#152: Mentorship, Inner Journey, Intuition, Life Coaching and Spiritual Crisis with Devin Martin
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Kia ora, ni hao and hello. Welcome to the Cherry Journal Podcast. I'm your host, Camille Liang. Today I'm joined by Devin Martin, the visionary behind lifestyle integrity and a distinguished executive life coach. In today's episode, we talked about Devin's transformative journey and his coaching methods.

We also covered topics like mental shift, inner journey, intuition and spiritual crisis. Let's get started!

Welcome, Devin. So first of all, let's shout out to our mutual friends, Tom Morgan, who made this introduction. And we had a brief chat before this recording, and I was so impressed by your experience. And I love to share your life stories and your expertise to my listeners.

Yeah, thanks for having me and hello, Tom Morgan. Okay, to start with, I'd like to ask you a question that bothered me for a while. You know, as a life coach, you are often look upon for guidance.

But when facing with uncertainty or questioning your own life, like where do you seek answers and inspiration? It's honestly been one of the greatest challenges of my life, I would say, is craving mentorship. And honestly, I think the solution that I default to has been people that I don't know personally. Books probably are my number one source of mentorship. And I

I recognize that that has major limiting factors. Obviously, I can't be in dialogue with these people. And look, I have a lot of amazing people around me. I have an amazing wife. I have friends who I think are experts in very specific niches, and I will go to them for specific types of advice, you know.

There's somebody I'm going to ask about my computer. There's somebody who I'm going to ask about subtle energy. There's somebody who I'm going to ask about entities. There's other people who I think philosophically or spiritually are more advanced than me. But I'm also just on a daily basis reading a book for an hour or two a day, and I'm just obsessed with other people's minds. And so I kind of collect great minds, people who I think have amazing minds, like

I feel like I get to crawl inside of someone's mind and just spend time there when I'm reading a book that they've written. And so I think that is probably my biggest, you know, and also I will say I've had many coaches and I've had therapists and, you know, different types of professionals help me as well. But really, yeah.

I'm an obsessive autodidact. I love to learn myself and books are my number one source of information. Cool. So last time we briefly chatted about your journey towards transformation and it's very inspiring. Could you share some milestones or the moments or practice that have significantly shaped your path? Yeah, I mean, it's funny. We mentioned Tom Morgan and he interviewed me fairly recently and

And he asked for these transition moments. And I mentioned two big moments involving psychedelics. One when I was 17 and I took my first ever psychedelic. I took LSD for the first time and really had what I would say is an experience of emptiness in the Buddhist sense of shunyata, of, you know, my ability to ground myself in consensus reality in any absolute sense disappeared. I realized that.

just how relative all concepts are, never mind, never mind just the ego, but words, you know, language polarities, hot and cold, you know, and unfortunately I had zero spiritual education to fall back on. So I didn't know what was happening. I just knew that I just fundamentally didn't trust the way that my mind was processing reality anymore.

I sensed that there was something much deeper, much more true, much more real to present moment awareness than words would allow me to hold on to. And I became obsessed for a few years with trying to understand, actually, what is my mind before words? I had a sense that there was a lot going on before I attached concepts and language to things. And I didn't even know what meditation was. I didn't know what Buddhism was. I didn't know, you know, I didn't have anything. And so I spent a couple of years trying to think without words, which...

is not that functional in the world. It doesn't help when you're going to college and trying to take courses. Music helped, art helped, but then eventually I discovered breathing exercises and meditation. And then that became a portal to Eastern philosophies. And then I found the work of a guy named Ken Wilber, a Western philosopher and, and finding his work really,

radically recontextualize my whole mind. It was like I had been swimming in a sea of chaos and suddenly everything had a neat little drawer to stick it in and I could understand how different pieces related to each other. And he was also another portal to

20, 30, 40 other thinkers that were in his books. And so that process of going from being, I often say I was born a fourth generation atheist. So my spiritual lineage on my mother's side is Russian Jews who are pretty good at being atheists. Yeah.

And so if I had found Dawkins or Dennett or one of those people in high school, I would have loved these people, but I didn't. But what I also didn't realize was that I had a deep spiritual impulse. There was something... I like to say I still don't believe in the God that my parents don't believe in. The bearded man in the sky who makes the rules and punishes people. I still don't buy that story, but I do find the word God interesting now. And so discovering that I am a spiritual person has been one of the biggest...

transitions in my life and trying to pursue this spiritual impulse, but having no tools, uh,

almost killed me. I mean, I fell into a deep, dark spiritual hole. People call it a spiritual emergency. I mean, I was suicidally depressed for two and a half, three years. I thought about killing myself almost every single day. And part of that was circumstantial. I just didn't have a view of a life that I wanted to live. I didn't see adults around me who I thought were thriving that I wanted to emulate. And actually, looking back on it, it goes back to your earlier question. I didn't have mentors. I really...

I kept I thought, oh, in elementary school, you know, I had some good teachers starting in middle school. I kind of lost faith in the education system. And I kept thinking, oh, in high school, there'll be these amazing mentors. And then it was like, oh, in college, there'll be these amazing mentors. And then it was like, oh, if I get a job, then I'll have a mentor. And I just kept feeling let down. Like there was nobody who was really thriving in my small town America, little limited worldview.

And so then finding somebody like Ken Wilber in a book, my mind was blown. I was like, oh my God, there are people in the world who are asking really deep questions and actually have satisfying ways of talking about it. So that was like,

one big transition. And that led me away from the consensus path of like, get good grades, go to a good school, get good grades there, get a good job after school, have a long-term career. And so now I'd blown up my life. I was like, okay, I'm taking a blue collar job. I don't want to work in an office. I'm going to figure this out for myself. Meanwhile, I dropped out of college. I'm going to study philosophy and spirituality and music and all these things on my own. And I got, took that very seriously. And that I think precipitated the second kind of maelstrom that

chaos or crisis point, which was I got success in my career, but it was the wrong career. And I was kind of living a double life. You know, by day I was working with security systems. My clients included, you know, Fortune 500 companies, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. And so, you know, big networked cameras, biometrics, card access, or really keeping, you know, like paranoia and keeping track of who crosses what boundary and, you know, serving the corporate overlords and governments and stuff. Yeah.

And then in my spare time, I'm a musician who is running a recording studio out of his house and producing albums for bands. And I'm writing music with singers a few nights a week. I'm

I'm going on meditation retreats. I'm doing psychedelics. I'm part of a philosophy discussion group based on the work of Ken Wilber. And I ended up leading that group for a few years. And so on one side, I'm like defining boundaries and keeping track of who crosses them. And then on the other side, I'm dissolving boundaries and wanting to be one with the universe. And at some point, I felt so out of integrity. I just blew my whole life up. I basically I had started coaching part time as a holistic health coach and

But nobody knows what that is. I didn't even know what it was until I got certified, you know? And so I didn't have a vision for how to replace my six figure salary. You know, my being an employee with going out on my own, I didn't have any real role models for like starting a coaching business.

And at some point I was realizing that I was making myself miserable, living out of integrity, doing work that I didn't believe in. And actually, I met the love of my life and she dumped me. And I agreed with her. I was like, yeah, I'm not impressed with this guy right now either. And so I basically pulled the eject cord and, you know, quit my job, left New York City, went to Burning Man, of course, because that's what you do. And and rented a log cabin on top of a mountain for a year.

and i just decided uh if i don't have a clear vision i'm going to focus on shifting my consciousness full time and so i every day i woke up and had a literal spreadsheet of transformational practices

Breathing exercises, yoga, meditation, journaling, dream journaling, lucid dreaming, reading all kinds of scientific literature. I finally discovered the word Kundalini Rising and I realized that I had been going through some crazy transformation that was probably precipitated by 10 or 15 years of intense yoga, breath work, and meditation coupled with a handful of ayahuasca journeys. And then I started having these crazy psychic experiences, which...

Even though I'd become spiritual, I hadn't fully opened up my worldview. I was still kind of a rational materialist. And then I started having these psychic experiences and they were ones that I could very clearly validate were real experiences.

Now I'm thinking, okay, what the hell is going on? I don't know what reality is anymore. And then I'm having all these strange physiological symptoms, not needing to sleep, not needing to eat, intense, beautiful, blissful energy coursing through my body like I'm exploding into like a million effervescent champagne bubbles and just like unbelievable clarity and concentration and meditation. And so I ended up taking this year and just saying, okay, I got to figure out what the hell is going on both in my body and in my worldview. And it

It was just a leap of faith. I feel like at the end of this, I'm going to be a different person and I will see the path. And that's how I ended up becoming a full-time coach. It came clear to me then that being more of an executive or a career coach, overall, generally just a life coach, working with people in all areas of their life, was going to be like, that is very much aligned with my purpose in the world. That is what I'm meant to be doing right now.

I see. Do you feel like it's necessary for people to pause? Because you mentioned you live on the mountains for one year just to be by yourself. Do you think everyone, if they couldn't find their purpose, do they need to pause and be alone by themselves to figure out? What was your advice or opinion on that? Yeah, I think almost everybody today is in desperate need of

quiet time where they can introspect in the absence of stimulation. And so, you know, we go into the toilet now and we take out our phone, you know, we wait in line for five seconds and the phone is out in the first second, you know? And so I think so many people are checking out as opposed to checking in, you know, they're just really,

constantly stimulated by the world around them. They're looking for answers outside themselves. And that's part of the process. You do need to look outside yourself, but it's out of balance, I think, for almost everybody. And so I don't think you need to go on sabbatical for a year. And I had no phone, no television, no internet for a year. For a year. And it was amazing. And I'm just so grateful I got to do that right before I had kids. But most people have obligations and they can't do that. But most people aren't spending five minutes checking in.

And so I progressively over many, over almost 10 years went from, you know, 20 minute sitting in silence, working up to, you know, 40, working up to 90, working up to maybe three hours a day, you know, and then basically a full time introspective journey that year. To me, that's like, don't scare yourself thinking it's all or nothing. Just start. I tell, I tell most people, you know, go to bed early, wake up early, like,

After 9 p.m., most people just consume, right? Your willpower is low. You're eating carbs. You're watching shitty TV and you're drinking alcohol. Like if you really want to change your life, if you're actually serious about knowing yourself and having a life that's more aligned with your heart, just go to bed before you consume all that crap, which is numbing you to the pain that exists in your life from not knowing why you're alive. And wake up a little bit early and take

Be creative or contemplative. Either one works great. The combination of the two is excellent. So sit and like, listen to yourself or journal or draw or dance or, you know, you can meditate. Great. But most people that's too hard. You know, if you really want to try meditation, I would say learn breathing exercises.

learn how to like have a relationship with your nervous system where you start to realize that you can actually choose your mood to some extent you can choose how excited or calm you are you know if you have anxiety you can shift out of anxiety by changing your breath if you're depressed you can do the same thing you can raise your energy levels but it's just that it's just that decision of i want to pay attention to myself and i think most people haven't actually seen

seriously said that to themselves and then done it. Exactly. I remember, I think back to 2017, when I was working in corporate and I lost the meaning from my job and I started a transcendental meditation. And for half a year, I had nightmare almost every night because I feel like something came out from

from my unconscious mind. Because when I live my daily life, my conscious mind kind of surprised all my unconscious thinking. But once I started to do meditation, everything just came out. Yeah, the first half a year was like a horrible experience for me because I heard meditation is good for your health, give you a peaceful mind. But for that half a year, I was like so struggle. But later, yeah, I did get the benefits from that.

Yeah, I think the marketing campaigns behind a lot of these meditation apps is leading to people to believe that meditation is supposed to be soothing. Yeah, exactly. And questioning the nature of identity and reality is not a soothing process. And there are real dark nights ahead of you. But it is a fruitful process. And it's like often in life, short-term discomfort leads to much more long-term satisfaction. And I think it's very true. And I have a lot of clients who work their ass off all day long.

And then they go to bed and then they wake up at 3 or 4 a.m. And they're awake for an hour or two. And most of them, when I ask them, I'm saying, well, what's on your mind when you wake up? And they don't know because they're trying to avoid, they're trying to get back to sleep. They're just like, I'm trying to like not indulge that part of me. I'm trying to, and I'm like, just do the opposite. There's something that's trying to get your attention. It's in your unconscious. And only when you're completely in deep, you know, dreamless sleep is there actually room for that to bubble up through your unconscious into your conscious mind.

Something's trying to get your attention. And if you do pay attention to it like you did, it resolves. There is a way out, but the way out is through. It's not by avoidance. Exactly. I know you experience a lot of different methods for breath work, meditation, and psychedelic experience. Can you give me some examples what kind of methods give you a profound experience?

shifts your worldview. I'll share one of my story first. Yeah, please. So I had my first ayahuasca experience in Portugal. Before, I never believed in reincarnation. All these spiritual things, I never believed in that. But after I had my ayahuasca, I saw from my own eyes,

and I listened to the message from it although back then I was super scared but I kind of digest myself and start to thinking about this the message and also read some more information in this domain because before I always have this bias like okay those spiritual guru they're just like woo woo stuff once I tried it made me think about it and start to lean to learn more I

I would love to learn your experience as well. Yeah. So I said that, you know, that early around 17, that one experience with LSD really cracked open my, you know, I was a math obsessed kid. I was math became really easy to me and I was very hyper rational. And so that, that's, that,

create a little chink in my rational armor. I started to realize that I was using my thinking mind to distance myself from present moment reality. And I got in touch with my body and I became much more primal. And so I would call, most people I think are disconnected from their minds in kind of two directions. I mean, from present moment reality in two directions.

pre-rational, which is like just the felt sense of being embodied, you know, your instincts, your reflexes, being primal, your desires, you know, your lust, your, you know, your enthusiasm. I think most hyper-rational people are disconnected from their bodies. They kind of exist from the neck up. And I was that way. But I think the other direction is trans-rational. This belief that there's something that transcends and includes the rational mind. And so this is the realm of intuition and creativity and

And my experience, my first experience with ayahuasca. So I did three ceremonies in Brazil in the jungle. And on the third ceremony, I argued with the woman who ran the place. And I basically was like, I want way bigger doses than you're giving me. I want. And she was like, we don't do that. And I was like, I don't want to. I don't want an upper. I just want it all. Because my experience with psychedelics is that the first time you do something is very special because you can be overwhelmed because you don't know what to expect. Right.

But you need a significant dose. And so if you like take little, little doses, you kind of like, it's like with somebody who has such a strong rational mind like I did, I could almost think my way out of these states. And I wanted to be hit over the head. And I knew that that would work for me. And so I finally got her to give me a disgusting amount. And I would usually sit for the first like hour. I would try to sit in meditation and just follow my breath and just be present. And then at some point I would lay down on the mat. And then this time within like 10, 15 minutes, I got this strange feeling.

I don't call it a voice, but like for me, intuition comes as a direct knowing. I don't see things. I don't hear things. I just know things. It's not mediated in any way. And I just knew I had to curl up in a ball, like in a fetal position. And, you know, like if you're a meditator, you're used to like, okay,

I have the thought I should call my mom, go back to the breath, focus. If the thought comes up again, go back to the breath. But if you think you should call your mom four or five, six times, maybe you should get up and call your mom. Maybe this is an intuition. And so it just kept coming back. And I was like, okay, I have to curl up into a ball in the fetal position. The backstory is that I was single. The last relationship I had been in was kind of like the biggest relationship. It was the only real love of my life.

I fell in love with her when I was like 12 and we didn't date until we were in our 20s. And so it was like, it was actually really immature love. And I was like finishing something that had started and she wasn't, we weren't right for each other. But we had broken up. I hadn't seen her much. I bumped into her once a few months prior and she turned out she was pregnant.

And it was just like, and my first thought was, oh my God, it's mine. And then she was like, no, no, I just met this guy when we got pregnant. I was like, oh, thank God. So she was so like, I hadn't talked to her in months after that. She wasn't on my mind. I was really focused on like, what is my purpose? Like that was why I was in that ceremony. And then all of a sudden I realized that there was this need to be with her unborn child. She was like seven, seven and a half months pregnant. I didn't even know.

And I was like, well, how do I be with an unborn child while I'm in this? I'm in Brazil. This kid's probably in like Massachusetts or something. And I realized that I didn't want to like theoretically be with a child. I wanted to actually physically have the child in the room with me. It was like, I don't know, to me, ayahuasca is different than other psychedelics where like I feel like other psychedelics you hallucinate and ayahuasca you see things, but they're real. They just are, you know?

And then I realized that I was trying to break space and time to bring this child with me. And as I was doing it, along with space and time, my separate self-identity was also breaking down. And so I was becoming this fetus in the womb. And I felt, you know, I was breathing in liquids. But also time and space broke. And I started experiencing every single moment of this child's life at the same time.

And this is probably the most excruciatingly uncomfortable thing I've ever experienced in my time. And I was like writhing on the mat. I would start giggling. I would start crying. I would feel like, like, oh, the kid broke his leg or broke her leg. And I would like feel like an injury. I would meet somebody and I would fall in love with them. And I get my heart broken and I would like get excited and then get, I mean, it was just like every emotion you can imagine and every experience of a lifetime in like rapid succession all at once.

It was so, I felt like my body was being torn into a billion pieces. It was just unbelievably uncomfortable. And then all of a sudden it crystallized and I'm laying on my side and there's this baby right there with me.

And I was just overwhelmed with feelings of love, just like, and it became, I realized I love this baby. If I never meet it, I never raise it. I love this baby like my own. And then it became this universal love of like all the unborn children and all the children who will be born and just unbelievably beautiful, blissful. And the sense of responsibility of being a human, becoming an adult, who's probably going to have children of like, we need to make the world okay for these children. And we like, this is like an unbelievably sacred responsibility and,

And it was just, it ended up being a really beautiful experience. And I kind of left it at that. And so I, when I got home after this, I wrote a blog post for each one of my ceremonies. And so I wrote my first blog post, my second blog post. And then I got to the third one and I wrote about this and I was like, can I put this online? This is her baby. This is really weird. I don't want to like freak. I was like, I have to call my ex and just say like, can you please read this and give me your blessing that you're okay with me putting this out? And I sent it to her and she called me right away. And she was like, Devin,

what was the date you were in the ceremony? And I told her the date. She goes, Devin, what time of day was it? And I told her the time. And she's like gasping. And she's like, Devin, I was in the hospital. The baby was born premature and died in that exact moment. I get chills talking about it. I was just crying so many times. And so I felt like this soul reached out to me to like provide unconditional love and allow it to somehow transition. And it was wrong for this baby to be born at this time in her life. It was a very wrong time for her.

And so then I come home and I'm like, well, what the fuck does that mean about, you know, reality and psychic phenomenon and time and space and energy. And, and I had another experience during a ceremony where a woman who was next to me, I, she walked past me in the ceremony and I instantly knew her deepest, darkest secret that she had only ever told her mother. And I walked over to her after the ceremony and I was like, why are you here? And she looked at me and she knew that I knew. And she told me, and her mother was like, Oh,

She told nobody that. And I was like, I know, I know exactly why you're here. And, and so like, and then I, and then she and I had this like entanglement. We thought we were in love. And I moved back to, I went back to New York. She went back to London and we kept calling each other on the phone and having these weird psychic phenomenon. She eventually came to visit me in New York city because we thought we were in love, but really we were like psychically entwined and we had a little bit of an affair. And then that Kundalini process started in me while we were together. And so that was really just this like, okay, everything is shifting.

I don't know what reality is. I need to be humbled once again, but I'm super curious and I want to figure it out. And I want to, I want to tap into this is this is like, and so I spent a year really saying like, what is intuition, you know, like in exploring that. And to this day, I think most people, uh,

underestimate their own wisdom because they're not trusting their intuition. Yeah. So how do you overcome your fear? I don't know if you are afraid when you first experience or second experience, how do you overcome it and thinking you are not crazy? Because, you know, I had the vision first time.

in my life in Germany last year. So I saw a gold figure like from William Blake's work that

on the sky and I couldn't move my leg but kneel down and I feel like Nietzsche was walking to me because I was in Leipzig University and I knew Nietzsche was walking there before so I don't know it's not my imagination I really saw him walking towards me but that's yeah that's experience I was so scared for a couple of months and when I came back from Germany back to Lisbon back home

I feel my left body was like trembling in the night before I go to sleep. I feel like there's a weird energy go through me and I could even interfere with the power. You know, I touch my TV, it's broken. Touch my dishwasher, it's broken. So I couldn't explain it and I was so scared. I kind of want to know how did you cope with that?

You know, it's funny. Every time I do psychedelics, I'm terrified. I mean, that moment when you're like, okay, yes, I'm going to put this thing in my body and I have no idea where we're going. And there's usually a period of like, oh, shit, here it comes. And that I do feel real terror. And I feel like I have to be super courageous. I just have to jump off the cliff and do it. The rest of this, honestly, I feel the opposite. I feel hope, you know?

The nihilism and the deadness that is a purely rationalistic material worldview that like everything is just randomness, you know, and matter has no consciousness and it's all just like atoms bumping into each other. Like that to me is soul sucking and depressing. And so when I get a glimmer of like the world is more alive or more magical or more connected, I'm like, oh God, I'm like, I'm afraid it's not true. You know, like I really want to believe it.

Also, sitting in meditation for countless hours, I learned to be present with and accept and welcome and even enjoy a lot of strange happenings in my body-mind. Also, I'll tell you, being suicidally depressed for a few years, there's nowhere my mind goes that

is new or strange to me anymore. Like it may, it could be new, but like, it's not scared. Like I have had all the darkest thoughts, you know, I have thought about killing myself and killing everybody else and, you know, life being worthless and other people being worthless and me being worthless. And, you know, I mean, I, I feel like if you go far enough into the darkness, you come full circle and you find the light. And for a lot of people, I know you're, you're familiar with Jordan Peterson. So,

My without knowing him at all and only reading him and watching him. My armchair diagnosis is that he's come very close to losing himself in the darkness, but he hasn't let himself go all the way in. And he doesn't have a strong spiritual grounding in just how safe it is there. Yeah. And so I find I find him in his head rationalizing everything to death, you know, and I think if you just want to step further and really felt hopeless, you know, without medication, without all the things he's done to without anything.

intellectualizing it, he would become a much more generous person, much less combative.

You know, when people go through this and they really find the other side, they have a hard time seeing other people as an enemy in the way that I think he does so quickly. Yeah, true. And I wonder when you have worked with your clients, I assume some of them may find your spiritual experience weird. Like maybe they will judge you. Are you the right person to coach me since you kind of lean onto this Wu stuff? So how do you deal with that?

that? Well, I don't have an agenda. So people set their own goals and the sessions go where they want them to go. I mean, I will, I will offer a lot of cognitive dissonance if I feel like there's a chance to, to, you know, catch them in, in, in some limitation of their thinking. I will try to throw a monkey wrench into the works and see if they can have an opening. But I also think people pick me out precisely because I have this, you know, and I, I,

I work with a lot of people in finance. It's a huge part, you know, just like really, really, really high IQ people who are hyper rational. And for the most part, I can spar with them. I can, I can keep up. And so then when I go with what they would call woo woo, it's confounding. They're like, wait a minute. It's usually, I think they think of stupid people of being spiritual, but here's a guy who seems to like be pretty smart and he's going there and he can talk about it in a way that's pretty grounded and,

And I think they want that. I think everybody, whether they can acknowledge it or not, has some spiritual impulse. They have a sense, an intuition that their separate sense, their ego is true, but limited. It's not the whole truth. And they do on some level feel connected to something greater. And there's a part of them that desperately wants to know that that's real. And so some people live in radical denial and they reject it violently and they have to work really hard to keep it out of their awareness, you know?

And I think when I look at the staunch atheists, like not Sam Harris anymore, but the rest of the crew of those, of the four big ones, like why are they so obsessed? You know, with, you know, like the preachers who are obsessed with not people not being gay, they often turned out to be gay themselves. Yeah. Right. And so the thing we fight the strongest against is often the thing that we want to, don't want to admit has some truth for us. So I think most people have a spiritual impulse, but,

their experience of religion has turned them off because the Bible doesn't resonate or the way the Bible is being talked about doesn't resonate with them. And so what they're rejecting is valid, but that doesn't mean that there's not something else that they're searching for and they just don't have the words for it.

And so, yeah, I thought I might talk to somebody about their purpose. I might talk to them about their core values. I might talk about relationships and connection and giving back and being of service. And, you know, all those things, you know, you can lead to spirituality as well. And so I'm looking to meet somebody where they're at. Like, what is the edge of their personal development in a whole bunch of different areas? You know, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, kinesthetically, relationally, you know, all different lines of development.

And yeah, and if people want to go there, you know, I often probably light up. It's fun. Yeah, I think I was in that denial period for a long time because I always want to use my rational mind, so-called rational mind to persuade myself, okay, that's not true. This is just some people's imagination or something. But I feel like

there's something above me always calling me, just keep throwing all these coincidences or some people like Tom Morgan and you talk to me, just let me accept this fact. I find it interesting. Yeah. And increasingly we're giving role models, we're giving people who are unbelievably successful in the world

We're also deeply spiritual, you know, and it's confusing for people that I thought you're supposed to be hyper rational and this person's, you know, navigating by some other thing. What is that? And everybody kind of gets that they don't trust themselves. I find a lot of these people who are hyper smart and hyper successful who aren't acknowledging being spiritual. There's a sense that they're disconnected from something deep within them.

And so we don't have to like connect it to gods or reincarnation or psychic phenomenon, but we can just talk about like, what is that source of energy within you? And just like, let's, let's get you living more vibrantly and let's get you making, but oftentimes for people, they weren't like it's decision-making. That is, that is like the thing they're struggling with. You know, that's, that's what I'm coaching people. How do you make decisions? And that's a topic I love because I think you have to incorporate multiple streams of information and, and,

You have to leave room for something that's ineffable. There is, unless somebody can explain to me how creativity works, because everybody wants to be more creative and there is no rational explanation. I mean, you could just say like, oh, it's synthesis, you know, we're just recombining. But most people have a sense there's something else going on and that's usually an opening for, okay.

Can we just admit like metaphysics are important because we have to admit we don't understand everything. Can we just leave a little space for the mystery in your mind and like let things percolate up from there? And like, we don't have to label it. We don't have to call it anything, but like, can you stay open? Yeah.

I didn't know that about him.

I think Tom Morgan wrote about it. Maybe I paraphrased it wrong, but the essence of this story is that your body will tell you something. And you also mentioned that you got some physical sensations during your practice. Can you share some stories of that? Yeah, yeah. I mean, to me, so I actually started with Transcendental Meditation as well. I was trained at the Art of Living Foundation, which is a guru named Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. Mm-hmm.

He essentially was part of the TM community. He left to start his own thing called the art of living. And so they, he has his own Kriya, his own breathing exercise called the Sudarshan Kriya, which was his big, he was said he was like given that as a download and he was told he had to go start his own organization. And it's now even bigger than TM and worldwide. It's huge. And so I started doing breathing exercises and doing TM. And, you know, so you focus on a mantra and then you try to be in the space of

You kind of like let go of the mantra and try to be in this kind of thoughtless space. And then your thoughts kick in and you go back to the mantra. And so I like TM as an intro, not as like an ultimate path, but as a way to get people interested. Because almost immediately I started having all kinds of strange, pleasurable sensations. If you follow the breath...

It sounds like the most mundane practice in the world. Like, oh, I breathe all day every day. I'm going to sit here and watch myself breathe. But it ends up being immensely pleasurable. I mean, anytime you're fully focused on the present moment, whatever you're focused on is magic. It's unbelievable. Like, you know, if you sit and focus on a mantra or a mandala in your mind, a vision of a mandala or whatever it is,

You start to realize how rich and subtle experience can be. So to me, it's kind of like zooming in with a microscope. Like I have a body. I could view it as like one big lump.

And it's like, am I embodied today? Yep. My body's there. Okay. We're good. And I think for a lot of people, that's kind of the level they exist at, you know, like they might have an ache and pain and not notice it for like, you know, like for months or weeks, but then you start to zoom in and you start to really feel, you know, the physical body, you know, every little muscle, you feel your breath and the way it affects your chest and your back and your stomach. And you're, you know, you start to feel your seat on the cushion is a common thing to focus on.

But then it gets subtler still. And what you start to notice is that there's nothing constant about having a body. It's a whole bunch of, you know, a near infinite number of inputs trying to get your attention at once. And so if you just focus on your big toe, there's a whole world of sensation going on in your big toe, you know? And so you start to like learn how to zoom in and witness different parts of your body. And then it starts to...

There's an appearance that somebody told me I started calling expansion. And I think what's happening is basically my awareness is shifting from my physical body to my subtle body.

And so I feel physically like I'm three feet wide, four feet wide, five feet wide, 10 feet wide. And it's this massive expanse. And I mean, I imagine it's like your aura or your, you know, the field of energy. And I physically feel like that's what I am. I feel and it's unbelievably pleasurable and subtle. And so some of those experiences and the way the breath works.

changes everything and an in-breath causes certain cascading sensations to ripple through your entire body. And the exhale causes another cascading and every thought, you know, is either caused by these sensations or in, you know, in a feedback loop, then causing other sensations. And you just start to witness for me, I felt like I was witnessing something,

Complete emptiness, much like in deep dreamless sleep, that type of that type of void, that type of not emptiness in the philosophical sense of things have no absolute meaning, but like a void. Like I learned that I could pay attention to my hearing or not. My you know, like if right now I asked you, what are you tasting? You'd go, oh.

I wasn't paying attention to my tongue at all, but there it is. And if somebody had snuck some, you know, hot peppers into your mouth, you certainly would have tasted, you would have felt it. So it's not that your tongue is not tasting. It's that you're not bringing your awareness to it. And so all of our senses are like that. Our whole body's like that. And then I realized, oh, my thinking mind is just another sense like that. Like I can tune in and pay attention to all those crazy thoughts going on.

Or I could not. I could listen to the room and I could just be thoughtless in listening to the sound of the room. But there's also this kind of like between place where you're not tuned into any of the senses. You're not tuned into your thoughts. You're there. You're available. You know, if the fire alarm goes off, you're going to you're going to notice if there's an amazing insight that your mind has is probably going to get your attention. But you can just kind of be in that space between all of them.

Which is devoid. You know, there are times where I'm meditating, my eyes are open and I have no awareness. If you ask me, I might notice, oh, it's black, but I'm not even noticing that. I just have no. And so like that experience to me was radical because as somebody who was

essentially assaulted by my brain full time for many, many, many years. And I would be an insomniac and couldn't fall asleep. I couldn't stop thinking. And I was just obsessed with thinking to realize that like, much like my other senses, the brain's just going to keep doing its job over there.

And you don't have to pay attention to it. And if it has something great, it's going to tell you about it. And so to me, navigating intuitively often seems like that. It's like you trust that your mind is going to get your attention when it needs it the same way your other senses are. And you are able to move through life and take action like being in a flow state. You just are. You are the action that's happening. You don't have to check in and say, well, I wanted to say hi to that person, but are they going to recognize me? And am I going to say it in the right accent? And is this going to be embarrassing? Which to me is like an autoimmune condition. It's like...

You don't trust what's spontaneously arising. You have to like analyze it and like, it's exhausting. I don't want to do that anymore, you know? And so learning to play with where my awareness rests and then having all these amazing, beautiful experiences of what's actually going on in my body. If I just stop

conceptualizing it in a thought and just directly apprehended like that. That changed my experience of being a human, I would say. Have you ever done Vipassana practice, like 10 days silent meditation? I haven't done Vipassana. So after doing TM for many years, I switched to Zen.

And so there's a Zen center nearby that I'll go and they do seven day sessions. And so I will, I've done that a handful of times. But, you know, I also spent a year in silence. You know, I had visitors every, every three, four or five weeks or whatever, but for the most of the time I was practicing. And what Zen is beautiful for me about is, is that it, you do seated meditation and then you do walking meditation and you, and you meditate with your eyes open the whole time. And so they're really trying to,

help you take meditation off the cushion. It's not about this radical departure from your life where you close your eyes and have some strain altered state of consciousness. It's like, no, no, no. Can you learn to be radical at present and then walk a little bit? And the more stimulation you get, the harder it is to stay radically present. If your friend talks to you or whatever. And so that year on the mountain, what I was really trying to do was like, can I be doing Vipassana or doing Zen meditation all the time?

Can I, you know, and I would just sit on the porch and just watch nature. And it was a similar meditation in Zen. One of the paths is you learn how to concentrate by following the breath. You count the breath of 10. And then once your mind is stable, like you put it on the breath and it never leaves, which can take, you know, it could take five years. It could take a month. It could take five years. But once you have that, now you can apply that concentration to things like koans, which are riddles. Or the other path is shikantaza, which is just sitting, just sitting, which is similar to vipassana, open awareness meditation.

You know, where you're not trying to focus on something, you're just trying to be present. And so I would just practice sitting that way. You know, I could do it on a cushion. You know, can I do it in nature?

And then what's the difference when there's something I have to do, an activity or someone talking to me? Well, where do I collapse? Where do I lose the present moment awareness and slip into thinking or whatever is happening? And so that really... And the more concentration you have, the more momentum you have sitting in the cushion, the more it naturally starts to translate, I think, into every other area of your life. Yeah, true. Yeah, I did it twice when passing in England and...

Because, you know, when you sit there from 4.30 a.m. to 9 p.m., this is such an unbearable experience. But I think for my second time practice, the teacher told me you can move the pen like what you mentioned. Because when I was little, I read a story about a Vietnamese monk

he set himself on fire and sit in the fire for the whole time. Because before I saw it, it's definitely a fake story. Who can bear that pain from the fire? If I burn my finger, I could be like, oh, it's so, so painful. But how could he just sit there peacefully? But after this kind of practice, I feel like, yeah, definitely human probably can do that. Yeah, actually pain is something that

My view has been radically altered from meditation. I now believe pain requires fear. You cannot feel sustained pain without some level of fear. And so you could think of fear as being like a multiplier or a divider on the sensation that your body is bringing to your awareness.

And so there are certain times where I've gotten injured and for some reason I was not worried about it. Like give me a cut on the arm and it's not that deep and I don't care. It doesn't scare me. But if you cut my fingers, I'm terrified of losing my fingers. Like I'm a wood, I'm a woodworker and I'm a musician and like my fingers mean the world to me. And, and I'll notice that I have this unbelievable pain. It's just like, it's totally out of context. You know, it's, it doesn't make sense how much it hurts. And, and just sitting in meditation also like, yeah, you get these, your back hurts, your knee hurts, your hip hurts, your,

And what I would notice, you can try to avoid it and it usually gets louder or you can try to focus on it. And then you try if you try to pin it down, like exactly where is this located in space and describe it. You know, how intense is it? Is it hot? Is it cold? Is it pulsing? Is it steady? Is it moving? Is it still, you know, like if you really, really get curious about it, it turns into a sensation without any meaning.

Meaning, and then it just kind of dissolves. And usually it's like, it's like to me, pain is, is a message. Your body's trying to get your attention. You know, like you step on attack. It's like, Hey, don't step there.

But once you get the message and you honor that message, there's no reason to keep obsessing about it. You know? And so I have noticed that like when I can have an injury and not be afraid, there are moments of absolutely no pain. And it's similar. Like you're not paying attention to what your ears are hearing or what your tongue is tasting. You don't have to pay attention to that wound in this moment. But the times when I'm like, oh no, this might be bad. Maybe I should go to the hospital. I shouldn't fall asleep. I'll just lay there in agony, you know, for hours. Yeah.

And it's a very mental thing. It's not a purely like a lot of meditation for me is getting to what is sensation separate from the story we're telling ourselves about what that sensation is or what it means. And almost all the sensation is neutral. It's benign. It's it doesn't have, you know, a strong valence towards positivity or negativity just is.

But we've trained ourselves to believe certain sensations are bad or good. But also, look at BDSM. Some people get immense pleasure out of what we would call torture. Oh, yeah. It's malleable. It's negotiable. It's not fixed. And that's part of the emptiness thing. These things don't have absolute meaning. So it's our mind that makes up the story and tells us how it is. Yeah, yeah. And I think, you know, like...

There are these fascinating videos of all over, you know, Instagram or YouTube of little kids falling down. And what a little kids do when they fall down is they look to somebody who's an authority figure and they basically kind of ask with their eyes, am I okay? And depending on how the parent responds, they either cry or they don't. And there's just one hilarious video where this guy goes, watch this. And he's holding his, you know, small, small, like baby in his arms. And he walks over to the wall and he whacks the wall with his hand. He goes, Oh no. And the baby starts crying.

And then he goes, now watch this other video I have. And the baby's just becoming a toddler. And the baby falls and just whacks its head on the wall. I mean, it's a brutal fall. And he starts laughing. And the baby starts laughing and gets up and keeps walking. Wow.

And I think so we're all kind of indoctrinated into some beliefs about what these things mean. Some people are very stoic. They don't acknowledge physical pain as meaningful. Other people are hypersensitive and it's a real experience, but I think it's more negotiable than we tend to believe. So let's back to the, another question also confused me a bit. You mentioned your wife is a therapist. Yeah.

And can you elaborate on the differences between therapy and life coaching and how this approach complement each other in supporting clients? Yeah. So therapy is a real profession with a central certifying board. That means you have to like pass a test and

Be qualified according to specific standards. Coaching is the Wild West. There's no standards. Anybody can call themselves a coach instantly, and they are. And so that's the first thing, just to be buyer beware. When some, you know, a lot of people have a profound day and say, oh, my God, I have to share this with the world and become a coach. And that doesn't mean that they, you know, have the gravitas required. Generally speaking, therapy is basic.

backward looking. So it's often about your formative experiences, your childhood, your traumas. It's often about, you know, what's keeping you from being present in the moment.

And like, how did you become the way you are and how do we shift the way you are? It's also usually an experience of radical acceptance. A therapist's job is to provide you with unconditional positive regard is the Carl Rogers term. And so they're not here to shame you or judge you. And a lot of time it's reparenting. They're providing the like, it's OK, whatever you're experiencing is fine that your parents weren't able to.

you know, or your culture or your friends or whatever it was. And so, you know, nowadays everything's trauma. So there's big T trauma, which is like the singular event. And then there's small T trauma, which is like the thousand paper cuts that, that change your personality. And so therapy is often looking at all that. And then there's also, there's, there's a little bit of like, there's positive psychology, there's mindfulness based, there's some more, there's, there's,

Other things, and a lot of that, you know, CBT also kind of veers into coaching. Coaching tends to be more forward-looking, and there's often goal-setting.

You know, what do you want to feel or experience or accomplish? And how do we change the way you're behaving? And so there is a lot of overlap there. Like I find certain people don't have the ability to introspect, to be aware of their emotions, to talk about their emotions. They might come to me for coaching and they can't even really talk about themselves. And I might say, okay, you need to go be in therapy for a while.

And I think great coaching rests on the shoulders of a decent therapeutic base. It doesn't mean you have to be in therapy, but it means the environment you were raised in helped you have some of these skills. And you've done some work, ideally, to think about your past and consider how it might have shaped you.

And I am, as a coach, often talking about people's past and mining it for insights. But I'm also, the other big difference is that I hold people accountable more. So what do you want to do? This is scary? Oh, good. Let's make sure you do that. And then the next session, did you do it? In therapy, you don't want to hold people accountable too much because it can feel like shaming them.

You know, and that's not therapeutic. You want to have unconditional positive regard. That's fine. That's fine. You said you were going to stop eating cake every day. You still ate cake. That's okay. You needed cake, you know, whereas I'm coaching. I'm like, why are you eating cake? You know, what is that doing for you? Let's dig into this a bit.

Yeah. And then, you know, there's obviously there's a million types of therapy and a million types of coaching. You know, there's I tend to be a very holistic. So career relationships, spirituality and health are kind of like the four pillars. And most people come with one or two presenting ideas.

conditions or ideas or goals, but then we're going to talk about everything else too. Like I, I refuse to be the executive coach who only talks about your business, you know, or, you know, and so I, I really feel like,

I love conversations that just dive in and out of different areas of people's lives. And maybe at first it feels like, I don't know why we're talking about my sex life. We were talking about managing my employees and now we're talking about drug use and now we're talking about Buddhism. But then if I can tie it all together and help them see the thread, it's often a more profound insight. And they start to realize that like, oh, this is a way that I'm seeing the world that is affecting everything. Yeah.

And if I can shift this one little thing, everything else changes with it. Okay, that's compelling. Okay, now I want to talk more about this. Can you share some strategies or exercise you are using? For example, a client has some spiritual crisis come to you. Like how it works?

Yeah. I mean, I wish I had more spiritual crisis. Tom Morgan was one of my ultimate ones. I mean, he talks about this. He had a big spiritual emergency. And I love that because it's something I've been through and it's such a

potentially beautiful, profound shift in your life. You know, for most people, they come in with goals that in the beginning, like, look, I do have a client recently who was like, you know, I want to be stably feeling one with all things and speaking from my heart. And, you know, he had very deep spiritual goals. Most people don't. Most people don't.

They want their relationships to be a little better. They want a little more success in their career. Often with me, people are considering major transitions. So is this the right marriage for me? Is this the right, nevermind, is this the right job for me? Is this the right career for me? Should I move to another country? Should I move to another state? And so I'm helping them talk through this. I mean, I ask a million questions. My number one technique is asking questions. And my fundamental assumption is that people have more wisdom than they're willing to admit.

And so I think for a lot of people, the most profound thing I do is I take notes obsessively. I have a piece of paper in front of me. I have a black pen and a red pen and often a highlighter. And half of what I'm writing is like, oh, that gives me an idea. Let me share this with them. But most of what I'm writing is probably quoting them. I'm writing down things that they say that I think are brilliant. And they're actually answering their own questions. But I find people go into an altered state during a good coaching session.

And afterwards, they don't fully recall precisely what they said. And I think this is where a lot of therapy falls down is the therapists are actually doing good work, but it feels like a departure from the rest of the reality. And it's hard to connect that

new way of being into the rest of their life. And I find when I can really like, I'm helping people rewrite their narrative of who they are and, and, and rewire their brain and how it works and see the cognitive biases and the mental models that aren't working. And when I can quote them back to themselves and then give them some context for like, do you realize what this means? Um, and they can go, people tell me they print out my notes and they bind them and they read them over and over for years. And I'm like, okay, that's, that's when I know it's working. Um,

And I want to give people an anchor, something that they can tap into. You know, it's like you had a brilliant moment here. Like you had this courageous, you made a courageous statement. Now you're going to have anxiety later and you're going to like rationalize this and say this, this is a stupid idea. I want to tell you when you said this, your face lit up, your energy was through the roof. You were the best version of yourself and,

When you are resonating with your heart, when you're like really in your center and you feel good, this is what you tell me you want to do with your life. Now, you know, when you're standing up and giving a presentation in front of the board and they're giving you a hard time and you feel like you're a failure and you're never going to be good enough, you're telling me that that vision you had is stupid. And I'm here to tell you, like, that's not your truth. And so it's often helping people just kind of get back to that. Like, who are you when you're at your best? You know?

We don't need to change who you are. We just need to remove some of the self-doubt. You know, a lot of people who are chasing massive success and I have people, I have clients who are extraordinarily successful, extraordinarily wealthy. What they're really after is self-love. What they really want is to feel good enough. They're using external validation when they need internal validation. And so I'm helping them like reinforce those loops of, you know, yes, you do actually think you're good enough. You do actually love yourself. You do believe that you belong and,

And you deserve to rest and you deserve to just be sometimes. And so it's hard for people, I think, to trust themselves because school is training us to not trust yourself, to be a cog in a machine that we don't even believe in.

And so, yeah. And so in like specific techniques too, like I'll have people, some people really want to find their purpose. And so we'll work out a purpose statement. No, they'll really come up with that, like a simple phrase that they can go back to. If they're questioning, should I do this? I'm like, well, does it feel on purpose? Let's, what is your purpose? You know, I'll have people come up with their core values, um,

I'll have people do exercises where they track their energy throughout the day. You know, I'll have people for a lot of people, something like journaling or breathing exercises is a profound shift. They're not used to experiencing that. They're not used to introspecting. And so some people contemplation and creativity are really foreign, even though almost every kid, you know, is super creative. By the time they're in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, they're convinced they're not an artist anymore.

And so it's like, you know, like try writing. Let's just see what happens. You know, some people need to move their body more. They're so in their head. They just need to, I get people, you know, my, my wife actually turned me on to this amazing practice called swapping. There's this woman named Mama Gina who is like the grandmother of this, this particular form of a women's movement, which is all about,

sensuality and sexuality and trusting your body and being in your body and releasing emotions. And there's a practice where you have a playlist of songs that go through different emotional states. So there might be anger, there might be sadness, there might be euphoria. And your job is just to let loose and dance them. And it's called swamping, I think, because swamps have stagnant water.

And if our emotions aren't honored, they stagnate. They get stuck. And now we're carrying around, you know, the entire past with us. And every moment we don't show up. We can't be present because we're still kind of holding on to this thing that happened yesterday and this thing that happened when we were six and this thing. And breathing exercises are one way, I think, of releasing old experiences. They really feel cleansing to me in a physiological way. But this swamping practice, you know, most men won't do it, but I give it to a lot of women. Yeah.

Yeah. And they come back and they're just, they're like, oh my God, I haven't felt this alive and connected to myself in ages. And it's just like the freedom, you know, to often be alone in a room and just let your body do everything it needs to do and just let the emotions come up and pass. And what you start to realize is that emotions like are like sensations in the body. Like there's a message.

You want to honor that. And then you want to let it go. Like you want, you want to let them metabolize. You want to let them pass through you. You know, I feel like a lot of people are constipated with their emotions. They're, they're holding on to something.

And when you learn to flow, like cry more, yell, get angry. Like most men can't cry that well. They can't feel sadness. And a lot of women struggle with anger, you know? And so, yeah, practice that. Go scream at the mountaintop. Go like bang. My wife leads these, these swamping, she calls it like, I think cathartic release sessions. And she has like bats or tennis rackets and big foam blocks. And he has people hitting them and just going crazy and like embodying their anger.

And afterwards, you know, it's, you, you feel, you don't feel angry. You feel peace. Yeah. Need a way to release your emotion. Yeah. It reminds me about back to 2018, I was stuck in my corporate job and also a toxic relationship. Then I went to Argentina learning tango for, yeah, for more than one week. And, uh,

I just don't know like how music has this magic or the movement of my body. It gave me some wisdom. I like, uh,

All of a sudden, I just got a clear message. Okay, I need to quit. I need to quit everything. I need to start over. But before I went on that trip, I thought, okay, it's my problem. Everything is my problem. I just need to work hard and everything will be fine. But after that dancing lessons, everything changed. It's quite similar as this swamping.

Yeah. Exercise. And for a lot of people, I think men in particular, yoga can be a beginning of that. Because, you know, if you think about the average day,

Someone once said that it's like having your body in a cast or like sitting at a screen, like having your eyes in a cast. Like the range of motion we experience in a day is quite minimal. And then you're in yoga and you're in all of these strange positions and you're feeling your body and things that were dormant and these emotions are coming up and you're releasing and you're doing all this deep breathing. And it's just like, yeah, yeah, it's supposed to flow more like we're all kind of stagnant, you know.

And like, you know, sitting at a desk staring at a screen for eight hours is not a human experience. Like it's not how we've evolved. It's not natural. You know, we're supposed to be running and jumping and skipping and rolling and, you know, making weird noises and being loud and being quiet and being, you know, a lot of people's voices are limited too. Like if you think of the three primary dimensions of your voice, you have speed, volume, and pitch. And so somebody you find compelling when they speak is probably varying those three things.

They're getting loud and then they're getting quiet. They're going up in their voice and getting high. And then they're grounding, you're getting low, you know, and they're talking quick and then they're slowing down. But a lot of people are just like monotone, flat rhythm. And so there's all these ways that we kind of cut ourselves off from the natural flow of energy that wants to spontaneously move through us. Like the universe is,

is moving through us. We are a portal for the universe. I mean, how the hell do a tiny sperm and an egg become a human being? Like, how does an acorn become a tree? Like, it's a portal. I have no idea what magic is happening. But I think we are the most exquisite sensing beings. Like, human beings are so sensitive. We have more capacity to be complex and understand the universe than it appears probably any other living thing can.

And so just being in the environment and actually being attuned with it, you feel compelled to, I think, to be of service, to take part, you know, to connect, to create, to contemplate.

Unless you cut off from that and then you don't feel anything or you just feel anxiety. But I think if you let these flows of energy loosen up, people are shocked at how enthusiastic they become about life. Yeah, exactly. Have you ever done the darkness retreat? No, I want to. It's kind of become popular. Yeah, I want to do it this year. I heard so much about it. What are the benefits? What made you want to do it?

I mean, there's something like, like I said, there's something fascinating about removing the external stimulation and looking inward. And so this is a forcing function. I mean, in my, in my meditations, when I go deep, I often have an experience. It's, I think it's called body mind drop where I don't have any senses. I am in darkness. I don't even have a body, you know, and, and, and it's unbelievably insightful and rejuvenating and,

You know, it's, it's, and it is like deep dreamless sleep. And so I think this just facilitates that kind of experience where you don't have to actively ignore what your eyes are seeing or actively ignore what you, you know, it's like a, I've done float tanks, you know, a sensory deprivation tank. And, and I loved it, but I, I remember a couple of my friends were freaking out and it was psychedelic or it was uncomfortable. And I was like, Oh, this is meditating. Like I get this. I I've had this exact experience on the meditation cushion of just no, no sensory inputs, no bodily awareness. Yeah.

And I could just be in that emptiness. And that like, it was, it was very blissful. It was a comfort. It was comfortable for me. And so I think I've never done it for whatever days or weeks or however, you know, people do these month long,

retreats. I've never been in that state for that long. And I think, I think all kinds of weird shit probably does come up. I think your mind probably does play tricks on you. Yeah. Cause for me, I'm, I admit that I'm a, I fear of darkness, especially like before I go to sleep. Sometimes I, I just, Oh my God, it's a lot of vision just to pop up. So, but I feel like this year there's an urge for me to overcome this fear. And,

And you will just go in there and it will probably get much worse than it does it the average night when you're afraid of darkness. And I think if you stick with it, if you go into the darkness, you,

you will find comfort there and for the rest of your life, probably never have to have this fear. True, true. Yeah, that's why I feel the urge to do it. Yeah, I'll let you know my experience once I die. Yeah, yeah, I want to hear about this. I actually recently met a guy who has done this and I haven't had a chance to really get the full download, but he's done a couple of them. And I actually just got a message from him today and I was like, oh, I got to reach out with him and hear more about this. Nice.

So what advice would you give to someone who feels stuck or unsure about their direction in life, but maybe they hesitate to seek professional guidance or seek a life coach? I don't think everybody needs a coach, but I do think everybody needs to engage with their stuckness. And so I would say, try to define your stuckness. Do you really know

where you're stuck and why like really really get to the point where you think you have your finger on it like you think it's your career why is it your career what about your career what would you like to be different and really try to figure out you know do you have a vision for another way like is there anything compelling out there that would be an alternative and for me I

I think clarity can be additive or subtractive. And so I, you know, if you can sit down in silence, you know, and that is the practice, really. David Data, I don't know if you know him. He's a, I don't know what to call him, a spiritual teacher, a philosopher. He wrote a book called The Way of the Superior Man. And in it, he talks about how to find your purpose. And he basically says,

Go sit alone in a room and stare at the wall until you, until you have to do something. And if you have to get up and go to the bathroom, go do that. And then get back and sit and stare at the wall. But like remove, remove the stimulation, you know, like be in the void, be in the emptiness of, of like what it feels like to not know why you're alive. Like actually sit with that. Yeah. Do you, can you really admit you don't know why you're alive? You know, and most people are going to hit a wall. They're going to, they're going to, they're going to be like, I'm stuck.

And then you need to talk to somebody like you need other perspectives. That's the point. You don't, you know, you don't exist as an Island. The world is a rich, rich place. And the more you engage with it, the more clarity you can get. And so a coach is just somebody who's going to do that directly focused on you for an extended period of time. You know, most of your friends it's give and take, and that's beautiful. If you have the right friends, you know,

More power to you. But it's also a big ask if you're really stuck and you need to like bang your head against this wall to have somebody sit and hold that space with you. And what you tend to find out is most of the people in your life have a bias.

They have some attachment to the way you are today. You know, you know, if they're relying on you to do your job, they don't want you to quit. If they're relying you to make money, they don't want you to stop making money. If they're relying on you to like, whatever, drive their kids to school, they don't want you, they don't want you to disrupt their life. Or some people it's actually, well, if you take this risk and I'm not, and I'm gonna have to think about why I'm not. So I'm just going to try to convince you not to do it. And this is not a conscious thought for some people, but a lot of people will try to hold you in the status quo because

Whereas I have no emotional entanglement in my clients' lives. They pay my fee. I'm good. That's all I need from you. We have a contract. We have an agreement. But now I'm here to be of service. And I love these conversations. I love holding space for people and being a mirror and helping them see themselves from a new perspective. And so I think if you can find a coach who's really passionate about that and good at it, it does transcend what a friendship can offer. It's a different format.

And, you know, and if you show up and you take it seriously and you are really prepared and you bring your deepest questions, it's a place where you can be held and pushed and challenged. And, you know, I think get to know yourself better. And so, yeah, I mean, for me, I didn't have a coach growing up. I didn't have I didn't have an awareness they existed. But I like like, you know, the initial question, I craved mentorship. I craved. And so I find a good coach is somebody who's

Like, it's not like you're getting a guru who's some enlightened master, but it's somebody who's on a similar path to you and they're a few steps ahead of you. And they can just kind of turn around and reach a hand back and say like, hey, I've seen this path before. Let me describe to you my experience and it's not going to be yours, but it's going to be helpful, I think. True. But how do you navigate the balance between supporting your client's journey will also encourage them to take their ownership? Because, you know, at the end of the day, they need to rely on themselves. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, look, it's challenge and support. It's always a mixture of being a cheerleader and then being an ass kicker. And people have to take a lot of ownership. You know, I can talk to you for 50 minutes a week, but I can't be in the rest of your life. And chances are something's going to come up in every session where you're like, I should be doing this. And I say, OK, I'm writing that down. You should be doing this. Can I check in on this next week? Are you going to have done this? And they say yes. And it's like, OK, that's out of my hands. This is on you.

You know, but we both get bored with the coaching if people aren't taking action. You know, it feels stagnant. It feels like there can be a point where you're like, okay, no more insights. This is actually the message I've gotten the last three times I did ayahuasca. I was told, stop it. You know, like you see enough, you're not doing enough with it. You know, and that's what I feel like, you know, I've been doing for years now as a coach is coaching.

I do a lot of psychedelic integration, so I help people integrate their psychedelic experiences. And I talk about the difference between transformation and translation. So transformation, you could think of as the vertical access translation as a horizontal. But you could also just say transformation is changing the way you view the world. Translation is changing the way you engage the world. And so if you have your mind blown, like I have a few times, it might take you five or ten years to really embody that.

And insight without embodiment is empty. It's just not that useful. It actually just hurts more. You're like, oh, I know better, but I'm not doing it. And so I think a lot of people, I just put up a post on my website called Psychedelics Will Show You The Work. And I realized actually after Tom Morgan interviewed me that I may have given the impression that psychedelics changed my life in a translational way, but they actually just changed my mind. And then I had to do a ton of work.

to integrate those. And I feel like a lot of people like, excuse me, they feel very different after doing psychedelics and then it fades and they think, oh, I have to go do more psychedelics. And it's like, no, you had a peak state. You want to turn it into a permanent trait. Exogenous chemicals work because we have the receptors that bind them. You can endogenously produce similar chemicals or the same chemicals,

within yourself. So like, if you go to the Zen center, you find a bunch of people who did LSD had their mind blown and they were like, what's it's like being picked up and dropped to the top of a mountain and then being thrown to the bottom again.

And someone goes, is there a path that I can walk up and down the mountain and actually know the whole terrain and it's be stable and consistent? And they go, yeah, it's contemplation. It's meditation. It's breathing exercises. It's yoga. You know, it's, it's study, you know, it's, it's being of service to other people. Like there's a lot of ways, you know, the eight limbs, you know, like there, there are different, different schools of thought, but,

But they all require you to show up differently every day. And if you just keep taking drugs, what you end up with is a really distorted view of the world. Yeah. So last question. How do you see the field of life coaching involving the future? Like what opportunities or challenging do you face? You know, I think it's probably going to become a regulated industry and there's going to be standards applied. Yeah. And I'm...

I'm a college dropout. I don't I'm not somebody who plays with rules. Well, I can't have a job unless I'm friends with the CEO and I can argue about policies. And so I find standardization does two things. It takes the bottom, the people who are really bad at something, and it either cuts them out or brings them up, gives them skills to kind of be in the middle or closer to the middle.

But I find it also tends to cut off the top. The people who are innovative, the people who are going beyond what is accepted, they don't fit. They're not allowed. They're doing something that's not right. And so I think that's going to happen. It also will become expensive to become a coach. You know, it's already expensive to get trained. You know, we all most people have some training.

And so and so I but, you know, so is that going to be good or bad? I don't know. I personally don't want to have to exist with like, you know, taking continuing education credits, sitting in a classroom. But but I think also that, you know, for our for clients, what's happening is the world is changing faster and faster and faster. And we're here to help people navigate that.

And a lot of people, I think, sense that AI is going to create a lot of economic insecurity in the world. The haves and the have-nots are going to become further divided. There's a concentration of wealth that's possible with technology, and AI appears it could really rapidly accelerate that. And anything that can be automated is no longer going to be a job. So I think a lot of people, I think the good news is a lot of people are going to have to figure out what they love. What is your bliss?

And whether you have some stipend to live on without working and you just get to have hobbies or you actually just have to like contribute and make a living following your bliss. I don't know, but I think either way it's good. I think people, people are suffering working in companies. They don't do with products. They don't believe in, in bureaucracies that are inefficient in cultures that, you know, tell them that they can't have emotions and they can't have spiritual life and then be part of the workforce. And,

And so I think that's all going to get disrupted. And I think it's going to be messy. And I don't know how it all turns out, but I think there's the potential for it to be, Charles Eisenstein says, the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible. And I love that. I love that because it's like, no, I can't draw the picture of exactly what it's going to look like because that would be too rational. And I think it's going to be more magical and mysterious than that. But my intuition is that it's almost like, I think Terrence McKenna used the term an archaic revival, right?

There are parts of our humanity that we lost. Rituals, connection with the sacred. You know, there are these things that shamanic traditions still have, indigenous cultures still have that I think we've lost touch with. I think the challenge is we all have to become indigenous. To be indigenous is to be from a place. It's not more magical than that, but we're not from anywhere right now. We're not deeply embedded in our environments. We're disconnected from our environment.

And so I think the challenge is we have to become exquisitely sensitive again, like really feel our bodies, really be in touch with our intuition and then look around us and say, what does my environment need?

And some people have to garden and some people have to be therapists and coaches. And, you know, I don't know what the answers are. But I think if we do it right, it's not going to be uploading our consciousness into some simulation. You know, it's going to be physical. It's going to be, you know, regenerative farming and, you know, things like of that nature, I think. And so I think there's going to be a lot of questions, a lot of confusion. And I think coaches and therapists and just helpers, people who are,

you know, starting groups, men's groups, women's groups. I don't care what your gender is groups, you know, people getting together. I think we're, we need a church. We need a, a secular church, something that's not based in a, in a, you know, a book, but it's a way for human beings to get together and connect with themselves and connect with each other and have a connection to the sacred. And so I think a lot of people are seeking therapy and coaching for that now, but there's something I'm not doing, which is creating community. And I think,

I think coaches and therapists are going to be involved in that. I think there is going to be a new stage of development. Beautiful. So where can people find you if they like to know more about your work and get connected? Lifestyleintegrity.com is my website and you can find...

my Twitter X and Instagram and whatever else and my blog there. And there's a contact form. But yeah, everything kind of works through there. Cool. I'll put it in the show notes. Thank you, Devin, for this beautiful conversation. Yeah. Thank you for having me. This is fun.