Common Pitfalls on the Path of Inner Transformation with Joe Hudson
Speaker 1: But it's curiosity as to where we are, what we are, the existence, the physical universe is basically playful.
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Curious Humans podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Johnny Miller.
Speaker 1: The elation that you feel when you feel a certain level of joy for the first time is different than the joy.
Speaker 1: The freedom that you feel when you feel a certain amount of joy or pleasure for the first time is different than the pleasure.
Speaker 1: How do you allow for or help people orient towards enjoyment more without trying to force it or create it?
Speaker 1: It's often more of a letting go than it is a creation or a force.
Speaker 1: If you experiment with it long enough, you'll find the exact thing that you just found which is like, oh, any kind of force is the opposite of enjoyment.
Speaker 1: So if I'm trying to engineer enjoyment, it is an enjoyment.
Speaker 1: But I've also heard you say that safety is in some ways an illusion.
Speaker 1: So how do you think about safety?
Speaker 1: Our system knows that if we're trying to force ourselves into doing something, that there's something naturally unsafe.
Speaker 1: Why else would we fucking do it?
Speaker 1: And that feeling of safety, if you want it to be reliable, if you want it to be something that can show up regularly, it has to acknowledge the fact that we're not safe.
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Speaker 1: welcome to the Cheeristhenus podcast, Joe.
Speaker 1: Hey, good to be with you, Johnny.
Speaker 1: How are you feeling in this moment?
Speaker 1: In three words.
Speaker 1: Three words.
Speaker 1: Excited.
Speaker 1: Great.
Speaker 1: I've got it in one.
Speaker 1: I feel like distillation is one of your superpowers.
Speaker 1: You're the first person that's answered in just one.
Speaker 1: So one of the things I want to talk to you about is joy.
Speaker 1: What is it that you understand about joy or how do you see joy that a lot of people don't get?
Speaker 1: The main way I think about joy that I think is somewhat unique is that my phrase is joy is the matriarch of a family of emotions and she won't come into a house where her children are welcome.
Speaker 1: And that joy is the result of facing into less comfortable emotions or what we think are less comfortable emotions, only to find out that the less comfortable emotions are really more about the fact that we're resisting them than the actual comfort in the moment.
Speaker 1: So I'd be like, let's say you have sadness and your brain is telling you, oh, you're going to be sad forever, or what's wrong with you?
Speaker 1: You shouldn't be sad.
Speaker 1: You have such a good life and yet you're still sa.
Speaker 1: Or why haven't you gotten over the fact that your mom died?
Speaker 1: It's been six months, six years, six, whatever.
Speaker 1: So that is what makes sadness uncomfortable.
Speaker 1: But if you're just in the sadness, in the moment, those sensations are actually quite comfortable.
Speaker 1: They're actually pleasant.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it definitely feels like there's a physical tension piece in this and something that happened the other day.
Speaker 1: My wife commented on the fact that you have a remarkably, let's say, fluid and tension free belly.
Speaker 1: And she was like, wow, I trust Joe more now that I've seen his belly.
Speaker 1: And this is in the context of a breath work journey.
Speaker 1: I wasn't just flashing my bow in there.
Speaker 1: Wouldn't judge you.
Speaker 1: So I guess the questions are like, what was that journey like for you to kind of, I guess, release a lot of tension in your body?
Speaker 1: What shifts did you notice and how did that relate to joy?
Speaker 1: Yeah, so my experience was I worked with a woman named Michelle who's now passed.
Speaker 1: Unfortunately, so many of my teachers have passed and she was actually right around here.
Speaker 1: She was maybe 10 miles away from here.
Speaker 1: And every day I would or not every day, every week when I was here.
Speaker 1: So I travel a lot.
Speaker 1: So it wasn't every week but it was definitely every other.
Speaker 1: And mostly every week, I would lay down in her session room, which was in her house, and I would lay down and spot naked, and I'd be in a certain position, and she would have me breathe, and then she would poke at me at places that she saw that were stuck.
Speaker 1: And the breath work that I did, which is similar to the one that you teach but slightly different, was all about stretching.
Speaker 1: All the ways that the body had held back emotions.
Speaker 1: I found out about her because I was hanging out one day and I saw an old friend, and I was like, whatever happened to you?
Speaker 1: Tell me, because I can see how different you are.
Speaker 1: And he's the one that said, oh, you should go see Michelle.
Speaker 1: And so you'd seen him before and after.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like, I hung out with him like a year before.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 1: And then I saw him, I was like, what?
Speaker 1: Like, I literally just stopped him.
Speaker 1: It was like, near the Whole Foods or something.
Speaker 1: I was like, hey.
Speaker 1: Oh, hey, John.
Speaker 1: What happened to you?
Speaker 1: Yeah, like, your whole body is different.
Speaker 1: And so that's how I found her.
Speaker 1: And a lot of the benefit happened, I think, in the first year.
Speaker 1: Like, as, like, the stuff that was really palpable happened for me in the first year.
Speaker 1: I ended up doing it for seven and maybe six.
Speaker 1: I'm not good with time, but it was literally, you know, if I say to you right now, hey, hold, stop feeling right, you have to hold down emotions.
Speaker 1: And so with your muscles.
Speaker 1: And so if I've been taught not to be sad because boys don't cry, I have to hold that all the time.
Speaker 1: And that creates body tension and constriction.
Speaker 1: And, you know, when I do coaching, as I've done, you know, people think that it's somewhat magic, but it's not.
Speaker 1: It's like I can just see how somebody's holding their body as part of it.
Speaker 1: So how somebody's holding their body and tells me what emotions they're not allowing themselves to feel, or more precisely, been trained not to feel because it's our nature to feel our emotions.
Speaker 1: And so she was really trained at that.
Speaker 1: And she would poke, poke.
Speaker 1: And I'd sometimes walk away bruised and sometimes not.
Speaker 1: I remember this one time, I think it was like two years in, I vomited in the middle of the session, which is not uncommon.
Speaker 1: It's not uncommon in.
Speaker 1: I see it a lot in the, like, in person stuff that we do.
Speaker 1: And she's like, almost a release.
Speaker 1: I was like, what the fuck?
Speaker 1: Next time.
Speaker 1: Exactly.
Speaker 1: Bomb and ardor.
Speaker 1: What do you need more stuff in there?
Speaker 1: When I, you know, like, what's going on?
Speaker 1: She had a very particular kind of release that she didn't.
Speaker 1: That she thought was like the best kind of release.
Speaker 1: And, and I won't say what that was because she didn't tell me what that was because then people try to mimic it, you know, and.
Speaker 1: But it was the same kind of release that you would see a baby do that like had, was having a full body release.
Speaker 1: And so.
Speaker 1: So basically a lot of that work is we're born with this full capacity to feel.
Speaker 1: And the bell, like you see how like 2 year olds walk around belly first and yeah, they say fluid, right.
Speaker 1: They just go between emotions like anger, sadness, joy.
Speaker 1: Exactly.
Speaker 1: Without any of the mental resistance.
Speaker 1: And yeah, she would say things like, you know, baby can cry for two hours and not get hoarse.
Speaker 1: So if we're getting hoarse, it means that there's constriction that we're holding.
Speaker 1: Super interesting.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 1: So how did your experience of joy change after this experience?
Speaker 1: Great.
Speaker 1: So, yeah, there was a lot of changes in the way that work affected me.
Speaker 1: My laugh was different.
Speaker 1: My ability to say what I felt changed.
Speaker 1: My ability to just be myself in the moment.
Speaker 1: This woman, Michelle, it was like there was no filter, whatever she felt like saying.
Speaker 1: I became a lot more like that.
Speaker 1: My orgasms changed.
Speaker 1: They went from like short and long to very long extended orgasms.
Speaker 1: So my ability to feel pleasure, to laugh, all of it just changed and was just far more fluid.
Speaker 1: And in that there's a lot more fluidity in all the emotions and therefore joy.
Speaker 1: And I think that I came up with the saying, joy is a matriarch of a family of emotions at the time when, like two or three years into that work, because I just realized, oh, I'm feeling all this stuff.
Speaker 1: And I had done a lot of emotional work before then, but just I had no idea how much had been impacted and set in place that were working on.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And do you think that phrase joy is a matriarch of the family of emotions arose from like once these emotions, I guess you've been resisting to some degree shifted, there usually is this like enormous kind of wave or like expansive joy.
Speaker 1: Is that the experience you had over and over again and.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yes.
Speaker 1: So definitely I had moments of, you know, being in the world and just seeing like this thin veneer personality behind like just these love buckets.
Speaker 1: That's like, that was the experience.
Speaker 1: And I was just.
Speaker 1: I could fall in love with everybody, which is distinct from liking People, but there's just, like, this deep love for people.
Speaker 1: And that happened, and there was a lot of joy and expansion, but there was this thing that happened where I thought that those peaks were where I was supposed to be.
Speaker 1: And so there was some version of understanding that two things were happening simultaneously.
Speaker 1: One is that my emotional framing was a little bit like the stock market.
Speaker 1: It went up and down, but it was always going up.
Speaker 1: And so oftentimes, I would relate the down that was happening to the most recent up, not the down of two years ago, because the down of two years ago was the up.
Speaker 1: I see the down of today would be up a few years ago.
Speaker 1: But so there's this weird thing that was happening where, oh, wait, I can go like that last high.
Speaker 1: I need to be like that last high, instead of realizing that my down today was like a peak experience from five years ago.
Speaker 1: So it's not exactly right, but it generally trends in that way.
Speaker 1: And so there was some recognition that the elation that you feel when you feel a certain level of joy for the first time is different than the joy.
Speaker 1: The freedom that you feel when you feel a certain amount of joy or pleasure for the first time is different than the pleasure.
Speaker 1: And a lot of the times, we mistake the elation for the joy and pleasure.
Speaker 1: Like, oh, my God, this is impossible.
Speaker 1: You know, it's like a kid learning to walk for the first time.
Speaker 1: Like, if you ever watch a kid take steps for the first time, they're like, oh, yeah, and then they fall on their butt.
Speaker 1: Then they're walking two weeks later, and they fall on their butt, and they're frustrated, but they're not mistaking the walking from the elation and the frustration.
Speaker 1: Sure.
Speaker 1: Interesting.
Speaker 1: And so there's a joy that happens that's different than the relief or the excitement of the first time.
Speaker 1: And people got very confused, and they'll start chasing that state of elation or the freedom that they feel because they've had a breakthrough, which is different than sustaining joy.
Speaker 1: Sustained isn't.
Speaker 1: Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1: Joy sustained is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's quite sweet and lovely and soft and quiet.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Beautiful.
Speaker 1: So this wasn't the direction I was thinking of going, but I've been experimenting with joy through Jhana practice recently.
Speaker 1: And my experience is that actually the sensation changes depending on where my awareness in my body is.
Speaker 1: So joy in the head is almost like rapture.
Speaker 1: Joy in the heart is like love and joy kind of down in the belly or the perineum is like, there's, like, beautiful stillness and just like void.
Speaker 1: Do you have that kind of experience?
Speaker 1: Is it that kind of, like, background sense that is always there?
Speaker 1: Like, how do you.
Speaker 1: How do you physically experience joy in the body?
Speaker 1: I guess is the question.
Speaker 1: What did you say was the head?
Speaker 1: You said head for me is almost like.
Speaker 1: Like rapture or devotion or kind of like awe.
Speaker 1: Like a sense of like, wow.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I would call it devotion would be more of the word I would use for it.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: But it is the recognition of something greater than myself.
Speaker 1: Not in a God way, but in a, like, we live on a planet way.
Speaker 1: You know, just like.
Speaker 1: Not that I have a problem with the God way either.
Speaker 1: I think they're really similar.
Speaker 1: But.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so I would say that my experience of joy is all three of those things hanging out together.
Speaker 1: And generally in my life is what I notice is that my life is an act of devotion.
Speaker 1: There was another word I used to use for it, but, yeah, devotion.
Speaker 1: There is a tremendous amount of love, like, and there's a tremendous amount of peace.
Speaker 1: I don't need to be doing something different than what I'm doing.
Speaker 1: And there doesn't feel like there's a.
Speaker 1: Like, for many years of my life, I was running from this, like, existential feeling all the time.
Speaker 1: And that's not the case.
Speaker 1: But I hesitate to say that because when I was not living from this place, I would hear somebody do that and then that became the thing that I had to do to be good enough.
Speaker 1: That was the place that I had to get to.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I can relate to that.
Speaker 1: And then there was also.
Speaker 1: I would hit it and there would be this elation and I would mistake that from the actual thing.
Speaker 1: My experience is that there's also a great remembering to it, meaning that when these things start setting in place, there's a. Oh, this is always how I've been.
Speaker 1: Like, this is the part of me that hasn't changed a lot changes.
Speaker 1: My thoughts change, my emotional states change.
Speaker 1: But if I ask myself, like, what hasn't changed the whole time, it is that feeling that is all three of those things described differently depending on what part of your consciousness you're coming from.
Speaker 1: But that's the thing that's been behind everything else the whole time.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Beautiful.
Speaker 1: And so in some ways, the practices or the inner work is like a process of remembering that place when you inevitably forget when life arises.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a bit like the body version of that was.
Speaker 1: Oh, like you knew this when you were a baby.
Speaker 1: We're going to remind your system how to get back to that thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's very similar in that way.
Speaker 1: There's a reason for the journey though.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 1: To have moved away from it and back to it is a really important part of.
Speaker 1: I don't.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure if I could exist in the world if I hadn't moved away from it and come back to it.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 1: There's a. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Like, what is the reason?
Speaker 1: I think it's very similar to like deciduous trees that are lose their leaves.
Speaker 1: They're like, oh, I know.
Speaker 1: Like, oh, leaves.
Speaker 1: It's like sun.
Speaker 1: There's this fantasy that is, once I'm joyful, I'll never feel X again.
Speaker 1: You know, why is it that I'm sad when I have all this great stuff and I've had this peak experience and I have a loving wife and I have money and why am I.
Speaker 1: There's this idea that you're going to get beyond that stuff and that stuff is really important.
Speaker 1: It's really important to cry.
Speaker 1: It's really important to get angry.
Speaker 1: It's really important.
Speaker 1: Not angry at somebody, but to move that kind of energy.
Speaker 1: It's really important to have fear.
Speaker 1: And it's like a natural thing in us.
Speaker 1: And so to go through that allows you to integrate that and have that as a part of your life.
Speaker 1: But remember your nature, like what's natural and what's happening in your world rather than like this idea that we're going to transcend and not integrate.
Speaker 1: You know, like, I learned how to crawl and then I learned how to walk.
Speaker 1: I can still crawl.
Speaker 1: I need to crawl sometimes.
Speaker 1: I'm really happy that I can still crawl.
Speaker 1: When I'm crawling, I don't go, what the fuck?
Speaker 1: I forgot to walk.
Speaker 1: What's wrong with me?
Speaker 1: And so I think it's a really similar trajectory.
Speaker 1: You, you.
Speaker 1: All of those, like emotional components are incredibly important signals.
Speaker 1: Like, oh, I'm scared right now.
Speaker 1: That means I am not taking care of myself in some way.
Speaker 1: Or it means I'm being asked to do something that I'm uncomfortable with because it's.
Speaker 1: It's bigger.
Speaker 1: I have to step into a bigger room, I have to get onto a bigger stage.
Speaker 1: Or I have to say my truth in a way that is a little scarier than I've had to in the past.
Speaker 1: That's like a great signal.
Speaker 1: Or I'm angry.
Speaker 1: It means, oh, I've got a boundary that I need to set that there's something that, I mean, asked to do that doesn't feel right, or I'm not taking care of myself.
Speaker 1: In a way of like a codependence or something to that effect.
Speaker 1: They're really good signals and I want to be able to have them and I want to have known the pain of not listening to them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: So this is like beautiful feedback, basically.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: That's a really nice segue to.
Speaker 1: So I know you're a fan of parables and poetry.
Speaker 1: There's a line that I wanted to kind of.
Speaker 1: I just wanted to share because I think it's interesting.
Speaker 1: This is from Hafiz.
Speaker 1: He says, the small man builds cages for everyone he knows, while the sage who has to duck his head when the moon is low keeps dropping all night, keeps dropping keys all night long for the beautiful rowdy prisoners.
Speaker 1: Which is so great.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 1: And I share this because I think you and the guys at AOA have become these craftsmen or forges of keys that can unlock people's cages.
Speaker 1: And I love what you said earlier of seeing people as these love buckets with these thin veneers of personality, and you guys drop in these kind of well crafted keys for them to kind of express and free themselves in different ways.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a really sweet way to put it.
Speaker 1: It's cool.
Speaker 1: We were just at a.
Speaker 1: We did a reunion.
Speaker 1: And our reunion is somebody who's done the deeper work with us, whether it's like one of our longer online courses or in person, week long.
Speaker 1: If they do that, then they can come to this reunion and where we move some emotions and do a little of that breath work and do a whole bunch of the exercises and just to see the face changes both in, like, I remember when you first came to AOA and now I see you now and like, how their face and body has changed, how their demeanor has changed, how their hug has changed.
Speaker 1: It is really satisfying work.
Speaker 1: It feels really good.
Speaker 1: And you explore projections, if I'm not mistaken for the last one, we did projections.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Every year we do something different.
Speaker 1: We did money the year before that and think boundaries.
Speaker 1: The year before that, we call it a reunion, but we used to call it the super mega happy fun time reunion.
Speaker 1: Then we realized somebody showed up and they're just like, yeah, I decided to come because it was a super mega happy fun time reunion.
Speaker 1: And I have been like, crying and screaming and doing like hardcore work from 9 in the morning till 9 at night.
Speaker 1: I'm like, yeah, maybe it's probably much fun.
Speaker 1: Maybe too much fun.
Speaker 1: Maybe we should change 10% less fun.
Speaker 1: Now we just call it the reunion.
Speaker 1: Something that I've been thinking a lot about recently is.
Speaker 1: And you actually had a tweet that I think was a banger.
Speaker 1: Was.
Speaker 1: You said, ultimately, my approach isn't about fixing yourself, but about undoing what is in the way of your natural capacity and potential.
Speaker 1: And the question I have is, how do you think about addressing the fact that the majority of people that come to AOA likely have this motivation of some part of me is broken or needs fixing as opposed to coming from this place of I'm already whole?
Speaker 1: Because it seems like that could really get in the way of the work that you're doing.
Speaker 1: If there is this underlying premise of almost.
Speaker 1: That's almost all the work we're doing.
Speaker 1: Almost all the work we're doing.
Speaker 1: Doing is showing folks that one is that they're their own authority.
Speaker 1: I'm not the authority.
Speaker 1: Somebody else isn't the authority.
Speaker 1: Buddha was pretty good at this.
Speaker 1: But almost every major teacher that I've ever really adored and loved has said, basically, don't trust me.
Speaker 1: Test it for yourself.
Speaker 1: Some version of that.
Speaker 1: I would go maybe even farther of the best expression of this.
Speaker 1: So I have two girls.
Speaker 1: Have you met either of them?
Speaker 1: I met Esme.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And when they were younger, I wouldn't do things.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't say, good job.
Speaker 1: That was great.
Speaker 1: Probably I should have done a little more of it at one point, one of my kids.
Speaker 1: But mostly what I would be doing is I would be asking them how it felt.
Speaker 1: How was that for you?
Speaker 1: Oh, I see how excited you are.
Speaker 1: That's amazing.
Speaker 1: Because I wanted them to refer to their own authority.
Speaker 1: I had absolute trust that who they are essentially is good and that it wants to be this amazing thing in the world.
Speaker 1: And I trusted that, and I showed them that.
Speaker 1: I trusted that.
Speaker 1: We never punished our girls.
Speaker 1: We occasionally shamed them and then apologized for it.
Speaker 1: We were.
Speaker 1: We were still.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: But, like, it was all about, like, oh, I see your essential goodness, and I'm going to treat you that way.
Speaker 1: I. I see that you know what to do.
Speaker 1: I'm going to treat you that way.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And that is far more effective.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And the reason that we do it is because we want them to see that in themselves.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Oh, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I get it.
Speaker 1: That, like, a small oak tree becomes a big oak tree, but I also get the fact that a small oak tree is perfect and the big oak tree is perfect, and it's just evolution that's occurring.
Speaker 1: And so that's how I see.
Speaker 1: And that's how we train folks to see the people that we're working with.
Speaker 1: They're the authority.
Speaker 1: They know what's.
Speaker 1: They know better than I do.
Speaker 1: I mean, you see the coaching, and it looks like I know shit, but I'm very deeply following the person because I know that the next step for them is unique to them.
Speaker 1: And.
Speaker 1: And you don't know what that is.
Speaker 1: And I don't know what that is.
Speaker 1: There's no way I can.
Speaker 1: But they do.
Speaker 1: They know it.
Speaker 1: You know, I just have to open up enough doors for them to look in, and they're like, oh, yeah, that's the way.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: I love that.
Speaker 1: And something that I've been exploring for myself is this, like, noticing when there's some part of me that either doesn't fully trust myself or doesn't fully trust, like, life.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And that's usually, like, again, another signpost.
Speaker 1: Do that.
Speaker 1: Would you say, what.
Speaker 1: Like, what.
Speaker 1: What changed for you?
Speaker 1: Or like, how is your relationship with trusting life and trusting yourself unfolded to the point where now you can just, like, fully be in that coaching relationship and just completely trust whatever's coming up for them?
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So trusting myself and trusting life, I don't think there's a distinction between the two.
Speaker 1: Like, one strips of projection of the other.
Speaker 1: So that would be.
Speaker 1: And.
Speaker 1: And for me, it's more trusting life than it is trusting self.
Speaker 1: So, you know, it was building self trust that helped me trust life, but now it's.
Speaker 1: I guess it's like trusting life moving through you in a way.
Speaker 1: Exactly.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Which is all that's ever happening.
Speaker 1: It's an interesting question.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 1: Because on some level, of course, I look at what I've done, and I'm like, oh, I am a baby oak tree, and I am continuing to grow.
Speaker 1: And so there is a way in which I look at the work that I do in the world, and it's constantly improving, which means there's constantly mistakes.
Speaker 1: I'm finding, if you would want to call them that.
Speaker 1: I don't particularly call them that because I don't think the baby oak tree made a mistake by being a baby oak tree.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 1: But there is this constant way in which I'm improving.
Speaker 1: So there's the discernment of, oh, this is what wants to happen next, and this is what didn't feel quite right.
Speaker 1: And that's almost always how it works, is that it feels like the way that evolution happens inside of me is something doesn't feel quite right, and then I work on that thing, and then all of a sudden I'm more sensitive and Then now I can feel the next thing that doesn't feel quite right.
Speaker 1: And then that like creates another like evolution which makes me more sensitive.
Speaker 1: And now I can find.
Speaker 1: So it's like this like higher level of discernment.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And sensitivity too, which can be a double edged sword in my experience.
Speaker 1: Because if you don't listen to it creates a lot of pain.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, yeah.
Speaker 1: I don't call that a double edged sword.
Speaker 1: I call that like, thank God.
Speaker 1: Yeah, sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: A double edged sword if you don't listen to it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And that's why my experience of life now is like, it feels almost choiceless.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 1: Because like if I feel this and I'm called to this certain thing, I can't say no because I know how much it fucking hurts if I say no.
Speaker 1: That's interesting.
Speaker 1: And it's choiceless because you have such sensitivity to what is in or out of alignment with what.
Speaker 1: Like.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: That's the experience.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: That reminds me of the.
Speaker 1: One of my favorite things that you've talked about many times is this idea of enjoyment being efficient.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean a.
Speaker 1: It's so interesting how like it's so there's parts of me that are like, fuck that.
Speaker 1: I try and come up with examples that it's not true, but I think I agree with you.
Speaker 1: And with my own experimentation with enjoyment, I've noticed that if I try and manufacture it doesn't really work.
Speaker 1: But there is a way that it can be kind of oriented towards how do you.
Speaker 1: Or how do you teach or for yourself, how do you allow for or help people orient towards enjoyment more without trying to force it or create it?
Speaker 1: Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: So enjoyment is often more of a letting go than it is a creation or a force.
Speaker 1: If you experiment with it long enough, you'll find the exact thing that you just found which is like, oh, any kind of force is the opposite of enjoyment.
Speaker 1: So if I'm trying to engineer enjoyment, it is an enjoyment.
Speaker 1: So what starts to.
Speaker 1: What you start to find out is that at any moment you can enjoy just a little bit more.
Speaker 1: Not if you try to force it.
Speaker 1: Like right now, if I was like, okay, I'm going to force enjoyment like my body constrictions.
Speaker 1: But if I'm like, oh, how do I enjoy myself just a little bit more right now?
Speaker 1: My vision becomes a little more expanded, my body becomes a little more relaxed, I'm a little more present with you and it's like, wow, I didn't have to change anything.
Speaker 1: Nothing particularly changed outside of just this question arose.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: But if anything, there's the experience of feeling more or receiving more.
Speaker 1: Either way, you want to look at that.
Speaker 1: And maybe it's receiving more because the question created a space of, like, less tension in your body, which then maybe allowed for more expansiveness and then more receiving.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: And so then that's what enjoyment becomes.
Speaker 1: That clearly there are certain things that I do that I enjoy more than other things, you know, and so if I look at my life, there are things that I don't enjoy that I do less of now than I used to do or I don't do at all.
Speaker 1: And there's things that I have learned how to enjoy that I used to not enjoy doing.
Speaker 1: And so between those two things, life is pretty enjoyable.
Speaker 1: If I am going to write emails, and I know I'm going to write emails, and I either do it with enjoyment or not enjoyment, like, this is a great experiment people can do.
Speaker 1: If you do it with enjoyment, it feels like it's taking a little more time.
Speaker 1: You type a little slower, you're a little more present and your body more in your body more.
Speaker 1: So the whole thing's moving a little bit slower.
Speaker 1: And so, like, how is that efficient?
Speaker 1: Well, first of all, efficiency isn't how fast you go.
Speaker 1: A fast car is not an efficient car.
Speaker 1: The first thing is that the efficiency is there because it's taken less energy.
Speaker 1: So at the end of the email writing session, you have more energy.
Speaker 1: So that's good.
Speaker 1: You can work more if you want to or enjoy yourself more if you want to, and then.
Speaker 1: Or both.
Speaker 1: But the other piece is that if you're being present in your emails, there's a lot less back and forth in your emails.
Speaker 1: So it ends up being quicker.
Speaker 1: It ends up being, oh, I took my time with this email.
Speaker 1: And instead of just answering the question or getting emotionally overwhelmed and putting it in the to do later category, where then I'm going to have to read it again.
Speaker 1: I've never done that before.
Speaker 1: Then you have to read it again, which takes twice as much time to respond to the email.
Speaker 1: Instead, I'm going to, oh, that brings up this in me.
Speaker 1: I'm going to enjoy that thing.
Speaker 1: And then I'm present with it and then I'm going to respond right away.
Speaker 1: Or I'm going to take a moment and go, okay, so I can just answer and press Enter and get the dopamine hit.
Speaker 1: Or I can say, what is it?
Speaker 1: I really want Here, what's the real thing that I want?
Speaker 1: And I can make that email move two or three things down the line or jump a step rather than just do the thing.
Speaker 1: And I notice this inside of our business all the time.
Speaker 1: I can just tell you when someone's just trying to get through their emails.
Speaker 1: I'm like, it bothers the crap out of me, honestly, because I'm like, you're wasting my fucking time.
Speaker 1: You know, you're not taking a moment and considering what you're actually trying to accomplish here.
Speaker 1: Instead you're just getting that to do list because you're in anxiety and you can tell the difference in the emails where it's coming from.
Speaker 1: I feel personally called out in this moment, but I love the idea of.
Speaker 1: And that's another thing that I appreciate about your work is like the way you want to email is in a work practice.
Speaker 1: That's something that you can really do every day.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's great.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Something I'm curious about as well, and this is from conversations with a friend, is this idea of like noticing when I'm acting from like for reasons or like justifying versus just like I intuitively feel like this would be good and in alignment to do.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And so I guess the question is, what is the role of reason in the way that you make decisions and the way that you show up and act?
Speaker 1: Reason is a lovely, beautiful, amazing thing.
Speaker 1: I love it.
Speaker 1: I love a fucking amazing intellectual brain.
Speaker 1: You know, I work with people in AI and golly crap, I'm so smart.
Speaker 1: And this weekend were with some people who are just brilliantly smart.
Speaker 1: I love a great brain.
Speaker 1: I find when we're making decisions, bringing forward, we're just relying on the brain that things go sideways.
Speaker 1: So apparently there's something that like in Every second there's 11 bits of information that you get from your brain, but like 40,000 bits of information you get from your body.
Speaker 1: You have four times more afferent neurons than efferent neurons.
Speaker 1: So it's like a superhighway going up and like one lane of traffic going down.
Speaker 1: Oh, cool.
Speaker 1: I didn't know that.
Speaker 1: That's great.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So there's a lot of information to get from the body to make a decision from the heart, from the gut.
Speaker 1: And I say those things not because it's actually the heart or actually the gut, it's just that's the somatic experience of it.
Speaker 1: And there is some neurology.
Speaker 1: There's like a cat sized brain and the gut and the mouse sized brain.
Speaker 1: Around the heart.
Speaker 1: But the.
Speaker 1: But there's a lot of information there.
Speaker 1: And then the other thing is, if you look at how we work neurologically in the brain, that the decision making happens for the most part in the emotional center of the brain.
Speaker 1: Meaning that if that part gets destroyed and the logic is there and the IQ is there, we can't decide what color pen to use for like 30 minutes or whatnot.
Speaker 1: So logic is this really wonderful thing, but it seems to work best when it's in the background a little bit.
Speaker 1: Like I'm logically talking to you right now.
Speaker 1: I'm constructing sentences.
Speaker 1: That requires logic.
Speaker 1: I'm making sense in my sentences.
Speaker 1: At least I hope I am.
Speaker 1: That requires some logic.
Speaker 1: Kind of.
Speaker 1: Joe, I get that a lot of people talking about.
Speaker 1: I listened to your podcast.
Speaker 1: It made no sense.
Speaker 1: I listened to it again and then it made sense.
Speaker 1: Which I know isn't particularly about the rationale.
Speaker 1: It's just about where the logic lays in the.
Speaker 1: In the process.
Speaker 1: And so what I notice, and there's this study that I was reading just last night about how leaders typically have a lot more time in theta, which is kind of a meditative state or the space between dream and awake.
Speaker 1: It's that.
Speaker 1: And that they're just in theta a lot more.
Speaker 1: And my experience of that is that the logic is just there.
Speaker 1: It's just happening.
Speaker 1: And I don't need to particularly occasionally I'll stop and I'll think, But generally it's just happening.
Speaker 1: For me, it's like a tool that my system knows how to use.
Speaker 1: Much like the way a basketball player, if like a professional basketball player is playing, they're using their body, they're using their brain, but they're not fucking thinking.
Speaker 1: And they're not definitely not thinking.
Speaker 1: Okay, I'm going to take the right turn and then I'm going to take the left and the.
Speaker 1: That would be a terrible basketball player.
Speaker 1: Terrible basketball player.
Speaker 1: So it's very stressful.
Speaker 1: Similar to that.
Speaker 1: Yes, that if you can trust your thinking.
Speaker 1: And what typically happens is that when people are caught in their head and they're thinking too much, it's all just an avoidance of emotion.
Speaker 1: And that if they move that emotion, the clarity of thought comes immediately.
Speaker 1: Sure.
Speaker 1: So you mentioned that when people avoid emotions, they typically will maybe get stuck in their head and maybe make poor decisions.
Speaker 1: Etc, Etc.
Speaker 1: This is something I'm really interested in.
Speaker 1: The work I do is around the nervous system.
Speaker 1: And something that I keep coming back to over again is this idea of safety.
Speaker 1: I attempt to help Create the conditions for senses of safety so that almost like the intelligence of the nervous system in the body can kind of unfold from there.
Speaker 1: But I've also heard you say that safety is in some ways an illusion.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So how do you think about safety?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that's a great question.
Speaker 1: It's a question I've never had before, which I love.
Speaker 1: So safety is an illusion.
Speaker 1: We're not safe by nature.
Speaker 1: And there's something in us that knows that.
Speaker 1: And so just like with enjoyment, if you try to force doesn't work.
Speaker 1: So trying to force safety is in itself a feeling of lack of safety, which is why so many people are anxious, trying to force their anxiety out of the way.
Speaker 1: They're like, it doesn't happen.
Speaker 1: I'm still fucking anxious.
Speaker 1: Because our system knows that if we're trying to force ourselves into doing something that there's something naturally unsafe.
Speaker 1: Why else would we fucking do it?
Speaker 1: Right, Right.
Speaker 1: And so there's that aspect.
Speaker 1: So there's some recognition that has to come that you.
Speaker 1: And that feeling of safety, if you want it to be reliable, if you want it to be something that can show up regularly, it has to acknowledge the fact that we're not safe.
Speaker 1: So, like, I get to be safe in the.
Speaker 1: In the idea that I am going to definitely die, in the idea that could happen at any moment.
Speaker 1: That at any moment you could start yelling at me and telling me I'm an asshole, like, anything can happen.
Speaker 1: And so where does that sense of safety come from?
Speaker 1: And I think that sense of safety comes from two different things.
Speaker 1: One is the recognition that in some way you're dying every minute.
Speaker 1: Like, who I was today is different than who I was yesterday.
Speaker 1: Definitely than a year ago.
Speaker 1: Definitely than 10 years ago.
Speaker 1: So there's that thing, and there's also this recognition of, well, whatever comes doesn't mean that I have to leave myself, including my death, including you yelling at me.
Speaker 1: And so that recognition, that creates a sense of safety that's incredibly deep and profound.
Speaker 1: And that is far more resilient than any kind of sense of safety that you're going to get.
Speaker 1: Because I finally have enough money or I finally have enough people who love me, or I finally have enough power or whatever that is.
Speaker 1: So that's one.
Speaker 1: I think that's a big component of it.
Speaker 1: Then there's another component of it, which is if I want to do work with people, if they're safe, if they feel safe, then they're going to learn a lot quicker.
Speaker 1: So I want them to feel safe.
Speaker 1: If they feel completely safe, there are certain things they're never going to learn.
Speaker 1: That's interesting.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: There's some things that.
Speaker 1: Can you give an example?
Speaker 1: Well, I can put it to you this way.
Speaker 1: There is no.
Speaker 1: The times that people learn the quickest and the fastest in adulthood is when there's massive moments of transformation.
Speaker 1: I lost my job, I got divorced.
Speaker 1: My marriage might end.
Speaker 1: I just had kids.
Speaker 1: Those are the places way outside the window tolerance.
Speaker 1: That's like overwhelmed.
Speaker 1: Exactly.
Speaker 1: And that's when transformation happens.
Speaker 1: Because it's the.
Speaker 1: It's the time when the sense of self can't really fucking pretend it is real.
Speaker 1: It's breaking down.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: It's like, well, I am this guy who does this thing and everything's working out.
Speaker 1: Nope, I am not.
Speaker 1: My identity is like imploding in some way.
Speaker 1: Exactly.
Speaker 1: Grief or whatever.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And so there's.
Speaker 1: Those are the moments where the most growth is possible.
Speaker 1: I've even thought about it as on the business, which is like.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think the person who did this best is kind of troddish.
Speaker 1: Pema Chodron, she asked When Things Fall Apart is the name of the book, which is like, fantastic.
Speaker 1: You're meeting the person at exactly the most opportune moment for transformation.
Speaker 1: Yay.
Speaker 1: So do you try and accelerate that process to some degree?
Speaker 1: I never try to accelerate with other people.
Speaker 1: I just never trying to accelerate something.
Speaker 1: There's again, that deep trust.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's hard to trust in their system, I guess.
Speaker 1: It's like an acorn that it's like when it's ready to break open to some degree.
Speaker 1: Exactly.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So there's also that sense of, you know, our work is intense.
Speaker 1: The work that we do is intense.
Speaker 1: And it's intense because it is jostling the sense of self so that we can say, oh, is this really who you are?
Speaker 1: Is this really who you want to be?
Speaker 1: Is this really how you want to be in the world?
Speaker 1: And so there's just that.
Speaker 1: So it's this incredible, incredibly fine balance on safety.
Speaker 1: It sounds like what you're saying, and correct me if I'm wrong, in the same way that you talked about.
Speaker 1: There's elation, but then there's background joy with safety.
Speaker 1: It's almost like there's safety in a sense of self and then there's the background safety that is there no matter what is happening.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's interesting.
Speaker 1: So one of the things.
Speaker 1: One of the things that we'll see is one of the ways that we train people that are working with us.
Speaker 1: And that I'm never going to pretend that you're not safe so that person might feel like, oh, my God.
Speaker 1: So that I'm not safe, as an example.
Speaker 1: So a lot of coaching times, somebody will get up in front of me, in front of us 100 people, and they'll say something to the effect of like, oh, my God, I'm so anxious.
Speaker 1: And I'll say, oh, cool, what's happening?
Speaker 1: And they'll say, well, I have a hard time speaking in front of people.
Speaker 1: And you're like, what are you doing right now?
Speaker 1: Exactly.
Speaker 1: Because if I believe their sense of safety.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: If I believe that they aren't safe, then I am being codependent, being bought into their story.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: I'm being codependent.
Speaker 1: So a lot of what I'm doing is just actually disagreeing.
Speaker 1: Bullshit.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Calling bullshit.
Speaker 1: Which actually makes people feel really fucking safe, as it turns out.
Speaker 1: You're almost, like, setting a boundary with their story.
Speaker 1: Exactly.
Speaker 1: I'm constantly setting the boundary with this story.
Speaker 1: And most people think, oh, I want people to feel safe means I'm not going to set a boundary with their story.
Speaker 1: Oh, yeah, it's true.
Speaker 1: They did really hurt you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: Empathy.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 1: And so it's right.
Speaker 1: Oh, no.
Speaker 1: I can be with your emotional experience, but I'm not buying into your story.
Speaker 1: And that actually, I think, makes people feel safe at a different level because it's an agreement with.
Speaker 1: I know essentially, you're safe.
Speaker 1: I know essentially that you know what to do, how to handle.
Speaker 1: I know essentially that you can be at peace in your death, and I'm going to treat you as such.
Speaker 1: And then that invites that part to come out and lead.
Speaker 1: And then I follow that part because that part knows.
Speaker 1: That's the part that knows the next step.
Speaker 1: Exactly.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: There's like, an image that I have of, like, almost like the safety, or the ultimate safety is.
Speaker 1: And there's a phrase that has been coming up for me a lot, which is this idea of, like, secure attachment with reality, which kind of comes back to, like, trusting reality more.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And it is that maybe the ultimate safety is, like, flowing with the river or, like, flowing with life and, like, trusting in that.
Speaker 1: There's, like, safety in that, but there's not safety if you try.
Speaker 1: And as soon as you try and make something static, that's when there's no safety there.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: That's really beautifully said.
Speaker 1: I agree.
Speaker 1: There is no safety in trying to make life stop.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Right, right.
Speaker 1: But that's what we try and do a lot of the time.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: If I'm only happy all the time, if I'm only in JHNA 8 all the time or whatever it is.
Speaker 1: And when you try, and I mean in Jhana practice, the more that you try and stay there, the more it goes away.
Speaker 1: So it's this beautiful feedback loop of like, oh, I really like this.
Speaker 1: And then it kind of diminishes.
Speaker 1: So it's kind of training you to actually, like, by letting go is how you get more of it, which is unlike life.
Speaker 1: Or unlike.
Speaker 1: Not unlike life.
Speaker 1: It's like, unlike my conditioning.
Speaker 1: Yes, it's unlike conditioning, but it's exactly how life works.
Speaker 1: But it's how life works.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Emotionally, it's very similar.
Speaker 1: Meaning that when you start to love your emotions, they start to change.
Speaker 1: And then you go, oh, okay, if I love my emotions, they'll change.
Speaker 1: And they stop changing.
Speaker 1: Because trying to get your emotions to change isn't loving them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely been there.
Speaker 1: And yeah, it's interesting around, like, the.
Speaker 1: You know what you said about when someone is actually, like, really out of their window of tolerance is when the most transformation happens.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Sometimes.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: There is like, a level where you can see somebody re traumatizing themselves and then.
Speaker 1: But if they can find safety in that place where they're like.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 1: In groundlessness.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 1: That's the key.
Speaker 1: So what we'll do is we'll create, like, deep containers of love so that people can feel safe going through something that they don't feel safe going through.
Speaker 1: And that's the.
Speaker 1: That's the way that we do it.
Speaker 1: And it's amazing because, you know, you'll see people talk about, you know, oh, we can't do that with clients because that will make them feel unsafe.
Speaker 1: And we think, okay, you're right.
Speaker 1: We can't do that with clients to make them feel unsafe.
Speaker 1: How do we do that with clients in a way that makes them feel safe?
Speaker 1: That's our thought process.
Speaker 1: Because that deep sense of love, trust in them.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to make them a victim.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to make anybody I'm working with into a victim.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And for you?
Speaker 1: Well, the way that you do that is by connecting to the part of them that is fundamentally safe the whole time and by, like, witnessing that and, I guess, reflecting that, like, safe and wise and leading them and always has been leading them and.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's beautiful.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: You were saying that, like, it's about allowing yourself to go down the river that's one way to say it.
Speaker 1: The other way to say it is to recognize that you're fucking always going down the river.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it's like grade four, but you're always going down the fucking river, as it turns out.
Speaker 1: And so it's that recognition of that.
Speaker 1: And so it goes back to your question about trust is how do you trust life?
Speaker 1: It's like, how do you trust that fire's hot, it's fucking fire.
Speaker 1: Like, life is life.
Speaker 1: It does its thing.
Speaker 1: Trusting it isn't to say that everything's going to work out well.
Speaker 1: Trusting it is to know what you are in it.
Speaker 1: And so I think that's.
Speaker 1: That's where a lot of people.
Speaker 1: The idea is like, oh, one day I'll have enough confidence that I can trust life, or one day that I'll have enough knowing or knowledge or wisdom or something to trust life.
Speaker 1: And it's like, no, just fucking know what life is, and then know what you are, and everything works out really well.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: That's beautiful.
Speaker 1: I have a couple more selfish questions.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: One.
Speaker 1: So one, I guess, like, trap that I'm conscious of is someone who occasionally plays the role of teacher is the way in which that there is a risk of, like, creating that staticness, this, like, calcifying temporary structure which in some ways protects against my own defense and unraveling.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 1: How do you think about that and not fall into that trap as a blind spot and maybe even use teaching as a way to, like, increase the unraveling?
Speaker 1: Yes, absolutely.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I got to see a lot of teachers.
Speaker 1: I call it, like, they're mountaineering.
Speaker 1: They're on the side of the cliff and they've stopped and they're helping everybody get this part exactly.
Speaker 1: Which is.
Speaker 1: I mean, I just want to say how fucking noble that is on some level.
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 1: Like, oh, you're actually sacrificing your own progression for the progression of others.
Speaker 1: And it's completely unnecessary.
Speaker 1: And it's usually done because of an identity of teacher.
Speaker 1: One of the ways to do it is, like, what you're doing right now, which is constantly going out into the world and saying, here's where my foible is, right?
Speaker 1: And there's a guy named Gay Hendricks who's been doing it for four years and just recently was telling me that's how he.
Speaker 1: He did that is he basically was constantly vulnerable with his.
Speaker 1: Where he was in the situation.
Speaker 1: And that kept him, like, humble.
Speaker 1: And I agree, and I've done that, and I do that Kind of more now with the past of these.
Speaker 1: Like, this is how fucking weird it was.
Speaker 1: I don't particularly do too much of where I am now.
Speaker 1: And that's for two reasons.
Speaker 1: One is that I noticed at the end depth of the work that I'm doing with people that if I.
Speaker 1: If they're trapped in a corner and they're like, wait a second, they will.
Speaker 1: Some of them will go and attack and.
Speaker 1: And.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And it just slows.
Speaker 1: Project onto you.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: It slows down their process.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 1: So I will.
Speaker 1: I will.
Speaker 1: As I've worked with people longer and longer, I start opening that aspect of myself up to them so that they can see it and experience it.
Speaker 1: But in the early stages, I don't really do that because I've noticed it doesn't serve anybody.
Speaker 1: But secondly, I don't do it is because what I'm particularly going through is not entirely relatable for somebody who's been doing something for five years and I've been doing it for, whatever it is, 30.
Speaker 1: And so I just find that it makes people feel not the way that I want them to see it, which is that they and I are the same.
Speaker 1: But.
Speaker 1: So here are some other things that I use to make sure that I get to stay in the game and I'm not playing on the outside.
Speaker 1: So, one is that I'm really clear to never take responsibility for somebody else's growth.
Speaker 1: And that's in two ways.
Speaker 1: One is I'm not responsible for what they do in the workshop.
Speaker 1: That's not my responsibility.
Speaker 1: Also, if they have a massive transformation, it doesn't mean I'm fucking special.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 1: So.
Speaker 1: So that's one way.
Speaker 1: So the other thing that I do that I'm really clear about is I'm like, if I.
Speaker 1: It hasn't happened in years.
Speaker 1: But that thought process of noticing I'm above anybody at any time for any reason, and that doesn't mean, yeah, I'm a better coach than a lot of folks, that's fine.
Speaker 1: But being a better coach doesn't make me a better person, or I have more money than a lot of folks, doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: Or that guy plays violin better than me, that's fine.
Speaker 1: But if I notice that I'm actually putting myself above them a little bit as a human, or I'm thinking we're equals, or I'm thinking I'm less than comparison, all of those comparative things is, like, incredibly dangerous for a teacher in particular.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I listened to the podcast you did with Brett about that.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And that was one that, like, broke me open because I realized that I had been unconsciously putting myself above certain people.
Speaker 1: And actually it was like a protection against being vulnerable.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And that.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I feel like, a little bit of tenderness in this moment.
Speaker 1: It's just like.
Speaker 1: And I.
Speaker 1: And it's something that I have to kind of, again, try and remember or, like, notice if I'm so cool.
Speaker 1: Hack on that.
Speaker 1: If you ever put yourself above somebody, what you'll.
Speaker 1: It is immediately a sign that there's an emotion that you are not allowing yourself.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Because that's the only reason we do it.
Speaker 1: That protection is we're protecting ourselves from an emotional experience in that moment.
Speaker 1: So if you, like, if anybody listening feels like, oh, I notice I'm putting myself above and.
Speaker 1: Or below or equal to somebody, that means there's an emotion that you're not allowing yourself to feel.
Speaker 1: Let yourself feel that emotion.
Speaker 1: And there's no more need for the.
Speaker 1: That particular thing.
Speaker 1: So that's a really important one.
Speaker 1: Other things I do is I have teenage girls.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And they imagine they take the piss out of me all the time.
Speaker 1: Which is lovely.
Speaker 1: I have a wife who does the same.
Speaker 1: That's really important.
Speaker 1: What's the role of humor in this work?
Speaker 1: As she seems, like, really important and, like, underrated.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I totally agree with that.
Speaker 1: I mean, a laugh is a great emotional release as much as a cry.
Speaker 1: And so that's part of what makes humor so great.
Speaker 1: But taking this work seriously, it slows shit down too.
Speaker 1: Seriously.
Speaker 1: Slow shit down.
Speaker 1: Like, taking it not seriously enough slows shit down too.
Speaker 1: But most Westerners take shit more seriously than is effective.
Speaker 1: And so that's fun.
Speaker 1: Also, like, making fun of myself on a regular basis, I think in a public situation, I think is a really lovely thing so that people can see that the actual work is that you take yourself less and less personally.
Speaker 1: McCracken.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Burt McCracken.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So Burt McCracken is.
Speaker 1: Because a lot of the work happens on the floor.
Speaker 1: I will crouch down for everybody and a little tough to pair my.
Speaker 1: The top of my butt would pop out.
Speaker 1: So Ernie and Burt, if you remember the Sesame street.
Speaker 1: The name was Burt McCracken.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So there's just kind of this constant making fun of even the fuck you.
Speaker 1: Joe Hudson is of fu.
Speaker 1: Joe Hudson, which is the Twitter handle, is all about, like, not taking yourself too seriously.
Speaker 1: And there's a lot of humor in life.
Speaker 1: And I love this quote, and I think it was Voltaire who said, God is a comedian playing to an audience too Afraid to laugh.
Speaker 1: Like, it is so humorous.
Speaker 1: Like, the whole thing, the idea that, like, I'm a teacher and that you're a student is fucking funny.
Speaker 1: Just, like.
Speaker 1: Just that in itself is hilarious.
Speaker 1: And, you know, that we're not all the student and all the teacher, you know, so much of it.
Speaker 1: So that.
Speaker 1: That part of it.
Speaker 1: And that's another thing that keeps me in that window of my own personal growth.
Speaker 1: The other thing is just I see the hell that comes with usually when folks who are not.
Speaker 1: Folks who are teaching, who are not growing.
Speaker 1: You know, I used to have this idea, like, if you were a good teacher, you didn't make money.
Speaker 1: If you were a good teacher, you didn't have a picture out there.
Speaker 1: If you were a good teacher, you were doing everything for free.
Speaker 1: You know, like, there's so many ideas of what I thought, like, made a great teacher.
Speaker 1: They were all just projections of my own puritanistic attitude towards myself.
Speaker 1: And now there's just this.
Speaker 1: This beautiful recognition that we're all just playing a part in something and that there's.
Speaker 1: And I've played the role.
Speaker 1: I've played the other role.
Speaker 1: I'm playing this role now.
Speaker 1: I see through the roles.
Speaker 1: Like, the whole thing is just this thing.
Speaker 1: And when you don't do that, when you think that you're important, when you think that you.
Speaker 1: You know, the other day somebody came up to me and they're like, you don't know what you're talking about.
Speaker 1: I'm like, you're right.
Speaker 1: They're like, well, yeah, I made this shit up the same way.
Speaker 1: Like, you know, somebody made up Amazon.
Speaker 1: I made this up.
Speaker 1: Like, I don't know.
Speaker 1: And I absolutely will have epiphanies this year that will tell me that some of the things that I'm doing, I could be doing better.
Speaker 1: Like, that's just.
Speaker 1: Like, that.
Speaker 1: What the fuck is there to defend?
Speaker 1: And what I notice is that when teachers start defending and need to be in a position and not be questioned or any of that stuff, that's just misery.
Speaker 1: It's just like, misery.
Speaker 1: And I just personally don't want that misery.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well said.
Speaker 1: Well said.
Speaker 1: So one more curiosity I have is, again, this is, like, coming from my experience.
Speaker 1: Oh, can I want to say one more thing about.
Speaker 1: The other thing about it is that people who you're teaching want you to be that person.
Speaker 1: Like, the idea is that, like, you know, the teacher has gone fucking berserk, but it's not.
Speaker 1: But the entire organism.
Speaker 1: Organism goes berserk because there are people who will come to you.
Speaker 1: And they're like, yeah, I want you to make my decisions for me.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah.
Speaker 1: I want you to be an authority.
Speaker 1: I want you to be the person who knows shit so that I can relinquish that.
Speaker 1: And I don't have to stress about that and I don't have to worry about that.
Speaker 1: Just make my decisions for me.
Speaker 1: Just tell me how to be.
Speaker 1: Just give me the ladder to get to the place.
Speaker 1: It doesn't.
Speaker 1: That completely disempowers the person, but they want that and they will put pressure on you to give it to them.
Speaker 1: And so it's not a one sided thing.
Speaker 1: It's not just like a teacher went berserk that we get to see all the time.
Speaker 1: It's like the entire organism went berserk.
Speaker 1: And so it's a really important thing when you're teaching to not allow that.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And a way to break that like spell is I found again, forget all the time.
Speaker 1: But like, if I'm not fully taking risk, like radical responsibility for like the adventure of life is how I frame it.
Speaker 1: But it's like there's a way in which if that's happening, I'd like.
Speaker 1: It was kind of like the hiring thing we talked about yesterday.
Speaker 1: I would be.
Speaker 1: Because I hired a certain person, I'm like actually responsible for creating the conditions that are like, yeah.
Speaker 1: Causing challenge or suffering.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's that.
Speaker 1: There's also another trap that happens which is like the codependent trap.
Speaker 1: You're a teacher and somebody shows up and they're like, I can make your life easier.
Speaker 1: Oh, it's the, oh yeah, you could.
Speaker 1: Yeah, please make my life easier.
Speaker 1: And then it's like kind of a codependent behavior that the teacher has which is like, yeah, I don't want to do that.
Speaker 1: You could do that.
Speaker 1: And now I depend on you.
Speaker 1: And now I'm scared to lose you.
Speaker 1: And now I'm.
Speaker 1: I'm treating you with a different way than I'm treating everybody else.
Speaker 1: And now you're the person between me and everybody else.
Speaker 1: And now there's a hierarchy.
Speaker 1: And now there's a lot.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of.
Speaker 1: There's also, oh, wow.
Speaker 1: I am overwhelmed with the bigness of what the fuck is going on.
Speaker 1: Like I have 120 people whose lives are changing in front of me in a fucking three day weekend.
Speaker 1: That's fucking big.
Speaker 1: I don't want to feel that.
Speaker 1: That's a lot of immensity.
Speaker 1: That's a lot of joy.
Speaker 1: That's a lot of like excitement that I have to process through my body.
Speaker 1: I don't want to.
Speaker 1: So, oh, here's a way out.
Speaker 1: I can have sex with you.
Speaker 1: Or here's a way out, I can be drunk on power.
Speaker 1: So there's also this place that you have to really accept.
Speaker 1: You have to own.
Speaker 1: You have to own like the bigness of what you're doing.
Speaker 1: You know, it's funny because so many people would hear that as arrogance.
Speaker 1: But in the Jewish tradition, humility, the word for humility is to take your God given place in the world.
Speaker 1: That is humility.
Speaker 1: Humility comes from shemut, which is like ground.
Speaker 1: There's like a groundedness as well.
Speaker 1: It has to be.
Speaker 1: So it's like actually allowing yourself to be that big is interestingly as much of a destruction to the ego because it's like there's just less of you that your boundaries have gotten.
Speaker 1: Your distinction between you and everything else has fallen away a little bit more.
Speaker 1: And so there is that aspect too that I think is really underseen because people are like.
Speaker 1: Because there's a certain kind of arrogance, the arrogance of avoidance that totally screws you as a teacher or as a CEO or as any kind of leader.
Speaker 1: Arrogance of humility.
Speaker 1: But there's another kind of arrogance which is like, yeah, I'm doing this is fucking happening and I'm going to feel all those emotions, which allows you to actually be more humble and actually be of more service.
Speaker 1: And an example that I think about this is with CEOs.
Speaker 1: A lot of times when I'm working with a CEO, I will walk them through this visualization of like, you know, everybody woke up this morning and nobody said, I hope the CEO thinks I did a shitty job.
Speaker 1: You're the most talked about person in the fucking organization.
Speaker 1: As it turns out, when you walk in, people are self conscious.
Speaker 1: They're wondering if you think good of them or bad of them when they spend more time on a presentation to you than they would with anybody else.
Speaker 1: Like I walk them through this thing where they have to actually fucking own the power that they have.
Speaker 1: It's incredibly fucking uncomfortable for people to feel that.
Speaker 1: And then when they feel that though, there's so much more humility in the way that they behave.
Speaker 1: It's them trying not to feel that which creates this, this armor that creates this narcissism.
Speaker 1: A great definition of narcissism is the inability to feel emotions.
Speaker 1: And so what I notice is that when people aren't feeling what they're doing, then it's far easier for them to be narcissistic.
Speaker 1: And you're defining narcissism as like a fluid state rather than like a fixed trait.
Speaker 1: Intellectually.
Speaker 1: No, no, yeah, intellectually I would say narcissistic.
Speaker 1: We were all narcissistic.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 1: We were all on that spectrum somewhere.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 1: And I'm not talking about like narcissistic personality disorder, but I'm saying on an intellectual level, narcissism is thinking that you're better and or worse than people.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: On a heart level, it's just not allowing yourself to feel all the emotional experiences.
Speaker 1: Got it.
Speaker 1: On a nervous system level, it's constantly descending from an attack which is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, these are all, they're so fluid.
Speaker 1: Like all of these kind of intermingles.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Okay, I have one more question before kind of going into like some rapid fire questions.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I guess the best way to ask this is like, what do you think of the limits of the work that we can do like on our own, like in our own kind of like self contained space versus because it seems to me like there are some aspects of this work that require a relational dynamic.
Speaker 1: And so I've done a lot of self guided breath work.
Speaker 1: A lot of the teachers, the things that you teach in the experiments are self guided.
Speaker 1: But what are the limits to that work?
Speaker 1: Are there certain things that need to be done in relationship?
Speaker 1: I mean all of our coursework is done in relationship.
Speaker 1: Everything that I put out into the world for free is experiments people can run on their own generally.
Speaker 1: I mean, I do that because the like that's the cheaper work.
Speaker 1: The cheaper work is the work that you do on your own, the cheaper.
Speaker 1: Just meaning that it's less efficient.
Speaker 1: It's like the cheap gas instead of the really good fuel, the rocket fuel.
Speaker 1: And so relational work, there's some work that you can only do on your own.
Speaker 1: Don't get me wrong, there's just some like, you know, a lot of the work that we'll do with somebody will feel like meditation to a meditator.
Speaker 1: Like, oh, it's like I'm meditating with somebody is something that I hear dozens of times through a course.
Speaker 1: But there's a way of meditation on your own that you can only do on your own.
Speaker 1: And it teaches you something that nothing else in the world can teach you.
Speaker 1: It's really important work.
Speaker 1: There's similarly certain stuff that you're only going to get working with other people.
Speaker 1: You can sit in a meditation for 25 years and you're not going to come out and there's going to be traumas that are going to be unhealed in that experience.
Speaker 1: So the relationship part is just really good.
Speaker 1: But to me, there's a more important thing which is a matter of efficiency and a matter of what you can actually accomplish.
Speaker 1: Meaning I put somebody, a modern person, in a room by themselves and say the meditator, to do these exercises, they have to have the discipline to fucking finish them.
Speaker 1: Discipline's not the word I would use, but they have to finish them.
Speaker 1: Inspiration, maybe.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And discipline is like too hard of a statement.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it's just like enough desire to finish them.
Speaker 1: But if you're doing it with somebody, it's really easy.
Speaker 1: And so I love working out.
Speaker 1: It's a lot easier for me to work out with somebody than it is to work out without somebody.
Speaker 1: So to me, there's just an efficiency factor of working with somebody.
Speaker 1: Working in a group, you just get the fucking shit done.
Speaker 1: We're at this off site with a whole bunch of creators right now.
Speaker 1: I love thinking about my business, but because I'm here, I am thinking about my business instead of thinking in my business.
Speaker 1: Yeah, sure.
Speaker 1: And.
Speaker 1: And it's because we have other people to do it.
Speaker 1: That shared contact.
Speaker 1: And there's also, I think of it as almost like learning nervous system capacity when you're in that relational field that like, I have an ability to kind of go deeper and feel safer when there's other people that are kind of like.
Speaker 1: Yeah, holding that for me.
Speaker 1: Totally agree.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So there's a lot of benefits of doing the work with people.
Speaker 1: And almost all of it you can do, and almost all of it is quicker with people.
Speaker 1: And almost all of it you can do by yourself.
Speaker 1: Not all of it, but almost all that you can do by yourself.
Speaker 1: And a lot of that is slower.
Speaker 1: Okay, I have a few rapid fire questions I've saved.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: How's your sound?
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1: Why might it be helpful to get naked?
Speaker 1: When in conflict with your partner, any action of vulnerability increases, decreases the power struggle.
Speaker 1: And so being naked with somebody is an act of vulnerability.
Speaker 1: What is the most controversial, outrageous experiment you've carried out for yourself or prescribed to someone?
Speaker 1: Probably the most outrageous experiment that I did on societal standards would be how to enjoy masturbation as much as possible.
Speaker 1: Like, how to enjoy the experience of, like, get peak pleasure out of masturbation from the very beginning to the very end.
Speaker 1: Nice.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And I use it typically to help people through porn addiction.
Speaker 1: What experiment.
Speaker 1: What experiment might you prescribe to someone who notices a lack of aliveness or vitality in their life.
Speaker 1: Move.
Speaker 1: Anger.
Speaker 1: If you had to distill the essence of what you teach in the world into a sentence or two, what would that be?
Speaker 1: How to love yourself.
Speaker 1: What does success mean to you?
Speaker 1: More people loving themselves.
Speaker 1: Beautiful.
Speaker 1: Well, this has been a pleasure, Jay.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much.
Speaker 1: Always good to be with you, Johnny.
Speaker 1: I am.
Speaker 1: For folks who are curious to go deeper into the actual work we've been talking about.
Speaker 1: What are the best places you would go?
Speaker 1: Best thing to do is go to the Art of Accomplishment website and sign up for the mailing list.
Speaker 1: If you sign up for the mailing list, you'll find out where all the free workshops are.
Speaker 1: You'll find out.
Speaker 1: You'll be on the newsletter to hear about the podcasts.
Speaker 1: You'll know where the Twitter is, you'll know where the YouTube is.
Speaker 1: And then there's the kind of for the public online coaching that I do so you can participate in that.
Speaker 1: And then there's a whole bunch of experiments that get opened up to you.
Speaker 1: So that's the absolute best way to do it.
Speaker 1: Great.
Speaker 1: And that's artofaccomp.com artofaccomplishment.com yeah.
Speaker 1: Amazing.
Speaker 1: So I'd like to close with a line from Rilke.
Speaker 1: He said, try to love the questions themselves and live them now.
Speaker 1: Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Speaker 1: With that in mind, I would just take out the word try.
Speaker 1: You're the only person I've interviewed that Trex Rilke, usually he gets it right.
Speaker 1: He was German.
Speaker 1: There's a little try in there.
Speaker 1: I can say that because German, that's great.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, I still want to ask a question.
Speaker 1: I'm assuming he was German.
Speaker 1: I think he is.
Speaker 1: He is, yeah.
Speaker 1: He's German.
Speaker 1: What is the question that is most alive in your consciousness right now?
Speaker 1: And what question might you leave other listeners with?
Speaker 1: The question that's in my mind right now is what part of our business do we have to call to allow it to grow?
Speaker 1: The question that is in, we just did a business workshop.
Speaker 1: Then that would be question I would leave others with is what's the part of you that has not ever changed and what is it like to get in direct contact with that part of yourself?
Speaker 1: Beautiful.
Speaker 1: We will wrap with that.
Speaker 1: Cool.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Jay.
Speaker 1: Thank you, man.
Speaker 1: I hope you enjoyed this conversation.
Speaker 1: It would mean a lot to me if you could take a few seconds to open up your podcast app and give curious humans a shiny five star rating.
Speaker 1: This not only helps more people to find it, but it will help me to get more awesome guests in the future.
Speaker 1: And if you're not already subscribed, then the Curious Humans newsletter is where I share monthly morsels of interestingness and podcast updates.
Speaker 1: You can sign up for that at JONY Life.
Speaker 1: That's J O n y Life.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening, Sam.
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