Integrating a Transformative Experience

As you're moving forward, it isn't a straight line. And so what you think to be moving backwards might just be the way the humans learn, right? Kids go from walking to crawling. And so to be easy on yourself about your learning process and be appreciative of those moments that you are learning, this helps integration out more than anything else.

Welcome to The Art of Accomplishment. Where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease. I'm Brett Kistler, here today with my co-host Joe Hudson. If you do much of Joe's work, chances are good that you will have a transformational experience. You may suddenly recognize some pattern you've played out over and over again in your life and find the ability to step out of it. These types of experiences have changed lives but we know that the moment of epiphany is not the end of the story. When you return to your life after a profound breakthrough, you may experience feelings of confusion, being lost, or even being unmoored from everything that once grounded you. That's why integration is so important when doing this work. Joe, what is a transformative experience?

Yeah, that's a great question. The funny thing is, when I was listening to your introduction, you talked about an epiphany, and I think there's, um, It's really important to distinguish between epiphany and transformation. So with epiphany, epiphany is kind of a recognition of a belief system that offers you relief. So it's like you, you understand something, there's this click in your system, and there's this relief that occurs. Transformation is distinct from that in the fact that transformation actually changes the way that you act. Right? It changes how you do things. And the epiphany is a, it's a really important part of some transformations, not all transformations, but it's a really important part. But the thing to recognize about an epiphany is it's dead almost as soon as it arrives, right? So you have this epiphany and you're unburdened from a thought, but pretty soon that epiphany can become your next burden. So Maybe in some part of the development, you're hanging out and you have this epiphany like, oh, I have will, I have free will, I can choose. And that's a really important thing to say, get out of like a victim mentality, or to see where, um, you can be more empowered in your life. And then you're like, choice, choice, choice, choice, choice. And then that becomes the next rut, because being completely in choice, which was very important prevents you from seeing grace. It prevents you from seeing the fact that maybe you've never really been able to control any thought that you've had, that they've all been gifts, that every emotional experience that you have isn't something that you can control. You can repress it or not, but you can't control it. And maybe you can't even decide to repress it or not. Maybe it's just instinctual. So each one of these epiphanies is like the tender beginning of a rut. And I think it's really important to see that because the important part is the lifting away. The important part is the freedom from a constrictive thought by seeing through it. It's not to attach yourself to the epiphany. It's, it's to recognize that moment of freedom that is created and to step into that moment of freedom more and more often. Transformation is a little bit different than that. Transformation is I now can't do things the same way. And it's not willpower, right? You can will yourself into some transformations potentially. It's, it's not an effective way to do it, but you can do it. But it's especially transformation that gets especially confusing when, uh, you can't choose the same way anymore. You know, we've had people in our work that all of a sudden they go into a grocery store and they just like can't buy the same things that they've always bought. I know that seems weird, but it's happened more than once where people all of a sudden are more in tune with their system where they just can't eat the same old crap they've been eating. And those are the ones that are a little bit more scary, right? And it's why transformation can be a pain in the ass sometimes, because it's— there's some moments of feeling out of control because you don't have that experience that you've relied on, that habit that you've relied on for years. And sometimes it happens in the weirdest ways. So transformation is just the change of what you do intellectually. It changes what you get done and how it gets done. But emotionally, it's changing your decisions, right? Because you're allowing more fluidity of emotions. You want to feel more emotional things instead of repressing them.

Or even though it's changing the emotional context within which all your decisions are made.

That's right, yeah, because you're, neurologically speaking, you make decisions based on emotions. As what you're willing to feel and what you're willing not to feel, what you're excited to feel, what you're excited to feel that you used to be horrified at feeling, that will really change a lot of the decisions you make. And then there's another transformation that is created not from the intellect or the emotion, but from the sense of self. And when that sense of self changes, those can be some of the biggest shifts that happen. An experience of deep freedom, because usually when the sense of self transforms, it widens, it grows, it becomes less of a small thing, more of a big thing. And so there's less to defend.

What's an example of that, like, sense of self changing for, like, what's a common example of that in one of your courses that somebody might experience?

What would be somewhat common would be, so let's say there's this a feeling of an abyss, a place in their life or psyche that they don't want to look, a person doesn't want to look. And every time they kind of glance over at it, they're like, I don't want to look there. Then all of a sudden they see it for what it is, and they see it as a direct path to freedom, and they jump into it. And they're like, oh, that's, that's actually where I want to go. It's, it's very much kind of the allegory of the cave, or, you know, Luke Skywalker going into the cave, where they just are like, okay, I'm gonna go and face that thing. And oftentimes when that happens, the sense of self collapses in on itself in some way, particularly because we define ourselves in contrast to other things, right? And so the sense of self becomes more universal. If you were to think about yourself just like in this moment and say, okay, what am I? But I can't think of it in terms of what I'm not. Right? Like, therefore I'm a soul, but what that means is that you're not material. Or I am my thoughts, but that means you're not your body. Like, if you think of yourself not in the terms of a not, every time one of those things that you think you're not goes away and you find out that you're that too, then the sense of self changes. And so oftentimes people avoid these big abysses, and when they don't, when they go into them, that sense of self completely shifts. And then there's like some really big shifts of sense of self that can happen, and those are the most disorienting transformations.

What kinds of situations can trigger these breakthroughs?

Almost anything. Deep depression often transforms people. Times of transition stress, like where the sense of self or your ideas or your emotional frameworks are not working, and so they have to change. You know, stress can change things. Sometimes just a truth smacking you in the face, you know, you just have that moment where you're like, oh fuck, that is not working. You can also just change people's contexts. Like, you know, like take a wealthy, highfalutin person and stick them in a ghetto with no money, and they're gonna have transformation, right? Or vice versa, there's gonna be a switch, right?

The change in perspective.

Yeah, the change of perspective. And it also changes who you think you are, because so much of who you think you are is based on and based on context and what people tell you you are. And if all of a sudden you're around people who don't tell you you're that, it starts to shift. Also, emotional fluidity is a big part of how transition changes. To have big emotional experiences, neurologically speaking, it allows you to kind of reprogram some of the behavioral learnings that you have. Big emotional experiences can do that. So all of those things can trigger breakthroughs and transformation.

What does transformation look like deep in the process? What different ways can it show up?

Literally almost any way you can imagine. So for instance, if we talk about like the awakening sense in the Zen Buddhist sense of awakening, everybody says awakening and it can mean so many different things, but we're talking about That moment when the sense of self dissolves into universal, where you see that you are everything and everything is you. That moment of awakening particularly is what I'm talking about here. For some people, they don't even notice it. It's like such a gradual thing. And it's like months after it happened, they look back and they're like, "Oh, holy crap." For some people, it's like, like people like Byron Katie or Eckhart Tolle, It's like they're in the deepest depression and the next day they have this utter freedom. For some people, it looks like Zen sickness, where they have that epiphany. The Zen have a word for it called Zen sickness, where the sense of self shifts out of you. So it's not, you aren't you anymore, everything is you, and you feel depersonalized. And I was talking to a psychologist who was a meditator, had some awakening experiences, and he was saying that a good percentage of what people call Depersonalization disorder is like a Zen sickness of awakening where you get that feeling of not being just you, but you don't like it, so you try to stop it. And then you're like, "Grrr," and that tension creates a tremendous amount of disease in your system. And if you go on to like the depersonalization disorder websites and you look at people talking about when it happened and how it happened, It is like exactly awakening experiences that you read in religious texts. It's unbelievable. Like, I mean, to the letter kind of stuff. And so it can happen every way. It can be like a dark night of the soul. It can feel like the bottom fell out from underneath you, like you have no place to stand anymore. And it can feel like absolute bliss and love.

So it sounds like transformation isn't always a good thing then.

For sure, because Is it a good thing to get into shape? Yes, I would say. Is there going to be uncomfortable moments of getting into shape? Absolutely, I would say. So there's freedom on the other side of it. The question is, how much resistance and fear is there between— in the integration, or how it looks? And, and they're exactly correlated. So if you get Zen sickness and you say Oh, okay, this is normal. This is Zen sickness. This passes, no big deal. Like, you have a very different experience than if you're like, what the hell is happening? How do I get it to stop?

So it's again putting it in context.

Yeah, exactly. There are moments that can be uncomfortable, and those moments can be seen through in an instant.

Okay.

And I think a large part of my work when I work with people is that when they meet these states, just to let them know it's common, just to let them know I've seen it many, many times before. And almost that often can transform everything, because it's really— they just get scared that what they knew isn't available to them anymore. And the thing about integration is, when it's integrated, you have complete availability to where you were before, and you have availability to a new thing. It increases your flexibility. It doesn't decrease it. So if you want to go be angry and prejudiced and hateful, or if you want to go be in the bad habit again, or the habit that you felt was uncomfortable, you can, you have that choice. You can go back and eat this stuff, it's just gonna hurt more.

So then let's talk about integration and how to support the smoothest integration from these experiences. What does integration mean to you and what makes it important?

Integration, it's like, I think it's the Integral people who talk about it as transcend and integrate. I think about it in those terms a lot. Like, there's a way in which you're— like, if you go from walking to crawling, you don't lose your capacity to crawl. You just walk most of the time. And it's like that. It's just like there's a new flexibility, there's a new way of doing things. And so that's, that's what I think about when I think about integration. And it's that time of moving from the unknown of a new epiphany or a new skill set into the known. So if you look at really early stage child development, there's the primary reaction, the tertiary reaction.

It's—

and it's basically like a little kid, a baby, they have a hand and they don't know that that hand is part of them. So the hand hits them and scratches them and whacks them in the face, and the baby's surprised, like, what the hell is that thing? And then all of a sudden they see that that hand is theirs and they know it, but they don't particularly know how to control it. And then they learn how to control it. And these are the ways that we develop in everything. There's the kind of the original epiphany that happens, and it leaves us in this kind of unknown, like, what the hell's going on? And then the second stage is, oh, I see it, but I can't completely— I haven't completely mastered it. And then there's the mastery of it. And this can take, you know, many years for some epiphanies, and it can take minutes for other epiphanies or other transformation, other experiences. So that's how I think of it there. But there's almost always those 3 stages that go on, and the integration is getting from that first moment of like, aha, oh, whoa, to, oh, this is normal. And the amazing thing is oftentimes when it's normalized, when you've mastered it, you kind of forget it's there. And the reason you forget it's there is because you've confused the skill with the feeling of euphoria or epiphany that you get when you first get the realization. So like watching an infant walk for the first time, and they walk and they're like, ah, and they get super excited. And then they're not excited when they're walking at 3 years old. It's just normal. They hardly are conscious that they're walking. But they don't confuse walking with the elation. But as you get into other stages of development, you confuse the elation with the new perspective because it's all happening internally. It's not physical. You can't measure it or see it outside of yourself.

So what does it look like when this process is healthy? It sounds like that story with the baby is like, that's sort of what healthy integration looks like. You have the epiphany, you see yourself in a way that you hadn't seen yourself before. You're not immediately sure what to do about this, but you just start to find that your actions change, your words change, and you start to kind of develop this relationship with your fuller self until eventually it becomes second nature, and then you stumble into a new epiphany.

I would say that, you know, the choices that you can make in the integration that I think are really important, that help for that healthy integration, are things like not trying to find the answers. Like, after a good integration, you have less answers, not new answers. It's not going from like, oh, this is the right answer, to this is the right answer. It's going from, oh, I know less in a way, and I'm more comfortable with it. There's more of a mystery out there, and I'm more comfortable with it. And at the same time, I know more of my own truth. I know more of my own self. So there's a deeper knowing of self and truth, but less of a knowing of kind of like having solid answers to things. It's also like choosing the sensitivity side instead of the less sensitive. Often with transformation, we become sensitive to new things because we're not repressing stuff anymore. And so embracing that new sensitivity and not trying to block that sensitivity. So those are some of the choices that you can make. And also to see, as you're moving forward, it isn't a straight line. And so what you think to be moving backwards might just be the way that humans learn, right? Kids go from walking to crawling. And so to be easy on yourself about your learning process and be appreciative of those moments that you are learning. This helps integration out more than anything else, these things.

So the first time you draw a boundary of a particular kind or speak your truth in a particular way, it might be messy.

Yeah, most likely it'll be messy. That's right.

It sounds like a lot of what you've just been describing is like, as we transform and start to see ourselves more clearly, we let go of some of our deeply patterned behaviors so that they may just become more, like, a little bit more ambiguous. We don't assume to know what's going on in the world and we have more space for curiosity and wonder and to see the subtlety in things. And that leads to sort of the not knowing what's going to happen.

Yeah. So there's more flexibility in life. It's less patterned response. I think if you're look, if you're saying, oh, if you know the integration is going well, if you wanna look, it's not short-term, it's like you can't monitor every minute and say, is this happening? But like over weeks or months, the question is, Do I have more emotional fluidity? Do emotions move through my body more smoothly? Do I take things less personally? Is my physical sensations— am I more aware of physical sensations? Am I experiencing that world differently? Are patterns losing their grip? These are the things that— and pendulation going back and forth between the learning and the old behavior and the new behavior. These are the marks of integration happening.

So let's talk a little bit more about what can go wrong. You talked a little bit about like the Zen sickness type thing, derealization. What else can happen?

Almost all of it. I wouldn't say all of it, but almost all of what can go wrong is resistance to what is, right? So oftentimes when we're trans— when transformation is happening, we have a deeper acceptance and love of ourselves. And so the next thing that needs to be loved, the next thing that's been rejected shows up to be loved. And we don't see it as showing up to be loved. We see it as showing up and fucking with us. Oh my God, no, fuck, I was just in this bliss state, now there's anger, grrr, instead of like, oh, there's the anger, it needs to be loved now too. It needs to be integrated now too. So when we start resisting the movement or start fearing the movement in particular, that's when things can go really sideways. Like, I don't want to feel this way. I don't want to have emotions. This often, I don't want to be this sensitive, I don't want to see the world in a non-personal way. Instead of saying, ah, this is it, and this is, this is the natural flow of things, it must be because I'm experiencing it, and, and being settled with it. That lack of resistance is what makes everything go very smoothly. So usually most of the stuff that goes wrong is really just people in fear of the transformation that's happening, that particular stage of transformation that's happening. And when I work with people and I just— as soon as they find out it's normal and they see that I'm not bothered by it, I'm like, oh yeah, yes, yeah, it kind of feels like you're walking but you're not entirely— it's not entirely you walking. Like, that could be an experience. Or, oh yeah, your visual field changed. Or, oh yeah, you go to the grocery store, that's happened before. Then they can get curious about it, and everything shifts. Some exceptions to this are things like some Kundalini energy awakening stuff.

That—

it's definitely impacted by how much you're allowing of it, but there you can push transformation through your energetic channels. I don't really speak about this very much. Um, I think energy, the idea of energy, is misinterpreted by a lot of people. I think that As soon as you say it, anybody who considers, defines themselves rational can say, "Energy, blah, blah, blah, there's no such thing," or whatever they want to do.

I think one way to bridge that for anybody listening to this, looking for a rational bridge to this stuff, would be just to think about it as nervous system activity. There's a lot of different ways that you can produce a lot of different nervous system-type responses that can be described metaphorically with energy.

That's exactly right. Somebody who I learned a lot from around it called them like close cousins, like they're almost identical, hard to see the difference between the nervous system and the energetic system. And so I absolutely agree, that's the best way to think about it. I think the other way to think about it that can be very helpful is bodily sensations, non-muscular bodily sensations is another way to think about it. But anyways, you can those things can shift in such a way that maybe they keep you up all night, or you're excited too much, or, you know, something can go out of whack there. And that's kind of far more of a physical thing that's happening. It can be really exaggerated by certain breathwork or certain, um, yogic practices. And if you— if that's happening and you've confused, like, oh, that Kundalini thing is gonna set you free then I really suggest like going seeing a professional, like a really good acupuncturist or something like that, who can rebalance that energetic system or nervous system. And then the other thing that can happen is people can go into traumas and, um, like relive a deep trauma and not be held in a deeply loving container for enough time for them to integrate that trauma and see that they're not living it anymore, that it was something that was in the past. And so that's another place where it can go wrong. Somebody goes into a trauma and like, it's like they can't be held in love. They can't be held in unconditional acceptance. And then therefore it gets stuck again. It will move, but it's just not It's not the skillful way to move through it, and it's definitely not the, the most gentle way to move through it, or the most efficient. So those are some of the places where it can go wrong, where someone can just like— one person who's not very skilled at holding trauma, they've just kind of processed their own, decides that they really know about trauma and somebody moves some trauma because they know some of the exercises or things that can move that trauma. And and but they don't know actually how to hold it. So that's another place where it can go wrong. So I really recommend if you're moving trauma to move it with somebody who has some experience in that place to really dive into those places.

Yeah, along those lines, I'm curious about a pattern that I've seen before in this, in this type of work. And this happens in all kinds of student-teacher relationships where there's like a mentor in the role of transmitting the wisdom of some practice or facilitating, you know, trauma release of some kind, where the student walks away from an experience feeling transformed, but also increasingly feeling dependent on their teacher or some other projected gatekeeper of the wisdom. What do you have to say about that?

Yeah, in general, avoid teachers who do that, is what I would say. But it can get a little confusing there too. So the kind of teacher that I would recommend is a teacher who's constantly pointing you back to your own truth, who's teaching you the skills that you need to be independent, to be more successful and more self-aware, more skillful in your means, so to speak. And, and the way to get there most efficiently is to really teach you how to listen to yourself and to follow your own truth and encourage you to not take their word as solid gold or even wisdom, but to take their words and experiment with it and find out what's working for you. And so that's the, that's the relationship. The relationship is where the teacher doesn't see themselves as better than or worse than or equal to you, but they see themselves with but best can be described as you. And that's kind of the best relationship, the most effective relationship. Maybe you need something else, and maybe you need, you know, to explore the depth of a dysfunctional teaching relationship, or a one where you, you know, decide somebody else knows— somebody else knows better for you than you do. But it's definitely not anything I would recommend. And if you're doing it, you know, go into it consciously. The confusion in this is that if I was teaching you physics, you wouldn't assume that you understand physics after I taught you 2 workshops. You know what I mean? Like, okay, we spent 4 hours together learning physics, and you're like, okay, I got it, right? So there's things that the teacher should know because they have more experience in the work. That you might not know. You might not have spent the time on the landscape. You might not have, like, been in the terrain as long. So there's something about that the teacher should hold some value, but it shouldn't look like dependency. It should constantly look like, you know, it's increasing your capacity as a person, for the most part, pretty consistently. There might be some strays, you know, there might be some backwaters that you get caught in. But sometimes you have students who are just like, "Okay, well, now I've spent 16 hours with you, I'm ready to teach." They always find out the hard way that teaching isn't as sexy as they think it is.

Well, there's also just like, there's the contrast between the pre-transformation self and the post-transformation self, where all of a sudden you just feel like you see the world so clearly And like, there's a part of you that just immediately comes in, like the ego comes in. It's like, okay, now I see the world completely. I'm ready.

Exactly. I mean, that's where like the idea of a tradition holds power. I mean, it holds some things back and it gives really good things. But like, since we were talking about Zen today, let's talk about it. And you know, somebody has a big awakening in Zen and, you know, like a master will just smack them on the back of the of the back with a cane, that it really hurts. And they're like, "Okay, who felt that then?" Right? Where they're basically challenging that part of you that thinks, "Now I get it." The part of you that thinks that there's a finish line, that it's not a constant evolution, that there's some place where transformation stops. And a tradition— that's one of the really beautiful things about a tradition. And there's other things that limit you in a tradition.

As well.

You start thinking that the tradition is truth or that the writings are truth or that the teacher is truth instead of what's happening internally being the truth.

I think something that happens that contributes to the sort of the starry-eyed teacher worship thing is that having a transformative experience where what you described is like you've been de-patterned a little bit and you feel like there's like a, like sort of a 404, like you've described, you're sort of sitting in the unknown And I think that can lead to sort of a fear of being in that unknown and a desire to kind of collapse that unknown down onto something like a teacher or some particular belief that gives us that sense of knowing again.

Absolutely. Like we're constantly trying to find some way that we feel like we're in control or that we're ground— we're on like, okay, I know this is real. The truth is, it's like just the opposite. It's like the more you go, the more you realize that it's not real.

Yeah.

And at the same time, interestingly, almost paradoxically, you're far more grounded. You're far more— it's far less likely that you're going to be swayed from your love and your freedom and your truth.

Yeah, I think this kind of speaks to the importance of community coming out of like the courses of yours that I've taken. It has been really, really helpful to have other people who have been through the same experience and be able to cross-reference with them how they're doing in their lives and not just be dropped back into my previous life and having a hard time contextualizing.

Community is far more important than the teacher, I would say. They really help each other out, hopefully. There's so much more wisdom to be gotten from a community of practice with a similar intention than there is from a teacher. If I'm teaching someone how to access their anger, my capacity to do that is not as good as the person who just learned, or at least they have some capacity that I do not have. So someone who's just learned to release their anger, like, you know, in a safe way, it's just, it's just like, it's electric, you know. And so a community can do that because there's people at different stages learning different things. They can teach each other We see this in learning math with, you know, third graders. So that community is incredibly important. I think that that's really important. It's also really important because there's a kind of a relatableness that people going through the journey together can have. And so there's less fear can kind of interrupt the transformation and maintain the pattern. So I think for that's another reason that community is just so critical. And to allow yourself to be a part of that community and be vulnerable in that community is tremendous. The weakness of a community is that a whole community can decide that the teacher is special.

Right. And the teacher could buy into that, and then the whole system locks into something that becomes a cult.

Yeah, it's a— yeah, that agreement between a community and a teacher or a facilitator or a leader is a— You know, there's something in us, there's something natural, just like there's something natural in us that wants sex. There's something natural in us that wants somebody to know what the hell's going on, to have the answer, to know which way to go so that we can feel safe. And it's why when we do kind of the longer-term courses, one of the things we learn is that that wisdom is best found in the community. It's found in group intelligence. Which is really tricky to access, and you need a lot of skills to get there. But I mean, that's the far deeper wisdom, and I teach that because I like to access that wisdom, you know what I mean? Like, I can sit here and talk and blah blah blah, I can play the role of the person who knows something, but one of the places that I get the most insight, I learn the most, is to watch a community access its deeper intelligence. And I love that. I love working that way in business. I love working that way with people. It's where I learn and I grow the most, and I find everybody learns and grows the most.

So then for people that are coming out of courses and going back into their world and trying to create or be a part of community or be doing this work with people in their lives, I've experienced that it can be really difficult to present the work how do we present what we're doing to people in our lives? When we say, hey, I just did this course, it was really great, it was transformational for me, what's the best way to describe this to people?

I don't— I'd say don't try to describe it to people. Describe your experience to people, don't describe the work. Meaning just show up with more unconditional love for the people around you, show up with more self-awareness, show up with more less patterned responses. Show up in a way that inspires them to join you and meet you. But I don't recommend missionary work or using the tools on people who are not in agreement to do it. It's a form of like better than this. You have to kind of think that you've just discovered something that makes you— there's a very natural part of it where you just discovered something that gave you freedom, you want to share it with everybody. And if you can even own that, it's just like, okay, I just experienced something that I really want to share because it's giving me so much happiness, and I realize that like I do not want to push anything on you. And like, how do you want to deal with that? You know, I think that's a beautiful thing to say to somebody and see where they are with it. But to do it without permission, to do it without like consciousness, just, just don't. Just be in your in your new world. Enjoy it. Enjoy them just as they are. That's what I suggest.

And what would be a good line to draw between the tools that are actually meant to be brought into the world, like having a view conversation and how/what questions, and some of the tools that are perhaps not ready to be brought to people who haven't been exposed to the work, like projection reclamation or something like that?

Yeah, if you're asking them to do anything then don't do it. So in view, you don't have to ask them to do anything or be any way. You just ask questions and speak from a vulnerable, impartial, empathetic, and a space of wonder. So you're not requiring anything from them. But as soon as you're asking them to do something, or you're telling them about their experience, or you're trying to cajole them into a new way of being, or trying to have power over them or feel in control or not feel the helplessness that you have being their friend, anything like that, then don't do that.

Yeah, it sounds like that just comes straight back down to being in view, like not being partial.

That's right.

Not trying to change them.

That's exactly it. Yeah.

Okay, so do you have any more tips then for those of us who have just come from a Course and are ready to present our new selves, our transformed selves, into the world? And to the other people in our lives?

Yeah, so I think the main thing there is that there is a natural pressure from a society or a group or a marriage to have you be who you were. It's hard for people to see the new you. It's hard for you to see the new version of a person across from you. And there's behaviors that you've agreed upon. You have an agreement. Like, "Hey, I'm gonna save you, you're gonna be a victim," or, "You're gonna bully me and I get to be resentful." And no matter how healthy or unhealthy those agreements are, there's a pressure to stay in those relationships. And so I think about the 3 to 5 rule in this, which is when you have a new behavior, you're drawing a new boundary. When you're, you should expect that the person is gonna treat you like your old self 3 to 5 times, and each time they're going to kind of up the ante on the behavior. So let's say you've got a husband who is a yeller, and you're like, "Oh, okay, well, I don't want to be with your yelling, but I really want to be with you. So when you're yelling, I'm going to leave the house, and I'll come back in 30 minutes, and if we can talk, great, and if we can't, then I'll leave the house again for 30 minutes." It's gonna take 3 to 5 times of doing that before that person, the husband, gets it and is like, "Okay, I got it. Yelling doesn't work anymore." And most likely they're gonna get even more— they're gonna use a whole bunch of other tricks to keep you in. So they're gonna up the ante 3 to 5 times and then the behavior falls apart. So just that's the expectation. And I'm really grateful that it's built this way, that humanity seems to tend to act in this way, because it really forces us to learn to keep that boundary. It forces us to really learn what's necessary to change this behavior even under stressful circumstances. So it's actually quite a gift. But it's good to keep it in mind that, like, you're not going to go back into your world and everybody's going to be like, "Oh, hey, he's different, so now I'm just going to treat him like the new person that he is.

There will be resistance, and it's an opportunity to double down on doing the work.

That's exactly it. Yeah, yeah, well said. I think the other thing to know is that some people are going to go away. You know, if you transform, there's some people are going to be like, "Eh, I don't like the new agreement." That only happens, I find, like 70-80% of the times people stay and 20-30 people leave. Everybody's very scared of it, right? So whenever somebody transforms, one of the ways they kind of try to revert is to go, "Oh my God, I'm gonna lose so-and-so." They're scared of the result. But it doesn't happen as frequently as you would think, you know, only 20 or 30% of the time. And it's basically like, "Hey, this is the way I want to live. Hey, this isn't the way that I want to live." And if you can see it that way, it's really beautiful. It's not personal. It's just choices that people are making. It's great to see it that way because it can just be really transparent that way too. It's like, hey, so I've decided that I want to live in a world where, you know, we show up in love instead of showing up in shame with each other. Do you want to join me? Do you want to support each other in that transformation? Like, if the more transparent that articulation of your vision is, then the easier it is for people to meet you, and the less likely it is that they're gonna decide to leave. And some people are gonna leave. Some people are just not gonna want to live, inhabit the world that you want to create for yourself. But it's nothing to fear because better people show up, you know, or not better, but people who want to live in those agreements, they always show up.

And those who stay are getting a more self-aware version of you.

That's right, yeah. And not only do they, they show up, you also start inviting people in who are also transforming, and so that propels your own transformation. So it really works out well. And oftentimes those people can't show up if the space is filled by, you know, someone who's abusive or doesn't have the same agreements.

In this work, you— like we touched on a little bit earlier— you often highlight the importance of staying in the not knowing after a breakthrough or seeing through some habitual way of perceiving things. But integration necessarily seems to involve some kind of a collapse from that unknowing state into some new identity, which becomes a new rut. How do we stay the most in that unknowing without collapsing it, but still staying grounded in our lives?

Yeah, that's a great question. I think it's not about trying to stay in the not knowing, it's more about not trying to get into the knowing. I think There's like a, you know, some big thing happens and your mind's like, "Let me figure that out. I gotta figure that out." And your mind always figures it out. I guarantee it. If your mind at this moment hasn't figured it out, I guarantee you it will. Like, have a little patience with it. It might take a couple months. But like I was talking about, there's like those 3 stages of development as far as like the baby's hand not knowing it's the hand hitting and scratching its face. And then there's the, oh, I know it's my hand. And then there's the, like, oh, I can control my hand. Those three stages are really important. And if you cut any of them short, like the full integration doesn't happen. It's just like, you know, babies need to crawl for a while for them to get like solid left-right brain cohesion. So it's just a really important thing to allow the not knowing to be there as long as it wants to be there. Meaning not forcing it. And then, then the knowing shows up, just kind of like, oh, I get it. It's not figured out, it's just like, oh, I get it. And then all of a sudden you can articulate it, and that process is the smoothest, and it creates the deepest integration. If you like strive to put words on it, strive to understand it, then you're limiting it, you're containing it in a way that doesn't allow it to like fully transform you.

Well, thanks a lot, Joe. This has been a great episode. Thanks for talking to us about integration.

Pleasure. Yeah, good to talk to you as always, Brett. You too. All right, love you, man.

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