In Conversation

Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods. To the podcast where we still believe that another world is possible, and if we all work together, there is still time to lay the foundations for that future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I’m Manda Scott, your host and very much your fellow traveller in this journey into possibility. And the first thing to say is a huge thank you to all of you who have made contact in whatever way you have, to express where you are in the world at this moment and what the podcast means to you. I am enormously grateful and completely aware that we are all struggling with the realities of the world that is not as we wanted it to be. We are on the brink of cataclysmic change. We know this. And knowing this, we have choices. We can either fall into the despair and the terror and the rage and whatever else rises up in us as we watch the whole biosphere hurtle towards irrevocable tipping points. Or we can become the change we need to see in the world, each of us. And yes, this is a cliche by now, but that doesn’t stop it being true. And here are a few others: we are the people we have been waiting for; and if not us now, then who and when? We have been saying this for a long time. And if you’re listening to this podcast, then you’re already on board, at least intellectually.Manda: You know there is no going back. That ideology and a desperate need for control is never going to win out over biophysical reality. But you also know that avoiding ecosystem collapse doesn’t just mean moving to regenerative farming, or buying second hand clothes, or even changing all the narratives of all the world’s media systems. Wonderful though each of these things would be in their own right. Still, there has been a gap between what we know and how we behave, between where our better selves, our heart minds might push us, and the behaviours that are locked into the core of our being; that are written into our firmware, if you like. But now, this minute now, we are hitting the buffers where the old paradigm is so obviously not fit for purpose that we can see the absolute urgent need for something new.

Manda: After Dr John Izzo of the Elders Action Network reminded us of our purpose on the earth, and Andrea Hiott of Waymaking helped us to embrace paradox, this week we are talking to someone who can help guide us into the embodied reality of a different way of being. Who can give us actual practical guidance of things that we can do every day in order that we can be and become whatever it is that the web of life needs us to be and become, in order that emergence into a new system can actually happen. As you are about to hear, Dan McTiernon is a certified transpersonal psychology coach, embodied meditation teacher and breathwork instructor. He’s also host of the Being Earthbound podcast, which is absolutely on my essential listening list. With his wife, Joanna, he’s the co-founder of the embodied coaching organisation Earthbound and a project leader for the Embodied Permaculture Project, which started out as an international two year action research project. But the first nine weeks of this program are about to be released as a self-study course, and by the time this podcast ends, I really believe you will want to join up with that. I will put a link in the show notes as soon as I have one, hopefully before this goes live. There is another really exciting project, at least for those of us involved in farming and growing in the UK, which is called Calmer Farmer. And I have recorded that three times to get it right, it’s far harder to say than it looks on the screen. You’re going to hear about all of these, but the thing I want you really to focus on, the thing that I think is key to who we are and where we’re going, is that we need to let go of the idea that we can think our way out of where we are at the moment. That we can really plan towards the midterms in the US or the elections to the Scottish Parliament in 2026, or the elections for the Brazilian parliament also in 2026. Or we can somehow create the narratives that are going to work that will  make everybody realise that we’re heading in the wrong direction.

Manda: And yes, I am still writing thrutopian novels and yes, I still think this is really important because we need to lay the framework. But we need to start being the change. We need to change who we are in and of ourselves. We need to come into our physical bodies, find that truly calming place of peace, and then find what we can trust within ourselves. The sensations that we can truly believe in that are the signals of connection to the outer world and to our inner selves. This is what we do in Accidental Gods, this is what we do in dreaming awake, this is what the podcast is about. But Dan is the first person I’ve had on in nearly five years that has a really clear, succinct guidelines for stepping forward into who and how we need to be. And it could not be more timely than this. So here we go. Pin your ears back, really embody this if you can. People of the podcast, please welcome Dan McTiernan of Earthbound.

Manda: Dan, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. How are you and where are you on this, over here it’s a slightly damp, Monday morning.

Dan: Yeah, it’s a very damp Monday Afternoon here. I’m in Southwest Finland on a very small piece of land in a very small wooden house, where I live with my Finnish wife and two boys. And I’m good, thank you. Yeah. I’m happy to be here talking with you today. And I’ve been looking forward to this for a week or two, so it’s great to be here.

Manda: Thank you. And is it normal for it to be damp in Finland by the end of November? I had a Finnish girlfriend for a while, and as I remember she told me they had three seasons and that was July, August and winter, although there were mud seasons in between. And winter seemed to last quite a long time, and I’m thinking that it should be snowing with you. It should be quite cold.

Dan: Yeah, and it was snowing a week ago. We had a massive blizzard and now it’s suddenly shifted 12 degrees above freezing and it’s going to rain about 50ml today, so a lot of rain.

Manda: And this is not normal.

Dan: No, I would say this isn’t normal. November is traditionally a kind of muddier month, but normally the ground would be pretty much frozen by now.

Manda: Right. And I remember the Finnish thing of you take your outside shoes off as you step in the front door. And if you take a step further, you’re going to be shot. So I’m guessing you’ve learned to take your shoes off as you come into the front door. And southwest Finland, so that’s quite a long way from Russia, But I am looking at geopolitics and thinking that Russia and America are now basically one big empire. And observing the fact that Alexander Dugin, for a long time, the guy who basically is the intellect, if we like to call it that, behind Putin. And he had a vision of a Russian empire that stretched from Dublin to Vladivostok. That was his exact words. And they were always going to be in conflict with the United States. He had a big vision of superpowers in conflict. But now the incoming president is basically a Russian asset, that means he’s got Dublin to Dublin and nothing in between. And I’m imagining that being in Finland, on the border of Russia that might be getting quite expansionist in its views, could be a bit scary. Because the whole thing of we all put on white and go up the trees and keep the Russians at bay, which is what happened the last time the Russians came, doesn’t work when you’ve got infrared sights on your rifles. Is this being spoken about at all in Finland, or is everybody just keeping their head down and ignoring it?

Dan: I think it was a much bigger topic of conversation publicly when the NATO thing came up. So Finland has recently joined NATO with Sweden, after having been nominally neutral since its founding. And even though it happened longer ago, we’re kind of in the satellite of Russia because Finland was a Russian state before it was given its independence during the Bolshevik Revolution. So it’s always been in the mind space of Russia. And we’ve got I think it’s 800 or 1000 kilometre border with Russia.

Manda: Yeah. It’s your biggest land border, isn’t it?

Dan: Yeah. I do think things have settled a little since the decision to join NATO. Whether that’s a false sense of security…

Manda: It kind of depends whether the US continues to be a member of NATO or not, doesn’t it?

Dan: Yeah, exactly. I don’t know, but it feels to me that Russia has more important things on its mind than Finland at the moment. So that’s not to say things might not change, but I think so much of its resources, etc. are going into Ukraine at the moment that I think it would struggle to do anything too dramatic against Finland at this moment. But I’ve got a 17 year old boy who’s turning 18 in spring, who has to do national military service.

Manda: Oh, really? Does that happen in Finland? I hadn’t realised that. Wow. For how long?

Dan: I think it’s a year. And it’s interesting listening to that generation because you know, I try my best to instil some of the kind of realities of war, but there are several generations beyond living memory of of war. And there’s a kind of bravado there.

Manda: Right. Because we play computer games and and it’s effortless. And it doesn’t matter if you get hit because you roll over and you get up again and you keep going.

Dan: And that frightens me, actually, more than anything. That there’s no real felt sense of the implications of war. Like you say, it’s a kind of televisual event or a gaming event.

Manda: And that has never happened before in modern human history. Always each generation has had its war and the memories of that and the horror of that. And so it’s not been something that we treat with quite such equanimity. Okay. Let’s move away from that because that’s quite scary enough. You do a lot of different things. Your stretch is permaculture of land and people, it seems to me, and I’m wondering which of those is most alive for you this November, given everything that’s happening around the world.

Dan: Thanks for asking. I guess I would say the inter relationality between those is what most captivates me these days. I’ve got a pretty long history of working within permaculture and ecological design. Coming up to something like 20 years or something now. And more recently, in the last several years, I’ve switched over to a much more people oriented focus. I’m a transpersonal coach by training, but I would say I kind of work within embodied presence mainly.

Manda: So before we go any further, unpack for us what a transpersonal coach is.

Dan: Yeah. So it’s not the kind of coach that you would go to if you would like to get a promotion or lose 20lbs. It’s not a goal oriented process, it’s much more within the healing arts, I would say. Much more at the therapeutic end of the coaching space. And transpersonal just means beyond the personal self.

Manda: It sounds quite spiritual in the ways that I’ve listened to it, but it may be just that they were spiritual people talking about it. Is it spiritual in your sense?

Dan: It’s spiritual in the sense that life is sacred. And really, my coaching is an invitation into a felt experience of being a part of the web of life.

Manda: Right. Very aligned to what we do on Accidental Gods. So what kinds of people are they? Not the people who want to lose weight or presumably also fix their relationship, or fix their job, or do the things that were all old paradigm. Are you getting people who are interested in shifting to a new paradigm, or people at the interface between the old and the new? Are those the people who might come to you?

Dan: Yeah. I guess because of my background in permaculture and this sort of activism space, I’m really finding that my niche is working with people who have come into some kind of change making role. But they’ve come into it normally, as we all do, from this Western industrial paradigm and its culture of trauma, as you describe so often on your podcast, and with all the conditioning and reactivity that comes with that.

Manda: And do they come knowing that that is the framing? Or do they come with all of the baggage of that, and they just know that there’s something else that they want to get to?

Dan: Normally they come to me because they’ve reached the kind of buffers of what they’re doing. So that tends to play out as either burning out, falling out, so relational issues, or dropping out of the change making work altogether. And that seems to be the symptomatic pattern of doing change work for a period of time, when you still feel yourself to be this separate, atomised, small self that isn’t connected to the wider world, to life itself. And therefore you’re acting from this very defensive, very controlling place because there’s fear there. And as we all know, that wears you out after a while. So people have got to the edge of that and they’re realising there has to be a different way to approach this kind of work, or this kind of life. And they’re at a place where they’re ready to explore something different.

Manda: Brilliant. So I’m translating that into modern geopolitics because it’s there, and it’s what keeps me awake at nights. And watching the fact that the people who have the most fear and the most need to control have just taken control. And a part of me lifted when you said ‘and that leads to burnout’, I think oh good let’s watch them all burnout, that’ll be great fun. But it won’t be, obviously, because the burning out will carry a lot of other things with it. So if people come to you with that burnout, drop out, fall out paradigm, I’m wondering about the internal changes that you’re able to help people to come to. I mean, I don’t think we can do a coaching session in a podcast, but we can look at the parameters for people listening who are feeling. I think I would put a fourth one of freaking out, which is as polite as I can get for the people to whom basically the world feels like it’s collapsing. And to be fair, on a biophysical level, the world is collapsing. And knowing ourselves to be part of the web of life feels to me the only possible way of getting through, and that that’s now become much more present and urgent for a larger number of people than it had before. So I’m trying to think how we take this forward in a way that’s generative for people listening. If I were to come to you and I’ve reached that boundary of the world is not how I thought it was, and I don’t know how to change, what kinds of directions would we take it in?

Dan: Well we tend to work with a kind of four phase model. They’re not linear, but of grounding, attunement, opening and integration.

Manda: Okay. So let’s go through each of those as a concept.

Dan: So grounding, obviously you’ll see all of this immediately in your work, but grounding starts by actually landing back in your body, landing back on the physical earth, discovering a felt sense of safety in the body. So a lot of that work is about down regulating very dysregulated nervous systems. So we’ll work at quite a coarse level to begin with with things like breathwork and grounding meditations and physical contact with the earth, for example.

Manda: And can I ask very quickly, how long does that take for people to feel safe in their body? Because certainly with some of the feedback that I’m getting, people are predicting unsafeness, shall we say, particularly the people in the US. That it’s going to become physically unsafe to be there. How do you negotiate feeling safe when there’s a narrative, shall we say, of a likely lack of safety?

Dan: Yeah. Well, we have to make a distinction here between actual threat and perceived threat. And most of us are not living in actual threat.

Manda: At this moment.

Dan: At this moment. But there’s a high level of perceived threat. And our nervous system feels itself at threat all the time. And so we tend to move to the side of that kind of hyper vigilant, hyper aroused state, or this dorsal vagal kind of shut down, keep the world away from me, please, state. So the way into that is a very gentle reintroduction to the feeling body, and recognising that this global feeling of fear actually isn’t that normally. We get quite specific about what are you actually sensing in your body now? Where do you feel fear? I feel fear in my chest. Well, what does that feel like? It feels like a small, tight lump or whatever the actual description is. And then we notice that, okay, so actually fear is quite localised in the body, but there’s other parts of me that are feeling either neutral or actually quite relaxed at the same time. So it’s kind of shifting from this threat level, Defcon one or whatever, to something more akin to what’s really here. And that doesn’t mean that there won’t be real physical threat out there in the world. It’s not a kind of naive approach, but it’s a way of coming back down to something that is at least functional and hopefully quite quickly. You asked how long. It can be very quick. It’s just people are so trained out of a felt sensing in the body. We’re just trained to think and be lost in abstract, projected thoughts, so that we feel like we’re somewhere above or in front of our body all the time. So just the act of being invited with someone who’s relaxed and calm to just feel their body for a moment is actually quite seismic in its effect. And then we just have to do that consistently.

Manda: And the key there for me was with someone who is relaxed and calm. It seems to me that for you to be able to hold that embodied space and the energetic framework or the energetic I suppose aura is a bit of a loaded word, but that works. That even over zoom, I’m guessing you’re in Finland, presumably quite a lot of your clients are not in Finland, even on zoom we’re discovering within the Dreaming Awake, within the shamanic work, you can do a lot of energetic stuff that I used to think you genuinely had to be in the same room as somebody, and now we discover that’s not the case. And are you discovering that if you can hold your grounding and your sense of physical safety, then it’s easier for someone, however many thousand miles away, to come into that?

Dan: Absolutely. I think this work is 80, 90% even about my own grounded presence as a container, as a holding space for another person to allow themselves to be as they are.

Manda: And what do you do to ground and to hold that space for yourself?

Dan: Well, I have some formal practice. So every morning I’ll do some kind of mindful movement qigong type stuff, followed by some breathwork, followed by a period of meditation. But for me, that’s a kind of sitting in open awareness with what’s here. So it’s not a very narrow focus.

Manda: That’s a meditation. That was Trungpa Rinpoche, that’s open focus rather than narrow focus. But it’s still holding present in the moment, which seems to me to be the key.Brilliant.

Dan: But that’s quite an important point, actually. A lot of people’s experience with something like meditation is narrow focus, and it often means that what they experience is being really bad at narrow focus and failing and not doing it well.

Manda: Right. And then they get an internal narrative that says, I can’t meditate or meditation is boring or meditation is depressing because I’m not good at it.

Dan: Whereas this is simple, not always easy, but it’s the 180 degree swap round. So you sit immediately into an experience of wholeness, into a field experience of the body and of the space around you. And then there’s movement within that. Life moves. The sensations, energy in the body, and all we’re doing is noticing it. And it’s really different for most people, because most of us think that meditation is a quite traditional contemporary mindfulness practice, for example. And this is actually quite different to most mindfulness practices.

Manda: Yes. And exactly that, it’s very opening. And I find if I can go and do it outside, it’s a very different experience to doing it inside. That there is something about blue sky above and grass and trees and birds and fully being aware of the web of life being alive, that helps me to integrate with it. Is that your experience also?

Dan: It is, although I think it’s very possible and actually in terms of most people’s life circumstances, quite helpful to know that what we’re noticing is that we are alive in a body in the world. And you can be sat in a flat in a city and have that experience. I agree with you that there’s a deepening experience when we’re in nature, because there’s that bigger container there that’s felt immediately. And because nature, you know, we work a lot with acceptance in terms of am I allowed or not? Most people have this experience of not being really allowed, on some level.

Manda: Allowed to be fully present in their body?

Dan: Allowed to be existent.

Manda: Okay. All right. Yeah.

Dan: A lot of people’s core limiting self beliefs are around ‘I’m not allowed to be as I am’.

Manda: I don’t have a right to be here.

Dan: And if you think about that from an ecological activist perspective, there’s a lot of that very overtly, in terms of we are kind of a parasitic…

Manda: Yes, we are the cancer on the earth and it would be better if we weren’t here.

Dan: Yeah, we should all actually be gone. And that’s not very psychologically helpful. So we work from if you exist, there is no judgement about whether or not you’re allowed to exist. You are accepted by life because you exist in this moment. So learning to feel that in your body is a gateway then to a kind of deeper connection with the rest of nature. But you can do that in a house, in a flat, in a city, because you are nature. And that’s the kind of central piece here.

Manda: Yes, yes. I’ve found quite useful recently something from James Lovelock’s last book, Novacene. I don’t engage with all of it, some of it just took me beyond edges I couldn’t go beyond, but he has a concept that Gaia is a living, conscious organism, and that it has, she perhaps, whatever, they have sequestered as much sunlight as possible, and then released it as fast as possible in order to create 8.5 billion potentially conscious nodes within the web of life that are human consciousness. And that’s an interesting framing, I find, because then each of us is here because the web of life needs us to be here. And what then we need to do is to figure out how to find out what it needs of us, rather than walking through life with this ‘I am basically a parasite on the planet and I am colluding in a system that’s destroying everything, and I am therefore a bad person and the world would be better off without me’. Which is, as you said, becoming increasingly prevalent within a sector of the world. You talked a bit about breathwork. Are we talking Wim Hof? Go and sit in the ice and do lots of cold water?

Dan: Well, sometimes a little bit.

Manda: I’m guessing not by the look on your face. What kinds of breathwork do you find help people most?

Dan: Simple, easy to access, very doable breathwork. To begin with, we teach something called the A, B, C of breath. So it’s an activating breathwork, a balancing breathwork, and a calming breathwork. You’ve probably come across most of these patterns already, but for example, an activating one, a very gentle one that we teach is: four counts in, a hold of four counts, and feeling that as a kind of rising in the body, so a kind of enervating feeling, and then a release of four counts.

Manda: Okay. So in four, hold and activate, and release with the same count as in. Because I’ve often done an in for a certain amount.

Dan: So for an activation, normally if you’re breathing out longer, you’re, you’re bringing on board a kind of rest and digest parasympathetic system. So that would be a downregulating one normally. So for example, the calm one that we teach as a basic is a four-eight breath. So you’ve probably done that a million times before. So four in and eight out long slow low outbreath. And that does lots of good things, basically. It sends signals of safety to your body and it cascades various hormones into your system that help you come back into a sense of relaxation and safety. And then the balancing one really is just an equal in and out. So we tend to teach a five-five. That’s because it’s about the optimal Human breath rate. We tend to breathe something like 20 breaths a minute as modern humans. So we breathe very quickly, very shallowly.

Manda: I tend to breathe at three breaths a minute. So I’m obviously breathing very, very, very, much too slowly.

Dan: I don’t think that is too slowly at all. So a five-five would bring you out at about six breaths a minute, which tends to be optimal but not always possible. But just generally learning to consciously slow your breath during the day with something like that balanced breathing. And breathing through your nose, which helps that generally. It slows the flow of the breath and again, sends lots of calming signals to the rest of your system. So they’re super simple but incredibly powerful if you actually practice them regularly.

Manda: Yeah. And just practising those means you’re bringing your awareness back into your physical body. You can’t count your breath without thinking about breathing and being aware of your ribs moving and your diaphragm moving, unless it’s locked tight like mine does. But yes, all of those are going to help you just become fully present in the moment again.

Dan: It’s the quickest, most engaging, in terms of speaking the language of the body, practice you can do. And it’s meditative at the same time. You are in a state of grounded awareness. You are embodied because you’re sensing your body breathing. And the shift is so quick. Like, I would always recommend something like a breathwork practice before meditating, for example, as a preparatory practice. So that you’re not doing that grounding while you’re meditating. Because that’s the other thing, most people will spend ten, 15 minutes or however long they meditate for, just trying to settle. And they never actually have an experience of relaxed openness, because they’re just trying to kind of fight with their system to relax, relax, relax, concentrate concentrate, concentrate. So this is a way of doing that in a very physical way. And a lot of people, as you know, the hyper vigilant types are super animated, you know, they can’t sit still. A lot of people with ADHD or these experiences of this scanning type mind, find breathwork really good because it’s something very easy and engaging. And you’re doing something actually, clearly. And then you stop, and you feel what the feeling is in your body and the field around you afterwards. And that’s meditation.

Manda: Right. And it seems to me, once people get over that hump of I haven’t got time, I’ve got to check my social media, I’ve got to do a thousand other things, and they actually just find the space to do that, it becomes addictive in its own right. And I’m guessing what you were saying about when you do the breathing, it releases a whole different set of neurotransmitters, that there’s parts of us that really enjoy those. Can you go through a little tiny bit of geeky neurophysiology and tell us what the neurotransmitters are? Or is that taking it too far?

Dan: No, we can do. Yeah. I know you talk a lot about dopamine and serotonin circuits, but I think first and foremost, rather than getting into the biochemistry, we’ll talk about the experience of following good feeling in the body. So we know that oxytocin is released when you do various breathwork practices, we know that there is a kind of dopamine release as well, particularly with the enervating ones. But rather than concentrating on what those are at a biochemistry level, what’s important here is that we’re following an experience of good feeling in the body, which we’re so not used to. So whatever that is, is secondary to recognising the flavour of that in your body and using that as the path. So again it’s the opposite of this kind of willpower I must concentrate, I must rein in the wild horse of my mind, contain it in this small corral, and whip it into submission.

Dan: This is open the gate and feel the feeling of freedom in that horse in your mind, in the body. Feel the pleasure of running through this wild open landscape, and eventually your horse will come to stillness and and you’ll know the feeling of being in nature, as nature. So it’s really about that. It’s like follow that path of pleasure rather than duty.

Manda: Yeah. Judgement and all of the traumas that come with that. That’s so beautiful, Dan. Thank you. Even just with you saying that. Partly because you have a horse metaphor, but even then it feels so much more enlivening and so much more something that one could look forward to. And it seems to me also that in the almost militaristic mindset that can come into ‘I will sit and watch my breath, I will think about nothing else. I will castigate myself every time I think about something else’. And it’s basically a form of internal bullying and control. And when it falls apart, which it is inevitably going to do, then there’s more room for self-judgment, and it all comes back to the whole mindset of how we approach who we are as humans. Which is we’re not good enough, and we have to somehow fit into a box that is impossible. And what you’re offering is the invitation to be exactly who we are, and to feel into the wonder of that and the magic of it and the connectedness of it. It sounds truly magical, and we’ve only been through the first of your four kind of broad steps. So do you want to step on to the second one and let’s see where that takes us?

Dan: Sure. Yeah. So when we’re when we’re feeling, uh, like our nervous system is a little bit more grounded, when we feel there’s some more space, there’s less of this kind of static storm that a lot of us experience when we check in. Then there’s the possibility of attuning. So attunement is the second. Of tuning in to inner knowing, to intuition, to much subtler signals from the body, energetic signals that we just can’t hear when we’re full of all this kind of noise and this stress. So this is really an invitation into recognising yourself as a transceiver; as a transmitter and a receiver of information.

Manda: Okay. Good word!

Dan: So if you think of yourself as a tuning fork, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that kind of experiment where you strike a tuning fork and there’s two tuning forks together, and then you mute that one and the other one is ringing.

Manda: No I haven’t. Oh, interesting. So the vibration within the air of one set of sound waves sets off the other tuning fork.

Dan: Yeah.

Manda: Wow. So that would be like the one where where you start a pendulum and there’s, I don’t know, 60 pendulums, and eventually they’re all going in synchrony because they just do synchronise. Okay. And so tell us more about being a transceiver and that attunement and where you take the tuning fork metaphor.

Dan: Yeah. So we are tuning forks. We are communicating all the time at this bioenergetic level. And we know this as a kind of common sense experience of walking into a room and feeling tension, or being with a person who’s relaxed and feeling relaxed. That’s because we are resonating with that person at this energetic level. But what does that mean, kind of as a wider experience? For example, as an ecological designer? What does it mean to begin to be able to sense the resonance of plants, of animals, of the land itself, and also to be able to interact at that level? So there’s this deeper relational experience at this energetic level. But then there’s also, once we’ve got this space in our system, an ability to to ask questions of the wisdom of our body. I’d be interested to hear how you relate that to asking the gods of the land, for example, and what that interaction is like for you. For me, this kind of tuning into intuitive or inner knowing, is about dropping into I tend to visualise it or experience it within my pelvic bowl quite often. So it’s a kind of gut experience for me. Obviously for some people it can be a heart experience, and it is sometimes for me. But the locus of my listening is often from my pelvic bowl.

Dan: And being guided by that in your life. So rather than going always to your strategic mind and ticking off the kind of rational to do list, or rationalising, making decisions based on that kind of left brain, outer knowing modality. What’s it like to drop down and ask through the body? Ask life through the body and then listen to what emerges. And you get better at this, of course. But what emerges can be lots of different things. It can be chapters of a book, you know, in your case. Or it could be just a sensation in the body, or it might be a memory, or it might be a strong emotion. Or it might be a word. You know, dismiss nothing in that process. But get good at listening, take it seriously and learn by building a kind of relationship of trust with it that you can be guided. And that actually it’s trustworthy and reliable. And it’s different from the reactive body. And that’s important.

Manda: Yes. Can you deepen into that? Say a little bit more about that. How do you help people learn to trust? Because when we’re doing the shamanic work, that is the core. That’s why it can take people 10 to 15 years is learning to distinguish between the stuff that my head mind said, which I’m guessing is what you would call reactive body, and what’s actually coming that I can trust. And the only way to do that for me is to test it. Real world testing, of I’ve got this instinct, if I act on it what happens? How do you help people to learn to trust, to build that trusting kind of felt sense?

Dan: Well, I think you’re right. And I do think of this as very much a kind of practical life skill in that sense. That yeah, use it. Be guided. Start with something small, normally. Don’t decide whether to leave your partner or move continents or anything.

Manda: Yes, chuck in your job because you had this sudden instinct. Yes, yes.

Dan: Don’t do that. But you know, what food feels good to eat in this moment? Or which which direction should I take on this walk? All those kind of small questions that quite often we assume we’ve made a decision but are normally being led by our conditioning actually. So to differentiate, we’re always working from both ends. So we’re working from this experience of wholeness and depth, and we’re also noticing all the bits that feel contracted and tight and stuck. And we’re meeting them from this experience of kind of grounded wholeness. But you can tell very easily the difference, because there’s a kind of feeling tone that’s very different. And one tends to be quite spiky and at the front of the body, in my experience. There’s a lot of front body experience of reactivity because we project our sort of armour at the front of our body. And to kind of learn to sit back into the back body and feel there what’s going on. It tends to be quieter. The signals, in my experience, are much more subtle. You have to be patient, normally, in a way that we’re not used to. And quite often at first it may be quite unfathomable also. There’s also something known about your reactivity because you’ve practised it so many times

Manda: It’s a common pathway that we know how it goes. Right.

Dan: You’ve been reacting since childhood, and it kind of makes sense to us. There’s an internal logic, even if it’s not very helpful in our life or it’s doing us harm, it makes sense because it’s our coping strategy and we just do it subconsciously.

Manda: And we’ve practised it often enough that we know where it goes. Okay.

Dan: Whereas this will feel unfamiliar to begin with, and easily dismissed by the rational mind. Like, oh, it was just a kind of daydream and blah blah blah, let’s not think about that. So you kind of have to make a commitment, like you say, to testing it. It’s a kind of AB testing model in that sense. And build a relationship. Like building a relationship with your being is something that requires time and consistency, like building a relationship with anybody, with anything. And if you want to build trust with an animal.

Manda: You have to be with it.

Dan: You have to be with it patiently, without expectation. Noticing subtle signals, without a kind of goal expectation. And get used to that being actually what reality is, rather than this ‘we know the answer. It’s A B C and we’re going to act now’.

Manda: Yes. And certainly in the horse work and some of the dog work that I do with people, getting to a place where we don’t have an agenda is really hard. And you end up in a kind of diminishing tightening spiral of trying to have the agenda to not have an agenda. And letting go of that is really, really hard. And I’m remembering Tanya Luhrmann’s concept of the Citadel mind, which is so embedded in our culture’s way of looking, which is everything inside my mind is mine alone. Nothing can come in from the outside other than that I put it in there and nothing can go out other than that I speak it or write it or whatever. And what you’re describing is much more that sense of a fluid osmotic membrane between us and the rest of the world. And I’m wondering, this may be my projection, my assumption is that people who come to you are coming from big business and quite embedded in Western mindset. ‘This is how the world works’. How do they cope with the mindset shift that says we are energetic beings in an energetic world, and the energies around us will influence us, and our energies will influence the rest of the world. How does that settle and what does it do to people’s lives?

Dan: Well, we’re always working with reality and we’re working with direct experience, and I don’t ever try and paint a cosmology for people in that sense. ‘A’, because I don’t really know what the nature of reality is at that level. But ‘B’, because we tend to experience this kind of stuff quite differently to each other. So if I tell you how it is and you don’t experience that, then you will dismiss what I’m talking about.

Manda: Right. And the other way around. If you have experienced it, it doesn’t matter what you’re saying, the experience is real for people, as long as you can anchor it, I guess. Because if you listen to people like Rupert Sheldrake and he goes and he talks to vast conferences of scientists, who sit there with their arms folded and the body language telling him he’s all wrong, shaking their heads and it can’t be right. Whatever he’s saying about all of this kind of work. And then he says, two glasses of wine in, and they’re queuing round the dinner table to tell him their personal experiences of why he’s exactly right. But they live in a world where this cannot happen, and it is important to their professional structures that they maintain a reality where it cannot happen, in spite of their personal experience that it does. Do people end up feeling caught in the contradictions of that?

Dan: In my experience, no. I have to say, I don’t work with corporate clients, for example, that are kind of fully entrenched. I do definitely work at the change maker end of the world. So these are people that might be working in NGOs or regenerative farmers or…

Manda: Okay. They’re already in a space where they’re open to this. Yeah.

Dan: Well they are sort of. They’re open to the fact that we are nature. But I don’t think most of them, and this is where the kind of rub comes, actually feel that in their body.

Manda: So it’s an idea, but it’s not a reality.

Dan: It’s an idea that they’ve bought into fully. So in terms of bringing it back to your thrutopia model or a story model, it’s a philosophy they have bought into because they can see it, you know, it’s evidentially true. However, experientially it’s not alive for them. Yeah.

Manda: Right. And you bring it alive!

Dan: So my job is to open the door basically so they can feel it.

Manda: So are you open to the idea that about 100,000 people are now going to be emailing you, asking for you to open that door for them? Do you run big courses or is it all 1 to 1?

Dan: Um, no. So I work with my wife Johanna, and we run an organisation called Earthbound. And for the last two years we’ve been doing a small group research project with permaculture practitioners. Exactly with this: how does embodied presence interact with outer change work? And we’ve just got some funding to scale that up to work with UK farmers and food producers, which will be launching in January 2025.

Manda: And you’ll send me a link for the show notes.

Dan: Yeah. So this is called Calmer Farmer, which is a bit of a tongue in cheek title, but it’s the same thing. We’re interested in a very practical program of experiential research to see what embodied presence practice brings to the well-being of farmers, because we know that they’re a particular sector that are struggling with their wellbeing, but also to farming. Like what’s different when you actually really feel like you are nature from the inside out, rather than being someone who’s trying to help nature or work with nature from the outside in.

Manda: Right. It changes the whole paradigm of what farming is.

Manda: Wow. That sounds really, really interesting. Thank you. Okay, so we’ve come from grounding and attunement. I’m looking at my almost illegible notes; opening and integration. So have we covered attunement? Attunement seems to me it’s moving into the felt sense of our bodies accepting that we are transceivers and learning how to listen. And I guess also, it’s not just hearing what’s coming in, it’s learning how what we send out impacts the world. Can we talk about that a little bit? Because that seems to me, the way the world is shifting now, this is going to be really important for those of us who want a future that we’d be proud to leave behind, is understanding that we’re not just receivers. We’re also sending out, whatever the word is. Transponders?

Dan: Transmitters.

Manda: Transmitters. There we go. Thank you. Yes, what we transmit is really crucial and if what we’re transmitting is rage and panic, it may be where we are, but learning how for it not to be is going to be critical.

Dan: Yeah. And this feels to me one of the most crucial pieces here. What is it to become a kind of node in the network of grounded presence? And what is that in terms of its ability to be catalytic in your family, in your community, in your workplace. And we know, as I’ve said before, just on a common sense level, we know this is true. We know what it is to be with someone who is comfortable in their own skin, relaxed, agenda free, happy to be with you and let you share. So what would that be like? What would activism be like from there? You know, if we dropped the idea of activism and oriented towards connectivism, so a kind of embodied awake relational action. What’s that like? And that’s dependent not on what you do together, but how you are together, the quality of your being. And that only happens when you go through a process of coming back into relationship with your being so that you feel really here, like really here in the body, fully occupying yourself and really available.

Manda: Right. This may be an aside, but I had a text exchange with a friend at the weekend that I’ve known for a very long time, who is very switched on to all of this, who was incredibly frustrated because they’d been to a community meeting. The local landowner who owns huge amounts of land, is about to put a solar farm five square miles around their village. And not surprisingly, the local community is not up for this. But there’s a lot of misinformation and disinformation. You know, solar panels will blind everybody therefore we can’t have it. And my suggestion was, what happens if it’s a community solar farm? Agrivoltaics is a thing, we can increase biodiversity if we do it right. How about we engage with this and see if it can happen in a way that is more constructive. And my friend is the lone voice going is this possible? In a sea of people going ‘no’. And we don’t even want to listen, and we’re just going to elevate the rage and the impotence in a way. Is it your understanding, belief and experience that if we were able to sit in transmitter-receiver mode fully, that that kind of meeting could come to a place of calm and maybe slightly more responsiveness?

Dan: Well, I think you’ve got a hell of a lot more chance of something productive and generative coming out of that if we can shift the quality of our being with each other.

Manda: And is one person in a group of 60, what’s the critical mass I guess I’m asking.

Dan: Yeah. Well, that’s a good point, isn’t it? I do believe in the catalytic effect of just one person. But also, being realistic, if you are one person and 59 other people are feeling very defensive and very entrenched and very angry, it’s not easy. So this is a kind of culture shift over time. So for example, finding the kind of soft edges within that group, if there are any allies within that, that would be interested in at least having a breakout conversation that’s held in presence. Or with a kind of embodied respect for each other. Then you’ve got a kind of small nexus of influence there. It’s not easy because we’re inviting this in in a highly traumatised culture, who have been trained into polarised entrenchment and defence control, defence control, Defence control. And so that needs unlearning. But I think the only way we can do that is by wholeheartedly committing to to this kind of healing work. Wholing work. I think you’ve been talking about, referencing Bill Plotkin recently, and he’s got a very interesting perspective, which is one I work with. Which is you can’t heal without wholing first. So wholing precedes healing.

Manda: And this is wholing with a W in front.

Dan: Yeah. So this is the experience of internal and external wholeness. So psychological, physiological, existential wholeness. And then you meet all the bits that feel broken and tight and sore and wounded from there. So it’s quite hard if we’re always trying to fix the bits as partial fragmented experiences. What we need to do actually, I would suggest, is rather than trying to start any new political movements from this experience of highly conditioned, highly separate sense of self, we would be much better off putting our energy into healing a critical mass of humans, and then noticing what they create.

Manda: Right. See what emerges from that wholeness. Because if we could predict it, we’d already be there, right?

Dan: Yeah. So we are in this time between, you know. This is why a thrutopia is so important. It’s difficult in these circumstances. And part of being with reality is being with things that aren’t our preference. You know, I don’t want ecosystems being dismantled left right and centre, or people to be at each other’s throats everywhere around the world. But it’s what’s here. So how can we experience this process of being with reality and grounding at the same time, and opening at the same time? So the shift from attunement into opening is exactly what you were talking about before. It’s this recognition that actually you are porous, you’re an open system. You’re a borderless system, so you can feel safe and open. It seems paradoxical, but it’s actually true in your felt experience. So what’s life like? What is your change making work like? What are your conversations with solar farmers like, when you recognise that there is this kind of mutuality in terms of we are all part of this thing called life? And even though the behaviour you’re displaying at the moment might seem aggressive or violent, I know that that is coming from actually a place of fear and a need to defend something you feel is at threat. Whether that be your own organism or your family, or your way of life.

Manda: A belief system.

Dan: A belief system. So if I can know that and I can meet you at a much deeper level, kind of being to being, as this openness, most people will come at least a little way towards you in that moment.

Manda: And it seems to me now, in this space, we’ve been talking or I have been talking a lot, about the need for us to grow up and consciously evolve. And now we need to actually do it. We need to be the person who can hold that sense of wholeness and engagement and transmit and receive. In spite of the fact that our patterning may be to become defensive and enraged. Because if we don’t do it, nobody else is going to. And it is the essential thing that needs to happen now. Gosh, it seems to me like your Calmer Farmer is coming at a very, very good time and that that finding ways to build on that and scale it up and scale it out, could be one of the things that shifts us. It gives us the tools to shift in our communities very, very swiftly. Are there many other people working in this field that you know of?

Dan: It is definitely a growing field, just within the kind of food sector the UN development program have a Conscious Food Systems initiative now. And Conscious Food Systems Alliance, they’re taking a consciousness first approach to food system transformation. So that’s a global project. Our Embodied Permaculture project was one of their case studies recently. But it’s amazing to see that work. I mean, it truly is global. They’re working with all kinds of different scales, all around the world. And it’s very interesting. But I do also think that beyond food there is a recognition, you know, that often misquoted Einstein quote about you can’t solve the problems with the same thinking that caused them. Apparently, I don’t think he even said that. I’ve tried to research it.

Manda: It’s true, though. Yes.

Dan: But what does that mean? It’s not about a different system of thinking. That’s the problem, we assume thinking means…

Manda: Yeah, one set of belief systems to another set of belief systems, and then everything’s fine.

Dan: Yeah, it’s got nothing to do with that. It’s what is it to come into this kind of whole system intelligence, this embodied thinking genius that we have access to, if we allow ourselves to come back into relationship with it. That’s different thinking. That’s a whole different…

Manda: It’s a different way of being. It’s then a beingness instead of a head mind. It’s heart mind instead.

Dan: And that’s a real thing. I mean, this might sound like hippie nonsense if you have never practised this, but it has real world benefit and real world application. And actually, most importantly to me, and I think that’s why I find it easy to talk about it, is it’s a normal part of being a human being. It’s what we are. It’s not some special state we disappear to an ashram to cultivate. It’s our birthright. We are these connected beings, so let’s just remember and relearn that and notice what changes. Rather than focusing on all the behaviour change. I know we need to do that as well and I’m not dismissing that.

Manda: But it will arise out of what you’re suggesting. And we still are looking for the top down, let’s select the right government and then they can make everything happen. And actually you’re right, it has to come from the inside out.

Dan: And how can you elect the right government if you’re coming at it from this feeling of existential fear? It’s impossible. You just can’t make wise decisions. And, you know, you’re talking about power to the wise and wisdom to the powerful. What is wisdom in that context? It’s not cleverness.

Manda: Or the capacity to control everything, which is how we have perceived wisdom for a very long time. Who’s got the best control system. Yeah. You’re right.

Dan: So it’s who’s in the deepest relationship with the world, I would say that could be a measure of wisdom, for example.

Manda: And themselves. All parts of their being and the web of life. This is increasingly where I’m coming to. Its relationship with self, other, other human and the web of life. And how do we facilitate that for the most people who want it? And then if there is that sense of a person in a room creates a ripple effect, let’s find out what the critical mass is. Because it might be one person in 60 if that person is really centred and grounded and connected, and we don’t know until we try.

Dan: But I think it would be interesting to try. Like seed these nodes of grounded presence and actually make that a kind of focus of action, rather than trying to design the next system.

Manda: And the farming community is going to be a really interesting community to work that in, because there’s a lot of activation. But if we can have the people who have learned to embody in that, then then what happens? Because food is essential one way or another. If we’re going to make it forward, we have to be able to eat and we have to be able to create food in a way that is healing and whole within the web of life. Or ecosystem collapse. It’s really quite straightforward. It’s just doing it.

Dan: And I just wanted to say that farmers are in relationship clearly with animals, with the land, with plants, with their own bodies within the landscape, all the time. And actually, that’s why I think there’s a lot of leverage here. So these people are already much more engaged with, reality, with Life.

Manda: With the mud and the rain and whatever the season is. Yes.

Dan: And the blood and the guts and everything else. Yeah. So all this is a kind of support to deepen that experience. I think that’s why there’s a lot of leverage. You know, this is a good place to work because it’s just helping that process rather than starting from a blank slate, if that makes sense.

Manda: Yeah. Or trying to impose a political viewpoint. We are extraordinarily almost at an hour, and we still haven’t got to the second two of your four. For the sake of completeness and I can feel that we’re going to need to come back again, but we have opening and integration. So just talk me through those. And definitely we will schedule another podcast at some point. But I am currently booked into June so it’ll be a while.

Dan: Well I think we touched on Opening somewhat, didn’t we? This sense of recognising that we are this porous, open connected System, basically. We’re embedded in this bigger field of our communities, but also of the whole of the living world. So I don’t know that we need to say that much more about that. It’s a lived experience of that. I’m here. Like I’m really here and I’m really open. I’m really available to you or to whoever, human or non-human. And then Integration is really the process of bringing this. We talk about embodiment often in terms of muscle memory, this feeling of we don’t have to think about something anymore. When we learn to play guitar or drive a car, you know, it becomes embodied, second nature. So that’s one aspect of this work, is practising it enough that it becomes second nature. That we no longer have to put effort in, as such. We recognise that rather than regulating our nervous system on purpose through breathwork, actually, what happens is we tend to, throughout the day recognise, oh, okay, there’s a flavour in my body that I never recognised before. It’s peace.

Manda: Right.

Dan: Which is quite shocking to most people. It was to me.

Manda: What does it feel like to you? Can you give us a kind of word picture of the textures of it?

Dan: Sure. So there tends to be quite often a downward energetic feeling. So I often have a felt sense of a feather slowly landing. So this gentle settling. Or of mud settling through churned water, this kind of sedimentation feeling. So there’s a sense of coming into a heavy stability in my legs. So I feel really quite here in my legs. There’s a connection with the Earth. There’s a tendency to feel like I’m kind of resting back in my body, sitting down and in. And as I tune into that now, there’s a very pleasant sense of something that feels like tenderness to me. A very gentle, tender, caring quality that I can feel in my body. I can feel it in my heart. I can feel it in my pelvis right now. And there’s a lot of stillness there and space.

Dan: And from there, what is it like to act from there? Noticing that life still wants to emerge, wants to flow. Evolution is playing out, but without losing that contact there. So then you’re opening out into that and the other aspect of integration in that, so that one is that kind of embodied sense, but the other is this kind of seamlessness. So there isn’t a distinction between inner and outer work. I don’t have to go sit on a cushion and close my eyes to experience peace. There is life happening through my body, emerging, I am participating in life. And that’s all an experience of embodied presence over time.

Manda: That’s so beautiful. And even as you were describing your sense of peace, I could feel my entire energetic system settling. That sense of of leaves coming to rest and the feather coming down and the silt moving down in a river. That sense of being able to breathe more freely and and then be more open. So I hope that reached out to everybody listening as well, because even that was a beautiful experience. And the fact that it is accessible to everybody with a bit of practice, seems to me absolutely a crucial understanding to put out into the world now. This can be our lives. Exactly as you said, you don’t have to mine half an hour out of the day and force yourself onto a cushion ‘I am now meditating’. It can be the practice of being. It becomes our lives. Thank you.

Dan: And it’s really important that we normalise that, normalise the language around that, normalise the experience of that. You know, that’s what culture shift is, then isn’t it. Okay, who or what are we really as a lived experience? And then what cascades from that? What are the new systems we design together? What are the political structures we build?

Manda: And it all evolves from the web of life, then. We’re not doing it on our own. I think this is one of the understandings that is really important for people, is we feel that humanity has to solve the problems that humanity has created. And I think humanity needs to become an integral part of the web of life. And the web knows what needs to happen, and then it becomes a dance rather than yet another herding of sheep. Beautiful. Brilliant. Dan, this has been amazing. I think it’s genuinely life changing. It feels life changing to me, and I am in awe of what you’re doing. And I’m sure that you are changing the lives of the people that you coach and the groups and everybody that you touch. Definitely, I would like to invite you back. Is there anything else you’d like to say for this time round before we close?

Dan: Just thank you to you. And it feels really important to me that there’s someone like you in the world doing this work of the personal practice that I know you’ve been doing for decades, but also the teaching work. But then this storytelling, this sharing process, it’s so important, isn’t it? And if we are creating a living philosophy then you are doing that work really beautifully.

Manda: As are you.

Dan: Well thank you. And then otherwise, to listeners out there or viewers, I think it really is just this piece around there’s a calling here that’s inviting us constantly back, to being part of life. And I truly believe that everyone is feeling that on one level or another. We don’t always respond to it, but it’s there because we are a part of life. So maybe just to notice that in your own system. Can you feel this call? It’s like a yearning, a homecoming kind of call and to follow that.

Manda: Thank you. Yes. So much. Yes. I think I just, in the moment, restructured the entirety of Dreaming Your Year Awake, which is a gathering that we’ll hold early in the New year. Into, if this is our calling, what does it feel like? Thank you so much. Dan, this has been utterly extraordinary and totally heart lifting. Thank you so much for all that you are and do. And as soon as we close, we’ll book another one for next year. Because the world will be a different place and we’ll see where we go to. So thank you very much indeed for coming on to the Accidental Gods podcast.

Dan: Thank you.

Manda: There we go. That’s it for another week. Enormous thanks to Dan for the clarity of his thinking, and for the groundedness and open heartedness of his being. I really hope that the clarity and the great heart, the open hearted, full hearted, clear hearted, strong hearted sense of being in Dan’s presence came across in all of the recordings. For me, this was a really encouraging experience. I swim in these waters all of the time, and yet there’s something about the clarity that Dan brings to this that felt new and fresh and so, so timely. I’ll put links in the show notes to everything that he does, but really, whatever you picked up from this, I would so encourage you to begin the breathwork, to begin the presencing, to do whatever it takes for you to come back into the safety of your own body, and then begin to find the things that you can trust. And if there are things that we need to do within Accidental Gods to help you with that, then let me know what they are, because I am more than happy to do them. This is where we need to go. We absolutely need to let go of the head stuff and accept that we are energetic beings in a field of energy. And yes, this steps outside all that we are taught, all that we believe about how the world works, all that is being told to us about how the world is not working. And I think it really matters that we understand this is not about winning or losing. This is no longer about waiting for our side to win in a political process or our thinking to become dominant. This is about ways of being changing. And we don’t know what the critical mass is in any group of people, but if each of us listening can change who we are, and if we can share this podcast with others who get it, and each of these can change, then we can change the world.

Manda: So more than ever this week, if you know of anybody else who wants to understand the ways that we can be in the world, please send them this link. Share it on your social media. If you want to give us five stars and a review on the podcast app of your choice, that would be really nice, because the algorithms are beginning to pick us up and move us. And the more people we can reach, the more likely is the chance that we will reach the critical mass that helps us to shift beyond who we are now. To shift beyond our adversarial, tribe based ways of being, into something that is genuinely connected, genuinely regenerative, genuinely whole and healed. And that’s what we’re here for. So go for it. Please share widely.

Manda: And while you’re doing that, we will be back next week with another conversation. In the meantime, enormous thanks to Caro C for the music at the head and foot. To Alan Lowells of Airtight Studios for this week’s production. To Louise Mayor for sorting out all the video for YouTube. To Anne Thomas for the transcripts. To Faith Tilleray for yet again wrestling with all of the stuff behind the scenes; literal, conceptual, spiritual and digital. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for listening. And for those of you who have connected, really, I’m enormously grateful to know that this lands well with you and that it’s helping you in these times of extraordinary change. So that’s it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.

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