Chris from 'Conversations for the End' joins me for a conversation about grief, suffering, addiction, Carl Jung, and what happens when the things we avoid begin to find their way back to us.

After losing his brother in a car accident at fourteen, Chris spent years trying to outrun the grief through distraction, achievement, drugs, alcohol and different forms of escape. In this episode, we explore what suffering can reveal when we stop treating it only as something to fix, numb or avoid.

This is a conversation about death, renewal, symbolic meaning, the unconscious, modern life, the internet, and the difficult process of becoming more honest with yourself.

In this episode, we explore:

→ What “the end” really means

→ Losing a brother at fourteen

→ Grief, addiction and avoidance

→ Why suffering can reconnect us to life

→ Carl Jung, symbols and individuation

→ The parts of ourselves we try not to face

→ The internet as a modern trickster

Follow Chris from CFTE:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/conversationsfortheend/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@conversationsfortheend

Your podcast is called Conversations for the End. What does the end mean to you?

You really did go in deep for that.

Straight in.

Okay. Yeah. So I guess when I was pondering these names for the show, initially it was going to be Conversations for the end of the World. Right.

I think in these trying times, I think a lot of people have this perception that the. The world is on fire as the kind of as is memed.

And I thought it would be good to have conversations with people whose ideas I value, kind of with that as the backdrop of what we're, what we're dealing with. So that's kind of what's orientated around Conversations around the end of the world.

Now on the show, you'll see behind me there is a eclipse in one of the frames. Now that is a symbolic motif of the end of the world kind of eclipse and related to the word apocalypse.

Now, the root of the word apocalypse means to reveal or to disclose.

So in kind of a double meaning way, it is set, you know, Conversations for the end, with the backdrop being kind of turbulent times of the world we live in. But also it is conversations to reveal. Right. Stuff about ourselves, about each other. Yeah, I think that's kind of the orientation I had with it.

There's sort of, yeah, split meaning. But what drew you to the. Why is it so important to have these sort of conversations?

Why was it that you wanted to build your work around those sorts of conversations?

I am, I am a kind of a believer that we live. We live in what Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist, called a de souled world.

So to speedrun it, I guess if we go back to the Enlightenment era, the birth of what we would call modern scientific thinking, that has brought us lots of benefits.

You know, we have technology, we have advances in medicine, we have a whole host of benefits that we, that we get to enjoy as a result of kind of where that started, and it obviously started slightly before that. But generally let's call that the kind of, you know, the starting point.

However, as a result of that process, as a result of the kind of modern scientific worldview that many of us, whether we are scientists or not, will unconsciously adapt in the way that we perceive the world, we have taken the soul out of the world in some sense. So Max Weber had this idea of disenchantment.

So we no longer see the kind of the magic inherent in, in the natural world and in, I guess maybe just kind of our general day to day existence, you know, the kind of wonder and the mystery of being a human being. And how bizarre that is. Everything is reduced to this or that. You know, matter is just dead matter.

And, you know, we just came from the Big bang, or we are just a selection of cells, you know, a brain in a body. And I do think there is. There is more to life than that.

Within ourselves, in our connections with each other and within the world, there is mystery and there is magic. And I think really having these conversations is kind of dipping my toe into exploring that depth in one way or another, if that makes sense.

Yeah. How do we begin to bring more enchantment back into our lives?

You're coming at me with the big ones. It's a really good question, and I don't think it necessarily has an easy answer because everyone lives different lives.

And enchantment, I believe, can be found in many different places.

You know, I do think one of the obvious sources of enchantment that I think many of us will feel is perhaps you have one of those evenings, you go out on a long walk through nature. You can feel a change in the way that you receive the world. You know, when you see a sunset now, how many sunsets have you seen in a lifetime?

Yet you will still see one after the, I don't know, hundred time and say, wow, you know, that's beautiful, right? And that is enchantment. And I think that is a place to start. I think getting out in nature, taking time to really sit with what's going on there.

Carl Jung has a good little letter that he writes to a friend.

So his friend is a colleague, I think, is going through a kind of period of crisis in his life, and he's trying all these different spiritual methods to understand what's going on. He's sort of intellectualizing it. And I think he says he's reading Sanskrit.

And Carl Jung writes him back and says, you need to go to a local forest, basically a local patch of nature, and you need to sit with a tree. You will find yourself in the simple things of your life. It's not in these grand narratives. It is in. Is there. And I think there is wisdom in that.

I think we will find more than we think is available to us if we just spend time around the natural world. But then to expand. I do also think there is enchantment in. You know, I did a video where I talk about that moment. Beckham, Greece. Right.

You know, that free kick. Yeah, that. That moment where a nation are lifted. Right. I feel it now, when I think about it. You know, I feel that moment.

And you might find it in A crisp, cold pint. The way the. Another story I tell is, I was coming back from India.

I'd been out to India for six weeks, again, exploring the grand narratives, to kind of find myself sitting with these babas and gurus and kind of reading the deep texts, trying to find these. Where was the source of meaning and depth?

And then I'm on the coach back from Heathrow, and there's me at the back of the coach, and then there's one guy at the front. That's it for the whole coach. Peeks his head back, walks to the back, sits down by me, starts talking.

He's a scaffolder, and he talked about scaffolding in the same way people would talk about the Sistine Chapel. And that, again, is enchantment.

Yeah.

You know, the ability to see beauty and depth in. In the mundane. Beauty in the mundane, I think, is. It's different for everyone as well. Exactly. I would say, what lights you up?

You know, is there something that lights you up? Explore that. You know, even if you get a glimmer of it, I would say explore that.

I was speaking to Prof. Stevens earlier about the forest bathing, which is essentially what you discussed there, and he was saying this. I think they actually prescribe it sometimes in Japan, but I've heard of it through that philosophy before.

And that idea of forest bathing, you're going into nature and sitting with a tree, laying on the grass, looking at the sky, hearing the rustling of the leaves and the. Of course, like, being closer to an actual forest or areas like that is easy, but there are ways to do it in the city.

The nearest park or field, you can even just lay on the grass there. And that's what I've done where I was living, because it's all I had. But it just slows you down in that moment and. Yeah. Brings you down to a.

Appreciate the world. And like the sunset thing.

Yeah, you could see a hundred sunsets, and it could still be as amazing that last time because it's unique to you in that moment. It's the only time you will see that exact sunset from this exact spot ever.

Exactly. Although I will. I will caveat this with a brief, funny story. I remember not too long ago watching a particularly fantastically beautiful sunset.

There's lots of people there watching this sunset.

And then behind me, this group of lads walks by, and I just hear one of them, you know, as someone sort of passes, you just hear the fragment of their conversation. And I heard him say, ah, it's just a sunset, isn't it. Once you've seen one, you've seen them all.

And I now see it as my personal vendetta in terms of putting out content to reach that guy. I need to know. I need to know more about him. I need to explore what has happened to him that has made him feel that way.

And I.

And I hope that he has since been re enchanted with the world. But it is, it does stick with me and it is. Yeah, it was particularly funny to hear that spoken out loud by a human.

Yeah. But yeah, I'm sure you'll find him. I've got every face fingers crossed. Yeah.

But I think you're right.

Yeah.

You can find it in all sorts of places. I think, you know, in terms of the nature stuff, even, you know, the difference of having plants in your house. Right. Have that stuff around.

Yeah. Just jumping back into the name, specifically the end and the end of the world you spoke about to the end of the world is death as well.

Conversations around death, I think we often ignore. It's something that people fear, obviously, and just don't talk about. Whether that's right or wrong, I don't know.

But is there an argument to be made that by talking about death we can live more honestly?

I would say my perspective on death is approached in many ways. And in many ways I think we are lacking in Western culture around what you're saying, how we don't necessarily have these conversations.

Firstly, I think the thing to consider is often in many cultures, death is almost always followed by some form of rebirth, some form of renewal. Right. And this is in that the name of the show, Apocalypse. Right. There's a form of death, a form of destruction, but it is a revealing.

It is a revealing of something new. And I talk a lot on the show as well about symbolic death, about parts of ourself that may no longer serve us. Right.

And we sometimes are confronted with those parts. And that can be painful for various reasons.

It can be something that has been tied to our identity for a long time, something that is just painful to process. And in order for it to. To be let go of, to die, there is a kind of a process of heat, of tension that has to be worked through.

I mean, you know, from your profession better than I, but this idea of. With forest fires, they have this concept of a controlled burn. Right.

And a necessary death to burn certain elements of a forest to stop a fire spreading.

Right.

And I think all these ways of looking at death as.

Not as a finality, simply at the end of life, but as Something that is a reoccurring theme in life in many different levels of kind of abstraction that we should embrace, that we should see as an opportunity for renewal. I think that can benefit us greatly. Agree to take the punctuation point off the end of death as finale.

Yeah, you know, it builds us up to that. Those conversations around it.

Because I remember speaking to a grief expert on the show who spoke about things that we would just think are just parts of life. But losing a relationship, losing a job, they're all forms of grief.

You're losing something that potentially added to your identity and to who you are.

So by approaching those things and when you lose that person in your life, who you've been with for however many years, to turn around to that person, and instead of going, you'll find someone else. There are loads of great people out there. They're not. They don't deserve you.

Whatever it is that we say, it's like, actually be like, it's pretty, it's shit. It's difficult. Like, it's. It's okay to feel a bit down about it.

I'll be here as you need to work through it, and then on the other side, we're good to go.

Yeah, exactly. And I think that what you're describing there in relation to, say, the grief of a relationship is very much. That's a mourning, isn't it?

And when you think of death in the kind of physical, material sense, we have these symbolic, ritualistic containers for that kind of mourning, you know, a funeral is that. I think the problem we maybe have in the west is we've lost touch with what those containers, what those rituals are for.

So it becomes kind of just the thing that we do. And we're not thinking with awareness about the significance of why are we here? What is this serving?

What is the function of us being gathered here to talk about this person, to. To do the processes that we are. That we are going through. I can give you another story if you allow me.

Yeah, I just. One of the other things that just popped into my mind is about how we sort of process it. And it feels like here we're very. It's very somber.

It's very down. There's a lot of cultures where it's like a celebration. And I don't know if that makes people almost come to come to terms with it a lot easier.

If you're celebrating this person's life as opposed to thinking about how sad it is that they're no longer here, think about all the things they did and all the good times.

Yeah, I guess it's. It probably comes down to. And look, I'm no expert on this, but at least my. My own experiences with.

With grief and with loss, I feel like it must come down to whatever it is that you're doing in that process, be it celebrating, be it mourning deeply, what function is it serving? Is it moving something? Is it acknowledging a transitional period, a change in states? And I think often we struggle to do that.

You know, we struggle to utilize the symbolic. The story. I was going to say there is. Jung tells this story. I'll sort of paraphrase it to shorten it, but you could go to Western.

The Western man's house and say, what relationship do you have with your religious symbols? Right. Or you would say, oh, we don't really have a relationship with our religious symbols. And then you would go away.

But if you came back at Christmas and you said, why do you have that tree in your lounge? He would say, I don't know. It's just what we've always done. Right. And Jung links that to when he was in Africa.

He said there was a tribe that every morning they would walk out of their huts, they would spit on their hands, rub it in the ground and hold it up to the sun. And he asked them, why are you doing that? And they said, it's just what we've always done. Right. So his point that he makes there is.

We think we are far advanced in. In Western culture to what Jung at the time would have called primitive cultures. Slightly problematic now, but we.

We are run by things that we don't quite fully understand, and we engage in rituals still, like funerals, that we don't fully understand. And I think what would benefit us generally is just trying to understand why we do these things.

What purpose were they there to serve, and trying to have awareness around them, you know, when we engage with them.

Yeah.

I don't know if I answered the question that you initially asked, but.

Yeah, well, now you were just adding a story when you. But yeah, it's. It's a great. It's a great thought to sort of explore in that why we do things. And. Yeah, I suppose it's just the done thing.

It's as simple as that. And asking those questions is quite difficult, I suppose, for a lot of people. So potentially it gets avoided. Wanted to just dive into your.

You mentioned your own grief and your own journey with this sort of topic. You lost your brother when you were 14. What did that do to your sense of the world?

What didn't it do. No, it's a difficult thing, isn't it?

And I think a lot that happens in terms of when you look at these pivotal life events, a lot of it starts to make sense retrospectively. But retrospectively, when you look back, you can kind of see what that was doing over time. When you're in it, it's very difficult to.

To understand what it's doing. I suppose if I'm to look back, I would say.

I did what I had to do to cope with what at the age of 14 years old was, you know, probably a very difficult, traumatic event to face. And you find your strategies, don't you? And that for me, over.

I'm 36 now, over the years came in the form of, I guess, emotional avoidance, like avoiding truly connecting with people. It came in the form of drugs and alcohol, and it probably just generally came in the form of not thinking about it that much.

And then as you go through life, I think you can only avoid, you know, on the topic of having the difficult conversations of talking about the things that we don't necessarily like to talk about.

Yeah.

If you don't talk about them, you don't escape them. They will find their way to you one way or another at some point in your life. And much of my life has been, I guess, navigating. That is that.

That came up for me in various ways.

Yeah, it was quite. It's a common way to go about, isn't it, that avoidance. This is such a difficult thing and at any age to go through that.

But at an age where you're old enough to understand it, but you're too young to maybe have the life experience to reflect on it fully. And I spoke to Mary Howell recently about the idea of letting go. She doesn't believe in letting go because things will always be there.

But the important thing is that you process these things. And the way you do that is obviously varied on the person.

There's no prescription per se into how you process things like this, but it's important that you process it however you need to. It goes to the side. You can sort of move on with your life. It's still there because there's always going to be things that bring that back up.

And that's the sort of important point is there'll be. You get it with songs, you get it with a smell, you get it with a location.

You go, you hear these things, and it will take you back to a moment where you could describe the entire scene. You could say exactly who's there. Exactly what's happening. And you can never let that go.

But what you can do is process it so that when it does come back up in that moment, you can acknowledge it and then sort of put it back to the side.

Yeah, yeah.

And I kind of take the, the mindset that I think our, our psyche, our inner world is somewhat of a self regulating system in that, you know, perhaps when we use me as an example at 14 years old, there was probably very little of that event and the trauma and the grief that 14 year old me was able to process. Right. But then as you go through life, like you say, you have these windows, these moments where the wound is opened up again.

I remember specifically not too long ago, a few years back, our family dog died. And I remember being in the gym and having this moment where, you know, the emotion of losing the dog came out.

And I reflected in that moment that it wasn't just the dog in that moment, it was, it opened up the doorway to the grief for my brother. And that was a gift from my dog, bless him.

What an absolute legend he was, you know, he, he allowed for that door to be open, you know, and in the sense that the psyche is maybe self regulating at that point in my life, I was probably able to process some stuff at least somatically in my body that perhaps I wasn't able to process at 14.

So every, every moment, every opportunity that life brings forth to us in the present that does hit a charge, an emotional charge or open up a wound from the past. I will try and see it as an opportunity.

This is a chance to face that, you know, however you want to frame it, but face what is there, often buried, and to process what I can of it in this moment.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

Yeah. Almost in stages, potentially as it comes up.

Yeah.

So there's something that you wrote a while back which I really thought was powerful. So I'm going to read it out so the listeners can sort of experience it as well as I do. When I was 14, my brother died in a car accident.

It was an event that fractured the world as I knew it. For years I tried to escape that pain that followed through distraction, through achievement, and through various forms of addiction.

Anything that might dull the unbearable sharpness of grief. It took a long time to realise that what I was running from was not only the memory of loss, but the immediacy of being alive.

Grief was not merely an absence, it was also a presence, a visceral reminder that I had loved and that I could still feel over time, I began to understand that suffering is not simply a mark of something missing, but also a sign of life asserting itself in the present. There's a strange paradoxical beauty in that recognition that pain, too, can participate in meaning.

Now, when life becomes difficult, I remind myself what a joy it is to suffer, not as a romanticization of pain, but as an acknowledgement that suffering, when met, directly connects us back to the pulse of being itself. What do those words, what a joy it is to suffer mean to you after going through something like that?

What's funny is I've started using that phrase more commonly in the kind of everyday moments of, like, inconvenience. Right. Kind of tongue in cheek. But it does. It does resonate to obviously, the core of what this idea is. Yeah.

I think, again, it's realizing we are perhaps not that great in modern culture about holding the tension of opposites. This idea of paradox. Right. Things are either this or they are that we often associate. Bad moment must be entirely bad.

It feels difficult to see what are obviously traumatic and terrible things as some sort of blessing. But I'm kind of of the mindset when it comes to spirituality and how I think about existence.

You know, whether you want to call it God or you just want to call it being or existence, it's either all God or none of it is, you know, and.

When we come up against these moments of suffering, be it the smaller sufferings in life, be it the grander sufferings in life, I do think it is a reminder, especially those deeper, deeper pains. It is just a reminder that you exist in a state that allows you to feel something so deeply. That is a. Is a reminder, you know, of.

Of how weird all of this is. Like the fact that we exist right in now. I don't want to get too. Too sort of stoner guy about it. It is weird, right? It is weird that we. We exist.

And again, part of just living as a human being is we take a lot of this for granted. It's kind of all baked into us that, well, I'm just a person. I'm just. Things are made of this and things are made of that for a minute.

Just like, step back and just, you know, it's all quite mysterious, isn't it? Life and suffering is just, to me, a marker of. It's a deep feeling, and it can. It can connect us with ourselves. It is a sign of our being.

It is a very clear sign of our being. And I think the more we can connect with our being, the better. I'll give You. A quote that I love. I'm not the full quote, but it relates to suffering.

And it's from. It's from a book called A Tragic Sense of Life.

And when he's referring to, I guess, kind of reality, he says, do not close your eyes to the agonizing sphinx. Let her crush you with her hundred thousand poisonous teeth until she has swallowed you.

And when she has swallowed you, then you will know the sweetness of the taste of suffering. And I love that quote.

That's good.

It's a beauty of a quote.

How do you think people can open themselves up to more of feeling that feeling that suffering in a more positive way as opposed to avoiding it, as we spoke about before?

There is the obvious thing of. Kind of what I'm nodding to there, which is we all live a life where there are good things and bad things.

Now, it would seem presumptuous to assume that we should just have good things. So there's that element of it. Right. You have to have a little bit of both. I also think we all think we know what is best for us. And I often think we.

Again, that's an assumption we make that I don't necessarily think is always in the best interest of our psychological and personal growth. Right. So when something uncomfortable arises, we go, this must be inherently bad.

However, on the other side of that could be the expansion and the growth and the healing that you. That you seek. There's that. I think it's Joseph Campbell. The treasure you seek is in the cave you least wish to enter.

If you look at the mythic stories across time, every hero that had to receive some sort of treasure or boon or wisdom had to come up against some sort of dragon, some sort of monster.

Every story. Every story,.

You know, and if we treat these mythic stories as kind of, you know, motifs that exist within our lives, within our psyches, sometimes we have to descend into the underworld. You know, that may be in reality where things stop being so good.

That may be in our own minds, in our own psyches, our own inner worlds, where we have to look inward and go into the depths of ourselves to see what has previously been hidden and face something that is painful, is scary. That is, you know, may hold potential risks to devour you. Right. Like a dragon might.

Yeah.

But I think if you can do that and know that in doing that, you are not simply working your way through some sort of pathology. Right. If you're depressed, if you're feeling depressed, you can frame it like, I'm depressed. I need to fix this or you can frame it.

Something is at dis ease within me. I'm going to look and see what that is and I'm going to take the courageous step to understand it and try and adjust what needs to be adjust.

Perhaps again, some symbolic part of me needs to die in order for me to be reborn on the other side of that depression. So again, I think it's about curating meaning within experience. Right. I think that's what that is. It's like suffering is unavoidable.

Yeah.

You, you will not get through this life without suffering. But if you can approach it in a way that curates meaning out of it, you might be able to transcend that suffering.

Yeah, you see it as most extreme, I suppose, when people are maybe diagnosed with terminal illness or have a near death experience where they're almost a different person on the other side of it because it's shown them that like the largest amount of suffering and they move through it and it gives them a fresh perspective on life. And what you were describing before, like, how amazing is this? Like, does it really make sense?

Not really, but it almost takes that thing to happen for someone to realize that and to fully live. And I don't know if there is a way, and I've asked people this before, to get that same sense of life without going through something like that.

Yeah. And you might be right. And that might be the cruel twist of fate that the, whatever force is behind this universe is laid out for us.

Is that the only way to, to really appreciate the, the depth of our experience is to suffer? I think that's, I mean the story, the myth at the, the core of Western civilization in the story of Christianity. Right.

Whether you have you subscribe to any of those stories, if you just see it as a story at this point, it is a story. Christianity did kind of build Western civilization. Whether you like what Christianity does nowadays or not.

That story is like the ultimate suffering story. You know, Christ as a, as a character, again, you know, let's just say as an archetypal figure, as a sort of a patterned character, is innocent.

Is the people that are doing what they do to him know he's innocent. And then he suffers in the most unbearable way to the point where the suffering is so bad that he forgets himself. Right.

He says, father, why have you forsaken me? Right. And he in is the kind of the divinity, right. The manifestation of God in, in human form in some sense.

And look, I'm not taking this Christian angle. What I'm saying is as a kind of symbolic story to think about your own suffering.

There will be points in life where suffering is so difficult for you that you will forget the kind of inherent divinity and sovereignty within yourself. Right. That you are a unique soul in a unique body, living a unique life. And that's okay. It's okay to feel that, to feel that burden.

But if you can meet it with awareness, I think that that's maybe what the key is, right. Is to meet with awareness and some consciousness. You may be able to garner a bit more out of it.

But perhaps the only way is, like you say, we can't simulate it, we just got to do it. Yeah.

And I think we also forget what we have been through, and sometimes we take it for granted. But everyone listening or watching now, whatever they've been through, and however bad that felt in the moment is still going.

And one of my previous guests said to me, we are undefeated. Like, you didn't get to hear by being defeated. You've never been defeated. So give yourself a little bit of credit as well to where we've got to.

Yeah. I think it's a Jordan Peterson line where he says people are blind to their own weaknesses often, but they are also blind to their own strengths.

And that inbuilt resilience. Yeah, totally. It's like, yeah, you may be suffering, but here you are. So let's focus on that.

Right.

There is meaning in that. There is meaning in. To again, to use the kind of Christian story and the symbolic images inherent in that story. I'm not trying to convert anyone.

I see those stories very much as symbolic stories about psychological processes to bear our cross.

Right.

That is something we can all do to carry our suffering with a bit of intent, with some meaning, and to understand that in life, I will try and take what I can of the suffering any given moment.

Yeah, yeah.

You wrote in that piece about how you escaped and sort of avoided that suffering originally through, like, the distraction, achievement and addiction.

Yeah.

What did that escape look like for you?

I guess what comes to my mind is what I always think. People always ask the question, why would people do. Why would people do drugs? Why would people become addicts?

And the question I always like to ask is, why isn't everyone doing drugs and why isn't everyone an addict? Because, you know, the world is hard. Right. This themes we're talking about suffering being. It can be. It can be exhausting. Right.

Just to get out of bed in the morning sometimes. So everyone has their ways of. Of managing things. I have always had a I think since my brother died, I've had a kind of relationship with destruction.

Somewhat of a romantic relationship. You know, I sort of say there not to romanticize, but that doesn't mean I wasn't romanticizing in those years where I was an addict.

And a lot of that does come from. I think I wanted. What I was seeking at the time was destruction. I wanted to lose myself in various different forms of destruction and annihilation.

Now with sort of party drugs and alcohol, that becomes a very quite physically exhausting, a very kind of intense form of destruction. You know, very not great on the body. You could put yourself in a lot of physical risk by. By doing some of those behaviors.

And then when I dropped that stuff and kind of moved more towards the kind of psychoactive substances, the psychedelics, I think there were lots of benefits that came with that.

A lot of personal growth from engaging with my inner world in a way that was perhaps a bit calmer, a bit more reflective, you know, doing yoga and things like that. But again, it was kind of a form of chasing annihilation. It was like the, the annihilation of. Of ego.

There's a term that I like called a bliss junkie. You're addicted to the ecstatic experience that comes with psychoactive drugs or you know, a yoga session where you just.

You feel yourself dissolve a little bit. And it's still. Even in that, even something that's seemingly positive.

And I'm, you know, I would say things like yoga people should still do, but you can still chase and experience in that. So I think it was a.

Is that something you were aware of at the time? Were you. Had you sort of changed your ways in a desire to change and to be. Start to get out of those maybe more damaging behaviors?

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I was definitely trying to.

Yeah, yeah.

Just like go on the straight and narrow a little bit and. And to. To discover myself a bit more. It's a, It's a gradual unfolding, isn't it?

But then as you unfold and as you kind of circle the, the core issue, the core wounds, perhaps it reveals itself to you in new ways.

And that revealing to me that I was still chasing a form of disillusion through practices like yoga and through psychoactive substances did me a lot of good.

But ultimately you're still running from actually maybe facing the thing that you have to face, which is something much, much more dense that's going to require more work.

People lose themselves in like they overwork themselves. They'll put all of their energy and Time into whatever work they're doing to avoid facing something that might be nagging at them.

And that was the one I did. That was the one I did recently. That was the last year of my life. Yeah. Yeah. Running. Still running from it and keeping, Keeping busy. And.

Yeah, I think it's, it's hard to see like when you say was aware at the time. It's very difficult to see at the time, isn't it? To, to understand.

Yeah. It's something that you reflect on after, after the fact. What was the point where you decided change was needed?

Did you realize that you were going down a sort of destructive path?

You mean from the, the sort of drugs and. Yeah. Well, like I say, it works in stages. Party drugs and alcohol that probably just got to a point of sheer exhaustion, just not feeling great.

And then a kind of a move into, into the other substances, then with the other substances. When I became kind of that bliss junkie addicted to those experiences that did me poorly in the end as well.

I. I smoked so much cannabis in my attempt to escape the real issue and the real wound that I catapulted myself into a drug induced psychosis for about. I mean, acutely for. For 12. For about 12 months. And that's again another form of symbolic death.

You reach a point where who you were has reached its kind of critical mass. The center cannot hold anymore and things collapse. Everything collapses.

And then when you're left in those moments, and I think it links back to what you just said about, you know, people still being here. Everything collapsed for me after that psychosis.

When I came out of it and was in recovery, there was very little of me left in terms of anything I would be happy with and felt good about. But I was still there.

Yeah.

You know, and then it was like, okay, here we go, let's move. Let's just keep moving forward.

So you can do.

Yeah, and in some ways it's good. Right.

Because often the parts of you that may burn off when things reach critical mass in a difficult point in your life are the things that you didn't need to have anymore, perhaps weren't serving you anymore. So you may be left with very little.

The good news around that if you are going through, listening and going through like a difficult time and you can maybe feel a bit like that, the good news is you get to rebuild and you get to rebuild into something totally new.

Maybe it's like a shedding of the skin. You lose some of that stuff that was there before.

Yeah.

With an opportunity to grow new Avenues and new parts of yourself.

This is it, death and renewal.

To someone listening to us now talk about these topics and the idea of avoidance and potentially running away from the things we need to face.

What would you say to someone who may be listening and you say could be going through a difficult time, but maybe they're putting all their time into their work or into alcohol or drugs. What would you tell them now having been through what you went through?

I mean, let me say if I am no authority on addiction, on psychological growth, on personal development, I am but a man who has stumbled his way through this stuff and has, you know, maybe picked up some insights along the way at their least were useful for me. I often think at the core of things like addiction there is a, there is a deeper, there is a deeper wound.

Gabor Mate has this idea, not why the addiction, why the pain? Like what is the addiction helping you with? What is it making you avoid? And that pain can be difficult to uncover.

But a lot of people that I've spoken to throughout my day job and in life, I think they know it.

You know, they often don't really like say it, but you know, people will say, oh yeah, well I just, I do, I do take this drug because it chills me out. And then you sort of go into a bit more of a conversation with them and then they'll just drop it on you somewhere down the line.

But oh yeah, 10 years ago this really horrific, traumatic thing happened to me. But it's probably not anything to do with that. Are you sure? It's not anything to do with the really horrific, traumatic thing that happened to you.

So there's that element of it. But then there's also, I guess some people, it doesn't have to necessarily be super, super intense and traumatic.

It could just be that maybe I would say to people, ask yourself, is there a part of you that maybe you don't, a story you don't want to continue living in a role you don't want to continue playing just a partial part of yourself that you no longer want to be. And is that part of you linked to some pain? You know, tentatively dip your toe into the self inquiry of what that may be.

And I'm aware with like deep traumas and pains that it would be perhaps slightly ill advised to dive into that on your own. I think therapy, support for things like that are really good.

But in the elements of your life where perhaps things don't feel aligned, just have a look at that.

You know, again, like you can sit in a Quiet room when you come home from work, before you've turned on music, tv, anything, shut your eyes and listen to what comes up for 10 minutes. You'll get an answer about something that's like bugging you. Right.

That stuff will rise to the surface.

Yeah. And James Hollis, the fantastic Dr. James Hollis, said to me, and I love this, I wish I remember this.

If you are willing to look inward to explore your inner world and perhaps some of your wounds and your pain, if you are willing to do that, then something within you will come up to meet you, will arise in you, to help you and process.

It's. It's looking one layer below where we normally look. So I spoke to James Edit, who's a army veteran turned sort of psychotherapist, and he's.

He mentioned about this idea of we go surface level. So if I react angrily, it's like, why did I react that way? Okay, well, maybe I was tired, didn't sleep well last night. That's fine.

But that's the surface level. It's like, what caused me to feel that feeling. Yeah, I'll go a bit further.

And he sort of spoke about one of his experiences where I think it was in jiu jitsu, where this guy had a beard and he was like sort of digging his beard and his face into his neck. And it brought back memories from. For him of, like, abuse in the past. And had he just surface level, discussed it and looked into it. It's.

It's not a very nice thing. Why did it make me feel that way? But then by looking back, it starts to unveil some of those things that. They're only one question deeper.

But very often we never go that. That far. We just stop at that. That very first answer.

Yeah, I definitely. I resonate with that. I. I talk a lot on my channel about this idea of that Carl Jung had of personal myth.

And he never quite fully defines it very clearly. But there are many people who have looked at it and ways we can think about it, and it's that we're all living in stories, right?

And there's no way of escaping the myth or story that you're in. You can't live outside of one. You're in one, whether you like it or not. And just like the Greek heroes, we have mythical fates in these stories.

Now, the point of Carl Jung's psychological development is to find wholeness within yourself. Right.

The way I would just generally describe that is he would say there is something in you that is trying to become in the same way that a plant blossoms. Right. But some plants won't fully blossom. Now we can think of that kind of as mythical fates where there are tragedies too. Right.

Where the heroes fall prey to something. To understand the story that we're living in so that we are not being operated by unconscious forces.

One of the key things you can do is in moments like that, this person described when something sets off some sort of emotional charge in you, particularly if it's disproportionate to what is happening.

Yeah, right.

That's when you can take that point of self inquiry and say, okay, why, why did that happen? And go a level deeper. A good example that this is mentioned by fantastic Rick diamond, who I've had on my show. He uses the example of your.

Your father treated you like an employee and you hate every single one of your bosses. Right. It's the kind of repeated story so often you might come up against a person in, in life and have an adverse reaction to them.

But what you're reacting to is actually something that's happened in the past and the person just kind of fits the.

Mold that allows a line enough to take you backwards.

What we'd call a projection kind of there something to be charged. So you're reacting to the past. And yeah, that is where you want to get really.

When you have the thing in the present, you want to go, okay, what is that? In the same way we're talking about grief, Right. It's like something happens.

It might be the end of a relationship and you might feel this intense response from it. I had this recently and it feels disproportionate to what is happening.

However, if you go a little deeper, if you allow yourself to sit with it and to explore it, you might find that the end of a relationship, the grief that came with that is, is getting bound up in some grief from the loss of a loved one in the past or something like that. Right. And then you can start to again use it as an opportunity to. To feel it in real time.

Because what's really good about work like that is it does help if you're feeling it.

Yeah.

You're actually in it at the, at the time. So, yeah, I think that's a fantastic example of, of that sort of playing out in real time. It's a good chance to reflect.

Yeah, absolutely. I want to dive into Carl Jung. Okay. As you've mentioned a few times and obviously the podcast is mentioned a lot. It's a lot.

It's based on a lot of his work. When Was it you first came across his work and what sort of drew you to it?

So it was. I took the, the Jordan Peterson Gateway into. Into Jung. Yeah.

Someone got me onto the early Jordan Peterson lectures and I thought they were very interesting. I didn't understand anything he was talking about in them.

Sounds great though.

Yeah. Talking about the symbolic. But I think that is a testament to the nature of symbols. Right.

Symbols, unlike signs, point to something beyond themselves. So you see a stop sign that means stop, a symbol, you'll see it, but it says there's something more behind it.

So when he's doing these lectures on symbols and he's talking about the symbolic, I'm obviously intrigued by what he's saying, but I'm also I guess resonating with, with the symbols. And he talks a lot about Jung and utilizes a lot of Carl Jung's ideas, which led me to explore Jung more.

I'd read about two books and then I went into that psychosis that I talked about earlier. So sort of took a year off from reading Jung while I explored my inner world in real time. And then, yeah, the interest was still there after that.

And I went and did my first undergrad degree which was in TV production. I wrote every essay I could. There was sort of using some sort of theory on film or tv.

I utilized Carl Jung's ideas because it was just beckoning to me. And then I went and studied on my masters. I went and studied at the University of Essex where I studied Jungian and post Jungian studies.

But I guess that's the kind of narrative. But I think it was just something in me beckoned to me. It was like this, this is interesting.

Like we talked about earlier on about it kind of enchantment. What is the thing that is lighting you up is saying there's something here. Investigate this more.

It was something was there and I just wanted to keep looking.

Yeah. Have you found that it gives you language that just general self improvement sort of content doesn't.

I mean it is a little bit. Jung was heavily influenced by the like the, the Romanticism era, the Romantic poets, that kind of era of time.

So that bleeds into his work, into it, into his ideas. So I do think there is an element of that.

I think symbols though are inherently there is depth to them, not just because of the way they function, but I guess they're bound up in time, you know, and like history and goes back to archaic man. And then you've got Christianity and all the different religions have all these symbols, you know, cross culturally Similar symbols.

So there's kind of a mystery in that as well. So I, Yes, I do think there is a certain mysteriousness that I think draws in a lot of people and I think myself included in terms of the.

The language.

I would actually, I would actually argue that there are really useful concepts that Jung has kind of put forward and many people post Jung have expanded on and kind of criticize that are interesting for looking at our psyches, our inner world. Sometimes I think it's actually overcomplicated and part of what I'm trying to do on the channel is make it more accessible, make it less convoluted.

I think sometimes you can take a long time to get to a point. And I think actually if the psychology is any good, then everyone should be able to understand it in some way or another. Right. So it does help.

It does help to understand certain elements.

But I do think, like any theory, language is a useful way of describing experience and perhaps a way of understanding the mechanisms that might be moving within us. But we don't want to get too bogged down in it. Right. The Jung was a big advocate of, of that we should explore his ideas through our own experience.

It's not just sort of parrot what he was saying. We have to live it. We have to engage with our inner worlds and that is unique for all of us. So. Yeah, I do think it gives you points of second.

Like a tool.

Yeah.

All to be used.

Yeah. And a tool to interpret it. Yeah, exactly.

In their own way.

Yeah. It gives us. It gives us a reference. It gives us some ide. Yeah. But nothing's going to be lived. Experience of. Direct experience of your.

When you talk about the symbols, what would be like an example of that? Can you give an example of what that might look like in day to day life?

Yeah, I mean, I don't know about day to day life. I can, I can say. I can say a symbol that I bet many people have probably seen and is relevant to what we've been talking about on this show.

So people may be aware of the. The symbol of the ouroboro, which is the snaking. Is the snake eating its own tail?

Okay.

Right. You see that, you see a lot of back tattoos with that on all around the place, but you see it in various places.

Some people will say it means infinity, but that is a symbol of transformation, of death and rebirth. You know, the snake is eating itself and simultaneously sort of regurgitating itself. And it is, it is circular, so it is. Is infinite in. In some.

Some respect and again, these symbols aren't open to any one interpretation. The interpretation, depending on how you're approaching it, is going to be sort of context dependent.

You know, it's going to be, yeah, a whole array of different ways of looking at things. Especially when it comes to like dreams and stuff.

You know, if we look at the symbols that come up in our dreams, which is part of Jung's psychology, the last thing you want to do, and I know people will do this, I've probably done this at some point in my life, is you wake up, you have a dream about the snake eating its own tail and you go on Google and you type in what does that mean? And it comes up with something and you go, ah, that must mean that.

But we have to think about it in terms of ourselves and the relevance to us and the other stuff in the dream that, you know, it comes up, what does that mean to me? And whatever else.

Um, so yeah, what I'm saying is symbols, they're not static, they're not open to one definitive interpretation, but it points beyond something. That would be my example.

Yeah. Is it a silly question to ask if you have like a favorite symbol or one that really relates to you?

I mean the, the ouroboros is pretty. I think it's relevant to me.

I've been through a lot of deaths and rebirths in my life, you know, through psychologically, internally, but many different Personas in many respects. You know, very much a jack of all trades to some degree. And I, and I, you know, subscribe to that way of being in life.

I think is there is growth in allowing yourself to not be static and to change and to, to allow parts of you that no longer serve you. So I probably, probably would relate to the. Yeah, the old bar.

You got a back tattoo?

I don't. I actually have. The back tattoo I have is a biblically accurate angel.

Okay.

So you know, the one with like the multiple eyes and the, the big. I don't know if I do biblically accurate angels. Was frightening.

Yeah, it sounds it.

Yeah, they were very kind of abstract, multi eyed kind of beings. If you read how they're described in the Bible, they weren't sort of, you know, blokes and women with halos.

Yeah. Okay, that's interesting. Learned something today? I've learned lots. One of the things I've heard you talk a lot about is the idea of individuation.

What is that in plain English?

I guess we could just think of it as the, the process, Jung's process of psychological Development. Now, Jung, generally speaking, I'm trying to keep this really simple. I don't want to overcomplicate anything.

Jung believed that the point was in life to become not perfect, but whole, to be whole.

Which means, generally speaking, we're trying to make the unconscious parts of ourself conscious because those unconscious parts of ourself have sway on how we operate day to day in our life. They affect the decisions we make, they affect the reactions we have to external and internal events.

So individuation is just the process of becoming whole. I, I, I, I could, could expand more, but I don't think we want to because I think we can open up a whole.

Yeah.

A whole can of concepts that I'd have to.

The conscious and this sort of subconscious. The unconscious.

Yeah.

And becoming more aware of what that looks like.

Yes. Making the unconscious conscious and, and allowing those two to meet in relationship and into dialogue.

That is, that is ultimately what it is to, and to, to go through that process to become, to become whole. And it's very basic terms.

Yeah.

I'm thinking about how we do that and thinking about the conversation we've had so far and whether you need certain experiences in order to investigate that. Unconscious.

Is it, I suppose, what you were saying before, if you recognize that you've reacted maybe in a certain way that doesn't quite align with what was the situation. That's, yeah, that's a chance to go in and just be like, okay, what's there?

Fantastic opportunity. Yeah. I would say that's probably the most common opportunity we're going to get.

Yeah.

When something causes a reaction, why, you know, dig a little deeper and try and see. You can enter into dialogue with yourself, you know, if you allow something to come up. Because something might come up in that. When you might.

Let's go back to that example of like bosses and fathers. Right. Your dad treated you like an employee.

You might get annoyed at your boss and then you might ask that question, why do I feel that way about my boss? And then something in your, in your head might say, oh, excuse, your dad treated you like a, an employee.

And when that comes up, that might be really painful because maybe it didn't allow you to connect with your father. And there may be other stuff that comes with that.

You know, it comes along for the ride and it hurts and whatever else, and it makes you feel vulnerable.

So you immediately, you push it away and chances are you'll put like a, another narrative on it which would be like, you know, oh, he's just whatever you want to call it. And the boss is just this. And that's that. Going into the cave to face the dragon, isn't it?

That's what that moment is when you, when you scratch belief, that first initial layer, and something comes up and you ask yourself, why are you reacting? If your psyche brings something up for you, try and have a dialogue with that. It might be scary. It might be like facing a dragon.

It probably will be scary.

Yeah. But to smaller and larger degrees. So that can happen, right?

Yeah.

But I think if you can do a little bit every day or, you know, at least once a week. Yeah. Like it's. You can make him. You can start to understand yourself.

Yeah.

And subsequent. Subsequently understand the myth or the story you might be living in. Yeah.

Because you also look at, like, things that make you react positively. Yeah.

Yeah.

Why was that? What do I like about that as well?

Yeah.

To start to understand what drives you again below the surface.

I mean, you might have. Obviously we're talking about having an adverse reaction to a person. Right. As one example.

But you may also have, like, an overly positive reaction to a person. You might put someone on a pedestal. You might see something in someone where you're like, oh, they're amazing. And that may be you.

In the same way you, in the previous example, you might be projecting your father onto your boss. You may be projecting parts of yourself that are unlived onto some other person because they may have those. Some of those qualities.

So you may see someone who's, you know, succeeding in life or in ways that perhaps you. You struggle to, you know, or has qualities that you would like to have.

And you may not even be consciously aware of that, but because they're buried in the unconscious, and that means that you're going to sort of put that onto them. So, yeah, 100%, you can. You can see that in the positive. And I think if there is that charge, you can ask yourself, like, why.

Why am I feeling that way about this person In a.

In a practical sense, what's the best sort of methods? Again, this is going to be like, individual to the person. But would stuff like journaling help? Or is it just to simply sit in peace and think?

Yeah, I think Carl Jung was an advocate of, of writing things down. Yeah. I think you got to find what works for you. And look, there are, There are people that know this stuff better than me. I, I think if I.

If I'm okay at anything within this, if I'm good at anything, it's somewhat communicating the ideas in the Format that I do.

Yeah.

But be curious, you know, have a look online and explore some of these ideas. But, yeah, I think find what works for you. It could be journaling, could be painting.

You know, any creative expression is a great way to get in touch with the unconscious. Right. Because the unconscious often communicates in images. Right. And symbols.

So it's not necessarily going to spill something out to you that is like, oh, by the way, you're.

You're feeling this because of that, but you might, if you just allow yourself to be creative, to paint to whatever it may be, you may start to see that something is coming up in, in the, in the work that you're doing that could be like a symbol in itself, you know, that points to something within you.

Yeah.

One other thing that I've seen you talk about, and we were speaking about social media earlier and the things off camera, the things that we face there, and you've mentioned and you've described the Internet as a sort of trickster within Carl Jung's archetypes. Can you elaborate on that?

I could try, yeah. I mean, it was a, it was kind of a. A theory that I was working on around the kind of risk, the recent influx of what people are calling AI slot.

Right. The trickster, again, not an easily definable archetype. Right. These things are not any one thing. They are multiple things. They are dynamic.

They are changing.

In terms of the Internet, the Internet is, across the literature, often seen as a bit of a trickster because many of the tricksters were the kind of the gods of the lim. The liminal spaces of between worlds. They oscillated between between worlds. Many of the other gods couldn't necessarily do that as well.

And they were also communicators. That was their thing. Right. Hermes and the, the gods, like that were good communicators.

So that's why they often get tied to the, to the Internet as a. As a thing. The angle that I took with AI Slop is. I was asking the question, can AI slop be good for us? Right.

Seems paradoxical because it doesn't feel like that, does it, on the surface. I think few people would agree that seeing that all the time is particularly enriching. I don't know.

I don't want to yuck someone else's yum, so to speak. You know, if you like it, you like it, fair enough.

But the angle that I took was that what many of these tricksters do, you know, be it Loki, Hermes, Coyote, in these different myths, in these different cultures, is they will often trick you into seeing a part of yourself that you are neglecting. So they'll be mischievous and then do something that is kind of not good for you in the effort to reveal to you where you are falling short.

You know, like the jesters in medieval courts, the ones that were given sort of the right to come in.

The only one.

Yeah. To berate the king, to show the king where he has fallen short.

And there were clowns in various different European cultures that would go and do this to like the mayor and things like that. It's this kind of a theme. So with the Internet, the way I saw it was we can fall into a bit of a trance with our phones. Genuinely. Right.

Kind of conditions.

Absolutely.

To pick those things up. It's all engineered that way. We all fall prey to it. And we can fall into a bit of a trance with the doom scroll.

This is very much the trickster puts us into a trance.

But the paradox I believe of that is when you are bombarded with so much stuff that is maybe not nourishing you, there will come a point where you will recoil from that and you will say, I don't want to watch this anymore. We've probably all had that moment where we realized, I've been doom scrolling for two hours on the sofa.

What have I done?

What have I done? Yeah, exactly. And it's in that moment, Right. In that brief moment where something is revealed. Right.

I mean thematically, you're talking about apocalypse to reveal. We're talking about the small moments where opportunity arises to see something deeper in that moment. Yes. You have been bombarded with.

It might be AI slop, it might just be social media or whatever you've been looking on for two hours and you feel some sort of reaction. This is not good for my soul.

What the trickster, if the Internet is one in that sense has done is put you under a spell to the point where something is clicked in you. That by showing you what is not good for you, it has revealed to you what nourishes you. So you may say I need to go outside to go for a walk.

Yeah.

You know, and that can happen on the micro level just on a Sunday afternoon on the sofa.

But I think what we're seeing culturally with the bombardment of this kind of content is it's happening on a slightly bigger level where we're not just feeling it in these micro moments, we're seeing it. Oh, this is what this is now, isn't it?

I don't know if I want to keep Doing this because we've been living with these smartphones for a decent amount of time. Right. And often these new things creep in slowly until we get to a kind of critical point.

So I think, yeah, that's how I saw it, as a bit of a trickster. Again, this is not a. This was just a playing of an idea. But I do think it makes sense.

I think it's like you say it's drawing you in during that doom scrolling session to reveal that point of what have I just done? I need to go and do need to go to the gym, I need to go out and walk. I need to speak to another human.

Yeah.

And it's like that moment of, oh, that's what I should be doing.

Yeah.

Thematically it kind of fits what we've been talking about again, the paradox how something that I guess could be inherently bad for us, be it death, loss, breakup, AI slop, holds within it a treasure that reveals to you something deeper that is good for you. Yeah, right.

Yeah. I'm just thinking about the doom scrolling and how you can fall into that trap, realize it's no good, and then fall into it again the next day.

Oh, totally.

Later the same day.

100%.

The tricks is really trying to reveal that to me. I'll just keep overpowering it.

Yeah. I mean it is. I think it's. I think I saw a study once that said it was nobody, nobody, like hold me to this.

But I think it was said it was more like a compulsion than an addiction.

Yeah.

Like it's. It's so wired into us, you know, at this, this point and that's very difficult to navigate.

I don't think any of us are particularly good at doing that.

I just think when, when we talk as adults who succumb to this, like draw to just scroll, when we know we've got other things to do, we've got important things, we've got limited time because we've got other things to do. To then give that to a kid who doesn't have that understanding of it as well.

Can't imagine it's good for a developing brain.

No, no. But I think, I think as we, as we go through the next Few years more and more of that.

Obviously more studies will come out and stuff like that, which has had more time to look at it. But yeah, it'll be an interesting one to follow. But I do think it's a great, great idea and a great concept.

Yeah, I think we've got a.

We've got to try and see where the ills of the world, or at least our perceived ills of the world, where can they reveal something to us of a positive, you know, because we can, we can talk about how rubbish AI swap is all day long, but like it's not going anywhere. Yeah, it's gonna. Like you say, this stuff is, it's moving and it's happening. So what good can come from to.

Counter the AI slop? You're putting out great content, you're putting out informative things and stuff that helps people become a better version of themselves.

What is it that you hope people get out of the work that you're doing?

Firstly, that's a very kind thing to say. That is a gleaming review that'll be going up on the website.

Yeah. Quote it.

I once received a comment that said something along the lines of I really like the channel and you've inspired me to read more. And that to me was like. That was. That was it. You know, I like I say I am not an authority on this stuff.

I hope that in talking about what I am passionate about, what lights me up, I can connect people with ideas that can help them explore themselves and can help them be curious about the things that light them up. Now that might be the stuff that I'm talking about. It might be the ideas of Carl Jung and adjacent ideas.

It might be just give them the tools to be better equipped to find whatever else it is that they, they want to explore. But yeah, I don't want to tell anyone how to do anything. If there would be one goal, it would just be to light a small ember of curiosity in.

Be it ideas, be it the world, be it in other people or themselves. Yeah, that is it.

You know, curiosity is such a, like great thing because it like, like everything we've spoken about today, really, it's individual.

But if there is something you're curious about, so often people don't pursue it because they're worried about what people might say or whatever the fear is or haven't got the time to do it. Just commit yourself to it for a set period of time and just see what happens.

Yeah.

Because at the very least you will learn something that you don't Enjoy or you don't want to pursue any further. It might be something that you love and you go on to do forever, but you learn something either way.

And I think people don't necessarily think about it that way when they're in front of the crossroads, in front of the fork in the road, I should say.

Yeah, I think the. I take the. I mean, we've kind of talked about this a bit off camera today. The.

The process of being in the trenches of sort of early podcasting, right. Starting out a show, it's. It's tough sledding. It takes a lot of work. But you get.

The beauty of the format is you get to speak to a lot of interesting people, you get to learn things about yourself. And I will always say that the beauty is in the becoming, right? In. In the doing of the thing.

There is something that unfolds within yourself, between you and the world. There's some third thing that emerges in that interaction that has a kind of numinosity to it. There is meaning in it.

And regardless of what people want out of a situation, do the thing, right?

Let's just do the thing.

Just do the thing. Because, yeah, there is something in doing of the thing that will reveal stuff that you couldn't even imagine.

Don't worry about where it's going, what it's going to do. Just do it. Because the process itself is. Is the treasure, in my opinion.

Yeah. Yeah, I love that. I think that's a nice place to bring it in.

So, as you will know, the thing I like to do at the end of an episode is ask my guest to leave a question to the listener to take away and start their own conversation with someone in their life. A family member, a friend, or even a stranger. What question would you leave them with?

I was pondering this, actually, I was pondering this last night. I was thinking, what is it going to be?

And I think I want to take a hopeful one, and I want to, I guess, kind of allude to what we were talking a bit about there and what we talked about previously. What is beckoning to you in the world? It may be just a glimpse.

It may be like a shimmer of something at some point in your day or in your week or in the month. It may have been months ago, it may have been a year ago that something called to you very briefly. It may be like screaming at you.

You know, you need to do this thing. What is beckoning you? What is inviting you into the adventure of your life? That's all I'm going to ask.

Obviously, as we've discussed, I suggest pursuing it and I am aware that people don't always get the encouragement and I think I encourage you to pursue it.

Be curious.

Be curious. Yeah. There is not only adventures and whatever to be had, there is, there is becoming to be had.

There is, there is a you that can emerge in the process of going on the adventure.

Chris, it's been a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much for coming on today. If people want to find your show, keep up to date with what you're doing. Where can they do that so they.

Can find me on Instagram, on TikTok, on YouTube, I think. Come on, Fred's that post a lot, but it's just conversations for the end, straightforward.

And I'm on Spotify and Apple podcasts and the other podcast platforms everywhere, I think.

So yeah, I'll link, I'll link some of it down below so anyone listening can just scroll down, click on the link and hear your voice some more.

Awesome. Sam, thank you so much for having me, man. It's been an absolute pleasure.

It's my pleasure. Thank you. From me to the listener, if you have enjoyed this episode, please do share it with someone else you think would find some value from it.

If you haven't already, please do subscribe or follow wherever you're listening or watching as it really helps the show grow. But lastly, from me, thank you for listening, stay curious and I will see you in the next one.