Inner Truth with David Newell

Life, death, rebirth. Expansion and contraction. Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter.

These are the fundamentals and cycles of life as we know them.

Just as we look to the seasons and the stars for wisdom in their patterns, can we also see them within our own bodies?

This is the question that has slowly unravelled within Therese Jornlin over the past 30 years as she has gone deeply into the wisdom of female biology and explored the innate intelligence of the womb cycle.

Central to Therese's work is becoming deeply conscious of the womb cycle, fully aware of this most fundamental of biological cycles, and use it as an intimate re-grounding and re-connection process both with the earth and within.

In her course Women Awake, she deconstructs the cultural taboos around menstruation and our relationship to blood and instead teaches women to appreciate and elevate their cycle, to fully comprehend the mirror of their biological cycle to the ecology of the earth.

Just how important is it to ask fierce questions of yourself in life, even if you don't yet know the answers?

In many ways, a life can be shaped just as much by asking the question as by having it answered.

Moving ourselves to that internal conversational frontier where we call out into the unknown, places us in a position of vulnerability and receptivity to whatever beautiful calling may come back.

To go to the deepest depths of ourselves, we can think of at least three questions for our lives:

What is it that you most deeply and profoundly love?

What are your deepest and most profound gifts?

What are your deepest and most profound responsibilities?

These are the questions that Mac Macartney poses to himself and to all those he coaches in reaching their greatest potential and deepest connection with themselves and the world around them.

Having sailed into tricky seas earlier in life, Mac had a wake up call to return to nature, retrain as a gardener and then later take on the mantle of executive coaching where he co-founded two development consultancies.

He subsequently heard the call to go deep into what it means to be human and went in search of the First Nations people of the United States where he spent two years embedded in their culture, challenging every assumption and belief he had about himself.

After a series of remarkable experiences with these indigenous people, he left to found Embercombe, a social enterprise that teaches people to become responsible leaders and change-makers in the world.

Since then he has a well known and sought after speaker on all topics from sustainable leadership to climate change advocacy and works with clients as diverse and Danone to Harvard Business School, helping them to move towards sustainable and ethical business behaviour.

Listening to him speak is a thunderous and inspiring invitation to wake up to your potential to take action in the world.

I caught up with Mac to talk about the importance of fierce questions to effect incredible and life-affirming change.

"It is high time we realized that it is pointless to praise the light and preach it if nobody can see it. It is much more needful to teach people the art of seeing." - Carl Jung

Do you ever think that there is more to life than meet's the eye?

That there is a world of things hidden amongst the world of things seen?

The shamanic discipline of life centers around exactly this, with practices that cultivate a way of seeing the hidden dynamics in life amongst the ordinary goings on, to turn the mirrors of form into windows of enlightenment.

For the most part though it is perhaps fair to say that we live anchored largely to the physical. The scientist, shamanist and doctor Hank Wesselman believes though that our ongoing bias towards objective knowledge has come at the cost of a deeper, intuitive rapport with nature and our spiritual selves. This he says has led to a disenchantment with the way things are and that our re-enchantment with the physical and spiritual world can come from cultivating this visionary 'shamanic sight'.

Through his own experience walking the path of an evolutionary scientist to a Hawaiian shaman, he has danced in both worlds and drawn deep inspiration from his visionary experiences which he has faithfully documented in his popular book SpiritWalker.

Hank argues that Shamanism provides the perfect vehicle for approaching a goal of deepened intelligence and experiencing ourselves as an interface between the worlds of things seen and the worlds of things hidden.

In his words: "There is new spiritual complex coming into being in our world. This mystical mosaic draws from many traditions and many cultures, and has the potential to refresh and perhaps replace our current mainstream religions with new perceptions and new insights."

As we learn to see the world with renewed reverence again we can see the mystery of life with greater clarity and with it bring for the highest version of ourselves.

"Our practice is not to clear up the mystery. It is to make the mystery clear." - Robert Aitkin Roshi

"Tis a fearful thing to love what death can touch. A fearful thing to love, to hope, to dream, to be. A thing for fools, this. And a holy thing. Tis a human thing, love, a holy thing, to love what death has touched." - Yehuda HaLevi

To love is the fiercest and most essential of human callings and in our loss, our grief becomes the mirror to the depth that love. When we lose a loved one to bereavement or separation, it is often the case that we feel swallowed whole by the vastness of that grief and the pain of the loss.

Making sense of this pain, weaving gold out of the suffering, is a delicate art form and an essential responsibility for us emerge with a deeper clarity, meaning and integration from our losses.

In exploring this process, the popular five stage model of grief emerged in the 1960s to help people comprehend their feelings. The model speaks of a chronological step-by-step process of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally acceptance. To find closure, it is posited that one must go through each of these stages, but not everybody fits this process.

Through his own tragic loss and decades of therapeutic practice, grief specialist Patrick O'Malley soon discovered that what we need to process these events and the unpredictable spectrum of feelings that accompany them is to create our own grief story. A narrative that helps tell the full sweep our of our loss, that encompasses all of our interiority so that we may be with it in its fullness.

In his book Getting Grief Right Patrick speaks of the vital healing power of story-telling to reframe grieving as an act of the deepest form of love. He invites us to explore grief not as a process of recovery, but as the ongoing narrative of our relationship with the one we've lost—to be fully felt, told, and woven into our lives.

In his own words: "Sadness, regret, confusion, yearning—all the experiences of grief—are a part of the narrative of love." When we learn to embrace these we create a compassionate environment for our feelings and a story that honours the loss and moves us forward in a deeper, enriched and vulnerable way.

At 23, Andrew Forsthoefel walked out the back door of his home in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, with a backpack, an audio recorder and a sign that read "Walking to Listen." He had just graduated from university and was ready to begin his adult life, but he didn't know how. So he decided he'd walk and listen on a journey of 4,000 miles across the USA over the course of 11 months.

What started as a quest to explore and to listen to other's perspectives, quickly became a deep, introspective journey into his own self; his fears, doubts, joys, solace and loneliness. As he navigated his way across the US, having interactions ranging from the most ordinary to the most profound, he found a world that was a mirror of himself and a journey that was a pilgrimage of the soul.

Along the way, thousands of people shared their stories with him, often exposing their most intimate selves to a stranger who was deeply committed to listening. Those conversations were often tinged with threads of pain, be they from long-held divisions in race and class or from the moving stories of personal heartbreak and sacrifice. Each one provided Andrew an opportunity for deep listening and reflection, and within it the potential for profound inner transformation.

By the end of his journey, Andrew was a different person with a new perspective on what it means to come of age today. Having been transformed through the power of listening, his experience is a beacon of light to inspire others to step out into the world, connect deeply to others and find themselves in the process.

Many people today often feel dislocated and confused about the idea of God. Since Isaac Newton's findings of the universe and the birth of the Big Bang theory, we've had a hard time reconciling scientific truths of the cosmos and what the major religions tell us about both the start of the universe and the role of God.

This incoherence between science and traditional views of God has left us without a creation story and a map of meaning for our lives that we so desperately yearn for as humans. Or has it?

Nancy Ellen Abrams, a philosopher of science, a lawyer and lifelong atheist believes she has found a new understanding of God that marries faith and fact. Having undergone a remarkable healing from an eating disorder, she set out to understand how and why believing in a higher power is not only beneficial but also deeply essential to our existence.

In her book, A God That Could Be Real, Abrams explores a radically new way of thinking about God. She dismantles several common assumptions about God and shows why an omniscient, omnipotent God that created the universe and plans what happens is incompatible with science—but that this doesn't preclude a God that can comfort and empower us.

An absolutely practical, pragmatic and science-backed understanding of God is perhaps exactly what we need in this 21st century of global interconnectedness and challenge.

Beyond what we can understand with our rational minds, our bodies have an innate, natural sense of wisdom and truth. We can deeply feel authenticity in ourselves and in others and as we slowly learn to trust this bodily wisdom we settle deeply and peacefully into ourselves.

This innate wisdom though is most often obscured by our conditioning, in particular the core limiting beliefs we hold, our reactive feelings and our somatic contractions that fuel our sense of struggle and veil who we really are.

That's where John Prendergast Ph.D., one of the foremost experts in somatic healing and psychotherapy, has bridged the latest findings in science and psychology with spirituality to present an enriched compass of our inner senses.

In his book, In Touch, John peers deeply into this deeper dimension of wisdom that we all have access to. He speaks about the need to first pull back from excessive thinking and look to tune into 'resonance' as the launching point into this felt-sense of our lives.

At the heart of his work is the message that our body is an exquisitely sensitive feeling instrument and as we learn to tune into its subtle signals, the gifts of greater clarity, healing and inner knowing await for us.

Jan Engels-Smith is shamanic practitioner and the founder of the LightSong School of 21st Century Shamanism and Energy Medicine where she teaches students shamanism and journeying techniques

Central to Jan's work is the philosophy that shamanism is not the preserve of a gifted few seers or just for indigenous cultures to practice but that we all have the capacity to cultivate a shamanic skillset through journeying and practices that help move us from left brain focus into right-brain experience.

In her book, Through the Rabbit Hole, Jan talks about dominance of left-brained thinking in our culture and in particular the limiting belief that all we see is all there is. This belief keeps our imagination and our other subtler senses locked away from the wider world around us.

I caught up with Jan to talk about the ways we can move out of the box, cultivate a relationship with spirits and use journeying to find greater fulfilment and peace in life.

How do our genetics impact our energetic disposition?

Were we born with a unique energetic blueprint that means we operate best in a specific way?

It certainly seems that way from the wide range of preferences we all have about how we work, behave in relationships and cope with life's trials and tribulations.

In recent years, Human Design, a relatively new system for understanding our genetic and energetic blueprint, has been becoming an increasingly popular way for exploring this dimension of life.

I spoke with Manex Ibar, a visionary shaman and healer who specialises in Human Design as well as a number of other modalities including energetics, shamanism and genetics.

Central to our discussion was how useful it can be to have an understanding of our unique energetic blueprint, and how revelatory it can be in rearranging our lives for the greatest peace and fulfilment.

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"Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone" wrote Paul Tillich.

For millennia, great writers and thinkers have extolled the benefits of solitude, for reflection, inner peace and even to bring us closer to each other.

Yet with the most recent social research suggesting that more and more people are suffering from loneliness and that loneliness itself is worse for your physical and mental health than even alcohol and lack of sleep, there are some interesting questions that arise about the ontological nature of these two states and how we can be with both of them constructively.

To explore this I spoke with Robert Kull Ph.D., who in 2001 traveled to a remote uninhabited island on the rainy, wind-swept coast of southern Chile, more than one hundred miles from the nearest person. There he built a shelter and lived alone for a year to explore the physical, emotional and spiritual effects of deep wilderness solitude.

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