Ep 153: Antony Sammeroff Guest Host ~ Unleash the Freedom of your Spirit & Change the World!

Transcript

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Truth and Transcendence brought to you by being Space with Catherine Llewellyn.

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Truth and Transcendence, episode 153.

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I recently had the absolute pleasure of joining Anthony Samaroff on his podcast Be Yourself and Love it, and Anthony has kindly allowed me to reproduce this conversation on Truth and Transcendence.

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I hope you enjoy it.

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Hello and welcome to episode 106 of the Be Yourself and Love it podcast with me, anthony Samaroff.

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I've got a real treat for you today the silkiest voice in all of podcast kingdom, my friend Catherine Llewellyn, host of Truth and Transcendence podcast, which I've been on twice and so rudely not had Catherine back as a guest because my podcast was on hiatus for two years.

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But it's interesting because she was high up on the list of guests and got in there, sneaked in before me and sent me a little message oh, I see you've started your podcast again.

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Is it time?

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And it is absolutely certainly time.

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Thank you so much for coming on be yourself and love it podcast, katherine I am so thrilled.

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I've been looking forward to this ever since I first heard you on the tom woods show, I thought number one I want him on my podcast.

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Number two I want to go on his podcast.

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That was several years ago so this is a um a bucket list tick for me okay, oh, wow, okay.

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well, it's a great honor to have you and, um, I'm I've not scripted the show, but we're going to talk a bit about freedom of spirit because you're doing a workshop on that, or several of them, later on the years.

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But my audience might not know you and I want them to have the pleasure of knowing you.

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So let's hear a little bit about yourself.

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What are you doing with your life?

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How did you get here?

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What are your skills and capacities?

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I know that you're an evolutionary force in the world, but I'd like to unwrap that and hear a bit about how Okay, well, I'll do my best to sort of say something relevant from the more than one decade of my life.

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So at the moment I am running workshops.

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I'm noticing people are really drawn to getting together with other human beings at the moment, which I think is completely natural after the last few years.

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So I'm currently running Pelua energy technique workshops.

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I'm about to start running the freedom of spirit workshops in the autumn and I've also been running like half day sessions and day sessions and weekend sessions of conscious dance and meditation.

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So I've been doing quite a lot of workshop stuff.

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I have the podcast Truth and Transcendence, which is just a sheer joy.

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I mostly do it because of the sheer joy of it and the idea that there are people around the world.

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Joy, I mostly do it because of the sheer joy of it and the idea that there are people around the world.

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There are people listening to it in Russia, Israel, all these places.

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There are people who listen to my podcast and I'm thinking who are these people?

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I'll never know who they are or why they're listening or what they get out of it.

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So that's an incredible thing doing that or what they get out of it.

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So that's an incredible thing doing that, and other than that I just enjoy life.

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I live in rural Wales.

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There's lots of sheep, not very many people, birds, cats.

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It's a really beautiful place to be very peaceful, and so that's pretty much what I'm doing at the moment, and my whole thrust, I suppose, in my work, and has been all the way through, is this idea that the next stage of evolution for us as human beings is the evolution of our consciousness, and I feel for myself in my life that's something I've always tried to continue to grow and develop, and I get really turned on by helping other people to do the same.

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So that's kind of where I am now.

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In terms of my history, I'm working in the public field at the moment, but for a long time I was doing similar work, but for corporate exec type people.

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Yeah.

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I really wanted to hear more about that.

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Yeah.

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You know how you came into the corporate world to help facilitate people's development, how that even became a job for you and what you accomplished, like what you saw changing people when you worked with them.

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That's something I was really interested in myself and hearing more about.

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Yeah, thank you.

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It was actually like a really bizarre path.

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I had realized that.

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How can I put it?

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The mad way I've conducted myself in my adolescence and early twenties was great fun, but it wasn't fulfilled and I was heart lonely.

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I felt isolated.

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I had pain, pain in my heart, as they say in the song and I knew there was more but I didn't know what it was.

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And then some friends of mine came back from one of these enlightenment-intensive weekends and they'd completely transformed and after a lot of arguing that I didn't need to do it, I finally went off and did it and I met a lot of very interesting people who were really interested in being conscious and responsible for themselves and living life to the full that whole thing that everyone's into now.

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In those days it was much more new and we were referred to as a cult and we were referred to as a cult and is that the other?

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and we were saying, cults are undervalued right, yeah reclaim the term yeah, before long a gang of us got together and said look some of the principles we're trying to live by now.

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What if we took some of those into the business world?

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Because there's people going to work.

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They're hanging up their souls as they those into the business world.

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Because there's people going to work, they're hanging up their souls as they go into the building and picking them up again on the way out.

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They're spending more time at work than anywhere else, but for many people it's meaningless.

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People aren't communicating.

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It's soul-destroying for a lot of people.

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So we thought, well, how do we start to do that?

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Someone came up with the idea of doing telephone marketing.

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Right, we thought by doing telephone marketing we could start to spread some of this.

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And we knew nothing about telephone marketing.

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But we were very enthusiastic and bright, shiny people, you know so, and young.

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Because we were young we had the beauty of youth.

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You know that's in quite good clothes.

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We had a decent briefcase between us to go and sell the services, etc.

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So we started doing this and the clients after a while started saying how is it your people are getting much better results on the phone than our people, when your people only had a half day product training?

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And our people have been doing it 15, 20 years.

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Will you train our people?

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Right, so we started training their phoners then they?

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what did you train them?

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What did you teach them?

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we taught them about.

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Honestly, we'd never get away with these days.

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I don't know.

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We taught a lot of voice work, a lot of basic conversation skills and all of that, but also a lot of stuff about dealing with the pain of being said no to rejection on the phone, because, more often than not, that's what happens mutually supporting the team, taking responsibility for your energy, a lot of work around energy responsibility really all about one's personal power, I suppose, and self-expression.

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So, of course, when these people went back, they were much more effective, but they were completely uncontrollable.

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Oh, right, okay.

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So they then said right, guess what?

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Will you train the team leaders?

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Then the same thing happened.

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Will you train the managers?

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Same thing happened.

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Then eventually they said right, this is so good, we're going to get rid of all our reps and create a big call center.

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So we were the first people creating big call centers in the UK.

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So they then said help us to do that, so we'd help them create a really effective call center.

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That would be like a transplanted organ into a body.

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And they said it's not taking because the call center's working, but it doesn't gel with the rest of the culture, which is back in the Stone Age.

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So then I ended up training the board on how to incorporate that new culture, then on how to change the culture in the rest of the business, so that transition happened kind of organically and suddenly before.

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I knew it.

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I was doing one-to-one coaching with CEOs with a lot of the same thrust to it.

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But with all that work around, how do you get your arms around the culture, how do you actually sense what's going on with your people and how do you actually look after the goodwill in your business, all of that human stuff?

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which is difficult to do when you're sitting on the top of an organization, because you have to stretch your heart to do it and that can hurt Right.

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Yes, it's amazing that you had an experience of going into great places and encouraging them to move to Technicolor.

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But the interesting thing is you almost said, well, you'd never get away with it today, and then you didn't finish the thought.

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So I'm excited to hear where that was going.

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What?

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are the things that you think, things we used to honestly back in the early 80s.

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Some of the things we used to say to people on these telephone skills trainings was just outrageous these things.

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Like you know, you are 100 responsible for everything that's happening in the world right think about that okay right.

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Philosophically speaking, that's an incredibly empowering thought form to play with and nowadays people know that.

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But we were brutal with these 18-year-old telephone receptionists and these young people who just wanted to do a job.

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And suddenly they're in this building with these nutcases who've been on this seminar right, who are demanding that they embrace these very demanding, stretching ideas.

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You know, and sometimes people didn't come back on day two, frankly yeah, it's quite interesting because what you did reminds me of the work of Ricardo Semler, who wrote a good book called Maverick about how he kind of democratized the workplace.

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And there's another guy I can't remember his name now must try and get him on the show who did a similar thing with teaching these communication skills and Ricardo Semler's workplace.

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People chose their own salaries but it was open boot so everyone could see.

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Sometimes they elected their own managers and sometimes a manager would more often than not have a meeting and saying you know, we're looking at your salary.

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You know, maybe you would consider you might consider putting it up a little bit more more often than they would say you know, we're looking at your salary, you know, maybe you would consider you might consider putting it up a little bit more more often than they would say you know, we had a chat and we kind of think you're taking the piss, but a certain percentage of people would not affect the change of culture when he went into other workplaces and tried to change it and they would just leave and go somewhere else.

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And I don't know.

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And the same with the other guy.

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He did a great YouTube presentation called the new paradigm in business, and this was over 10 years ago.

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But, um, I don't know if that's just a certain mentality or because you put people through this education system where it's do what you're told when you're told, and people are so habituated to being told what to do that they don't like to participate in the decision making process.

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Maybe some people are just like that, or maybe it's conditioning and I love speaking to you about this because obviously I've just started this show again after a two-year hiatus and before starting the show, I had to go through a whole existential crisis about you know what I'm doing with my life and things like that.

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And what I did was I went back to the beginning to understand why I became a content creator in the first place, about 10, 12, 14 years ago, whatever it was.

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And it was this stuff, exactly what you said evolving consciousness, the idea that we could go into organizations and evolve the consciousness and spread like a ripple organizations and evolve the consciousness and spread like a ripple.

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And I, when I decided to redo my show, I decided that's where I was going back to the beginning.

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Um, to, to, to and in a way, I saw, as you know, whatever the enlightenment was.

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We had the renaissance.

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There was this nice story that we had the renaissance and then, like, we had the dark ages and the renaissance and the enlightenment, and the world was just going to continue evolving and evolving.

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And I believed that for so long when I came onto YouTube, because there was these amazing people presenting how to change the education system, how to change healthcare, how to solve disputes without the state, how to go into anarchism, and the ideas were so compelling and they seemed so true and I thought I was just in the vanguard of this thing.

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And then, uh, that these ideas were going to spread.

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And then 12, 14 later, 12 years later, 10 years later, covid, you know, everyone goes into a bot, the least free, all the social justice, warrior stuff, where you can't say what you think anymore without fear of being attacked, everything driving off an economic cliff.

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I was like there was a period of disillusionment from this idea that things are just going to get better and better and better over that time and I kind of lost my way.

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And this is for people who used to be a listener of the show before hiatus to wonder what happened there.

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And you're going to start drip feeding this in.

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So you're bringing me.

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And, by the way, on that point I was thinking of the people I was listening to back then, 10 to 15 years ago, and thinking, oh, are they still around?

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I'll need to get them on the show some at some point.

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This meant going back to the very beginning, so that is… Lovely.

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Well, I'd like to say a couple of things.

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Yeah, please do.

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This business about how you make change happen.

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I think one of the issues that can happen is that people come up with a fantastic theory about that and then try to enact the theory.

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And that never, ever works, because an organization is like an organism, and I've argued this many times is it a machine or an organism?

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And I say well, it's more like an organism, because it's a whole bundle of relationships and lines of power and influence and love and goodwill and emotion and all of those things.

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So if you want to bring about change in an organization, you don't just try and black the organization into the change.

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You actually collaborate with the people who are currently running the organization, because the organization is an expression of those people, but also they are affected by the state of the organization as well and they're the only ones who really know it.

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So, through them, metabolizing, where they are in a much deeper way and becoming much more conscious.

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Even that on its own starts to create a ripple effect down the throat and I just want to say one other thing before you come back.

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You asked me about effects of that.

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And I just remembered yesterday I was talking to someone.

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One of my favorite stories was when I was working with a group of four men who, between them, were responsible for a division of a bank which had 9,000 people in it.

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We were doing this long program together where they'd chosen the theme we were going to work on, having done some very deep self-assessment work with me.

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One of the themes was a thing called Chi Cascade.

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They came up with the name and they we'd done work around.

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We looked at energy and chi and so forth and they'd said to themselves well, we can work on our own energy, so our presence is much more, uh, benevolent and you know, etc.

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Etc.

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But how do we do that through 9 000 people?

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We can't be everywhere, right?

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So how do we do that actually cascade thing we did?

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a lot of work around that over a two-month period.

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They came back next time around and they said Catherine, because of what we did with you in the last couple of months, we've just saved 2,500 redundancies.

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Amazing and I said what?

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Because of course, I had no idea what they were going to go and do with the shifts that they'd experienced, but through the shifts they they'd seen a way through to save two and a half thousand jobs.

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So those people were now not going to be made redundant, which was wonderful for those people and their families and also great for the business, because of the cost of redundancy.

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Right yeah.

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There are so many stories where someone has and I think it's true for anyone in their own lives, somebody has an experience of inner transformation and then suddenly things in their lives shift, and things in the lives of the people that they love shift as well, and things in the lives of the people that they love shift as well.

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You know the areas they have influence over shift.

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So that was something I wanted to say in response to something you said earlier on in the conversation.

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Oh, perfect.

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Yeah, exactly, so it was this.

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That's exactly what I believe that we change the world by changing ourselves.

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And then that has a ripple effect and exactly you can't smash people in the face with it.

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You, you need to court their cooperation.

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I know I remember I was once having a dispute with my sister over a period.

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I was in London she lives in London, I don't so I was staying with her and she'd run the phone to me and say I thought the compromise was some sort of.

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And I said to her over and over again I said no, I never agreed to compromise with you.

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I agreed to convince it.

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I agreed that we could meet consensus.

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And I kept on saying it over and over again because there were decisions she wanted me to make too early.

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I said can we?

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I need another day or two before.

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But she wanted.

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And similarly, I'm sure in hindsight I was being in stubborn in certain ways that I didn't realize as well.

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But the idea was could we come to consensus?

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And you have to kind of bring people along.

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And the interesting thing is my dad I don't always think of him as super deep, you know what I mean, I don't know how to put it.

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But he told me at some point.

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You know, I was on the phone to her and I said you know, anthony's he hadn't heard this conversation.

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He independently said to her you can't use force with anthony, you need to bring him along with you, you need to, you know, talk him along.

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And that's exactly what I'd wanted.

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I was.

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I wanted her to talk me in to a position not not be so black and white, it's this way or that way, and learning non-violent communication around the age of 25.

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You know, picking up that book was a great influence on me because, like Carl Rogers, I think I'm sure you're a fan, or if you're not, I'm sure you, yeah, yeah, he's my biggest influence as a psychotherapist.

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He believed that these were skills not just for counselors and psychotherapists, for parents, for everything, for, for, for every situation where you have the appearance of authority and those um, and that these were tools to change institutions.

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And when I went back to reading carl rogers again a couple of years ago, it was like so much of what he was expressing was in me myself and embedded in this project to be yourself and love it.

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So it's really good to have you to speak to, because you're kind of like you're bringing it out of me is what I get again.

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To set the course on track.

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That's the show on track, this idea of evolving consciousness, of bringing presence to other humans, and that itself is transformative of them, and then we can synergize and then we can um, you know, do something.

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Uh, that's of more value.

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You know, even in the corporate world the employees are happier.

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They produce better customer service.

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The customers are happier.

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Their families are happier.

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Yeah, absolutely.

00:22:35.165 --> 00:22:45.292
And I think the other element, which is it's very easy to get into, how do I bring my great insights to other people?

00:22:45.292 --> 00:22:54.613
That thing is something we can sometimes get into Right, Thereby forgetting how can I discover what great insights other people have?

00:22:54.613 --> 00:22:55.294
Right.

00:22:55.960 --> 00:23:10.519
And so that's a big part of the conversation with organizational change, because every single person in an organization, no matter how suppressed or compliant they may be, single person in an organization, no matter how suppressed or compliant they may be, is capable of making their own decisions, because they do make their own decisions in their lives.

00:23:10.519 --> 00:23:23.605
So it's a question of how do you find that part of that person, how do you invite that part of that person into the dialogue, how do you let that part of that person know that they're welcome in the space?

00:23:23.605 --> 00:23:30.910
Because a lot of people have that in them but they don't believe anyone wants it yeah, and that's what how I put it.

00:23:30.970 --> 00:23:49.846
I say when people ask me like my, or as kyle rogers put it, not, or as I put what kyle rogers saying the therapist is no longer the authority who's there to provide insight, diagnose, analyze the client.

00:23:49.846 --> 00:23:55.709
Rather sorry, I'd say, the therapist isn't the expert on the client.

00:23:55.709 --> 00:24:01.248
The client's the expert in themselves and the therapist is there to bring out their expertise.

00:24:01.248 --> 00:24:02.201
And.

00:24:02.320 --> 00:24:07.121
I always tell people if I know something that's useful, don't keep it to myself.

00:24:07.121 --> 00:24:13.292
You, I'm not a math, a sadist, but I don't see it as my role to provide, um that.

00:24:13.292 --> 00:24:33.093
I see it as my role to make help the client feel that they are expert the expert in their own life, and they are capable of making good decisions, including receiving the appropriate support to help them make good decisions and use their own genius and expertise to handle their life.

00:24:33.093 --> 00:24:42.364
They should be feel competent and fit to face the challenges of life yes, absolutely right, and some people are not, sadly.

00:24:42.423 --> 00:24:48.772
Some people are not confident enough in themselves to give themselves the gift of asking for the help that would help them.

00:24:48.772 --> 00:24:51.662
Right right, which is a shame.

00:24:51.662 --> 00:24:54.309
But we are where we are, aren't we in our lives?

00:24:54.661 --> 00:25:02.515
This is absolutely true of me, because when I was growing up as a child, there weren't that many useful adults around.

00:25:02.515 --> 00:25:09.842
Many useful adults around, you know.

00:25:09.842 --> 00:25:12.368
Adults, for the main part, seem to want to use the children around them to feel superior.

00:25:12.368 --> 00:25:14.093
And where did I go for good advice?

00:25:14.093 --> 00:25:21.281
Or now, as an adult, I had to learn that, oh yeah, I can actually ask people for advice, I can actually go out and help and people will actually help me.

00:25:21.281 --> 00:25:27.424
But I didn't develop that habit as a child because there weren't many people to get help from, you know.

00:25:27.424 --> 00:25:46.537
So that in itself is a skill, but having one good, helpful relationship can completely change your relationship to receiving, just receiving in all capacities.

00:25:46.537 --> 00:25:50.107
Yeah, I agree, and I think, well, I think that's a cultural thing.

00:25:50.127 --> 00:26:04.358
You know, the rugged individual, rugged individualism um that scott peck wrote about, um that that's that's really considered to be virtuous in the Western world.

00:26:04.358 --> 00:26:14.217
The great thing about it is that we will climb the mountain and go down the other side and find the new valley and put up a tent and create a civilization right, which is fantastic.

00:26:14.217 --> 00:26:17.534
But the downside is what you're saying, I think.

00:26:18.305 --> 00:26:23.597
Yeah, and people think that information can replace mentorship and it can.

00:26:23.597 --> 00:26:48.310
No amount of YouTube videos is going to help you as much as having someone stand beside you and see where you are and whatever it is you're you're, you're willing to learn, see where your particular blind spots are and help you develop in those areas, because they've seen it all before when we've replaced mentorship in this society with a computer screen.

00:26:48.310 --> 00:26:53.298
Okay, well, that's been a good podcast.

00:26:53.298 --> 00:26:54.086
See you next time.

00:26:54.086 --> 00:26:55.867
Go, let's see.

00:26:56.809 --> 00:27:05.627
So I'm just so impressed and inspired that you actually managed to get into a corporate environment to teach this stuff and spread the love.

00:27:05.627 --> 00:27:10.057
Um, um, how did you?

00:27:10.057 --> 00:27:12.662
How long did this go on for?

00:27:12.662 --> 00:27:14.946
And oh, wait a second before we do that.

00:27:14.946 --> 00:27:21.913
You said you got up into all sorts of craziness in your, in the fun in your 20s, but it was not fulfilling.

00:27:21.913 --> 00:27:32.493
But I feel like that's an essential part of the puzzle, because I think that you also learned some essential things during those periods of fun which informed your work.

00:27:32.493 --> 00:27:36.614
So what were your 20s like?

00:27:36.614 --> 00:27:42.017
What was the fun you had and, ultimately, what did you learn from that that you treasure and take forward?

00:27:43.306 --> 00:27:43.507
Yeah.

00:27:43.507 --> 00:27:55.239
So I'd say it's my teens and my early 20s really, I think the and of course it's all rooted in my childhood anyway.

00:27:55.239 --> 00:27:57.353
So I'll just say something about that.

00:27:57.353 --> 00:28:18.191
We were very much brought up with an alternative point of view and an alternative approach to life, quite bohemian nature, cure emphasis all that kind of thing, and so, for me, I was already getting on my bike and cycling off nowhere when I was 12 and thinking nothing about it.

00:28:18.230 --> 00:28:23.776
I was very adventurous indeed, and that adventurousness ran all the way through.

00:28:23.776 --> 00:29:05.405
I was healthy, I was well, and so I had all the usual adolescent feelings running through my body about sex, about sex playfulness, wanting to dance, wanting to be friends with people, have fun, party, all that stuff was there for me, and so part of me just kind of letting rip was just partying and having a lot of fun and smoking weed and later on taking LSD and just generally having a lot of fun.

00:29:06.346 --> 00:29:22.076
Um, but the thing with it was there was there was I didn't know enough about um love to actually get my own needs in relationship to love as in.

00:29:22.076 --> 00:29:27.806
I'm talking about soul love, that very profound soul love.

00:29:27.806 --> 00:29:37.210
I wasn't really strong enough in myself in terms of my own self-love and my own understanding around my needs in that regard.

00:29:37.210 --> 00:29:46.352
So what happened then was it was entertaining, it was adventurous, it was colorful, but there was a part of me that wasn't being fed.

00:29:47.025 --> 00:29:51.737
And of course, in the culture around me, no one else knew anything about all of that either.

00:29:51.737 --> 00:29:55.213
We were stunted.

00:29:55.213 --> 00:29:58.034
I mean I'm talking about in the 60s.

00:29:58.034 --> 00:30:06.405
We were beginning, things were sort of becoming more liberated, but still there was an awful lot of people who never shared their feelings.

00:30:06.405 --> 00:30:14.785
There were a lot of people who thought that the only form of intimacy is sex.

00:30:14.785 --> 00:30:34.366
You know someone vaguely or you're having sex with them, and there's nothing in between, none of the rich field of connection and community and communing and all those multiple, wonderful, wonderful ways we can relate to each other.

00:30:34.366 --> 00:30:42.773
And when people are unconscious of that, which I was and a lot of I had a yearning in me for that, but I I didn't know what it was.

00:30:42.795 --> 00:30:49.174
I had a yearning for, and so it was isolating, and so I reached this.

00:30:49.174 --> 00:30:57.556
But I was bright, so I could see that what a lot of people were doing in their lives was not working.

00:30:57.556 --> 00:31:06.077
I could understand a lot of things philosophically, but in my actual experience of myself there was something missing.

00:31:06.077 --> 00:31:10.230
And here's what I learned from it.

00:31:10.265 --> 00:31:13.932
This is one of the things when I was putting together this workshop.

00:31:13.932 --> 00:31:29.290
The actual theme of the workshop freedom of spirit came from me going back through my life to see what's been a thread that's been there from the beginning, and this freedom of spirit thread.

00:31:29.290 --> 00:31:37.230
What I mean by that is that kind of flame of spirit that's inside me and, I think, inside everybody.

00:31:37.230 --> 00:31:45.705
That is always there, no matter what, no matter how oppressed I might feel or trapped or self-hating or whatever.

00:31:45.705 --> 00:31:56.755
That's always there and because that's always there, there's always the opportunity of reclaiming it, reconnecting with it and feeling utterly, utterly free.

00:31:57.917 --> 00:32:20.115
And I think one of the things that really contributed to that was my whole experience around psychedelics, where I had that discovery of I can choose where I put my attention and then immerse myself in something fully, and what I think is real isn't necessarily real.

00:32:20.115 --> 00:32:36.464
So that's incredibly liberating that the world is so full of possibility and color and that my ego, my rational mind, my ego self, is not in control of any of it.

00:32:36.464 --> 00:32:39.531
It's not in control, it doesn't know what's going on.

00:32:39.531 --> 00:32:46.288
And that's actually a good thing because that opens me up to the mystery, the vast mystery of life.

00:32:46.288 --> 00:32:56.730
So I think I came out of that with a strong appreciation of the mystery of life, the fact that I don't know and that's a wonderful thing and I am free.

00:32:56.730 --> 00:33:11.510
I'm ultimately a living feeling being who has some needs and it'd be great to understand more about those and try and get some of them met.

00:33:12.424 --> 00:33:33.752
So, I was kind of raw and very sensitive, I suppose, when I came into that place, when I then went and did that, that um seminar program it's interesting because you're you.

00:33:33.772 --> 00:33:45.417
You were kind of it sounds like you were happy and not in some capacity, yeah, exploring, but it's like you know, you, you had a taste for more.

00:33:45.417 --> 00:33:49.835
You know, when you were, when you were a kid, you like your idea of um.

00:33:49.835 --> 00:34:11.664
Classical music is the lullaby by brand when you're a baby um, whatever, um, the well-known song, but then, like later on, there's a catchy pop tune and then at some point you need mozart and then beethoven, and then lord knows wagner or mallor or something like that.

00:34:11.664 --> 00:34:16.315
Um, just by analogy, like it's not.

00:34:16.315 --> 00:34:26.458
As, as life goes on, you find you have a need for for something more than what you experienced before, or to go deeper into something.

00:34:26.864 --> 00:34:30.155
Going deeper and more of a sense of meaning, and purpose.

00:34:31.130 --> 00:34:31.945
Yeah, something more meaningful.

00:34:32.688 --> 00:34:33.612
More soul stuff.

00:34:33.612 --> 00:34:43.757
I was introduced to the whole soul stuff thing even as a child because my parents were mad really.

00:34:43.757 --> 00:34:48.389
They were introducing us to all sorts of very deep notions as children.

00:34:48.389 --> 00:35:01.248
But then when I flew off in my adolescence, I was following much more the physical, the emotional drives, but those other things that were already implanted in me were still present.

00:35:02.932 --> 00:35:11.715
The voice was still in there saying Catherine, there's something more that you also need and I was like I will come back to that, but right now I'm doing this.

00:35:11.715 --> 00:35:12.458
You know what I mean.

00:35:12.458 --> 00:35:19.512
And then it was like coming back to that Because I also think in life, at different times, we actually emphasize different things.

00:35:19.512 --> 00:35:22.288
You know, you can't learn everything all at once.

00:35:22.288 --> 00:35:45.936
You have to emphasize an aspect of of of the life for a period and then come back and integrate it, and then it's more holistic again yeah, it's interesting how you can go away from certain strands for a week, months, years even, and when you pick it up, it's like it's just.

00:35:46.217 --> 00:35:51.092
It's just like you're obviously picking it up with a greater amount of experience.

00:35:51.092 --> 00:35:59.331
You can contextualize that in a broader range of experience, but it really is like like riding the bike, like you know.

00:35:59.331 --> 00:36:09.338
Speaking to you now, it just feels like when I first started doing youtube youtube, um interviews on youtube in 2014, never mind 2024.

00:36:09.338 --> 00:36:26.380
You know it's like there's a running thread of a theme and then several of these running threads, but sometimes you have to escape them for a while and lose the thread and explore other things before you pick it up again.

00:36:26.380 --> 00:36:35.297
I feel like some kind of cosmic improvisation, like in the soap operas that people used to love so much before we had YouTube.

00:36:35.297 --> 00:36:51.748
They would just go on and, on day after day, characters would die, they'd lose their jobs, they'd come out of the show and then, two seasons later, they'd lose their jobs, they'd come out of the show and then, two seasons later, or they'd bring up, they'd bring back a character that they've, that that had left the show a couple of years ago.

00:36:51.748 --> 00:36:53.432
Surprise everyone, or?

00:36:53.753 --> 00:36:57.985
you know, um, it's like there's all these threads.

00:36:57.985 --> 00:37:02.253
Sometimes I've learned things and I've been like I I got so excited about that.

00:37:02.253 --> 00:37:04.739
What does that all amount to?

00:37:04.739 --> 00:37:10.032
I was sure I was going to do something with that, and I never ended up doing anything with it.

00:37:10.032 --> 00:37:18.054
And then suddenly, five years later, you start learning something else and you see how those two things fit together.

00:37:18.054 --> 00:37:27.358
It's like there's a bunch of paintbrushes and paint colors there and you never know which one's going to appear in your hand tomorrow once you start painting.

00:37:27.358 --> 00:37:37.751
I've not touched, I've not done that, I've not touched that one for for years, but now I feel like it's the one I need to make use of right now yeah, I think that's beautifully said.

00:37:38.072 --> 00:37:45.896
I think that's one of the wonderful things in life, that constant sort of and I suppose it also is reflected in the body, isn't it?

00:37:45.896 --> 00:37:57.056
Sometimes we're sleeping, sometimes we're awake, we're breathing in, we're breathing out, we're exercising, we're resting, we're out in the sun or we're in front of the fire in the winter.

00:37:57.056 --> 00:38:16.478
We have all these cycles, and I think one of the illusions that exists these days is that we're supposed to feel good all the time, we're supposed to feel the same all the time right, be good at everything all the time, but actually that's just not the case yeah, those are dangerous, you know.

00:38:17.358 --> 00:38:20.509
But first of all, the belief that you, you need to feel good all the time.

00:38:20.509 --> 00:38:34.237
Um, the avoidance of unpleasant, like I think carl jung said, um, most neurosis is the product of the avoidance of legitimate suffering.

00:38:34.237 --> 00:38:39.152
In other words, you don't want to feel those bad feelings, so you become neurotic trying to avoid them.

00:38:39.152 --> 00:38:58.507
And someone else told me the other day I think it was just yesterday's some quote that most of man's problems come from not being able to sit alone in a dark room, or something which is more or less the same insight yes um, a lot of my healing, a lot of my my main meditation practices.

00:38:58.568 --> 00:39:09.273
when I'm feeling unpleasant, it will be to sit and see where that emotion is in my body and try and absolutely accept that unpleasant emotion as much as I can.

00:39:09.273 --> 00:39:12.855
And it's amazing the breakthroughs I have from practicing that.

00:39:12.855 --> 00:39:17.873
That's usually when I get some deep insights and I realize where I need to go in my life.

00:39:17.873 --> 00:39:33.717
I feel like the incomplete emotion is like a package of information or let's say it's some food that you've not been able to metabolize because you're rejecting it.

00:39:33.936 --> 00:39:35.079
Your body's rejecting it.

00:39:35.079 --> 00:39:39.320
What if your digestive system stopped saying I'm not allergic to this?

00:39:39.320 --> 00:39:40.324
Actually, this is for me.

00:39:40.324 --> 00:39:46.286
It's got food in it and you need to kind of unpack it to get to the nutrients.

00:39:46.286 --> 00:39:49.576
Then you go oh wow, okay, there was actually something in there for me.

00:39:49.985 --> 00:39:59.275
I'm mixing my metaphors, but um I was actually, I was actually talking to someone on this exact metaphor, the other day I said you know if you eat a piece of steak.

00:39:59.355 --> 00:40:00.726
Let's say if you're someone who eats meat.

00:40:00.726 --> 00:40:04.726
You eat a piece of steak and it goes down into your stomach.

00:40:04.726 --> 00:40:10.248
Now, digesting a piece of steak is quite hard work for the stomach, but the stomach doesn't go.

00:40:10.248 --> 00:40:12.793
Oh my God, it's a piece of steak.

00:40:12.793 --> 00:40:18.554
Okay, I'm going to have to just get some therapy before I can actually digest this piece.

00:40:18.554 --> 00:40:21.327
And the stomach sometimes goes all right, steak, all right.

00:40:21.327 --> 00:40:24.577
Then this enzyme, that thing, blah, do it, digest it.

00:40:24.577 --> 00:40:26.231
It goes through, it gets sorted out.

00:40:26.644 --> 00:40:33.193
There's no kind of emotional drama about it, but we make such an emotional drama, we make such drama.

00:40:33.686 --> 00:40:35.876
Oh, that person may upset me, you know.

00:40:36.659 --> 00:40:37.423
Yeah, what am I going to do?

00:40:38.144 --> 00:40:39.632
Okay, I'm really upset.

00:40:39.632 --> 00:40:42.072
Where is that in my body?

00:40:42.072 --> 00:40:44.570
What is going on with me?

00:40:44.570 --> 00:40:51.539
Oh right, Like you're saying, we give ourselves so many problems by doing that.

00:40:51.539 --> 00:41:24.586
It gets locked in our body and then we get tightness in the body and then we end up having difficulty walking and then we have to have a knee replaced all the drama that happens in our bodies a lot of it, I think, could be just undone by practicing exactly what you're talking about, you know, throughout our lives yeah you're not, obviously in control of all the external circumstances, but what you've just got is data coming in and then there's a reaction oh, I don't like that.

00:41:24.686 --> 00:41:27.436
I mean, that's, um, not, you're like.

00:41:27.436 --> 00:41:33.269
Not liking what happens to you is not your freedom, it's a, it's a, it's slavery.

00:41:33.269 --> 00:41:36.635
Right, you know your preferences.

00:41:36.635 --> 00:41:37.677
Oh, I don't like this.

00:41:37.677 --> 00:41:46.838
So, like, you know they're, they're they're you think that's your freedom, but they're not helpful to you, because what you have to actually do is, like, stuff happens all the time.

00:41:46.838 --> 00:41:54.418
Right, I'm creating a blockage when I say, you know, when I don't go, okay, exactly what you're saying.

00:41:54.418 --> 00:41:56.271
Right, how am I going to deal with this?

00:41:56.271 --> 00:41:57.313
Oh, I don't like it.

00:41:57.313 --> 00:41:58.670
Why does this always happen to me?

00:41:58.690 --> 00:41:59.373
It's so unfair.

00:41:59.373 --> 00:42:01.349
Even that has to be dealt with.

00:42:01.349 --> 00:42:12.090
You have to accept those parts of you that are like I'm trying to do something good here, you're meant to be helping me, you being the universe, god, whatever, and like why are you?

00:42:12.090 --> 00:42:13.615
Why are you making it more difficult?

00:42:13.615 --> 00:42:22.715
People get, seems, some how, whenever you try and change something major, you should anticipate resistance because it's going to happen.

00:42:22.715 --> 00:42:24.905
But there were two things you said there.

00:42:24.905 --> 00:42:28.251
One was, and I've forgotten one of them.

00:42:28.251 --> 00:42:32.465
One was um, people think we need to feel good all the time.

00:42:33.007 --> 00:42:37.684
And there was a second thing there people think they should be good at everything all the time.

00:42:37.846 --> 00:42:46.056
Oh, yeah, exactly, and that's obviously dangerous because you won't actually attempt to do things that you you'll stop at the first hurdle.

00:42:46.056 --> 00:42:49.340
You know you should do things that you're crap at.

00:42:49.340 --> 00:42:52.110
I realized, unfortunately, in my thirties, I wish I'd.

00:42:52.110 --> 00:42:58.490
I wish I'd got that earlier, you know, but sorry you had.

00:42:58.490 --> 00:42:59.012
You had a.

00:42:59.492 --> 00:43:05.777
It looked like you had a thread to pull on there yeah, I can't remember now because I've now got swept up in the thing you said in response.

00:43:05.777 --> 00:43:09.512
The thing is talking to you, anthony, every sentence.

00:43:09.512 --> 00:43:11.858
There's so many threads that we could follow up on.

00:43:11.858 --> 00:43:13.590
You know we can't follow up on.

00:43:13.590 --> 00:43:14.512
That's another thing.

00:43:14.512 --> 00:43:16.811
We can't follow up on everything all the time.

00:43:16.831 --> 00:43:17.353
There you go Right.

00:43:18.585 --> 00:43:20.989
And this conversation is an example of that.

00:43:20.989 --> 00:43:24.356
We can just kind of go with where we're able to go.

00:43:27.387 --> 00:43:37.958
Yeah, we're making a chi cascade because the listener will continue to cogitate upon the threads that we've opened and hopefully add something.

00:43:37.958 --> 00:43:39.521
You know just a few principles there.

00:43:39.521 --> 00:43:42.887
One, you're not always going to feel good.

00:43:42.887 --> 00:43:46.335
Two, you're not always going to be good at everything at everything, and that's okay.

00:43:46.335 --> 00:43:50.492
And three, a big one for me to come to peace with is you're not going to finish everything you start.

00:43:50.492 --> 00:43:58.757
And just because you don't finish it, just because it doesn't come to fruition, it doesn't mean you didn't learn something of value from pursuing it.

00:43:58.757 --> 00:44:12.831
And b, you never know when god's going to pick it up again and say okay, you dropped this theme 10 years ago, but I'm bringing back the theme because I'm the master storyteller and I know what to do with themes.

00:44:12.831 --> 00:44:27.233
So I think, if you look at it, that it's only when you're in scarcity and you think I won't be able to replicate that that you get in that mindset of, oh, I didn't finish that.

00:44:27.233 --> 00:44:34.034
No, make sure what you're doing right now is fulfilling, and if you want to finish that later, you can finish it.

00:44:34.034 --> 00:44:34.306
Like.

00:44:34.867 --> 00:44:43.597
The apple tree creates so many apples, and how many of those apple seeds actually become apple trees themselves?

00:44:43.597 --> 00:44:45.407
Still, very few of them.

00:44:45.407 --> 00:44:47.050
Nature is abundant.

00:44:47.050 --> 00:44:49.436
It's only people who fail to thrive.

00:44:49.436 --> 00:44:55.831
We have the like, and that reminds me of that story from Carl Rogers.

00:44:55.831 --> 00:45:07.838
He said when he was a child there were these sacks of potatoes in the basement and they would never grow because they weren't in the earth.

00:45:07.838 --> 00:45:22.454
But there was just a small shaft of light coming in through the window in the cellar and some of the potatoes would shoot and they would send the shoots in the direction of where the line was coming into the cellar.

00:45:22.454 --> 00:45:29.376
So life fails to give up, refuses to give up, even in the most hopeless of conditions.

00:45:29.376 --> 00:45:33.295
And he saw his patients like that.

00:45:33.295 --> 00:45:39.692
They were not put in an environment where they could thrive, but they were doing their best.

00:45:39.692 --> 00:45:42.172
Life would still try and find a way.

00:45:43.405 --> 00:46:28.248
And when you were talking about the freedom of spirit, the thing that just doesn't die, that fire that's always there, I was thinking because everything is synchronicity of what Carl Rogers would call the actualizing principle that exists in each human being, and I think you were both knocking on the same door there yeah, I totally agree, and I just want to come back to the thing you said very briefly but which I think is really true, where you said that this business of deciding that we don't like something we're feeling and then letting that kind of restrict us or close down, that is a form of self-enslavement, and I would go further and say that's a form of self-denial.

00:46:28.248 --> 00:46:36.893
We're not accepting ourselves in that moment, because ourselves in that moment is the experience that we're having.

00:46:36.893 --> 00:46:52.333
So if we really love ourselves and accept ourselves, that will include loving and accepting whatever it is that we're experiencing, which is not the same as loving and accepting the thing that's external to us, that's having an impact upon us.

00:46:52.333 --> 00:46:55.282
So the pain is ours.

00:46:55.282 --> 00:47:07.739
The person smacking us in the face is someone else, metaphorically, but the freedom comes from embracing all of the experiences.

00:47:09.201 --> 00:47:15.579
There's a story that someone told me years ago that I love, which is set in a Tibetan monastery.

00:47:15.579 --> 00:47:21.231
The Chinese soldiers come over the mountain and they come and they take over the monastery.

00:47:21.231 --> 00:47:27.070
They've got the head of the monastery on his knees in the middle of the courtyard.

00:47:27.070 --> 00:47:32.599
The leader of the monastery is just looking absolutely calm.

00:47:32.599 --> 00:47:37.170
The soldier says how can you be so calm?

00:47:37.170 --> 00:47:40.527
Don't you realize I could run this sword through your head at any moment?

00:47:40.527 --> 00:47:42.719
The monk looks up at him and says do you realize I could have this sword through your head at any moment?

00:47:42.719 --> 00:47:48.777

Ep 153: Antony Sammeroff Guest Host ~ Unleash the Freedom of your Spirit & Change the World!

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