In Conversation

Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods, to the podcast where we do still believe that another world is possible and that 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 fellow traveller in this journey into possibility. And as the geriatric narcissists push us ever further into the death throes of the current system, the only predictable thing is that it’s impossible to predict where we’re going. So how do we find a sense of grounded stability, a sense of safety, a sense of embodied connection to the web of life? This feels to me the single most important thing that any of us can be doing right now. And this week’s guest is one of those who is leading courses, trainings, and embodied meditations that give people a genuinely grounded set of resources to feel this at a cellular, bone deep level, so that we can all make it the foundation for a life of authentic practice. So that we can find ways to feel safe in a world that appears on the outside to be increasingly unsafe. Dan McTiernan’s main focus in all of his work is to double down on the process and practice of finding our ground. He’s been working with people to explore the physiological, psycho emotional and existential layers of grounding as a holistic approach to a stabilised, embodied sense of safety and connection.

Manda: His sense is that this is foundational to any possibility of responding to a world in which all the ground has been ripped up, and we are literally laying each cobblestone at a time before we dare to take the next step on the path. In his words, this is a central thrutopian capacity and I agree with him. This is how we find the path through from where we are to that future that we would be proud to leave behind. Dan is a friend of the podcast. We talked last on episode number 263, and I’ve put a link to that in the show notes. There we explored his concept of embodied learning. This time around, as we watch the death throes of the old system grow ever more violent, his experience with the calmer farmer program, his Being Earthbound Practice Circle, and his What’s Here Now meditations are exactly what we all need. We set the date for this conversation over six months ago, but it could not possibly be more timely.

Manda: And just before we head into the podcast, I want to let you know that we have a gathering this Sunday 6th July. 4:00 till 8:00 UK time, that’s British summertime. The link is in the show notes. And this one is called Becoming a Good Ancestor, which frankly, given where the world is at the moment, probably means learning how to co-regulate, how to settle, how to come into a space where we can be fully human, Where we can access all of our creativity. But I particularly want to look at what is the legacy each of us wants to leave behind. How can we live into being that future that we’d be proud to leave to the generations that come after us? So if you want to explore that with us, it’s online, it’s four hours. We work together as a group and in small groups in breakout rooms and on our own in reflection. We do meditations, guided visualisations, and we share ideas. So you’re welcome to come along. You don’t have to have done anything else before, and you don’t have to be a member of accidental gods, though if you are, you do get a discount. So there we go.

Manda: On the heels of that, people of the podcast, please welcome Dan McTiernan of Being Earth Bound, to help us all find ways to become more embodied and to be better versions of ourselves in a world that needs us to be the best that we can be in every moment of every day.

Manda: Dan McTiernan, a friend of the podcast. Welcome back to the Accidental Gods podcast. How are you and where are you on this slightly turbulent Monday morning. This is the Monday just after the solstice, which in many ways is a beautiful place, but Donald Trump chose the solstice to patch his ego because his shoddy little parade didn’t work like he wanted. So now he’s playing military big boys. How are you? Where are you?

Dan: Well. Thank you. It’s lovely to be back. How am I? Well, I’m feeling all of that that you just shared. And it’s a really interesting juxtaposition, isn’t it? I spent my solstice evening on a river with my wife and my 13 year old watching swallows.

Manda: In Finland.

Dan: In Finland. It was very beautiful. It’s been very rainy and then for the solstice Eve the sun came out and it was just a gorgeous evening. So I’m feeling that in my body. But I’m also feeling this, like you say, it’s just the dismantling of relative ground from under our feet, I think. So what we thought was knowable is so evidentially no longer knowable. So I’m feeling that kind of sense of dropping through some of those cracks a little bit.

Manda: Right. In which case, you’re felt sense practice of being earthbound and of being able to create stable roots, which is what I would really like to talk about, becomes absolutely essential. And I guess this is a testing time to see how good our grounding is. How good it really is, and for me I push at the edges of what do I project and what is real. The fires of reality are burning away anything that I’m projecting and only what’s real can possibly survive. And that whether this is good or not, there’s parts of me that go this is useful and other parts go no, you’re just trying to make good stuff out of chaos. However, the capacity to ground is being tested. So I just want to check: rivers. I have a memory. I had a Finnish girlfriend for a while, and I remember being in Finland during the solstice and the mosquitoes were the size of sparrows. It’s very brave being out by a river on the solstice, or were there no mosquitoes where you were?

Dan: We’re having a kind of low mosquito season this year, which to be honest, I’m not complaining about.

Manda: No, it’s odd, isn’t it?

Dan: Although the swallows probably are. Yeah. So it was just lovely, idyllic. I’m very fortunate to live somewhere outside of a warzone, and to be able to do that kind of thing at the moment. So I don’t take that lightly.

Manda: Yes, likewise. Okay. So thank you. So let’s talk about Calmer Farmer, because I really want to talk about it. And that will lead us into methods of grounding that are resilient and that work and how we can model self-regulation and co regulation. So when we last spoke Calmer Farmer was about to launch. And as I understand it, you’re about to head into the second iteration. But you now have actual numbers, a beautiful graph that you sent me, that if I can I will replicate in the show notes, or at least put on the website. So tell us about the genesis and then the practice of that.

Dan: Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you. So Calmer Farmer is an intervention being offered through the Alef Trust, who I work for, who are an educational organisation that work with consciousness, transpersonal psychology, spirituality. And they’re really trying to let the rubber hit the road; they’re putting a lot of effort into real world work. And we identified food and farming as a sector that’s particularly struggling with well-being. You know, there’s just a hell of a lot of pressure on land workers from all ends; from top down legislative pressure, climate, and then just the the stress of having to keep things going. Spinning all those plates, all hours of every day. So we’ve offered a second phase of one initial pilot project. So the first phase was a ten week open online course for anyone who was a land worker or associated with farming or food production. So we’ve got a really eclectic mix, actually. We’ve got dairy farmers of 30 plus years through to 18 year old students that are just coming in and people doing CSA work, and so a lot of different scales and different lifeways within farming. So actually land worker is probably a better term than just ‘farmer’.

Manda: And what’s the nationality or the geographic spread?

Dan: So again it was primarily focussed at the UK. We’ve got a good spread across all four nations. Within that we’ve opened it up to some people from Ireland as well. And actually we also opened it up to, by request, to a few people from the US as well. But mainly UK and our focus is UK. So they were invited to spend ten weeks engaged in practical wellbeing activities. Basically a combination of a talk once a week introducing a particular topic; so it might be nervous system regulation or relations with other people, or the whole host of wellbeing perspectives. A short practice every week. So we tried to keep things as doable as possible for busy people basically. And then a reflective prompt every week. So we’re asking people to reflect on what’s going on in their lives and share how the practices and the topics of the week are interacting with their own individual life and their farm work.

Manda: And this is live? They’re speaking out? Or are they writing it down and sending it in?

Dan: They’re writing that down. So it was predominantly a self-study course, but we had three live sessions throughout. So we had a chance to gather at the beginning, middle and end of the course. And as you say, we’ve got the some of the preliminary data from that. And it’s very encouraging, I would say. Ten weeks is not a long time, but actually ten weeks is enough time for things to change.

Manda: Yes. Talk through it.

Dan: You said you’d share the image, but just some of the categories are: optimism; are you feeling useful? Are you feeling relaxed? Are you feeling able to solve problems or think clearly? And then there were these questions about connection with nature, a sense of oneness, kinship.

Manda: Can I ask about that? Because that was one thing, looking down, because the answers were different. And I would think oneness with nature and kinship with nature are very close cousins of each other, if not actually Siamese twins. How do you interpret the fact that the numbers of before and after on both of those were slightly different?

Dan: Well, this is actually an amalgamation of I think we asked something like 30 questions. So actually this has been kind of aggregated into more thematically, groups. 

Manda: Okay. Got you.

Dan: And actually I would say the only difference between oneness and kinship is maybe at the relational level. So there’s a feeling of kind of embeddedness.

Manda: Yes. Because you’ve also got embodied with the web of life. And that again had slightly different answers. So.

Dan: So actually I guess in a way it’s a little bit misleading, because they’re pulling from different questions within the survey and organising them thematically. But essentially it’s how much are you sensing yourself to be nature? And how open and free flowing are your relationships with the rest of life, with the animals on your land, with the plants you’re growing, with the land itself, with other people? So it’s a kind of measure of those two things, which are of course the same on one level. But you can discern the difference if you feel into that once more at the kind of inter relational level. And the other one is a sense of self.

Manda: Kinship with the animals with which one lives. What really interested me, because we also had listening to our body for decisions and being at home in our body and feeling safe in our body. But the highest ranking, so you had a 0 to 5 score, and the highest ranking at the time people were ranking themselves towards the end of the course was kinship with nature. And I think I thought that was a testament to your capacity to help people self-regulate. And also, I wonder if we had a self-selecting group who already were predisposed towards feeling kinship with nature.

Dan: I think that’s probably true. The cohort, while it’s varied, is also definitely skewing towards perhaps the more regenerative farming end of what we might call farming. So I guess it is self-selecting in that what we were offering was embodied and presence wellbeing practices and we were up front about this general working premise, that we are nature working. The only belief system we were working within was that we are nature working. So of course, you will attract people that feel an affinity with that, so there is a bit of self-selection going on there for sure.

Manda: Right.

Dan: But as you see from the charts, that increased over just ten weeks. So it’s very interesting.

Manda: As did openness to change. I mean, everything increased. That was the really interesting thing; every parameter increased and their capacity to self-regulate with embodied practice. Listen to their body to find an answer, as well as connecting with the web of life.

Dan: Yeah.

Manda: So tell us a little bit about where it’s going, because it’s not a second cohort; this first cohort is now going to go deeper for another ten weeks. Tell us a little bit about that.

Dan: Yeah. Well actually we had nearly 90 farmers on the first in the first group.

Manda: Brilliant.

Dan: Yeah it was a really good group for a pilot project. So that was kind of like a taster. They got to try lots of different things, see what worked for their particular type and their body, and begin to build a practice for themselves, to take ownership of that in terms of their own wellbeing and how that interacts with farming. And now this is an opportunity to dive a lot deeper into that. So we’re inviting a smaller cohort. Well, we’re inviting anyone who wants to come, but it is a smaller cohort of up to 20, on a seven month journey now. 

Manda: So more of a commitment on everybody’s part.

Dan: Yeah. So these are live sessions on zoom, because we’re in different parts of the world. And it’s split into, I mean they’re interrelated but there’s two different aspects going on. So one is a continuation of embodied presence practice. So myself and and my wife Johanna, who run Earthbound together, will be continuing to teach, to engage in practice with people. The other half of this next seven month period is actually inviting them into something called cooperative inquiry. So that’s going to be facilitated by one of our team, Joan Walton, who’s from the University of York and is an expert in this process of cooperative inquiry. Which is coming together around common concerns and engaging in a process of action learning cycles, to really discuss the subject and then to go back into the world and see if things can change, you know, try things out in your own context. So that’s pertinent to everyone, but in terms of farming how is it going to affect how you work on the farm, how you relate to your animals, how you relate to your customers or suppliers? And we hope that that will add an extra dimension, which was a bit more difficult when you’re doing a self-study course, which is what farmers have identified needing, which is mutuality, which is community, which is someone else to talk to about the stuff that’s bothering you.

Manda: Yes, particularly if you’re doing regenerative farming, where you tend to be this little island of diversity amidst a sea of monocultures, with all your neighbours leaning over the fence sucking their teeth, telling you that you’ve got too many thistles and it’s going to be horrible. You’re going to destroy their monoculture. Having people to just talk things through. I’m really interested in action learning, particularly in the context of farming, where things are so seasonal that, you know, I tried this this year and it’s going to be another year before I can go back and do it slightly differently because bits of it didn’t work and I’ve thought of another way round. Tell us, for people who don’t know, I’m assuming action learning and action research are very similar, but it’s a relatively novel concept. So tell us a little bit about what that is and then how it is working in farming, and then also how people might expand it into other ways of being.

Dan: Yeah. Well, it’s interesting because it intersects really well with my background in permaculture as well. Permaculture design is this cyclical process of iteration essentially. So you come up with a plan after some careful observation, you implement the plan, you evaluate how it’s going, you accept feedback and regulation from the system, and you tweak and you go back out there again and try again. So it’s that simple. It’s a kind of iterative life design process or business design process, whatever you want to apply it to, in which you take a good chunk of time to reflect before acting. And then you take small steps of action that are easily monitorable. And you let that loop feed back and if it’s working, you build on it. If it isn’t working, you tweak, adjust, start again, or completely scratch that plan if it’s not working at all. But it’s a way of bringing a really quite deep process of reflection into all the stuff that farmers do on the farm. You know, they’re always designing things. They’re always problem solving, basically. So this is just bringing a lot more reflection into that process.

Manda: And so what feels to me different about what you’re doing, and to be fair, a lot of the regenerative farming movement, but explicitly with you here. This could become, we could do this with industrial farming; and this year I didn’t spray enough glyphosate, next year I’m going to spray twice as much glyphosate. And clearly this is not what you’re doing. Because a human being is one part of a living system on the farm. And there are a lot of variables that are going to shift, even if you do exactly the same next year. The rainfall will be different. The sun will be different. The temperatures, the wind, the insects. We’re in the middle of biophysical breakdown and the entire ecology of everything around us is shifting year on year, even if we stand totally still. And yet, what you’re offering people, if I’ve understood it, is the capacity; or you’re opening the door to the potential; of listening to not just the land, but the whole of the web of life. And the web of life is a hyper complex intelligence, I would say. I sometimes get shut down and I don’t think you’re going to do this, but people go no, no, it doesn’t know what it’s doing, and it certainly doesn’t have a plan.

Manda: And I’m not suggesting it as a plan, but I’m suggesting there’s a hyper complex awareness that we can step into and ask, what do you want of me? Instead of I want to grow 100 acres of beans and I’m going to make that happen. And it’s a really different mindset and it leads to really different outcomes. And I’m wondering how that settles? Again, you’ve got a self-selecting group of people, but it goes so strongly against the ways that we have been domesticated into thinking that humanity controls everything. That’s the definition of trauma culture. Agriculture is the enslavement of the web of life. And what you’re doing is much more stepping towards initiation culture of I am an integral part and I have a part to play, and it’s not mine to impose. And yet I need to make a living because I still exist within the death cult of predatory capitalism. How are people navigating that complex schism?

Dan: Well, the first thing to say is it’s complex and it’s not so easy. Like you say, even the farmers that are interested in regenerative farming are still within the wider hard edge system of capitalism, and they’re also mostly bringing their conditioned, domesticated mindsets as to how one should go about living one’s life. Which is, as you say, mostly goal oriented to begin with and then you either succeed or fail.

Dan: So I will grow, you know, 100 bushels of beans or whatever it is. And there is no question about that. Or I will grow my business by 10% in the next five years. Well, good luck with that, that’s not reality, is it? So we have to learn to relax into a process oriented approach to life, rather than the goal oriented approach to life, so that we’re focusing on the aspect of our own individual life and our farm system that cultivate the conditions in which resilience and hopefully thriving can occur.

Manda: Right.

Dan: So you’re kind of creating buffer in that sense, by not narrowing down your demands of life to this yield on this hectare and that’s it. And so much of what we found, a lot of people were feeding back about in terms of their struggles, is this pressure they put on themselves or they feel the pressure to achieve a goal. And then you fail constantly because that’s a never ending, unwinnable game, basically, right?

Manda: You’re running up a down escalator and it’s getting faster and you’re never going to reach the top.

Dan: Yeah, it’s exhausting and you cannot succeed in that game. And even if you can succeed in that game for a while by adding glyphosate or fertiliser or whatever, if you if you’re engaged in that kind of farming, it runs out. The energetic need is so great and the depletion of the land base is so acute that, okay, you can do that for a decade or whatever, and then you can’t anymore. So this is a kind of one eighty approach isn’t it, it’s like what is it to engage in a process orientated view of life in which I participate in what’s happening, rather than I impose a kind of false imaginary goal onto life and then get really upset when it doesn’t happen. Within that, there’s the reality of having to produce a certain amount of crop in order to earn your living. And that’s why it’s not simple. However, for example, we introduced quite a challenging notion towards the very end of the course around the difference between your preference and wholeness or reality. And actually for some people that was like, oh, wow, okay. I’ve been doing that all the time. I hold things outside of what I perceive as wholeness or goodness or how life should be. You know, the council planning committee or this neighbour that’s causing me problems with access to my land or whatever it is. And you are not congruent with reality in that moment. So therefore you’re using a huge amount of energy to try and make things how they should be in order to fit in with your concept of what is whole, what is good.

Manda: Okay.

Dan: And when we can begin to soften that a little bit, (a) you begin to realise that a drought is not out to personally attack you. It could be devastating to your crop that year, I’m not dismissing or diminishing the impact of these things. But it’s reducing that pressure that we put on ourselves to have the goal, achieve the goal or fail. And the amount of energy that’s required to keep things either in or out of what we perceive as wholeness or our reality, which is just our set of preferences essentially; we would prefer that the rain fell every three days in a light shower and slugs wanted to go on holiday somewhere else for a few months.

Dan: But it doesn’t work like that. So can you relax into the process of life? Can you relax into what is happening and engage from there? And that gives you just much more bandwidth to cope with the stuff, the shit that happens to everyone in life, you know, the uncontrollables that arrive.

Manda: So because I tend to look at things through an internal family systems lens at the moment, and I’d really like to discuss because I think you’re more probably poly vagally aligned, but I don’t think they’re mutually incompatible. So I would say, let’s suppose there’s a drought and the neighbour is denying me access to part of my land, or at least making it difficult. There are parts of me that want to push back against both of those things, against the web of life for creating a drought and against the neighbour for reducing access. How do I, as a human being, soften into those being the reality in a way that gives the parts within me a sense of agency, and doesn’t simply stuff them in a box and push them into the shadows? When my experience is if one does that, they will explode back at probably the least appropriate moment.

Dan: We do that by finding our ground at a deep level.

Manda: Thank you. Tell us a little bit more about that.

Dan: Well, you know, one definition of grounding could be a kind of continual or a regular feeling of embodied safety and connection. And what most of us feel is the opposite; we feel disembodied, we feel lost out in this cloud of worry in front of our body, above our head. It doesn’t feel safe often to be in the body because there’s so much stuff going on in there when we check in. It doesn’t feel necessarily that safe to be in the world, because everything is changing all the time and uncertain, and there’s lots of turbulence and that shuts off our connection. Because we arm ourselves, we close down, we put up barriers and we hold things outside of our safe bubble. So we need to cultivate the conditions for safety and connection in the body and that’s a multi-level experience. We often, when you think about grounding and you know, as we talked about before we started recording, it can seem a bit cliched sometimes. It’s, you know, you’ve just got to ground, you know, chill out, that kind of thing. And we assume grounding means physiological grounding normally. So it’s either nervous system down regulating or being in contact with the physical earth.

Manda: Barefoot on the grass. Which is a useful thing. I send my students out barefoot on the grass a lot. But it’s not all that there is.

Dan: It’s vital. Both of those things are vital, but it’s partial. Grounding has many more layers to it and you could split it into, you know, physiological, psycho emotional and existential layers to make a very kind of broad brush stroke discernment between those. So there’s one thing to find it possible through breathwork, through meditation, through qigong, through walking barefoot on the grass, to calm your system. That’s important. And it is, I believe, vitally important to be in regular physical contact with the living Earth for all kinds of biological, bioelectric, biochemical reasons. But then there’s this this layer of your psycho emotional life. And we build so much false ground here. This is the kind of social, vocational layer of existence. So if I get an MA in whatever, soil engineering, then I’ll be safe. If I get a partner, I’ll be safe. If I wear certain clothes, then I’ll be accepted and therefore I’ll be safe. So we’re trying to create safety all the time here, right? And it’s exhausting because it’s not real. It’s relative ground. It’s like thin ice. You can fall through at any moment. You know, your partner might leave you, or you might lose your job or your MA in soil science might count for nothing if you move to a different country and it’s not recognised or, you know, blah, blah, blah. 

Dan: So this happens individually, but it also happens culturally. So, you know, legacy media agencies that are trustworthy, or institutions that we can rely on, or whatever that is. A rules based international order,  for example, to bring in current events. It’s all relative ground, because it goes away in an instant. As soon as someone decides actually, I’m just going to drop a bomb here, and I don’t give a shit what you think.

Manda: Yes. I don’t care about the rules. And everyone’s like. But you have to. This reminds me so much of Steve Bannon was asked, way back in 2011 by Michael Morris, why does the right always win? And he said, because we’re going for headshots and you’re all still in a pillow fight. And exactly that; we’re all still assuming that everybody plays by a particular set of rules. I mean, it’s the bringing a knife to a pillow fight and we’re all still thinking that the pillows are where it’s at, and then we discover it’s not and then that shatters our reality.

Dan: So what happens? You fall through the cracks. So where’s the ground, then? So that’s when we kind of have to engage with this existential ground. Beneath all that stuff, all the movement of life beneath your identity or your false persona that you’ve been putting up in public to feel okay, rather than your actual relaxed self; beneath all that there’s something we can contact. There’s an aspect of self which is completely embedded in life, which is still, which is quiet, which is imperturbable at one level, unwoundable, unlike our psycho emotional self. And which is true ground in that sense. There’s nowhere else to fall there. And when we find that ground, we can kind of come back to those other layers we talked about. You know, from there it feels much more comfortable just to be yourself, to not hide behind a persona. It becomes safe enough to have lots of emotions moving through your body. And rather than that jumbled tangle of mess that we normally feel, there’s discernment, there’s space between them, there’s the ability to be with as your emotional life. And then your body is much more likely to heal because your nervous system is in the rest and digest states and you are more likely to take the time to take your shoes and socks off and spend some time on the earth and enjoy that.

Dan: And so even though they’re kind of three different ways in, they’re of course completely intermeshed. But that’s how we’re going to be able to live in this world where we are literally laying one cobblestone at a time in front of ourselves to work out where the path is.

Manda: Right. Okay. Thank you. And this applies obviously way beyond food and farming and land workers, and applies to everybody alive on the planet at the moment. The finding of that stillness inside of the authentic place from which there is nowhere to fall is the work of the moment. And then I think the corollary to that for me, is then being open to the web of life and being able to ask, where do you want me to put the cobblestone? Rather than the old rules, or any set of rules that I am imagining will keep me safe. I think this understanding that safety is an embodied thing, first of all, that we’re all seeking safety, that that that’s absolutely core to being human, and being able to breathe on the planet, is that we feel safe. And that our culture for so long has given us false criteria by which safety might be measured and those are falling apart. And parts of me want to say that this is a good thing because they were wrong, but it doesn’t matter whether they’re good or bad, they are falling apart. And the reality is that finding that sense of embodied self, whereby there is nowhere left to fall, is the work of just now. So can we go a little bit deeper into the ways that you are able to invite people to do this? Because my experience often is our culture. People have spent so long cut off at the neck that asking somebody to embody can be really challenging, and yet it’s what we have to do. So maybe your experience is different. Maybe simply because I find being in your presence really helps me to embody. Maybe you don’t have as much trouble with it as I do, but how do you help people actually to embody?

Dan: Well, I think you have to take it gently. And you’re right that there are some people who feel unsafe, for very good reasons, you know, from past trauma and traumatic experience, that it wasn’t safe to be a body. So they abstracted themselves from their body. So coming back into relationship with the body is a very cautious, slow experience for those people. To be completely transparent, I don’t work with a lot of people with acute trauma. Kind of chronic trauma of being an industrial human is my forte, really. So most of the people I work with are able relatively quickly to drop into experience in the body. And you titrate that, like with everything, you know, the dosage is the medicine or the poison in that sense, your body knows when it’s too much. So you listen and you can just back off. But it’s a gentle invitation to notice reality inside you, rather than listening to the stories you tell yourself about yourself. And that’s the difference, really. It’s becoming congruent or becoming real with what’s real.

Manda: Right. It’s that sense of authenticity and knowing what’s authentic. Because the stories we tell ourselves are compelling and are often very well rehearsed, and we’re very used to believing them. So for people listening, this sense of titration and knowing when to back off, how does that feel for you?

Dan: How do I notice when it’s time to back off do you mean?

Manda: Yes. Well, first, how do you notice when you’re in your body and not just telling yourself you’re in your body. I think that’s quite an important step. But then the rest.

Dan: Well, that’s quite hard for a lot of people. You know, if I ask you to close your eyes and imagine your feet for a moment, I mean, your a particular case, because you’re very practised in this kind of stuff. But do you see a picture of your feet or not? Did you notice a kind of image of your feet?

Manda: Actually no, I take my awareness to the soles of my feet, which is a slightly different thing, but I could see a picture of my feet if I needed to, I guess.

Dan: Well, most people do. Most people draw a picture like a child’s picture of a person.

Manda: Right. A little stick person sitting with their feet on the floor.

Dan: So this is my foot. This is the edge of my foot. This is what it looks like. And it’s a concept. It’s a dead concept. It’s a memory or it’s a fiction. Okay, so when I ask you to actually feel your feet by inhabiting them, so the soles of the feet are a great place to do that. Feel the aliveness in your feet, there’s tingling there, there’s pulsing, there’s pressure, there’s temperature, there’s flow. There’s life. Can you feel that, firstly?

Manda: Yep.

Dan: Does that feel bound by the container of your skin? Does it feel bigger than what you imagined your foot to be?

Manda: Um. That’s an interesting question. I automatically sent roots down into the earth, which is probably not what you asked me to do. And those are not bound by the container of my skin at all.

Dan: Just feeling the energy, that kind of life hum of the soles of your feet. For me, it’s clearly bigger than the boundaried body.

Manda: Yes, yes.

Dan: So it’s more like you’re wearing energy boots or something. So that’s real. What’s not real is the drawing you made in your head of your foot. So it’s the invitation to kind of discern between a concept, a memory, and imagination. There’s nothing wrong with imagination, but in this context it’s not what’s really here. And then getting good at that, like settling into what’s here now, really.

Manda: Right. And you have an entire practice. Tell us, since we’re here with what’s here now. Tell us about that, because I find that fascinating in that it mirrors something that we do within Accidental Gods and Dreaming Awake, but in a different frame. And I’m really interested to see how it works.

Dan: Yeah, it’s a practice that I’ve been doing now for about four and a half years with two women who are coaches also. We met on a training and we’ve continued as a group, and we practice every week. So you can do this in pairs or threes. I call it ‘what’s here now’ and it’s embodied voiced relational meditation. So it’s embodied in that we’re doing the kind of thing that we just explored together; we’re sensing what’s here, really, in our body right now. It’s voiced in that we take it in turns to inquire into ourselves. So one person inquires, one person notices what’s here now in their body, in their field. And the other person holds space for that, so receives that information. So you’re asked to share verbally what you notice. And that’s actually really important, because a lot of people struggle to do this kind of noticing inside when they’re on their own. Because your brain kicks off and you go into a different, you know, you skip around and you get lost and you forget. Whereas you’re kind of held into a contract with another person for this period of time, ten minutes each, and it’s a chance to actually vocalise how you are rather than present how you should be, how you think you should be, which nobody ever gets a chance to do in life. We’re constantly presenting how we think we should be, to feel safe. Whereas this is an opportunity to express very simply how you are to another human being and have that be received.

Speaker3: Right.

Dan: So it’s like meditation in that it’s a turning inwards, it’s a being with what is. But it’s relational, you’re doing it with another human. And that for me is super potent because it changes what’s possible, then. It begins to normalise that it’s okay to be yourself with another person, someone that you don’t know. I mean, I do this with two women I do know, but we’ve started a group where anyone can come and practice this. So we’re getting used to being ourself in mutuality with someone. And that’s that’s a big deal.

Manda: It’s huge.

Dan: And people find that very potent as a practice. I would say it’s the cheapest form of therapy going. It’s quick. You know, we’re talking ten minutes a week if you want. You can do it more.

Manda: Yes, that’s 20 minutes of your time.

Dan: 20 minutes of your time once or twice a week. And it is transformative. It changes how you feel about yourself. It invites you to depth really quickly. So you drop through all that. Everyone notices all the loud stuff first. Oh, I’ve got an achy shoulder or I’m tired, or there’s this buzz of caffeine in my chest that I’ve noticed or whatever it is. You know, all the loud stuff gets heard and witnessed and shared first, but then very quickly you drop through that, to what’s underneath that, what are the subtler information fields that you’re listening to? What’s beneath even that? What’s this feeling of being, of presence, of stillness. And within ten minutes you can drop so deep with another person, in a way that could take you much longer to do on your own in meditation. Or in fact, never in meditation, because a lot of people just never get there. They’re just constantly in the game of trying to calm. Whereas this is much more. This is about like deep relationality with yourself and with the world, with other people.

Manda: It also seems to me that you’re building trust, because you have to absolutely trust the person that you’re with, that they’re not going to weaponize the vulnerability that you are producing, evoking, embodying. And that in itself is huge. And I will put in the show notes the link to where people can sign up for this. And very clearly you have the person listening is simply paying full attention and is not trying to fix or comment on. You’re not feeding back, you’re simply holding witness. And that also is an extraordinary meditative process, I would say. And it seems to me exactly as you said, a lot of people really struggle, particularly now we’re in the attention harvesting phase of digital media; to meditate in a way that is intention is the focus of attention, and we’re endeavouring to train our attention to focus on a thing; whatever that thing is, from a candle flame to our breath to our being, to a felt sense of gratitude or compassion or whatever. But when you’re with another person, still, and I am concerned that this may change with future generations, should there be future generations. But at the moment our conditioning is to to be in relation with someone, people can hold a conversation for, we are holding it for an hour. And I don’t know about you, but my attention is with this conversation. And yet people struggle to hold attention on themselves for for more than a couple of seconds.

Manda: We can hold attention when we’re in relation with somebody. And so that sense of relationality allows the attention to be there and allows us to feel safe to practice what it is to be authentic and authentically vulnerable and embodied in relation. And that strikes me as… Its genius. It’s an extraordinary thing to be practising and then to experience, I imagine. And again, this may not be true, so you can tell me. There’s something about all the work that Stephen Porges and the poly vagal theory people have done, and the heart math people; but when we are fully embodied, fully present in ventral vagal tone, where we’re in the rest and digest parasympathetic creative, spacious place, that creates a different energy. And simply being in that energetic space can help other people to regulate. So we’re creating co regulation from self-regulation. And my experience is that this works on zoom. That that I can be here and you can be in Finland and co regulation works. Which is kind of amazing and presumably is due to our capacity to read very, very small signals in vocal tone and facial differences. Because otherwise we’re talking about kind of quantum entanglement, which may be a thing, but I’m not relying on it. But I’m guessing we are very, very good at reading voice and facial recognition. How does that land?

Dan: Very well. I agree. Yeah, I mean, just to come back to what you’re saying about the one who’s receiving or witnessing. I do like to think of it as receiving, actually, rather than just witnessing, because it’s more engaged in that sense. More embodied.

Manda: That’s true. Thank you.

Dan: It’s as important, as transformational as the sharing. Because again, when do we hold space where we’re not always, it’s very rare and some of us may be better at it than others, but most of us are thinking about ourself often. Not selfishly, but just self-referentially, constantly, because of that lack of safety. So to let go of that as an act of service to another human being. So that I’m really here. I’m really clear internally. The space to receive this. And that enables this kind of ‘we are’ space together. That’s just so rare. But then to come back to what you’re saying about the co regulation. I have a theory that there is no such thing as self-regulation, because we’re never alone. So what we perceive to be self regulation is actually coming back into relationship with the web of life, with life. 

Dan: That there is no self. There is only co regulation. We’re hardwired for that. And we’re never alone. You know, whether it be the bacteria in our body or the breath that’s come from the boreal forest that’s in your lungs or whatever that is, you’re not alone. When you practice ‘self regulation’, you’re just coming back into a remembrance of that relationship, I think. I don’t know how that feels for you.

Manda: Yes. That makes a lot of sense. Thank you. Yes. I’ve been reading a lot about self regulation recently, but you’re right, that makes a lot of sense. Yes.

Dan: It might be controversial to some people, but it just feels true to me inherently.

Manda: Yeah. Yeah.

Dan: So then the idea of co regulation is actually much more inviting in a way. There are much more avenues into co regulation, because there is just co regulation. So obviously we feel that viscerally with a with another human or an animal, or we can feel that with all aspects of life. But that mammalian response is strong for example. So there is something special about that. It’s in our DNA, we are looking for that mammalian contact. Without getting into quantum entanglement, just to come back to the how it works on zoom. It works so well on zoom. I work exclusively on zoom because I live in the middle of nowhere in Finland, so I have to. But we can reach such depths together with clients and with groups. And I do believe in beyond just the cues that we pick up from each other and I agree with you that we’re probably picking those up at a very subtle level. There is an energetic field that we’re tuning into. Like, I can feel the space between you and me right now.

Manda: You’re right actually, yes. As I was saying that. Yes. Yes. And when we do the shamanic work, there are particular things where we switch off the video and actually the sound. And let’s say you’re in Finland and somebody else might be in Spain, and we connect them in the shamanic realm and they share a journey. And that’s not picking up any cues at all. And so you’re right. Even as I was saying that there were various other parts of me saying no, that’s not true. So you’re right. One of my guides actually came out of the blue when I was having an Emmette treatment; so I’m lying on a treatment table and lovely Maria was doing various beautiful things to my body and this guide turned up and as if they were standing beside me, said, ‘The world is not what you think it is’. And I wasn’t even thinking about this kind of thing. I have no idea what I was thinking, but it was like, okay, I have to stop and listen to that because that seemingly came out of left field and nothing ever comes out of left field. There’s a reason. And ‘the world is not what you think it is’ has, I think there was January of this year that that was said, just keeps unfolding for me.

Manda: Stop thinking that you know what the world is, because whatever you think, the one thing you can be sure about is that it’s not that. And so that actually frees up huge parts of creative possibility from having to define how we think the world is. But it’s hard because there are other parts that want to know how the world is. And that even just watching that interplay inside of the parts that really want some kind of predictability, of the cobblestones and other parts going, but this guide said not. And I trust this guide with my sanity and my life and if the world is not what I think it is and never will be, then just stop. Just stop trying. And that’s been an interesting dance these last six months and will be forever, I’m sure. And so let’s talk a little bit about this, because I think this is a place that I very rarely get to go on the podcast, and we can go here. Tell me your experience of energetic connection to people if you can, if there’s stuff that you can say without breaking confidences.

Dan: Sure. Yeah. Well, it’s been a really interesting capacity building learning journey for me. I was very disconnected from my body, and I became pretty ill because of it. And so my journey into this, it’s the classic kind of wounded healer type thing of most people that come into the healing arts and this kind of work. In that I realised I was totally disconnected. I could hear that very loud stuff like, your body is shaking so much that you can’t hold a cup of tea to your mouth, that you must be dying, kind of information. But I realised at that point that I needed to kind of radically change how I related to myself. And so that process of embodiment and attunement has kind of deepened over the years to the point, and I’m sure, like you just said, it’s a lifelong, perhaps many lifelongs journey. But I’m beginning to get to a level of sensitivity where it’s quite common for me to sense what’s going on inside a client’s body at the same time, the energy that’s there. I used to be a bit shy about naming that, but mostly I will name that now. And normally it’s pretty trustworthy. It’s normally true what I can feel, and it’s not me having the feeling; it’s really interesting to discern that. I feel it in my body, but I know it’s not my feeling, if you see what I mean. So that I can have a very strong sensation.

Dan: Like for example, with the client recently, we were just tuning in to various energy centres in the body just to see what was there. It was kind of what’s here now, but with a bit of focus to what we might call a chakra system or energy centres. And when they got to the crown area, there was a big uplift, you know, this kind of uplift of energy feeling from the base of the spine, up through their body. And it was so palpable to me, it was just like a big magnet above the head. So I named it and they went yeah, that’s happening. And they hadn’t experienced that before, it was a new feeling for them. So those kind of things, that kind of sensitivity. And there are people that are so much more naturally, you know, their type is so much more sensitive. I’m not one. I’m just a normal, not very sensitive human, I think. But I’ve learned this through practice and time, and I find that quite encouraging, to be just a plebby normal person that wasn’t born with memories of being a monk or something. Yeah, none of that. Just a normal person.

Manda: You’re not the seventh son of the seventh son.

Dan: Yes, exactly. And I’m learning how to do that. And my sensitivity is increasing over the years. My capacity to be with energy is increasing over the years. So that’s, I hope, encouragement for anyone else that’s interested in this.

Manda: Yes. Because it feels to me that what we’re talking about is expanding what is called psychic capacity, which makes it already sound like it’s something difficult, complicated, and other, because our culture is not very open to that. But exactly as you said, my experience is if we undo the domesticated conditioning of the trauma culture that told us this is impossible, and the Citadel mind (this is a phrase that I got from Bob Faulkner, who got it from Tanya Luhrmann) but the sense that what happens in the cage of our skull is ours alone, and nothing comes in and nothing goes out, which is manifestly untrue. And not a single other culture on the planet believes it, but our culture depends on it for the reality that it creates. So undoing that involves undoing quite a lot of the joint agreements that we’ve made in our culture. And the interesting thing about that, Rupert Sheldrake who has had one of the few Ted talks that’s ever been actually taken down, but is nonetheless a very interesting person. And he says because he is at core a scientist, he gets invited to scientific conventions to go and talk about his concepts of morphic resonance and things like that. And everybody sits there with their arms folded in the body language and shaking their heads and going, this is impossible. And he says, two glasses of wine into dinner, and they’re queuing round the table to tell him their personal experiences of why he’s right.

Dan: Yeah.

Manda: And there are very few people who are so invested in this joint hallucination that they don’t at heart know it not to be true. But it’s like when you begin to study any form of therapeutic intervention, you discover there is no such thing as a normal family or normal upbringing or a normal way of behaving. But we all still somehow hold this agreement that the world is the way we say it is, while we know that it isn’t. So I think, and this is partly why I love doing podcasts with people as switched on as you, is we can go guys, it’s not true. And so then once one begins to sense from other people, whether it’s visual or auditory or kinaesthetic or that felt knowing, then it seems to me that the key question is how do I know when this is an authentic sense from the other person, and when am I projecting this onto them? And particularly if one has any position of perceived authority. So if I’m a therapist or a healer or a coach it really matters that I know my own body’s energetic system and predispositions and contours and colours and textures, so that I know when this is mine and I know when it’s yours. First of all, does that make sense? And second, how do you discern what’s mine from what’s yours?

Dan: Yeah. I think it’s really important that we don’t impose. That’s why the question is what’s here now? Not, I think you should be feeling this.

Manda: What would I like to be here now.

Dan: Or I’m pointing this out, you should feel it now. And there is lots of that kind of stuff going on, quite subtly as well, just cueing you within guided meditations for example, to have certain experiences. And okay, I can kind of manufacture that, but am I experiencing that or not? So it’s really important to me that what we’re dealing with is reality in the moment as it is. So, for example, if I notice something going on with someone else, I’ve got another recent memory from a client that had a sense of constriction in their throat, and I could feel that myself. I won’t say ‘your throat is throat’s constricted, isn’t it?’ I’ll say ‘I’m feeling some constriction in my throat. What are you feeling?’ And that will often unlock them to talk about it. And sometimes it might not be the biggest thing that’s going on for them and we’ll move on. You know, I’ve picked up on something that isn’t pertinent to where they want to explore. But normally it is. So then it comes down to my integrity, I guess, in that sense that I’m not trying to push anything on anyone. And I try to do that with world views and everything really. I kind of have a worldview and like I said, my only belief system is that really we are life and everything else I’m interested in, but I don’t know. So why would I preach to other people what the answer is? I don’t know how the universe works. So yeah, so it’s allowing people to have their own experience, but then me being a guide to help them discern, what’s going on really, so that they can disentangle other people’s stuff from their own,  from reactive body stuff to kind of deeper knowing, information, and just helping them to map themselves in a way by getting to know themselves really well, knowing their own language.

Manda: Right, to find their own truth that is genuinely true, as opposed to what various parts of us are panicking and putting into place to try and paper over the cracks.

Dan: And I’m doing that for myself all the time within a session. You know, it’s a constant, not a neurotic checking in, but it’s a how am I? What’s happening here? Have I tensed somewhere in response to what’s going on? Am I contracted somewhere or how’s my energy? And obviously, as you know, from any kind of coaching or therapeutic relationship, that my own grounded presence as a coach or a therapist is quite important in order to allow someone else to relax. So there’s that checking in with me and then there’s the checking in with the other person, and then there is the field space. That you have to check into that.

Manda: Exactly.

Dan: Because there’s information in there that, you know, if we think about it from an ecological perspective, it’s an eco tone between two systems. It’s the edge effect. There is more life in the space between a forest and a prairie, the forest or a shoreline, there are more species, there is more life in the edge. So why wouldn’t that be true of the edge between people?

Manda: The edge between you and I or the listeners and us. Or groups. Because it seems to me that a group can create its own energy and you can have an edge place between two groups. I’m really curious when you do your Be here now with three people in the space, are two people witnessing responding and one person speaking. Or do they take different roles?

Dan: No, we do it like that. Yeah. So we just take it in turns to be the sharer and the other two hold the space.

Manda: Okay, so you have a 30 minute session instead of a 20 minute session with a bit of time at the end.

Dan: Yeah, with a bit of chatting, top and tailing. And we do tend to, in a triad like that, we do tend to take it upon ourselves, pretty much the only thing we need say is, ‘so please tell me what’s what’s here now’, you know, that’s the question. And then the only time we would intervene ever is if someone is clearly just talking about something. They’ve gone into abstraction. They’re not actually experiencing. So the only question then would be, and how does that feel in the body or something like that, just bringing them back to here, embodied reality. So one person of the triad might take more responsibility for that kind of role as you swap around. And timekeeping, for example. We give we give people a two minute warning when they’re at eight minutes of their ten minutes, just so they’ve got some idea.

Manda: Yes. It’s not too abrupt at the end.

Dan: Yeah. You need a little gentle off ramp. 

Manda: Brilliant. And for people new to this, because obviously with your core group that you’ve been doing with this for four and a half years, I’m guessing the tendency to start talking about instead of staying with is pretty small. But for people who are coming new, how long does it take in general… This is a general question. It might not work. Let’s see. But I’m just wondering for people listening, they’re going to be imagining this. And there’s always someone for whom this is the first time they’ve listened to the podcast, so some of these ideas might be very new. And imagining oneself sitting in this space I can imagine is potentially, possibly not, but I think probably a little bit daunting. Could be quite daunting. And everybody’s tendency in the first place is to start talking about, rather than to stay with. Or not everybody, but it’s our culture’s conditioning to do that. And being gentle with each other, having the integrity, the compassion, the generosity of spirit, to be with and gently bring people back is quite a learned skill. So do you tend to have experienced people with less experienced people? Is that a thing?

Dan: Yeah. I mean this actual What’s Here Now club that we’re calling it is is a new thing. So there are some people that have practised for a couple of years on various other things with me, but then there are people that have never done it before. I pair people up generally, and then I just invite the more experienced partner to go first, to model it. So that helps settle the other person normally anyway, because they get ten minutes to kind of just relax into it.

Manda: Yeah. And creates that eco tone that you were talking about. So there’s already an energetic space that is aligned and still and grounded in an ideal world.

Dan: Yeah. And you will, just as a receiver, you will ground through that. But you’re right, it’s a weird thing to do to begin with, if you’ve never done that before, that’s quite a daunting thing, I agree. But that’s part of the practice. David Wright talks about robust vulnerability; it’s like, oh okay, what I’m feeling is terror. I can feel a clench in my gut or my chest. My breathing is shallow. You know, bring that into the space. You don’t have to pretend to be all grounded, you know, you are how you are. And that gives the other person permission to go, oh okay. You know, they don’t say it, but ah, okay. I was feeling a bit of that. I’ve never met this person before so we settled together. But normally after one go at this, there are often people that say the first time around ‘oh it’s really hard, isn’t it? I don’t really know what I’m doing’. And you just have to kind of encourage people. It is really one of those things learned by doing. I can tell you about it until the cows come home, but you’ve got to do it.

Manda: Well, I was wondering, could we do it? But first of all, we’re kind of over time. And second, I think ten minutes each might be quite hard. Do you want to give people a flavour of a minute each?

Dan: Yeah, if you like. Yeah. That’s fine. Would you like to go first or second?

Manda: Um, I’ll go second and I will time keep, because I always do. But if you don’t mind if I chime at the start and at the end, that will help me to ground. So here we go.

Dan: So I would just indicate that I’m ready and you ask me the question, what’s here now?

Manda: What’s here now for you, Dan?

Dan: I can feel a heaviness in the palms of my hands. They’re in contact with my legs, and I can feel a downward flow of energy that comes with that, that I can now sense flowing down my legs, down my calves. There’s a lot of subtle energy tingling in the soles of my feet. I can feel a kind of rising joy in my cheeks. There’s a feeling like a smile wants to break out, and the kind of flush that comes with that of something enervating.

Manda: Five seconds left.

Dan: Okay. Thank you.

Manda: I mean, it isn’t really long enough, is it?

Dan: Yeah. But you get the idea. Would you like to have a go?

Manda: Yes. I’ll just ping the time very gently.

Manda: Yeah. So, Manda, tell me what’s here now.

Manda: I have a wish to loosen my shoulders. And as soon as I drop into my body, I am aware of a hyper alert, a tension in my solar plexus. That if I sit into it is quite bright and jagged and wants to sink. And then expand. And it has a very high pitched noise at the centre of it that a part of me wants to be the chime, and the rest of me knows is a scream. There is a part in me screaming inside that is very unsafe in the world and here. And naming it feels very jagged.

Dan: Yeah. We’re coming to time.

Manda: Okay, let me just ground that out. Thank you. I can feel that ten minutes of that would be very, very interesting. 

Manda: So, yeah. I’m teaching this weekend. We’ve got a four day intermediate healing course. I can feel that, because part of when we’re working with energy healing, what matters is what we sense that is not ours. And the absolute core to being worthwhile at all in any kind of energy healing is knowing what’s mine, so that I can know what comes in. When the instinct comes to to work on, I don’t know, somebody’s left knee, if it’s not authentic, there is no point. I’m not going to be useful as a healer. Whereas if that’s real, then I can work with it, and then I can flow with whatever flows. And helping people to know what’s real inside is absolutely crucial. So thank you.

Dan: Thank you.

Manda: That might prove to be really useful. So anything else that we haven’t talked about that you wanted to talk about. We could talk about this for days and weeks. We talked about Calmer Farmer. Do you want to talk about your Being Earthbound practice circle, just to tell people that it exists and what it is?

Dan: So since we last spoke, we’ve launched an ongoing practice circle. Well, there are two opportunities to practice with this. So there’s this What’s Here Now club which is one Saturday a month just for an hour, which you can engage with on its own. But if people are interested in a deeper dive, we pair that with a longer session on a Friday once a month. So it’s two sessions a month. And that’s really, you know, the strapline for that is growing up, waking down and reaching out.

Manda: Beautiful.

Dan: So if that’s of interest.

Manda: I have put the links in the show notes. You’re working with Substack mostly it seems like.

Dan: Yeah, but all those links you can find on Earthbound as well.

Manda: Okay, I will put a link to that too. Thank you. And people sign up and then they can explore the depth and the breadth of this. And it feels so important. This feels to me, the single most important thing that we can do is to have that sense of becoming earthbound, such that we can then become part of the co regulation of life and let go of our ideas that we know where we’re going, and we have to fix the unfixable on our own. And that seems to me a gift to everybody, that understanding that we’re not alone and we are an integral part of something bigger. And all we have to do is let go into that and then the world is what it is. So thank you, Dan, for coming back onto the Accidental Gods podcast. I feel we ought to connect again probably sometime next spring and see where we’re at. Thank you.

Dan: Yeah, I would love that. Thank you very much as well. It’s been a pleasure as always.

Manda: Always. Thank you.

Manda: And that’s it for another week. Enormous thanks to Dan for all that he is and does. This feels genuinely so timely. I have no idea where the world will be by the time this goes out, but I can’t imagine it’s suddenly going to have plunged into peace and harmony, bioregional living and a whole new economy predicated on flourishing of planet and people. Much as I would like that to be the case, I’m guessing it’s probably not going to happen in the next ten days. In which case, each one of us can definitely benefit from all that Dan and Joanna are offering. I have put links in the show notes to all of it, but if you don’t want to head there, then go to earthbound.fi (Because they’re in Finland) and you will find everything there. Or go to Dan’s sub stacks which are Calmer Farmer and Being Earthbound. And whatever you do, finding ways to become fully embodied, to listen to the intelligence of our body mind and our heart mind and allow our head minds to become in service to these, to become in service to life, feels absolutely the work of this moment. The old system is breaking apart. We have to let go of all that we believe to be true, and begin to take on board the possibilities of everything opening up in ways we couldn’t possibly imagine. This could be an incredibly Inspiring moment as well as utterly terrifying. So please, whatever you do, however you do it, get into your body. Allow the soft animal of your body to love what it loves. That’s straight out of Mary Oliver, and it’s absolutely one of the best phrases to take on board for this moment. So go for it. You will feel better, I swear.

Manda: And as ever, we’ll be back next week with another conversation. In the meantime, thanks to Caro C for the music at the head and foot. To Alan Lowles, of Airtight Studios for the production. Lou Mayor for the video, Anne Thomas for the transcripts, Faith Tilleray for the website and the tech and all of the conversations that keep us moving forward. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for listening. If you made it this far, five stars, a subscription, a like, whatever, on the podcast app of your choice would be really welcome. It absolutely does help the algorithm. And my goal for the rest of this year is that we increase by an order of magnitude. So if you can do anything to help that, we would be enormously grateful. And as always, word of mouth is the best way to spread. So if you know of anybody else who needs to know how to grow and how to embody how to co regulate with the web of life, then please do send them this link. And if they’re going to find it useful, please send them all of the links that are at the foot of the show notes. And that’s it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.

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