A Quest for Self-Knowledge: From Self-Help to Somatic Healing (Part II – Feeling My Heart)

In Part I, I recounted the first chapter in my personal growth journey, which was all about my mind and intellect and reframing the narratives that defined my life.

As transformational as that period was for me, around 2018 I once again began to sense that something was missing. 

I had gained a variety of tools to shift my perspectives from an intellectual point of view, but there was still a vibrancy and “juice” missing from my life.

My then-girlfriend Lauren and I decided to uproot ourselves and move to Mexico City partly to try and recapture a feeling of excitement and adventure that our work-oriented lives in the Bay Area had increasingly failed to provide. We felt stuck and bored like our seemingly impressive careers were failing to give us what we truly wanted.

But it wasn’t merely a change of scenery that would give me the feeling of aliveness I was searching for. Yet again, it was an inner change that was needed, not an outer one. The next chapter of my story was all about opening up my heart and the channels of emotion that had long been frozen inside of me, under the supervision of guides and teachers who had already done so themselves.

Burning Man – my first experience with psychedelics

In July 2018, I received a last-minute invitation to Burning Man, an eclectic week-long festival that takes place every year in the desert of Northern California. 

Burning Man is a legendary institution in the Bay Area. I’d heard about it for years, but never had the funds nor the contacts to go. With only a couple of days’ notice and a set of equipment and supplies that was barely adequate for the harsh conditions, I hitched a ride out of town to the desert.

Burning Man was disorienting for me right from the start. As the first morning dawned, I found myself on an endless white plain devoid of geographical (and cultural) reference points. I was completely unprepared, not just in practical terms but emotionally and psychologically. I had been in a period of obsessive, narrow-minded focus as the early cohorts of my Building a Second Brain course found traction. Rather than free me up, that success locked me down. I desperately clutched at what felt like a thin lifeline of success after years of struggle.

Black Rock City, as the sprawling tent city is known, was a fanciful dreamscape. On every side, I saw sculptures and contraptions of every shape and size: a 5-story tall crystal-encrusted gramophone, a ferris wheel full of skeletons, a giant artificial tree of leaves embedded with LEDs pulsing in rhythmic patterns, a spiraling ambulatory staircase full of old pictures. 

The camps weren’t mere habitations but works of art in themselves: giant carnival big tops criss-crossed with hammocks, geodesic domes full of foam toys, insulated yurts, and a full-size 747 fuselage someone had managed to tow out into the desert. And most dazzling of all were the people, dressed as sultans arrayed in their finery, as dinosaurs, bunnies, ballerinas, wizards, or in many cases, simply naked.

I didn’t know where to go or what to do in the sprawling tent city, not realizing that most people slept during the heat of the day and went out during the cooler nights. I hardly knew anyone even at the camp I was staying with, and thus was ignorant of the customs and traditions that give Burning Man its logic. I felt threatened and confronted by the wildly unorthodox clothing, art, music, sculptures, sounds, and even ways of speaking and behaving I faced on every side, with no source of familiarity or comfort to be found anywhere. It felt like culture shock but magnified tenfold.

In A Productivity Expert Goes to Burning Man I recounted how a profound experience with LSD on the final night of the festival was the turning point for me. 

Some of my campmates had found me huddled at the foot of The Man – the giant 80-foot statue at the center of the city that gets burned as a final ritual – consumed with loneliness and fear. They took me back to camp, we each took a tab of LSD, and soon afterward headed to Camp Mystic, an encampment of interconnected structures, artwork, venues, and workshops all designed for one purpose: to explore the state of consciousness afforded by this magical substance.

I spent the next 10 hours exploring Camp Mystic and the rest of Black Rock City beyond, immersed in an intensity of belonging, connection, beauty, and harmony like I’d never experienced in my life. Wandering under the stars, whole chapters of my life were rewritten, ancient interpretations and meanings dissolving and being remade. Forgotten memories exploded into my mind from nowhere, seeking the attention and forgiveness they needed to be complete. As I watched the sunrise, I was awed by the beauty and perfection of the universe, every strand converging and finding a connection in me, the sole interpreter and witness of my experience.

I recently attended a talk by Dr. Brad Jacobs, a physician and integrative medicine practitioner based in the San Francisco Bay Area. It was about how and why “peak experiences” are so powerful for personal growth. He defines such experiences as “moments of full immersion” that often create “intense joy, creativity and clarity, and where you feel a deep connection to yourself and the world around you.” They include near-death encounters, vocational challenges like those faced by first responders, extreme sports like skydiving, or deeply immersive ones such as spiritual awakenings or journeys with psychedelic medicine.

Dr. Jacobs’ explanation for why these experiences can change us so profoundly helped me finally understand how being part of something like Burning Man, which on the surface can seem so fanciful and even self-indulgent, can inspire inner change. It’s because they:

Overwhelm the sensesCall you to the present momentRelax fixation to prior beliefsSuspend your belief prediction modelFertilize cognitive and psychological flexibility

In other words, an intense or immersive experience pulls you strongly into the present moment, and then forces your mind to relax its grip as the sole filter on your reality. When you see and hear things you’ve never encountered before, you can no longer pretend that you have everything figured out and under control. Out of necessity, your mental model of reality has to loosen a bit to let this new information in, and in that moment of cognitive flexibility lies enormous potential to change fundamental beliefs and assumptions about many aspects of one’s life.

I believe that’s exactly what happened in my time at Burning Man, and there were three lasting changes it inspired in me.

First, the experience gave me a potent sense of peace within the vastness of the universe, a deep appreciation for the hilarity and absurdity of my existence, and an unexplainable certainty that everything is just the way it should be. I hadn’t had that feeling of “being at home in the universe” since my Christian childhood faith.

Second, I felt an immense, almost oceanic desire rising within me to help others and alleviate their suffering. I’d been so focused on my own survival for so long, far past the point where it was necessary, and now saw a new kind of purpose taking hold in me – to pass along the gift, to help others heal in the ways I’d been healed, to make a difference with this miracle of a life I’d been given.

And third, Burning Man was the first time I saw myself as being part of a global movement of human transformation. I encountered so many people contributing to it in their own way: energy and bodywork practitioners, fire-dancers, orgasmic meditators, Chinese and Eastern medicine practitioners, yoga and meditation teachers, therapists, artists, and writers. I attended workshops on Bitcoin, polyamory, and chocolate as a healing medium, my first exposure to these concepts that persist as interests to this day. I saw that this was work the spiritual traditions of the world had started thousands of years ago, and that we all now have a part to play in. I saw I wasn’t alone in my seeking.

That week in the desert was brief but felt like a microcosm of my life – a confused and clueless young man dropped into a threatening and incomprehensible world, only to be shown a door to a deeper underlying reality that made it all make sense.

Joe Hudson and The Art of Accomplishment

As wonderful as my Burning Man experience was, I struggled to integrate that newfound sense of aliveness and awe into my normal, day-to-day life. The high I’d experienced out in the desert gradually faded as I returned to the routine of my workweek.

As I’d done before, I began looking for a structured program and a teacher who could help me awaken and embody the new “self” I’d discovered. While attending a meetup in San Francisco, I heard someone speak whose words immediately resonated with me: Joe Hudson, a former venture capitalist and current executive coach. Little did I know, Joe would be my guide for the next chapter, which was all about learning to access my emotions.

I had built a new intellectual foundation, opening my mind to new possibilities and acquiring a set of practical skills I could draw on whenever I faced discouragement. It was now time to go deeper, from the head to the heart.

After hearing Joe speak, and with the encouragement of a friend who’d already taken it, I signed up for his introductory weekend course. I captured my experience there in Tide Turners: A Workshop on Using Business to Fuel Spiritual Awakening (this program has now evolved into the online-only Connection Course).

From that weekend workshop, I learned:

That vulnerability is a sign you’ve found your growth edge – that edge is different for every person and in every situation, can’t be planned or predicted in advance, and shifts moment to moment as a conversation unfolds. I discovered that I have the option of unlocking vulnerability in any interaction, simply by asking the question that lies at the edge of my comfort zone in the moment.The incredible power of open-ended, “How/What” questions to help people access their innate intelligence and resolve their own problems – instead of giving advice or proposing solutions, which usually just engenders resistance, I could invite them to tell the truth to themselves in a spirit of curiosity and self-love.How important it is to be impartial – to refrain from leading the conversation to a predetermined outcome of your choosing – and instead to be with people in their struggle, assume they know what’s best for them, really listen to what they’re saying, and reflect back to them the genius they already possess.“Joy is the matriarch of all emotions – she won’t enter a house where her children are not welcome” – this is a favorite and often-repeated quote of Joe’s, and its lesson is a north star for personal development. If you cut off access to any emotion – fear, disappointment, grief, anger – you also lose joy in the process. This observation functions as an accountability mechanism, reminding me that if I’m not feeling joy at any given time, it’s because I’ve lost one of her children along the way.

Joe’s guiding philosophy deeply resonated with me: that the most “worldly” experiences, such as in business, can fuel profound spiritual awakenings. That was also my first encounter with VIEW, an approach to having reliably deeper, more meaningful conversations that forms a cornerstone of Joe’s work, and now mine.

I would go on to take Joe’s more intensive week-long program the following year, in 2019, which I recounted in Groundbreakers: My Journey Healing Trauma, Unleashing Anger, and Awakening the Vagus Nerve (this program is still available only in person).

In many ways, Groundbreakers was the culmination of everything I had learned up to that point, like the final thesis for my master’s degree in applied self-development. It represented a leap from the world of the mind – with its sophisticated yet limited narratives, theories, models, and frameworks – to the world of the heart and its felt emotions.

During Groundbreakers, I worked through what felt like a lifetime of repressed emotions stuck in various parts of my body, from grief at the things I didn’t receive from my parents as a child, to a fear of failure that had been lurking in the back of my mind and unconsciously distorting my behavior for years. 

Most powerfully of all, I realized that I had shut down my anger as a child out of fear of my father’s reaction, to the point I was barely able to feel it at all anymore. On top of that, I actually felt proud of my inability to feel anger, as if it made me a better person, while under the surface that anger wreaked havoc on my inner life in its attempt to be heard. I discovered that anger is a form of surrender, and without it, all the other emotions remain throttled.

Here are some of the other lessons I took away from Groundbreakers:

Recognizing my internal dialogue and what it is trying to accomplish – I formed a new relationship with the “voice in my head,” seeing through the ways it uses guilt, shame, criticism, and self-doubt in an attempt to give me what I need, and found far more productive ways of doing so without beating myself up.Anger can be a transformative source of vulnerability and determination – I completely changed my understanding of what anger even is, from a regrettable source of pain and conflict to an essential component of living a vibrant life. I’ve since found that anger is the clearest signal I have of what I want and what truly matters to me, and the most unstoppable form of determination to go after that with everything I am.Self-love as the engine of personal growth – I had always judged myself harshly as not being good enough, or worthy enough, which had been my main motivation to learn and grow up to this point. But as that self-judgment ran out as a source of fuel, I reversed it and found that total and unconditional self-acceptance and self-love is a far more powerful one.Healing is deeper and faster when it happens on multiple levels – Joe’s work combines multiple forms of healing work, demonstrating how effective it is to cross-reference approaches at the mind, heart, and gut level.My heart as the bottleneck

Returning to normal life after Groundbreakers, I saw an immediate and dramatic impact on my work. 

My Building a Second Brain course had reached the point where it was ready for a larger stage and a wider audience, but I had felt stuck and fearful without fully realizing why. When I cleared my emotional channels and connected with my deepest seated desires, I was surprised to find within myself the kind of leader I didn’t know I needed. 

I realized that my style of leadership wasn’t about stoically charging forward in the face of implacable opposition like I’d been taught. It was actually about feeling every emotion – and I mean every emotion – much more deeply and viscerally as potent sources of information. I began to see that I could lead with authenticity and vulnerability, bringing others into the heart of my work instead of going it alone.

The newfound feeling of anger I had tapped into soon turned into a feeling of unbelievable clarity and determination. I got in touch with my anger at an unjust world that leaves too many people without options. I felt my anger that all the best knowledge and resources are reserved for the most privileged. I found my anger that people are suffering for lack of information that already exists and is already proven to work. 

With the determination to right these wrongs as my fuel, a few months later I sat down in our new apartment in Mexico City to begin writing the proposal for my book Building a Second Brain. Three and a half years later, that book was released to the world, and as of this writing has sold more than 250,000 copies worldwide in 25 languages.

It still amazes me to see how getting in touch with my emotions was crucial to becoming the kind of person who could write the book that wanted to be written. It’s about a seemingly technical subject – personal knowledge management – and yet just beneath the surface, it’s really about people’s inner lives and all the beliefs, stories, fears, and worries about information that plague them. It was only when I tapped into the depth and breadth of my own feelings and learned to express them fluidly without shutting down or dissociating, that I was able to tell my own story and the story of my work in a way that resonated and moved people.  

What I learned in this second chapter of my journey is that it is my heart’s capacity, not my brain’s capacity, that is the bottleneck to the change I want to see in myself and the world. 

Which means I don’t have to get smarter or more precise in my thinking to make progress. I can decide to get more connected, more present, and more expressive instead. Every time I’m faced with a decision and am tempted to do more research or acquire more insights, I’ve learned that I can instead close my eyes and listen to the still, small voice inside, which has access to a subterranean current of deep wisdom that is so much more vast, yet also somehow so much simpler, than anything my mind can access on its own. I still consider this a miracle every time.

Exploring the world of the heart opened up vast new possibilities for me. My relationships deepened, my courage and conviction strengthened, and my work became a pure expression of my creativity. I became my own best friend, unconditionally loving myself no matter what happened. I began to live for the moment to moment joy of it, not just to reach a far off destination.

And yet as my heart has unfolded, I’ve increasingly sensed that there are still deeper layers, and still deeper sensations to explore. The heart is just one organ after all, and we have 77 others. Next I’ll share the story of my current explorations at the new frontier of my growth: the somatic.

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