Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: His goal was to really like share these wisdom teachings, but more so less like the philosophy and the sacred texts and everything that are part of the Vedas and more so just share the practice as something that's so needed and the moment so ripe in the world to be having techniques, you know, religion and philosophies aside, but like just pure techniques that, that can do something good for us and to connect us back with our humanity that we all have
[00:00:32] Speaker B: inside us because we're not machines, we're people with, with nervous system driven need for belonging.
This episode of Roots to Fruits is produced and distributed by Be Connected, a Midwest social media and digital growth agency.
[00:00:51] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:57] Speaker B: Welcome to another episode of the Roots to Fruits podcast. I am your host, Kelly Williams. Many of us are currently, or have at least in the past, lived inside corporate systems that reward output while quietly eroding coherence. Today's guest knows that terrain intimately.
I'm joined by Emma Chow, a regenerative designer, strategist, storyteller and systems thinker. Over the past decade, she's led ambitious global initiatives including co developing and leading the Food Systems Transformation program at the Ellen MacArthur foundation, partnering with UNESCO Biosphere, programs on art and community engagement, hosting immersive learning journeys that shift how finance communities see climate and biodiversity and why. I really love having her on my show today. Teaching meditation, yoga, nidra, and leadership practices that place inner capacity at the center of outer transformation.
But her journey didn't begin in boardrooms or biospheres. It began in competitive sport, in intensity, discipline and drive. And somewhere along that path, something shifted. For Emma, the drive didn't disappear. It deepened.
Emma, welcome to Rootster Fruits. I'm really glad you're here.
[00:02:19] Speaker A: Thank you for having me.
[00:02:22] Speaker B: So maybe one way to get started is to tell us a little bit more about your competitive background. And when I think about that, how did competitive tennis teach you about success in life itself?
[00:02:36] Speaker A: Mm. Yeah. And I played almost every sport growing up, but tennis. I grew up in a tennis family. My dad was my coach, and I watched my older brother, who was like a tennis superstar through his teen years, and I kind of knew it was my track that I would follow, per se. It taught me a lot. And I would say it created or molded like a definition of what success meant because obviously in sport, and a sport like tennis, it's individual, where you're so vulnerable and exposed and if you have a bad day, you can't be benched. You just have to suck and choke and lose to someone you should have beaten. But it's ultimately about winning and winning trophies and your ranking and, you know, there's things that you can measure at the end of the day.
And so it created this drive and this feeling like you can always get better and you should always be getting better.
And that continued through my early adulthood. I played tennis in the U.S. i grew up in Canada, went to the U.S. to play sport at college the way that many Canadian athletes do.
And so it was like further reaffirmed that this is what success means. It's like you always need to be striving, you always need to be shaping yourself to go better, be better. And it was really a very mechanistic way of treating my body. My relationship with my body was very much like, this is a machine that I can make it do incredible things and how much faster can I be, how much stronger can I be? And it was a lot of pushing, there's a lot of intensity, which is a word you used in the intro. And that kind of relentless drive and doing was what propelled me. And I remember being in my like 18, 19, and all my peers would be like, you're so driven. Because I, when I became clear on what I want to do outside of tennis, whether it was in school or that it became like career and very much an impact led, mission driven career.
I applied the same mentality, the same sort of definition of success, like always be better, always keep going. Until later. In my 20s, everything was dismantled and then I had to go deep into what does success even mean? Because that was a North Star, you know, a word that I would use a lot. And it's like, I'm successful, how do I become more successful? And then actually it all, it didn't blow up, but it more like dissolved.
And then I realized that maybe there's something different and something that I haven't been exposed to. And let's go investigate that.
[00:05:23] Speaker B: So was that a subtle process or like a, like a light switch got pulled?
[00:05:29] Speaker A: It was subtle and dramatic at the same time because basically I had some of my own, like personal meditation practices. And meditation was something that I used. I got exposed to through tennis because it's such a mental sport. And I felt like I could never control my mind. And that was why I would get really nervous in tight moments and lose matches that I shouldn't have. So I was looking for some tools to help me. And so it was a decade long process. And then basically I was exposed to a different technique from what I had originally learned. And that started to pull up all these layers and it was almost like a volcano in the sense of. Like, it was. It was subtle and dramatic. I say that because it was like, not just one and done. It was like, oh, eruption, you know, oh, there's something else. Oh, what are these belief systems? What are these emotions? Oh, I have emotions. All of it. And then it would settle, and then I'd kind of be picking through the rubble, and then it would go off again.
And eventually it did hit a point where my body was speaking to me through my body's language of sensation and ultimately made me stop sprinting along.
[00:06:46] Speaker B: Yep. You said something early on that I want to come back to because I. I love it. I've never thought about it in the context that you described it, but you lived a long time treating your body as a machine that if you oil it, water it, keep it running, it just keeps. It's a. It's a. It's a race car, but in reality, it's an ecosystem that connects to everyone else around it. It's not a machine, it's a body.
[00:07:12] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:07:13] Speaker B: And so, yeah. So it's interesting that you found meditation as a means to get more out of your machine.
[00:07:21] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:07:22] Speaker B: That started falling.
[00:07:23] Speaker A: It was the same mentality, or in many ways, it was protecting me because my nervous system wasn't happy. I was struggling with sleep. I went through periods of insomnia while I was in university in the early years just because I had so much anxiety. Some of it was around sport, some of it was around school.
I mean, your life completely changes. You're suddenly an adult when you're a kid. And there was so much pressure. I couldn't. I didn't realize at the time, like, how separate I was from what my nervous system actually needed to regulate. And so, of course, it was firing off, and there was some serious adrenal issues going on, and I could not sleep. And so I was desperate for any tool to help me. But then I. I stuck with it because I thought, oh, well, this deed is a way that I can be even more extracting from my body. But maybe it's not extracting because really the intent was aligning. It was like, I have done all the training and my body is so capable, but it's my mind that is becoming the blocker. And ultimately it was fear. Like, if I went into, oh, now I'm starting to lose. And it's that constriction that was the sensation. It's like, not in the flow state that we know as athletes and we're always trying to be in as much as possible. But it's like for most time you're not unless you're a superstar.
And so yeah, it was that constriction. So I felt like if I could align the flow of my body and what I knew it was capable of doing with my mind to basically get out of the way and let all my body do its thing, then I could be more my potential that I sense was possible.
[00:09:12] Speaker B: So you said something changed in the practice, like a new technique or something that really kind of took the big shroud layer off. What was that?
[00:09:21] Speaker A: Yeah, so I had initially learned. It was actually quite incredible because at the university I was at in the US they had like a health and well being group and they had these drop in meditation sessions which are basically mindfulness, like Buddhist tradition. Watch your breath. Super short 2 minute meditations is what I was doing then in when was it? Like seven years ago now or so I got. I felt drawn to learn how to teach meditation. That was something that I felt like I wanted to do. And then Covid happened and the opportunity to actually do it was possible because I wasn't traveling for work and I had a regular schedule which I hadn't had in years. And I was like, okay, I can do this.
And I asked some people in my network if they had any recommended trainings, what they'd done. And someone recommended me to one giant mind, which I'd never heard of. And it uses a mantra.
So it's rather than watching your breath, it's using a mantra instead. And so it is working with a different operating system of the body and the mind rather. So instead of at the insight level, kind of watching your thoughts and watching yourself, it's in the being level, which I had never worked on. So it made sense that it was like I'd almost jump to the top and I needed to come back to the roots and connect with my being. Like who am I underneath all the layers and start to really decondition.
And it's quite an organic and unpredictable process. It's not officially Vedic or transcendental meditation, but it's rooted in the Vedic philosophy. And so I went on to train in that teacher in it, which I'm not doing at the moment, like actively doing courses, but it's my primary meditation practice in the day to day. And that was a lot of unstressing, as we call it was happening.
[00:11:24] Speaker B: I would love to educate our audience on a couple of things that you said. If you could explain what a mantra is and then also a Vedic. I think people may have heard the word, but I think it's really important and I'm really glad you brought it up because this ancient wisdom, if you've noticed it too, is starting to resurface in our lives pretty broadly for the right reasons, which we may jump into. But could you explain that for the audience?
[00:11:52] Speaker A: Yeah. So the mantra is really interesting because it's a Sanskrit word that means mind vessel, as I understand it. And I love that because it gives me an image. I just think like this vessel moving through the layers of my mind. And it's the sound that you're not even saying out loud, you're just thinking in this practice, you just think it and it just repeats all on its own. And it's like a being, an organism in itself. And it can have this profound technique that's difficult for me to put into words and explain because you just need to feel it. The best way to know that it works or know what effect it has is to feel it. And so in things like Vedic meditation and Transcendental meditation, normally you get a customized for you, there's a whole ceremony around it, a mantra for you. The technique that I learned, so I haven't learned those. The technique I learned and what I teach is a universal mantra.
And there's a free app, you can go get the one giant mind app and you can learn in 10 days.
And so it carries this frequency and works with layers of our being and can do some pretty incredible stuff. As I said, my teacher comes, Johnny Pollard, who's in Australia, comes from the Vedic philosophy and his goal was to really share these wisdom teachings, but more so less like the philosophy and the sacred texts and everything that are part of the Vedas and more so just share the practice as something that's so needed and the moment so ripe in the world to be having techniques, you know, religion and philosophies aside, but like just pure techniques that can do something good for us and to connect us back with our humanity that we all have inside.
[00:13:45] Speaker B: Because we're not machines, we're people with, with nervous system driven need for belonging.
And we get in the way of that belonging through being performative and everything. So would you say that that is kind of like in listening to it, it makes me think of Reiki, which as you know, chatted, I just got trained to do so by repeating that you're kind of like doing a self Reiki, you're resetting a nervous system connection to your physical body just through that. In a yoga class recently, I talked about like just vocalize. Even if you just whisper a truth or an intention, just whispering it to yourself so that only you hear it, you feel the vibration, it means more than if you think it. So just that being able to put the energy into the words. I think other ways of just reinforcing these positive ways of dealing with. Look, we're in an incoherent world and we're trying to be coherent beings in an incoherent world. So we have to have tools and practices. I've often thought these ancient wisdom and practice. Basically these are observations of what it means to be a coherent human being in a belonging system. This is what you become. Not rules to live by. It's just what you simply become.
[00:15:05] Speaker A: Yeah, it's something that's like so innate. And I think a lot of the mindfulness meditation, well, being kind of world has become gimmick, gimmick eyes, where it's like this thing that's separate from us or it's still rooted in the belief of unworthiness. Like I need to become better because I'm broken.
And often the most spiritual people, the most grounded people are not.
They wouldn't call themselves spiritual, they're just like salt of the earth. Everyday people that are really grounded in themselves and naturally have that coherence that somehow they've been allowed to, allowed themselves not to interrupt it.
[00:15:51] Speaker B: I call it the pursuit of inflapability. You know, the people like every. We all get flapped, we all get upset, we all get emotional. But how quickly you let that go through the system, because it's the feelings that are left over that you want to synthesize that new third eye run of your understanding of the world. But we, we let those hang on. And I feel like a great sign of somebody who's reaching that higher energy level, which is how quickly things just roll off their back.
[00:16:20] Speaker A: That's why I describe the meditation practice that I do. The one giant mind one. It's twice a day for 20 minutes is the core practice as you get to more advanced levels, like after a couple years. And you can dial up to longer sessions if you want. But it's like an inner shower.
We wash our bodies and that can be so cleansing in itself to wash off the day, especially if you had a rough day.
But I now, because it's become part of my routine, if I miss one or two practices, which happens. Right. Life happens, I feel a bit like I got some residues that just need to be filtered out.
[00:17:01] Speaker B: Do you, do you, do you feel, Are you like do you find yourself searching for more, more. More tools, more. More ways?
[00:17:09] Speaker A: I don't always. I wouldn't say that I feel actively like searching and seeking. I'm more open to it. And I think that's just part of my constitution and is a lifelong journey. Like, I am just so especially philosophically inclined and so interested, and I'm not devoted to one specific thing.
And I've almost collected a basket of all these different tools primarily for myself. And then as a byproduct, I might have gotten certifications to be able to share it with others. And I do so in a. In quite an organic, responsive way to the needs that I feel or like the ideas that come through and visions that I want to bring into fr.
But right now and more recently over the past couple years, it's definitely been a journey of reconnecting with my heritage. And so I'm half Chinese, and that part of me was completely disconnected. And it's really interesting because only now am I starting to not even read the ancient text. But I'm doing a training this year with a qigong mentor. And so that's to help me deepen my own practice. And I'm doing it in a group of other practitioners and lots of them are already teachers. And it's fascinating to read these English translations of some of the texts.
And it's the same philosophy and belief system that I have in terms of the microcosm and the macrocosm being completely intertwined and nature really being the primary medium that we're working with and that we experience that in our bodies because we of course, are part of nature and not separate from it. And that's just an illusion, that's false. And that is much more poetic language that I see in the pieces I'm studying at the moment and receiving.
But it matches the same narrative that I absorbed and built and understood for myself in the more corporate sustainability world, in the systems change, nonprofit worlds that I have existed in, continue to in my own independent way now.
[00:19:23] Speaker B: So you brought up business. And this is an area that I find fascinating. For years, I've just kind of joking casually, it's like every child started with yoga.
Like, you know, as a. If everyone did yoga and learned what yoga was about, because it's not. It's a practice. It's not anything other than it's the practice you do to stay coherent. If everyone did it, the world would be a very different place.
Obviously, we can't make that happen. But in the business world, where it's all about Shareholder value and growth, growth, growth. We built an extractive machine, to use the machine analogy.
And there's so many people that are inside, are truly coherent. But it's hard to be coherent when you live in such an incoherent. So you and I have talked about this. We almost have like a, a repelling energy against putting ourselves back into that environment.
But those that are in that environment, how do we help them? How do we show them a way to hydrate within that can then percolate out?
So, like, what do you, what do you think we need to do?
[00:20:31] Speaker A: It's definitely an inside job.
[00:20:34] Speaker B: It's an inside job.
[00:20:35] Speaker A: It's an inside job. And I remember, I remember because I was working at Deloitte, that's where I started my career. So big corporate consulting in the US And I was in an office learning day and they actually had a mindfulness session. And this was over a decade ago now, so it was quite innovative at the time and rare to have something like that. And so I went and there was actually, it was a full room and there were quite a few senior people there, partners and things. And I remember the facilitator asked, like, who has a sense of understanding what mindfulness is? And myself and one other person put their hand up. And I just had this moment there in that room thinking, imagine if all of these partners who are influencing the strategies and the operations of all of the biggest companies in the US at least, and some of them in the world in the day to day, I was like, imagine if they had the tools to be less reactive and more responsive.
You know, I'm not going to say like they meditate and they knew what mindfulness is like. No, they don't need to do that. But it's literally just being able to go a level deeper and have the coherence that you describe, that is innate intelligence and part of our design, you know, again, as part of part of nature. Like we are meant to live in a very harmonious, a very mutually reinforcing, reciprocal relationship kind of way to be responsive and dynamic and adaptable and the energy flows, the resources flow in very intelligent ways. The same way spring is unfolding here in England. And it's like everything's just popping and the daffodils are coming out and the nettles are coming out and they all have relationships to each other and a lot's going on under the soil. And under the soil is the inside game. So it's like we can't control the whole ecosystem. But even if we're one microbe and we feel insignificant if we take care of our own sphere, our own world, which I think is. I have to keep reminding myself this every time that I look out into the broader world right now. And it can only send you on a track of panic and feeling helpless. So it's like how do you bring your awareness back to what you can influence? And we can influence how we take care of ourselves, what we feed ourselves, the water we drink, the thoughts we think, the words we speak, and how we move our bodies. And that has more influence on, in visible and visible ways in the spheres around us that we probably don't even know the extent of.
[00:23:27] Speaker B: Are you seeing the same trend in England that I'm seeing here? There's this constant, I think not only, not only the word I'm looking for affinity for people wanting to try yoga the first time. There's like this draw towards it, but even within it I'm seeing a pretty steady increase in things like restorative, yin.
[00:23:52] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:23:52] Speaker B: Gentle nervous system related. I feel like everyone's feeling that pressure and looking for ways to help.
[00:23:59] Speaker A: Oh totally, totally. I wouldn't say it's in like a really explicit big way in England. I mean I'm also not in London so I have this unique perspective because I've been much more rural area in a town. But there, there's definitely this upwelling and I'd say it's reflected in even my own offerings I shared earlier. I'm not doing meditation courses right now. It just hasn't felt like the most resonant thing. And that's fine. I might restart them some point in the future.
But what I am doing is every couple weeks a rediscover rest session. And I don't even call it meditation because it's. That's not what it is. It is a rest session and it's a chance. Some people just need to sleep and they fall asleep. But it's some movement, it's some breathing, all designed for the nervous system.
That's what it is. It's not movement to get fit and grow muscles. It's movement so that you can fully relax and be in your natural state of homeostasis where self healing, the body's natural self healing can occur and you can undo some of that damage and reset your hormonal endocrine system and everything.
And we do that in the practice of yoga nidra, which is a super ancient, it means again in Sanskrit, yogic sleep. So it's a form of yoga that has no movement at all, but it's still rooted in all this great original principles and philosophy that you've been speaking of.
And they just listen and receive for like 40 minutes.
And I keep doing it because people keep showing up and it's often. I really find this interesting. At least my audience, they're not the typical yogis, they're not people who will be in a yoga studio. They're much more from corporate. I've got like lawyers and all sorts of people who come.
And also across generations, I find a lot of the wellness movement is very much like people in their 20s, 30s, early 40s, at least here.
And it can feel a bit exclusive.
But I find I actually have an older crowd who comes to my practices, which is really interesting to observe as well.
[00:26:15] Speaker B: And you do. I know you had one because I was going to try to attend, but I had something come up. You do some that are web based, so anywhere around the world.
[00:26:23] Speaker A: Yeah, right now they're all, they're all web based. I occasionally do in person or if I'm doing a retreat or something. But yeah, that's also quite nice to have people joining normally from at least two continents. I got people in North America, my mom often joins from Canada and lots of people in the UK and other parts of Europe. So it's quite just like a grounding moment to be reminded of the power of community as well and how we can use technology in a really positive way.
[00:26:55] Speaker B: And I, I think for the average person, I think this is like no new news. I think there's a general acceptance that quantum physics is explained by quantum mechanics, which explains we're all energy.
[00:27:09] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:27:11] Speaker B: So when you think of us as energetic beings, it is about, you know, getting that frequency up. And I think, you know, these are the. Because if you don't, that's when you start. When you start building up those residues and you don't compost those residues, it starts to draw you down, it hunches you down, it drives you into density. Yeah. Which is at the root chakra, which is where safety and fear roots.
You get up to here, this is released. If you don't need it, don't carry it, you know, walk lighter.
So, yeah, it's really fascinating. But you said something. I want to circle back because I really struggled with. Because I think everything is a dichotomy in any situation.
Like the opposite of fear may not be what we think it could be vulnerability.
[00:27:58] Speaker A: Right.
[00:27:59] Speaker B: There's just, there's ways, there's always. And we all have our individual stack from genetics, how we were raised and the relationships and experiences we've had. So I've got trauma from past relationships that love it, hate it, it's there.
So I give them names, I treat them as people, I let them have their place. I just don't let them rule anything.
But there's so much, I feel like from the point you're 10 on like around 10 years old is the most unedited version of you.
[00:28:29] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:28:30] Speaker B: And you start adding layers to it. So by the time you get into the workforce, Deloitte or chemical companies or wherever you're working, that pressure of that performativeness is like you in tennis.
So how do you get people that are treating their space, their agency as a machine?
I never could figure out the word that was opposite of performative.
And I think it's reverberant.
You can measure reverberant in conversations with new people because those that come back and say, you know, something that you said earlier, like they've been reverberating versus just waiting to speak next.
[00:29:13] Speaker A: Yes. Right. Yeah, yeah. It's like how I speak about the mantra and it, it's like it's metabolizing. It's like we might a word in and all words are equal, but they do carry a frequency that affects us on a cellular level. It's not just at an intellectual brain level and we're metabolizing it. And that's what leads to the conditioning you described in our own sense of amnes or the roles that we think we need to calcify ourselves into.
And if it's misaligned, that can only last so long and it might last through this whole lifetime, but chances are it probably won't. And there's a necessary reinvention, but it's not really going to anything new. It's more of a.
A deconstruction.
[00:30:03] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:30:03] Speaker A: Like back to the core.
[00:30:05] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:30:06] Speaker A: Back to the 10 year old that held the essence of who. Who you are. Like it had the blueprint and the codes of your purpose in this life.
[00:30:17] Speaker B: I think, you know, we've all heard of the term midlife crisis.
I didn't have a midlife crisis, but I had definitely a midlife shift there. There was a point where my. Where my mass exited and my energy was the outcome. So there is a point.
So I feel like it is all about going back and finding that unedited version of yourself because you knew what you liked, you knew what offended you. Truth was, was on unadulterated.
And that's the problem. You get People live figuring out, like, what does that mean to you, to anybody, what is your truth?
No one can answer that for you.
And I think you can find it in the 10 year old.
[00:31:01] Speaker A: You can, but it's amazing how quickly that gets not corrupted, but like overridden.
Because I would say for me, when I look back, there was such a. Well, I can't remember all of the days of my life. Then of course, based just on my memory alone, I can feel. It's more of a feeling to it. Like I can feel what it felt like to be in my pure self.
And then I can remember when. And it probably was around 12, then 13, 14. And it kind of went downhill from there in terms of like locking in to a program like lock. And the program is run on the language of I should, I should do this thing, I should be this.
And ultimately what's underlying that, at least for me, I think for many people, was fear.
If I don't do that, I will fail, then I will not earn enough money to live. If I don't, if I do do that, then I'll have the same outcome as my parents had. And I don't want that or whatever it is, you know, in these very fundamental years of literally the brain shaping and our sense of identity. And some people, I'm amazed and I'm like, I wish we could all have that, you know, beautiful purity preserved. But for most of us, that's not our karma, that's not our path. And other things come in and then later on in our lives we got to go unpick it. And it might be through a midlife crisis or a shift. And it's interesting that more and more people are talking about like quarter life crisis. And I remember when I was in my 20s, like that was the case. And I look back and be like, I, I didn't have a. It wasn't a crisis per se, but it is. When I packed up my life, left Boston and moved to England and completely overhauled my career and got off of the corporate consulting track and then onto nonprofit, and it was like a whole new world.
Some parallels at the same time, but it's. What I wonder is if it's, it's happening more and more and becoming more prominent in younger generations because it's like a collective consciousness thing of craving. Like there's this desire and knowing ultimately, but it looks, you can touch it. It's like on the surface rather than buried deep. And it doesn't come until you're in your 50s and it's like I know there's something there. It's like I know there's a jewel there and I will not stop until I allow it to be uncovered. It's not like, go find it, but it's like I just want it to be exposed so that everyone can see it.
[00:33:50] Speaker B: Do you think so? This is, this is one of my own, I guess, ways of explaining. I'm curious what you think is that it's all nervous system. Because your nervous system records everything it's ever seen, heard, smelled, touched, every sensation is not mentally lost. Your nervous system entrains everything.
And it's a really good thing to have a quarter life crisis because that means your nervous system is starting to say, I'm not sure I like where this physical body be heading.
I wanna, I wanna. And it. And it helps.
[00:34:23] Speaker A: It's like this rapid redirection.
[00:34:25] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think that's better. I feel like that's what's driving people to new, newer places. And once you start letting go and start composting that residue, that grief. Because grief isn't just sadness or loss. Grief is just the daily, you know, if you don't compost that, it starts to pull you down. So once people start shedding that and composting that and they start to.
And that third eye, that pineal gland turns on, I guess it kind of reinforces that. That decluttering or deconstruction I think is the word you use. I think, I think a lot of it is that. But again, for most people, this is happening and they don't know why. They feel. Even then they can feel like something's wrong with them. It's like the wind doesn't mean as much anymore.
[00:35:07] Speaker A: Yes, yes, exactly. You know, the whole formula, the whole equation, when that suddenly changes, it's wild because there's this emptiness.
[00:35:21] Speaker B: There's no replacements. Yes, exactly.
[00:35:23] Speaker A: It's because it's not feeding the panic nervous system, you know, the fight or flight nervous system. And when you get yourself out of that paradigm of running on that equation literally every moment of the day, because that's what we are trained to do through every platform, every aspect of our lives, whether it's sports and you're chasing that next win and you're pushing, pushing to be better, or if you're checking your email to see when your boss has messaged you and to make sure that they like what you've submitted or to make sure you're on, Even though it's 10pm at night and you're checking your phone in Your bed, it's constant and being bombarded, but it's like feeding that same.
That same thing. You're getting this reward and the dopamine hit. And then if you unlock yourself from that, then it's like, what's the point?
Suddenly I don't have the feedback mechanism.
And so there's like something new that needs to be created.
[00:36:27] Speaker B: So it's really interesting. So. So for. For that. For most people, like, what is it?
Is that. That dopamine hit. You know, I caught the rabbit. Hit the button. I want my treat.
[00:36:38] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:36:39] Speaker B: When that stops rewarding.
Yeah, it's. It's a really. It's really interesting. What. What. What for is it like. It's. I find it fascinating that everyone goes through that experience differently, but just understanding what that connection is is probably a big sign to.
To that going back and finding that original, unedited version of yourself is probably somewhat tied to that, I would think.
But it's tough because you just don't flip through old picture books and refine that.
[00:37:09] Speaker A: That.
[00:37:09] Speaker B: That inner child.
[00:37:11] Speaker A: Yes. And how to do it in our modern mainstream world.
[00:37:17] Speaker B: And I want to bring up another word. I know you know this term.
The audience may not. We can explain it. But I think something else that happens when you start to have that quarter life crisis or midlife crisis and you start to just un. Deconstruct to. To use your term. Love it.
Synchronicity.
You start to see pattern recogn. Patterns start to become so obvious and clear. And I think it helps kind of reassure. That intuition that we've been tucking away is actually a pretty good guide on. On how we go and what we do and how we do it.
[00:37:52] Speaker A: Yeah. And so much of it, I would say, reflecting on my own life personally, because there have been so many incredible synchronistic happenings, and often I don't realize that until later on.
Because this is the thing about going from control command and control paradigm to surrendering, you know.
Yeah, exactly. Like not being passive. There's a difference in that too. It's not being passive. It's like you still have your dreams, you still have your desires and you pursue them, but. But not gripping with.
[00:38:27] Speaker B: Very bracing.
[00:38:29] Speaker A: Yes. And the disappointment, you know, and the expectations and the holding onto the expectations too tight, perhaps. Because often the synchronicities, when I look back, they've unfolded in ways that I could not. In ways that are beyond what I could have imagined, and in much more beautiful, profound, rewarding ways as well, but across different time horizons, linear time horizons that I might have anticipated. So it's like sometimes things just go dormant the same way I know that it's not like, oh, I've stopped teaching meditation, I'm done with that. I know that that's going to happen in different ways.
And it's like these meandering paths and in the least, you know, some people could shape a story and be like, oh, you invested so much time, money, energy to do the training and then you only taught for a few years. Like what's the point in that? And whereas I look at it, it's brought me into contact with some people who I've taught that I can look back and go, if I hadn't met that person, they wouldn't have introduced me to this thing, this knowledge system or this offering or whatever which then has unlocked this whole other cascade.
And I'm like, that was the door that was actually the node that needed to be connected. And then I also get this practice that's very valuable to me at a personal level. So it relates back to productivity and our addictions. Always needing something to lead to an output that's immediate and that seems valuable and is valued based on our perception of how it's valued by society. And where is the intrinsic reward?
[00:40:13] Speaker B: The intrinsic.
[00:40:14] Speaker A: Of fulfillment. Right, of fulfillment. Because that's what the child self had. When the child self doesn't need to earn money or produce anything. It's like what did I, what did 10 year old Emma do on weekends where she just had empty space?
It looked a lot different than what I did five years ago or even probably today in my weekdays.
[00:40:37] Speaker B: Yep, yep. And I think synchronicity too when I look back on it, in hindsight it doesn't just give you one or two indications of patterns like it. It'll keep presenting them until you act upon them.
And the act upon goes back to mass versus energy. So let me just. Because I, I'm just, this is a really current state of something I'm digging into really deep.
[00:41:00] Speaker A: Oh yeah, go for it.
[00:41:01] Speaker B: Which is ambiguity. So, so there's a guy that I know engineer like me who does sound baths. He's a sound journey guy. In fact, my wife's going to one of his sound sound baths tonight. It's her first time. I'm so excited for her to go and.
[00:41:16] Speaker A: Oh, nice decompress.
[00:41:18] Speaker B: There's a couple other people in it and so he wanted to have something for, for technical men, basically engineer, engineer types because we're so trained to. There's no ambiguity. You design. Right.
A few People got together. I'm like. I just. I knew I needed to go. And sometimes you just know.
Kind of like when I reached out to you, you said, yeah, and I'm glad you did. I need to hear this guy out.
So I went. And afterward.
This was a young man that had worked with them in the past. But had been unemployed for five months and rented an RV and traveled around the US Trying to quarter life crisis. You know, just understand things.
And what he shared was just how much he is really with intention, trying to grasp, with ambiguity.
And I really started to think about that word. And I have an essay that's coming out in a couple of weeks called On Ambiguity. And what he's saying is nature. Nature. Nature stays in superposition. It doesn't make any decisions until it's clear that a decision needs to be made.
So that means you don't brace. You don't decide for certainty out of the sense of safety that it gives. You're bracing against entropy. Entropy is the force that keeps coming. And anything that braces against entropy will get crumbled the way you survive. Otherwise, life wouldn't exist. We would never be able to be a living thing. Which is mostly empty space and 70% water. So we're literally an energetic system held together electrically by water.
I think every human being is just a water molecule looking for its way to connect.
But I. I don't know. So anyway, I feel like what you're describing, it's not lack of strength. That is strength. It's soft bonded strength. It's how you let force pass through you without destroying you.
[00:43:09] Speaker A: Yeah.
Yeah.
[00:43:11] Speaker B: So we need to embrace ambiguity. You don't have to have a plan. You don't have to have, you know, ten commandments to live your life by. You'll become those by just letting your nervous system drive you towards the sense of belonging. We're all wired to be.
[00:43:28] Speaker A: It is. I love the water metaphor too, because it's like, how can we be more like a river, you know? And water which always flows to the lowest point. Like it's always coming to feed what's at the lowest point and nourish it. And it can carve rocks, but it's. It's soft. There's like a softness. You can't. You can't grip it. You can't try and hold it in your hand and keep it forever.
[00:43:51] Speaker B: It's constantly captured.
[00:43:52] Speaker A: But it's powerful and it's strong. And so it is a different definition of what strength is. And for me, it was definitely a Rebalancing of the masculine feminine energies which we all have in male, female bodies. It doesn't matter. We all have it in different ways. And for me it was definitely over indexed to the hardcore, very unhealthy push, push at no, no limits, the masculine. And it's very much a return to integrating with the feminine again, which I've found personally quite challenging in the society that I exist in, in an environment that's constantly giving me positive reinforcement for like going and winning that next match.
[00:44:36] Speaker B: How do people help themselves knowing, I mean, I need a job, I'm at a place I don't have to relocate, but it drains my energy every single day that I go in there. And there's so many people in those situations, like they're just trying to get through the day and have some hydration left for themselves and their family and their spouses, but they're stuck. So how do they help them?
What were some ideas that you can share to help people in those situations?
[00:45:05] Speaker A: It's easier said than done.
And that can sound a bit mushy, but it's like, how do you cultivate compassion for yourself firstly in those moments, right, because.
And I, I get it because I go into it all the time too. It's a survival mode.
And you feel, especially if you're sensitive, like especially sensitive, you go into those environments and it's like you're going in preparing for warfare every day and you're being attacked and like feel, feel it, even if it's not explicit because it's a violation of your humanity and everything that you know in terms of a culture of care between all, all living things, including us as human beings. And it's shocking because I've experienced it firsthand, I've seen it a lot secondhand as well. It's pervades pretty much every, every sector of society, you know, and every aspect. And we can't avoid it, nor can we fix it all because often I always say like it starts from the top and if it's embedded in the culture, it will persist beyond the people. And so as I was saying earlier, it's like, come back to your home base. What can you take care of? Firstly, give yourself compassion if you're in a really tough draining situation. And then do your best to carve out time, which is often the thing that you're chasing, you know, and you don't even have enough time to sleep. Like sleep number one, get some good sleep, sanitation, don't be looking at your phone, use tools like yoga, nidra and all the free apps out there to help you get to sleep and stay asleep.
And that, I think, is number one, because I've lived through having bouts of insomnia. And if, like, your sleep is missing, it's.
It's hard not to be in survival mode.
And then beyond that, food, you know, that's been a journey that I've been on as well. It's like, what are. Take inventory of? Like, what are all of your inputs? Like, you would a business if you were starting to be like, okay, what. How they need to reshape their strategy? Or what do they need to fix their revenue?
You know, profits aren't quite right. Well, what are your inputs? What is the food you're putting in your body?
Is it nourishing? Is it right for you? Is it right for the season? Like, all these different things. And that's a whole other podcast that would go on for days. So I'll stop there with that sleep, food, and then I'm not going to tell you. One practice to do, but find one practice. I would invite you to find one practice that can literally be two minutes. That's how I started with meditation, and that resonated with me. And it's not for everyone.
It might be swimming, it might be running, it might be 10 minutes of yoga. It might be just sitting with a cup of coffee or tea in the morning and, like, literally just taking a breath.
[00:48:07] Speaker B: Stillness. Just embracing stillness. Yeah, yeah. We busy with phones and EarPods and podcasts and.
[00:48:14] Speaker A: Which is escape.
[00:48:16] Speaker B: It's escape.
Mow the lawn without sound in your ears. Just be.
[00:48:20] Speaker A: Yeah, like, walk down the block with no phone on you. Which feels like a radical thing. You feel naked. I feel naked when I do it. I know I did it before this podcast. I didn't even think. I just left the house. I was like, I don't even have my phone, but I know I'll be back in time. And I do it more and more these days, and it's refreshing, but we have to be intentional about it.
Right? And that's the thing. We can't control the outcomes, but we can be intentional about our inputs and our attitudes and approach. And I also think about when you have no choice to, like, immediately, because I do not encourage you to just quit your job, have no plan tomorrow. Just hope that somehow you can put food on the table and take care of your kids.
Do not go do that unless you absolutely have to and you're in a dangerous situation.
But otherwise, it's like you kind of have to be in this less than ideal state.
And I think about, you know, net positive, net negative kind of energy balances.
So in your current situation, if you were to look at the past week, month, year, however you want to judge it, like, where was your energy? What was the total energy balance? Was it net negative? So you were really drained? Were you burned? Like, you had to take leave? Were you completely burnt out? Then you're really in the red? Or would you say you're around neutral? Like, you don't feel super energized, but you also don't feel really depleted. Like, you have energy on weekends to still be able to do things, and you feel generally maybe positive at luck or you in the green and you're not positive. And I find that helpful in tricky situations to just assess and be like, where am I at in this? And let's be compassionate because maybe I am in that negative. And it's.
It's not expected that I should have dreams and goals. Because we can only do that when we're resourced. Like, only when our battery is full can can that part of us open up and be like, I have an idea. I want to pursue. I want to build this business. I want to go this trip, whatever it might be.
You can't be in an outward creation state when your body is like, I need all energy preserved.
[00:50:43] Speaker B: Yep, that's a great, great point, Emma. I. That's really insightful. You know, don't start planning a future until you've secured the present.
[00:50:53] Speaker A: Yeah, it's like, bring it back to basics.
How much can you simplify?
How simple can you make your schedule?
How peel it all back.
[00:51:05] Speaker B: My book is based on basically what you just said, which is you said compassion for yourself. And I. I feel like it's loving. You can't love anyone else until you can love yourself. What does that mean? Loving yourself means you go back and find that original, unedited self because then you know your truth, because you can reconnect to when that truth was evident.
And if you can live your truth, only then can you love yourself truly.
And only when you can love yourself truly can you love everyone else unconditionally.
And that's when this turns on that electromagnetic wave where one calm nervous system can lower the energy in an entire room that comes from turning that on. And I finally pieced that together because consciousness, before my book even published, I kept having this recurring vision in like a delta state of meditation, I kept coming. Or in vivid dreaming, I kept coming back to chakras as a progression of Timescale.
And I kept coming back and back. And then what it led me to is, I think we talked about. There's a popular podcast called the Telepathy Tapes, which is about non speaking autism. And now that they're able to communicate, you realize these people are chakra embodied.
They don't have a root chakra that they had to go through. And. But, but the thing that they kept coming back to, that you kept hearing thematically, is incoherence, meaning your words have to match how you truly feel.
So if you're having a bad day, say it, own it, it's okay.
But when your words don't match it, it's incoherence, it's static.
[00:52:49] Speaker A: Yeah. And that's what we feel.
[00:52:51] Speaker B: That's what we feel. And we have systems across the planet that reinforce static.
Right?
[00:52:58] Speaker A: Yeah.
And then you think you're the crazy one. Yeah, this is what I mean. But. And I've observed it in others, not just myself, but often, if your innate sensibility is that you are a little extra attuned and not so easy for you to block off your senses, more than just your five senses, but the nervous system that is constantly taking in thousands of inputs every second. Because we're feeling the energy of the room, we're feeling the energy of.
Everything has an essence, whether it's at the smallest denominator or if it's at the macro, a company or a nonprofit, it has its own essence as well. And so it's like we feel that and we can't always describe why we met someone or we were in a room or at an event and we just left and we're like, I actually felt good.
I don't know why, but like, I feel good in the sense of energy flowing.
And so if we're sensitive to all of these incoherent organizations, cultures, individuals, that is like bombarding us, then it's easy for us to feel depleted. Like depletion is. It's not that you don't have enough energy because it's not like we, I think beyond sleep. It's not like we just have this resource stock to tap into whenever we want. It's more like it's moving through us.
It's fluid and it's emotion and dynamic. And so it's like if we're depleted, it means that all of the energy has been drawn out of us and it's the opposite of flowing. Like it really is blocked. And so then I think about buffering. It's like, how do I buffer myself?
And I Still do this. It's like I often don't know why I might feel really off or I'm feeling that compression or doubting myself or whatever the mental and emotional state is. But at some point I have to sit and be like, is that even mine or did I just take all that in?
It's almost like I've been hijacked and I'm like, oh, I need to do some stuff to clear this and reset myself. And it's amazing how quickly it can happen.
[00:55:15] Speaker B: You're the only one I've ever talked to that has said that to me. Because I go through it too. There's just certain days I feel off and I don't know why. There's no clear. So I don't know if I'm entraining others.
You know, energy. I don't know what it is. But yeah, it is. I. I find it intriguing in, in a self awareness kind of way. But yeah, there are times and, and I think you had said when we first met, you said something like allergic and I like that word too. Like sometimes we become allergic to static and we just can't.
[00:55:47] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:55:48] Speaker B: So we protect ourselves because our nervous system is now knows. So. So we sometimes just actively avoid staticky situations.
[00:55:57] Speaker A: Yeah. And what's fascinating to observe Right. In terms of personal evolution as well, is when what used to feed us then feels static.
[00:56:07] Speaker B: Yes.
Yes.
[00:56:08] Speaker A: And that's what at least I really had moments of being like, is there something wrong with me? You know, why?
I just do not relate at all to the version of me that somehow got something out of it, you know, that got the dopamine. It's like that just doesn't matter to me anymore.
So now what? Like how do I engage in the world while also disengaging with what doesn't feed me?
[00:56:34] Speaker B: And you have to becoming more and more embrace ambiguity. You need to embrace ambiguity. Right. Because there is no replacement plan. There is no plan.
[00:56:42] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:56:42] Speaker B: It's just being and belonging.
[00:56:45] Speaker A: I'm being comfortable.
[00:56:46] Speaker B: And if that magic stays connected in coherent squares, then everyone in that lattice can start thinking about future and endeavors and passions and where they want to take that embodied truth and make something like you and I, I think both get a certain amount of hydration within our own souls by helping others hydrate themselves. Like diet.
[00:57:14] Speaker A: Definitely helping.
[00:57:15] Speaker B: And I mean it's all about. But you know, something about the book I wanted to. To circle back to because I think it'll resonate with you because it's about. It really starts with the foundation of hydration because us, plants, trees, fish, birds, the planet itself, all about 70% water.
And if you think about your body and there's even new research like Dr. Neil Thies has published the discovery of all these hidden aquifers within the body and the organs we didn't even know were there.
So when you take an like I, this has been sitting with me since college. So freshman year in college I had a neighbor in the dorm that was a civil engineer. I was chemical. So I went to south to Baton Rouge to work in a chemical plant. He went to a construction company in Ohio and very first week, you know, they were commissioning a water treatment facility.
And he's just standing there, bright eyed, hard hat, just wants to learn and make money, you know. So two guys were pulling on the gate valve and it snapped and that arm went flying towards him at missile velocity. And the reaction is to put your hand up. And that's what he did. And he survived. His brain swelled and he had hundreds of micro fractures in his skull but he survived.
He barely had a nick on his hand because it dispersed the energy.
Water is able to disperse that energy.
And so I started to eventually I'm like shit, it's all about water. And it's our. So there's three bodies. The physical body which is like bones, muscles, tissue. And then the electrical body which is the nervous system, the electrical wiring and the breath and the 70% salt water. We're basically a walking, talking salt battery. But what bridges those two together is the somatic body which is the fascia, that silvery web that wraps every part of us underneath the skin. That's not only how we communicate up and down the seven chakras of the spine and how the organ, but it's also how we interact with the field, with the external world. And if you don't have that in good operating tuned condition, you're going to have a hard time reaching that, that heartfield energy.
So it starts with hydration. Make sure your brook is flowing, singing and babbling, not thick, sludgy. Drink more water.
Really, really hydrate yourself because when you feel better, you think better. When you think better, you see better.
[00:59:49] Speaker A: That's a good primer for a myofascial release course I'm doing in a couple weeks. Because talk about coming full circle back to the tennis thing. It's like I always was looking at all my peers and I was like no one else is stretching as much as me. Why am I so damn tight? And honestly, because I'm still unraveling my Body, you know, a decade later. And I've had every treatment in the books, and it's nothing acute, but it's more just like the gripping that I can feel in my body. And acupuncture has been a big thing for me over the past couple years to help with my back because I had sciatica and all sorts of stuff going on for years.
But I know it's nervous system, like, it is so much that I didn't have the capability to deal with. And so it's almost like my body just firmed up to keep me going.
[01:00:44] Speaker B: It experienced that physiological state so often in that environment that it keeps going back as like a tab that it reverts back to.
[01:00:53] Speaker A: Yeah. Like a default mode.
[01:00:56] Speaker B: So I, I do what. What has done wonders for me is muscle activation therapy.
[01:01:02] Speaker A: I've heard a bit about that.
[01:01:04] Speaker B: It, I haven't done it. It's fascinating. So research it. Even the history of it actually came from an nf, a retired NFL football player.
[01:01:13] Speaker A: Oh, nice technique.
[01:01:15] Speaker B: But it does wonders for me because again, I was born breech, hips were off, one leg shorter. And so my nervous system keeps trying to take my body back there because
[01:01:26] Speaker A: that's where it started.
Yeah.
[01:01:27] Speaker B: So through yoga and everything else, it's really about preventing my nervous system from taking my body back to a state that I don't want it to go back to.
[01:01:35] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like active rehabilitation.
[01:01:39] Speaker B: Yes, exactly.
Oh, wow. I, I, Emma, I think we could talk about these topics for.
[01:01:46] Speaker A: I know we could. That's like part one that's far.
[01:01:49] Speaker B: Yeah. I think I may have to have you back on the show. This is fascinating, and I, I think, I feel like everybody is, whether they're consciously acknowledging it or quietly dismissing it, their nervous systems are seeking what we're talking about.
So I'm really excited for this one to air.
So, again, Emma, thank you. I know we had to reschedule a couple of times, but I really appreciate it.
It's well worth it. And we'll end the show the way I always do. Bond soft and build strong.
Until next time, I'm Kelly Williams with Roots to Fruits podcast.
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