Chris Sparks is a one-of-a-kind human; he's a retired professional poker pro who was once ranked one of the top 20 players in the world.

But in recent years, he has applied himself to coaching and running workshops on decision-making, systems thinking, and peak performance. And as you'll hear in this conversation, he is not only brilliant but also wise.

Before we hit record, I said to Chris let's record a masterclass in mindset for staying calm and making good decisions in high-stress environments ~ and he didn't really disappoint.

Our conversation ranged from talking about tools he used to stay calm or shift his state during high-stakes poker games and how he eliminated mental distractions in critical moments. He shared some meta-principles that he learnt through poker but applies to life more broadly—as well as how his approach and philosophy around productivity have shifted over the years.

I deeply enjoyed this conversation with Chris, and I have a sense that you will too. I'll also mention that Chris has what he calls a 'performance assessment', which I've linked in the show notes ~ that provides a series of excellent questions to reflect on.

🔗 LINKS

📝 Take the Forcing Function Self-Assessment
💬  Find Chris on Twitter @SparksRemarks
🎙️  Listen to Chris' Podcast
👨‍🎓  Signup for Chris' Feb 2023 course on 'Team Performance Training'

Connect + Explore More from Jonny
🐦  Follow on Twitter/X @jonnym1ller
🫁  Learn more about Nervous System Mastery
🪷 Order our deck of Calm Cards (these make great gifts)
📱  Check out Stateshift — our brand new iOS + Android app
📝  Take the Nervous System Quotient (NSQ) Self-Assessment (totally free)
💌 Sign up to The Inner Frontier Newsletter

Aaron is a pioneering manual therapist and movement coach, founder and creator of the Align Method.

I'm currently looking at Aaron's book (The Align Method) & it's one of the books that has most impacted my relationship with not just fitness and movement, but a new philosophy of seeing the world as a playground and the fact that I'm recording this whilst squatting ~ is in part thanks to the wisdom and research that he shares.

This is one hell of a fun conversation packed with big ideas and super practical takeaways ~ we range from talking about the value of play and emotional fluidity ~ to post-ejaculatory experiences and a mini-masterclass in how to leverage your physiology & posture to change how you feel.

~~~

🔗  Resources & Links to Aaron's Work

👋  Follow Aaron over on Instagram @alignpodcast
🎙️  Listen to his phenomenal podcast 'Align Podcast'
📚  Grab a copy of Aaron's book The Align Method
👨‍🎓  Explore Aaron's upcoming 6-week course

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Connect + Explore More from Jonny
🐦  Follow on Twitter/X @jonnym1ller
🫁  Learn more about Nervous System Mastery
🪷 Order our deck of Calm Cards (these make great gifts)
📱  Check out Stateshift — our brand new iOS + Android app
📝  Take the Nervous System Quotient (NSQ) Self-Assessment (totally free)
💌 Sign up to The Inner Frontier Newsletter

It's always fun to have conversations with friends and this one, in particular, has been several years in the making. If you're interested in meditation, breathwork or getting more done with more joy then this episode is a must-listen.

Some of the themes we unpack include: what it means to 'expand your awareness', exploring the space and freedom between stimulus + response, what it means practically to 'escape grind mode' and what we both mean when we talk about increasing our sense of 'aliveness'.

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🔗  Resources & Links

👋  Follow Michael over on Twitter @m_ashcroft
👨‍🎓  Learn more about Michael's Course at expandingawareness.org
✍️  Read Michael's Essays on Every

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Connect + Explore More from Jonny
🐦  Follow on Twitter/X @jonnym1ller
🫁  Learn more about Nervous System Mastery
🪷 Order our deck of Calm Cards (these make great gifts)
📱  Check out Stateshift — our brand new iOS + Android app
📝  Take the Nervous System Quotient (NSQ) Self-Assessment (totally free)
💌 Sign up to The Inner Frontier Newsletter

In this episode, Edward Dangerfield and I do a deep dive on a new modality of breathwork, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Facilitated Breath Repatterning ~ or FBR for short ~ will be globally recognised in 4-5 years' time and that the research that is beginning here in Bali will go on to make some significant discoveries about the connection between breathing patterns + patterns of behaviour.

As you'll hear in this conversation, what I believe is truly unique about this mode of breathwork ~ is that it is both scientific in its approach, involving the practitioner 'reading the breath' of the client, and then making facilitations that often elicit profound shifts. I'll also add that my capacity to hold myself through intense experiences and feel comfortable expressing emotions has been transformed by this work.

Since recording the initial conversation with Ed (link) I completed a 400hr training with him and the team here in Bali. But despite having literally hundreds of hours of conversations with him, I learnt so many new things myself from this conversation.

~~~~~~

Some of the highlights were:

🕵️‍♂️    Ed describes what I consider to be his superpower for paying attention to subtle cues that he's noticing and tracking in clients ~ like a real-life Sherlock Holmes ~ everything from their posture to their tone of voice and the words they choose ~ which then allows him to make generally highly accurate hypotheses about their breathing patterns and how this shows up in their lives.

🫁 He walks us through an imaginary breath translation ~ so that you as a listener will get a sense for this art of reading and interpreting the language of breath. I also loved hearing him articulate the connection between capacity for dynamic breathing and dynamic thinking ~ the very tangible effects on health and lived experience of having Maladaptive breathing patterns.

🚀  And finally some of his bold ideas for the broader impact that this emerging modality of FBR might have ~ running large-scale studies, working with leaders of organisations to move them from moving overachievers to high achievers & an idea to design a breathwork-specific wearable device that could enable self-guided journeys to be run safely.

~~~~~~

🔗  Resources & Links
 
🎙️  Listen to my first conversation with Ed back in 2019 (link)
📚  'Nurturing Resilience' by Kathy Kain (link)
📸  Ed's Instagram: @edwarddangerfield
🖥️  Breathwork Bali Website (link)
🎙️  Related conversation on Functional Breathwork with Conni Biesalski (link)

🌎  Recommended International Breathwork Practitioners

SF/Bay Area – Jonny Miller (link)
Bali – Multiple Practitioners (link)
London – Jamie Clements (link)

Connect + Explore More from Jonny

🐦  Follow on Twitter/X @jonnym1ller
🫁  Learn more about Nervous System Mastery
🪷 Order our deck of Calm Cards (these make great gifts)
📱  Check out Stateshift — our brand new iOS + Android app
📝  Take the Nervous System Quotient (NSQ) Self-Assessment (totally free)
💌 Sign up to The Inner Frontier Newsletter

🎙️  Episode Overview

You might have come across Eric through his award-winning podcast ‘The One You Feed’ where he has interviewed hundreds of the wisest and most inspiring humans on the planet.

He's also a father, serial entrepreneur, behaviour coach, and author on a quest to understand how we might live more intentional lives.

And we get into the impact that these conversations has had on his life and perspective over the last decade, but we begin with the chapters of his life before the podcast — at age 24 Eric was living out the back of a van, spending $300 a day on his heroin addiction and up to 50 years in jail.

We dive into this transformational journey of recovery—the gifts and challenges inherent in the AA program as well as his thoughts on what created the conditions for both his addiction and the sobriety that followed.

It was interesting to see how Eric and I share a mutual fascination for questions around how to take insights and apply them to everyday life—and the parallels between the Spiritual Habits group program that Eric hosts with the work that I’ve been involved with around resilience and researching the nervous system.

🔗  Show Notes + Links

🎙️   Subscribe to the 'One You Feed' podcast on Spotify
👨‍🎓   Learn more about Eric's 8-week Spiritual Habits Program
🖥️   Watch his superb TEDx talk on the battle of changing your behaviour

Connect + Explore More from Jonny

🐦  Follow on Twitter/X @jonnym1ller
🫁  Learn more about Nervous System Mastery
🪷 Order our deck of Calm Cards (these make great gifts)
📱  Check out Stateshift — our brand new iOS + Android app
📝  Take the Nervous System Quotient (NSQ) Self-Assessment (totally free)
💌 Sign up to The Inner Frontier Newsletter

Paul and I first met 3 years ago at an event in Portland—he had recently left his job in corporate consulting and we bonded over how lost we'd both felt at times.

Later that week I gave him a copy of 'The Three Marriages' a book by David Whyte where he talks about the Pathless Path that is required for anyone looking to do or create something original.

Fast-forward to today and Paul has just published his first book — Called the Pathless Path — which is his roadmap of sorts for those of us who might have had the boldness to quit the default path & taking an experiment-based approach to figure out how to live well.

Some of the themes we dive into are:

🤔  How he has been exploring the magic of non-doing
❓  Some of the most powerful questions he uses during curiosity conversations with others who are looking to take the leap.
🎢  How to navigate the painful reality that family + friends might not understand his decisions to walk away from a successful career.
📚  Some of the things he believes hold most people back from living more intentionally & the big breakthrough moment he experienced in the midst of writing his book.

***

🔗   Links
📚  Get your copy of The Pathless Path
🖥️   Subscribe to Paul's excellent newsletter and listen to his podcast.
🐦  Connect with Paul and say hi on Twitter

Connect + Explore More from Jonny
🐦  Follow on Twitter/X @jonnym1ller
🫁  Learn more about Nervous System Mastery
🪷 Order our deck of Calm Cards (these make great gifts)
📱  Check out Stateshift — our brand new iOS + Android app
📝  Take the Nervous System Quotient (NSQ) Self-Assessment (totally free)
💌 Sign up to The Inner Frontier Newsletter

🎙️   Episode Overview

I'm thrilled to bring you this conversation with philosopher, writer & activist Charles Eisenstein. For those of you who aren't familiar with Charles' work—it's no exaggeration to say that his ideas contained in his books and writing have shaped my personal worldview more than any other author I can think of.

What I appreciated about this conversation was his deep presence and at times a refusal to answer my question because he felt like there was a deeper and more real question beneath the surface. You can feel the urgency in the tone of his voice, the deep sense of how much is wrong with the world and his sincere desire to not bypass this deep discomfort.

I've re-listened to this conversation several times myself and some of what really stood out for me was:

👽  Our mutual sense of confinement, wrongness and alienation that we felt growing up in middle-class education — he described how he wrestled with this question of ‘who marooned me on planet crazy’.
👐  His earnestness to be "fully available" and to be in service to life and his belief that it’s actually technically 'easy' to heal the planet, but our consciousness is getting in the way
🌎   We also touched in on the state of the world and how he believed that grief for the dying world is actually what is required for the world not to die.
🎅  Making the case for getting truly serious about being selfish & why laziness is a message that points towards how our life energy wishes to be expressed.
📚  Why Dr. Seuss' Myth of the Grinch is so relevant for our times and what we can learn from seeing today's world through a more mythic lens.

🔗    Show Notes + Links
💌    Subscribe to Charles' superb substack newsletter
👀   Explore his thought-provoking essays from the past decade
🌎   Two of Charles' Books: A More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible & The Ascent of Humanity
👨‍🎓   His self-paced online courses (the gift economy + exploration of masculinity are highly recommended)
📹   Curated youtube videos containing some of his biggest ideas 

📚 Two Books Mentioned by Charles
📖  Charles favourite story growing up:  The Phantom Tollbooth by Norman Juster
🎄  A myth for our times: How the Grinch Stole Christmas by Dr. Seuss

Connect + Explore More from Jonny
🐦  Follow on Twitter/X @jonnym1ller
🫁  Learn more about Nervous System Mastery
🪷 Order our deck of Calm Cards (these make great gifts)
📱  Check out Stateshift — our brand new iOS + Android app
📝  Take the Nervous System Quotient (NSQ) Self-Assessment (totally free)
💌 Sign up to The Inner Frontier Newsletter

This is a really unique episode—Michael King has been a mentor of mine and dear friend for nearly four years now.  If it weren't for some of our conversations I'm not sure that The Inner Frontier would even exist, at least not in the form that it does today.

I find some of his perspectives and approaches to meditation and life so refreshing and my goal for this conversation was really to tease out some of the ideas and radical concepts that he has shared with me privately over the years.

Some of the questions we explored:

😬  What is the case for living life from a place of ease rather than over-efforting — which is something that I've wrestled with for a long time, as well as how our experience of reality is shaped by who we are and our beliefs.
🧘  Some common meditation myths and pitfalls that he sees with meditators with varying levels of experience as well as how he recommends navigating the landscape of meditation and the vast number of options and traditions and approaches out there.
📝  And finally, he also shares a really powerful framework for feeling into and moving through any challenging emotional experience or resistance.

***

Michael is also launching the third iteration of his Meditation Teacher Training early next March which I was a student in two years ago. What I learnt in that training profoundly shaped not only my work as a founder coach but also deepened my own practice and my relationship to my own mind and emotional landscape. So if training to become a meditation teacher or deepening your own practice is something that calls to you, I would absolutely recommend getting in touch with Michael. He's generously offering The Inner Frontier listeners, $200 off the 2022 training — just mention Inner Frontier when you reach out.

***

🔗  Links
🧘 Check out the Meditation Teacher Training 2022
👋  Find Michael on Instagram @kingsmeditationandmentoring

Connect + Explore More from Jonny
🐦  Follow on Twitter/X @jonnym1ller
🫁  Learn more about Nervous System Mastery
🪷 Order our deck of Calm Cards (these make great gifts)
📱  Check out Stateshift — our brand new iOS + Android app
📝  Take the Nervous System Quotient (NSQ) Self-Assessment (totally free)
💌 Sign up to The Inner Frontier Newsletter

I'm really thrilled to be bringing you this philosophical deep dive with truly I think one of the most radical and thoughtful thinkers of our generation.

Dr. Zachary Stein is a co-founder of The Consilience Project—which publishes novel research and explores questions surrounding global risk mitigation and existential threats facing humanity. He is the Academic Director Center for Integral Wisdom and the author of 'Education in a Time Between Worlds' – which I've personally gifted myself to many friends and shifted how I think about the future of schooling.

In this conversation, we cover some truly fascinating territory, because of his multi-disciplinary approach Zak has a truly unique perspective on some of the biggest questions of our time.

To give you a sense of what to expect in this conversation:

🙏   We began with a model of what it means to move into the perspective of post-traumatic growth...
🌱   He shared a thought experiment of 'Nous Arc' which asks the question of what seeds of ideas could be stored such that they could reboot human civilisation.
🫁   We talk about the role of nervous system regulation in models of adult development
🌎   Zak's diagnosis of 'Global Intimacy Disorder' and re-imagining what it means to be human and his work to start the conversation for a new kind of global philosophy called cosmo-erotic humanism.

What questions come alive in your mind? How might you see yourself contributing? Drop me a note on twitter... and finally, if this conversation resonates, do consider sharing a link with a friend who might also appreciate it.

🔗   Links
Zak's Homepage // zakstein.org
The Consilience Project // consilienceproject.org
Nous Arc // Zak's talk at the centre for integral wisdom

Connect + Explore More from Jonny
🐦  Follow on Twitter/X @jonnym1ller
🫁  Learn more about Nervous System Mastery
🪷 Order our deck of Calm Cards (these make great gifts)
📱  Check out Stateshift — our brand new iOS + Android app
📝  Take the Nervous System Quotient (NSQ) Self-Assessment (totally free)
💌 Sign up to The Inner Frontier Newsletter

Joe Hudson is many things — he's a Venture Capitalist and renowned executive coach, but beyond that, he is a rare example of someone who in my perspective has accessed some profound truths about the human experience and is putting himself out there into the world helping others to find greater joy and ease in their lives.

***

❓  We begin with his perspective on wonder and explore what makes for the capacity to ask transformational questions.
🤩  He then shares his VIEW framework—which stands for Vulnerability, Impartiality, Empathy & Wonder—and how life-changing it can be if we're able to truly inhabit these states of being.
🔥  We both then begin to unpacking the concept of emotional fluidity, why it's very different from emotional management and dive into specific examples of unclogging the tube of anger, Joe's process for dissolving shame (in which I become the guinea pig and it gets real for a few minutes)

Joe also mentions his experiences doing naked breathwork, the one-two punch tactic he used to use to get out of speeding tickets, why selfishness is a word used to get children to do what their parents want and why you have to allow your heart to break a little to increase your capacity to love.

***

I was quite taken aback by how many of my recent Nervous System Mastery students had taken Joe's 'Connection Course' and how tremendously impactful they shared it had been in their journeys of self-exploration and finding greater depths of emotional maturity.

I rarely (if ever) promote other courses, but having listened to Joe's 'Art of Accomplishment' podcast episodes, heard from several of his students whose lives have been transformed by his work as well as the depth of our recent conversation I believe his work and methodology deserves to be shared more widely.

So to this end, I'd like to make the case for at the very least considering the 'Connection Course' that he's offering—it's very reasonably priced ($300) and uses a “cohort of two” learning format that combines the power of cohort-based learning with the flexibility of a self-paced course.

It's an opportunity to access workshops usually only reserved for elite execs and combines 20 years of Joe's research into dozens of spiritual traditions + robust psychological frameworks, also backed by the more recent findings from neurological research.

"This course is a unique approach to relationships with yourself and others. It dramatically changes your ability to accomplish what you want in your life with ease and joy. It will help you examine the way that you show up at work and in your personal life, all through training a mindset that leads to more connection and more satisfying relationships."

So there you have it—a wholehearted recommendation to first listen to the podcast conversation with Joe and if the themes of emotional exploration resonate, then definitely check out the amazing podcast and self-paced connection course linked below for a deeper dive.

>> You can use the code CURIOUS to save 10% on Joe's course here <<

***

Links to Joe & the Art of Accomplishment
👨‍🎓  Art of Accomplishment Connection Course (link)
🎙️  Art of Accomplishment Podcast (link)
📸  Art of Accomplishment on Instagram (link)
💬  Joe Hudson on Twitter (link)

Connect + Explore More from Jonny
🐦  Follow on Twitter/X @jonnym1ller
🫁  Learn more about Nervous System Mastery
🪷 Order our deck of Calm Cards (these make great gifts)
📱  Check out Stateshift — our brand new iOS + Android app
📝  Take the Nervous System Quotient (NSQ) Self-Assessment (totally free)
💌 Sign up to The Inner Frontier Newsletter