Creative Status: Episode 67: Rachel Fell: I Think Therefore I’m Not

by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

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

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

Embark on a mind-expanding journey with Creative Status as we unravel the intricate layers of holistic intelligence in an insightful conversation with Rachel Fell.

A coach, consultant, and educator at the crossroads of identity, awareness, and connection, Rachel brings her deep well of experience to the forefront in a discussion that challenges conventional thinking and reframes our ideas about intelligence through the lens of REALNESS.

???? Meet Rachel Fell: Join me (Oli Anderson) and Rachel Fell as we explore the realms of holistic growth.

With a background in organisational leadership, strategy, brand, and communications, Rachel has now dedicated herself to nurturing truly holistic development in her clients – we explore what this looks like in relation to creativity and intelligence in this conversation!

Beyond the Known: Delve into the interconnectedness of evolution, living systems, embodied psyche, and verbal identity—revealing pathways to actualisation and true creativity in a practical way that will change your life (if you want!?!).

Holistic Growth Unveiled: Explore the dimensions of holistic intelligence as Rachel shares her insights on interconnected evolution. Discover how embracing the complexity of living systems and embodied psyche can lead to profound personal and creative growth.

Creative Status: Where Holistic Intelligence Meets REALNESS

Join us for an episode that challenges the boundaries of thought and invites you to embrace holistic intelligence.

Tune in as we navigate the intricacies of interconnected evolution, living systems, embodied psyche, and verbal identity, uncovering pathways to authentic self-realization and true creativity for real human expression..

Stay real out there,

Oli

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Show Transcript: I Think Therefore I’m Not

This podcast is about using the creative process to become more real.

Intro

Oli Anderson: Oh, hi there – Oli Anderson here. You’re listening to Creative Status. If you don’t know, this is a podcast about using the creative process to become more real.

“More real” in this context just, just means that you’re getting out of your own way. You’re aligning yourself with the natural drive that we all have towards wholeness, and you’re ultimately building a foundation for unconditional self-acceptance that will allow you to have a better relationship with yourself, better relationship with other people, and then a better relationship with life as you can live without the unnecessary friction, frustration and misery of clinging to false ideas and concepts and images of ourselves and so on and so forth.

So, if that sounds interesting, you’re in the right place. If it doesn’t, sorry about that and, goodbye, I guess.

Either way, today’s interview is with Rachel fell, who is a coach, consultant, and educator who helps people to move towards holistic growth – for obvious reasons, then, she was in the right place coming, to talk about the issues that this podcast focuses on.

Really, if I was going to sum up this conversation, I’d say it’s about intelligence, reframing what intelligence even is if we look at it through the holistic lens of seeing human beings as systems within systems within systems:

We look at the limitations of thought. We look at how we can be more intuitive. We look at how we can use our intelligence to flow with life instead of holding ourselves back – loads of, really interesting insights and amazing, reframes of what it means to be an intelligent human being here on planet Earth.

So, Rachel, thank you so much for your time and your energy and your intellect and your intuition and all the things that we ended up talking about – and, everybody else, thanks for listening. If this helps you in any way, shape, or form, please leave a review or something so that other people can find the podcast and grow more real, too. Or not. It’s up to you either way. Here’s the conversation. Thanks a bunch. Boom.

Interview

Oli: Oh, hi there, Rachel. Thank you so much for joining me on today’s episode of creative status. We are going to be talking about human intelligence and how it can feed into or detract from, I’m assuming, our creativity and ability to be real and all that kind of stuff. Before we get into it, do you feel like introducing yourself and letting people know what you’re all about, why you do what you do, and what you want to get out of this conversation we’re about to dive into?

Rachel Fell: I’ll give it a shot, thanks so much. It’s great to be here. Yeah. So, my name is Rachel, and I’m a coaching consultant based in the Midwest, US – I work with folks to engage the power of transformation and to step into the unknown, really. And while that sounds quite nebulous, it’s actually pretty specific.

It’s moving into places and spaces, where we can, engage beyond what we think we know. And that really connects to our conversation today, because cognitive only intelligence really seems to be the norm, at this point in human history. And I think there’s just so much more available to us. So, yeah, really excited to explore this with you.

Oli: Yeah. And I think by what you just shared, you’ve cracked this open already. This whole idea of stepping into the unknown, I think, is the thing that shows us the main distinction between cognitive intelligence, as you call it, and real intelligence. And ultimately, it’s not even that new to be talking about this kind of thing.

If we go all the way back to Socrates, he basically said, all I really know is that I know nothing. And ultimately, that sums this all up, because the way that I look at it anyway, is that cognitive intelligence is ultimately conceptual intelligence rather than experiential intelligence. And it’s the illusion of control.

And we love cognitive conceptual intelligence because it’s about facts, it’s about figures, it’s about things that we can hold onto in this crazy, chaotic universe where we’ve all been, what’s, the word I’m looking for, we’ve all been forged, basically. And so stepping into the unknown is actually aligned with reality, because that’s the more chaotic way of doing things.

But ultimately, that involves getting away from concepts and ideas and all that kind of thing. So that’s me cracking this open. What do you think about all that that I’ve just said?

Rachel: Yeah, absolutely. And maybe to add some colour, some flavour, conceptual, but also representational, I think we forget that being human, to be human, is to be a literal time traveller –and so cognition, not just being conceptual, but representational and associative. And the unconscious is really driving the bus here on our experience and the ego. I know you’re a big fan of talking about the ego.

We forget that our very thoughts are the outcomes of lightning fast somatic processes that happen outside of our conscious awareness. And we’re drawing on associations, representations, and concepts. So these thought forms, they’re very complex and they are very associative, and they’re certainly not, let’s say, accurate all the time, if ever. So this invitation to expand our definition of intelligence feels very, aligned with human potential possibility. The expansion of our capacity individually and as a species.

Oli: Yeah. A way that I like to think about what you just said is that there’s a Veiled Veil between human beings and reality at all times. And ultimately, we constantly caught up in a cycle of fragmentation over wholeness. Surprise, surprise, because the ego is created by fragmentation.

But this Veiled Veil, it’s like a double whammy of kind of cognitive distortions. I suppose the first level is the level of perception. So because we’re in fragmented bodies, we perceive everything in a fragmented way, even though reality itself is about wholeness.

Not only that, though, there’s the next level of the veil, where we have our conceptual, cognitive interpretations of what we perceive, which are also limited by our own understanding and our own biases and what we already think we’re going to see and all this kind of stuff. And that limited perception and limited interpretation of life keeps feeding into itself, and it snowballs more and more and more until we ultimately end up creating a point of view to cling to that really has nothing to do with reality.

It’s just a kind of simulacrum that almost maybe kind of makes sense, but only based on our own emotional relationship with ourselves. And so real, intelligence, I would say, is about learning to let go of that and to be able to get away from all the perceived certainty of bodily perceptions and then cognitive interpretations so that we can flow and get into that truth of Socrates, basically knowing that we know nothing, but we sometimes think we do. And that’s actually what causes us to be less intelligent than we could be.

Rachel: Yeah. The slicing and dicing, the impetus to do that is quite real. And I think it’s human. It’s human to taxonomize, to name We’re conditioned inside a very material reductionist paradigm. And I’m not anti-material reductionism. I just don’t think it’s, like, the only way to explore the nature of reality.

So this piece about, kind of releasing the grip on that, it’s a complex conversation, because I don’t know that cognition can actually do that the inclusion of the somatic and really, I feel like this is the appropriate time to bring the nervous system into the conversation –  the nature of intelligence of any species super connected to the nervous system.

And so, what does it do? Can we access this place that you’re speaking about, or this potential and possibility, if we’re in survival mode and everything is either or and we really are needing to be correct or needing to be right, or to have the right answer, to be validated, to be worthy. there’s this collective sort of compression that cognitive. That’s the way I’m saying it. It’s sort of like this need to have the answer. The answer to be right, to slice and dice and to name actually contributes to our collective upregulation and our collective inability to relax into that wholeness. Literally.

Oli: Yeah. I think we can simplify it by saying that survival mode is our natural state, and the reductionistic view of life is a part of that. In fact, a lot of the fragmentary ways of perceiving and thinking that we’re talking about. And the whole reductionist methodology or, worldview is just the brain projected out into the world and then reflected back at itself and using its fragmentary way of thinking to kind of understand what it perceives.

And so it’s basically we’re looking at a reflection on a mirror, and we’re trying to make sense of it instead of understanding where the reflection is coming from in the first place. But that’s getting a bit carried away. But in relation to what we’re saying about survival modes, that’s our default state. When we’re just running according to instinct, we’re running according to fear, we’re running according to the ego.

All of those things, there’s nothing really wrong with them. It’s just the way that we have evolved to survive as fragmentary creatures on a fragmentary planet. And because fragmentation entails a kind of doggy, dog world, let’s say, where everything feeds off of everything else, we need to naturally be in survival mode to be able to have got to this point as a civilization or to just survive as individuals.

 But ultimately, if we only ever run on the autopilot of bodily instincts and fear and the ego and all the stuff that comes from that, and I believe the ego ultimately starts with the body and our relationship with it and how we hold on to emotional stuff and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, if we’re in that survival mode only then we’re never really going to experience life to its fullest.

Because if we’re in survival mode, we’re not present; we’re just acting according to our programming, basically. And it’s the programming that causes the problem. Maybe actually it’s not programming in this case. It’s wiring, our obsolete biological wiring. And it’s obsolete because our, evolutionary environment no longer exists. We live in this crazy world that we now have our obsolete biological wiring is designed to make us just focus on survival.

But life, as I’m assuming as a coach, is also about the thriving part. But you can get to the thriving part by identifying with and attaching to the fragmentary version of yourself that being a survivalist entails. And that’s why it’s about changing your relationship with your own biological wiring and your own social programming.

They’re the two main things that keep us unnecessarily in survival mode and stop us from going into a deeper relationship with wholeness. And personally, I think everyone has tasted wholeness at some stage in their lives. The thing I’m always throwing around as an example is what Abraham Maslow called peak experiences. And peak experiences are just those moments where you feel totally connected to everything around you, i.e. you’re tasting wholeness beyond the object-subject boundary of perceiving things as isolated entities within time, space and causality.

That was probably the most pretentious, sentence I’ve said all week. But ultimately, that’s what it’s about. If you’re in survival mode, you’re seeing yourself as independent in an interdependent world, and you can only thrive when you step into interdependence. That independence, ultimately, is what we’re talking about, is the Veiled Veil of perceiving yourself as been separate from everything else, as interpreting everything that happens to you has been isolated from everything else. And then you perceive the objects of your experience as a subject has been detached from you.

When you have a peak experience, like you’re climbing a mountain, or you’re making love, or you’re riding a motorbike, or wherever it is, you transcend that object-subject boundary, even if it’s just for a second. And you taste wholeness. And when you taste wholeness, I believe and have experienced in my life, that is our true identity. Actually, it’s not about the fragments and the egos and all this stuff.

That sensation of wholeness, of life just being itself and transcending that object-subject boundary, is who we really are. And so if we can understand that, that’s when we can start to live, to get a better relationship with our biological wiring that’s causing us not to be present, and to just act on instinct and to step away from social programming, which is where a lot of our interpretations come from.

So it goes back to the Veiled Veil of perception and limitation. Then we can put ourselves on the path to really using, an intelligence that is rooted in presence. I suppose more than just wiring and programming. So that was a very long winded response.

Rachel: I mean, peak experiences are only available in a specific nervous system state. You cannot fake them.

Oli: No, you can’t, because it’s real. You can’t, fake. Yeah.

Rachel: Right. So you’ve opened about ten different tabs in my brain with that…diatribe. But you cannot fake the funk on what Stephen Porges would know. Ventral vagal and polyvagal theory. But that’s safe and social.

We think of the brain, and earlier in what you were sharing, logic and, rationality and reason, we forget that the brain is actually responsible for that very survival. It’s like this expansion of slowing down, even saying, what do we mean when we say brain? It’s like, well, there’s that prefrontal cortex and the neocortex, but there’s also the limbic system, and there’s also the brain stem, which is, in a lot of ways, the seed of neuroception and the entire nervous system.

The body is one big brain, essentially, one big intelligence. I don’t love to call it machine, but. So we’re being asked to essentially rewire our own neuroception, our own sense of safety, which is no small task, and it requires that we can both be in our human experience and observe it at the same time.

So mapping the self, and mapping our own intelligence, it can start really basic understanding, the state of your own nervous system. If you’re in survival mode, that connection, that nondual connection you’re speaking about, is literally likely not available to you. You can access thoughts that might calm you or bring you into a place where it is available, but it’s literally a function of intelligence.

It comes down to stress and how your body can handle stress

Oli: Yeah, it comes down to stress, ultimately, in relation to what I was rambling about. Survival mode, ultimately, is always, the more you feel the need to survive, the more you you’re driven by that need to survive, the more you’re going to be living in that fragmentary way of being where you’re seeing everything through the lens of independence over interdependence.

And ultimately, it comes down to stress and how your body can handle stress. And obviously, if you’ve got more stress in your life and you’re thinking in this fragmentary way, that’s going to exacerbate that stress, you are going to lean more towards survival mode. You could probably still have some peak experiences. Like, if you think about it, maybe I’m romanticizing it a little bit, right?

But let’s say you’re a caveman. You’re super stressed because you don’t know where your next meal is coming from. You see some, I don’t know, like a sabre tooth tiger or something, and you decide you’re going to go kill it. You kill it and then you’re going to feel that release. Because ultimately, stress is just tension. And then you get the release. And in that leap from tension to release, that’s where these peak experiences normally arise, I find.

And so, there’s a chance that, okay, if you’re predominantly in survival mode, you still will feel these peak experiences. And I think that’s why a lot of the time, ancient people and religions and stuff like that, because ultimately, that was their way of connecting to wholeness.

But in general, yeah, 100%, if you’re in survival mode, then you’re going to be less likely to do that and you need to rewire your nervous system. I think a good example here is trauma.

Trauma is ultimately what I’ve found anyway to be the human experience that causes us to attach to the ego, i.e. The most fragmentary version of ourselves, the most vehemently. Like, we cling to it so strongly when there’s trauma motivating us, because trauma just sends us into survival mode, like you said.

And so we can’t handle any stress, it’s going to trigger us and it’s going to bring the trauma back, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But then there’s this really amazing book. I don’t know if you probably have heard of it, The Body Keeps The Score – it’s about trauma.

Ultimately, One of the things it recommends in that book as the best thing for dealing with trauma is yoga. And obviously I’m biased because I just love yoga and it’s helped me in my own life to have some of these peak experiences and stuff like that. But I think the reason that yoga is so powerful for getting you out of that survival mode and starting to move towards thrival mode is that it starts to rewire your immune system, your nervous system, in the way that you’re talking about.

Because ultimately it gets your body prepared to handle stress, the stress of life. And then when your body is more prepared to handle stress, then all of the extra mental friction and things like that are going to be more manageable and they’re going to dissolve so that you can start to get back into this natural flow that I think we all have towards wholeness and ultimately what I think we’re talking about.

I don’t know if I’ve gone on a tangent, really, with the intelligence thing. But what we’re talking about, ultimately, is, like, how survival mode is our default state, but there are things that we can do to facilitate the process of kind of transcending that and the sense of identity and everything that comes with it. So we can put ourselves on the path that we all truly want to be on, which was where we’re feeling that we’re moving towards wholeness.

We get out of a state of forcing things and friction and into more of a flow state. And that involves a certain kind of intelligence which actually comes back full circle, actually, because you can only get into that flow state by knowing that you know nothing, transcending your ideas about how you think you need to survive, or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and trusting life, something like that.

Survival mode is a lack of trust. It always comes back to trust for me now, and it’s something to do with that. Like, real intelligence is your capacity to trust and the qualities and skills that you need to be able to live with that trust, because then that takes survival mode out of the equation, and you’re having less stress and stuff.

You’re mapping full body intelligence when you engage with yoga

Rachel: Anyway, I love what you said about yoga, because the somatic awareness and the mind body connection, that’s what that’s doing. You’re mapping full body intelligence when you engage with yoga. So you’re literally opening physical wholeness in the sense that you are consciously mapping your full body as a body mind.

So whatever practices, there are so many ways to engage somatic intelligence, but that really feels like a very pragmatic step inside of all of this. That’s not be with the felt sense as you move. So I’m curious, when I share that, does that reflect your experience with yoga, that it’s opened a sort of m full body intelligence within you?

Oli: One of the main lessons I got from yoga is that what is good for the body is good for the mind, and it’s because it’s the same system. So if you take the idea of resistance, for example, physical resistance ultimately makes you stronger. That’s the abridged version. But it’s the same with your mind.

Like, we need resistance, that sweet spot of kind of creative tension or whatever you want to call it. We need to push ourselves and stretch ourselves so that we can evolve to the next version, because only if we do that can we find what I call the edge and transcend the current version of our ego. And so it truly is a mind-body system.

And a lot of people forget that yoga is actually, for your mind more than your body. The reason yogis originally started doing all these asanas is so that they could meditate more, because when they were sat in lotus pose all day, they would get stiff and all this kind of stuff, they get back problems. So they started doing physical asanas, asanas, so that they could do more of that.

And obviously, I guess now, as people are going through a yoga flow, they breathe in and breathe out at certain times, and it becomes, basically it’s a moving meditation. And the other reason that yoga has been so important for me, apart from showing me that my mind and my body are the same thing, it’s a system. is that at the end of a yoga session, if I have gone from that state I was talking about earlier, from tension at the start of the session to release at the end when I’m in the final cob’s pose, I have felt one of the, I get a peak experience in the way we’re talking about. I dissolve.

The word I’m always using for this is “dissolution”. I got that word from the yoga teacher Brian Kest, who was on the podcast. But dissolution is the perfect word for it because you’re holding on to all this stuff, your identity and your stress and your ideas and perceptions and blah, blah, blah. If you go through the yoga flow in the right way, then when you get to corpse pose shavasana, you dissolve, your identity dissolves.

You transcend that object-subject boundary I was talking about, you become one. You become one with everything. And it sounds really cheesy, but that’s the only way to describe it. And then obviously, you get up and five minutes later, you’re checking your phone, or you’re thinking about your next thing to do, and blah, blah, blah, the world creeps back in.

But this is why I’m saying, as long as you taste those experiences, those peak experiences, that dissolution, then you can transcend the fragmented identity of stress and the body and survivalistic systems, and you know which direction to move back in. And that feeds into the trust as well, I think.

Rachel: Yeah. What you’re explaining in your experience with yoga is a physiological process dropping down into a different nervous system state. Your brainwaves are lengthening, your literal waveform is more relaxed. So, yes, to really come into this, to speak about this a different way, separation exists inside of wholeness. So where am I now? Is a really powerful question. And if you’re really identified with your separateness.

One thing I do with my clients, this mapping of nervous system states and this sort of self location, it sounds very basic, but it’s incredibly, incredibly powerful because you can see the reflection of your state and your emotions and your thoughts. So your state in Shavasana, your literal physiological state, is one of more connection, interconnection, oneness.

When you’re jacked up and angry or frustrated or identified with your pain, with your trauma, that is a literal physiological state of separation. If we start by mapping, if we start simple, we can shepherd, guide, walk with ourselves into rewiring our sense of safety. And that’s a whole process that the body has to come along for the ride on. You can’t fake it. You can understand all the concepts. You can be, able to explore them existentially, philosophically, with language. But until you actually include your body in the mix, I don’t know how successful one would be at that rewiring.

Oli: Yeah, you just couldn’t do it. You have to experience it. And you can only experience it by really experiencing your body. 100 million% agree. This is why it comes back to intelligence, which is, I guess, what we kind of started talking about. Anyone can read a book about this stuff. Anyone can listen to this podcast, anyone can go on Wikipedia and read about all these convoluted theories and things like that.

But at the end of the day, it is basic. And the most basic thing that we can do is experience things through action. That’s what it all boils down to. And by doing that, you get out of your head, which is just your perceptions and conditioning and blah, blah, blah, and you put yourself back onto this path that you’re constantly being called back to anyway.

But because we lack that trust I keep talking about, and we identify with the survival version of ourselves as a default, it’s very hard for people to be able to take that leap from the mind to the body. And the other thing as well is what we were saying, right?

The body is more linked to nature. It’s more about chaos. And the tendency these days is for us to think that we can overcome nature itself and human nature with our thoughts. And that is reflected in our relationship with knowledge as a culture. It’s all about adding more concepts, more labels, more fragmentation.

But it gives the illusion of control in the short term. It helps to give people a sense of security in the short term, but in the long term, it’s unreal. And it’s going to cause a, wider and wider gulf between who they really can be when they’re thriving, because they’ve got in their bodies and they put themselves back on this path towards wholeness versus who they think they need to be to avoid doing that, even though it’s actually what they crave, because that’s just human, right?

Rachel: I mean, direct experience doesn’t need words.

Oli: Yeah.

Rachel: Direct experience doesn’t need words. Yeah. And words themselves, like, words, are worlds. and they can be beautiful, use them with care. Volume is violence. And more and more and more, it is this movement towards greater separation, greater definition, existential control, human exceptionalism, and cognitive exceptionalism, quite frankly, is what you’re talking about.

So this invitation to, let’s say, zoom out and redefine intelligence feels like just such a. It’s a very useful doorway, I found, because if you slow down and you ask people what they mean when they say intelligence, you’re going to get a wide swath of answers, I found, most of which are very focused on or centred on thoughts and the quality of the thoughts.

And I’ll take it a step further in being correct, being right. And the intelligence of nature is far greater than any one person’s thoughts or the collective thoughts, which is what you’re nodding to. It’s like the intelligence of the body. My God, that’s what AI is trying to replicate.

Oli: Yeah. It’s the idea that thoughts are who we are, and that if we can just create the right combination of thoughts as individuals, then we can be whatever we want to be. We can have whatever we want to have, and we can explain the things that we don’t like about life away. And it’s ultimately about using thought as a substitute for actual intelligence. Because actual intelligence, I think it’s the absence of thought. Actually, maybe not the absence. It’s a detachment from thought.

Rachel: Yes.

Oli: Yeah, I always thought that was wrong. “I think therefore I am”. Ultimately, he should have said, and maybe it’s a mistranslation or something, but the truth is, “I am aware, I am conscious, therefore I am”.

 “I think therefore I am” is actually the problem because we are not what we think. We are not what we think. We think we are what we think because we want to believe that that makes life easier. But actually, and this is why so many people are so bothered about being right and been wrong. It doesn’t matter if we’re right or wrong.

What matters is if we’re flowing in this way that we’re talking about towards thriving instead of just surviving. The only reason we’re so bothered about being right or wrong is because the ego is fuelled by the points of view that we have created to sustain it in the first place. That’s why people get so worked, up about being right and wrong.

There’s a quote by David Bohm was a physicist, and he said, “our opinions are something that we have, not something that we are”. But the problem with our culture is we think that our opinions, our thoughts are something that we are. And so we identify with them. And anytime someone disagrees with us, they’re not just attacking our opinions, our best understanding of the truth in that moment. They’re attacking us personally because we think that we are our thoughts.

And so, actually, the solution, I think, is to step back from thoughts like, “I’m not worried about being right or wrong anymore”. Okay? Right now, I might think this tomorrow, maybe I’ll have learned something new. It doesn’t matter, because the true experience I have of being me is what you said. It is experience. It’s not about how I’m thinking about it. It’s stepping away from all that stuff and, just being.

And it really is that simple. Like, the solution to a lot of these problems that people face is breaking it down to the basics. It’s like you said, your mapping system for different nervous system thing is states. s basic, and it needs to be basic.

Like, actually, all of this, ego attachment to thought and knowledge, conceptual knowledge of facts and figures and theories and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that’s just turned into a kind of edifice that is adding more and more complications to the human experience.

But the only reason we need complications and complexity a lot of the time is because it’s the ego’s way of avoiding the truth. The truth is really simple. Like, we’re moving towards wholeness or we’re not. And we can only do that if we trust. And if we don’t, then that’s when we’re going to try and hide behind this big wall of convoluted theories and concepts and ideas that we don’t really need. That’s the thing, right?

I think in terms of intelligence, is letting go of all this stuff. We don’t need it. You’re not intelligent because you can remember a lot of facts and figures. That’s a memory. It’s memory. It’s not intelligent. So that’s me rambling.

Rachel: I mean, I’m so glad you bring up Descartes. And I had a little giggle when you said intelligence is the absence of thought. Because, this is a little bit of a – well, it’s vulnerable, it’s personal.

So I went through a pretty profound, positive disintegration starting in 2018. And basically, my sub and unconscious would no longer be ignored. It was like a pressure cooker from the inside, and it forced me into the inner world and self-locate, self-relate to really bring the observer online in wholly new ways.

And I’ve never been somebody that’s very, been terribly allegiant to any sort of identity, if I’m being honest. but as part of that whole process of disintegration, call it an existential crisis, call it a dark night of the soul, it was this literal disintegration of the thought forms, the templates, all the meaning that had existed up until then.

Fast forward…I don’t actually experience active thought very much anymore. It’s quite quiet in my inner world, so it’s almost like cognition now acts as like, a support as opposed to it’s not standing on the boardroom table screaming at all the other intelligences trying to take the wheel. It’s not the only player on the team anymore.

It’s an incredible player, but it supports a whole much expanded, let’s say, system wide intelligence. It’s one of many players on the team. And so, yes, when Descartes said that, I talk about that and explore that a lot, and I really wonder if what we’re actually talking about here is a metacognition which awareness. I am aware, therefore I am observer. It’s like, of course I drink coffees, therefore I am.

No words needed. I’m in this forest. I am, “I am” is the core of it but maybe there’s an invitation to think of this more. Like, where is my awareness? Pointed is a question that I come back to, my awareness of my own awareness. And when you talk about autopilot, there it is. There’s another really interesting, very, very basic practice that we can use in our lives to map our own awareness. What are we pointed at?

Oli: That is one of the most important game changers I found for human beings to change their lives. And it’s focus.

“Before you had the dark night of the soul, your cognitive mind was fragmented”

Think about what you just said, right? So in your experience before you had this dark night of the soul, I’m assuming the thoughts were just swimming up from wherever they swim up. There was all kinds of stuff going on in your head. The hamster wheel of thoughts that people have day by day, which is mainly 80% of the same stuff going round and around in their heads, was your normal experience.

And then you went through this dark night of the soul, and after that, you had a more active relationship with your cognitive side. Which means obviously it’s still there, but it’s more like you’re directing it with your focus rather than it directing where your focus needs to be.

Rachel: That’s exactly right.

Oli: Yeah, that’s something I’ve seen a lot. And I think the reason that it happens is it all comes down to the ego again, right? Surprise, surprise. Before you’re dark night of the soul, you were basically living as an unreal version of yourself, which is the ego. That’s just something that happened because of what you’ve been through and like your unconscious intentions, drives and so on and so forth.

We create these versions of ourselves that are fragmented to sound like a broken record. They’re fragmented because the only way we can create that ego, is by disowning parts of ourselves that are very real or trying to hide from them. That’s when it comes down to the shadow self and all that kind of stuff.

The more we ignore the shadow self because we’re living out the ego, the script of the ego and the path that he wants us to be on, which is unreal, the more we’re inviting an eventual dark night of the soul into our lives. And yes, that’s exactly what you’ve been through right now.

When we’re living in that ego state, we are going to have lost control of our minds a little bit. Because the reason I have found that we’re on the hamster wheel of these thoughts going on and on in our, heads without us having any control over it, is because that state of disconnection between our realness and the ego, that state of disconnection means that we have all kinds of unanswered questions. And the brain, in that sense, the cognitive brain, is kind of like a computer you feed a question into it and then it just goes round and around and around trying to answer the question.

A lot of those questions can be answered because they only existing at a level of the ego anyway. And you can’t get closure around them. But whatever the questions are, they’re going to be linked to like “Why am I disconnected?”, “Why do I feel bad?” “Why do I have this restless feeling?”, “ How can I solve this problem?”, “Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah”.

And it goes round and round and round around. But then eventually when you reach this point where the shadow self is screaming in your face that you need to wake up, you hit rock bottom. You have this existential crisis and you go through the dark night of the soul.

And that process of going through the dark night of the soul is actually a process of spiritual purification or whatever phrase you want to use. And by going through that, through the dark night, you realize that a lot of those questions can be answered because they were unreal in the first place.

Or you get a deeper relationship with reality because in a way, that night of the sword shows you what’s actually true and where you were holding yourself back with illusions. And so you get a lot of answers to the questions. And by doing that, the questions that can be answered, and by going through that process, you’ve basically been through Personal Revolution. That’s what I call it, where you’ve gained mastery of your mind, and that’s it. And once you’ve done that, you can change your focus. And it’s exactly what you said. Your mind.

And so that’s the key thing, right? We learn to focus on what’s real. Then that just means, especially if we’ve been through a dynamite of the soul or we’ve started doing yoga or whatever it is that has changed that inner experience, we can focus on things that allow that to grow rather than to keep shrinking away. And that is ultimately, when we’ve put ourselves on the path of stepping away from just being a robot that’s acting for survival to being an actual human being that’s using real human intelligence.

The final lesson is acceptance. If you accept life, you get life.

Rachel: Well, I’d love the opportunity to volley in different language, because the exact same thing. And I find every human being seems to have a different way of. And then to share something like what you mean my own way? I don’t know it in your way, but I know what I mean. I know what you mean in my way.

If I were to add this, the shadow is…The shadow is, the darkness, let’s say, what is beyond our current me in the sense that curious about what people mean when they use words. And the word ego is one I explore with clients a lot because it’s kind of squishy, it’s a little nebulous. It’s like, well, what do you mean when you say ego? Or what do I mean?

And for myself, it puts this, like, ration consciousness, transcend having a self. I mean, we can go into whole exploration of person where Rachel that exists in separation consciousness. But also she is 100% animated by the not self. And the not self is the larger frame. So anyways, ego is sense of self. Do I put the fork in my mouth? Do I put my oxygen mask on first?

Now, if we expand this, it’s like, well, if my sense of self is my thoughts. That’s the issue here. It’s like the expansion into the shadowlands, the invitation or the sub and unconscious to be part of our definition of self. It’s like we’re not running the show. And that really internalizing, playing with, exploring, that is what opened things up for me. So it’s really like what lives in my sub and unconscious. And my shadow is intelligent.

The nature of the shadow is intelligent. It’s not bad or good or wrong. Like letting go of all of these labels. And it’s like, let what is in the darkness, let that intelligence be part of this process. Exactly. And maybe loosen your grip a little bit on needing to name and place and slice and dice and see what happens.

Oli: Yeah. the shadow is real.

Rachel: Yeah, it’s the sub and unconscious nervous system. So if you want to rewire, I mean, if you wire you. Well, learn to work with your triggers you can rewire your own neuroception for sure, but it’s not for the faint of heart.

Oli: And I think the final lesson when you start facing the shadow self is the difference between surviving and thriving in the way that we’re talking about survival is the illusion that it’s all up to you, that you are in control.

Thriving is the acceptance of your dependence on life itself. But at the same time, knowing that you can trust life to take you where you need to go. If you can listen to life, that’s a whole other avenue that we could have opened up, but we’ve run out.

Rachel: Yeah.

Oli: If you can listen to life because you’re not trying to control everything, that’s when you get a real life. Something like, that.

Rachel: Yes.

Oli: The final lesson is acceptance. If you accept life, you get life. But the only thing that stops us is a heightened nervous system, I guess, that is sending us into survival mode instead of trusting.

Well, Rachel, thank you so much for this conversation. I’m going to share all your links and everything in the show notes. This has been a super stimulating one. So thank you for your time and your energy.

I’m going to go do some yoga or something and start thriving

Rachel: Wonderful. Thanks so much.

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