How To Create Your Own Life Experience With Barnet Bain

Welcome to the Conscious Pivot Podcast with international speaker, business mentor, best selling author of Pivot, and your host, Adam Markell. The Conscious Pivot shares the stories and wisdom of people who have successfully reinvented some area of their business and personal life. You'll gain powerful insights into how you can fully embrace new opportunities, increase your performance, and master the art and science of innovation and resilience. So please join Adam as he guides you on your Conscious Pivot.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Conscious Pivot Podcast. I am your host, Adam Markellen. I am incredibly. I feel so blessed in this moment. I am going to introduce you in just a few minutes to a dear friend of mine, somebody I absolutely love and adore. And he is a new friend. I haven't only known him really just for a couple of years, but you guys are going to get the essence of this guy really quick. Before we do that, I want to just speak into what's present for me, which in this moment is gratitude. I feel so lucky to be breathing right now to have just the blood is flowing in my body. It has to because it's cold here in California. We got a cold spelling. I feel like such a freaking wimp. I'm from the east coast and yet I moved out here, Randy and I and the kids, like six years ago, and now we're such wimps. I mean, it gets under 60 degrees and we're like reaching for blankets and stuff. So we've gotten soft. And all my east coast buddies and people from the Midwest and elsewhere in the world who are listening and watching this are thinking, yes, you guys are pretty, pretty soft. Well, so be it. I am. Again, I just feel really honored to be here, to have this is what I'm doing, able to do with my time. And I thank God for that. And in this moment, I am just really appreciative of your time wherever you are, whatever you're up to, if you're at work or on the treadmill or walking outside or listening, consuming this content in the car, it's really beautiful medium and I recommend it. I highly recommend it. Each of us have this opportunity right now to be producer of content and a voice in the world, a voice for reason. And our world is so in need of that. So I guess I'm assuming that what we say here or what we may say in the next hour is a voice of reason. That's probably asking too much of myself and my guest, but we're gonna do our best. So with that, I will introduce the Amazing. Barnett Bain. I'll say a little bit about Barnett and then we'll get right into it. Barnett is an award winning filmmaker. That's putting it mildly. Educator and creativity coach. He is the author of the Book of the Book, the Book of Doing and Being Rediscovering Creativity in Life, Love and Work. I'm also a Simon and Schuster author, so we have that in common. And the third story, Awakening the Love that Transforms. Barnett consults and trains business leaders and private clients who are committed to high performance. Through his talks and workshops, Barnett guides people of all ages and walks of life to their vision of what is possible and develop their gifts and talents with passion. I love that. Barnett is a core faculty member at Columbia University Spirituality Mind Body Institute. This is the first Ivy League master's concentration in spirituality and psychology. He also has among his film credits a beautiful film that I saw about a year ago called Milton's Secret. He was the director and screenwriter on that film starring Donald Sutherland, who I love as an actor as well. Winner what Dreams May Come True. He was the producer on that starring Robin Williams. I mean, he's just done some really, really beautiful work. One of the things that I also love is that he's an official partner with Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work foundation and Big Brother's Big Sisters of America, which enjoys participation of millions of community, corporate and educational leaders annually, including President Obama, who are using Barnett's creativity content in their curriculum for community schools and corporations. Barnett, it is a pleasure and an honor to have you on the show. Welcome.

Thank you. It's always great to be with you, to be shivering with you.

Yes, we are a couple of skinny.

Shivering couple east coast guys. We certainly forgot the roots. Quick.

Too funny. Too funny. So look, this is a bio I said to you before we even hit the record button. It's a bio people would kill for. I mean, this is your credits and what you've done in your life has been amazing. And the beautiful part is that there's always the next, if we're lucky, if we're really lucky, there's a next chapter, there's a next pivot for us. And I know we're going to get into your pivot story as well. But before we do that, what's not written in the bio that you'd love for people to know about you, Barnett, the person or in your professional world?

Well, you know, I'd love to both know people and to be known by people. And for that, it's really about connecting, spending time feeling the energy of somebody that I'm with, being willing to be known in that way by others. I guess you could call that humility. I use the word humility in ways that might be unfamiliar to maybe most of our listeners. I like to think of myself as being willing to have it all be brand new in the very next moment. That even though I do have a lot of accomplishments and a lot of achievements and I have certain ideas about life, I want to. I want to develop a capacity to let it all be different in the very next instant. And I call that particular trait humility. And I suppose, above all else, I value that. And I'd like people to know me for that. I'd like them to experience me in that way. I don't know how often that happens, but I'm putting it out there, so maybe we'll get some feedback down the road.

Yeah, that's beautiful, Barnett. How is it, I don't know, that we are conscious or consciously creating. We're thinking about how we create our experience of being. How often we do that. And I have a practice in the morning that's intended for that one purpose. Just to be the conscious creator of my own life experience. And how people experience us is beyond our control, of course. But to. To have it, to set that intention, that we would want people to experience us in a certain way, like. And use the word humility as part of that, is beautiful. I don't think that humility gets nearly enough credit in so many instances. It really is such a great foundation to build on when we realize how little we know.

It's really a great foundation to pivot on. It is. And I think it's key to really be able to have a willingness to pivot. It requires a surrender, and it requires a surrender to what you think you.

Know.

And a willingness to allow what you would. What maybe I did know, what maybe I really knew and what maybe worked for me. It's harder to let go of the things that work for you than the things that didn't work for you sometimes.

Yeah.

It's certainly been harder for me to let go of the things that I thought were working for me. To have the humility to allow something entirely new to take me, and then I'm. I'm enabled to pivot. I both discover something new and allow myself to be discovered by something new. I think that's what a pivot is.

I'm call. I want. I want you to say more about that. I'm feeling like I'm not complete on the Extraction of that juice.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, we're talking about a willingness to have it all be new. You know, there is. It's almost a cliche that all crows are black, all swans are white. So even though I may never have seen anything except a black crow, I'm really stretching it with this. With this analogy. But go with me. The willingness that even though I've only ever seen or known all crows to be black, that in the very next second I could have the humility to see a white one. That even though everything I know about myself and about life and all of my strategies to get along in the world, even though I have a fair amount of comfort with them, in the very next second, something could supersede it. Something could change it. So to me, that's humility. That's holding on to my worldview lightly and allowing it to be reinvented in the next moment and to really pivot, to really be willing to make a pivot. I mean, there's. I think there's a couple. There's a number of different kinds of pivots. You know, people get slammed up against the wall or they bottom out or they top out or they hit the bumpers and for whatever reasons, from the outside in, circumstances from the outside in compel us to make a life change. But then there are certain circumstances from the inside out, that's a whole different ballgame. From the inside out. To allow my life, to allow everything I know about life or some things or one thing I know about life in the very next second to be obsolete and replaced by something new. That kind of humility sets the stage for a very different order of pivoting.

It sets the stage for a very different life. I think I remember reading so many years ago, Osho said that all new information, that life exists in the unknown. In essence, everything exists in the unknown that's divine. That would be considered life in the next moment. As you said, what could happen in the next moment? Could I see a white, white crow, a white, black crow in the next moment or any other thing that would be outside of the range of possibilities that are programmed into us based on our. Our experience to that point. And our ego and our arrogance and humility takes it. Takes it as a poss. A distinct possibility, if not a probability that things will change radically whether we see it or not in the next moment? And more to what Osho said that I thought was so incredible it changed my life. When I remember thinking about this, reading and thinking about it was that everything in the Past is dead. It's dead. So how often are we spending our time protecting the past, thinking about the past, reliving it, all that. And it's dead. There's no energy, there's no power in it. So clearly the present moment is, as we know, is so powerful because of its possibility. And what's in the unknown, which scares the daylights out of people because pivot is a euphemism for change. You know, how it is that we change. It's the constant. It's the great. One of the great constants in the universe is that everything is changing. So it's a constant that changes, a constant. So it's a paradox and a you and in a. What's the right word? And a oxymoron at the same time. And. And people are terrified of that, of the. I mean, I'll speak. I mean, for myself, I've been terrified of change. I've been so addicted to control or addicted to certainty. And I've seen a lot of people that play in that space too. We want things to be the same. And status quo leads to stagnation. Stagnation is death. So I follow that same sort of those breadcrumbs from Osho that what is in the unknown is alive. There's life in that. And what is in the known. What you said earlier about humility being a sort of a way to temper the what we know part. Well, what we know is not. Is a dead thing anyway, potentially.

I mean, it's.

It's interesting.

What we know is very different from having a set of competencies, from having a capacity to respond in the moment, from having been matured enough and developed enough so that we have character, we have principles, we have humility that. All of which empowers us to be responsive in the moment, in the present, to whatever comes up. And then I know personally, I shuttle back and forth from acknowledging how competent I am to deal with whatever comes up to. To wanting to control what comes up very, very different. The knowing that I am. That I have the confidence, the competence to respond to whatever comes up in the moment. That's flow. The control. That's me losing both faith in myself. Well, it's not losing faith in myself and retreating into old patterns and old behaviors that seek to control, to play small, to push out. You know, there's no humility in that whatsoever. To push out possibilities that things may come up that are new to me, that are unfamiliar to me, that clash with my ego, my egoic needs, my desire to feel on Top of things or in control of things, or that I've got it buttoned down, or that I am. That I have certain kinds of measures of safety or control or status. All of these kinds of conditionings that we pick up from the culture that we cling to, that we hang on to, we play inside the color, inside the lines of that, those are all mechanisms for control. Those are not. You know, there's not a lot of humility around trying to hang on to, crutches to hang on to. I always get these images of, you know, these railings that you have on the side, like safety railings, and you hang on, you just play inside of that.

The bumpers.

The bumpers.

Yeah.

This is the exercise, the game for me. I try to keep it as a game. I try not to make it too serious. Sometimes I am more successful at that than others. But the game for me is to be aware enough of how I'm responding to life, am I seeking to control life, make it small, small, small, small, small. Small enough for me to delude myself into thinking I am controlling it, when all I'm really controlling is I'm narrowing down my participation with it, and I'm making it so small that it's. That it appears to be familiar and I get to play out the same themes over and over and over again. Or am I flowing? And sometimes. Sometimes when I let go and I'm really flowing, there's a moment of exhilaration, and then I can. And then I can be terrified because it's very unfamiliar to let go. And what comes up for me, what can come up for me is a sense of dread, in a sense that I've been identified for so many years with what I think I know that when life sort of just starts to take me along, or what other people.

Are convinced that, you know, what other people.

That's. Usually.

We've done a great job of convincing other people.

Yeah. You know, we're all actors. We're all performing a little to minimize the.

There's a moment of humility for us. Barnett, thank you for that.

Yeah. So when we get swept along in the present, it can feel like. Well, all of my strategies for controlling, for playing, for role playing, for presenting myself to look good for others, for feeling safe, for all of those strategies when they don't, when there's no place for them to be applied, it can feel like a death. It's also a liberation, but it can feel like a death. So, you know, there's. There's lots of elements to this, this growth thing, lots and lots of elements.

It's a death and a birth at the same time.

Same time. It's a paradox, as you said before.

Really interesting. Yeah. Letting go is so important. My God, I remember, forget where I encountered this thought before, but it's so great because I don't think that anybody ever has an original thought. I don't know that anybody ever did. We are, and I'll mean that in a, in a weird sort of way. I just mean what Socrates said, that all, all remembering, all, all, all learning is remembering. We're just remembering.

Yeah.

And so I think that's really powerful that we, that this moment of it being a death and a birth at the same time. It, we've got to be letting go all the time.

It's all the time.

The whole of life is a process of letting go all the time.

We have, we have been, we have both been trained by our family, our family origins and our communities and our education and our every, every piece of our culture operates in a particular story. And that story trains us to live into it. I mean, inside this story there is this notion that you can aggregate knowledge, and with a whole bunch of knowledge you can out think life or most circumstances in life. And to a certain degree, that appears to work. You know, if you live life on those terms, it appears to work. Until it doesn't, you know, inside a very limited bandwidth, it appears to work. I, if I just get the right job, if I just have the right marriage, if I just have the right circumstance, then if, then, if, then, if, then. And it appears to work, I have yet to.

Because there's a logic to it, right? Barnett? I mean, if, then thinking is logic from college, and I was a lawyer for 18 years, so I'm familiar with that brand of establishing premises to have arguments that are sound. And it's sound, it's sound thinking and yet somehow it doesn't tell the whole story.

It doesn't tell the whole story. It tells logic story, a logic story, it works as a head story. And because what is fundamental to the way our culture operates is head tripping, head office, head story. I mean, everything, you know, even thin, even in the language. Because we approach life as, through analysis, we analyze everything. Is this good or is this bad? Is this up? Is that, is this down? Because we are giving it all to the supervisor. Everything that happens above the eyes is the supervisor just constantly assessing, determining and judging and rearranging parts. But as you said, there's nothing new under the sun. So it's really, it's just rearranging the furniture. The bigger action, the bigger domain of activity is not in the head. It's a feeling.

It's an experience.

It's a feeling experience. It's not an analytic experience. It's not an experience that severs us out of the whole and analyzes it. It's a feeling experience that unites us with the whole, marries us to it. Now, we can't go. We're not suggesting, listeners, that we abandon logic and reason and never turn back. But we are talking about wisdom here, which in this context can be understood, can be defined maybe as being able to move beyond logic and reason without losing sight of it. So we don't become insane, right? But we don't become entirely reliant on it. Because the big action is in the feeling space. It's not in the slicing and dicing and analyzing and supervising space. It's not in making everything a legal argument or making everything a moneyed abstraction, a zero sum game, an accounting proposition, a ledger sheet. He did this to me so I can do this to her. It's not in approaching life only through the head. And this is. This is a. A big thing for me to chew on and a big thing for me to swallow. This is really an exploration that I am deeply, deeply involved in. Because like you, I'm a heady guy. I'm making such an effort to put the clutch in on my thinking. Most of my thinking is unnecessary. Most of it is unnecessary. The ruminating and the futurizing and the constant analysis. And more and more it goes. But I don't. It goes like a flywheel. I just don't pay it too much attention. More and more the focus of my attention is on what am I feeling.

Here.

What am I feeling? And most of the time, I realize most of what I'm feeling is our old feelings and not about now, most of the time. Over and over and over throughout the day, all day, every day, I have interruptions, I call them interruptions to my flow and my well being. I'm flowing along in the present and then something comes up that is same as or similar to or familiar how even remotely to something from my past. And it triggers me out of the flow, out of the present. And now I'm thinking, now I'm thinking, and usually without awareness that I'm having an old thought and an old feeling or something that is similar to an old thought or an old feeling that is triggered by something that appears familiar in the moment, that is triggering old defenses. And old ideas and old beliefs and it takes me right out of the flow and right into my control thing. So over and over again I have to remind myself this is an old feeling and not about now, or this is an old thought, has nothing to do with really what is going on now. I am just connecting. I'm just connecting all the stuff that I'm holding in my body or holding in my memory. And so much of my day, so much energy through my day goes there. So much. And it's really quite an adventure to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

Yeah. It almost feels like a lot of that energy that time that we're spending is soothing. Soothing an eight year old. Soothing our eight year old emotional self that hasn't gotten past eight years old.

Yeah.

Meaning that, that we've really not, not dealt with, dealt with a lot of the things early on in our lives that didn't make sense. That not so much didn't make sense. That just imprinted us at a point where we didn't have a choice about it.

We could not have dealt with them then. You know, we could not have dealt with them then. You and I have had this discussion in the past. So for the benefit of our listeners, things happen to you, they happen to me, they happen to everyone that's listening. Things happen. Many of them we're not even consciously aware of. But certain kind of hurts and certain injuries, certain abandonments of love, certain inundations. Too much or not enough. I'm not even talking about the more obvious violence. Certain things happen to us. They happen to us very, very young. And they happen to us frankly, in utero. Things that happen to our moms when we're in utero. Our mother's biochemistry and the child in the womb, that's one martini shaken, same biochemistry. Whatever's going on in her is being imprinted into my very development, into my body, not into my thought process. Because it's not until the very beginning, early months of life that we even have a thought process. So these emotions and thoughts and feelings that happen from our mothers and after birth, in our very, very formative months, they go straight into the body. They don't go into a memory bank because we don't have a cognition in that way that early. It goes right into the body. So you're going along through the day and something comes up and all of a sudden you have a charge, an adrenaline charge or a fear or an anxiety or some kind of response and.

It'S not a new feeling at all.

No It's a feeling from four years.

It's a feeling from four years old when your parents were arguing about something and, or you were six or whatever it was and you determined this means something. There's a meaning to this, but you don't have a cognition about it. It's not a thought, it's a feeling. And it means something from that moment forward. And you don't know what it means, but it informs your life in so many ways. And these are the things you're talking about that come back in different situations.

And we look at it and we can see in our lives certain patterns because as you say, these thoughts, these feelings, they have followed us all through life. Listeners, if you look to a thing that whenever you feel there's certain patterns of behavior, think back to when you feel like too much is happening or something takes you by surprise. There's a feeling that has just you can recall that is so familiar, that goes back as it's followed you as long as you can remember, as long as you can remember this feeling. And then we put thoughts to it. But that feeling and it usually has something on the order of I'm not enough, I'm not good enough, I'm not lovable, I'm bad, I did something wrong, I'm not safe, I'm not safe, it's a scary place, something's going to happen to me, I'm not enough to respond to life. It's usually somewhere in that menu you have your own version of it. Maybe, maybe not. It'll be in that tone. And that feeling, it's a body feeling. Sometimes it feels like I know for me, sometimes I get tighter. I just feel like this emptiness.

There's a warmth, right, that sometimes there's this burning heat. Yes.

And it's always an old feeling and not about now. And when we can recognize something in my present life, I'm in the moment, I'm in the present, something comes up, it triggers that takes me out of the present. If I know this feeling is old and not about now, I can respond to the young part and return to the now. I don't have to get triggered. I realize, wow, this is that four year old you're talking about or the six year old. You don't even have to know what it is, you just know it's not about now. I tell myself when that happens, even if I don't know precisely at what age or what was the injury. I love you, little guy. I want you. I see you, I hear you. It's you know I'll take care of you. It's not what you do, but who you are that I love. Just. Just that. Even when I say that, it's not what you do in the world, it's who you are that I love. You don't have to be afraid anymore. I'll take care of you. You can trust me. You can trust your inner voice. You know, you take a breath, my love will make you well. I know that you're responding to feelings of injury, of hurt. And there was maybe there was no mom to take care of you in a way you wanted or no dad. But you know what? For all of us and all of us listening, another person cannot fulfill all your needs. In the end, these. These fundamental injuries and wounds that take us out of the present, they can only be met by us.

This is called self care. And you could use a number of terms, I suppose, to describe it, but it's self care. And it's something that I think is in great. There's a great need for this for people and men in particular. I know a lot of our listeners and viewers are women. And men in particular, I think, have a more difficult time in the feeling space, which is what you're talking about, this identifying what you feel and being safe with your own feelings. Because otherwise what tends to happen, it seems, is that people, they sedate those feelings. There's lots of ways to sedate them. We know what they are, whether it's spending or it's drinking or it's smoking. But to sedate or control the things that are uncomfortable, that feeling that's uncomfortable. And to be experience. What you're talking about now is one of not necessarily avoiding the feeling and then. Or having reactions to it, which is more often the case than not. We react. This is about being still in the moment or in the presence of that feeling and having a strategy to not so much heal it. But I don't think there's anything that's broken or anything that we're trying to, you know, that we've got to fix. Right, Exactly.

We take it in.

Right. It's a part of yourself that's a disowned part. Exactly.

You're home.

Yeah, exactly. You're coming home. That's the. That's an integral. That's a word for integration. Right. You come home to that fuller expression of who you are and then it's authentic. It doesn't have to be pretty, doesn't have to be perfect, doesn't have to be meet anybody else's Standards or meet society standards. But it's you.

Yeah, yeah.

How nice that it is.

You know, it's, it's. We're not broken, nothing needs to be fixed. But we do create beliefs, we do create thoughts, we do create structures of energy that are held in our beliefs and thoughts and choices and attitudes and decisions and feelings and emotions. And they become islands, they become isolates of energy. Like if you think of, I think of the water going down the drain in my bath. There's a whole bath of water there. But around the drain there's this little galaxy that's, that has a self organized pattern of behavior, a pattern of energy movement. We do that with our thoughts and our feelings. We take an infinite energy c. And we organize it in such a way that by holding it in place, we impose a certain kind of a gravity that keeps it, that keeps the planets of those beliefs revolving around the core. It keeps it going. And so when we have these injuries, these feelings, and as you said, he may be eight, you may be six, you may be four, you may be two months, parents are doing something and however you, you know, a child always makes it about them. Yes, however you make it, I'm bad, I'm not good enough, you know, or, or it could be the same, the same situation for another child is who will take care of me? Are they going to divorce? Am I going to be. Or are they going to hit me? Are they going to, am I going to be injured? Am I going to be abandoned? I mean, however you take that, that becomes a energy that begins to repeat itself and it starts to seek affirmation. That child is, as it matures, the child starts to look through that lens and is constantly looking to affirm that am I safe? Is looking through that lens. It becomes an organized energy structure. And as we become aware, we get older, we become more mature, become more sophisticated. These feelings and thoughts come up and instead of being identified with them, we learn how to relate to them, put them out so I can relate to them and then bring them home, take the gravity out of it so that it doesn't have to just go around in that cycle. It can disperse. You bring home that energy pattern which could be 50 years old. It could be like when you're six or you bring it home to the present, you disperse the energy or, you know, men, as you're saying, we have a tendency to be dubious about emotions. We have certain beliefs about emotions.

Less comfortable, for the most part, comfortable with them.

We're trained. You know, in my era, I'm a little older than probably many of our listeners, but, you know, it was all about being strong and silent and, you know, never speaking. Just suck it all up and stoic about everything. John Wayne that doesn't afford any possibility or any room. Forever unwinding some of those tightly held old injuries. Every time they come up, it means I am automatically going to have to abandon that part of myself just when I most need my own support. And I could feel it, I could develop a capacity to feel it. It took me years to develop a capacity to even feel. Somebody would say, my wife would say, usually, what are you feeling? And I'd say, no, I'm not feeling anything. I don't even know what you're talking. I don't even know what you're. What's a feeling? I know what a feeling is. I know what thoughts about feelings are. I know what anxiety is. So what is a feeling? So it's a challenge for guys. Some guys.

Yeah.

This guy.

I want to type. I don't know if this is a good. I'm following the thread, so I'm not sure if this tie back is a good fit. But you talked about humility at the beginning. Emotions feel humbling. It is humility. We are so vulnerable in our emotions and arrogance is the, you know, I'd say is the opposite of humility. And that's much more of the head. There's much more arrogance that resides in the head. You could call it ego or whatever, whatever it is that we want to. How we want to label it. But and I, and it's interesting because I would have said maybe a few iterations of myself earlier, however long ago that was.

Where do I understand that one?

Yeah, I would probably describe it, go, oh, it's a journey. It's this journey from the head to the heart. That sounds fine, but now I probably describe it more like. And I'll date myself with this. When we were driving in the car and there was a radio that you had to tune in by dial, Remember the dials, right? Not even the, not even the buttons, not even the buttons with the digital go, you know, 102.7, you know, was a good station, 95.5 when it was on your dial rock station, not the, the pop station anyway, but we would dial it by hand. And I think it's. Rather than it being a journey from head to heart, we have both by no accident, no accident, we have both a very well oiled machine between our ears and it's what separates us from every other being. Known to us. And we also have this incredible organ that is our heart and our feeling, this thing inside of us that we feel through. It seems more of a recalibration. I want you to get your thoughts on this. It seems. It's more a harmony. Creating a harmony so that maybe that recalibration of the dial to get the tuning right. And even when we drove, we wouldn't keep the station forever. 20 miles later, you'd have to dial.

You know.

To retune it. Exactly. Does that make sense to you, Barnett, that it's this.

Yeah, that really resonates with me deeply. We have the head analysis, slicing and dicing, supervising, labeling, strategizing. There's no feeling in that. Thoughts about feelings. It's weak. It's strong. I don't really know how to feel. I do anxiety instead. There's all kinds of. There's all kinds of distinctions that go on here. Then we have the heart. Different kind of attunement, but we also have the body. Sometimes. I know when I talk about the head and the heart in the way that I create those distinctions, I beginning to realize I'm still in my head. I am now doing a head version of the heart. So I'm beginning to get a sense that the heart and the body, the head, the heart and the body, it's all one thing. It's all one thing. And that if I can shuttle my consciousness, you know, I'll say to people, you know, where are you? Put your hand on where you're operating from? And they. They usually go, put their hand on their head, and then they put their hand on their heart. They never just go their whole body.

They don't go to my elbow, right? No, I'm coming from my elbow, Right.

But when we're triggered, you're going along and you're. Suddenly something happens. Somebody says something at work, the boss, a colleague. And suddenly I feel I didn't do it good enough. Or I feel bad, or I feel defensive. And in comes that feeling that we talked about a little bit earlier, that feeling that we all know there is a feeling that has haunted me from as far back as I can remember. I'm not feeling it in my heart. Maybe I am, but not always. And for me, it is a feeling in my body that my body starts to tighten. I feel like scooped out of this life is scooped out of me. Or maybe I feel brittle, or maybe I feel I have no aliveness and my whole body feels like a hundred pounds. So it's not just. It's not a heart deal, it's a body deal.

Right. Or I'm so tired I need to take a nap.

I need to take a nap.

I have to throw up in bed right now. Yeah. Or have a drink.

I am beginning to have a sense of that. Even in the way that I have talked about or related to my heart, it's still through the head. But when I take a breath and I realize my head is just the one that's trying to explain everything to myself. So if I'm trying to explain it to myself, I'm in my head and my heart is not separate from my body. The heart is a place of connection. My body is a place of wholeness. It's the body. It's the body. Now, you know, I live in a world I work in, a world that has lots of consultants around. And they laughingly refer to consultants as heads on a stick. Any of you met anybody that works for these big organizations? You know, they're pretty heady people. Pretty heady people, but not too in touch with what's going on in their bodies. What's going on my neck. You know, business people talk about. I had a gut instinct. Musicians, jazz musicians talk about the groove. That's not a head trip. You don't find the groove in your head. Athletes don't find the zone in their head. Golfer does not find a swing from. You will never analyze as much as we try, as much as people go take the lessons. You and I are surfers. You will never ride a wave from the head. Will not happen. You cannot process data through the head at the speed at which life comes through you. But you can through the body because it's a non linear intelligence. So there is the head that analyzes things and thinks about things. And then there is a body heart. One unit that includes the head. The head does not include the body or the heart. The heart, the body includes the heart and head. The body is the totality of things and it is not slicing and dicing. It is just in the world and knows itself to be part of the world. I have to very briefly share a really great story. I heard I was talking to a buddy of mine who wrote a beautiful book and I can't remember the name of it, but I'll get it for you. I just read the galley. So it's about to come out. And he talks about in this book, he talks about Carl Jung comes to the America and he goes to New Mexico and he visits a Pueblo Indy chief. And the chief says to him, I Am told by my friends here that you, doctor, do great work, but your work holds that. Oh, no. He said, I hear that you think that you approach the world thinking through your head. And he began to laugh, and the people around him started to laugh. And Jung says, yeah, why are you laughing? Yeah, doesn't everyone? And the chief says, no, I don't even know how you get through it, but it makes. It makes sense, you know, it explains a lot about your culture. We think with our stomachs. So that was the first part of the story. This conversation changed Jung's work dramatically, completely changes his entire work dramatically. The second part of the story is that they go travel to the coast, and there is a young man from the pueblo who goes out to the Pacific. He has never seen the ocean before. He stands at the edge of the Pacific for a great length of time, and then he comes back to where they were all staying and Jung was staying. And somebody says to him, so what was your experience of the ocean? And he says, you know, there are great canyons under the water, just like we have in New Mexico. And there are forests down there, just like we have in New Mexico. And there are animals. It is full of animals, great and small, some of them so large and so fierce and so ferocious. But don't worry because they. They cannot come out of the sea. They have to live there, so you don't have to worry. And Jung said, how do you know this? You stood by the ocean. And he said, because it speaks to me. I feel speaks to me. We're one with it. You shuttle up to here and label things and try and put things together in a linear way. We already know we're one with it. And so it speaks to us the same way that when we are ill, the plants speak to us and tell us what would serve us. We don't need to go by a process of elimination. And try this one, Try this one, try this one, try this one, Try this one. And Jung said, that's so interesting, because I've often wondered, how did you find your pharmacopoeia? Did you try this one? And it didn't work. So you adjusted the dosage and then you didn't work. Change the planet. I mean, that's it. That's infinity. It says, no. We're attached to everything. We're connected to everything. Everything is speaking to us. And this is really the way we operate in our dream world. Every night we return to that relationship. We're not trying to out think and out strategize life. In our dreams. So this really is to the point of what we're. To the core of what we're speaking of here today. Can we begin to develop a relationship with the present through our heads? And the answer to that is no. The head is not in the present. The head is really designed to say the light is red, and then we give that over to our own volition. That means I should stop or I'm going to blow through it.

This is a.

Our relationship with the present is an embodied experience and an emotional experience, also through the heart.

It's an expanded definition of consciousness. Yeah, because this is a program mostly about pivots that are not in doing things, although lots of pivots result in doing things and experiences that change based on it. But it's really more of a pivot in consciousness. And that takes in a lot more than just the headspace. As you said, it's an embodiment. It's the heart, it's the body.

It's.

It's a feeling. It's. It's intuition. It's what's non. It's preverbal. It's things we cannot put into words in essence, but just things that we can intuit if. If we have a. If we're in our bodies, fully embodied in a moment. And I don't. I don't know of anything yet that. That takes me to that place. Better than a breath. Yes.

So there are people that are watching this now. So if I'm going to invite people that are watching us to take breath and look it at him, just look.

At Adam.

And tune in to what you experience of his warmth. By his warmth, I'm not referring to his temperature. I'm referring to a quality of his energy. You know how sometimes you look at people and you go, wow, that person's cold. We just know they're cold. And sometimes we look at somebody else. We look at Adam and we have a sense of is this someone who, at a soul level, is inviting and makes space to others? And we can. If you look at Adam, you can get a sense of the warmth of the man. This is not happening from your head. You can also have a sense of his charisma. Now, what's charisma? Charisma, for purposes of this investigation, charisma, I want to define as voice of his expand itself. What is the quality, as you tune into Adam, of the. Of his charisma? Well, you know, I have an experience of it, and in the body that has. Is a little exciting. And I sense that There are great gifts of his soul are coming through him that to us, and that is appealing. So now we have a sense of warmth, we have a sense of charisma. These are not the five common senses. Now we're on to seven already. The five common senses that reside through calibrations of the head. We're now into two that reside in calibrations of body, body attributes. You're not going to read Adam's charisma through your head. It's just not going to happen. And there are many, many, many more of these uncommon senses. I suspect, though I don't know, but I suspect that there are infinite experiences related to our feeling states relative to the really small basket of possibilities, relative to our diagnostic capacity. We've pretty much maxed them out, folks. Danced all the dances and sung all the songs up there.

Oh, man, no kidding. We've run through the playlist.

Have we ever. Yeah.

Oh, my goodness. Barnett, I've so enjoyed this conversation.

Great.

I would love, with the few moments we've got remaining, to just ask you about rituals. Is there one particular ritual or practice that you have on a daily basis that helps you to be more in tune? As we've been talking about, I live.

In nature. I live in most glorious nature. And so in the morning, my first thing is I look outside, either at the ocean or the mountains, and I let in the beauty of it. And I'm very specific about my experience of the beauty. It's a felt state, it's not an analysis. And I experience beauty as being simultaneously serene, peaceful and exciting at the same time. And I am making. I make a ritual of this as a practice of this. I start in the day or first digging the morning. And it's easy to do that with nature, to see the excitement and the peace in every thing in nature. I begin with that and then I do my best to be. To remember, to return to that as many times during the day, throughout my day, to find the beauty in things, but not as a head trip. By attuning to the simultaneous experience of excitement and peace, same moment, in order to develop this embodied awareness of things. I want to meet reality incarnated, not just in my head. I want to meet the world in my body.

That is. That's a line right there. I want to meet the world in my body, not just in my head. Barnett, thank you so much. What a blessing. Love this. Love this conversation. Yeah. Oh, my goodness. Everybody out there, who's listening, wherever you may be listening or watching, at home, at work, on the car, etc. I hope you've really, really gotten just. Just giving yourself some moments during our conversation to be. Just to be. There's so much doing. And Barnett, I know you teach several times a year, some amazing courses on the difference, the distinction between doing and being. And so we'll have in our show notes information about your work and where people can find out more and get to your website and find out about the events and courses and services that you offer as well. And I will say this to everyone, I want to end. Not end, but this is just an ongoing beginning of this conversation, which is evolving in such a lawless way. There's no laws about it, no rules, which I'm really digging, by the way. It's very cool. But as we close out this particular episode, I want to end as we began. And that is to say how grateful I am. Grateful to you, Barnett, for being with us. Grateful to everybody that's tuned in and listening and viewing. And we'd love it if you would, of course, leave a review. The reviews are really important for us. The feedback is great on itunes. If you've not yet subscribed out of markelle.com you can go ahead and do that. You can join our community of pivoters by going to pivotfb.com which will take you to the front door of the StartMyPivot community on Facebook. So pivotfb.com for that and as bring this episode to a close. I want to remind us all how important it is that we are grateful in this moment and for this breath alone. And with this breath, I am going to set an intention. It is a prayer and a wish and a hope and every everything else I can muster into it that tomorrow, each and every one of you, that you, Barnett and myself included, and everybody else, we'll wake up, that we had the blessing to be able to wake up today. And my hope is that we'll wake up just a little bit more tomorrow, that our bodies will wake up and our minds will wake up, our consciousness will rise just a little more than today. And by doing that, I think the trajectory of our lives and what we're doing in the world and the impact that we can have in the world by who we show up, as how we're being, that this is profound and it is such a blessing in that moment, because as we wake up and we realize we're waking and we're taking that first conscious breath of the new day, realize in that moment, there are people who are taking their last breath at that very moment. And of course, there are. There's new life being born, babies that are taking their very first breath in that moment. And that, that is so holy. It's spiritual, it's sacred. And we don't need a whole lot more to be grateful for in that moment than that. So we wake up and we're in gratitude. And if you're willing to, in your bed or when your feet hit the floor, to declare out loud these words, they've changed my life. And I've been blessed to share them with many people. And they are. I love my life. I love my life. I love my life. I love all of you. Thank you, Barnett, for being with us. What a blessing. We will see you all very, very soon. I'll say ciao for now.

Thanks for listening, everyone. We hope you now have the tools and greater insights to navigate your own Pivot. Help us inspire others by sharing this episode and leaving your comments over@adammarkel.com podcasts for more tips, strategies and support as you consciously pivot into a new business and lifestyle you love. Join our Pivot community on facebook@pivotfb.com.