Meditation, The Power of Awe, and Verb-Centric Language with Author, LPC, and Mindfulness Guide Jake Eagle

Jake and Michael developed together they developed this method together during their research at UC Berkeley into why meditation makes an impact on our mental health and how meditation has changed as it's moved from the East to the West Jake and I of course discuss the book The a method but also get into his own personal story with making meaning and why making meaning is so important to him personally I've never had this experience before but Jake hopped on our Zoom call and said I love making meaning that's what I've done my research about and I would love to talk about it and I was like well you have come to the right place so I am really thrilled to be sharing this episode with you it is one of my favorites that I've done I think and if you are new here thank you so much for being here please subscribe to the coher collective here on YouTube and you can subscribe wherever you're listening to this podcast whether it's Apple podcasts or Spotify if you're on YouTube please give this video a like and leave me a comment down below sharing your thoughts and what experience with meditation you have if you are listening to this podcast give us a review or a rating of five Stars it really does help spread the word and help us all make more meaning that is all I have to get us started so with all of that being said let's take a deep

breath and get started and we'll just hop right into it the first question I always ask all of my guests just to kind of set us off on the right foot is what is one thing you're thankful for right now I am uh thankful for technology because that's what is allowing you and I to do this where do you live I'm in Dallas Texas yeah so you're in Dallas and I'm in Hawaii and I Mo I moved here seven years ago from the mainland and before the pandemic started I was working with clients via Zoom so I had transitioned into this sort of world of technology before the pandemic which allowed us to maintain uh our lives and our private practices my wife has one also so I'm very grateful that technology allows us to do this yeah no me too I especially as a as a young person I grew up with technology but seeing you know there there's a positives and negatives to anything and everything but seeing the way people are using it for good and for connection has been really cool um my second question that I always ask everyone is tell me your story um um that's kind of a weighty question feel free to share anything that feels pertinent my story is actually it's a pretty consistent story since I was very young I have been extremely interested in fulfilling my own potential and helping other people fulfill their potential and I don't know exactly where it came from but I remember having this interest before I was 10 years old uh just really wanting to um do the best I could do wanting to help other people do or be the best that they can be and for many years I was in uh the world of business I ran companies on the east coast of the Mainland and my orientation there of course was to make money because to to have a business you need to make money but my orientation was always about helping my employees go to the next level go to the next step develop new skills and then eventually that led to me going back to school and becoming a psychotherapist which I've done now for 30 years and that was very much about helping people fulfill their potential so that's kind of at the heart of my story I think that is so beautiful and it's interesting to me how many people that end up in this kind of work often start in business and find that the side of business that they're really passionate about is that kind of professional development side of things and it's like okay why is this the thing I'm drawn to one thing that you mentioned that I want to ask you about is that you've had this desire to fulfill your potential and help others do the same since before you were 10 years old when do you think you first realized that mission when you were young and how did you know what that was at such a young age well when I was a a teenager my father excuse me my father was in a business called success motivation and he would go around and work with other companies and help them essentially in today's world it would be called coaching he was doing Executive coaching before that he' had his own company where he had about 60 employees and was very uh very involved in helping his employees live good lives so I think that I sort of grew up in a in environment where this was natural and then I started off by I left home when I was fairly Young when I was 16 I started my first business and it was just a natural inclination I had to see how whatever we were doing how we could do it to the best of our ability and it served me really well and I think it's this is different by the way than helping people many people become therapists because they want to help people and I don't want to say that I didn't want to help people but that wasn't my driver I I wasn't driven out of um empathy or sympathy for people who were struggling as much as I was driven because I felt like I could see their potential even when they didn't see their potential and I was able to reflect that back to people and it seemed to serve them extremely well absolutely so in terms terms of that that it's not even from this I just want to help but this I see what you can be and I want to let that expand and be a part of that Journey maybe why Psychotherapy eventually because there's I'm sure lots of modalities that one could use to support someone fulfilling their potential why Psychotherapy Psychotherapy because when I was in my early 20s went through a very difficult period where I was pretty unhappy and my sister at the time lived in New Mexico and she told me about a therapist in New Mexico who she thought was extraordinary and I'd been to therapist but I didn't find them very helpful so I flew out to New Mexico and I spent a week with this man who would work with people by spending half a day with you so two three four hours and there was no constraint around time um you paid him what you could afford for to pay him so it had a very unique quality to it uh he lived in a little town in in New Mexico called imdo his home was right on the grand uh on the Rio Grand River oh so it was this wonderful setting and I would drive about an hour to get there and then I'd spend a half a day with him and at the end of the week I ju first of all the therapy was incredibly helpful and second of all I had a vision of the kind of life I wanted to live I I wanted to do what he was doing because I just thought a it was incredibly helpful and B I just loved the example that he shared with me of a way to live life and and make a living and do what I would call good work right oh my goodness that's so powerful and that not only something could be so useful and beneficial to you but also broaden your horizons of what you can do for others too that is really really neat so you said what you would call good work so I'm going to follow up on that and ask you how how do you define good work I think good work is a matter of finding what we do in the world that aligns with our natural gifts and allows us to be very congruent I believe that when people are congruent as they go through their lives it Fosters a kind of Health and ease and in ability to relax even while striving that is missing in our culture that that too often I see people who are striving towards something but it doesn't necessarily fit with either the gifts they have or the values that they hold dear absolutely I love what you just said about relax even while striving and I find that so important just personally that when you kind of click in to what aligns or you know feels right inner Compass whatever word you want to use that ease does come and the work even though you're working hard makes sense you kind of Click into that flow and it just feels right so that is very profound and I think that this actually serves as a really good segue into your beautiful book because there was a portion where you were talking about I'm going to have to pull up my notes here but it really made me think about how in our society we have this culture of go go go of grind of you have to work hard in order to achieve that you must kind of cut your teeth and like pound the pavement that there's this Pride that comes with pain or with suffering to get where you want to go um and one thing about your book which for our audience listeners is called the power of awe I'm going to raise it up to the dust jacket I never read books with dust jackets but this is the cover for anyone who wants to see a very beautiful book Jake co-wrote this with Michael amster and in the book discussing awe you talk about how practicing awe is is a reset for people's nervous systems for people's emotional bodies for your mental body why do you think that reset is so powerful and this is going to be a slightly leading question but it made me think a little bit about how our society and the way we value hard work kind of pushes us to be in fight ORF flight for a lot of the time and one kind of of insight that I got while reading this was actually stepping back into rest and digest into awe into waiting and expanding um while may seem counterintuitive to what we're socialized to think of as good work um actually helps a lot of us do better work that was a bunch but I would love to hear your a bunch um so let me let me go back and break some of that down so book is the power of awe and we have taken the word a a w and turned it into an acronym and created a method it's called the awe method or the a we method and let me just briefly tell the listeners what that is so this is a method to access an emotional state this state is one of awe a lot of people don't even know that awe is an emotion and honestly I didn't even think about it until four or five years ago I thought about Joy I thought about gratitude and love but I didn't think about awe until my co-author Michael amster and I did this research at the University of California and Berkeley and we had developed the method before we did the research the research was to try and prove how effective it would be and it turned out to be extremely effective so the method is that we use the a to place our attention on something that we value appreciate or find to be amazing and that can be something in our environment or it could be something in our mind like a thought or a memory the W stands for weight and that's where we pause just very briefly this whole thing by the way takes say 20 seconds so we pause very briefly and we give additional attention to whatever it is that's that's the source of our awe and oftentimes during the waight it helps if we have a slight adjustment in our posture and I'll tell you why later and and then the E awe the E stands for exhale and we ask people to do a slightly longer than normal exhalation and then this feeling and this experience of expansion occurs and it can be subtle or it can be really intense and and significant and that is the practice it it takes typically as I say anywhere from 10 to 20 seconds it's essentially a breath cycle so on the inhale we're placing our attention on something that's the source of all at the top of our breath we're having a slight pause and then we're exhaling a little longer than normal and each one of these steps does something physiologically that moves us from what we're typically in which is a it's not necessarily fight or flight it may not be that dramatic but it is an activation of What's called the sympathetic nervous system where we're on okay we we may not be in fight ORF flight but we're on we're energized we're we're we're very um attentive to what's going on around us and usually busy and preoccupied when we go into the state of awe it shifts our nervous system to what's called parasympathetic which is the relaxed state but it's not the kind of relaxed state that you would enter if you were to do meditation when you meditate you go deeply into a parasympathetic state of relaxation rest and repair or rest and digest the emotion of is a very unique place in our nervous system where it's predominantly parasympathetic so primarily we're relaxed but it has a little dose of energy to it a little dose of the sympathetic nervous system so the best way I've heard it described is that it's similar to being in a playful State when we're in a playful State that's the same place that our nervous system is when we access off

we're relaxed but joyful right with a little bit of energy laughing smiling whatever and when we did the research what we discovered is if that if people did this practice three times a day and remember it only takes 15 seconds we saw significant decreases in depression anxiety physical symptoms of pain loneliness and we saw increases in well-being and mindfulness and what's what's astounding is that you know those things are not unusual if somebody does a rigorous meditation practice over weeks you see these kind of changes you see changes in the brain structure but what we determined was that this could happen while only spending about a minute a day doing this very simple practice and that was extremely um unpredictable I mean if you had asked me I never would have said we'd get those kinds of results right but but we did and by the way we did this at a very stressful time we did it at the height of the pandemic and we were working with 200 um Frontline Health Care Providers and 300 patients wow so they were all people that were quite stressed out yeah that is it is just so fascinating to me so in the book you do discuss these kind of comparisons between meditation and the a or awe practice and it does feel like a little snippet or almost

like frame grab of meditation but in a very different way in the sense that it almost feels like you're activating another part of your brain kind of like you're talking about it's not just um sympathetic nervous system it still has that dose of the the parasympathetic I may have reversed those please correct me if I'm wrong um right predominantly parasympathetic with a little bit of sympath sympathetic okay beautiful as someone who has practiced meditation for a while and then of course started reading this started trying practicing awe and feeling similar effects to a regular meditation practice but with the amount of time just really cut down but it's still feeling different cuz you're not going into like a deep trance state or having like a very I don't know like more trippy experience that sometimes people have in deep meditation but you do experience those um positive effects that I think a Western View on meditation tends to frame it as like good for your mental health good for your body why do you think it is that this practice specifically can tap into that same thing in such a short period of time well let me describe three different levels of consciousness that we have identified and we call them safety hard and spacious so safety Consciousness is where we live almost all the time 90 plus percent of the time we're very focused on getting things done taking care of ourselves taking care of our loved ones and it's very much about creating a sense of safety in our lives we may not think of it that way but that's pretty much what our culture drives us to do earn enough money that you'll be okay put money away for retirement um you know help your children Advance all of this is a very doer oriented way of going through life nothing wrong with it and it's worth getting really good at it the next level is called heart Consciousness and that's when we access a state of gratitude and appreciation and I imagine your listeners are familiar with it it's been quite popular the last many years people have gratitude journals there's a group called heart maath that has created a wonderful model and tools to help people access heart Consciousness it's very easy to do we do it naturally anytime that we think of people that we're grateful to have in our lives or we're appreciative of something that someone does for us we go into heart Consciousness now spacious Consciousness is the next level and that is a state that people have been working to experience for long long time and usually it's through some kind of contemplative practice like meditation or chiung or even yoga variety of things right when when people access it they experience a kind of timelessness words drop away it's very difficult to describe and it it does have a kind of a trance quality to it but for the most part it has always been thought that to access that would take a lot of practice and Mastery at some contemplative practice right what Michael and I found and this was not something we ever planned on but we what we really found was essentially a shortcut to get into spacious Consciousness and the shortcut is this very very brief practice where we focus on something we value we have this pause and when we have the pause what's happening is what it's called the default mode Network regions of our brain that are very often very active it's where we have a lot of selft talk or inner dialogue that quiets down during the pause and then when we have the exhalation we activate something called the vagus nerve which puts us into a deeper parasympathetic relaxed State it's the combination it's the sequence that moves us so quickly into this contemplative spacious quality of Consciousness and and this is something I want to talk more with you about because this to me is one of the most significant ways that we alter meaning and I I know that that that's at the heart of much of what you do is is think about how people make meaning and it's one of my areas of passion so if you can shift your level of Consciousness you will change your interpr a of any event or any interaction that you're having so if I'm if I'm in safety Consciousness and you and I are in a relationship and you come in and you say we need to have a talk if I'm in safety Consciousness I'm probably going to respond to that defensively right alarms start going off right uh oh what what happened what did I do what do we need to talk about is this going to be a problem so I go into a defensive posture which immediately limits the possibility ility for you and I to have a really productive conversation whereas if you had accessed and this is something I love about the awe method if you had used it proactively and you had accessed the state of awe before you initiated a conversation with me your presentation would feel very different and if you came in and you said we need to have a talk but you were in a state of spaciousness my nervous system wouldn't have the same reaction because your voice quality would be different your posture would be different and the tempo at which you speak would be different you may even use different words and what I would experience is that you're inviting me to connect with you right and the reason that's significant is that one of the things that happens awe is a pro-social emotion so when you're in awe hey I find you more attractive I'm going to want to move toward you and you're going to be more receptive to connect with me and so what happens is you're creating an environment in which connection becomes much more possible much easier and and much deeper as well right I love that um I want to follow up on the notion that before you engage in a conversation that may be confrontational not in a negative way but just in a addressing something way or maybe just hey I do want to talk about something from a state of awe you mentioned that your posture is different your voice your tonality maybe diction word choice can all change do you think that anything else happens to an individual who practices a that could change the way they're received or perceived from a a an energetic or I guess emotional metaphysical place where if I were to have just practiced awe and then went in to have that conversation yes those physical elements of posture voice sound would shift but also perhaps there's something else intangible happening too yeah I don't actually think we can separate them so as soon as there that physiologic shift it's also an energetic shift it's affecting us in a variety of ways it affects the energy field that's around us um I can't document that or tell you how that happens but I can tell you experientially it's very Vivid and I experience it myself and I see it with other people um one of the one of the most profound things is after somebody accesses a state of awe you can just you can detect the difference in their physiology it's absolutely clear as soon as someone does this and it's important to remember that you're not staying in the state of awe because remember that's kind of a wordless place where we don't really have a lot of access to thoughts right it's this place of expansiveness and and rest but when we come back from it even after being there for only 15 or 20 seconds we come back from it in a different physiologic and energetic [Music] state so I tend to agree with you that it is impossible to separate the physiological from the energetic and that when one shifts the other shifts it's like almost difficult to separate them into a dichotomy because they're so intertwined um and one thing that I really love about the book is also how you and Michael frame things from both a scientific and an emotional and a spiritual framework you kind of use all of these different thought processes to talk about the same thing um with slightly different language but all getting at that same heart um I do think that there are some I don't want to necessarily say Skeptics because that has a negative connotation but some individuals out there who wouldn't agree and would say well there really isn't an energetic shift it is just you know if you step into a place of awe you're going to feel better your brain chemicals shift you're in a different state and so just the way you approach that person is different and it's 100% physical physiological what would you say to someone like that cuz again I agree with you that experientially you can just feel that difference for yourself if you're practicing or engaging with someone else that's practicing and you kind of Click into that energetic um exchange but for someone who may only rely on a physical or physiological mindset what what's your response to that I'd say that's fine that's fine just look at it from a physical point of view I'm in a group Michael and I are both in a group with about 45 doctors and researchers and most of them aren't going to be comfortable probably talking about energetics and things that aren't completely easy to study objectively although that being said there are there are ways where we are able to measure energetic Fields certain kinds of Photography um we can measure skin resistance we can measure um heart rate variability and these things are actually examples of energy but if somebody's not comfortable thinking of it that way I wouldn't make uh an issue of it I would just say if you want to think of it as physiological that's fine listen to the quality and the change of the voice of the person after they access the emotion of awe notice the rate at which they speak changes they will always come out of a state of speaking more slowly and deliberately now if we want to just say that that's physical that's fine the point is that something changed and that change has a distinct impact on the person who's experiencing it and the people around that person right well and I do think that that's really powerful too that it's that's okay you don't have to approach this from a spirit spiritual or metaphysical framework at all you can still appreciate the science behind hey it works you know it is actively changing the way we engage and and on that the piece of how people engage one thing you said earlier that I want to round back to is that awe is a pro-social emotion and I have been in cognitive behavioral therapy since I was 12 years old I want to say um my mom is a certified therapist so the framework around pro-social behavior is very much one that I was raised with one that I've engaged with a lot um in terms of awe being pro-social I think when I conceptualize of awe I think of this as a very internal experience that it's something that I am stepping into Within Myself appreciating other things where does that shift come in to make it also about connecting with the external it it comes in because our sense of self some people call it the egoic self becomes smaller when we access the emotion of awe so imagine yourself going into the emotion of awe and connecting with a Timeless vast expansive place and what happens to you as you connect and your sense of self your sense of the world expands expands expands in relationship to that self becomes slightly smaller I become less attached to how I think of myself or what you think of me my my identity becomes more porous and as that happens I'm also more available to to connect with people I'm no longer in a defended posture I'm therefore also no longer as reactive as I was before I accessed the emotional state of awe right absolutely that really is powerful so to connect that back to this broader conversation of making meaning now that we have kind of the basics of A and the awe method down um and really the motivation behind it and how it can really help us connect earlier you mentioned that stepping into that expansive space of Consciousness really impacts the way that human beings make meaning expand on that for me how do you view that as changing our perspective of meaning making so I think there are two primary things that influence the way we make meaning the first one is our state of consciousness and you can just think of that as your state of mind mind so if you go to a doctor's appointment and you're waiting to get results from a test and you're nervous and worried about that you are in a particular state of mind or State of Consciousness probably somewhat anxious probably more reactive than you would be if you were in a completely relaxing situation so it's a different state of mind and because of that you will perceive and interpret anything happens differently than if you were in a highly relaxed state so somebody bumps into you while you're sitting there your response is going to be very different than if somebody bumped into you while you were sitting on the couch watching a movie that you love right right so our state of mind State of Consciousness affects the way we make meaning and everybody I think more or less knows that but what people don't know is well what do I do about it and that's why we've created this map saying there are these three fundamental States Of Consciousness safety heart and spaciousness and you can more or less you can choose which one you want to be in based on what you think is best and appropriate in the circumstances you find yourself in so this is very empowering for people because if you feel that you're anxious tense overly reactive and you say what state of consciousness am I in you're probably going to find you're in safety so you say well can I take a minute to shift into hard Consciousness by thinking of the things in life that I'm grateful for and that can be as basic as the fact that I'm alive even if I'm having to face difficult circumstances I'm alive I'm here I have the capacity to do something about this or it can be things that are much easier to connect to like the people people we love or the animals that we have that are so dear to us those bring us into a state of heart Consciousness and then what you and I've been talking about is using the awe method to take ourselves into even a higher level of Consciousness so all of this to me is one of the primary ways that influence how we make meaning the other one that I'm so passionate about is language it's the way we use language and I'm going to suggest to you that the way we use language is actually a mismatch for much of what it is that we're trying to do and trying to accomplish and even in the therapeutic environment we use language that is predominantly noun centered we use language that makes things seem static and objective when they're not everything is really subjective and everything is in motion including the self so we talk about oursel as if we're a fixed static entity but we're not we're continuously evolving and changing and moving and it's interesting that you know you said your mom's a therapist and you've been exposed to cognitive therapy and the intention in cognitive therapy I believe is all to help people in going in the right direction but the language that's used even in cognitive therapy tends to make make people think of themselves as static and see themselves often as stuck and I I can give you some examples but I I don't want to keep going on I want to give you a chance to right engage no absolutely I think that is so fascinating and I feel like that's my response to everything you're saying um but it's my honest reaction um I think that those two prongs that you bring up for making meaning this one our state of mind it is just so important with your gut reaction or your intuition of like the story that you're making up about what's happening right because that is how we make meaning as humans it's the story that we tell ourselves that our brain is either interpreting or creating as we take in sensory information and then make a judgment call on what actually is happening it's like that is just even being aware of that process happen happening I think absolutely changes the way that the process does happen I'm also fascinated with language so I love that you brought that up my masters is actually in English and writing um and to talk more specifically about cognitive behavioral therapy a big thing that I have been thinking about lately is the way that therapeutic language is

becoming for lack of a better term weaponized in our culture because therapy is becoming mental health and therapy is becoming less stigmatized more people are in it and now I I mean I don't know how much you've been exposed to this but especially on the internet and even amongst my peers and cohorts it's oh well they're a narcissist oh well this is actually a boundary and it's like okay these are supposed to be terms that help us us lend insight into making meaning into how we make meaning in a way that is healthy for us and society and the world in that pro-social way but those tools are now being used in a very non prosocial way that actually pushes people away and like you said it gets you stagnant into this state of this is who I am this is where I'm going to be and I think also in I'm correct I'm right in that way as opposed to how do we engage and learn and make meaning together right so yeah I'll throw that out there if you have any thoughts um let's use a simple example uh if I say to you I'm sad that's me defining myself in this stuck static place I am sad I am depressed that's noun centered if we change that to what's called verb centered language and I I'll say more about this as we go along I would say something to you like either I'm I sadden myself or I'm making myself sad and what I've just done is I've turned it from being a static expression into motion I am doing this to myself I am making myself sad and when I say making myself take take away any idea of blame I don't mean that sure I just say I am making myself sad and if I'm making myself sad then I can also make myself other things I can make myself unsad I can make myself happy um so when I hear people talk about how they feel they often do it in a way where they end up feeling stuck the next level of that that's even more complicated is if I say you make me sad because now I'm holding you responsible for my emotional state you make me sad we do this all the time Reese I mean when you listen to people have arguments they're constantly blaming the other person for their emotional state and they talk about it as if it's an objective reality it's actually not at all it's nothing more than a subjective interpretation of what's going on but because of the way we use language it sounds as if it's almost a fact yeah and then I'll go ahead and I'll justify it I'll say well you make me sad because you said you were going to come home last night and you didn't come home and I worried all night long so now I'm justifying what you did to me but the reality is don't know what happened I don't know why you didn't come home I don't know what was going on I have no understanding of it and so however I make myself feel is entirely my doing I then find out that actually you know you were in a car accident something difficult happened you lost your phone you couldn't contact me and all of a sudden I shift into a state of empathy and I go oh my God I had no idea I feel so terrible I feel so terrible that I was blaming you for me when you were suffering you were having a hard time so all that happens in that situation is that my interpretation my meaning of the situation changed because meaning is subjective but the way we use language we act as if things do mean one thing and that they mean that one thing for everybody and and that's absolutely not the case I totally agree and that meaning is absolutely so subjective and a personal Journey like you said it's the way I'm projecting my experience of something as a reality and it's like that may be your reality in this moment but someone else says something and boom your reality changes because of context because of information and it's so fluid and honoring the contradiction within making meaning that we are actively doing it right but that also in doing that it is also undone I think is really powerful um on language because I think this so fascinating another thing that I think about a lot um from my studies in English but also in like poetry and writing which you include some really beautiful poems and epigraphs and quotes throughout the book as well that I think really support the the feeling that a reader gets in the book um but I I've studied a lot of um literature from non-english authors or authors or writers who write not in English and so there's always this question of translation right how can we truly understand someone who's not speaking in our direct language well I think what you just said as a perfect example of we're always translating even if we're using even you and I right now we're both using English but we are still translating what the other one is saying through our world viw and perspective and lens of what that means that's right right exactly right we're always translating and so is for example I have something I want to say to you and I'm very aware that if I say it there's a possibility and please notice the way I'm saying this is a possibility you'll offend yourself versus is saying there's a possibility I'll offend you I I don't believe that I'll offend you because my intention is good but you may offend yourself and there's a huge difference there so because I know that I'm very mindful of how I will say what I say to people right so I love that you've taken this there's a possibility that you will offend yourself that this is not a you know people do things accidentally all the time you can't live your life walking on eggshells thinking that something's going to happen but you still at the end of that sentence take on but that's why I'm careful about what I say because I don't want to be someone who has someone else offend themsel around I suppose so I think oftentimes there's this at least for me contradiction in I know that I'm responsible for my own feelings and yet when I'm interacting with someone else I don't want to make them feel a certain way but I know that they're still responsible for that feeling where do you feel responsibility comes into this equation well two pieces I feel responsible to use language in a way that makes it less likely for you to misconstrue my intention doesn't mean that you won't but it makes it far less likely and I'll give you an example in a couple minutes um there's another part of that let see if I can bring it back um oh when I interact with people the lower their level of maturity the more responsibility I have to take so I try in terms of personal Intimate Relationships I pretty much limit them to dealing with people who are very mature and so if I say something and they offend themselves they will say to me Hey Jake I don't like the way you said that and then I can immediately address it we can we can work our way through it instantly almost right if the person's not terribly mature and they won't even tell me that they feel hurt or offended that's where it's much more difficult and now I have to take a lot more responsibility I have to try to imagine that I really know what that other person is feeling because they may not tell me and so I think it has to do a little bit with with the level of maturity of the people we interact with the the less mature the more responsibility we have to take um so let me come to my example of what I want to say to you which is um and I'll say it in a way where you don't have to respond unless you want to so what I'm struck by is watching you I have no idea how old you are but you seem quite young to me I I don't know um and yet I'm completely uh I impress myself with your presence your interest your knowledge of what we're talking about now you could offend Yourself by feeling that I'm calling you out as being very young you know like well just because I'm young doesn't mean I don't know stuff right right right you could go there and so that's why I'm being deliberate I'm not I'm not telling you that you are anything I'm not saying you are uh amazing for your age I'm not saying that I'm just saying my perception of you is that you seem like a a young person you seem younger than my daughters and far more um aware introspective I hope they don't listen to

this and so I just am really having a good time uh talking with you and watching you and I wanted to share that thank you so much that I have that is so kind and I thank you for that and I have not offended myself I have humbled and stepped into gratitude myself I'm still actively learning this language from you in this moment um because I think that that is truly so helpful um and I I absolutely hear what you're saying and using that example of you know it it really could be so easy to offend myself in a less awesome state in the true like root of the word being awe um to say oh well only because I'm young is it impressive or only because I'm such and such but it's no the heart of that is kindness and graciousness so thank you that really does mean so much to me um but so h i I am curious though uh how you got to be this way this is not a typical conversation that I have I would say with anybody and it's certainly not a typical conversation I have with what I would consider to be younger people so I'm I'm just really curious absolutely I don't know you want to answer that but absolutely I I love these conversations remaining open and following those Curiosities so um just to share I am 24 um to give some context there um and I guess I'll kind of mirror what you shared at the beginning that you felt this purpose since before you were 10 for me it's just I don't remember that a time it wasn't a part of who I was to want to live life as my best self and help others do the same live life as their best selves um growing up I dealt with with some mental health um struggles and therapy Psychotherapy cognitive behavioral therapy all were a really big part of learning for me um but growing up in Texas growing up in the Bible Belt there was also this mirrored image of the spiritual journey with all of this too and trying to find the bridge between science and spirit and where I kind of fell in that just drove me to be deeply curious about why people do the things they do why they say things the way they say them and how can we better show up kindly empathically and help others do the same and be a conduit for that growth so that that's a little vague about how I came to be that way but certainly through my own struggles and strife with some things and then falling into philosophy um in high school and exploring some Buddhism and stuff there so College was just an expansion of that for me you're suggesting that some struggles and strife are part of what contributed to you becoming the way you are but I would say so many people have struggle and strife and they don't manifest that the way you are at your age so there's something and this is coming back to our conversation there's something about the way you made meaning of the struggle and of The Strife that is atypical I I don't know what it was and you and I may not choose to figure that out but it's a great example of how people make meaning so there's something somewhere along the line that allowed you to make meaning of challenging circumstances in a way that was empowering um somehow opened your mind instead of closed your mind for example you have a masters in English yes right yes and I'm asking you to change your language in our conversation in ways that go against everything we learn when we learn English particularly at the Master's level when some people see the way I write personal writings and I say things things like I saddened and disappointed myself you know they go you you can't say that you can't do that you know it's not technically correct but my point is you've adapted to it in the course of less than an hour you're willing to try to language yourself in a new way which also is unusual it's very unusual um anyways I I I Delight myself and refresh myself uh talking with you and you'll notice that I don't say either I am delighted or I feel refreshed because those are static I say I Delight myself and refresh myself and I'm doing that and you're the source but you're not doing it to me you're not making me feel that way I'm doing that as a result of our interaction and so I find it very um Del just uh wonderful well I wonder and Fascinate myself with this conversation and even in communicating this way I I want to draw attention to how it takes on this feeling of personal like onus of one our own feelings but also the way that we react to other people without taking away from what other people can offer us right in that I I don't know how you would maybe frame this but throughout the conversation I have learned myself but much of what you have said like you have been the source of that education and learnship so it doesn't remove any of that as a spark for something starting within someone else and yet we still are able to take ownership of your part to play in that which I think is really powerful in one positive interaction so that you know it's not inflating your ego or adding to a lack of humility but also in those negative interactions it's not it's much easier to separate yourself from someone else's negative experience absolutely I don't take it personally it it's the flip side on the one hand if you criticize me I'm less likely to take it personally because I'm going to hear you telling me about you if you say to me you know this has really been kind of you know I've really bored myself with this conversation I would hear you saying that that's what you are doing I wouldn't hear you accusing me of being boring right and that's the translation I make in my mind I've been using this language for over 20 years and it's a natural translation for me the other thing is that it also creates more personal agency so that I own my interpretations I own my perceptions I even own my projections what what I how I see you the way I would talk about it is it's how I see you in my mind it's not really you yeah it's just what I'm doing with you in my mind and if I'm doing wonderful things with you in my mind and I'm creating healthy and respectful pictures and images then that's going to lead to a really healthy relationship right if I'm doing something with you in my mind that's negative either toward you being very judgmental about you or making myself feel bad then that's really going to be a complicated relationship absolutely the more overt we can make this the better right absolutely the more overt and like explicit almost that it's right explicit and to make it explicit I'm suggesting we need to use what I call verb centered language instead of noun centered and let me just give you a couple examples so um at the time of Buddha language was called poly p a l i and poly was a verb centered language so if the buddo were talking about becoming enlightened he actually wouldn't do that he would talk about enlightening yourself Enlightenment is not a place you get to it's not a destination and you're done it's an active process an active process of putting out delusions of greed and insecurity and fear but it's an active process we are enlightening ourselves Moment by moment hopefully right right and yeah and and then interestingly before Buddhism the Hopi also use the Hope a Native American tribe in the southwest theirs also is a verb centered language and hopes don't have any kind of um physical structures that are indicative of uh of defense or war in other words they don't build forts they are a peaceful tribe that emphasizes Harmony and I don't think that it's coincidental that Hopi has this emphasis on Harmony Buddhism promotes a certain kind of Harmony and their languages are verb centered now we talk about creating Harmony we talk about living in cooperation but we're using a language that's in congruent with that message so it's really confusing well and it's also interesting to think of how Buddhism for example has traveled to the west and become very popularized as a thing to experiment with or introduce and we're not speaking poly and in English it becomes reaching Enlightenment as though it is a stage that you hit and you can never fall out of it whereas there have been scattered moments throughout my life practicing meditation laughing joyfully with my loved ones where you feel that you are enlightening yourself and then in other moments you know you you have to pay taxes and you may not feel as you are enlightening yourself but it is this process of enlightening perhaps as much as you can in any given moment and that feels even more doable en reachable as though there is not a metric that you must hit and for perhaps the beginner more doable and more reachable but also reminding the very well practiced that this journey this process process is never over we are constantly evolving and enlightening continuously yes yes that is so powerful one thing that I do want to shift um because a lot of what we have discussed with um language and social relationships has been about you know prosocial relationships connecting with the other or the self do you how would you characterize that as connecting with perhaps a higher power is there this secondary layer or level um where this practice of a or a we e um enhances that experience as well there is and I I'll answer that um just to wrap up when talking about poly and H Hopey I just want to introduce that my wife Hannah and I were introduced to a couple John and Joyce Weir in the late 9s and they had taken this idea of a verb centered language and created one in English and it's called percept or perception language and that's what my wife and I have been teaching for 20 years when we do our workshops so the reason I say that is because I don't want people to feel this is some obscure thing and oh it's an interesting idea but how would I ever do it there actually is a way there are or five steps One is using more verbs than noun nouns another one is talking about is is using language primarily in the present tense so if we talk about what's happening now in this moment there's so much more opportunity to create change and Reconciliation than if you and I argue about what one of us did a month ago which is extremely unproductive right so um I don't know if you create show notes or things like that but we could we could maybe share with people a little bit about where they can learn about percept absolutely abolutely I will 100% include that in the show notes and I'll also add for our listeners that percept is referenced in the book The Power of awe is well and the couple of the Weir are referenced in there so another great starting point for that is the power of all I've forgotten that yeah um okay now to your question about connection and this is to me the most interesting thing about accessing a state of awe creates an experience of connection in dependent of other people it doesn't have anything to do with other people it is a connection to something greater than ourselves we can call that God we can call it the universe we can call it nature everybody has different ways of describing it but this is why people who were in our study and there's one example I think in the book of a man who was isolated in the hospital for four weeks getting I believe blood transfusions because he had a severe form of cancer had to be isolated he took our course while he was in the hospital and through zoom and he practiced awe and said over the course of the month he felt deeply connected but he couldn't interact with anyone so his connection was clearly Beyond connecting with other people it was just something greater than himself and he found tremendous Solace and comfort in that absolutely that is the the piece of this that fascinates me as well is the bridge between connection because connecting with other people is so important and you know adds this color to life but and I absolutely agree with you kind of goes back to language that it's like we can call it God we can call it the universe we can call it whatever you want to use science um but I do think that most of us have this sense of something bigger and awe I think maybe more specifically than any other emotion really gets at the heart of that very powerfully while still reminding us that our feet are on the ground right it it does a really beautiful job of balancing these two things um when you and Michael were first studying awe was that intentionally crafted at all into the choice of choosing awe in that it does help with this more day-to-day tangible relationship as well as this more metaphysical broader spiritual relationship or was that just kind of it wasn't crafted at all I mean most of this is is something we really stumbled on we really didn't have any preconception about the emotion of awe we didn't even know that awe is what people were experiencing until we started to deconstruct after we did some pilot projects and we read people's reports and their and their uh summation of their experience we kept hearing this theme and I was at the time I was reading a book by Michael pollen about how to change the brain based on psychedelics and I I kept seeing this connection that the psychedelics were giving people experiences of awe but our people using this simple method were describing what was happening in the same way but there was no psychedelics involved but they were talking about awe and that's how we realized this is awe this is the emotion of awe and then we went and found the people who were the leading researchers on awe and that's how everything kind of developed in terms of us doing a study but we didn't know any of this when we when we started this was all very organic I think that's really fascinating and one thing that I would be remiss if I didn't bring up um because another researcher who I really love Dr ber Brown I'm sure you've heard her name um she recently her most recent book is um atlas of the heart and any of my regular listeners will know it well um but in atlas of the heart she names 87 human emotions as the core emotions that we experience and awe is one of them and she discusses this kind of profound feeling and I pulled a quote that awe leads people to cooperate share resources and sacrifice for others it allows us to fully appreciate the values of others and then see ourselves accurately and evoke humility and just in reading the power of awe it I was I stunned myself with how beautifully your work and this section of berne's work um or a section of your work and a section of berne's work aligned in this way of connection so I'll just throw that out there if that um evokes anything for you yeah it's nice to hear and I appreciate her work um the only thing I would challenge is where she says it allows us to see ourselves accurately I would change that word accurately because accurately implies eyes there may be a right or a wrong and so I would say that awe allows us to see ourselves um more more vividly more clearly more holistically um but I would take away anything that suggests uh anything that suggests the idea of a right or wrong accurate inaccurate um absolutely I I'm careful about opposites people often will talk about being authentic or inauthentic and I really don't think those are constructive label and those are also noun based they um we we put labels on things categorize them and act as if that describes a person but it it takes away all of the movement and the um the dynamism that is part of being human right and it is interesting how this noun bbased language tends to get us into dichotomies whereas Even in our conversation attempting to shift into a verb based language it feels like it gets us more into multiplicities and absolutely expansiveness which I I do think is helpful okay I want to be respectful of your time so good I'm having a good time I I realize you may have too long a show or you may need to cut it into two parts um whatever you need to do is fine this is you said something that made me want to make one more comment oh please please I can pull it back

um oh I know what it was you talked about language putting things into categories that make them dualistic and that's absolutely right from my point of view and what happens when we trigger dualistic thinking and the easy way to think about that is labeling things as good bad right or wrong that's dualistic or binary when we do that we trigger the Primitive Center of the brain so the Primitive centers of our brain which is where the fight flight freeze mechanism is responds to things that are perceived as threatening to our well-being threatening to our life so if a tiger jumps out of the bushes I go bad danger run I don't think about it I just label it and that's how the Primitive part of the brain works which is by the way why it's so incredibly fast it doesn't think the modern part of brain the neocortex doesn't do that it it has the capacity to make distinctions and to contextualize and to think about where am I and what's going on and what are the choices I have and that allows for many more choices the problem is we use language that stimulates the Primitive part of the brain which puts us into defense and reactive mode and and this is another problem with the noun based languages uh we threaten one another or we threaten ourselves unnecessarily because most of the challenges that we experience in our culture are not challenges to our physical well-being their challenges to my identity it's a challenge to who I think I am if you if you say something suggesting that I'm dumb I'm going to react to that because I'm attached to my identity of being a smart person and so I'm going to feel my identity is challenged if that same thing were expressed in a verb centered way I wouldn't hear you telling me about me I would hear you telling me about yourself and that maybe the way I talk you make it hard for yourself to understand me oh well that's very different that's very different that means that I'm not communicating as well as maybe I need to or would like to but I just want to point out that this the way we use language stimulates different parts of the brain and what we're doing in our culture now as you said earlier weaponizing a variety of things is we're we're triggering the Primitive part of our brain completely inappropriately unnecessarily and way too often because we are fundamentally safe most of us are very safe 99% of the time right right yeah 99% of the time nothing is threatening our physical well-being right in the maso's hierarchy of needs most of us um are lucky enough to have that bottom yes section met and that feeling that threatened state that maybe puts you back into the Primitive part of your brain is feels unproductive to me so that's that's very helpful in kind of contextualizing all of this so towards the end of my episodes I always like to create a little bit of space if there's anything that in light of our conversation um that we touched on that you want to make sure you clarify something dig deeper into or something that we did not touch on that you think would be helpful beneficial that you want to make sure you throw out there this is space for you to do say any of that yeah there's something I want to do um so I just created a new course it's called transformative tales and it's a series of very short uh booklets that are easy to read and then there's a series of also very short audio recordings that follow up and it's a way of um micro dosing is what we call it micro ing on our personal development so a little bit at a time over time so I love this course and I loved this conversation with you and if you think you wouldd like to do it I'd like to gift one to you oh thank you so much that is quite kind and I deeply appreciate that um I would love that and okay so when we're done send me your address and I'll put one in the mail to you thank you I would love that and I will put um information in the show notes for any listeners that want to check out transformative Tales um that they can explore that as well good good absolutely so um I just want to encourage you to do um to follow whatever it is you're doing because you seem just uh so well suited for this I I don't know you know I don't know you historically I don't know most of your conversations I listen to maybe a little short thing before I came on today um but I just I've just thoroughly enjoyed this and I feel like you're

doing I don't want to say what you were meant to do but um it seems very congruent to go back to where we started about what makes our work feel energizing and meaningful to us and I don't know what it feels like to you but from this side watching you and engaging with you I've done at least 50 podcasts this year and none of them have been this much fun so wow that is quite High Praise and I appreciate myself I yeah good yes so and and by the way some of them were with really you know I did with Dan Harris which is 10% happier and we did uh New Dimensions radio but you bring some you bring a freshness to this from my experience that's not not typical it's it's unusual and uh really fun valuable for I elate myself with that good thank you thank you very final thing that I always like to use to close out our episode which is actually quite fascinating in light of some of the things we've discussed so I might have to rethink this question now a little bit um but I always like to end on what is one word word that describes your state right

now the first word that came to mind was Envy um but I think of Envy in a positive sense not not like jealousy but I'm very envious of you at your age doing what you're doing um I I I didn't really find my path until I was um in my mid-30s and I see you at your age and I go this is great I wish I were doing that so yeah that's that's my state currently well I truly cannot thank you enough for your kind words your expertise your time your energy this has been wonderful and I excite myself with this episode going out to people to learn from you so thank you so much and I will certainly be in touch great and if there's ever a followup if people I don't know if people have questions or if you ever see an opportunity but if you want to take it further I'm available to do that absolutely that sounds wonderful you have a great rest of your day Jake thank you so much bye ree bye