexuality is the root of you, getting into that rooted place will transform the rest, it will transform the tree trunk and the branches and the leaves and the way it blooms, you know, it’ll transform everything. And that’s why doing this work is such profound work.

Someone choosing to step into the de-shamification process of their erotic nature, of their sexual desires, of their sexual expression, it ripples into every other place. They start to realize, oh my god, I’ve been living miserably in my work world. And now I can see it because I’m finally getting some pleasure through my authentic sexuality.

And honestly, they didn’t see it before. And that kind of interconnection is where the magic happens.

Oli: Yeah, it makes total sense because like we’ve said, sex isn’t something that you have, it’s something that you are. And so if you’re not accepting your true sexuality, then ultimately you’re not accepting yourself. And so if you don’t accept yourself, obviously your whole life is going to be a reflection of that discord. And, you know, everything you’ve brought into your life is going to be authentic as a result, inauthentic as a result of that. And so this process of de-shamification, what does that entail?

Francesca: I’ll give like a real example. And I’ll use myself because I think this is a powerful one. So my name is Francesca, which maybe you’ve deduced is a good Italian name. So I was raised in a very Italian household. And my lineage has mobsters and the mafia in it. And that’s part of my story. You know, my great grandfather, grandfather, that that was their life.

And that kind of energy has been, you can call it epigenetically passed down, you can call it energetically passed down, whatever you want to name it, that lives in me. And it was manifesting in my fantasies and my desires. And so in my 20s, my hottest fantasy was to like be in the kitchen and be like the domestic housewife who was cooking dinner and her angry mobster husband would come home and start yelling at her and throw her up against the wall and choke her and yell at her and slap her. And then all I wanted to do was be like bent over the kitchen table and fucked, you know, that like that was my fantasy. And that was so taboo because especially because my lineage, I come from a lineage of wife beaters. So to have a fantasy of being slapped across the face during sex.

Yeah, that’s a mind fuck. And there was so much shame around it. And I’m, I talk about it now in a really strong way. But for a while, all I did was tell the partners who I knew weren’t going to judge me in that. And so the first part of it is, I always say, do not throw your most vulnerable parts of you out into a world that is not going to understand you and not going to love you.

There are people in this community who do not think anything that you desire is weird. They are not going to further traumatize you through this process, right? And only when you get to a place of real fortification, can you come on a podcast and talk about wanting to get beat up inside. So that’s the first part is like really protecting your most vulnerable creation.

And I imagine in the creative press, like with art, when you’re working on a big piece, you don’t put it in a gallery at the beginning, right? You don’t do that. You like you wait until you are fortified. Yes, this is what I made. This is what happened here.

This is what birthed out of me. And I don’t give a shit what anyone else thinks. That’s one of the biggest down for or not downfalls, but the biggest mistakes that I see is that a little bit of confidence and all of a sudden they run out into the world and look what I did and no one’s going to be there to catch you.

This world is not going to understand you. And so there’s a real fortification process through the date de-shamifying that takes time. And I think we need to honor that.

Oli: Yeah. Okay, there’s there’s loads of things that I can ask you. The first thing is just about I suppose kinks in general. So if we’ve got this idea that the creative process or the sexual process, which is a weird way to phrase it, but anyway, both of those things are ultimately about us becoming more real and allowing, you know, the fragments of ourselves to get out of the way so we can become more whole basically.

That’s how I see it. So with that being said, do you think that kinks and in this case, you’re kink about, you know, needing to get beaten up and stuff, like there was something in your shadow territory or in your shadow self that needed to come to the surface and that would make you more whole if it did. And so that kink was actually just part of your real self, your unconscious self, unconscious also calling, you know, for that to happen.

Does that make sense?

Francesca: Totally. Totally. I believe that the sexual energy is alchemizing energy. It’s here to work us. It’s here to reveal more of us to ourselves. The element that I associate with sexuality is fire. It is a clarifying element. It clears away our distortions, our accrued matter from society that really is just burdening us.

If we lean into embodiment of the erotic in a really authentic way for us, because authenticity is going to be different for everybody, it will reveal more of us to ourselves. And so I had that fantasy and I played out that kink. What I really want to make known to all of the listeners is though, I didn’t try to understand it. Like 10 years later, I can look back, connect all of these dots, understand what was happening, kind of fumbling in the wreckage of the pile of shit that was before me and say, oh, this is what you were alchemizing here. I see it now.

I get it. But a lot of people ask me like, do you have a book that I can read on this? I say, no, please don’t read a book. Please don’t try to understand this. Enter into this space as it is the mystery. You don’t know what’s going to come out of it. And I’ll tell her back to when an artist sits in front of their easel and they say, I want to create something.

Do they map out every single thing and try to understand what they’re creating when they begin? No, of course not. That’s where you get this like paint by numbers bullshit. So stop. Don’t try to understand what you’re doing here. Just play. Just play with it and see what happens because magic will happen.

Oli: Yeah, that’s amazing. So this kind of goes back to what we were saying at the start about the control freak, freakery stuff or just been a control freak. So if you’re doing, you know, paint by numbers or sex by numbers, actually, all you’re doing is kind of super imposing some kind of way of forcing the process.

And if you force the process, well, it’s just going to be limited by all of your current thinking, which is what got you where you are in the first place. And so actually, there’s an element of whether it’s the creative process or any other process of having to step back and trust that what will that what needs to be revealed will be revealed.

So if people have kinks or whatever, then if they start analyzing them before they like follow it through and learn the lessons that the kink is going to teach them, all they’re going to do is distort the lessons that are there with their own limited interpretations and all that kind of stuff. And so ultimately, by judging it, or by trying to interpret it or make sense of it, you take away the power of the alchemy or something like that.

Francesca: Yeah, yep. And I when I’m working with people, I’m usually nuanced saying the difference between intention versus attention. And so a lot of people, especially in spiritual communities or conscious communities, you know, they are saying, well, set your intention. And I say, please don’t please don’t set your intention, because intention is a very covert, alluring way of saying, that’s my agenda.

Your mind does not know. Please throw away any intentions here. Now, for any kinksters that are listening, this does not mean we’re not going to do appropriate boundaries conversations, doesn’t mean we’re not going to negotiate not to doesn’t mean we’re not going to make safe containers, right?

None of those things are true. You can have a very safe container, set your boundaries, have your kinky negotiations, because we are doing edge play in these places, right? But then you drop the agenda of what unfolds in that container, and you pay attention, you listen, you stay in your body, you feel every sensation, and you let that be the pathway. Rumi has this great quote that’s that part of his poem that says, take the first step and the path will unfold. I’m not perfectly stating that, but you get what I’m saying, like, you don’t know where you’re walking.

You have to take that step first, and then watch it unfold in front of you. That’s what happens in the arena of the erotic every time.

Oli: Yeah, you’re so right. Like if you set your intention, actually what you’re doing is just um, it’s allowing the ego stuff to creep in through the back door. And it’s a way of kind of tricking yourself into thinking you are going to be fully president and blah, blah, blah.

But actually you’re putting a filter around whatever you’re doing from the outset. How do you think identity feeds into all this stuff that you’re talking about? When you say identity, you know, like sexual orientations and gender identities and things like that. Yeah, ultimately any, any kind of external label that we attach to ourselves and then go into the process of living or creating or having sex.

Francesca: Yeah, totally. There, um, there becomes what I call like an over identification with the label as a means of being understood. And I think this goes back to a worthiness wound of a seeking a validation wound. There’s a, and I think it’s part of the natural process of maybe I’ve been oppressed. A part of me has not been accepted. And so we swing on the pendulum from being super repressed to being almost reckless with our identities, where I’m going to say, this is me.

This is my thing, right? You’re over asserting yourself in a way. Labels can be very over assertive. And what happens when we over identify with these labels is we, we blind ourselves from seeing what might be unfolding in front of us because it doesn’t match up with the label that we’ve given ourselves.

When I’m in practice with someone in person, I put a little box by the door and I asked them, write down all of the labels that you have given yourself, mother, father, sister, bisexual, queer, like whatever it even man, woman, please ditch them. And we put them in the box by the door and we enter into our sacred sexual space without any of those to burden us.

On the way out, I say, you can take the labels that still feel good for you and you can leave the rest trusting. The universe knows what to do with them now.

Oli: That’s exactly it. So I think the identity stuff is ultimately 99.9 % of the time. It’s just fragments that we’ve picked up and attached ourselves to consciously and unconsciously because of whatever we’ve been through. And so it’s the whole thing that the ego is just a way of surviving what we think we’ve already been through.

But if we take that stuff into a sacred place, whatever sacred place that is, then actually it just ends up causing us to miss out on the sacredness itself because sacredness is about wholeness and no label can ever encapsulate a person fully. And so if people don’t understand that, then obviously they’re going to miss out on the most powerful experiences available to them, which is self-transcendence.

So is all this stuff that we’re talking about really just about that? Putting yourself in a situation where you can transcend your ideas about yourself to see something that’s actually there?

Francesca: Yeah, transcendence is a, it gets tricky for me because so often in, especially in like spiritual and conscious communities, it gets conflated with disassociation. And so part of the path that I’m that I’m really inviting people to come into is first full embodiment.

Really. And I’ll give an example of like what does, what it even is that. So the labels, let’s go back, let’s use the labels as an example. If I’m sitting in a full embodied place with myself, one unto myself, and I put one of those labels on, do I feel more empowered, more expanded, more full, more supple with myself?

Or does my body feel burdened, contracted, constricted? Right? There’s like a way that you can from a very embodied place feel and try things on one at a time, be like, Oh, yes, that’s my yes. And that is my no, you know, one of the labels that when I try it on in an embodied way, you would think I might feel more empowered.

But actually, I feel really constricted. And that’s the label of being a woman. Like this gender identity is really constricting for me. I don’t, I don’t like it.

It doesn’t feel good on. And so I think there’s a way that you can be fully embodied while sitting as witness to yourself simultaneously without judgment. And that’s what I like to define transcending myself. Okay, I’m not, I’m being fully embodied. I’m fully present with myself.

And I’m simultaneously sitting as a divine witness to myself.

Oli: Yeah, so that’s ultimately what I mean as well when I say that we transcend ourselves. So I don’t think we can ever, you know, with the, you know, in the whole mindfulness thing, there’s the observer and the observed.

So I think when we transcend ourselves, we just go into that observer place of, you know, pure consciousness or whatever you want to call it, where you’re not judging yourself, you’ve stepped beyond the duality of saying this is good and this is bad, and you’re just there in the moment. And if you can get to that place, that’s where, you know, as you said earlier, the magic happens because you can let life just do what life needs to do.

And it’s not the, it’s not you and life, it’s just all one thing in those moments. And so that’s I think the creative process and sex is so powerful, because if you do it right, not that there’s a right or wrong way, but if you do it in the way that we’re talking about, I think, then you fully taste wholeness is how I’ve experienced it. And then you can remember that sensation of, you know, who you really are in that moment as you go about the rest of your life.

And so it shows you that, you know, all these little labels and stuff that we pick up, they’re all just contextual and they’re contingent on, you know, what we’re doing as we go about our day to day lives, but they’re never who we truly are. And the problems for a lot of people in life come from thinking that that’s those labels are the end of the line. And so really, it’s just about getting perspective, something like that.

Francesca: Yeah. And I usually see it, I know you’re using the word wholeness, I see it as this pillar, I call it the pillar of coherency inside of me. And so if you’re if you can almost imagine a big pillar going through the center of your body, and what society will do it is it will fracture that pillar, you know, you can kind of see the part of the pillar that’s that’s on in my head is slanted to the right and then the other one is like to the left.

It’s all fragmented all the way. And what the sexual alchemical power does is and pulls it all together again. And I like, I feel I feel that I am in coherency again. Oh, I feel the pillar of coherency inside of myself again.

Oli: Yeah. And then once you felt like coherence, like I kind of said, it just puts everything into perspective. And it changes the way that you you live ultimately.

Francesca: Then you can’t you can’t unsee it. You can’t see how oh, shit, the the education system really like pulled my brain all the way over here. And it’s like, that’s bullshit. You know, once you touch into it, you touch it, you feel it like, that’s it.

That’s really me. You can’t unfeel that.

Oli: What do you think about the idea that most of this journey that we’re talking about of becoming more whole or real or, you know, in alignment with the other thing, most of that journey is about unlearning stuff. It’s not about adding things. It’s about basically removing all the bullshit, like you said.

So the things you picked up from the education system or the media or, you know, the people down the road, your neighbors, whatever it is, all of that external bullshit that we pick up is the thing that makes us believe in these labels and to become incoherent in the first place.

And so when we reach that point of no return that you’re talking about, and we’ve experienced the real version of who we are, there’s no going back because we’ve just unlearned the futility of all that stuff.

Francesca: Yeah, it is unlearning, deprogramming. And the way you’ll know you are, you’ve deprogrammed yourself or unlearned something is there will be a lightness on the other side of it.

So all of those learnings that society says is the right way to be a human. They are burdens to life. You feel burdened. You feel like you’re carrying things.

I have to do these. This is the way it is. They’re these pressures. And when you unlearn one of those, you deprogram yourself, there is a lightness. And it’s one of the very, almost like anti climactic pieces of this journey is that being a human is very simple. But being this in the simplicity of being a human in this society is very hard. I want to name it because I don’t want to oversimplify that, oh, it’s just unburdened, unlearned from all of it. It’s really difficult to do that, to just be in a simplicity of humanity.

Oli: Yeah. Yeah. But I think once we strip away all of those unnecessary complications and complexity, that’s when life really kicks in. But the problem is, because most people are so driven by shame and all the underlying emotional stuff that we talked about earlier, they have created this false version of themselves that I keep ranting and raving about. And that depends on complexity to exist or to keep its hold over people.

And so part of that control freakery we were talking about earlier is that so many people are running around looking for reasons for their lives to be complicated and to be complex. They need that in order to keep the illusion in place. And so that’s why everyone’s looking for new labels to buy into and all this kind of stuff is because they feed or the ego feeds on that complexity. And then it becomes a barrier to all of the real stuff we were talking about.

Francesca: Yeah. I’d love to also just give one piece of something that can be actually very addictive is the stress hormone. So it’s not all in our heads. There becomes then a biochemical reaction in our bodies that keeps us addicted to the complexities that we’re speaking of.

So cortisol is the stress hormone and it is extremely addictive. And you see it when people in the corporate world, right, they can’t put their phones down and not check their email.

They can’t just sit on the train on their commute home and begin to unwind and relax because the cortisol is still running through them. And so I also want to say like give yourself a lot of grace in this process of returning to simplicity because there is a process here.

Oli: The other thing as well is like ultimately this process of becoming coherent in the way that we’re on about is it’s about removing the effects of judgment from our lives and because of what you know because of what we’re saying a lot of people actually judge simplicity they think simplicity is you know it’s beneath them.

Francesca: Lazy.

Oli: Yeah, yeah, yeah, like all these different things and that’s part of the problem. It’s like part of the web of judgment we impose everything but let me throw a curveball at this conversation – so you were saying when you know when we get to this state of being coherent you know it’s ultimately life’s very simple and we feel very light and there’s less tension in our lives I think that a lot of the process that we’re talking about, whether it’s you know becoming more real or whole through creativity or sex or anything else, it’s ultimately about the interplay between tension and release.

So a lot of us we picked up all this you know mental tension that we talked about and you know there are certain things we do whether it’s you know creating something or yoga or having sex or whatever that allows us to kind of relieve that tension basically that’s the short version I don’t want to rant about it too much and so this interplay of tension and release is basically essential to the creative process because if you don’t have that tension and release then you can’t go through the process of creative synthesis or whatever you want to call it – synthesis – and that kind of applies I think to the sexual process I keep saying sexual process which sounds really weird it applies to sex because of the interplay between you know polarities basically so this is where I want to bring in the masculine and feminine polarity idea because everyone’s obsessed with that it seems, especially like online, and that obsession is probably for two reasons:

One, people become obsessed with labels in the way that you said so a lot of people feel out of touch I think with their natural polarity and so they go really hardcore about trying to express their divine femininity or divine masculinity and they really turn up the volume so they can condition themselves back into that way of being but another thing as well is just people need this interplay that we’re talking about and that’s an obvious way to get it so – I don’t know if I’m making sense – but what do you think about that in relation to all this stuff that we’ve said?

Francesca: Yeah, I am deeply resonating and what I saw as you were speaking I got this this image of a very concave darkness and then a penetrating light and what I’m going to tether that to in the realm of the erotic is I’ll use the terms Yin and Yang because they can sometimes help the masculine and feminine is so charged with a lot of gendered programming so I want to release those but in the Taoist philosophy there is the Yin field those are the places of deep receptivity the it’s slower darker wetter fecund there’s a steeping feeling in the Yin field and those are the moments where we are deeply listening we are feeling you know we’re receiving those messages and then the Yang is from that place of deep listening I penetrate the world with my creation it’s not a movement of I’m going to create a bunch of stuff and give my gifts to the world because that’s what I should be doing it’s because I can’t not do that from this place of receptivity oh this is what I’m called to be this is what I’m called to make and so I penetrate the world with my gifts and that’s the light and the Yang is this there’s like a swiftness to it a lightness to it I decorate the world you know with Yang and those are my gifts but they’re always my gifts of Yang the movement are always going to be rooted in Yin stillness and that’s why the label of woman is very constricting for me because I feel the places of deep receptivity in me and I also feel the way that I penetrate the world that is it.

Oli: Yeah yeah like that stillness the you know the masculine or the Yang whatever we’re going to call it that is but basically just pure consciousness and it’s something that we can all tap into you and I think that’s ultimately the it’s the place we’re all trying to get to so in a way when you’re talking about coherence or I’m talking about wholeness isn’t that just deep awareness and then all of these these cycles that we have to go through and the release of tension and growing through the fragments of ourselves all that feminine stuff that needs to happen is also applicable in all of our lives but do you think in terms of what we were saying about kinks and all that kind of stuff being away for the hidden parts of ourselves to come to the surface that can apply or that logic can apply to the way that people might come together at specific times in their life to create a scenario or a situation together sexually in terms of masculine and feminine in polarity?

Sso basically what I’m saying is people are kind of attracted to each other because of you know where they are in terms of that polariity but also what they need to bring to the surface of themselves there and then?

Francesca: Yes yes so I absolutely believe that we are attracted our sexual alchemical powers get activated when we are in the presence of someone who is going to help us alchemize something yes for sure and in that alchemical interplay both people are going to flow between the masculine feminine, the Yin Yang, whatever words we want to give to it.

That’s where it’s really important for not one person to over identify with the masculine or the feminine. I’m going to stay in places of deep receptivity, deep listening, and I’m going to penetrate the world. Same way as my partner, I want them to stay in deep receptivity and penetrate my world as we’re interacting with one another. But certainly, I don’t know any person that I’ve worked with that hasn’t brought something to the surface for me.

It’s the magic that the clients that are attracted to me, they always help me see something deeper in myself. It’s an ongoing, I have never arrived. That’s not how it goes. And I’ll give a real example because I think tangible examples are helpful.

Right now, I’m attracting so many clients who have who want to be regressed back into little space. So they want to have diapers on or they want to be in eroticizing themselves as a baby. And I’m needing to deal with the fact that biological motherhood is not in the deck for me this lifetime.

And there’s a way that the pain of that truth is being alchemized through my playtime with these clients who want to be in diapers. You know, I don’t think that’s an accident.

Oli: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

That’s basically that’s exactly kind of what we were saying. So people are attracted to the things that are going to help them alchemize whatever they’re dealing with at that moment, whether they know it or not. And people come into our lives that are things coming to our lives with this creative project that help us to bring the unconscious to the conscious surface, etc. But also to alchemy ourselves. And I suppose the lesson is exactly what you just said, which is that things are always coming to the surface.

Always. It doesn’t matter how deep we think we’ve gone into life. There’s always something that is emerging, like always. And so if we can accept that, that makes it easier to understand, you know, the processes that help us to engage with life. So sex, creativity, etc. Is that it is the alchemy thing that you’ve talked about, but it’s always happening.

Francesca: Always. Because and I will always use nature as an example. The tree does not stop cycling through the seasons, just because it feels like it’s mastered the seasons.

It doesn’t matter how many winters that tree goes through, it doesn’t say, okay, I’m done cycling through the seasons now. That’s not it.

Oli: Yeah. And that’s ultimately what this is all about, I think. So for me, creativity and growing real, and all the things I talk about, and sex as well, from your point of view, and well, from the point of view of how it is, is ultimately just about aligning ourselves with our nature.

And our nature is that to keep evolving, to keep expanding, to keep moving towards owners in the language I keep using, and to alchemy is everything that we experience, basically. And it’s always, always happening. I feel like I could talk to you for like another three hours or something, and in a way, we just track this open. But we’ve run out of time. Have you got any final words? Or like, if you’re going to sum all this up, and, you know, maybe let people know some changes they could maybe make if they were thinking about working on any of this alchemy stuff. You know, what would that be?

And also, can you tell people where they can find you on the internet?

Francesca: Yes, absolutely. So the thing I want to, if you get nothing else from this entire discussion is notice when you are, quote, shoulding yourself. And just notice, I am doing this because I think I should do this. And then ask yourself, if I didn’t feel connected with that should, but it feel burdened from that should, what would it look like? And without any pressure, right, you don’t have to change super fast, we’re not here to pathologize shoulds either.

Just notice what shifts in your paying attention to these shoulds and see what unfolds in the bedroom in your creative projects, in your work with your relationships. Just begin to notice that if you get nothing else.

Oli: That’s amazing. Because, you know, all of those shoulds are ultimately just judgments of some kind. And they block the awareness and yeah, so powerful. Where can people find you? What’s your website again?

Francesca: So my website is priestisfrancesca.com. And what I would like to offer to all of your listeners, I hold containers for the School of Erotic Mysteries every season.

And I go through this by the seasonal wheel, not the calendar, not Gregorian calendar, we stick with nature here. And so there’ll be a link in the show notes. If it’s not currently open, what I’d like to offer is you can get yourself on my love list. And you put in the code when you register for the love list, put in the code creative juices.

And if you end up joining, if you feel like joining in the create in the School of Erotic Mysteries, and you use that, I’ll know that you came from this podcast. And I will give a bonus, a special bonus valued at over $200 just for the listeners here, which I’m really excited because I want everyone to make beautiful creative juiciness in their life.

Oli: That’s a very sexy code, “creative juices”. So I doubt anyone’s gonna forget that, but I’ll put it in the show notes anyway. But Francesca, thank you so much for this conversation.

It’s given me a lot of food for thought.

Francesca: And just really enjoyed talking to you. So thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed playing today.

Creative Status: Episode 23: Avilasha Sarmah: Creativity for Earthlings

Published on March 20, 2023

Creative Status: Deconstruct ego, integrate the shadow, manifest real life.

To get where you wanna go… 👇

…you have to trust the process.

Really, there’s no other way because reality is always gonna reality and the only way to work with it is to LET GO and stop trying to CONTROL things.

In theory this sounds simple but it’s not always necessarily EASY (though it definitely can be for some)…

To get there we have to learn to find true SANITY (alignment with what’s actually REAL):

-We have to learn to LET GO of our THOUGHTS and to IGNORE the negative conditioning and BS.

-We have to learn to LET GO of our ideas about who we are and what we need to do (by letting reality do it’s thing and holding on to our INTENTIONS as we NAVIGATE it).

-We have to LET GO of our negative emotions from the PAST (where else could they be – not here in the present).

All fo this intially takes a kind of STRENGTH as we have to rewire ourselves to UNLEARN and return to our natural state.

In this episode of Creative Status, I’m joined by Avilasha Sarmah, a talented novelist, writer, and poet who also goes by the moniker of Storyteller Earthling. Avilasha shares her insights on living without resistance and flowing with a sense of trust, drawing on her experiences as a creative and intuitive thinker.

We explore the role that the creative process can play in connecting us to our intuition, and how it can help us to tap into our true selves and live more authentically. Avilasha’s deep love for nature and the environment is also evident throughout our conversation, as we discuss the overlap between being an earthling and being real.

Avilasha’s journey to becoming a published author is inspiring, having written and published two novels – “MORNING” (2021) and “When the Cuckoo Called” (2017). She has been writing poetry, with a focus on nature, since she was only nine years old. Her writing reflects her passion for the environment and her desire to inspire others to connect more deeply with nature.

Through her own experiences, Avilasha offers practical advice and tools for listeners to cultivate a greater sense of trust and flow in their own lives. Join us for an inspiring conversation on the transformative power of creativity, connecting with our intuition, and how we can all become better EARTHLINGs.

This was a free-flowing, fun conversation and if you’re looking for some creative insight you’re gonna get it!

Listen using the player above or go to any podcast player including Spotify!

(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:

Avilasha’s website: www.earthlings.co.in

Avilasha on Instagram: www.instagram.com/storyteller_earthling

Creative Status Links:

Free one hour creative workshop to take you brand or project to the next level.

Show Transcript

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, mainly in the areas of health and relationships. But also if you want to take it a little bit deeper, it’s about looking at your relationship with yourself, figuring out the fragments that are holding you back and causing you to hesitate and stopping you from growing and flowing and moving with life and taking all of those inspired actions that you want to take when you’re able to tune into yourself and listen to your own intuition. And ultimately it’s about exploring how the creative process is the process of doing that, tuning more deeply into a sense of wholeness.

That’s the little rant, if you don’t know. My name is Oli Anderson, I’m a creative performance coach. I help people with their lives and businesses, but mainly it’s about helping them to distinguish the real from the unreal so that they can do all the things I just said, get out of their own way and start flowing with inspired action.

Today’s episode of Creative Status is an interview with Avilasha Sarmah, also known as Storytelling Earthling. I have been following her for a while on Instagram and we’ve had a few chats she seemed like someone who totally understands all this stuff and I just really wanted to talk to her more deeply about it and it was a good thing to do that because I got a lot of insight from this conversation.

We covered all kinds of stuff, the law of attraction, how to live without resistance, how to keep flowing, what the artistic process is, how we can find inspiration, how no matter who we are and no matter what we’ve been through, our interpretations of reality are all going to be slightly different even if that reality is the same for all of us when it’s bubbling beneath the surface of life itself.

There’s loads of cool stuff in here. So Avilasha, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for coming on here and letting me ask you a billion different questions and throwing curveballs at you and everybody else. I hope you really enjoy this conversation as much as I did and I’ll see you next Monday for another one of these when we have another episode of Creative Status. Here we go.

Interview

Oli Anderson: Oh hi there, Avalasha. Thank you so much for joining me today on this episode of Creative Status. We’ve been following each other basically on Instagram for quite a long time and you seem like somebody who gets it so I wanted to talk to you and now here we are having this conversation. Before we get into it, do you feel like introducing yourself and telling people who you are, what you’re interested in and why you wanted to have this conversation?

Avilasha Sarmah: Sure. First of all, thank you for choosing me, like asking me to be a part of your podcast because I have come across, I follow your podcast on Amazon and I love the content that you create, the topics that you talk about because it really inspires me to think and it’s my honor to be a part of it today and hi for people listening, I’m Avalasha. I am from India and I, you can find, like I use the alter ego, Stoical Earthling to create content and that’s how I would identify myself as Stoical Ertling and basically I’m a writer and a poet and a person and I publish two novels and I love writing so yeah I’m a writer who loves to travel so yeah you know that’s what I write about travel and nature and whatever inspires me to create.

Oli Anderson: Wow, so actually you’re a very prolific creative person so you’ve written a load of books, you’re doing all this poetry and everything. Let’s dive right into this thing that you just shared though about being a storytelling earthling so this you know the really interesting concept there is this idea of being an earthling so obviously we’re all technically earthlings as far as we know but what does that mean to you like why did you decide to go with that little name?

Avilasha Sarmah: Yeah sure thank you for asking this question because like I didn’t realize the fact that I live like an earthling but I did not use the word for a long time yeah but like for me earthling is something like I feel this is my belief that we are here on this planet briefly and if I look at it from a travel point of view like I’m traveling this life is this journey is my journey right so when I’m traveling I’m here briefly so this inspires me to create like for example in a basic trip when you’re traveling we are organically inspired by the trip by the journey and we are creating we are looking we’re not you you know succumbing to the everyday problems or the negative thinking that we’re under but when you’re traveling we forget that and we tend to focus on the new stuff we allow life to inspire us you know we allow the journey to you know take us where we want to go we don’t fight it with resistance so this is why I used the word earthling and this came to me like you know I growing up you know I think everybody places that we are told this is how life should be like we’re given a set structure this is what we should do and you know like this is the what success should be what’s what you know I did everything I was a courier I where I thought that I was successful because I was following all the rules but it just I was very unhappy and so I you know during the pandemic I just realized that I felt like there’s this thing like what if the world ends tomorrow and I I’ve I’ve not even started living you know so I when I sat down and wrote my second book it’s called morning the purest feeling and it’s about the whole the book itself is about something which echoes my own journey it’s like a person who questions the life that he is in and then he starts uh starts uh you know being honest with himself it’s two people in a female like two people so love story of salt as well so it’s like same thing with me so for me being an earthling was that the time I started living consciously and started paying attention to the wall around me and allowing me to inspire me to create and my dominant creative form was poetry hence so it’s I don’t know a storyteller.

Oli Anderson: Yeah, there’s that there’s so much amazing stuff going on there and I um like I really kind of resonate with it.

I know resonate is kind of a cheesy word, but I really, I see life in the same way. So I’m always talking about being human or being real. And I think there’s definitely an overlap between what you’re saying about being an earthly and the whole real thing. A

nd so for me, the word that you just use that kind of sums it up is consciousness. So the more conscious we are, the more awake we are, the more aware we are of, you know, our surroundings and life itself, the less blocked we are, and the less blocked we are, the more that we can be creative and we can enjoy life and we can truly, you know, make the most of it whilst we’re here before we do drop dead.

So as you’ve gone through this process of, I suppose becoming aware of, you know, the, the transitory nature of life and the fact that we’re all on limited time and everything, what, what changes have you made that allowed you to get to this point?

Avilasha Sarmah: Sure, it’s a very interesting question. I think the first thing I did was stop listening to the external world and started listening to my intuition. Like, it’s not like my intuition was always there, but I fought against it because it was against what everybody else was telling me, so-called elders, that this is what is right. But the moment I started listening to that, I started listening to my inner voice, I think that changed.

That was the beginning.

Oli: So what, do you think that intuition normally has the right answers? Like, have you learned anything about that? And what was it that was causing you to fight that inner voice specifically, would you say? And how did you win that battle so that the intuition could come back?

Avilasha: Yeah, that’s an interesting question. I think for me, like, writing was the means. Like, I am my most honest, honest self when I’m writing. So it’s like, when I sit down to write, this is where I get real. And this is where my intuition speaks to me. Like, I am more in connection with the higher powers, I don’t know, when I’m writing, like, I’m asking myself questions that because, because I did not listen to my intuition, there were a lot of question marks, a lot of questions. But I realized questions can happen because the answers were ready to be unveiled.

So when I asked myself those questions, I wrote them wrong, basically writing was the way I found answers. And though, and that’s where I believe that this is the intuition is the real deal, because it feels right to me. And if I am going forward, the more I get real with me, like you talk about being real, unblocking your realness, right? So I think I’m going to resonate with what you say in what the what your content says, because it’s exactly what I go through myself. It’s a more real I get. And if I get unreal, I don’t listen to my intuition.

I get my payback. And I have, you know, it’s like, okay, you get this vibe, right? You get a vibe about stuff. Okay, this just feels right. This doesn’t feel right.

And if you go with something that does not work, doesn’t feel right, I mean, it just doesn’t work out.

Oli: Like, yeah. So yeah, 100 % true. Like I found this in my own life. So if you don’t listen to that inner voice, that real voice inside you that you’ve tapped into with your intuition, then all that happens is you end up trying to force your life through all of the unreal things that you’ve been trying to filter life through. And anytime you are mainly motivated or inspired by that unreal stuff, well, you’re just going to get unreal results. And so actually, this process you’re talking about stepping back from all of that external unreal stuff that we take on board is the solution to, I would say, most of the problems in our lives.

And most of those problems are just caused by, you know, not being an earthling in the language that you’re using.

Avilasha: Yeah. Yeah, I guess, you know, you are also like you echo what I am saying, but just reducing different terms. Right, I’m using one thing and you’re saying unblock the realness.

But I think being an earthling is being real and being more conscious.

Oli: Yeah. Yeah. Like ultimately, exactly that is all the same thing. So the way I look at it, you know, the I think the truth is the same for all of us.

Like I think all human beings, you know, we’re experiencing the same truth from a slightly different point of view because of our own, you know, bodies and emotions and all the things that we’re going through.

But the truth itself is the same. And if you can tap it into that, however, you know, that works for you. That’s when life starts to open up and you can be more inspired and you can create more amazing things and do more things that are actually aligned with who you are. So this stuff that you’re saying about, you know, tapping into your intuition and not listening to the external stuff that’s not real, how has that helped you to be more inspired?

Because you seem to be a very inspired person.

Avilasha: Thank you. I think, yeah. So answer your question, like when I get more real with myself and more in listen to my intuition, I feel like And I’m going with my vibes here. Like I’m following what feels right to me, what doesn’t.

Very, very organically, there is this like for example, the more I started being real with myself, the more I felt a connection with nature. I have always been a nature lover, but it’s more like now I can look at nature from a perspective which is more conscious and aware. And when I’m doing that, I tend to get inspired by nature for example.

Like for instance, I tend to find poetry in my observations. Like if I’m witnessing even a bird or how the way she’s colored or the way a flower is colored, or if I’m traveling, if I’m noticing the river, for example, or the mountains, it’s just the way I look at it.

Like it’s poetry to me. And that inspires me to create. And talking about inspired creation, I think what I was trying to say is that like for example, as a writer, I used to work in social media, like digital marketing and in content and branding and stuff. So before that, I used to write for brands. Like, you know, and every time I worked for a client, they had certain specifications, keep your language less flurry, the market demands you to write this. Like there was no creative freedom, you know? And even as a writer, as a novelist, you know, moment, I have self-published my novels because if it’s a publisher, they tend to, you know, change your style and they’re like, this is working.

They tend to tell you how to write a book. When I want to write a book because the joy of writing the book is what inspired me to write. It’s not like I suddenly wanted to, you know, make it commercial. I wanted to write a book because it inspired me. The story came to me.

I can’t change it because the market is asking me to keep it like that, you know? Or that suspense thrillers are trending. If I don’t like suspense thrillers, I mean, why should I write it? So that’s what inspired creation for me is like, writing and doing something, you making space for that kind of content and not like succumbing to, you know, what is successful, what is trending. Like you make your own trends or you become, you define your own success, you know, that’s what I am.

Oli: Yeah, there’s a theory, isn’t there? Or like an idea that if you’re a creative person and you want to create something that really connects with others, then you need to do all this inner work and you know, you need to figure out who you really are, away from the ego and all that kind of thing and to find a solid foundation to put yourself on.

And then when you create from this real place, you’re going to be aligned and then you’re going to be creating things that are actually true and resonate with other people in the world. Do you think it is that simple? Not that it’s easy, but is it that simple? So you do that in a work, find out who you really are and then you express something based on that information.

Instead of, you know, trying to just do what’s popular and all these external stuff you just said?

Avilasha: Yeah, you’re asking if it’s simple. It’s not simple, obviously, but it’s very uplifting. Like, it’s like flow and I believe that, you know, nature’s flow is what is truth. So when you’re creating, inspired from within content, like you said, you do the inner work and then you have certain realizations and share it with the world or whatever, or however way you share it, whatever medium. I think that’s like being in flow and if I’m not doing that and if I’m not giving that, if I have a calling, for instance, I’m inspired to write something. Like it’s very, very, it’s like this inspiration which comes to you, you can’t stop.

That’s like being in flow, you know. If you don’t do that, then you might get another more, like these inspirations tend to be like always there. It’s not like you have one inspiration, you ignore it. And then again, you find, like, you know, so for me, I think what you said, I think doing that is like being in flow and being real in your terms. It’s not simple, but it feels right, you know, like it’s flow, like less resistant, like what they call the path of least resistance.

Oli: Yeah, I think you’re right. I think the main thing that causes resistance is almost always some kind of false idea or identity that we filter everything through. So I’m always saying the same thing on this podcast, it’s the ego thing. So we have shame, guilt and trauma, that makes us identify as something we’re not.

And then if we’re identified as that and using that as the filter for everything that we try and achieve, then we don’t actually produce anything real. But if you can step away from that, like you’re saying, then you remove all of the blocks because the only blocks are the ego stuff. And when there’s no blocks, that’s when you can get into this creative flow state where a lot of ideas are just popping up and you either act on them or you’re done and you’re inspired because you keep learning and you keep growing and you’re expanding and blah, blah, blah.

So to make it more practical maybe, like how can people live in a way or how can earthlings or real people live in a way where they’re putting themselves in that flow state as much as possible?

Avilasha: Okay, yeah, like also it’s something because I also follow like a lot of, for me, I follow Abraham Hicks who keeps on inspiring me. So on your content as well, like for example, it’s not like you can attain that complete state of flow because we’re human beings. We want to be negative emotions, we want to feel contrast.

It’s not like you can completely get there. But if you can enhance that, like for example, if you be in flow once, you will be inspired to enhance that, fine tune that flow, how much ever you can because when we feel like negative emotion, it’s like, you will be, it’s very organic, right? You feel negative, you’re organically asking for feeling better and that feeling better is flow, right? So it’s something which is a choice you make every day. Like either you choose to not be in flow or be in flow. It’s a choice, it’s a moment to moment choice. And it’s not easy because we have so much resistance, right?

In us and we are our own greatest enemy because we are fighting ourselves with our own thoughts, right? But for me, the state of flow that I could achieve was through writing again. Because I write and for when I’m writing, I feel like it’s not like I start writing and I’m in flow, but I write to get to the state of flow.

And yeah, this is something for me. And I feel like if it’s my two cents, I feel like if somebody, everybody has this dominant creative form, whatever ways they want to express themselves. And if you, that is because that process gives you joy. So following your calling, whatever it is, following your passion, that is the way as much as you can, that is the way to being in flow as much as you can.

And improve your life experience.

Oli: Yeah, 100%. And I totally agree as well. Everybody has some kind of a creative outlet that is gonna tune them back into the real version of themselves and put them back in that in touch with the intuitive side that you mentioned earlier in the conversation. Where do you think most of the resistance comes from?

So you’re right, like we can be in the flow state a lot of the time, but like human beings are human beings. So thoughts are always gonna pop up or things are gonna happen and so on and so forth. But what is the main thing that causes us to resist this natural state of flow? Because I think that state is, the flow state is natural. But what keeps us away from that natural state?

Avilasha: Our own thinking, I think we are like in your words, we are unreal most of the time. So we have created a system thanks to society and conditioning that believes in the unreal. Because what is belief? It’s a thought that we think, right? That’s belief all the time. So our beliefs are growing up with media, everything, you know, social media, everything. It’s like constantly telling us being unreal is right.

And then we have this dominant belief systems which is formed because of that. And that’s that’s that we are not listening to intuition. We are like listening to what is trending, what is cool, what is whatever. Everybody is following, trying to follow other people, you know, and not following us because we when we follow us, we are not part of the crowd. We are we are outcast here because being yourself makes you vulnerable.

We are not ready to accept that. So for me, resistance comes from my own personal experiences, negative belief. And in the law of attraction universe, when you’re thinking negative thoughts, we are attracting more negative experiences.

So it’s like, it’s just that. And that’s why for me writing enables me to stop that and meditation. I also meditated in the morning. So it’s like, it stops that and, you know, gives me the opportunity to refocus into what is feel good and what is right. And yeah.

Oli: Yeah, yeah, I completely agree. I think the simplest, simplest definition of the law of attraction that I can give is that you just focus on what you do want instead of what you don’t want. And if you can train yourself to do that, and I agree meditation is like a super powerful way to do it. And also, yeah, for me, like writing helps me as well.

But anyway, if you can train yourself to focus on what you do want and to think about those things, then obviously you’re going to feel better, you’re going to be unblocked, and you’re going to be moving and flowing in the way that you want to. You’ve said that a lot of the resistance just comes from the world kind of hypnotizing us or conditioning us to think that, you know, the unreal stuff is real, and that we should care what other people think, and we should chase things that, you know, we don’t even really need my material goods or whatever it is.

What about at the level of our relationship with ourselves? So in the way that we relate to ourselves, is there anything that we’re doing that is, you know, causing us to just focus on the stuff we don’t want? And then to get more of that and to block ourselves and to not flow?

Avilasha: Yeah. So when you when you’re asking a question, the thought I had was like, when you said the best matrix, you know, defined law of attraction is to think what we want and focus on that. But it’s not easy. If I mean, it comes to me sometimes when you I have certain ones, okay, this is what I want. And the negative thought comes like, how that sounds so far fetched, or, you know, how will you get there?

Or where’s the money, you know? So I think for a personal level, it’s, it’s again, like, unreal, whatever belief system has been, what like, what I have told myself, like, since a long time, like, based on what I see, what is like the world that we see society will live we see like, certain people being successful and having this idea that, okay, this is how what success is, this is how you get there. Which is not true.

Because everybody has a different story, like you said earlier, that we all come from different experiences. And we cannot have one size fits all even when it comes to success. But that’s what is we tell ourselves, you know, because we see what what we see with what we believe, but in truth, that’s not that’s not truth. What we feel is what we like feeling is true. Like, if it feels, it’s feel right, it feels right. And if it doesn’t feel right, it isn’t. So instead of following that, you know, we don’t follow that we we we tell ourselves this small story of this is this is how it should be like if you start something, these are the steps which are already defined.

But why not create your own, you know, you create your own steps, but you’re not ready for that sometimes. So I think negative you know, believes that we hold in ourselves. That is what gets in the way.

Oli: I think so, yeah – you said something really important. I’ve never really thought about but it’s the thing that gets in the way or one of the things that gets in the way is one. Yeah, negative thinking. So maybe as soon as we decide, we want to achieve a certain thing.

So let’s just keep it simple. So we want to get a book published or something. As soon as we’ve decided that’s what we want, the negative thoughts might start creeping in saying, oh, well, you know, I’m not good enough to do this or this is not going to happen to somebody like me or, you know, blah, blah, blah, all these different scenarios where things can’t work out.

But then the other thing, which you’ve kind of alluded to is we start thinking about every little step along the way that’s going to get us where we want to be. And a lot of the time, all of that planning and all of that attachment to certain steps in order to achieve certain results is putting us in control of the whole process, which is actually impossible.

So you know what I mean? We can’t control all of those steps. So I’ve learned in my life that a more real approach is, okay, we know what we want. We know where we’re trying to get to.

We have a vision. We have a loose understanding of the milestones and the goals that we have to chase along the way there. But actually, we have no idea whatsoever how things are going to unfold. We know that they will unfold in the way we want them to if we keep going, but we don’t really know all the little details.

And so if we’re too attached to that, and we start thinking about those things and those steps and trying to control everything, that actually turns into a negative thing that just holds us back from getting where we want to be. Does that make sense? And so ultimately, it kind of comes down to faith or trust or something like that. Like, do you think that is a big part of it? Like, we need to have faith in the process, and that faith, or you can substitute faith for any word that works for you, but that faith requires us to kind of transcend our ideas about ourselves.

Avilasha: So yeah, I think what you said is absolutely right. Uh, faith because like even with law of attraction, they are telling us you must believe in what you ask for when believing itself is hard, right? It’s not like we wake up selling and we start believing in something that we don’t believe. It’s a process of believing. I feel like, you know, so, uh, for me, what I’ve started, you know, after a lot of, you know, believing in our self, like, you know, believing that if I, if I want something, it is going to happen. And the way I do it is by looking back at the past manifestations that yes, I will be taken care of.

I mean, this, if I, if I want something, you know, I have to allow and do one thing after the other, not try to get everything done all at once. Do what needs to be done at this moment and it will work out because, um, like even with the Earthlings concept, I always wanted to build something like this, but where I came from, I came a very different career. I never imagined I would be able to get there, but looking back, you know, it has all happened on its own. And when I stopped focusing too much on what’s happening and what’s not happening, that’s also like you said, resistance, like if I, if it’s like planting a seed and going and, you know, looking at how when, why is the seed not, you know, blooming? You know, yeah, it’s exactly what happened with me as well. So fate, I think it’s, it’s like, it has to be a very moment to moment conscious process of being aware.

And, um, yeah, like, you can’t have beliefs. I release it’s a process I feel for me.

Oli: Yeah. Yeah. Like, could, could you elaborate on that process? Like if you’ve, I don’t know if I’m putting you on the spot saying that, but like that process for the average person from, I suppose, a state of non-belief in ourselves and in life to actually believing and going with it, what, what does that look like?

Avilasha: Yeah. That’s, that’s a great question. Uh, for me, I used to be a complete non, I was, I was the complete opposite of what I am now. I did not believe in our half faith or I was very insecure, you know, trust issues, right? And then trusting or trusting the process is like, it’s just unbelievable, you know, the past self, right?

But the way I did it was taking one moment at a time, like, you know, setting smaller goals, like, okay, I want trust, I won’t get this done today and trusting myself that I will be shown, like I will get me, this is where inspired action comes to me. It’s like, you get into a state for me by via writing, I get in the state of receiving where I’m like, okay, if I want to do something, uh, and I don’t know what to do now.

That’s how that’s how faith is cultivated. So then I can ask myself, what do I want to do now? And following that want, when I’m following that want, then I, uh, I, after following what I want to do now, very organically, I receive another, okay, maybe I want to do this now and then doing it like one step at a time. And when you look back by the time the day is done, you will get your task accomplished and has happened to me all the time, not as a rating, but setting smaller goals. Because if I have a big idea and I cannot get it done today, it’s impossible. It’s like planting a seed. It’s a process.

I think even nature, that’s why I turn to nature for inspiration. It’s like you have to understand, like you cannot have everything. All of a sudden it has to be one step or 30 other. But if I can do smaller goals and that’s how can I can develop faith, but it’s not like I will a hundred percent faith because there will be moments where I will completely question myself and everything and getting into the negative thinking. And, but when that happens, what I have realized is not to engage because it’s again, if I keep trying to make sense of negative thinking, I will not get the answer right then.

But if I can sleep on it, I have a better vibration and I have more clear, more clarity when it comes to thought. So that’s how I, the process is, I think I hope I answered your question.

Oli: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s amazing. So it reminds me when I was a kid, this is a bit of a story, but like one night when I was a kid, like really young, I was like four or five years old, something like that. Like I wanted to watch some cartoons at nighttime, basically. So I went downstairs and it was late at night. My dad was watching TV and he said, you know, what are you doing? Get back to bed.

It’s really late, blah, blah, blah. And I told him that I wanted to watch some cartoons and he assumed that because it was so late, there were no cartoons on the TV. And so he started flicking through the TV channels. Actually, he said, I’m going to flick through the channels. If there’s a cartoon on, you can watch it. Otherwise you’re going back to bed. So he started flicking through the TV channels, assuming there’d be no cartoons on there.

He could send me back to bed. As he was flicking through those, his cartoon and the cartoon, it was just a baby, like suspended in the air, walking across this kind of valley between these two mountains. And every time the baby took a step, like some bricks would appear underneath its feet and it would start to make a bridge so he could walk across the valley. And it just kept walking and eventually it got all the way across. And the relevance to what you’re saying is, it’s kind of like that baby on the bridge.

I’m always thinking about this, this baby. I’ve never been able to find this cartoon again because basically by having that sort of innocent mindset where you can trust yourself overall, even though sometimes, you know, the negative stuff might creep in, you’ve got enough faith to take the next step and then the next step appears and then the next step appears and then the next step appears and you can just keep going like that. And that’s ultimately, you know, how real life works. I think.

But you can only do that if you trust or you’ve got the faith that we’re talking about. Yeah. Yeah.

So I don’t know what you think.

Avilasha: Yeah. If anything, that’s the perfect, you know, no, that’s a perfect image, image. Like you can say like, you know, exactly like the baby walking in innocence. And the next step appears. That’s exactly what I think I do believe what life should be.

That’s being an early at the same time. Like you are trusting a journey to take care of you, you know, and yeah, that’s exactly what I also believe in. Like what I said, that you have to trust the process enough to understand that it’s always going to be more. It’s like, I tell myself this that if I’m mountain climbing, and I want to reach the top of the mountain. And once I reach there, it’s not like my desires will stop. I will be I want to do more, right?

Maybe next mountain. It’s always going to be a process. It’s always going to be more, more, more. And it’s not like, you know, people say like, I become this and if somebody says that, you know, I’ve reached where I want to reach and it’s that’s false because after a point, you start asking for more. And similarly, if we can trust the process, you know, that journey becomes worthwhile.

We know we’ll fight less and we reach faster, I feel that’s something I’ve learned the hard way. And yeah.

Oli: Hmm.When we talk about trusting the process. Maybe this is opening things up a bit too much. But what exactly is it that we are trusting? Like people always talking about trust the process, trust the process. I agree with it.

6 million percent. Like that is how to live. We live by trusting the process of life, which is ultimately I think just about letting life carriers towards more wholeness or reality or whatever. But what exactly are we doing or trusting when we trust that process?

Avilasha: Trusting ourselves. I mean, we all have like this. That’s the thing that’s the God in us or the source or higher self, you know, just the inspiration which comes to us. Like also like, for example, I don’t know if you experienced this. I think you have because it reflects in what you create is that sometimes you get an idea. Okay. And then you follow that idea.

And then every step of the way you create like you are guided like maybe this. Yeah. Yeah. That’s the guidance. So what I call guidance or the inspiration.

That’s what we’re trusting. That is what is I also call flow of nature. You know, that’s the process that’s the inspiration that’s the trusting.

Oli: Yeah. That’s exactly it. So this flow of nature. I have found is applicable to all of us. So when we earlier on in this conversation, you know, I said the truth is the same for everyone. And part of that is that the laws of nature are the same for all of us. And if we want to be real, then we need to basically get rid of all the mental bullshit that is stopping us from moving and living with those laws.

And so, as we talk about trusting the process and getting better at trusting the process. All I think that really means is that we have become more aware of those laws. We have increased our understanding of the fact that those laws exist and that they play a role in our lives.

So one law that you’ve mentioned is the law of attraction. I think that’s a real thing. I think there’s a lot in like bullshit out there because people want it to be something.

It isn’t, but it’s a real thing. So basically, if you think about what you want, you’re going to move in that direction. Like we said, another one is just the law of cause and effect. And so if you want a certain thing, then if you want to achieve certain things, then that’s a cause and you need to live as the effect that’s going to get that because everything is a process, blah, blah, blah, blah. So as you’ve talked about getting better at trusting this process, are there any of these kind of natural laws that you’ve become aware of, apart from the law of attraction?

Avilasha: Yeah. The flow of nature, like even, you know, I think it’s very in intricately everything’s interlinked like law of attraction. Like for example, I want something, you know, like, which means that this is something which already has been manifested. And I, when I followed it, want I am in flow of nature and that’s law of attraction.

Right. So I don’t know what other laws are say like when you say, but, but this is what, like I feel is the real the truth. The truth is not something which is like what we want is the truth. Like truth feels good.

That’s what I have realized. Not like if it’s not something external, like truth is such something. Like, like, this is what I have to be objective.

This is what I’ve realized. Like if what I want means it is what works for me. And this is what is my truth. And if I follow that, that’s flow of nature. And I am going to get to where I want to be.

Like, for example, if suppose I want to be a billionaire, we all want to be right. But I’m not there yet. And I mean, I’m not there yet.

And it’s far fetched. But I’m not saying that I will not be. But it’s not like, for example, I have to, it’s a process and like if I keep following my wants right now and I keep doing that, and maybe in the long run, you know, I might reach there. So that’s, but if I have, if I want to be that really not like following some somebody said being a billionaire school. So you know, you want to be a billionaire.

What do you believe in? Like, do I really want to be there? Do I want? Yeah, I think it comes with it. Or do I just, what do I want?

So it’s just, yeah, that’s true. The one thing, meaning like you something that really feels right to you, like your own thing, you know, like, I have to interrupt and say something here. Like, for example, when I, I have this poetry or things is this another page I have where I talk about nature poetry and stuff. So there I often post from the poetry, poetry prompts and suppose I ask people to write about the moon, for example, the same moon, you know, is everybody has such different perspectives like same moon, but everybody’s writing so differently. So this is something that I’ve realized is even with wants and success and everything, everybody has their own view of the same thing.

But if we all have different stories, I know I hope that makes sense.

Oli: Yeah, it makes perfect sense.

Avilasha: Yeah.

Oli: Yeah. So everybody’s looking at the same reality or the same moon or the same truth, but we all have our own interpretations based on, you know, the filter that we’re viewing life through. And I think, you know, and the short version is that I think those interpretations and perceptions as well are just fragments of the whole truth, but we all have different fragments that we’re kind of working with – just because we’re all individuals – and by pushing through our individual path to more wholeness instead of fragmentation, that’s when we start to learn and grow and expand and all this kind of stuff that we’re talking about.

But just to backtrack a little bit, the question I was going to ask you is how do people know what they want or how do they find real intentions within themselves because one thing I’ve noticed is a lot of the time people think they want something, but actually it’s not them that wants it, it’s their social conditioning that wants it, or it’s their ego that wants it, or it’s their shame and trauma and all these different things that are inspiring them to try and fill a void within inside themselves.

And so when they start chasing that kind of stuff, it just causes more fragmentation instead of putting them on this path and this natural drive towards wholeness, which is the flow of nature and blah, blah, blah, I think. So a question is for you, how do people know if they want something real?

Avilasha: I think the law of attraction answers that. Whatever we manifest, whatever our current reality is, it’s completely based on our thoughts. So if somebody wants something which is real, how do you identify that?

For me, what works is writing it down. Getting real with myself is like what I want, I write it down and then I get to the point of feeling. It feels like this is what I really want, like you have to feel the joy. I think what is true one feels like joy. It’s not, it does not feel like any other thing, but like pure positive energy is what I would use the word. That’s how I identify this is, this is the real intention and not something just coming from ego or some, some other like sadness or trauma or because yeah, you’re right, it’s very hard to identify sometimes, you know, with the source of truth.

So also like, that’s why law of attraction plays such an important role because law of attraction gives us exactly what we’re asking for. Like if, for example, if I’m not, if I’m, if I don’t believe in the journey or something, I get more instances where like, for example, if I want something, which is coming from drama and it’s not truth, I will, the law of attraction will give me more of that. And then I’ll keep on thinking for more.

And till I get to the point where I have no choice but to be real with myself, I think it is that money is already inspiring us in that way.

Oli: Yeah. Do you think that always happens? I, some people, you know, they keep, there’s the famous saying that’s always getting thrown around, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. And a lot of people out there in the world are running around trying to create lives for themselves or build lives for themselves, where they’re just chasing things because of all the external, unreal things that we’ve already talked about. And eventually, they almost always do reach a point where they, you know, they just say to themselves, wow, you know, this isn’t working.

I need to change something. And that’s when they start to wake up. Or do you think some people just spend their whole lives running around in these unreal hamster wheel circles, and then just, you know, die miserable and frustrated? That’s not a very happy question.

Avilasha: I think a lot of people do that. They don’t just put their intuition and, you know, live on their lives and never satisfied. And I mean, yeah, but I feel like we always get an opportunity, like, like you said earlier, that well being or joy or whatever is our organic state, natural state of flow is happiness, joy. And we just do something to pinch it off.

Right. So, yeah, I think if for me, I think ever since I was young, I always felt like there’s more to life. And I started asking questions. And I feel like it’s very different for everybody. I don’t think that there is one answer to that. Like, there may be different triggers for different people. But sometimes a lot of people have this, how does I get to like, I try to understand how to answer this question. Can you can you again, like, exactly?

Oli: Yeah, so I suppose, yeah. So a different way of asking that question is if you keep getting the same results. So by which I mean, you’re getting results in life that you don’t necessarily like. So you get the same negative results. Then eventually, you would think that for most people, there’d be a point where they realize that the problem is them and the way that they’re thinking.

But a lot of the time, because people are so distracted, chasing all of these unreal things that they think they want, they don’t actually realize that they are the ones causing the problems in the first place.

And so do you think most of those people will just naturally, you know, have some kind of a breaking point one day where they wake up and realize, wow, okay, I need to change something? Or is it possible to just spend our whole lives just, you know, going around in those circles and then that’s it?

Avilasha: I think it’s again, depends on the person. A lot of people go through lives like that and die and never realize, I think they get another chance the next lifetime. I don’t know.

But I think some people do question and they wake up and get aware. And I think a lot of people who follow their creative passion or follow what gives them joy, I think they tend to wake up because for a moment there, you’re giving yourself the opportunity to choose what feels good to you and not run around.

I think when you’re insecure and that’s where I feel again, like everybody gets the opportunity every day to choose what is good for them. But every time, I think there are two different responses to this. Some people, you know, take the opportunity and make something, make their lives worthwhile. And some people fight it with resistance.

Yeah, I guess that’s the answer.

Oli: Yeah, I think like to kind of go full circle, it always comes back to the wholeness versus fragmentation thing. And I think the fragmentation or ego, resistance, whatever you want to call it, it.

That only comes about because we’re scared to face the truth about ourselves and to push through some of the uncomfortable emotions that we might have picked up in life that made us more fragmented than we needed to be in the first place. And this natural drive that we all have towards wholeness is actually the thing that we can tap into at any moment that is going to bring more joy into our lives.

Because actually, when I think about it, I think that feeling of joy is just a feeling of being connected to wholeness. And it just means that you’ve removed all of these mental barriers and blah, blah, blah. You got into the flow state and you feel joyful purely because you’re not holding onto that fragmentation.

And so if you can live like that, that’s when you can be in earthling in the way that you’re talking about, or you can be real in the way that I’m talking about, and then life just feels kind of amazing. So I don’t know if that makes sense. Like I’m kind of rambling a tad. I apologize.

Avilasha: Yeah, I think the thing is the way to being real. If when you chose to be in earthling, you get to be real and get to live a life where you are woke and aware.

Yeah, not go that social media way, but like really awake, not trying to be.

Oli: Because you’re choosing your nature. You’re choosing a nature. Yeah, exactly. Wow. We’ve been talking a long time, kind of. But we covered a lot, I think. Have you got any final words to just sum all this up? Like if you’re going to sum up this conversation, and the main points or the main lessons, like what might that be?

Avilasha: I think I felt like an entire conversation was about being an earthling and how to be real. Like we were talking the same things, like, but in different languages, like I use the earthling, you know, top is the way of trying to make sense of what I believe in about the truth of life. When you use the concept of unblocking your realness and connecting to the wholeness, which is joy, and being aware, right?

And I feel like to end it to it is like the only way, like I found the way which works for me is to connect to the wholeness, get to real and be an earthling, to follow what gives you joy. That’s how do I identify that is whatever, like when we come to this earth, we have so many options in front of us, you know, we could do whatever and we very organically choose what we like and what we don’t like.

And that becomes our passion. And what we don’t like, for example, if somebody wants to be an athlete or a player or wants to go into sports, and they are being told that, no, you know, you go into finance, for example, you know, like, they have developed their lives and dislikes, it’s completely different from what we do. I thought I’d give an example, which is very different from us, because we are creative people and sports and finance are not creative. But what I’m trying to think here is that, like, we develop our lives and dislikes very organically.

And if you can, we didn’t make any effort, you know, to identify them. So that is the inspiration, that is the process we trust that likes and dislikes are coming to organic. And if you can, if you can, you know, believe that like, if you can follow what gives us joy, passion, what we like, I think that’s the right right path. That’s where already being an earthling and being real as but the moment is don’t do that the moment we shut ourselves down. And we say that no, this doesn’t work, you know, I think I should choose this way of life for this success, this career, or this person, you know, like, that’s when we get unreal. And we pretend to live a life where we are, we’re not living anymore.

Like, like, for example, something I had, I had this thought earlier today, like, only a robot who doesn’t have emotions will be like, they will choose what’s the best selling route to living an ideal life. But because when somebody tells you, this is what’s the weather most money is at. So you follow that. We can’t live that we will at some point, you know, we will hate it, you know, we will have our desire, we’ll want to do something else. So I think being an earthling being real is also understanding that we have emotions are very real. And I think emotions and feelings are our compass towards living the life that is true to us or being true to ourselves or why we are on this earth for the in the first place.

Oli: Wow. So it’s about following your is the Joseph Campbell thing of you that goes is follow your bliss. It’s kind of if you do that, you’re going to be in touch with your nature. And then you can be an earthling and then everything will be amazing.

Avilsaha: So not really. Not all amazing. I mean, but with the alive and all a robot.

Oli: Yes. Yeah, I was just been a bit cheeky saying the amazing thing. Yeah, you get the whole human experience. Should we put it that way?

Avilsha: Yeah. Yeah, I guess.

Oli: This been really good. Where can people find you like on the internet or where you’re from?

Avilasha: Yeah, so if you’re on Instagram. And my website is earthlings: www.earthlings.co.in. So if you go there, everything is there like all the social media and the magazine and the I also have a podcast which I’m working on. So I hope you know, you, you know, agree to be a guest someday. So and see you on there.

Oli: Absolutely. Yeah. Okay, well, I’ll share all that, you know, your information and stuff in the show notes. But I will ask you, thank you so much once again, it’s been awesome. Thank you.

Creative Status: Episode 22: Sam Furness: Perception, Creativity & the Other Side of Truth

Published on March 13, 2023

Creative Status: Deconstruct ego, integrate the shadow, manifest real life.

What you perceive, you receive 👇

It might be hard to accept (especially if our lives currently suck) but the way that we CHOOSE to perceive our lives can affect the way that we LIVE our lives.

To make things even more complicated, we often make UNCONSCIOUS CHOICES about what we perceive because of our underlying emotional ‘stuff’ and the demands of our ego so we can keep the SHADOW SELF at bay.

As a general rule we can say this:

If you REPEATEDLY get things that you don’t want from life or things never seem to go your way then you probably have some inner work to do with the things that drive your perceptions.

Luckily, this is something that we can ALL DO because – whether it feels like it or not sometimes – we all have power over our own INNER STATE and the things that we ALLOW into our experience.

It starts with you but it ends with you too.

In this episode of Creative Status, I had the pleasure of speaking with Sam Furness, the founder of Channel Twelve, a creative project that encourages people to broaden their perceptions and embrace different forms of creativity.

What stood out to me the most about Sam was his ability to flow effortlessly around these topics and translate his personal experiences into practical lessons. He has a talent for breaking down complex ideas into easy-to-understand concepts which makes his lessons easier to integrate and act on.

Sam understands that creativity stems from following your intuition, releasing yourself from assumptions and pretensions, and allowing your work to emerge naturally. It’s this philosophy that has helped him unlock his own creativity and inspire others to do the same with the creative ‘Quests’ he leads with the Channel Twelve project.

We also discussed the power of changing our perceptions and how it can unlock endless possibilities in our lives. Sam’s year-long challenge of immersing himself in a new creative pursuit each month not only led to a more diverse and fulfilling lifestyle, but also sparked a new level of creativity and innovative thinking.

Through Channel Twelve’s Quests and Projects, Sam aims to help others broaden their creative focus and enjoy playful lifestyles that are illuminated by curiosity. Overall, this conversation was a deep dive into the power of changing our perceptions and embracing our creative potential.

If you’re looking to level up your artistic game or just want some inspiration on how to live a more fulfilling life, then this episode is a must-listen. Tune in to learn more from Sam’s inspiring journey and his philosophy on creativity.

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

All episodes on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6UG491sXbZv6fUKIMVrIT6

(Scroll down for the 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:

Sam’s Channel Twelve website: channeltwelve.co.uk

Sam on Instagram: instagram.com/saaamfurness

Creative Status Links:

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Show Transcript: Perception, Creativity & the Other Side of Truth

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 at the deepest possible level, ultimately the level of your relationship with yourself and then by extension, everybody else in the world. And if you’re feeling particularly grand eloquent and excitable, you could even say it’s going to help you improve your relationship with reality as a whole.

Wow, don’t want to over promise though. If you don’t know, my name is Oli Anderson. I am a creative performance coach and I basically help people to be more real in their lives and their businesses. For me, being real is ultimately just about connecting to a feeling of wholeness, which is something that you will have heard me talk about on this podcast previously if you’ve listened and if you’ve never heard it before and you decide to listen, then you basically will hear me talking about that.

Today’s episode is an interview with a guy called Sam Furness. He has a project called Channel 12, which I would basically summarize as being a community of people that come together around the value of creativity and take themselves with Sam’s facilitation on what he calls quests.

Each quest is ultimately a way of playing with perception so you can see something new in yourself and in life and to basically play with the way that you relate with the world around you and allow more realness, shall we say, just so I can be a walking cliche into your own experience. This interview was super chill in my opinion. Sam’s a super chill guy.

It unfolded organically and ultimately we talked about how the idea of these quests allows people to see things that they might not see, how it can help people to get out of their comfort zones and all that kind of stuff and to expand and to grow. But then on a slightly deeper level, we talked about this thing to do with perception and how playing with our perceptions can really change our lives.

It fits into an idea that’s come up a few times already on this podcast and I’m always throwing around out there which is that we don’t see the world as it is but as we are. Some people can be resistant to that because if their life kind of sucks and they’re just seeing all this chaos and confusion and misery all around them, they don’t necessarily want to take responsibility and say, okay, maybe I’m playing a role in this.

But if you can just play with the idea and say, okay, my inner state is reflected in the outer world around me, then you realize that you have a lot more power over your life than you may initially believe. And so this whole thing of perception really is something that’s truly important, I think, when it comes to improving our lives, which is basically the main theme of this podcast, as I probably already said. So anyway, I’m going to stop rambling, but there’s some really good stuff in this interview.

Sam, thank you so much for letting me interview you and for giving me your time. I just randomly stumbled across Sam on the internet and then reached out to him. So thank you for going down the rabbit hole of just letting this strange person get in touch with you and then ask you a bunch of questions.

Anyway, here’s the interview and I hope you all get some stuff out of it. And thanks so much. I’ll see you next Monday for another episode of Creative Status.

Interview

Oli Anderson: Oh, hi there, Sam. Thank you so much for joining me today on Creative Status. Based on what we’ve said previously in our little pre-chat, we’re going to cover some kind of philosophical issues around creativity and perception and spirituality.

But before we dive down that little rabbit hole, do you feel like introducing yourself and just telling people who you are, how you ended up working in this area of creativity as a whole and what you’re hoping to get out of this conversation?

Sam Furness: Sure. Yeah, well, it’s great to be here. Thank you very much for the invite, Ollie. So my name is Sam Finesse and I am the founder and quest leader at Channel 12. We produce experiences, workshops and content that help people and organisations explore sort of different sides of their creative potential and different ways to see the world around them.

There’s a kind of a bunch of different ways that we we do this predominantly through a programme that’s been running for the last two years called Creative Quests, which is a monthly kind of club that people sign up to from from all over the world. Each quest has a theme.

We have themes that explore those workshops, guest speakers, challenges that we set people between our workshops in a sort of an in an effort to get people just exploring different sort of corners of their their creative self. That’s been a project that’s been before it was a thing that other people signed up to. It was a project of mine, personal project for about five years previous to that. So it’s kind of in terms of how I got to work in creativity, it’s been a winding path to setting up my own thing.

It’s still I’m still only a year into it being a full time full time job. And what am I hoping to get out of this conversation? Well, I personally find that I personally think I’m my most fluid when I’m in conversation with somebody else. So I always look forward to having conversations about creativity with other creative people that are on the journey because it’s it’s always in that sort of toing and froing that new new understandings of things emerge, right?

Oli Anderson: Yeah, that’s the main idea of this rambling podcast that I’ve created. So normally as we go through it, like me and whoever I’m talking to new insights will kind of emerge in that to and fro that you’ve mentioned. And I think that is the creative process in a way.

If we’re doing it right, if we’re both coming out from a kind of real point of view, hopefully that’s what’s going to happen in terms of what you just said about your work and all that kind of stuff. What was the main idea behind the quest thing? So why did you decide that sending people in your community on these little quests was going to be something that would help them?

Sam Furness: The root of it goes back about seven years, beginning of 2016. I have been working in the music industry, managing music artists for four or so years at this point. And I loved that job. Being a music manager is great fun. You get to do lots of great things. And I was really fortunate to work with some amazing music artists. But as my roots are in making things myself, you know, theater music predominantly. And your job as a manager is to really be the behind the scenes person.

It’s certainly not to be the artist. And over time, it felt like that part of me was getting neglected. And it was really, I was giving all of my creative self to the artist project I was working on. So I just did, I set myself this challenge for a year in 2016 to explore a different form of creativity in my spare time each month.

And just making that time for myself and having a sort of a theme to follow, a simple kind of boundary to follow each month that, you know, I had a month to do it and I had a theme to explore. It just kind of reignited my creative spirit in a really significant way. And I learned a lot of that year about how spending time with different creative mediums can really, really not just upskill you to, you know, get better at painting or origami or whatever it happens to be that you’re exploring.

But also these, they can kind of become, these themes can kind of become little wayfinding tools for day to day life as well. So really this project to kind of be a bit more creative in my spare time really developed into like, sort of like, oh, this could just be like a way that I, this could be like a practice that I sort of adopt in my life when I need it to kind of top back up when I’m feeling creatively depleted or I wanna discover some new things or meet some new people. Just felt like a useful tool for many reasons.

And yeah, it took many, many years of development and eventually it became something where I turned it into something that other people could join. So it’s quite different now. It’s different as a format, but in, I say, yeah, it’s different in format, but its spirit is exactly the same. It really is.

Like it is exactly the same as it was seven years ago. It is like, get out into the world, explore it from a slightly different point of view, be a magnet for serendipity because you’re opening yourself up to it. And see where it takes you.

It’s not, you know, it’s very process led. Sometimes these quests end up developing projects out the back of them. Sometimes they’re just a great way to spend a month, you know? Yeah, that’s kind of how people are on this journey. And yeah, we’re two years and eight quests deep now as a community platform.

Oli: Wow. So it sounds like initially it started off as you were just trying to find new ways to mix things up. So different mediums, maybe different themes for different artistic projects, whatever it was. But over time, this has evolved into something that’s actually a lot deeper than just the variety part. So it sounds like actually, as you go through these different quests, you start to see the world in a slightly different way.

That opens you up or the person, the people doing the quests, up to seeing themselves in different ways. And then that gets onto this thing that you said about being open to serendipity and allowing life to kind of merge into whatever it is that you’re becoming.

If that doesn’t sound too pretentious. So is that a fair assessment of what’s happened?

Sam Furness: It’s a perfect assessment of what’s happening. Yeah, really smashed it. I’m gonna go back through this and steal that for the website. Right. Yeah, that’s exactly it.

It really, there was no grand plan at the beginning. This was, it was very much naive. It was quite naive, really. It was like, honestly, I thought, I’m gonna learn, I’m gonna find a new hobby.

That was kind of the goal. It was like, I wanna learn a new hobby through exploring what I perceive as other people’s creativity. And maybe along the way, I’ll find a new thing.

Because my thing was kind of music and theater. And when I started the project in 2016, those things just weren’t calling out to me. And so that’s why I was like, well, maybe I’ll just try something new each month and I’ll find the new thing. And by the end of the year, I can just take photography or animation or color or whatever it happens to be that I explored. And me and photography can live happily ever after.

And that was it. But really, actually, I fell in love with the process of like, wow.

Oli Anderson: Do you think people… Sorry, sorry. Do you think people tend to fall in love with specific mediums?

And when they do that, they begin to identify with whatever that is. So for example, a lot of photographers, they seem to love the idea of being a photographer more than the photographs themselves, if that makes sense. And so when people become so attached to it like that, it actually ends up killing their creativity.

And so if I understand what you’re doing right with these quests, the quest is ultimately about, connecting to a deeper version of themselves or awakening different parts that may have been hiding for a while or whatever it is. And then that allows them to have a better relationship with the creative process as a whole.

Sam Furness: Yeah, exactly. And we get a real mix of people join these quests, whether it’s people that are looking to just get more creativity in general in their life, and make time for more creativity in their life by kind of joining a community where there’s accountability and inspiration and new friends and that kind of thing.

But also we do have people join that are practicing creatives, artists, that are using it as a tool to kind of throw a spanner in the works of their own process. And… And yeah, using it as a tool to stay sharp. You know, when I first started doing it, it was very much a tool to get my creativity back. Seven years on, like I certainly don’t feel like I, I’m lacking any creativity in my life at all.

There’s an abundance of that. But so now this has really evolved into a process about keeping my creative tools sharp ever evolving, keeping my perceptual skills ever evolving, because it all feeds back into your sense of creativity. And I think what you’re capable of creating, I think it all starts with what you are open to sort of attracting. You know, I often think of creative quests as like, it’s almost like changing your diet. It’s like, you know, there’s that saying, like you are what you eat.

I think it’s really the same for creativity. And I guess the, like the, what would it be? The analogy would be more like, you are what you seek or something like that, you know?

Like that is, it’s much more about the things that you surround yourselves with and the things that you’re curious about are the things that end up becoming a part of you and sitting with you. And they then become, those things become inklings. And then those inklings become like curiosities and those curiosity, curiosities become ideas and ideas become projects and projects become whatever, you know, it’s, but I think it all starts with this openness to, just something.

Yeah, so yeah, it’s people join for all kinds of reasons. And I think you’re exactly right back to your point about, it’s not obviously just photographers, like any person, I think expertise is a great thing. And I never want creative quest or the way I speak about it to be sort of bashing the idea of mastery. Like I think being in it, being really highly skilled at something is amazing.

But I think a master of something is always open to evolution in some way.

Oli Anderson: So this is where this conversation is probably gonna start to open up a little bit because for me, the whole creative process is just about tapping back into our humanity. And that sounds very kind of, you know, highfalutin and lofty, but all I mean by that is that the creative process allows human beings to keep evolving, to keep growing, to keep expanding.

And when we put ourselves on that path towards expansion or whatever word you wanna use, what we’re actually doing is moving towards a deeper sense of wholeness within ourselves. And so I feel and believe and have understood in my own life with my own journey that if we’re struggling to be creative, if we’re struggling to express something, then we have put some kind of a fragmentary block in our own path that is stopping us from being open in the way that you’re talking about and that causes us to just feel stuck.

And there’s all these different ways that we can become fragmented. Maybe we have an emotional block. And so we identify as a version of ourselves that kind of tries to keep those emotions at bay. Maybe we get too identified with a certain label, like we’ve just unfairly tarnished photographers with and all those kind of things.

But- Sorry to my photographer, Brent, I love you. Yeah, me too, okay. So if we can understand this, then we can put ourselves in situations like quests, ultimately, that are gonna push the boundaries of what we think we know about ourselves. And when we get to the edge of whatever that is, when we stretch ourselves, that’s where the idea meets reality and something new can come in, some new insight. And so to bring all this rambling back to what you’re saying, at the start of your journey with the quest thing, you said, you know, you’d lost touch with your creativity and all that kind of stuff.

And now you don’t really have that issue. So what would you say is the main transformation that you went through as a result of, you know, putting yourself in these new situations and bringing more variety to the table?

Sam Furness: I think the main thing was going from seeing creativity is something that I needed to find time to do. More into a kind of just ever present approach to like living a life.

That really was it. And that often actually, I think sometimes the thing that we’re seeking isn’t necessarily to, and maybe this is just my view, but I think a lot of the time we’re seeking the feeling, you know, like, and a lot of the time, I think the feeling is that we’re seeking is a kind of connection to other people or the places that we live, our communities, or obviously ourselves.

And I think you can do, well, certainly for me, I can get to that place now without necessarily having to make a project at the end of it. You know, sometimes the projects really do kind of just, you’re just so overflowing with ideas and inspiration that there’s just no option but to make the thing. And that’s an amazing place to be where the project just feels like it’s kind of making itself, not without hard work, of course, but, you know, I think, yeah, it’s, it’s, I think, that’s the main difference is that to me now I can, I feel like I get as much satisfaction from kind of just always being in the processes as I am with actually putting something out in the world.

I guess it’s the seeing your life like as the art project. It’s very meta, but in, and there’s a great quote that we came across on our poetry quest in January 2021. So our first quest that we did as a community, one of the best, a because it was the first one and it was just all felt brand new and I was just breaking myself from start to finish. Like, oh my God is this thing that I’ve been doing for five years, like actually going to work with a group of people who are these people that signed up. Like it was people from all over the world. It was mid lockdown.

It was just, it was very, very exciting and very Holson. But one of the quotes that we came across that month and I can’t remember who it’s by easily Google Googleable though was if you can’t be a poet be a poem. I just love that. Like to me that is like a great example of that’s like the most perfect quote for what creative quest is for me exploring poetry for a month.

You probably like by the end of it, you’re probably not going to identify as a poet, but you’ll feel poetry in your life like well without a shadow of a doubt. And I think I think it’s that. Yeah, read back to the perception thing.

The pro quest process is really a kind of unlearning process as it much as much as a learning process. It’s kind of re examining what your relationship is with the thing that we’re exploring together and yeah themes range from stuff like poetry, photography, animation, like more medium based things through to much broader stuff like time, home, colour patterns.

Oli: Yeah. So I suppose all those different lenses of the different topics that you’re using for the quest itself, all of those different lenses end up giving you a filter for viewing life through.

Ultimately. So you know, all art, all creative projects, no matter what medium they’re in, ultimately they are dealing with the same subject matter which is life and the human experience. And so I suppose if you put one of those filters on and view your life through it, like you said, it will give you something new that you can do in the way that you live. And so is it fair to say that as you know, you personally you’ve gone through this journey of losing touch with your creativity at the start and then getting back in touch with it.

You’ve just learned to perceive life differently as a consequence of all of these things you’ve been doing. So it’s the perception that’s made the difference to your creative drive.

Sam: Perceptions definitely made the difference and that that’s been the biggest surprise, I guess, and the thing that I’m, I guess that I’m most, to be honest, kind of most proud of with with creative quest developing is that it has developed this like I had no interest or idea about perceptions seven years ago like I knew it was a word and I knew what it meant but I didn’t really think about it in terms of creativity.

But through the process of of doing these quests each month and I’m, I think I’m like 25 or so different themes deep at this point. It was just a really amazing thing to notice was like wow my experience of London is really different when I’m exploring food to when I’m exploring animation or the things that I find interesting on my walk to work when I’m thinking about patterns versus when I’m thinking about, I don’t know, whatever, like whatever it might storytelling.

And it’s just really got me really interested in this like, and I feel like I’m really just at the very beginning of this curiosity of like really digging deep into like the science of perception like what does shape the way that we see the world like through creative quest I’ve learned very clear and I’ve learned very clearly that the things that we’re passionate about really shape the way that we see the world around us.

The way that yeah skateboarder sees the world is different to the way that a climate activist sees the world, you know, and it and you know and any any other iterations of that like that’s through speaking to lots of interesting people and actually exploring these things myself that’s that’s super clear.

But yeah, I, I feel like I’m literally just just paddling in in that subject which is of course hugely vast because it takes you into the whole world of neuroscience and neuro aesthetics and yeah I’m no, I’m no pro on any of that stuff so I’m that’s kind of curious that’s where I’m curious to go to go next with it for sure.

Oli: So what would you say is the, you know, the main lesson when it comes to this perception thing. In terms of, I suppose, being more creative, obviously, but also at this deeper level that you’ve allowed this to branch out into you which is, you know, of life itself. So how does, you know, what what changes can we consciously make, I guess, in the way that we try to have control over the way we perceive life, the way that we manage our beliefs even and all that kind of stuff in order to be more creative and to have a better life as a whole.

Sam: Yeah, there’s a great quote by a neuroscientist who I got to know over the last few years of kind of being more interested in in this side of creativity called Beau Lotto. He is founder of a studio called Lab of Misfits and he has a great book called Deviate.

Yeah, I came across a couple of years ago, maybe like two, couple of months before I launched Channel 12 and then our first Quest series in that following January. And I kind of just devoured this book and it’s just a really, really well written approachable, but scientific book on perception and creativity, the intersection between the two.

There’s actually a, I actually interviewed him, there’s a good interview with me and him on on the channel 12 Instagram on our videos somewhere, somewhere way back from March 2021 – if people want to check it out. And there’s a quote in that book which I kind of come back to a lot because it just perfectly described what I was experiencing which was change your ecology, change your brain. And you know that essentially means your ecology being the things that you’re kind of surrounded with.

If you want to change your brain the way you think, you know, the way that you perceive, the way you understand, you have to change the things that surround you. And not just like a one-time thing, it’s like really spend time in different environments, you know, around different conversations. And this can be, this sounds like a massive thing, like, oh my god, how do I change the ecology of my life?

Like, it’s, it sounds, but there’s super easy ways to do that. Like, you can, you know, you can change the things you watch on Netflix. Like, you know, not rely on the his for you, you know, like the internet is a really a nettle, is a dangerous place for that, because it’s, it’s algorithms are constantly adapting to make them, to make the whole architecture of the internet you experienced, to make it appear more like you.

And, and, but the great thing about algorithms is that they’re actually really fickable, fickable, that’s not a word, a really, really fickle and easily led, you know, you can jump on Twitter or Instagram or whatever and, and follow 20 new accounts for something that you didn’t know much about, like color or time or whatever. And your, your silly algorithm will just try and catch up with you.

And it’ll be like, Oh, okay, well, do you want some of this and do you want some of that? And then suddenly, you know, when you’re logging into your Twitter, Instagram, whatever, it actually looks a little bit different. And the messages, they’re a little bit different.

And so I think I could go on about this all day, but it’s, it’s like very, very simply, it is, you can, you can change your input with, with where you put your time and attention. There’s a really simple exercise that we do, which we call take a theme for a walk. So it’s one of the very first things that we do on a creative quest. After our first session, it’s very simple, everyone just has to take the theme we’re exploring for a walk for around the place they live or wherever they happen to be, you can do it literally anywhere.

And it’s just like, where does the theme show up when you start looking at the world through that theme, storytelling, animation, what, you know, whatever it happens to be. And it’s, it’s really amazing. It really is astounding. Every single time you will notice something that you did not notice, or you’ll, you’ll notice something you see all the time, but you’ll see it differently.

And, well, yeah, yeah, you will see it differently. And so I think that’s the main takeaway for me is like, if you want to disrupt or sort of shake up your creativity, you have to open yourself up to spending time in, in, in new environments.

You know, I think our best creative ideas are born in, they’re not born in the familiar, the best, our best creative ideas are born in somewhere between what we know to be true, and something new and surprising. And I think it’s like in the middle of that kind of Venn diagram of our truth and something new and surprising in the world that really great creativity, whether it’s artistic or innovation, that’s where it’s born.

It’s like looking at the something with a new, with a new lens.

Oli: I think as well, there’s a really important point that can be made about the active use of our perceptions. So what you said about social media is very true, very important. A lot of social media just ends up being a vortex for the most important assets that we have, which I think you’ve mentioned some of them, but our time, energy and attention, we’re all going to die one day.

So that means that those things are incredibly precious. And if we’re just being passive and we allow the algorithm or all of the robots that have been designed to suck away our attention, to direct where our perception goes, then eventually our lives will be an extension of whatever that is. And so the approach you’re talking about actually is a lot more active, is ultimately an active way of directing what we perceive in the world so that whatever we’re giving our time, energy and attention to via those perceptions is going to grow instead of just the passive things that we may be getting sucked into without even realizing on social media or elsewhere.

And so this goes back to what you were saying about, don’t be the poetry, be the poem. So if people in general are trying to grow, trying to evolve, trying to expand in the way that we were talking about, then that almost always means that they, that the starting point or that they’re in the midst of some kind of a transformation. So in simple terms, they’re at point A, they want to be at point B.

Getting to point B is just about giving your attention to the things that are going to help you get there. So that might be managing our own thoughts, thinking about what we do want instead of what we don’t want, for example, thinking about how we can live our values and intentions and blah, blah, blah. And so actually, if we try to perceive things that are going to allow us to become that version of ourselves that we’re trying to be, then that’s a very powerful thing.

And it means that the perception is actually allowing us to create the life that we want. I don’t know if I’m making that sound too simple, but do you think that is something people could actively do? And that they may have actually been doing anyway, as part of these quests, without necessarily realizing that’s what they were doing?

Oli: Yeah, yeah, I think creative quest is definitely not an A to B process. But it’s, I mean, actually coming back, there’s another thing that Beau Lotto from Lava Misfit says, he, I think he’s talking, he’s kind of talking about transmission and change. And he says like, the goal is not to go from A to B, it’s to go from A to not A, which I think is just cool.

And I think it’s a little bit more like that. It’s like, it’s, it’s really seeing creativity and whatever way that manifests in your life, whether you’re an artist or like, you know, some of the most creative people I’ve met in the last few years have been like sports people, you know, like it doesn’t, I don’t think of, of creativity as being, you know, limited to the arts in any way.

But it’s, it’s kind of, yeah, feeling your, feeling your way into it, you might, yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s an emergent process. You know, I think, you know, we say with, with people that sign up to, to the quest, this isn’t, you know, this, like as a disclaimer on the website that says, this is not a course.

This is not a course, this is an invitation. And some people look at that and be like, what a load of wishy-washy rubbish. But it’s not a course, like it’s, it’s not, it is not an A to B, like, type thing, like you’re going to have forexed your skills on this, and you’re going to have, you know, done that.

It’s, it’s much, much looser than that. And it really is an, it’s an invitation for people to come on a creative exploration journey, process, adventure, however you want to frame it. And see what, see what happens. It really, and be as, yeah, back to the thing from the beginning, be open to the serendipity.

Oli: Serendipity, yeah. Yeah. The, the spiritual side of this that you kind of mentioned at the start, but definitely mentioned in the little pre-chat, how does, how does that come into it from the, the point of being creative?

So, I suppose the first question, just to open this up, do you think that if people are, you know, in touch with their spiritual selves, whatever words you want to use there instead of spiritual, are they more creative and more open to the kind of serendipity that you’re talking about?

I would say so. What do you think about that?

Sam: Yeah, it’s, it’s, I mean, I would, I would broadly say yes. It’s, I find myself when I get asked these questions, I like, I go through my head and I feel like I’m like, rolodex’ing every single theme that we’ve explored or created, quests and going, hmm, does that question sit with this one?

Does it sit against that one? And it’s not a very helpful way of doing it, but that’s just little insight into how my brain works. I do think people that are more open to, to magic is also a very overused word, but just, yeah, the, the feel, the, the, yeah, the, the, the, yeah, it is magic.

Like the feeling of, of being surprised, being illuminated by something, having your heart opens by a small bit by a conversation with somebody, and feeling really, really changed by that. You know, I think that’s a spirit, I think that’s a spiritual process for sure.

I’ve been, I haven’t quite developed this metaphor enough to start lambasting it around, but maybe I’ll try it out here. I’ve started thinking about creativity as almost like a kind of belief system. And not in the kind of, not in a religious sense, although I’m sure for some it is, not for me personally, but I think it really is something, it’s something that a people believe they have or they don’t. And then I think within this kind of belief system of creativity, there’s all different kinds of beliefs, right? There’s some that see creativity as connected to, you know, a universal divine kind of power. There’s some that see creative spirituality as more about the spirit with which you move through the world and the values that you want to instill through your actions and the things you make and the things you do.

So yeah, it’s, I’m trying to play, I’m sort of beginning to play with this terminology a little bit. And how, and I’m not sure I’d ever put this on the website, but it really is, creative question in some ways is about helping people on into this belief system. You know, that there’s, sounds quite culty at this point, doesn’t it, Jesus? Now that I’m saying it out loud, it sounds very, very cult.

Well, I didn’t want to point that out. No, it’s, yeah, it’s, no, it’s, I don’t mean it to sound culty at all, but I just mean the self belief, you know, like the belief that people, that you can feel more creative, that you can see the world in different ways. Yeah, it’s, it’s, you go through one of the things that’s really amazing on a creative quest is really like noticing when the universe, you want to, is like really aligned with where you’re at. And lots of the people on our quest to call it, this, this came from them, not me, they’re like, call it quest magic where, you know, we were exploring a theme for the month and And then suddenly all these things start popping up that’s really relevant.

And you’re like, whoa, how amazing that this very specific like conference or this like event or this thing happened like right in front of me today. And it’s like so, it’s like all of it’s like the universe is going like, here’s a gift, here’s a gift, here’s a gift. And Julia Cameron in the artist’s way calls it, I think she calls it like synchronicity, you know?

Like when you feel synchronous with the world around you. And I guess quest magic is kind of our like version of something like that. I have a very sort of actually, I’d say unspiritual sort of idea that sort of devil’s advocate for this, which is like maybe this stuff is happening all the time.

You just didn’t notice it because you weren’t thinking about the theme that we’re thinking about. I spent my time going between that school of thought and this is totally the universe being magic man.

Oli: Yeah, yeah. Like actually that’s one of the big questions I used to have in my life. Well, is it just a mere coincidence or is it synchronicity?

There’s something much bigger going on. And now I 100 % lean towards, you know, the synchronicity side of way of perceiving things. I find when I’m really in the creative flow state, so when I’m not getting in my own way and I’m open to serendipity and what it has to teach me and blah, blah, blah sSynchronicity is just something that does happen way more.

I don’t know why that happens. I can’t really explain it. Synchronicity is a term that Cal Jung came up with, I think, and he believes it’s something to do with the collective unconscious and all this kind of stuff. Either way, I just take it as a good sign that I’m on the right path, I guess, and that I am aligned.

And so here is another curveball question kind of related to that: I think that the creative process ultimately, no matter what medium it is, and that includes things that aren’t traditionally thought of as creative endeavors. So like you were saying, like being an athlete can be a creative thing. You know, you could be a taxi driver or something and you could still do it in a creative way.

Like anything literally can be creative. I think all that really happens if you go into that creative process is you just end up raising your awareness of certain natural laws or certain realities about life and existence that apply to all of us.

And that’s why all of these creative endeavors are just a doorway into the same thing. And when you raise your awareness, all that really means is that you get your identity out of the way and you stop blocking your view of the way that life actually is.

And so when you stop blocking the view, you’re perceiving things more clearly and then you can flow and you can keep going and expanding and moving towards wholeness or whatever we want to call it. And that is when, you know, we get more synchronicity in general, but also it just means we’re actually moving with life instead of against it. And I think that’s basically, you know, all that spirituality is, is that it’s just finding a path into that way of being.

And I think all the religions are basically saying the same thing, which is that they’re just giving a slightly different path into, you know, this state. So how does that, you know, fit into all of the things that you’ve learned and experienced, you know, over the last few years doing this quest thing? If it does.

Sam: Yeah, there’s parts of it. I think it kind of, one thing that we, that always kind of comes up is this, like changing, well, changing of perception of the thing that we are exploring. One of the main things that I hope people get from a creative quest is that they see the thing they’re exploring differently to how they saw it at the beginning. And therefore, you see yourself differently because you’ve kind of changed your idea of what you thought was true. And you’re like, oh, suddenly this other version of this is true.

And through that, you might have actually completely changed the way that you view a whole group of people. Like poetry was a perfect one. We started with poetry. I knew it was gonna be a tricky, I knew it would be a powerful one. I hadn’t done a poetry quest before, but I just kind of sensed it enough over the years to know what are good themes.

And I thought poetry is a really good one. And it was January, it just felt like a good one to get the year started with. I would say that 75 % of the people that joined because when people sign up to a quest, they generally don’t know what the theme is gonna be. That’s quite a key part is that you’re taking this plunge to go on like this month with a group of people to explore something you don’t know what it’s gonna be. You find out your days before.

And I’d say probably 75 % of the 30 people that we had at that point were like, oh, God’s sake, you’re kidding me. Like you’re signed up for a creative adventure and we’re exploring poetry. Yeah. And to me, that felt like, okay, game on.

Let’s see if this process really works. And I would say like, honestly, 90 plus percent of the skeptics were really, will still now say, oh yeah, I don’t see, I won’t see poetry the same ever, ever again. And or see poets the same ever, ever again. That it’s like, you know, that it’s, poetry is obviously also wrapped up with kind of classroom, you know, English lessons and all this kind of stuff and like it’s pretentious and whatnot. And I think the most powerful thing that as a group we collectively learn on the poetry quest, and this comes back to what I was saying earlier about it not being a course.

Like me and my very small team that plan these quests, we’re not like, okay, by the end of the month we want everybody to perceive poetry as X because We have a framework that we follow.

We design a couple of sessions, but really the process is kind of, is the people doing it and exploring it in their lives. The thing that people learned the most on poetry was that actually to be a poet is to really just, is to have the vulnerability and bravery to express yourself in your authentic voice. That is not something that I could have perceived to be what people would feel by the end of that month, but it’s where the group got to. So suddenly you’ve got this whole group of people from all around the world that now see poets as brave people.

That’s a big deception to go from, I’m not sure if poetry is me for me, to be like, whoa, if only I had the bravery to be a poet. Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That’s a big shift. And yeah, I think we’re still really early on with this as a framework and a practice, but I hope in future on bravery, we have the bravery to explore some bigger themes and themes that do really push the sort of understanding of the world around us. Well, yeah.

Oli: So ultimately that poetry example is very powerful because I’m kind of like that myself to be honest. Like I sometimes get a bit cynical about poetry.

I don’t know why, it’s just the thing that I picked up somewhere. But I know that’s just, it’s an unreal perception. Like what you’ve done, you’ve walked people through this process and now they see things a lot more clearly, a lot more of a real way actually, by digging deeper into it, they got out of their heads and they actually experienced something and it’s shown them the truth.

And that’s allowed them to understand themselves more and understand the rest of the world more, which is a beautiful thing in a way. I’ve just realized I’ve been talking as per usual longer than I planned to. But I think we covered all the things that we wanted to.

Have you got any final words or anything just to sum this up, to kind of bring it all together? And also can you tell people where they can find you and the Quest projects as well online?

Sam: Sure. Okay, final words.

Oli: No pressure.

Sam: Well, first of all, the Quest life really is the best life.

And it’s super easy to do. You know, earlier I said about how, although this project has developed from a, kind of a hobby type thing, I really don’t like the word hobby, it’s another thing for another day. But I’m gonna use it here because that’s what it felt like at the time.

It felt like a sort of a hobby project. Into a thing that other people all around the world sign up to and is growing into, you know, I think a really interesting creative business. Although it’s changed a lot in its format, it really is, its essence is the same. It is, the framework is so simple.

It’s so easy to bring into your life. It is not something that you need to like upturn your life for, you do not need to quit your job, you do not need to go traveling around the world. Like there are infinite ways to explore the world that already exists right in front of you. And if you’re feeling stuck creatively, emotionally, like professionally and whatever, in any way, the only way to unblock yourself is to, I think is to kind of like step into, switch the lenses that you see the world through a little bit, refresh your input.

It’s, give yourself a month and just think, okay, this month I’m gonna explore this thing that I’m curious about. Sit down for five minutes and make a list of all of the things you associate with that theme. And then start using that list to go, okay, well, how can I use this list as a set of starting points to explore this thing? Take the theme for walks, try and find the theme in the town, city that you live in. Use it as your theme, as your conversation partner, with the world around you for a month.

And it’s not something you need to quit your job to do. Adventure is an attitude. It does not involve, have to involve some distant land. It really can be about just exploring what’s right in front of you in a new way.

Oli: Wow, that’s really powerful because obviously ultimately what we’re talking about is getting closer to reality.

And reality is, it’s never gonna go anywhere. And there’s a lot of misconceptions, ultimately, like you’re saying people think they need to go traveling, they need to do something really massive, like climb Mount Everest or something to understand what life is all about.

But actually, if you’re more grateful and you just appreciate the power we all have to change our perceptions, there’s all kinds of little things we can do right now to kind of tap into this thing that you’re talking about. So yeah, that’s awesome. It’s very powerful. What’s your website as well, just so people know?

Sam: Oh yeah, of course, of course, of course. It’s Channel 12, which is all letters, channeltwelve.co.uk. And yeah, and on there, we have a quest page and then there’s a page of projects that we’ve created too. If you’re listening to this in a few months time, i.e. past probably April, May, 2023, we will have a new website, but that link will still work. You might just get redirected.

Oli: Brilliant. So I’ll share that in the show notes. But Sam, thank you so much for coming on and talking about all this stuff. It’s been awesome.

Sam: No worries, thanks so much for having me.

Creative Status: Episode 21: Martin Salama: The Law of Attraction Without the Nonsense

Published on March 6, 2023

Creative Status: Deconstruct ego, integrate the shadow, manifest real life.

“As within, so without” 👇

We don’t see the world as it IS, but as we ARE and so if you want your life to be REAL then you need to work on cultivating a real INNER STATE.

There’s so much bullshit out there about what we need to do to improve our lives and start getting better results but – by asking us to only focus on rearranging things outside of ourselves – this kind of thing only holds us back from our REALNESS.

In general, this BS falls into two categories:

1. The BS strategies we come up with ourselves when we hand our lives over to the EGO.

This is ‘stuff’ like people-pleasing, chasing other people’s goals instead of our own, etc.

2. The BS from gurus/internet marketeers etc. that tell us to FORCE the outside world to meet our needs intsead of starting with our own needs first by working on our INNER STATE.

A lot of this BS focuses on the law of attraction and all kinds of techniques and esoteric things you can DO to shape your world.

Actually, all you need to do in ANY CASE is work on the inner stuff and then allow the rets to fall into place.

Are you ready to unleash the warrior within you and start living an incredibly full life every day?

Our guest on today’s episode of Creative Status, Martin Salama, is the architect of the Warriors Life Code, a set of principles and practices designed to help you achieve your goals and live your best life.

During our conversation, Martin shares his journey towards discovering the power of the law of attraction and how it has transformed his life. He also clears up some common misconceptions about the law of attraction, such as the idea that it’s simply about positive or even wishful thinking or that it works magically without any effort.

Martin believes in taking action and making conscious choices to bring your desires into reality. That’s why he created the Warriors Life Code, which combines the principles of the law of attraction with practical strategies for personal growth and success.

Whether you’re struggling to achieve your goals, feeling stuck in your life, or simply looking for inspiration, this powerful conversation can help you tap into your inner warrior and start living your best life. Martin shares some powerful insights and strategies that you can apply in your own life, from setting clear intentions to taking inspired action and embracing the power of gratitude.

Tune in to learn how to start getting more clarity, more momentum, and how to live incredibly full every day without the nonsense!

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

All episodes on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6UG491sXbZv6fUKIMVrIT6

(Scroll down for show transcript)

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Episode Links:

All Martin’s links: connectwithmartin.com

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