Life’s Toughest Choice: When Choosing Yourself Means Career Change, Divorce, and Defining Free Will- Eric Windhorst, Imi Lo

 

Eric is Back! In this episode we discussed:

– the courage it takes to leave a secure career, 

– the fear of hurting loved ones when leaving a family that no longer aligns with your truth,

– and the philosophical question of whether free will truly exists. 

**

This conversation with Eric delved deep, touching on those universal life questions we all ponder. 

We went deep. Eric generously walked us through his journey of making a major career shift later in life, leaving behind the security of a science career to follow his heart and become a therapist. He didn’t shy away from addressing the very real anxieties around finances, societal expectations, and the weight of responsibility we often feel as adults. If you’ve ever felt that pull towards a different path but fear held you back, Eric’s experience will resonate.

I am incredibly grateful for his vulnerabilities and openness- Eric opened up about his decision to leave a marriage that no longer felt aligned with his truth. He spoke with such sincerity about the complexities of this experience—the pain, the fear, and most of all- the fear of hurting those he loves.

His willingness to be so vulnerable was a gift to us all. Sometimes, choosing authenticity means making difficult choices, even when it hurts. And for those intellectually inclined, we also delved into the age-old debate of free will versus determinism. Do we truly control our destinies, or are we guided by a force beyond our understanding?

What I loved about this conversation was that it was not an interview but more like two friends just… talking. Conversing. We were touching upon anything that came into our minds about life, the universe, everything.

I hope you’ll listen with an open heart and mind because Eric’s insights were rich and deep, and they might spark something in you too.

Listening to Eric, I felt connected to his story.

Even though his experiences were unique, they reflected the common struggle we all face when trying to break free from what society expects of us to find our true paths. He reminded me that this journey is never straightforward. It’s filled with doubts and uncertainties, but also moments of clarity and a deep inner sense that guides us.

 ** 

(Roughly)

[00:00:00]: Catching up

[00:00:24]: Faith in the universe

[00:01:39]: Challenges of being authentic and sensitive

[00:04:35]: Eric’s path to authenticity

[00:09:03]: The role of therapy

[00:17:28]: Career change- financial and emotional uncertainties

[00:25:22]: House renovation and spiritual awakening

[00:35:02]: Do we have free will?

[00:53:55]: Fear of hurting someone you love, relationship challenges  

[01:42:06]: Closing thoughts

**

[00:00:00.00] – Imi Lo

Good morning. Good to have you back. Thanks. It is really good to be back. I’m happy to have the chance to speak with you again.

[00:00:09.19] – Imi Lo

Me too. I don’t really have any plans for today. I thought we would just have a chat like two friends.

[00:00:16.50] – Eric

I think that sounds absolutely fantastic.

[00:00:19.77] – Imi Lo

Then see where it takes us.

[00:00:23.23] – Eric

Yeah, let’s do it.

[00:00:24.59] – Imi Lo

I think we already started before we started. I was just saying I wish I had your faith in the universe sometimes when things don’t go well. I do have some topics that people have asked me to ask you because people seem to really have taken a lot from what you shared last time. There are certain themes we may pick up on around being sensitive men in the world, some of the social dynamics. Someone even mentioned specific We don’t have to get through all of that. These are just requests. We can honor them or we can say, Well, maybe the chemistry is not going there. Someone even mentioned things like homophobia, the thoughts of being misunderstood, and negative stereotypes. I think the pain of being authentic might be a really good big theme around the risk of helping someone take down the defense whilst over-exposing them to risk. Yeah.

[00:01:39.73] – Eric

Well, that is a big one. That is huge. Wherever you want to start. And I think it actually does dovetail nicely with the sense of trusting the universe or trusting life, or trusting other people, just trusting life to meet a meet us halfway. You were mentioning earlier, just like you admire my faith in the universe. What I was saying is that, from an internal parts perspective, my soul, My soul part, which I’m driven by for better or for worse, sometimes for my ego’s desires about it, but my soul has no doubt about anything, as in it has a plan. It has a plan for If I follow that plan if I follow that thread, I have never gone astray. Things always end up somehow working out, even in ways that are, quite frankly, beyond rational comprehension. But that doesn’t mean all of me feels that way by any means. There are parts of me, wounded parts, like we all have, family traumas, being different, being sensitive. The last time I was on, we talked about being a man in the world, being a sensitive man, a hyper-aware man. We live in a world where those types of traits, they’re not normalized, first of all.

[00:03:09.14] – Eric

Then they’re often shamed by other men who want to hide their own sensitivity. There’s a lot of those dynamics that go on. I have parts of myself, like we all do, that it’s like, is everything going to be okay? Can I trust life to provide for me, financially, materially, emotionally, and socially? It has taken a long time for some of those really sensitive parts of myself to come to a place of understanding and acceptance that actually everything is going to be okay. Because of my whole nervous system, as well as multi-generational trauma, if I look at patterns down both family lines, all of that pointed to the fact that the world is unsafe. It’s not a good idea to be yourself. The best thing you can hope to do is adapt and maybe be successful in a financial sense, but not in an authentic being of oneself in the world. It’s been a lot of work to get to this place. Obviously, the work continues as well.

[00:04:13.68] – Imi Lo

You mentioned a few times financial implications and being authentic. Have you also taken the plunge at some point in your life to have left something that would be more conventionally recognized or financially stable to follow an authentic path? Can you share a little more about that, if so?

[00:04:35.90] – Eric

I can share. Yes, I have. I’m just thinking briefly about how much context to provide. Okay, so- Not too much context so people can- Yeah, I know. I tend to… So I have… Last time you were introducing me I was saying labels and all of these things, and I don’t adhere tightly to labels. I hold them loosely, but they’re useful. So I’m somewhere in the high plus giftedness range, and I have ADHD, probably diagnosable ADHD, which I don’t treat. And my daughter has severe ADHD as well. I don’t treat it because when I take stimulants, it shuts off my intuition, and I’m just not interested in living machine-like. That’s what it makes me feel like. I also have some autistic traits as well. Why am I saying this? What were you asking? In terms of context, it’s sometimes difficult for me to keep a linear pathway because my brain goes off in multiple divergent paths at once.

[00:05:38.90] – Imi Lo

If I know if you’re doing that, would you like me to… Well, I got the feedback that I interrupt people a lot, so I’m trying not to do that. I did.

[00:05:45.86] – Eric

I think I saw that. Yeah.

[00:05:48.63] – Imi Lo

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But then would you like me to take us back? Or maybe we’ll just find a balance between your diverse thinking and sometimes a more linear path. But I think I’ll lean towards- Let’s- Let’s sing you do- Let’s dance. Let’s dance.

[00:06:04.69] – Eric

Okay. So yes, I did leave a more conventional path. So when I was… Okay, so in my first degree, I went into biology and chemistry. I love nature. I actually love science. I find science fascinating. It suits a certain aspect of my psyche. At that point, I was also very emotionally shut down and blocked. Going into science was a perfect place because it’s all focused on the rational. It’s very masculine in that sense. It not only provided a sense of like, Oh, I’m fascinated by this information. It kept me distance from things, which is what I wanted to do. I wanted to have the subject-object because that made me feel more comfortable. I also love nature, of course, which I could go on about, but I’m not going to follow that diversion path right now. I did my first degree in biology-chemistry. My first job, my first real I guess, job. I was working as an environmental consultant. Environmental planner, consulting company. I got the job and management was like, Oh, man, who is this guy? I was an up-and-coming star. That fed my ego part, which was looking for that reassurance to rarify, and I’ll call it a false self.

[00:07:27.11] – Eric

I don’t mean it to be so… That makes it sound like It was an adaptive self. I was reliant on people praising my adaptive self in order to have self-esteem. So achievement. In university, my GPA was just perfect. I performed excellently. Everything looked really good on paper. I had it all mastered. I was working for about three years, two years, and then my daughter was born, and I mentioned this during our last call as well. When she was born and I got to hold her, I was the first person to get to hold her, her energy, as well as just her looking at me with her beautiful blue eyes, quite frankly, it awakened that part of me, the more authentic part of me, which sounds beautiful. It was beautiful. Excuse my language, but it really fucked things up big time. What I mean by that is it threw me into this incoherence and this positive disintegration because there was the adaptive self, and then there was this authentic part which was all of a sudden being seen and it needed to come out. It was yearning for expression. I went to therapy. Fortunately, I found a therapist, a Jungian therapist, who was able to see what was actually happening in me, not just the symptoms of what I was experiencing, because for all intents and purposes, I was having intense anxiety.

[00:09:03.35] – Eric

A major depressive episode is how it would have been diagnosed, according to the DSM. That’s not false. Those are true conceptualizations. But what he saw in me, he saw my soul, yearning for expression. He saw my authentic self wanting to come out. Having somebody see that and not buy into the medicalized dynamic of things, provided me with enough of a bit of a nest, let’s say, to start developing and to start growing. As part of that process, I discovered a lot of my sensitivity, my neurodivergence, my personality type, INFJ. We talked a little bit about that last time. And also it became very clear that I was on the wrong path in terms of where my soul wanted to go. So what did that mean? Well, that meant I had to go back to school. I needed to train to become a therapist myself and ended up pursuing a pretty open-ended degree in.

[00:10:00.72] – Eric

Spiritual care and psychotherapy. I was terrified, like, well, that’s. I mean, different parts of me felt differently. So my soul was like, let’s just fucking do this. Let’s do it. This is going to be so exciting. This is going to be meaningful. Some of my wounded parts were like, yeah. They were like, holy, what are you doing? So I had to go back full time because part time was not going to work. I had, at that point, had two young kids, so I had two young kids. I was working full time. The breadwinner in Canada. Thankfully, we have a pretty good social kind of system in such that school is actually pretty affordable, especially when you have dependents and everything. So I had to go back full time to make it work. But that meant I was giving up, for all intents and purposes, from the outside, what looked like a career that I had been building towards for six years. People saying, people praising me, everything looks so good, except that I was miserable. And there’s parts of me that didn’t even want to recognize that I was miserable. I remember my therapist. I did a lot of data analysis in my job, and there’s a part of me which loves using excel spreadsheets and calculating things and looking at scenario analysis, things like that.

[00:11:15.30] – Eric

My therapist asked me, he’s like, oh, that doesn’t really sound like something you would enjoy. And I was just like, who the fuck, like, who the fuck do you think you are, buddy? Like, of course I enjoy this. Of course I enjoy this. Like, because that was my ego identity.

[00:11:27.90] – Imi Lo

Yes. The fact that you reacted so strongly though, you know, oh, my.

[00:11:31.68] – Eric

I was so. I was so. Oh, I was obtusely offended. There was also something else he said, which perhaps will. Yeah, I guess if. If synchronicity is afoot, maybe we’ll talk about as well another thing that he saw. And I was like, no, don’t. No, I’m not going to go there. And now I’m getting off on another kind of, sorry, divergent, divergent direction questions.

[00:11:55.27] – Imi Lo

When it’s appropriate to do so. So give me a signal.

[00:11:58.63] – Eric

So let me. Yeah, I will give you. I will give you a signal. So anyway, so I ended up going back to school full time with two young kids, no income. My wife was on maternity leave at the time. And I just kind of like, I knew I had to do it, but I did not think it was going to end well. My therapist said, oh, you could probably make, like, you might be able to make like $50,000 a year. Like, you can probably make an okay living as a therapist. And I was convinced the most catastrophic parts myself were thinking, im going to be sitting with my kids on the side of the road with, like, tin cups, begging for. Begging for money. That was, like, my most catastrophic part. And then even so, it was, like, financially speaking, I was on a career path where I would have been making six figures within. Yeah, within, like, a couple of years. Like, I would have been making a lot of money, and again, being praised for that. And here I was starting over in a field that I had no background in, with two young kids, no income, and no guarantee of what the future held.

[00:13:01.86] – Eric

It was absolutely terrifying. But there was also something inside of me that just knew this was the path. So you can ask questions now, because I think I saturated.

[00:13:12.27] – Imi Lo

Inspiring. No, thank you. That was concise and coherent and just inspiring. I was with you all the way there, and I can really resonate with that fear to others. You might be catastrophizing, but I do understand this. I’m the same. Like, to me, the only way to feel safe is to think about the worst and then see if I can cope with it. But it sounded like even with that risk hanging in there, it was still worth it. Were you aware of how inauthentic it was when you were in it, or were you still, like. I think you might have already answered it. How much in denial were you of the inauthenticity?

[00:13:55.20] – Eric

Again, it depends on what part of myself we’re talking about. So, again, the soul part was like, man, you’re an idiot. What are you doing? Get on track here. But my soul energy is so confident and so strong. But these other parts of me, oh, I was like, I was in denial. Even up until I was even in the program, I was still very ambivalent about. About buying into this, if that made sense, or kind of, like, fully surrendering to it. I don’t think I really fully surrendered at all, quite frankly. No.

[00:14:32.76] – Imi Lo

How could you then soothe your nervous inner child and stay on the soul path?

[00:14:42.45] – Eric

Oh, man, that is, like, such a. Such a big question. I don’t know if I can answer. Answer that. Like, in a way that, like, with. With, like, good. Good reasons or how I did it. So my partner, like, supported me unconditionally. So I think that that’s precious. Even though. Even though she didn’t understand, she unconditionally supported me. So. So that, like, having somebody. Right. Having somebody for my inner child who could kind of, like, not be questioning it, that was huge for me. Otherwise, just a lot of fear and trembling some connections with other people in the program that really felt resonant on a soul level. And then there was a certain kind of just determination, as in there was this anxiety, there was that inner child part was not convinced the whole time, and there was some element of just like, putting 1ft in front of the other. It’s like, it’s like I have to, I have to follow. Like, I didn’t really feel like I had a choice in me, if that makes sense. I haven’t really felt actually like I’ve had a choice about anything since I was 25. And what I mean by that is oftentimes, intuitively, or again, I talk about kind of my soul part will, something will happen, and it’s like I can choose either to follow that thread or I can choose not to.

[00:16:20.34] – Eric

So like, there’s this thing, there’s this, there’s a thread I’ve been following, and I don’t ultimately know where it’s ultimately leading. I don’t know if it ever ends, quite frankly. So I can choose to let go of the thread, but when I let go of the thread, I’m miserable. So either way, there’s some degree of suffering, and I would call it following the thread is authentic suffering, as in there’s still uncertainties, there’s still fears, but there’s like this deep sense of being supported. There’s a deep sense of meaning and purpose, like a groundedness in it, like a determination. When I let go of the thread, maybe to follow something that’s easier, maybe to abate some of my anxieties, some of my fears, it very quickly, like I can’t even do it anymore. But for a long time, when I would do it, I would be miserable. I would feel like my life energy would just be like. Would just like drain out of me, and life just felt like, drab and colorless. And then. So as this process has continued over the past 15 years, it’s like I just can’t let go anymore. I don’t want to.

[00:17:28.85] – Eric

I have too much evidence empirically that this is the right thing to do. So. So yeah, there’s definitely determination and kind of like a trusting this trusting in the universe, but that doesn’t mean at all times, in all places, I feel that degree of reassurance at all, because I’m human.

[00:17:46.75] – Imi Lo

You’ve given me a wonderful answer. I love that. And I’m gonna be grieving. And as from that, of course, yeah. Let’s say on the typical day where, I don’t know, you look at your bank account or you receive some bad news about, I don’t know, you saw in the news that the average earning of a counselor in a city is this. I don’t know, just something happened and you panic. What then you do. Because were there a backup plan? Was there this temptation to, so go get a job or something? Do you have to dance back and forth or it’s just like you were on the path. There’s no turning back. You just have to soothe yourself. I think what I really wanted to find is if people were to do this, how can they replicate your process? I’m trying to combine science and art.

[00:18:42.22] – Eric

Like, absolutely.

[00:18:43.34] – Imi Lo

What could they say to themselves to soothe themselves? I like the idea of, it’s just different kinds of suffering. You choose yours. What I often do, I’ve got all these whiteboards on my wall, little reminders that I have to remind myself of things, but different people have different tools, and I wonder if you can share yours.

[00:19:07.18] – Eric

So the first thing I would say is, don’t, please don’t replicate my process, but find your own process would be my first thing to say. So, sorry, what was the question? What was the question again specifically? Oh, so when something difficult comes up, something triggers me. So when something triggers me. So I don’t typically, yeah, I don’t really focus too much on the money side of things anymore, but I’ll just give a pretty innocuous example that happened recently because I think it kind of illustrates a little bit. And this is going to sound, it’s going to make me sound pretty pathetic, quite frankly, but, okay. So I had ordered a new couch, okay. From a, from a company, and it was a modular couch. It was beautiful. I’m really looking forward to this couch, I’ll be honest with you. But they sent it, and a whole section was missing from this modular couch. And I was like, okay. So I got in contact with the company. Oh, just wait a few days. It might still come. Well, it didn’t come. Got in touch with them. They said, okay, we’re going to order a replacement part.

[00:20:11.27] – Eric

And then the next day, the morning, I got an email saying, we actually don’t have any more parts. Oh, my God. My inner child part was like, oh, my God, you just spent like $800 on a piece of, like, I’ve never spent money like that on a piece. Oh, spent all of this money and, oh, you just fucked up. Like, like, what are we going to do here? Like, it was like this catastrophic kind of, like, childlike response because. Because I have these inner children like, we all do. So, so what I did is I noticed it because I’ve been kind of working on the self-awareness with these kind of components for some time. So I noticed it. And then I’m like, huh? Huh? That’s my child part. That’s the little boy who wasn’t adequately cared for. It wasn’t adequately understood and seen, and he feels like he’s all on his own in the world and that something really bad is going to happen because of this. And it was like, wow. Like, that’s extreme. And so then I kind of, like, turned towards him, like with my more kind of adult consciousness in the present.

[00:21:16.14] – Eric

And I’m like, it’s going to be okay. We’re going to be okay. And I didn’t always have that connection with, with this part or with these parts. Like, it’s taken me quite some time to develop trust with, with my parts because adults in my life were, um, well-meaning, but, uh, let’s say incompetent often. Um, so for the child parts, to trust the competence of my adult part, it’s taken some time, but now we’re in a relationship, so I can kind of turn towards, I’m like, you’re not alone. Okay. And it’s okay. Give them a hug. How do we solve this problem? Well, I got in touch with them. Well, it turns out they’re just going to send me a whole new couch.

[00:21:57.45] – Imi Lo

Of course, they’re in perspective. It’s like, well, they either give you a refund or they better solve it.

[00:22:02.74] – Eric

Exactly. So now, so now I’m going to have a love because it’s modular and I can say, and now I’m going to have a love seat and a couch. Everything’s going to be fine. And then that part’s kind of like I told that part. It’s like, it’s okay. Like these things happen and we solve the problems and sometimes it turns out even better. And what I’m noticing more and more is, and I guess I’m going to be, is it okay if I start jumping to a little bit more of the spiritual? Oh, I don’t. Well, I’m just, yeah, okay, well, I appreciate that. So, so what I’m noticing more and more with how my development, my psychological growth and spiritual growth kind of ensues, is that really the outer circumstances, the things happening outside of me, or apparently outside of me are just reflections of my inner state. Like it’s, or there’s some letter. All it is, is constant lessons to learn that’s all that life seems to be. And I’ll give another example of this. And I might get a little bit emotional, actually, because it was a very difficult period. Kind of a dark night of the soul.

[00:23:07.15] – Eric

So this past summer, and so last summer and then going into this previous winter, we went through a major house renovation. Like, major house, like, where a whole. Like, we had to move out. A whole section of our house was taken off. Lots of mechanical and structural problems with that part of the house. And then we were going to build a little bit bigger, so a little bit more functional, solve those problems more beautiful. It was a disaster from the start. The project was a disaster from the start. And this was happening concurrent with kind of a positive disintegration slash kind of a spiritual awakening I was going through, and they were mirroring one another. And so, what do I mean by that? So they had to dig a new foundation for this, for this new structure. They were putting onto the addition onto the back of the house. Well, the soil here is pure sand. Like, I’m actually, like, live on a sandbar of what used to be a large lake. And when they were digging, it was just collapsing in. It would not hold. The foundation was just collapsing it. Like, our neighbor’s property was sinking into our.

[00:24:15.27] – Eric

Into the hole that was being dug. And that actually mirrors specifically how I’ve often felt in the world, like, so the basement as the unconscious. And I just basically am so permeable to the energies of other people around me that they just. It just infiltrates my unconscious, and it just, like, it just fills in my space. I have no. I have no foundational structure. And so this was all happening. And I was kind of cognizant of, like, this interesting dynamic that was happening with all of these problems externally were mirroring the problems I was experiencing internally and issues I was working on. We also had all of these contractors working on the project. Some of them were deceptive and lying, which I’m pretty good at detecting inauthenticity and lies and. Whoa. In the contracting world, people are often a real treat. And that mirrored parts of myself. There were protector parts of myself that were trying to deceive me and go back to old coping mechanisms, turn away from what I knew I had to do when I would actually learn my internal lesson. Everything in the renovation started going well. When I wasn’t, everything in the renovation started going horribly.

[00:25:22.89] – Eric

It was like the same. I mean, that sounds. It sounds, as I’m saying this, it sounds ridiculous, okay? Like, I am a scientist. I am always very skeptical of things, but it’s like there’s just so much evidence now that literally this isn’t just a meaning-making process. This is like there’s some kind of a connection here that the elder is trying to teach me some type of a lesson to learn inwardly. And as I learn those inward lessons, the outward shifts. Anyways, we ended up getting through it. Extended, huge, extended timeline, way over a budget. I have no money. There’s no money. It’s all gone. And that was catastrophic for parts of me, too. And I come out the other side of it. I have a nice, sturdy foundation now. Everything’s functioning well, and I’ve lost a whole bunch of security that I thought I had had. I had a whole bunch of money saved, and it’s just all evaporated. It’s all gone. And I feel like everything’s still okay. It’s really weird. It’s a, it’s, it’s such a strange, it’s been such a strange experience.

[00:26:25.15] – Imi Lo

Must be really powerful and change your perspective on life.

[00:26:29.18] – Eric

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And increasingly, increasingly as I’m, you know, working with clients, as I’m listening to music, as I’m spending time in nature, as I, as I often do, even seeing numbers and things, like, there’s all of these breadcrumbs, there’s all of these lessons, and it sparks something intuitively in me. Like, a client sometimes will say something to me about their own process, and it will elicit something that I need to learn about my own process. And so what I’m coming to learn, and I think my. I guess my demeaning or the story that I’m kind of making of life in a lot of ways at this point, is life is an opportunity for us to learn lessons. And all life is, is a continuous growth process. And sometimes that growth process is intense and overwhelming and sometimes too much, quite frankly. Other times, we’re kind of blocked and we’re out of the flow. But it’s just every day is an opportunity. Through conversations with other people, if we’re kind of, like, paying attention, we’re constantly getting messages about, about. Yeah. Something that may be a material change we might need to make in our life, maybe something more internal in terms of our psychological dynamics, our coping mechanisms.

[00:27:42.25] – Eric

And it seems like every, every day for me is just like, by the end of the day, it’s like, man, I just learned, like, ten lessons today. It’s like, what? Like, holy cow. And then tomorrow is going to be like, it’s just like a continuous process. And some of those really sensitive parts myself, they’re like, we’re scared. We don’t like all of this constant growth and change. We want, we just. We want that, like, that stability, like, and we want that kind of routine, like, and I have some of these autistic traits, although it could also be trauma related. And so, you know, at times I just want. I want stability. And yet when I’m just in that kind of, like, comfort zone, let’s just say I quickly get uncomfortable. Like, I don’t actually want to be just in that, like, stagnated state. It doesn’t feel increasingly. It just doesn’t feel good. Um, so that’s kind of like how things have been shifting. And this is. A lot of this has happened, actually, since the last time we talked back in February.

[00:28:35.50] – Imi Lo

So I was just thinking how quickly our ego often jumps to judge something as really good, really bad, really catastrophized, you know, like, you know, your house was flooded, things like that. Lost a job. It’s very difficult to. Convinced. Seems too violent a word. But yeah, just. Even. Just to shift our perspective. Otherwise, when our ego is so drowned in feeling something is a disaster, something is really bad. How can it not be bad? Your earlier narrative about switching career reminded me of a quote from, I think it’s Marcus Aurelius, my favorite spiritual teacher. He said, it sounds radical, but I think it points to the soul death that you were talking about. Think of yourself as dead. You’ve lived your life and now take what’s left and live it properly. I quite like that because it’s like kind of a radical way of letting go. Think of yourself as that. So just literally letting go of that inauthentic life and then start from here. So doing that, you don’t compare. You don’t go and compare your new study in counseling with your science job because that was not there anymore.

[00:29:58.73] – Eric

Oh, I did, though. But anyways. Yeah, I hear you. Yes.

[00:30:01.70] – Imi Lo

Yeah. No, I mean, yeah, I’m just stating that as though if I were you, I’m probably writing that down and then sticking on the wall, but needing that daily reminder because I would be doing exactly the same.

[00:30:15.29] – Eric

Yeah. Like. Like these little sticky notes I have. Like, I don’t look back.

[00:30:19.80] – Imi Lo

I can’t shoot my computer, but I have so many, you won’t even believe it. I’m surrounded by them.

[00:30:27.65] – Eric

Present. Just be present. Get out of your mind. Just be present.

[00:30:31.27] – Imi Lo

I guess right now is, um, just next to me. I’ve got, like, half time putting them back in. I guess I’ve got more.

[00:30:45.26] – Eric

I’m jealous of your supply. I know my ego’s jealous and it’s comparing my supply to yours. And I feel inadequate.

[00:30:52.54] – Imi Lo

I’ve got these from, like, Japan.

[00:30:55.10] – Eric

Oh, those are cute.

[00:30:57.18] – Imi Lo

They are. Okay. Such a diversion. But yeah, we were talking about still trusting the universe and. Yeah. Well, thank you for sharing all of that. And I do wish it can inspire some people to explore. I mean, what would you suggest someone, if they have a sense or a feeling? This is a question I find myself asking my guests quite a lot. I think maybe I am constantly on some kind of similar process. And unconsciously, I’m trying to help myself, too. How do they follow the bread crumbs and choose the authentic path when all the noise and ego is screaming at them? Who would they be like, someone asked me, oh, if I do that when I go to a party and others ask me what to do, what I do, I wouldn’t know what to say, which is such a cliche kind of American notion of what do you do? And then you don’t know what to say. Kind of anxiety coming up, status anxiety. But then I think living in this world, that is really quite an immediate thing that would come up when you were about to make that kind of jump.

[00:32:19.42] – Eric

Oh, I felt horrible when people would ask me. I felt so much shame. Oh, oh, yeah.

[00:32:26.27] – Imi Lo

Because previously you would be defined by a proper title in a big company, and they can already guess that you will be earning around a hundred scientist.

[00:32:34.24] – Eric

Amy. I was a scientist, right? I was a respectable scientist who understood the world and could. And could, you know what I mean? And people looked up to that kind of intelligence, and I kind of. I left it all. And people would ask me, my friends, like, two of my good friends from high school, they were like, what are you doing? They didn’t understand. Why would you do that? But, I mean, they’re not, they don’t have the same kind of neurodivergence as me either, but they had no kind of reference point of like, so you’ve built all of this up. Everything’s like, why would you do, like, why would you throw things away to follow something that’s completely unknown and uncertain just because it feels right? It’s like, that’s just so foreign. That was such a foreign thing for a lot of people. And actually, I met up with these friends last weekend, and my one friend had this really great insight. He’s like, you know, Eric, like, you know, the path you’ve taken does not surprise me in a lot of ways. But I don’t, I still don’t understand this intuition that you have and this ability to see things or maybe have faith in the universe.

[00:33:45.35] – Eric

He’s like, he’s like, the way that my mind works is I just take in kind of data and information from the past and from what I observe in the world, and then I kind of project that into the future. And I think that’s really the way that most of our kind of, like, ego selves work, right? Like our rational selves, right. The only way that our rational component can anticipate the future is to take past data. So our past experiences, whether that’s unconscious or conscious, and the knowledge that we’ve gained, and then take that and project it out into the future. So we take the path and we project it out. Well, you’re probably then actually only taking in 1% of the possibility, not even of what is actually potentially possible. And so I guess maybe a roundabout way of answering your question about, like, how do you trust, how do you trust the processes? Well, one, one aspect of it, like you said, is facing death, like being afraid of death. Um, you know, the Ernest Becker, the denial of death. I remember reading that book. This idea that, like, if you can face your immortality, um, which ultimately a lot of our fears seem to be based on, is, is some type of a survival thing.

[00:34:55.66] – Eric

If you can face the fact that you’re going to die and you can actually feel that pain and the suffering, you’re, you are free then to be present and live.

[00:35:02.78] – Imi Lo

Um, yes, yes, yes.

[00:35:04.28] – Eric

Easier said than done. Obviously, a near death experience is very often transformed people. Um, dark nights of the soul, like my dark night of the soul were basically where all of my, all of my security blankets I had built up were torn away from me outside of my control. And I was in this kind of, this, this, like, this kind of tornado, and eventually the pieces kind of settled again. And then my ego, what my ego learned, or that rational component learned, is like, we do not have control here. We are not, we are not very smart. We are not very intelligent. We can only compute. And this goes into AI. AI is not very intelligent either. But that’s a whole other discussion. But we can only take data in. It would be quite an interesting discussion. So we can take data in and project data out. Okay, but how much information is our minds typically actually encompassing? Probably 0.001% of all possibilities. Right. Living intuitively and with our intuitive knowing, being in touch with energy. I’m very kind of energetically sensitive is I’m constantly getting data flows coming into me from other people, from places, songs, like, all of these things.

[00:36:15.16] – Eric

And it’s like there’s. There’s. And so my. My rational brain just wants to take what I went through and project it out into the future. You are that person. You are that identity. You are what society tells you. And then I project that out. Future. This other part is kind of like. It’s like my future self is actually pulling me towards it. And I have no. My ego has no agency in that process either, other than surrendering or resisting.

[00:36:42.45] – Imi Lo

Yeah.

[00:36:42.45] – Eric

And, yeah, that’s terrifying. It has been terrifying. But now that I’ve kind of experienced enough renditions of this cycle of, like, facing something that seemed catastrophically uncertain and scary, getting through it and ending up better off than I could have ever imagined, and again, maybe again, we could say that’s privilege. There’s a whole bunch of problems, right? And ways I can see what I’m. I can even analyze what I’m saying and say, like, well, would this be true for everybody? I don’t. I don’t necessarily know. I like, this is my experience, and it’s situated. I do think there’s a lot of possibility for people outside of what most of us would think. But there’s context and there’s structures like we were talking about last time that do inhibit things. And if you’re a minority of various different kinds, if you’re a woman, like, there’s. There’s so many different factors that shape our experience. So I don’t want to make it sound. You know what I mean? Like trite, you know? You know? Okay. I also want to honor. I also want to honor that. I also want to honor. Honor those pieces. But it’s like I’ve.

[00:37:48.11] – Eric

It’s like. And this, again, maybe sounds a bit trite, but if life is. Is kind of like a game, as in there’s. There’s certain rule, like the way that the game actually works is that it’s all just learning. And if we can follow and we can learn, then things are going to be okay if we’re being authentic. And I think that is actually the nature of the universe. Like, when I. When I look at. At the natural world, for example, we’re part of, obviously, the natural world, except that with our big cerebral cortexes, we seem to think that we can transcend bio. Like, we can just transcend things and we can kind of create our own unit. It’s never going to work, quite frankly, because I would trust billions of years of evolution over a couple hundred years of rational scientific analysis any day. But when I look at the natural world, every organism unabashedly expresses its authentic nature. That’s what plants, animals, everything’s expressing itself. Everything’s growing towards its potential, and there’s death and decay and there’s giving and receiving. And I think as humans, we can choose to surrender to our own authentic nature, as I would call it.

[00:39:01.50] – Eric

And that might sound a little bit nebulous. I talk about the soul. There’s a felt sense, though it’s very difficult to put into words. It’s kind of like the finger pointing at the moon kind of element. But I think when, when I’m in touch with that, when we’re in touch with that kind of authenticity and things are kind of flowing in alignment, like, like a plant that’s taking the, you know, the sunshine in and expressing its authentic nature. I also think that in some ways the ecosystem responds, right? It’s like if I’m, if I’m flowering well, then the bees are going to come at the bees, you know, and the pollinators are going to come and they’re going to pollinate other, other things and they’re going to get food from that. And like, it’s all this giving and receiving reciprocity. And I think that’s the nature of the universe. And it’s only humans that seem to impede that process. And we create structures that impede that process. Educational systems, institutions that make people conform to a certain ideal of how they are told they should be giving away their own personal power and authenticity in exchange, again, for financial.

[00:40:01.83] – Eric

Many people are just forced to exchange their own natures just to survive. Horrible that that is the case. And, you know, my work in this world is at the individual level, but I think increasingly, as I’m kind of growing and changing, it’s going to be a higher level analysis, too. It’s like we need to create structures and ecosystems as well inside of ourselves and outside of ourselves that facilitate people’s authentic growths, because that’s the only hope we have, really. It’s the only hope hope we have. Otherwise, we’re going to continue to repeat the same patterns. Like, even if we bring back down the bad guys and the sociopaths and that, that oftentimes are in charge of these systems and then a lot of people going along with it because they’re, they’re afraid, even if we were to bring that, we’re just going to repeat the same thing until we come into our own authenticity, because otherwise we are basically like a ship without a rudder. It’s like, yeah, we can kind of capture the wind and. But we have no sense of being able to direct that at all. Yeah.

[00:41:01.49] – Imi Lo

Thank you. There were so many. I’m making notes sometimes to put some mental notes in because there are so many things I wanted to respond to at points. So it may feel like we’re going back and I hope the audience would be ok with me sharing certain parts of my own story if it felt, you know, if it resonates. I think the reminder of death was often a very powerful one. You know, just that cliche question, what would you do if you only had six years left to your life? Can often already be quite powerful, where many people say, well, there’s no way in hell I’ll be doing this bank show. So there’s that one thing, though, I heard all that you say about our data being limited because of our ego mind and we don’t see everything. One thing, though I find past data might sometimes be helpful is to think about my childhood before again, like you like your coffee arts. I assume not everyone would be the same. Some people were really traumatized from their womb and. But personally, for me, there were a time in my life where I was, I think actually for everyone, but, you know, it depends on what you’ve experienced.

[00:42:24.28] – Imi Lo

Probably got tainted by noise coming in. But when I think about what did I use to enjoy doing, just rolling in there, like when I had free time as a child, that was. I could get some data about my authentic self from that. Like just. Just, you know, I remember I used.

[00:42:46.30] – Eric

To want to just play creativity. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:42:50.45] – Imi Lo

My dream was to my first degree. I didn’t complete it was to go to art school. And that’s all I had wanted. I never wanted to be winning big bucks or getting any titles. I did understand those things. But to me, being cool in the sense of what my seven year old self would think of as cool was successful. And although the word cool sounds really adolescent sometimes, I really like using that to bring myself back to that state. Now, like I would often say to myself, just, I care more about being cool than being successful by society standard, because the word cool brings me back to that state of what do you think of as cool while actually following your authentic path, doing your arts. That was cool. To my youngest.

[00:43:42.65] – Eric

What does the. What does using the word cool, but what does that feel like? What does that, like, viscerally feel like to you, if that makes sense? Like an embodied way.

[00:43:52.54] – Imi Lo

Free and, like, relaxed and not guilty. Because I think sometimes when I had done very inauthentic things, there were a niggling sense of existential guilt because a part of me realized I probably wasn’t. I don’t like these words. Is it?

[00:44:10.54] – Eric

No, it’s hard to put in words.

[00:44:11.40] – Imi Lo

Like, oh, everyone has a calling and potentially need to maximize. I don’t actually buy into that, but sometimes I have to use words like that. But I had a strong niggling feeling that I’m wasting my time. Like, what am I doing here? My time could be used better in doing something that I am actually better at, even though that path is full of uncertainty and scary things and no one recognized it. So, yeah, it’s a negative answer, but free of existential fear because it just felt right and cool, felt self-validating. Like, I don’t need. I didn’t need anyone else to think it’s cool. I think it’s cool. I would only surround myself with people who also think this is cool. Yeah, but I used to be that cool when I was like ten. And then I became, I still think you’re cool.

[00:45:04.00] – Eric

I still think you’re cool.

[00:45:05.28] – Imi Lo

Well, I became more and more uncool and I became more and more attached to external things, which is another thing I wanted to share, where when you shared all that, I had my fair share of. I forgot the exact words, but something about you didn’t have a choice. I palpably felt like that when I. With two decisions in my life, one is quitting the doctorate. I was three years into a five-year doctorate. But although it was five years, actually a thing that I’ve invested in for ten years with a lot of money. Long story short, to get into that thing, you need to first do another degree as a conversion, which I had also had to invest in and I hated a lot of. I’m like you, I’m really bad at linear, like science. Like, when I studied psychology, I really couldn’t do statistics. I have this calculator, I can’t even say the word. Like, I cannot do math and numbers. I get into trouble whenever I have to deal with numbers. And anyway, long story short, I invested a lot of resources, money and energy into it. The sunk cost is like enormous, but I abandoned that.

[00:46:14.63] – Imi Lo

But then I didn’t feel like I had a choice. And it also was. On the surface it will almost seem impulsive, like one day. But then when I recall my life, every time I quit something, be it something as big as a ten-year project, like that sort of thing, or just like quitting a job, it’s always like, just this one day I will have a sense that, okay, that’s it. And on the surface it will almost seem impulsive, but it’s not. It’s been building up. And then you. Sometimes I just. I just got the signal that my body pushed me out. I didn’t have a choice. So whenever I talked to my late therapist, who I’ve now lost, sadly about it, he would say, well, I don’t think you had the choice. You were pushed out, you were bullied out. You were something, something else. It’s not you or people do that a lot in relationships. They seem to think they created the whole thing when actually, no, you were in a dance and there were so many threats pulling you from people that are not even in the room, too. So there’s that micro level and there are all those macro stuff that we were talking about. Anyway, pick the level. And then there’s a spiritual level of, like, my very proud tattoo that I keep showing that says, have I talked about this with you?

[00:48:12.63] – Eric

Oh, no. Amorphous idea. That love of one’s fate.

[00:48:15.17] – Imi Lo

Yeah, that’s very fast of you. Yeah.

[00:48:19.48] – Eric

Thank you. So, okay, why don’t we look at it from the. Why don’t we look at it just at the individual level to make it at least a little bit simpler? Maybe personal level.

[00:48:37.54] – Imi Lo

It’s okay if you want to go macro, too. Now that I have.

[00:48:40.12] – Eric

Yeah, I don’t know. Basically, I’ll just share my experience. I’m going to share my perspective, just not necessarily like a balanced or kind of multifaceted, but just my own kind of experience thus far. So I’ll use myself as a case study in free will, assuming that my experience is at least somewhat like other humans experience. Of course, there’s obviously diversity and complexity there. So, first of all, did I choose to be born as a second child in a family of four of Dutch kind of heritage immigrants, Christians? Did I choose that? I mean, it depends on what level you want to look at it from an ego perspective. Of course I didn’t choose that. Well, like, of course. I mean, the two people came together, had sex, and cells started to replicate, and it’s just random kind of chance, right? That’s one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is like, and this is the way that I would look at it, because this is kind of what I guess I’ve been shown or what I’ve chosen to kind of adhere to is like, I actually chose those circumstances. And I don’t mean that in, like, a catastrophic sense of, like, I chose to suffer and be constrained by things, but my soul chose those, that particularly constant, that particular constellation in order to be hurt and wounded and learn a whole bunch of lessons in order for me to become the person I am now and the person I am going to be into the future, which ultimately is somehow working towards more love in the universe or more love in relationships.

[00:50:23.25] – Eric

Have I. Do I believe in, like, free will? Like, I can choose. I can just choose to be whatever I want. Theoretically, I could probably push the bounds in certain directions, but my experience has been that the further I get off track of what it seems to be like I’m here to do, the more that the universe will just bring me right back to where I need to be. So, for example, with this, like, house renovation and the separation, it’s like all of this. All of this catastrophe kind of happened because it forced me out of my comfort zone that I knew I needed to get out of years ago, but I was too afraid to get out of, and it reached a certain crisis point. Well, fine, you’re not going to listen and excuse my language, but kind of like, fuck you, buddy, and you’re going to have to. Now we’re going to force you to because we have a plan for you. And when I say we have a plan for you. So I work with guides. I have relationships with four guides. They’re actually with me here. They have different positions around me.

[00:51:31.15] – Eric

And that was never a conscious thing for me for most of my life, but it’s become a conscious thing in the last three years or so. And now that I have a more intimate relationship with them, they’re just energies that I put anthropomorphic traits onto, or other kind of traits onto just energy that I’m in communication with. And it’s heightened my intuition in such that, like, oh, crap. Now this conversation is going to get really, really interesting. Is actually, there is no. Actually, there is no linear time. So we talk about free will. Is this. The assumption is that we’re choosing something across space and time, right? But the reality, the actual reality of existence is that everything’s happening right now, past, present, and future, just across different dimensions. Quantum physics seems to point to this, that it’s all kind of relative. So, man, I don’t even know. Oh, crap. Now my mind’s going to other places. So here we are talking about this from a conscious perspective as two kind of ego consciousnesses, you know, obviously in relationship to other things, trying to make sense. It’s like, it’s like we’re trying to talk about the water that we’re both swimming in while swimming in the water.

[00:52:50.26] – Eric

We’re trying to describe the water that we’re swimming in and what it’s like to swim in this water and to go in different directions. And meanwhile, we’re swimming in the water, and as we’re swimming in the water, we’re changing position. And across space and time, even the way that we’re talking about this is probably impacting probabilities and possibilities for both of us. So there’s almost a sense of, like, absurdity to the whole thing, because it’s. And I don’t mean it’s pointless to talk about, because obviously, it’s very meaningful to engage in interesting conversation, but it’s kind of like, what am I even trying to say, Imi? I don’t even know what I’m trying to say. It’s like my ego wants an answer, so I want an answer. I want to say, do I have free will or not? And the reality is you both have free will and you don’t. That’s the answer, I think. And it’s like, okay, but which one is it? It’s like, it’s both. Oh, but how is that possible? It’s just possible. That’s not satisfying. It’s like, well, too bad. It’s like. It’s like the tension of opposites, right?

[00:53:52.25] – Eric

It’s like there’s always, there’s, like, the binaries there. And to understand it, we have to transcend that level into a level of consciousness that brings them all together. And to get to that level of consciousness, free will doesn’t even have meaning anymore, if that makes sense. So I hope that I didn’t just, like, deflate your balloon at all in terms of conversation, because I. Yeah, yeah. Okay, good. That makes sense.

[00:54:22.00] – Imi Lo

Yes. People will get from it what they get from it. You’re not responsible for how they receive it.

[00:54:27.62] – Eric

Oh, oh, yeah, I know. I know that. But I just feel like I went off in multiple directions, and I don’t have any kind of a satisfactory answer whatsoever to the question of free will, everything to me feels kind of like co-creative. There’s a thread I’m following, there’s probably 10,000 different sub-threads that I can grab onto that all lead to the same direction ultimately, and there’s a more direct path as well. And if I choose to kind of follow the breadcrumbs that are being shown to me, I’ll probably get there, you know, quicker, whatever that means,

[00:54:27.62] – Eric

Oh, oh, yeah, I know. I know that. But I just feel like I went off in multiple directions, and I don’t have any kind of a satisfactory answer whatsoever to the question of free will. Everything to me feels kind of like co-creative. There’s a thread I’m following; there’s probably 10,000 different sub-threads that I can grab onto that all lead to the same direction ultimately, and there’s a more direct path as well. And if I choose to kind of follow the breadcrumbs that are being shown to me, I’ll probably get there, you know, quicker, whatever that means, from an ego perspective. And if I, again, this is my belief system, but if I don’t kind of learn the lesson, then I’ll probably have to come back and learn it again in some type of different constellation of relationship. Yeah. So I almost think that the question of free will, just to quickly summarize, is it’s only meaningful for the ego, and because the ego can only understand a very. And we’re trying to translate languages here, right? Like the nature of the universe language to human English language. It doesn’t translate the finger pointing at the moon.

[00:55:42.02] – Eric

We can try to kind of approximate things. We can, we can read poetry or do art, right? That that kind of evokes things, but we can never quite capture it. And I think it’s one of those questions that, like, the question cannot be answered. Our ego wants to know, and there’s a certain level of hubris in that, even thinking that we could even come to some satisfactory understanding, if that makes sense. It’s like, what am I trying to say? It’s an interesting kind of thought experiment, exercise, but ultimately the gods are kind of looking down and saying, you guys have no clue what you’re doing. Anyways, almost like a bit of a hump. There’s a humbling there of the ego to the universal forces, and kind of like, I’m reminded of this picture in Carl Jung’s red book where there’s a figure that’s bowing down to the fire, the fire coming from the unconscious of creativity, there’s like a humbling of the ego saying, what do I know? What do I know? And I think the humbling of the ego, whether it’s questions about free will, like having your ego humble, uh, is, I think, the source of wisdom.

[00:56:51.31] – Eric

Uh, and, um, I have, I have stories I want to, you know, I have stories I want to adhere to, to defend myself, or to kind of explain things or to make meanings of things. Some of those stories approximate, quote-unquote, reality, and they’re useful, but oftentimes the story changes, and then you have to let go. You have to let go of the old story. Or if life is just like a river, like a flow. Like we’re on a river and it’s just flowing. The best way to navigate is to let the river kind of take you. If you try to hold on to things or take it, if you take a picture of the river and say, okay, I think I understand you now. Well, you understood the river at that moment in time, you know, in that context, and it’s changed again. And so ultimately, it seems like everything’s just eternal flows, and our ego says, no, I want to understand your eternal flow, and the ego can’t. It takes these little snapshot pictures, and then we can have enough of them to create what approximates some kind of. Like some kind of a movie that’s not too scattery.

[00:58:01.56] – Eric

But ultimately, the map is not the territory, and the territory is only in the present moment in surrendering to experience, in letting go of my stories. So some of the things that I learned yesterday or some of the things that I’m learning through my conversation with you today, they’ll be very valuable. And then there’ll be a point where it’s like, oh, and now there’s another whole round of new lessons or new kind of learnings to have and to be able to let go. To be able to let go and then grab on. And then let go and grab on. It seems like that seems to be the wise way to navigate for the ego because we need the ego to make sense of things. And yet the ego in and of itself has no, it’s so limited in its purview, in its context, and structured by the nervous system and by thought patterns and by behavior patterns, that, again, I’d much. I’d be more open to the present moment and to the energies that are swirling to the. To not just try to take my own agenda and project it onto things or onto people, but to allow myself to receive as much as possible from my environment, obviously, if it’s safe to do so, context is.

[00:59:21.68] – Eric

But being kind of saturated with what’s happening and then being a let it go through me and let it pass through and then welcome more in, it’s a much more receptive and a more vulnerable way to live, a less masculine kind of way to live. But it also just feels kind of fluid and it kind of feels right. And then I also have to use my rational kind of masculine brain to, like, schedule my life and come up with a plan for my day. And it’s like once the structure is set, though, then I have to, I don’t say I have to, but then it’s like surrendering to the experience. So the in-breath, the out-breath, the masculine, the feminine, the balance, the free will, and the determinism, it’s all just. It’s all kind of ways that we’re trying to describe something which is ultimately indescribable. It’s all approximations. Not to say we don’t approximate, but it’s all just approximation.

[01:00:21.60] – Imi Lo

I’m going to ask a question that’s probably pretty ego-driven, but I’m going to try. I love it when you say, we have a plan for you. I find it very reassuring. I also hear my ego, or maybe an inner child or my wife, asking, so then how do I know what the plan is? It sounds like I’m trying to fish for certainty, but it’s also my way of asking, how do we best achieve ourselves with signals.

[01:00:44.79] – Eric

Then how do we calibrate ourselves? Yeah, yeah.

[01:00:48.25] – Imi Lo

Or I think our ego self would also feel more soothed if we have more data. Like, for instance, how do I say you’re sorry? How do I know counseling is the right path? What does it look like? I know we can’t know for sure, but I also need. I also need, you know, what constitutes the authentic thing. You were asking me earlier about how my body felt when I was cool. I guess I’m asking you the same question.

[01:01:23.31] – Eric

Related to that way?

[01:01:24.69] – Imi Lo

Yeah.

[01:01:25.32] – Eric

Yeah. It’s related to the body. It’s related to the body. It’s related to the body. I think it’s different for everybody. And some. Some people are so traumatized or disconnected from that part of themselves that they don’t have access to it. And for a lot of people, it’s. It’s something that has never fully developed. And for some of us, we have memories going back to having that sense of resonance and feeling it in our bodies. So the way that I experience kind of like what I will call the knowing. And it’s an intuitive kind of wisdom. So when I’m working with a person, and so I seem to have some combination of, like, claircognizance, clairsentience, and clairvoyance. And again, even just saying those terms, there’s parts of my ego which are like, what the fuck are you talking about? This is not scientific. What are you doing? But whatever. I know. I was a scientist. What happened to you? You went off the rails, man. But what happens to me when I’m tuning into somebody, when I’m working with them, and maybe we’ll be talking about something I can sometimes see things into the future.

[01:02:45.18] – Eric

I can see them in a certain kind of situation. And sometimes I just almost know things. And I get a visceral sensation of chills down my shoulders, my arms, my back when something is true, like something is aligned. And so when, so as I’ve kind of trialed, had, my ego has trialed and errored this over the past 15 years of kind of development, it’s like I’ve now, my body and my intuition are kind of calibrated where it seems to be, you know, that when I get that sensation that something is true. And I have so much evidence now of clients making certain kind of decisions or my own self making decisions, and then looking back and me able to look back saying I was right, like my intuition was right. So I have enough empirical evidence to kind of support that hypothesis, let’s just say. So I can trust it, even though for all intents and purposes, it is just a personal feeling or a personal sensation. And I. It’s like, on a. Yeah, it’s this unabashed, like, there’s an unabashed kind of, uh, again, confidence in that, while there’s also, you know, other parts of myself.

[01:04:06.72] – Eric

Again, my wounded children are like, when I’m in, you know, when I’ve been triggered or when I’m dysregulated, it’s like, and I can’t see straight. It’s kind of like they don’t trust this either. It’s not like I’m always, it’s like I’m always in this zen, like, balanced state and being able to trust everything in the universe. No, like, we’re all human and we all have these different experiences. But does everybody have that, though? Does everybody have that ability to kind of, like, see things or sense things? I’m not so sure. I only have my own organism to really at least have some degree of confidence in. Hmm. And then I could talk about the clients I work with, but then, you know, the kinds of people that are probably coming to work with me might have a felt sense of resonance with, with this type of way of navigating life. Um, so, yeah, so I guess it’s like, from an ego perspective, it’s like we, we want to come up with a model, right? We want to come up with some kind of a model that we can trust that, that, that, yeah.

[01:05:17.41] – Eric

Um, so my, my innate sense then is, is that our minds or egos want to extract. Extract, again, like a map. And we can do that to some extent. A map to explain things and to then feel confident, to feel assured. I don’t know if that ever works. Well, I don’t think we can map. We can have a high-resolution map of the complexity of life, but we can experience in a visceral, moment-to-moment experience, the multifacetedness and complexity. My experience. Anyway, the second we kind of go to more of a subject-object, like I’m trying to pull back and I’m trying to then analyze, is I’m so limited in what I can put into words or into thoughts. Let’s just say, so what’s happening in client work or intuition, it’s like there’s so many different things that are happening. Some of them, the story I could say is, well, I use this intervention, and this intervention resulted in this kind of response stimuli, and it’s like, but is that what happened? How do I know that’s what happened? Was it just my presence as a person? Was it. Was it the fates of time or the gods?

[01:06:46.38] – Eric

Kind of just deciding at this point that a person is going to change. There’s a certain level of anytime, at least for myself, anytime I’m trying to just know things or map them all out. It’s like, well, it seemed like a good idea at the time. It seems like based upon what I knew and the context, it kind of makes sense. But that doesn’t mean that’s what actually happened or what’s true. I don’t know if this, if that kind of. So I do have a knowing, and I can see things that I try and I trust that knowing in a deep, kind of really deep, meaningful way. And yet I don’t know how to communicate that or extract that from my own visceral experience or even the moment-to-moment context in which it happens to then say, well, this is it. Because in some ways, it’s kind of like what religion tries to do with spirituality, let’s just say, is it tries to create a structure and a dogma to try to bind people back to the original experience of, let’s say, the masters or Jesus. And it’s interesting because then people start worshiping the structure and not actually connecting with the essence of what the person was trying to convey, because you can’t.

[01:08:07.42] – Eric

You can’t hold it. You can’t hold it. You can’t grasp it and hold it and feel like that’s just not. You have to. It’s, you know, Jesus taught in parables, for example. It was always, there’s always an elusiveness to it and to surrender. I guess, to surrender and to trust that elusiveness and to then have enough experience that even without good data or kind of like a mapped out financial plan or knowing how things are going to really pan out in relationships, that I can take this. I know I need to take this action. Yeah. It’s an act of faith in some ways. And yet the faith for me is embedded in what I see as a natural system of the way that things work. And yet I don’t know if I can. I just can’t. I can’t seem to kind of put it into words or, and it almost seems, like, sacrilegious almost to kind of, and I’ll go to some of my kind of Christian background here is like going to the Old Testament. The Israelites always wanted, they always wanted, like, they wanted God to be with them. So they wanted something to worship, like an object.

[01:09:20.69] – Eric

Right. An object to hold on. And God was like, don’t. No, no, no. Like, this is a bad idea. You just want to be like the people around you that it’s not going to work. Well, well, of course, they needed to do it. They wanted a king. They wanted these objects. Because again, we end up kind of worshiping the idea or the concept or the object or the idol, forgetting that the whole idea is that these things are pointing us to something beyond. And to even talk about what that beyond is is impossible because I’m thinking and I’m translating and I can’t, it doesn’t translate neatly into language.

[01:10:04.25] – Imi Lo

Thank you.

[01:10:06.64] – Eric

Yeah, no problem.

[01:10:08.18] – Imi Lo

How should we use the left of the minutes? Well, on my list, I have something about, I don’t know if we can cover that. The pain of being authentic in the world and open-heartedness. Let me just see. Where should we go? What does your gut say?

[01:10:38.30] – Eric

I don’t know if I have clarity in my gut.

[01:10:40.54] – Imi Lo

Neither do I. I feel like we had a very full conversation already.

[01:10:44.73] – Eric

Actually, I think we did too. I feel like, I feel like I just had, like, a big meal and I need to digest. It’s kind of what it feels like.

[01:10:54.40] – Imi Lo

We don’t have to squeeze another topic in. We can always resume this.

[01:10:59.75] – Eric

Yeah, I think I would love to resume it at some point. For sure. Like, absolutely.

[01:11:06.75] – Imi Lo

Yeah. I think today we’ve talked a lot about listening to the plan. We ended up talking about that Jungian concept of listening to our calling. And I don’t want people to think they have one calling that they need to listen to or something like that.

[01:11:22.29] – Eric

Yeah, yeah.

[01:11:24.65] – Imi Lo

Encourage courage to turn.

[01:11:28.45] – Eric

Yeah. Courage, faith. Yeah, yeah. Entrusting one’s kind of like body and inner knowing. Right. Like, even going back to what you were, you were talking about, like, when you were younger and, and just like, how it felt to feel cool. Like, from the, it was an inside, it was an inner kind of, it was an inner. It wasn’t a coolness. Like, I want people to see me as cool. It was like, I feel like something.

[01:11:53.00] – Imi Lo

Feels really cool about this.

[01:11:54.82] – Eric

It’s the opposite of that. It’s like. And I can kind of resonate with that. Yeah, I can read all according to you, but, but I can resonate with that kind of sense of. And, like, living that out. Right. And, like, living, expressing that authentic, uh, that authentic spark.

[01:12:12.45] – Imi Lo

I have one question for you.

[01:12:14.27] – Eric

Yeah, of course. Of course. Yeah.

[01:12:16.23] – Imi Lo

What is your biggest fear right now?

[01:12:20.90] – Eric

Oh. Oh, so different parts of me would have different fears. Yeah. So very briefly, like, I mean, certain wounded parts of me still have, when I’m in those kind of places, they still have fears about, you know, material well-being and how other people think about me and, you know, all of those kind of very human things. But the thing that popped into my mind intuitively the second you answered that or asked me that question is I fear. My greatest fear, like, in a full kind of bodied, authentic kind of way, is that I’m not going to. Is that I would let go of the thread. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That’s my biggest, my biggest fear is kind of like that I’m going to face a situation where I’m too scared or maybe I’m being challenged in a certain way, and I kind of choose to, choose to let go of what I know to be real. That makes me really sad and afraid. I would say that’s kind of the biggest piece at this point for me. Yeah. How about you?

[[01:13:46.23] – Imi Lo

Oh, every day, so many. But they always surround similar themes. I think I have a lot of material fears, too, most of them irrational. Irrational? Meaning they’re probably more existential than actual. You know, it’s not like I am going to be on the streets, but I don’t know, actually, I think they probably represent something much deeper. But then I saw. What did I see the other day? Just finding it. Where do you find your. I’ve got this collection, of course. Hang on a second. I don’t know. I wish I, I can’t find a quote, but I sometimes wish I feared not living in this life more than anything else. I wish I feared the right things, but I often fear the wrong things. There’s this quote, let’s say the real question is not whether life exists after death. The real question is whether you’re alive before that. I wish I spent more time fearing that I’m not alive enough and therefore follow the existential ends to do the authentic things rather than fearing things that I have no control over and don’t ultimately mean much.

[01:15:08.49] – Eric

And, yeah, I mean, I think that’s very human, right. And if you look at a lot of the, you know, ancient philosophers, and it’s all kind of pointing to kind of similar, similar tendencies in humans, right. To kind of, you know, do the good. Know the good, but not do the good. Let’s just say. And again, yeah, I have, I have those, you know, those different fears as well, which can sometimes take up more space inside of me than is necessary. And. Or I would like, let’s just say. And then it’s kind of like, it’s also like they’re just, they’re kind of like just scared little parts that haven’t been able to trust, you know, the life and just kind of loving them and kind of welcoming them in and then recognizing of, like, you know, it’s going to feel actually a lot better if we do that creative project or you follow that thread. It’s like, it’s going to be exciting. Let’s. Let’s go grab it together. And then, of course, the fears come back and that’s part of being human. But, yeah, I think it would be really beautiful if we lived in a society or societies, right, that really prioritized helping people to get in touch with what is authentic for them and really be more concerned about whether they’re being honest and living, like, in tune with that than having to look out for, you know, their material needs or the scarcity kind of mindset or, like, trauma.

[01:17:08.18] – Eric

And maybe that is like, maybe that world is still on the horizon. Maybe that can be created and maybe that’s what we’re here to help contribute to.

[01:17:22.00] – Imi Lo

Thank you. So I do need to go, and I’m sorry, in terms of the timing. Yeah, yeah.

[01:17:39.00] – Eric

I want to go do my shopping. We will talk again, if you would be glad to.

[01:17:44.43] – Imi Lo

Oh, please. I’d love to. I need to digest this meal into the different elements of my being. And then, yeah, by all means, maybe in a few months again, we can connect. I’d love that.

[01:17:58.00] – Eric

Time flies.

[01:18:00.00] – Imi Lo

It sure does. And it’s all happening all right now anyways. But, hey.

[01:18:09.00] – Eric

We’ll talk again soon, for sure.

[01:18:11.00] – Imi Lo

For sure. Take care. Okay.

[01:18:13.00] – Eric

Take good care. Bye. Bye.

[01:18:15.00] – Imi Lo

Bye.