Jacob Nordby on Creativity as a Cure

don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us.

Our guest on this episode is Jacob Norby, an author whose many quests have led him to a deep fascination with life and all of its weird splendor. He penned the award winning novel The Divine Arsonist, and a nonfiction book, Blessed Are the Weird, a Manifesto for creatives. He's the founder of Manifesto Publishing House and his new book is The Creative Cure, How Finding and freeing your Inner Artists can heal your life. Hi Jacob, welcome to the show. Hey Eric, I'm so glad to be here. It's a

pleasure to have you on. We're going to be discussing your latest book called The Creative Cure, How finding and freeing your inner artist can heal your life. But before we do that, let's start the way we always do, with the Parable and the Parable. There is a grandparent talking to their grandchild, and the grandparents says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always

at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second and looks up at a grandparents says, well, which one wins? And the grandparents says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. You know, there's a parable

I've loved for a really long time. And I woke up in the middle of the night, actually, and something prompted me to think about this, and I was just sitting with what does that mean to me? And began to realize Eric this to me is, I mean, there's the obvious face of a layer, like it's wonderful to feed the parts of ourselves that know how to be a better person and be more healthy person. I love that level. The other thing, though, that I began to

re lives was, oh my god. I've spent years asking various parts of that question and then developing practices and have found some very interesting, practical, earthy ways to feed the good wolf. And I assume that a good number of those practices are in the latest book. Yes, and I'm delighted that we're talking about the book. I want to be clear that I told my publisher before we released this when I said, I wish we could find a different word than creative. It's kind of like the

word love or God or something. It's so big and it's come to mean so many things. That for a lot of people, it starts to feel like, oh, this is just for those people. Those writers are those artists, are those genius inventors. And what I want to do, though, is say that what we're talking about the theme of your show is connected to what I feel like is the core of the creative spark, the energy that brought

us here to be ourselves on this planet. Let's start there. Then, let's start by exploring a little bit about what creativity means to you. You've got a line in the book you say creativity is a forgotten cure for these life depleting ailments and a spiritual practice for returning to your truest self and living a life you love. So that's a little bit about what creativity does. But in your mind, what is it? It's kind of elusive, I think for a lot of us. You know, like I love philosophy, Eric,

I love psychology, and I love all spirituality. I love all of these things. And you know, what I've felt tasked with in my life is making those things touch the ground for myself. And so for me, as I've been with that question semantically and spiritually in every other way, it really comes down to me, it's sort of synonymous with the soul for me. And again there's another big word, freighted with so many meanings for a lot of people.

For me, underlying the word is an energy, is a feeling, is an experience, And to me that's sort of this mysterious spark of Okay, something showed up here a as me and as you and as everyone who's listening. And before we knew the names for anything, or the rules for life, or what good and bad was, this spark was here and it's still present, and it oftentimes becomes buried under layers of traumatic experiences and socialization and all

of these things. And so for me, the practice then is not creating the spark, because I don't feel like that ever goes away. It's healing the connection to it, a little bit like there's the Buddhist idea that underneath everything there's essential goodness and you've got to uncover it. You start off by saying, um, you know, you believe that every human being is creative, and so again some people are gonna, well know, not me, you know, like, not me, I don't feel creative. What are the ways

that people might be creative in their life? That they don't even recognize. Again, there's the obvious ones like well, I paint, or I write, or I play music. But what are other ways that the creative impulse shows up in our lives? That really came home to me. I think several years ago, Eric, I was walking to my brother Nate's office. He was then the head of a tech company, and we were walking through and he said, so,

how's the book writing going? And I told him a little bit about it, and he turned and had this wistful look in his eyes and he said, you know, Jake, I'm just not that creative. And we were walking through this space and there were teams over here, development teams working on things, and people over here doing things. And we walked into his office and he sat down in front of three screens, Eric and looked like the matrix,

you know, code running down it. And I watched his posture change, and you know, it was like he was sitting down to a grand piano, and he he kind of forgot that I was in the room, was sitting here working away. And I tapped him and said, Nate, you just said you're not creative, But when you sit down in front of your work in front of what

you love to do so much. It's like watching a cod or version of Mozart, like I'm watching you create something, and this, to you is a liveness, this is connection, this is creation. And that's just one example. And that began this process then Erica pulling that thread and saying, Okay, there's this misconcession about what this. There's a lie. Somehow

we believed a lie. And this was also then amplified for me when in twenty nineteen, the World Economic Forum came out with their every five years study of what are the skills and abilities we need to improve on to you know, survive in our careers And these are big money, big data. People and creativity had moved since the previous time they had done this study had moved from the bottom of the list to number three. Some other things had had entered the list for the first time,

like empathy and people related skills, softer skills. And that was interesting. So I did a study with ten thousand people and said what's your greatest creative challenge? In seventy four point three percent of them responded and said, I doubt my talented talents and abilities. I don't think I'm good enough. So that was the kind of the Newton's apple on the head moment for me. Okay, there's some we know we need it, we don't really seem to know what it is or who it's for. We have

to figure this out. So that's been quite a process since then to keep asking that question. And so one of the things that you identify early on in the book are three enemies of creativity. So I assume these are you know, doing that analysis of like, well, why are people feeling like they're not creative? What's getting in

their way? If the belief that you have is that underneath it's there, and a lot of us are saying, well, I don't see it as there, then there's these blocks and the three that you identified, do you want to walk us through those? Yeah, so let me see I can pull these out of my head right now. Uh, socialization, which the Toll texts um would call the domestications the socialization rejection or the fear of it or and the

fear of it, and then traumatic experiences. So say a little bit more about what those mean and what ways do they get in the way of our creativity. Yeah, I'm curious if you're willing uh for me to put you on the spot a little bit as we talked through this, is that all right? Sure, I'm happy to be on the spot. Well, I love being interviewed, but

I really loved real conversations so much more. And uh yeah, no. And I've spent some time on your site and looked at your show, and I love the work you're doing. I love how you're asking these questions and leading people into a truly deeper experience of themselves, of life, of healing, you know. And sometimes these things stay at such a conceptual level that people can walk away and go, Okay, that's it's good to be more loving, it's good to be more compassionate or whatever. How the how do I

do that? Yes, you know? And so I think stories going into you know, what are the real stories of these things can really be helpful sometimes. But yeah, domestication or socialization. What's interesting to me about this one, Eric, is that this isn't some evil force. It is the process by which we learn how to be humans as we currently know that, which means that everything we learned to do talk, read, write a bike, use the bathroom, eat,

everything we have to learn by mimicry. We have to learn by people saying this is how you do that. But then at some time, at age thirty five or forty, a lot of people, a lot of us, wake up, I certainly did at age thirty four and look around and say, I don't even know who I am. I don't know exactly what I want. I've built a life. I feel the prison walls around me of this life. But I don't even know how to find my north

star again. I don't know how to find my way back to ourself that could even tell me what's real, what's important? And so where were you at that point, Like, what were you doing when that sort of landed on you? Well, I was driving into the parking lot of a new building that my brothers and partners and I had designed and built for this enterprise we had just launched several years before. It was on fire, and um, everybody in the community was looking at us, saying, while you guys

are really sharp, you're doing wonderful things. And I just bought this big, beautiful house. And I walked through that office and I looked round and said, why does my heart feel so heavy? Why when I look around me does this feel like I can't wait to get out of here, and I don't know where I would go. And was this a tech company? It was several, It was a mortgage company, it was a real estate investment firm in the tech company. Yeah, got it, got it.

And you had just realized that you had sort of succeeded in achieving what you thought you wanted to achieve. There you are and it doesn't feel right. Yeah. A young guy was working for me two thousand and seven, how it feels like three lifetimes ago, came into my office in the summer and said, Hey, I'd like you to go to this meditation retreat with me. And I had been reading Deepak Chopra and Mary and Williamson and Wayne Dyer, and but I had never learned how to meditate.

And I said, oh, I should probably learn how to do that. Okay, I'll do that. And I didn't know why, though eric I had all these fears. I look back and realized it was my ego self was really afraid of what was coming. And I didn't know why. I

thought meditation was pretty pretty chill, you know. But I ended up getting in his truck A couple of months later, and we drove up a couple of hours into this mountain town and got up to this beautiful cabin lodge and somebody opened the door and they had long hair, and there was like, I don't know, sage or incense in the air, and somebody was tapping on a hand drum and like, oh man, I'm not in Kansas anymore, what's getting ready to happen? And it turned out to

be a shamanic initiation. I didn't even know what a shaman was at the time, and they administered very powerful Now it's in very common part of the conversation, you know, d MT. But I had never been high, I'd never been drunk. I didn't know anything about any of this stuff. And that was really a date with destiny. You know, it's quite an introduction. Yeah, yeah, let's just jump right off. So it sounds like that was a pretty transformative experience.

What happened next, you know, in your life? Well, it was during that experience, Eric and my brothers, you know who I went back to the next week, and then what happened the next couple of years. They were deeply confused by it and you know, upset by because things started to change and they said, what, you went up in the mountains and took drugs, Like what, so, now, why is everything changing? What happened there, though, was this contact with an original self, with universe, with something that

was alive and freedom. Eric For the first time, probably all of my life, I experienced this freedom from fear. And looking back at my growing up years, my childhood, much later, as they delved into trauma studies and things, I began to realize, I have been shaping my entire life from the basis of fear. I have been creating everything in this bathe and this fear and this anxiety and trying to get away from rather than moving toward

something I would love to create. And so I would like to say it was all tidy, and I just, you know, had that experience and and then got myself aligned and started taking strides forward. It wasn't tidy. It was this tremendous process of surrender too, some tug inside that said you need to keep going, you need to keep moving towards something that feels real, even though you can't see the outlines of it yet, and that led

you into writing. Yeah. So the financial meltdown in two thousand nine wiped me out, which was great because I had been struggling so hard to keep everything together. I'm the oldest child and how this pressure, you know, to keep it all together. And then it was taken out of my hands and suddenly I was without all the things, without my titles, without retirements or companies or identity or credit score or anything. Oh I had when it was just really bad. Uh So, so I felt like I

needed to move. And my then wife was actually such a help and that she said, I think we need to get out of here, like this town is full of ghosts for you. And so we looked around and eventually moved to Austin, Texas. And it was during that time that I've had this part time job in a warehouse and I was the only one. They're just waiting for these orders to come in. I had all this time, Eric and I was deeply depressed and deeply afraid and confused.

And that's when I began reading The Artist's Way actually and um so where I began journaling for the first time really as a study thing. And it was during that time that I had this tap on my shoulder and the question was, what are you going to do? With this time that you have. You've been waiting all of your life for freedom to follow your dream of being a writer, because that was one of my earliest dreams at age ten. And you have time now, so

are you going to waste this time? And so that's when I began writing, and that's when my first book started to form. That is a journey. I love how you talk about how untidy it was, how much fear there was in there. There was a lot of unpleasantness in a transition into a life you really wanted. And I think that's always good to know because I think

people tend to think like it's all easier. Positive. You know that when you move from doing something into the life you want and you arrive in a place where like this is really what I want, that that's easy and it it it's often a very hard fought battle. Well, yeah, this is I'd love to if you're willing. I'm sure you've talked about this so many times, but I would

love to hear. You know, you said before you were in software development and different things, and then it took time to create what you've created, and I would just love to hear a little bit about that. If you're willing. Sure.

I mean it's a little bit of a long story, but I started a solar energy company in about two thousand and eight, and I worked really hard to try and make that work, and we had a couple of years that were pretty good, but then the state of Ohio kept sort of changing its legislation around energy and and and just it just eventually, after like the third time that we had, you know, millions of dollars of deals just kind of go up and smoke, I was like,

I can't do this anymore. And so I stopped doing that, and I was just doing software consulting in my sort of field. But I was kind of bored, and I thought, well, I'll just start this podcast. You know, I just wanted to do it because it sounded like it would be fun to do. I thought I needed it because I was, you know, I just needed the emotional sustenance and uh, I wanted to spend more time with my best friend Chris, who's our editor and producer, and so I I just

sort of started it on a whim. But it went well. Surprisingly, people were really listening and it kind of took off. So a few years into that, I started to think well, maybe I could do this for a living, you know, maybe I could do this like this is what I do, because I started doing some coaching work with people, and I just thought, this feels right, this feels like the

right place for me. But it took me, you know, even from that point another probably two and a half to three years to grow the podcast to the size financially where I felt like I could make the leap right, Like I was still primary breadwinner for a family, I had a son about to start college. I prefer not to go the route you did, which is like lose

everything and start from nothing. I was like, well, you know, if I can avoid that, that might be might be best, right, and so um, it just took me years of kind of doing both, you know, doing the software work and doing this work, and you know, there's lots of interesting lessons and how those things work together, but for me, it was just a gradual process and then at a certain point making what felt to me like a educated leap.

We're still leap of faith, still walking away from a lot of money in a particular career, but also not doing it blindly and having a sense of like, all right, there's at least a path forward here, and it's been I don't know if it's been three I can't keep trying of time. I feel like it's been three years since then and we're still going. So it's it's working. So this is a question my brother and I asked all the time because he comes from you know, the

way his brain works in the Myers Briggs world. He's an I N T J, so he tends to process very intellectually. First and um, when I went my own way there for a while, he told me, Jake, I followed you all my life. He's my next sibling, and he said, I can't go there with you. And I really felt like my earliest best friend diverging. Their paths were going separate ways, and I've felt a lot of

sorrow about that. And then over the years, somewhere about two or three years ago, he began to have these experiences of panic attacks as this head of the tech company that we had started, and he would show up at the hospital and they would say, no, you're not having a heart attack, you're not dying. In fact, you're

really in great health. And so that began this process of him going Okay, but something's not working, and then he began to pull his own threads and he got into Dr Joda Spenza and Dr Bruce Lipton, and he took this sort of more intellectual path and and now we're doing many of the same things, meditating every day, journaling every day, doing these practices, and I love that.

But that has become this really important conversation to both of us because I feel so strongly Eric that there are many many people out there who feel left out of the conversation when it comes to spirituality or some of these things because they don't like the way it's framed or they can't understand it. They go, I'm just not that kind of person. But Nate just told me.

He said, Jake, there was a soul hunger. And he's like, I kind of don't like the way I say that because it sounds flowty, but he said that's the only way I know. He's like, there was something in me that woke up and said I want more. I'm not satisfied with just making money and just creating things. And

he's like, that became insatiable. So I'm curious for you, at what point something became insatiable and not just in the terms of leaving a certain career behind, but just to pursue this theme, this thing that you're doing now and sharing with the world. Well, pretty early on for me, I think, you know, I was going to point to, you know, at twenty four, I was homeless, heroin addict, and when I got sober, that was a real launch into what matters in life. And I got sober in

a twelve step program. And a twelve step program they say a spiritual experience is what you need to recover, you know, so I was sort of going to questions of meaning and spirit and connection really on sort of you know, life or death sentence. It felt like right like I really had to do it. But I realized I loved it and I was really interested in those ideas, and so that waxed and waned some over the intervening

years as I had a rear. But I think, you know, I was really involved into all step programs for a while. I was very involved in some Buddhist groups for a while. So I feel like it's been there for me for a long time now. This podcast was just the latest sort of iteration of it, and the one that actually worked well enough that allowed me to sort of do it at an even deeper level and do it more of the time without having to say, okay, well, eight hours of my day goes over here. So I'd say

for a long time I've kind of had that. I mean, it's one of the benefits of burning your life to the ground early is that I was forced a very quick, very early on go well, okay, what what's what's important here? What matters here? What do I want? Doesn't mean that I didn't wander down, you know, putting career maybe more important than it should, but I feel like there's a

time in life where that's kind of our energy. And I had a child and so there was providing for the child, and so all that comes together in promoting career some degree. But I feel like, at the same time, my alcohol and depression have always lurked close enough. I know what makes those things better, and it is a connection to something deeper, something more meaningful. When I stray too far away from meaning and connection, I get in trouble. Yeah.

I love hearing the various paths, you know, and not that there's a path to get somewhere specific, but the path to connection, the path to healing that connection, and then I love how you pointed out the practice, you know, and also the wave form, the waxing and waning of

that sense of purpose or connection. People come to me and I do work probably as you do, with some guidance, and people sometimes who have been, you know, very intent on some sort of awakening or some kind of transformation, they'll hit a point after a year or two and they're like, I'm kind of scared because I don't feel

all that intent about this right now. I feel kind of bored, and I just know that if we take this back to kind of where we started, that spark, that true self, it knows the way through all of the parts of life. It also knows the way through the practicality, and there's not something that's better or worse about any of that. As I see it, it's like navigating the sea. It's like you're not going in a

straight line. And people who get really focused on I've seen it happen in workshops and people taking you know, courses, It's like, Okay, as soon as I get done with this, then everything is going to be perfect, and I'll never be anxious or feel out of sorts or feel like I'm off my balance again, and I'm like, yeah, well, your true self is just laughing about that right now.

I think there are inevitable ups and downs and periods of intense focus and periods of stepping back, and you know, I think those boredom periods or those dry periods are always really interesting periods to discern. And I was going through one a little bit recently with my spiritual practice. After having you know, a few years of really powerful awakenings and insights and deep committed practice, I hit this point where I was like, I just don't really feel

like doing this a whole lot right now. And I was a pretty dedicated Zen practitioner working with a Zen sanga, and I'm talked with my spiritual director a fair amount about this, like is this a time for me to pivot direction a little bit and and go after some areas of this that feel really interesting to me? Or is this a time to say, you're hitting this sort of inevitable dry period and the task here is to

learn to work through it. And that's deep discernment. And I don't know if I discerned it correctly or not, but I discerned it as I was going to explore some other spiritual directions that felt really interesting to me, at least for right now. So I think those are always the sort of questions, and like you said, I think it's really helpful to have guidance along the way, to have somebody to at least talk to. My spiritual

director didn't have the answer. A matter of fact, I ended up doing the opposite of what he what he thought was the right thing to do, but he asked a lot of right questions that got me in the direction of Okay, I think this is what I want to do. Like and for me, it ended up with like, I have always trusted my curiosity. I have always trusted when something is sort of calling me, and when I mean calling me, I look and go, well is it?

You know I've been called by Heroin, right, So I'm gonna say that, like, okay, not everything that calls me as a good idea, but taking the self destructive things out, I've always followed my curiosity. And I just realized I had a curiosity about some different types of spiritual practice, and I was like, you know what, I'm going to trust that. I'm going to trust that there's something in that for me. There's something that's calling me in that direction,

and I'm going to choose to listen to it. But there may be another time in life where the answer is to say no, I'm going to stay. I'm gonna stay and really work through this. Yeah. Well, and Eric, I feel like this is so important for the world. I spent the last eight years working with hyper Publishing an Insight Events USA, and I just had the incredible benefit of becoming real friends with people like Don mcgarois for Agreements Guy and Dr Joe to Spendza and Julia Cameron.

I just it was such it was an amazing experience to get to know these people behind the scenes. I guess Dr Joe not as much, but we helped produces events for a long time. But what I noticed was, with Dr Joe being an exception, almost everyone else, the people showing up to by the books or come to the retreats or seminars, by and large, they were a certain category, a certain demographic, and it was by and large middle aged, white females and generally affluent. And by

the way, that's a absolutely wonderful demographic. And I began to notice this, there are so many people feeling left out of what's happening there. They don't feel like it's for them, they don't feel like they could possibly get there. They're just like, I'm just not wired that way, which is why I feel like we see a lot of men of our age. How about how old are you? So I'm forty eight and a half. I would have given you I would have thought you were a decade

younger than me. At least you're awfully kind. Yeah. So I think that our generation of men eric Generation X, or whatever we call that. I feel like, by and large, were something of a lost generation. And you know, I don't mean that like some negative thing. I just feel like many of us were raised by parents who had been at some level connected to the counterculture. My parents were Hippies when I was born, and they were very

passionate about that. And then my mother told me, you know, she was right in the heart of hate Ashbury nineteen, so right at the epicenter of everything big, and she said, yeah, Jacob, we thought we could drop it off acid and give

enough positive vibes in the world would change. And then sometime about the time you were born in seventy three, the party started to be over there was really crazy racial stuff going on in San Francisco, and there was the Manson murders, and we were having kids, and we didn't have jobs and there was no food, and she said, we just we just had to quit. And she said, we felt terribly disappointed and disillusioned by the idea that something that felt so real and alive we had to

give up. And so they went back to in their case, they jumped right into really extreme Christianity, but also went back to getting the regular kinds of jobs and raising us that way. And so I feel like our generation of not just men certainly, but I observed this a lot with men. Many of us were conditioned, were socialized by parents who were disappointed. Therefore they weren't really teaching us about life from this place. Of these are deeply

held convicts. It was like, no sit down, get good grades, and somehow just get yourself out of here and go get a job so that you can survive because our old things didn't work. So I'm looking at very broad categories here, but I just see a lot of men of our age feeling spiritually disconnected and also feeling somewhat cynical.

And so there's a lot of what I call now like mix stoicism out there, and it's an ethos, right, it's good stuff, but it also doesn't quite scratch the deeper hitch for a lot of us in saying, Okay, I don't know that I want to go all the way down one of these you know, wisdom tradition paths or anything super new a g even though I've kind of done all of that. But I do want something that feels like it goes beyond just a sort of sterile code for this is how I live my life.

Does that make sense totally? Totally? Well? I mean, I think there is a deep yearning from a lot of people for more meaning, you know, a life that has more meaning. I actually think it's embedded in all of us, right, I mean, and I think most human beings will hit

a point where they start to look for that. I've always found Hinduism interesting because they talk about the stages of life and they sort of say, you know, like your thirties mid forties is going to be a time that you you know, late twenties you're gonna be very focused on career and family. That's what those years are for.

And then you're going to emerge on the other side of that, and spiritual questions are going to come alive for you, and you're gonna start to think about meaning, and you're gonna start to think about legacy, and you're gonna start to think about what ways am I contributing. Now, again we are talking broad demographics. Not everybody follows those things, but I've always loved that they sort of have said,

you know, that's that's a kind of normal progression. And so if you're a fifty year old man, you're probably going to start to notice a hunger for meaning. Now, a lot of people may not into it. What's happening. I think it's where you get the cliche of the fifty year old with the year old wife in the sports car, right, But it's because there's a sense of

something's not right. And my experiences when when we get that sense of something's not right, some people just double down on the paradigm they already have, which is like, Okay, something's not right, so I need more of it, more money, more status, more whatever. Or some other people question the paradigm and they go, wait, I've got a fair amount of that stuff and it seems to not be really working. Maybe it's a different direction. God, I love this conversation.

So if you look at this to the lens of Maslow's hierarchy, the basis of that pyramid are survival, and then you have an upward mobility, and the very apex is you know, self actualization. And of course all of these are these big words and concepts, but I think what you just described is what happens for so many of us, and Carl Young would absolutely agree about. I love the the sense like the Iliad is the going

out in the Odyssey is the coming home. And I've just been reading more Young lately, and he talks about that turning point Eric at which time it's the inward longing begins to wake up in most people in some way of it's time to come home. It's time to

come home to myself. And if you look at it through Maslow's it's like when we start bumping our heads, let's say, in midlife, if we've achieved enough enough survival levels type things, and maybe even some of the higher order needs, then of you know, esteem or prestige or whatever it is in community, we can start bumping our heads on the floorboards of the next level up, which is actualization, and oftentimes we find ourselves trying to answer

the questions of the higher order with lower order answers like well, I guess I just need to have a third home now, or I need another sports car or whatever it is, and that we know you and I know that doesn't really satisfy, not long term. And by the way, nothing wrong with second and third homes. I want to be clear about that. Whatever is true and a life for anyone is I feel like really good,

that's right, that's right. Yeah, that's interesting that you think of it that way, because that does seem to be

one path. One path seems to be okay, I sort of ascend through these these hierarchy of needs and I get to a point where I'm the next The other is sort of the path that I was put upon, which is, I've just burned my life to the ground completely, you know, and I'm sort of forced into forced is the wrong word, but compelled by my consequences into uh, into seeking deeper meaning also, you know, so I think there's nothing like life crisis as far as a transformation tool.

I love taking apart these ideas, these concepts like Maslow's or any of the frameworks, because I don't feel like any of them explains it completely, but they can provide sort of examples, I think, for us and for me that one I did the same thing Eric, I burned my life to the ground, or it was burned down. In fact, the title of my first book was The Divine Arsonist, because that's exactly how it felt. Everything is gone.

And so that actually was the first time I had consciously I've been reading all the books and success literature and trying to do all of the things sort of hyper vision lee for all those years, and that was the first time I think that I was I, like your word, compelled. I was compelled to ask myself questions like who am I, what do I truly desire? Before that,

those have been sort of unconscious, automatic reactions to life. Well, I just guess I need to go out there and flail around and build a business and make more money because I'm not feeling safe with the amount that I have now, And the more money I had, the less

safe I felt, which was interesting. And but having a time of poverty in midlife there early midlife was actually really useful because I got to ask the questions do I need to basically take a vow of poverty and be a renunciate for the rest of my life, because that was felt like a very valid path for me at the time, and I began to look around and go, that's not what I truly desire, which allowed me then to begin making choices, little by little, step by step,

back toward a life that felt like it had some additional meaning or more meaning than what I was doing before. I want to take a second here and sort of see if we can pivot this to some of the ideas in your book. I'm gonna keep dragging you back, promote your damn book, Jacob. Your publishers on the other line, they're like, get on track, man, that's so funny. Some people you can't drag them off their book no matter what you do. Every third line is well in my book.

I'm like, okay, but I do want to talk a little bit about this idea because as you were talking, it came to mind, and it's the idea of imagination, because you were talking about imagining what sort of life you wanted, and I've, over the last x a number of months, have started to think about imagination a lot more, and your book was just another sort of input in to that for me about the power of imagination. Let's talk a little bit about the role of imagination in

connecting back to who we really are. Well, it's such an interesting thing. I was driving down the road one day and was really asking this question, and like, that feels like there needs to be some simplicity here about this question of what even is creativity? What does it mean to be creative? And again felt like kind of the Newton's apple on the head. I actually pulled over and wrote it on the back of a on the back of an envelope or something, this creative formula. So

it came out. It's like, oh, interesting, So there is a structure, and imagination is the very first thing. So the creative formulas imagination plus feelings and stories plus actions equals result. And I began to realize, oh, we are literally creating all of the time, every day, So whether we are conscious of it or not, we are employing this formula. And we may be creating wonderful things, or

maybe creating destructive things, or just purely unconscious things. And I look at unconscious things often as more like clutter rather than just purely destructive. But it's like, Okay, my life is getting more and more junked up with this clutter. So imagination, though, so if I begin to picture what I would desire in any moment, rather than just letting kind of the unconscious old patterns run the show, I can actually begin moving the needle a little bit toward

something that would be a desired result. You basically said, we can't get rid of imagination, and so since we can't get rid of it, what ends up happening for a lot of us is that the imagination turns into imagining all the ways that things could go wrong in our lives that really hit me and struck me in that Yeah, a lot of our imagination, that's the direction it goes. Well, now we're back to the three enemies of creativity. Since we're talking about the book, socialization, rejection

and the fear of it, and traumatic experiences. This became very personal to me, Eric before I wrote the final draft of this book, because I was going through a period of depression, and you know, this is after years of meditating and years of you know, teaching and all of this stuff, and I was feeling pretty ashamed about that. It's like oh my god. You know I should know better than this. But during that period of real depressive episode, I began to rather than treat the depression as an enemy.

I think for the first time in my life, I made space and asked it what it needed, like, this is a feeling, this is here for a reason. And what was interesting as a younger version of myself showed up, I guess in imagination and he said, can we please just rest? I'm so tired? And that was interesting. It was also during that time that I was reading The Body Keeps the Score book on trauma, and also The

Deepest Dwell, another book on trauma. And what was interesting is I had been reading those books for the information and for you know, improving my work. I began to see myself in the mirror and it was no longer something to read and then share with other people. It was like, I need to develop a practice. It was during that time that I learned the role that early traumatic experiences. And I want to say this to everyone listening. Some people have what's considered on the you know, more

clinical scales extreme trauma. Other people take the same assessment and go, I don't have anything, so why am I still broken, and so it doesn't require an extreme level of trauma to begin to darken or create static in the connection to your true creative, original self. Many things can happen, and it's basically unavoidable in our world. And I think that a lot of us don't want to take on the label of trauma victim, for example, because

we don't identify that way. But this is coming back to that idea Eric of since it's the first step in every creation imagination. The fact is that those three factors step in over time and they do develop a darkness in our imagination. For most people, it's really rare to run into someone who came into adulthood without being taught through the don't do that. You're not good enough, you're dumb, you're not going to fit in, I don't

feel safe. If you look at the core beliefs that are way down in the roots, I'm not good enough, I don't belong, I'm not LoVa ball, I'll be rejected or abandoned. Those things often aren't at the front of our brains running the show, but they are deeply down there, and so learning how to address those, learning how to give them their say. But then also really start healing

and creating new neural pathway. This is a practice, and for me it has developed as something that has to be a kind of non negotiable practice in my life. I don't meditate now because that's going to get me closer to enlightenment or because I'm following a particular wisdom tradition. It's like this is a daily routine, a daily hygiene practice to keep me in touch with and heal and keep the heaviness of those old beliefs on their way up and out, sort of keep metabolizing them, and then

make space for something better to support my life. There's a bunch of things in what you just said there. I can't decide quite which I want to which threat I want to pull, But I think I'm gonna pull on this thread which is in your book. There are a couple different times where I felt you sort of wrestling with a question that I wrestle with a lot.

I think you'd be a great person have a good conversation about this with And it's this idea of allowing our thoughts and emotions to be kind of what they are and ask them what they have to teach us and what they have to show us and healing them. And at the same time, how do we balance that

with not empowering them or living in them or from them. So, for example, you talked about writing your book, right, and I thought the way you talked about the creative formula for writing your book was really interesting because you did talk about how you've got these fears like that are saying you can't do this, You're not gonna be able

to do this, You're not good enough. Right, So you didn't automatically squash them with positivity, but you also didn't let them sort of run all around and take over the whole place. So how do you balance those two sort of ideas of allowing thoughts and emotions to be what they are, ask them what they need, etcetera. And also then putting in better, more useful positive beliefs. Well,

now we're back to just that they've practice. Eric. I feel that there is no benefit to trying to affirm or positive my way over the top of things that are there. And as you just said, there's also no real practical benefit in just wallowing in those things. And so what I've found is I use a very simple daily journaling practice and it's in the book. It's also available in my site for as a free download, and it's a set of three simple questions. Uh, And I

do this literally every day. How do I feel right now? What do I need right now? And then what would I love or how would I love to feel? Sometimes that's a better way to ask the question, depending upon what I'm in the middle of that day. I've found that this actually helps me as a precursor to attempting mindfulness or meditation. Also because what happens in those three questions. For me, it's so simple. And even people who you know don't like journaling or have never been journal ors,

I say, well, then, don't call it journaling. It's simply listening to yourself. By the way, when I say a specific pattern, it's like not dogmatic. But I've just found that when I do it every day, it tends to get enough out and it brings the unconscious to consciousness for me. And so when I say how do I feel right now? I like to get grounded with that.

You know. Sometimes it's very physical. I feel tired because I didn't get enough sleep last night, or I'm feeling emotionally churned up about this big change that's underway or whatever. So just the level of honesty with which I answer that question for a few sentences, there's this relief that happens.

And this goes back to a lot of us early in childhood were taught that our needs didn't matter and our feelings don't matter, and so reaffirming that to myself every day is this sort of micro choice to say no, I matter, and what I'm feeling right now matters. And also there's some part of me. I view some part of ourselves as almost like a toddler. And you and I have both had children, so you know, as a three year old is not going to say, Daddy, I need a drink. At some point, it's going to get

louder and louder and something's going to break. They will get our attention. And I feel that way about parts of the self as well. It's like, if I don't pay attention to this, or at least give it someplace to have something to say, something will eventually break. It's going to find a way to get my attention. So that's one of the practices that I've developed in my life every day, Eric, So how do I feel, what

do I need again. This can range anything from more philosophical or emotional needs down to I feel like I need more money because my tax bill is do something about the act of acknowledging it on paper. It's a relief. It can be transformative. And also it's interesting how it works with the brain, where rather than having this just sort of flying around like a flock of crows, it becomes something now that's on paper, it's outside of me,

it's out there, and it checks a box internally. So for people who are maybe less right brain dominant, it checks a box and it's like, Okay, I'm going to address that. I'm not just letting it sit back there and create anxiety. And then the magic question of what would I love or how would I love to feel when I'm going through if I haven't for a while, but if I'm going through times of real emotional turmoil or something kind of acute, is going on saying how

would I love to feel right now? It might be I would love to feel more confident, I would love to feel more safe, But just getting that out there, and then a prompt that I use quite often is I am so happy and grateful now that and begin to write that, and it's interesting. I can show up sometimes to the journal feeling pretty anxious or pretty chopped

up in some way. I've noticed though, that developing this as a daily practice actually does something, and it tunes me back in, and it also creates sort of a boundary around some of those things, which, in a practical way, eric allows me to go back to my life and feel like I'm not ignoring anything. I'm paying attention to these things. Carl Young might say, I'm paying out the shadow in an intelligent way, but it actually allows me to be more rational. And by the way, I'm gonna

hold up this poly vagel chart. Um, you've probably have seen this. It's something I use a lot in my work. It actually got cut from the book. I've put a lot of brain research and things, and the publisher cut a lot of that, which was fine. I'm happy to email a link to that if you want to put

it in the show notes. But I use this as a visual sort of tattooed on the inside of my skull right now, because it's this curve of anxiety and at the bottom level, I call it the green zone because it happened to be green on this person's chart. But in the green zone, it's the ventral vagal nervous system state in there. And this is what's interesting to me. You and I have studied and been involved with various wisdom traditions and spiritual practices. But in this green zone

is calmness, in connection, it's being settled. There's groundedness, safety, connection, safety oriented to the environment, curiosity and openness. There's compassionate experience there, and there's mindful and in the present. When I came across this study of the poly vagel nervous system, I began to realize, oh my god, this is the holy grail for personal development, self help, spirituality, Like this is the holy grail, and it's a nervous system state.

There's some very proud to feel physical benefits like you know, better immune response, better digestion, it reverses aging oxytocin. We actually begin to feel connected to ourselves and to other people and feel safe in doing so. When I look at a practice like using a journal practice or and some version of meditation or mindfulness, I've come to call it a lot more deeply relaxing. What I've found is that as we get up out of the green zone

into the higher levels of anxiety. Our left brain wants to interpret that as the place we're being the most sharp and the most effective making the executive decisions. But in reality, that five or ten minutes I spend writing down my thoughts and feelings and needs, and the five or ten minutes or twenty some days, it's five that I spend deeply relaxing. We might also call that meditating

or mindfulness. Those actually move my brain waves and my nervous system into a state where my body is actually allowed to do what it's meant to do, and I actually see the results in my life. I find myself making better decisions. I am more curious, I'm more open. So I also call this the creative zone. It's the green zone as the creative zone. It's like, we want to find out how to be in better connection with

all of that. These practices actually matter, and I'm loving that we're discovering more and more with brain research that it's it's very practical too. Yeah. I love to see the brain research, the neuroscience sort of come in and confirm and add insight to what a lot of wisdom traditions have been saying for a long time. I'm all for as many sources of you know, confirmation to something because it's hard, you know, life's hard to know, like what's the right thing to do? Do I have coconut oil?

Or do I have coconut oil? I mean, the debate is out right, you know. So I'd love to have like fifty studies that tell me coconut oil is okay. Like I'm gonna feel better, you know, so when the when the wisdom traditions and the modern science line up, I feel like, okay, good, I feel a little bit better. And then of course the ever important personal experience like okay, does this actually help me? You know? What's it do for me? Um? Tell me about your meditation practice? What

what does it look like today? What do you do you you call it deeply relaxing. You've also called it meditation. What is it you're actually doing for that five to twenty minutes or thirty minutes? Well, I've created some meditation tracks or visualization tracks. I actually use my own sometimes, but really for me, even oftentimes it's settling down into my body. I'll take a lot of deep breaths for

about five minutes. I will oftentimes start into that with a practice of breathing in, I'm loved, breathing out, I'm safe, breathing in, I'm seeing, breathing out, I'm enough. A lot of times I'll find myself sort of the parts of my psyche and self sort of recollecting themselves. And then I love meditation tracks. I find them on YouTube. There's this great oming one that I love at last for three hours, So generally I'm only listening to twenty minutes

of that one. No, but I've found that just by keeping that so simple and and actually having in my brain and especially helps people like my brother Nate to have a chart like this to go, oh, that's why I'm doing this. But then just I'll sometimes visualize myself

actually moving into the green zone and just allowing the pleasure. Um, so many of these things often feel like shoulds or feel like hard work, and the pleasure of deeply relaxing, of going oh, this feels so good, and having the intellectual side being supported by Oh, and there's all this information that say, this is the awesome stuff happening my body. That also can help when I'm feeling particularly you know,

not present. But I just find that spending that five minutes, and Eric, I teach in my workshops, I'll teach you know, let's just close our eyes right now and breathe and count one finger at a time on our knees to tend one breath with each finger, and then do the same with their toes. And I'm like, with that simple practice that lasts about a minute and a half, you've actually moves yourself closer to the green zone, just with something that doesn't require any special mantras. I've done parts

of that. It had stop lights sometimes when I was feeling particularly anxious, I said, you could do this during a phone call or a board meeting or something. It's like, you don't have to wait until you have the right pillow and the right meditation track. The benefit of coming back to yourself. And by the way, I feel like this comes back to the theme of your show. I know now from experience and all this wonderful research that as I do these things, I gain what Franco would

talk about the difference between stimulus and response. I widened that gap and I begin to create a space of more choice. And so when people are like, how do I feed the good wolf rather than the bad one? The question is how can I gain more choice? How can I become conscious that I have a choice right now? And so for me, these practices are the things that create more more choice, more opportunity for choice toward listen. I feel like it's a really rare human on the

planet who would choose the bad wolf. I feel like many people have a very small gap between stimulus and reaction, and so find ways of creating a greater gap there, of finding like, oh, I am a powerful creator. I am a powerful creator, but you know what I'm not if I don't have enough space to make a choice. Yeah, that's perfect. I've often when people ask me, like, what have you gotten out of meditating? You know why you do it? And the thing that I most often point

to is exactly what you just said. I said. I feel like it has tangibly increased the space between stimulus and response. I feel like it increases that gap where I have more of a chance to say, Okay, how do I want to react? Not just externally that's part of it, but internally also internal stimulus okay and instantly right boom an internal stimulus, all sorts of cascades of thought jump in. But now you know, sometimes there's enough space to go hang on like, is that true? Do

I really need to follow that? You know? And so, so it's not just space between stimulus and response externally, it's internally. You and I are out of time. It's

snuck up on us. We're going to continue in the post show conversation briefly while I drag you back to your book again at least a little bit where I want to talk very briefly in the post show conversation at least about how to be both grounded and wildly imaginative, how to be creative and responsible, how to daydream and reach your goals direct lines from you, and the tools

for fostering conscious creativity. So you and I will do that in the post show conversation listeners if you'd like access to that, as well as lots of other post show conversations, and an episode I do each week called a Teaching Song and a Poem, where I share a song I love, a poem I love, and UH and an idea that you might work with, and the joys of being supporter of the one you Feed. You can go to One You Feed dot net slash join Jacob,

Thank you so much has been really fun. We could probably do it for another two hours, and we'll do it a little bit longer, but thank you. I've been looking forward to this and I enjoyed it too. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community. With this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support now. We

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