If you've ever felt stuck in the mud of a life that seems more grey than colourful…and you long for a deeper sense of purpose and fulfilment to get your flow going, this episode is for you. Today’s guest, James McCrae of the incredibly popular Instagram page Words Are Vibrations, explores the transformative power of creativity as a tool for personal healing and social change. Listen on to unlock your hidden potential and embrace the sacred essence of life itself.

Welcome to the We Are Already Free podcast, inspiring down-to-earth seekers to live their truth and be the change. I’m your host Nathan Maingard, and it’s an honour to be here with you.

We are joined today by James McCrae, the man behind Words Are Vibrations on Instagram. James is an artist, poet, and teacher who empowers creators to live with purpose and turn imagination into reality. He is the founder of Sunflower Club, a global community dedicated to creativity as a tool for personal healing and social transformation. As a creative strategist, he has worked with top brands and startups to define and actualize their message and mission. His books include Sh#t Your Ego Says and How to Laugh in Ironic Amusement During Your Existential Crisis.

Throughout this episode, we dive deep into various thought-provoking topics that are sure to resonate with you:

• Unveiling the Shadows: Why Memes, Writing, and Art Are Shadow Work
• Discover how engaging with memes, writing, and art can serve as a powerful means of exploring your own shadow, unearthing hidden truths, and catalyzing personal growth.
• Escaping the Matrix: The Journey Within
• Explore the fascinating concept that life on Earth is not about escaping the matrix, but about navigating it with awareness. James invites us to transcend fear, tap into intuition, and embrace the liberating path of self-discovery.
• Trusting Your Intuition: A Gateway to Freedom
• Stay tuned until the end to uncover the secrets of trusting your intuition. James reveals practical techniques and insights that will empower you to enhance your decision-making, find reassurance, and discover your life's true purpose. By the end of this episode, you'll understand why creativity is not just about solving problems but receiving divine inspiration, and how embracing your innate creativity can lead to personal growth, healing, and the positive transformation of society as a whole.

LINKS AND THINGS:

• Words Are Vibrations on Instagram
• James McCrae's website
• Sunflower Club Podcast

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I love being me with you. What a pleasure

Love

Nathan

Listen on to unlock your hidden potential and embrace the sacred essence of life itself.

the answers are in being a conscious, being. Spiritual being is living a human body experience. it's simple, it's here and it's now, you don't have to go out and find it. Eat real food. Just shining your light so bright. We are already free. You're free. you are a walking map. Have always been free.

You are always free. Already free. We are already free.

His books include Shit Your Ego Says and How to Laugh in Ironic Amusement During Your Existential Crisis. Throughout this episode, We dive deep into various thought provoking topics that are sure to resonate with you. Unveiling the Shadows. Why memes, writing, and art are shadow work.

Discover how engaging with memes, writing, and art can serve as a powerful means of exploring your own shadow, unearthing hidden truths, and catalyzing personal growth. Escaping the Matrix. The Journey Within. Explore the fascinating concept that life on earth is not about escaping the matrix, but about navigating it with awareness.

By the end of this episode, you'll understand why creativity is not just about solving problems, but receiving divine inspiration, and how embracing your innate creativity can lead to personal growth, healing, and the positive transformation of society as a whole. Find links to James, his Instagram, and more by checking the show notes in whichever app you're listening, or visit alreadyfree. me slash four one, to access bonus segments, chat with me directly and more. And now let's embark on this journey of self discovery, liberation, and tapping into your creative potential with today's guest, James McCrae of Words Are Vibrations.

The thing I just wanna start with is saying I am kind of fanboying right now. Yeah. I really, really deeply appreciate your work.

I'm curious to know what is the shadow that you had to go to to be able to move between them like that?

It's all sacred.

And this morning, because of that kind of just also. I think I got on my phone again straight in the morning and then I didn't get into a morning practice. And what I then did is I just, I managed to take a breath. I saw the sun was about to rise, and I thought, okay, let me just go sit on my deck. And I got my ukulele out and I was like, I'm just gonna play one song.

On the ukulele, like that's my morning practice. And it was amazing cuz I sat and I played to the dawn, and as I played as I was playing, I started seeing the little drops of dew along the edges of the leaves that the sun was starting to shine through. And suddenly I just looked around me. I was like, holy shit, I'm in heaven.

And then I wrote a, a song, like a one verse song that was like the transmuted, the rea, the the acknowledgement and. Gratitude for polarity that that is the experience that I came here for. And so when I hear you speaking, that all just comes rushing back.

I believe that is kind of the nature of the soul, but that's not the nature of the earth. And, and, and of the third dimension, I think this is a place of polarity where we can experience both sides of that. So I think while we're here, you know, in this temporary body. That I, you know, embrace it. Embrace the, the, the totality of the human experience.

Almost protection, even when protection is not necessary. So it creates enemies where there might not be any enemies or it creates threats when there might not be any threats. And therefore listening to the ego can get us into trouble. Cuz it brings into into that mindset of scarcity and competition, which is ultimately not a very fulfilling place to be, whereas the intuition.

You know, having a strong ego, um, can be helpful. You know, you can have an, uh, you, you can have an overdeveloped ego where you're too full of yourself or you're, you're, you're too ego driven. But you can also have an underdeveloped ego where you don't. Think enough about yourself. You don't think highly of yourself enough,

and then you might be afraid to use your voice.

You might be afraid to assert yourself. You might be afraid to follow your purpose and your vision because your ego isn't strong enough to give you that permission to do so. So I think it's good to have an ego, but to keep it in check. So I, I like to think that I. I'm on more friendly terms with my ego, and I think I had to write that book in order to get there.

Um, but it's not necessarily like lead, like running this show then in, in the same way that it, that it, that it used to be.

It's useful because it's where my identity lives. And I came here to have an identity. I came here to be. To pretend to be Nathan for a while, and the ego's whole objective is to protect that identity. So it's doing the best it can.

Like it, it gi, it orients us in this world. It gives us a localized kind of perspective, which, no, it's not the ultimate truth. Like there, the localized human perspective is not the ultimate truth of our reality and our existence and our purpose, but it's kind of like the role that we're playing in this game.

And it reminded me, my second guest on the podcast was Emily Siao of Free Birth Society. And when we talked about we are already free, she's like, yeah, your name's cool of your podcast at all. But most people are literally born into prison. In terms of how we birth people right now, and since you said that at the beginning, I'd just be curious to hear more from you around like how, you know, where's that perspective at for you and, and what does birth look like and how would you like it to look?

And I'd just love to hear a little more about that.

When is the origin of this sensation? And it was, oh, it was trying to take my first breath when I was first born. Because

Then I need to take another one. And guess what? It doesn't stop. We've been taking our own breaths ever since, and now it's like, you know, I don't even know how good most of us are. At this, at it now, you know, breath work. Whenever I do breath work, whenever I try to do breath work, I'm, I'm, I'm constantly reminded how bad I am at breathing and how, how, how unintentional my breathing is.

Over sterilize and, and, and medicalize the experience. Um, you know, I think that there's, there's li being born and dying are, are, are really the two biggest ceremonies that we go through in our lives. The biggest rites of passage. So I think that one thing that's very much lacking in our society today is this idea of meaningful initiations.

Ceremonial, um, and intentional and, um, things like that would just really help, um, just orient us in a different way as, as, as a society.

I had a hot cup of, uh, fresh ginger and lemon tea I just made and my water. And I wanted to bring sage with me to burn some sage before. Cuz that's generally what I'll do before I start a podcast recording. And I didn't, I couldn't carry it all. And so then it was like this little missing piece of ritual for me.

So I'd just love to hear from you, what are some rituals that you have found really powerful in your life? And I don't know, just anything more on ritual that's really resonating with me.

We do them kind of mindlessly because they're so, they're like unimportant, so to speak. But I've been thinking a lot lately of how. The small moments in our days really are the majority of our lives and how we do the simple things right? Like how, how we, um, put away our clothes or how get the mail and how we greet our loved ones when we come home.

Something is made holy by the attention that we give it. So when you do things with full intention, you're almost sanctifying it in a way and you're making it holy. So when we can give our attention to those small things and treat everything like a ritual, like when trying really hard to keep things really clean and organized right.

That's how I try to spend the majority of my mornings.

I just hadn't the way you just. Spoke that hard. I was just like, I didn't wanna move because it was just such a precious little gem of truth speaking. I just was like, oh, this is great. It's like that feeling if I could just stay here forever. Um, but yeah, thank you for that little, um, that it was exactly that this morning.

Cuz I feel like I'm just seeing this huge like exodus from California to Austin, Texas or to Texas.

Beautiful, um, kind of, you know, rocks, formations, and I mean, I've never, I've never lived in a place more beautiful than that. And I was 10 minutes from the ocean and I could go swimming all the time and I did. Um, so I feel like after living in New York for eight years and my partner was in New York for like 16 years, we thought we were gonna.

Are a lot of healing benefits to to California, and I really enjoyed living there. Now, what's sparking the exodus to Austin? Well, for us it was completely accidental and there was nothing. there was nothing intentional about it, to be honest with you, because, well, first, first of all, this was kind of during the, the, the height of the pandemic.

You know, I, I had no faith. I had no faith and still have no faith in the government of California and LA specifically.

So despite how much we loved being there, it didn't feel safe. If there were another crisis of some sort, I don't trust that city to handle it in any, in any way resembling common sense.

I didn't know that it was kind of this like, um, becoming this more sought after city. I literally just said it. It was just like, it just came out. And I wasn't even serious, but then my partner was like, oh, maybe we should, and I'm like, oh really? And we talked about it and we just decided to do it. We had never, neither one of us had ever been here.

We didn't visit first. We just found a place and just decided to move here and,

At least that's what it feels like to me. At least that's what it's, you know, my path is, um, kinda goes through Austin at this point in time.

And based on what you've been saying so far, it sounds like you have quite an act of a very active connection to your intuition and that that's what's guiding you. Could you speak to that?

In my experience, the best ideas just pop into your head. And you're just there to kind of receive the idea and to act on it. And when I do that, when I just trust the ideas as they come through and then I look back on them, they're always so much better than if I'm trying to like solve something with the my conscious mind.

So I realize that creativity specifically is not about solving something, it's about receiving something. There, there, there's a bit of a passive role to it. I mean, there's, there's an active role in getting in, opening up your intuition to, to, to be in that place of receptivity. But the idea comes from.

Take place of that, that healing, that social transformation through creativity.

It's not the mind. It's not like I'm trying to like, think of something cool to say. I'm feeling my body and feeling my emotions to see what's trying to come out. And then I honor that by, by, by letting it out onto the page. And then even more so when you get up and express it in public, there's a huge release that happens and we can all feel it.

And then I also believe that creativity is critical for social change. Because if you want to change a society, you need to build new systems, essentially, right? So we need builders, but before you can build something, you need to have a plan. So we need planners. But before you can have a plan, you need to have a dream.

You need to have a vision. So we need dreamers and visionaries. So I feel like artists are those initial dreamers and visionaries that plant a seed in the collective consciousness that can then take root and grow and be built in reality. But I believe it starts with the, the vision and the imagination of the artist.

He didn't have that one there. I think I would've bought it. But there's another one that he does where there's an artist with a paintbrush and he's like, Sort of pushing the paintbrush across the sky, sideways across the image, and behind him is just flowers and, and, and waterfalls and butterflies and beauty.

And in front of him there is bombs and war and armies. And, and the paintbrush is where, you know, it's exactly what you've just described, that he is visioning an alternative reality that does, you know, that that becomes a new template. And, and I've just, you know, hearing you say that just really reconnects me to that message.

So, so I, I, you don't have to worry about rattling those off unless there's something specific, a new project or a new thing you'd like people to hear about, which if there is, please go ahead.

And, and there's all these other things that we're kind of dependent on that we have to hustle then we have to strive outside of ourselves for validation. But I think the real game changer is realizing that it's, it's kind of with's already within you, and we can, we can find freedom and salvation and fulfillment and enlightenment within

this 3D space that we're in, um, and we can kind of come into harmony with it when we stop looking outside of ourselves and just look for that peace and inner fulfillment rather than always seeking and chasing and comparing ourselves to others because it's only about you and your own purpose and aligning with that and bringing your attention back to that.

Take a moment to be a conscious consumer by taking an action based on what you've learned here. Most people will just press play on the next thing, consume something else, and move right on. But you are not most people. I know you want to live a life of meaning, depth, presence, purpose, joy, and wonder.

So, if you ever find yourself struggling to create or share your creations because you're worried about what others think, or you are just ready to create amazing memes, then find the link to the bonus video at alreadyfree. me slash four one.