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Jan. 24, 2021 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:02:59
Edition 513 - Ya'Acov Darling Khan
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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Well, thank you very much for all of your emails.
I hope that wherever you are, whether it's hot or whether it's cold, I hope that you're bearing up and getting by.
I'm just kind of waiting for the springtime here, but you know that.
I've said that before, so I'm not going to bore you with that.
If you want to go to my website and email me, that would be nice.
Always nice to hear from you.
It's theunexplained.tv, designed and created by Adam.
You can follow the link and email me from there.
And if you'd like to make a donation to the online show, that would be great.
Got that all done.
Thank you to Adam, and thank you to Haley also for booking the guests, including the one that we're about to speak with.
Now, the show that we're about to do kind of ties into a lot of email communications that I've had over the last year, and also a lot of experiences professionally that I've had over the last year.
What I've learned is that the world is full of balanced, nice, and decent people, and I hear from them a lot.
And there are also, it seems to me, more and more very, very angry people out there.
And it's understandable if you think about the pressures that people are facing, all of us, in lockdown, fear for our incomes, that includes me, all of the things that are there to concern us.
And in some people, that generates anger against people who might see the world in a different way.
I think there's less acceptance around these days and more willingness to go for people.
So I think there's a lot of stress and tension here, which is why I'm about to do a conversation that I wouldn't perhaps normally do.
It's with a man who's spent a lifetime studying shamanism and how you can, I suppose, enlighten your inner flame, seek your inner power, and effectively help yourself.
And how ancient wisdom can perhaps do that for you too.
So if this is the kind of thing that you don't want to hear and you want to hear ghost stories or space stories or science or UFOs, then this conversation is not for you and please turn it off now.
But if you want to listen to something different, then I think you might enjoy the conversation that I'm about to have with a man called Yaakov Darling Khan in the southwest of England.
His new book is called Shaman, Invoking Power, Presence, and Purpose at the Core of Who You Are.
And I just thought, and you can tell me, I'm sure you will if you think I'm wrong, that at this point in time, it might be a conversation that's worth having.
Just for itself.
You see what you think.
So I don't think I've got anything else to say.
I'm not going to ramble on.
Just to remind you, the website is theunexplained.tv.
Please send me an email.
When you do, tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
And I've had a lot of email lately from people who are really suffering in the midst of the situation that we find ourselves in.
And I totally relate and totally feel sympathy with you.
I am sure in my heart, even on the worst days, that we're going to come through all of this because we always have.
Humanity always has.
It may take time, but we will.
We will overcome, as Song once said, once intoned, I think is the word.
All right, let's get to the southwest of England now.
Jakov Darling Khan is there.
Yaakov, thank you very much for coming on my show.
You're more than welcome.
Pleasure to be with you.
Now, look, we're recording this.
The weather forecasters are telling us that certain parts of the country are heading for snow and a bit of a freeze.
Talk to me about where you are and what the weather is like there.
I'm in the southwest corner of the United Kingdom on the edge of Dartmoor, which is we don't have much wilderness left in this country, but Dartmoor is still wilderness.
It used to be ancient oak forest and there's lots of old volcanic, you'd call them in, in America, you'd call them hills, I think.
I think so.
I think they're gently undulating to us.
They look pretty impressive.
That's right.
If you're in America, you've got the Rocky Mountains and various other things.
I think they'd just be nursery slopes for them.
Absolutely.
Yes.
We're very blessed.
We live on the edge of Ugbra Beacon, which is one of those tours.
And we kind of feel like we're nestled into her skirts, just protected.
Beautiful place.
Okay, for my American listeners, a tour is a little hill.
Those of us who went on holiday to Devon, we know all about the various tours there.
And when you're 10 years of age, you get taught about those things when you go on holiday down there, which a lot of us did.
When we were brought up in Liverpool, which you were too.
I certainly was.
Yeah, I was amazed to hear that, Howard.
Yeah, I was born in Crosby, where I believe you lived.
And I went to school there as well.
And it was a terrible time because my grandfather was a Manchester City football supporter.
And when I was about three or four, I think he injected something like blue blood into me or something.
And I was going to school in Liverpool.
And Liverpool at that time were winning everything.
And my team never won anything.
And so it was years and years of suffering.
Well, football ebbs and flows, of course.
In the 70s and the 80s, I think Manchester City were on a roll.
They were the big news in Manchester.
Then, of course, for all these years, it's become Manchester United, David Beckham, and you name a star player.
They've probably touched Manchester United in some way.
They've passed through there.
And Liverpool, likewise, not that I thought we'd be talking to football on this, but Liverpool, likewise, they've had their ebbs and flows.
And of course, they're back now at the top.
So I understand what it would have been like to have been in Liverpool and not to be a supporter of Liverpool or Everton.
Difficult, I think, is the word.
Monday morning was a time of suffering.
God.
Oh, well, we're both in different places now and doing different things quite radically.
How do you describe, before we get into this conversation, which is going to be, I suspect, different from many conversations that I do here, how do you describe yourself?
Well, I am a practicing shaman, and a shaman is a traditional healer in the old term.
And it's not a title that I chose for myself.
It's actually been rather a difficult path to accept and understand what it means to play that role in the modern world.
And that's been a really deep challenge over probably three decades.
In terms of really who I am, what I am, primarily, I'm a husband to my wife.
And, you know, that's my number one priority, making sure she has what she needs.
You know what they say?
Happy wife, happy husband.
Exactly.
First things first, exactly.
Exactly.
And we've been together 34 years.
And our work we've developed is called movement medicine.
And movement medicine is a physical embodied meditation practice that brings together teachings from the psychotherapeutic, from the ancient shamanic, from more the modern neuroscientific,
to systems theory to understand how change happens and what's effective in terms of supporting people from all walks of life to discover more about who they are, what matters to them, and what their role is in this life.
Okay, well, that's a big brief.
That's a very large remit.
It is.
It is.
And it's a privileged remit as well, because we get to really be with people as they are asking themselves the important questions, you know, like what actually matters to me?
You know, when it comes down to it, what is it in my life that really gives me a sense of purpose and meaning?
And could I give more attention and time and space to that?
We might call that soul, the unique gift that we see that every single person that we meet, and we've traveled the world teaching in the past 32 years, and we've met thousands and thousands of people from all walks of life.
And in a way, yeah, it's a big remit, but in a way, it's very simple because our job is to give our attention to what's fascinating in a human being, what shines in them, what switches them on, what gives them that twinkle in their eye, that spark.
And that's what our work's been about over all this time.
Now, I'm not sure how much of this I'm going to buy into.
Hard-nosed journalist I'm supposed to be, but I've got to tell you, there is a, you know, not a great one for quoting the Bible, but I'll quote it here.
One of the commandments is, thou shalt not worship any graven image.
Okay?
Now, the reason I'm saying that to you is that I think an awful lot of people in this world have turned their careers into a graven image that they worship.
I did.
You know, radio has been a massive part of my life.
It still is.
And for a long, long period, it was everything.
And I've come to realize over the years that I'm very lucky to be able to do it.
Some people say that I do it okay, which is nice.
I've won some awards for it.
But it became the only thing in my life for a long time.
It became the driving force in it.
It is no longer.
And I think that's good.
But I think an awful lot of people probably, and I'm not coming at this from any mystical point of view, I'm just coming at this from a sort of general health point of view.
An awful lot of people are coming to the same realization that they have built the foundations of their lives on things that are not as important as they thought they were.
Absolutely.
I think that's absolutely true.
And, you know, I thank you very much for being so very honest about your own journey with that.
I recognize that journey in myself.
You know, I spent my 20s as a wannabe, my 30s kind of wondering why on earth I'd spent so much time driving towards a particular outcome, my 40s kind of really asking the deeper questions.
And as, you know, now in my 50s, I do have that sense of my role in terms of my work.
That's one part of my life.
And of course, you know, that we're in the midst of this massive pandemic, which has thrown an awful lot of us back on ourselves to really ask those questions.
Like, you know, is my work actually the most important thing?
And the thing is, for me, there's a balance.
There's a real balance to be had.
I consider myself just to be really blessed.
I have good health.
I have a partner who I've been together with since my early 20s.
And we've really worked hard to be in the harvest of our relationship where we actually are learning to love each other more rather than become more irritated with one another as the years go by.
Those things have become more and more important.
In fact, they're the ground that we stand on.
And it's interesting.
I was talking to my wife the other day and going, it's very odd.
You know, I never, I'm not sure I had an image of how I'd be as an old man, you know, as I'm approaching just over halfway through my 50s.
Not old, but approaching elderhood, I would say.
I never had that sense of who I'd be.
And I see myself now with my little puppy walking the hills of Dartmoor, just being a man on the land, enjoying the real simple things and working to look after the little piece of land that we have here and, you know, making sure my wife has what she needs.
And those things have become like a really deep sense of contentment, which is, I suppose, more about being who I am, not just about what I do in the world and getting my identity from some external idea of success, which is, I think, what you're talking about.
Yeah, I think so.
I get exactly what you're saying.
You told me, Yako, that you were a wannabe for a while, a wannabe want.
Well, I wanted to be a shaman because I thought being a shaman was somehow special and exotic and would make me into, you know, give me some kind of sense of being a special human being who had some kind of special relationship to the powers of life.
You know, I'd met shamans and those shamans had really inspired me.
And in fact, the language that they spoke, it was the first language that helped me to make sense of my own experience growing up.
And so I had a lot of respect for those guys.
And, you know, I had one teacher who said to me when I was in my very early 20s, you know, I travel around the world doing what I love doing more than anything else.
I get well paid.
And isn't that a good way to live?
And I kind of went, yeah, that sounds like a great way to live.
And I'd love some of that.
And, you know, and he was very well respected.
And I liked the look of that.
But, you know, in your 20s, you don't really, I certainly didn't understand what occupying that role in my community, the community that we work in, which is, you know, very diverse.
I didn't know what it would mean.
I didn't understand what it would mean for me personally, what I would have to go through myself in order to land in that place.
I also didn't realize at that time that being a shaman isn't something that you want and then decide, well, I've done enough now.
Now I can call myself a shaman.
It's traditionally, you never get to call yourself that.
Your elders or your community recognize that in you.
And it's a role, it's a vocation.
But you didn't tell your careers officer at school, I presume, that you wanted to be a shaman.
No, actually, you know what I told him?
I said I wanted to be a journalist.
You don't want to do that.
So is that what you were trying to do?
Or did you decide at 18, I'm going to be a shaman?
Well, what happened was, you know, I had a lot of experiences as a child.
You know, I used to speak to my great-grandmother after she died regularly.
My dream life was much more real to me than my waking life.
I actually, you know, couldn't wait to get to bed as a kid because my dreams felt that much more real to me than my waking existence.
If I had been living in an indigenous community in the forest somewhere, they'd have just taken me to the shaman and said, look, will you look after this one and teach him what he needs to do with this?
But, you know, I was growing up in a Jewish family.
My first, what I really wanted to be was I wanted to be a rabbi because that was, it had that sense of spirituality.
And that was spirituality in my family meant being a rabbi.
But as I became a teenager, and of course, like any teenager, I wanted to fit in.
I wanted to belong.
I didn't want to be some strange on-the-edge alternative psychic lunatic.
I wanted to, you know, I wanted to be part of the gang.
And so that kind of experience, I pushed away.
I moved away from it.
And then in my early 20s, I was playing golf in London and I was on a golf course and in the middle of a storm under a golf umbrella with my mate standing next to me, we were in physical contact.
It was raining heavily.
And the umbrella got hit by lightning.
My friend got thrown off me.
And I felt like I'd been literally like a tent peg, just banged into the ground.
And no harm, no physical marking, no, no illness, but a real sense of I could, perhaps even should be dead.
And I'm not.
And something woke up in me then.
In that meeting with my own mortality, I just, I felt like, okay, I've got to get down to work here.
I've got to come back to the sense of what mattered to me as a child.
I need to discover what this is about.
And then I set myself out on a road to try to find people who could teach me about the sorts of things I was interested in.
Okay, do you think something saved you because you were you?
No, not particularly.
I think it's, you know, I think there's a, you know, I think it's partly chance and partly good fortune and partly just actually, you know, as I've grown older, in a lot of indigenous communities, being hit by lightning is a sure sign that you ought to train as a shaman.
So it's given me a real passport to work with elder shamans in far-flung places where I've been able to learn a lot about different traditional ways of healing and ways of seeing the world and seeing our place in it, which I think are very helpful to us human beings.
So I don't think I would say because of any sense of specialness.
I think it's just a matter of chance, really.
But there was certainly a sense in me of I'd been given a second chance.
And you decide you want to be a shaman, you want to be a wise person, a healer, I don't know, a guru may be.
Would you call it a guru?
I think, no, I mean, one of my teachers described the role of being a guru of sitting on a stage covered, you know, on lots of pink cushions, covered in flowers, answering stupid questions all day long.
And that wasn't really my, forgive me if, you know, people are into that path, but it wasn't really.
We can give your email address later, I think.
It wasn't really my thing.
That's not really my role.
Though I understand that the word guru actually just means teacher.
And so teacher, yes.
If I had something that was useful, then if I could learn something useful that would be useful to others and teach it, then yeah, fair enough.
There was a path to walk.
What did you do then?
You'd been hit by lightning.
You thought that maybe you'd been empowered to do something, or maybe this was a sign that you'd already been empowered.
That wasn't the thing that empowered you.
Who did you go to?
First people I met was a bunch of people from a group actually in the United States called the Deer Tribe that was run by a man called Harley Swift Deer, who was half Cherokee and half Irish.
And it was a very fantastic combination.
Sorry to jump in.
Totally, yes.
And he was very, he's dead now.
And unfortunately, he was very, he had very mixed reviews by the pure indigenous people of the United States.
Many people thought he was a charlatan and what he was teaching was mostly fantasy and made up.
But I found the teachings that I learned with him very, very useful.
They gave me a kind of framework or an understanding to at least start to study what's my relationship to the natural world, to the powers of nature, to the invisible realms, to my ancestors.
There was a lot of really wonderful and pretty crazy ceremonies we did that gave us an opportunity to change our state sufficiently without the use of plants or drugs or anything else,
but just through the intensity of experience to be able to change our state sufficiently to have a sense of connection to something greater than ourselves.
And that was my beginning.
And I started to experience that relationship to not through belief, but through experience, through sensation in my body, through a feeling in my heart that I was able to be in touch with a greater power just through the ground underneath my feet.
What separates, and like I say, I'm sorry to jump in there.
Digital always gives you a little bit of a delay, so you're never quite sure when somebody's finished a sentence.
But what separates the experience of being in a state that is generated by some ritual or procedure that you go through from hysteria?
The reason I'm saying this is that we've all seen video of religious meetings of various kinds and people being told that they've been healed on a stage.
Throw away your walking stick now, or you can see and they scream, hallelujah, I can see.
What is the difference between some of those things and what you might call hysteria?
That's a very, very good question.
How do I want to answer that?
I think for me, life is very mysterious.
There's things happen all the time that our knowledge so far is yet to explain.
And so, you know, as far as we've gone with our scientific understanding, there's far more that we don't know about the universe and our place in it than we do know.
So for me, that's the bottom line, that life is mysterious.
This is a mystery.
So it's when we see somebody going into a state that we would consider to be hysterical and that we don't understand, it touches something inside us.
And sometimes that makes us very uncomfortable.
So we want to push those things away.
We want to put them in a box.
We want to give them a label so that we can be separate from them.
And hysteria might be such a label.
Not to say, you know, that those scenarios that you painted so well of people, you know, being told they can walk or being told that they can see.
And there's been a lot of charlatanism, hasn't there?
There's been a lot of people using their personality, their charisma to make an awful lot of money at the expense of people's ignorance or need.
And at the same time, some of what they've done has been remarkable.
So it's very hard to know.
But in terms of the kinds of experiences I was having, they were much less dramatic than that.
It wasn't like I'd be, you know, my eyes rolled back in my head, speaking in tongues or screaming or, you know, sometimes actually, you know, later on I got into working with a woman called Gabrielle Roth, who was a, she called herself an urban sham and she lived in New York.
And she was, her whole thing was getting people to let go through dance, through movement, through giving yourself to a greater power, which was rhythm, which was the drums, which was, you know, she coined the term sweat your prayers and she really meant it, to really let go.
And so there was a lot of what we might call hysteria in those workshops and those venues.
But actually, you know, a little bit of hysteria when we're connected to the body is pretty good for us most of the time.
I'm sure it's about getting rid of, you know, all of that pent up, stored up angst and tension.
Exactly, especially these days when we're living, you know, we're confronted by so much unknown and so much fear and a lot more antagonism in the world, a lot more polarity, a lot more, A lot less ease in being able to listen to somebody who has a different opinion and to actually be interested.
You know, we tend to polarize quickly.
There's a lot of hate going on.
Exactly.
And there's a lot of stress and tension.
So, and we suffer from not having a more friendly relationship with our bodies and with our hearts.
And, you know, the work that we're doing is all about bringing the intelligence of our thinking together with the intelligence of our physical body and our emotional intelligence.
And so that we can learn that our emotions, they're like the weather.
They come and go.
And it's actually very healthy to be able to move and release tension and release emotion, even hysterically sometimes, even to have a good shout and scream.
Because otherwise, if we don't, we tend to internalize and implode, which is bad for us, or explode on the people that we love most.
And that's a very tragic situation.
And, you know, not difficult to remedy.
A little bit of, you know, there's all kinds of ways of remedying it.
The way that we use is called movement medicine.
And it's very simple to set of practices that help us to learn how to move, to stay in the body, to move with awareness, and to be able to connect a little bit more deeply to what's going on underneath the surface so that it doesn't come out in all of those stresses and tensions and arguments and fights and
polarities and everything else that we're seeing.
I've got to say that during these lockdown days, we all have difficult days to deal with.
But sometimes I'm an avid consumer of the news because that's my background.
And I read the latest state of play with the health service in this country, UK, being under tremendous pressure with more and more people dying, with a virus loose amongst us that is claiming more and more victims with evidence that I can see outside my home with ambulances back and forth blue lighting all the time.
And, you know, sometimes I'll get emails from people telling me on those days that I'm not delivering what they want me to deliver and telling me what they think is wrong with me.
And on days like that, I just want to hammer the walls and scream.
And I think a lot of people, they may not get emails, but they go through all the other stuff.
And they've got, you know, I don't have kids and family around me to deal with.
So they don't have to be part of my dynamic, which is probably a good thing in this situation.
But, you know, sometimes I have those days and I just have to bottle it and hope that the next day is better, which it invariably is.
But you're saying there's another way.
There is another way.
First of all, you know, I'm really glad that you mention and acknowledge the really difficult situation that we're finding ourselves in.
And, you know, mentioning the NHS, the National Health Service in the UK, really straining.
And, you know, hats off to those people who are working so hard and to look after us and, you know, keep us as safe as we possibly can be.
And really important to acknowledge that.
And what you're saying, yes, there is another way.
Because in the end, bottling that kind of emotion, there's all kinds of research which shows us that our emotional health has a direct effect on our physical health and our immune system, in fact.
So by bottling up emotion and by holding on to that tension, we are actually lowering our own immune system, which in times like this, it's not a good idea.
So whatever way we can find to create a channel that's healthy, you know, I'll tell you something.
This is, I don't know, your listeners might find this a bit crazy, but in our living room, myself and my wife, we have these martial arts boxing gloves and these big pads that you can put on your arms.
And, you know, every now and again, when we feel that level of tension, we put those on and we look each other in the eye and we punch.
We know we're not hurting each other because we're protected, but we allow that feeling of frustration and fury and pent up emotion.
And often what that leads to is the recognition of a kind of broken heart, the sorrow, the human grief at what we are doing to each other, to our planet, to how we live.
Well, I think inside everybody is a three-year-old child waiting to get out.
I think that's the truth of it.
And most of the time, because we're not three years of age anymore and we have to behave like people who are not three years of age, we just have to, you know, keep a lid on those things and just try and deal with it.
And I think that's probably the cause of a lot of people's, a lot of people contact me and they say they're having a really hard time now, which I totally relate to.
And I too, along with people who email me, am having, even last night, the weird nightmares that I never quite used to have before and all of those things.
So they're all manifestations.
So I think we need to, rather than talk around all of this, I think we have to try and get a handle on what it is you think that you're connecting with.
Are you helping people you think to connect with themselves or connect with something outside themselves?
Well, both, hopefully.
On a very...
Yes, I agree with you.
We all have that kind of child That wants to express themselves.
But not all the emotion we feel belongs to the past.
A lot of it is just in the present because, you know, we are mammals, we have hearts, we feel a lot.
So it's part of our humanity that we have a lot of emotion.
And the problem isn't necessarily that three-year-old.
It's a lack of simple education about what those emotions are for and why we feel so much.
And mostly it's out of our love for the people we care about.
We feel concern.
We feel it's a lot of, if you follow it to the end of the road, often what's there is our love for each other.
And coming back to what you asked about, are people connecting to themselves or something greater than themselves?
Ideally, both.
And that's partly to do with identity.
You know, we often think of ourselves through the means of what we're thinking.
And the practice that we're doing is helping people to shift attention from what we're thinking to the actual experience of being in a body right now, here.
Like, what do I experience being here now?
And this physical body is literally, it's made from Earth.
It's made from the material of this physical body actually came from stars that exploded millions and millions of years ago.
We're all basically carbon.
We are, basically.
But there's something that animates that carbon.
And that intelligence is what, you know, we call that intelligence the dancer.
Or you can call it your inner shaman.
But it's that part of you that is, it's part of life.
It understands the turning of the seasons.
It understands the nature of gravity.
It understands that we are born, that we live and that we die.
So what we're helping people to connect to is their elemental selves.
We are solar powered beings.
We eat food that, you know, stores the energy of the sun and it's released as we eat that food.
We are literally solar powered.
So through that, the fire that's burning in our millions and trillions of mitochondria, those tiny little things inside the cells, they're like little engines.
They live on solar energy.
So if we can connect to that part of ourselves that is fire, or the 65% of us that's water, we can learn to be a little bit more fluid,
a little bit deeper, a little bit, have the power of transformation or illumination, to be more grounded through sensing the earth of our bodies and then through breathing to aerate a little bit,
to be able to lift our nose from out of our belly buttons, to be able to see the bigger picture that we're part of, to be able to see something of where we come from, to embrace our ancestry, our lineage, the wisdom that's at our backs, and to see the road that we're on as if we're seeing it from a bigger place rather than just our day-to-day fears.
And ritual or practice, what it does is it just gives us a little bit of time to put the busyness of our lives into a bigger context, which again, if we pay attention, can become rooted in what actually matters to us.
Like what do we love?
What gives us purpose?
What gives us that feeling of purpose?
And you know, indigenous cultures around the world, people who still live close to the earth.
I've noticed I've been very blessed to spend a lot of time in the Amazon or with the Sami people of Northern Europe and watching how they are with their kids.
Education is very much to do with listening and seeing what that child is good at naturally, what they're into, what they love, what makes them happy.
So not trying to hammer them into a peg, into a position.
Well, education, you know, the root of the word education means to bring out, not to stuff in.
But, you know, we talked about our schooling before we came on.
My education was all about stuffing in as much information as possible.
And being a good student meant repeating what somebody else had said about something else.
It had nothing to do with being creative or finding my own expression.
And that kind of education was good for training people to work in factories, but it's not, you know, for training people to be obedient.
But it's not good for needing our human species to evolve and to be more creative and to look at how is it that we are living in the way that we're living, which is creating so much suffering, not just for humans, not just for ourselves, but for the whole biosphere, for the natural world.
And we're trashing the system through which we live as if it belonged to us.
And, you know, we need to discover a different way.
We need to open up our own creativity to be able to be a little bit more intelligent about how we're living.
And, you know, when we look at viruses like the one that we're Dealing with now, there's a lot to say that this is coming from the fact that we are taking away the last little bits of wilderness.
And, you know, exactly, which is how the scientists tell us, as far as they understand it at the moment, because we are impinging on the habitats of creatures who don't expect humans to impinge on their habitats.
We are acquiring their viruses, bugs, conditions, fleas, ticks, whatever they might be.
And that's not because of something that they're doing.
It's because of something that we're doing.
I think we probably agree on that one.
Yeah, exactly.
And the reason that we are exploring all of those wildernesses to see what we can take, because we need more and more material to live this way that we've lived.
There's a certain kind of sense.
There's a logic to that.
If you're telling that story, that what matters is to gather more and more things until you die.
If you consider that that's what's important, then it makes sense to take whatever you can from wherever you can until it's gone.
But as a way of living, you know, it's not creating the happiness, the contentment that we were told it would.
I'm not, you know, I love my central heating.
Don't get me wrong.
I love it.
I love the fact that we can talk now through this technology.
It's not that, you know, I'm not saying let's all go back to living in yurts and tents or whatever.
Because it's not going to happen.
It's not going to happen.
But we need to.
Some of the indigenous people that I know and love and who live in the Ecuadorian Amazon, one of them, a man called Domingo Pais, who's a leader of the Achua people, he said that what we need to do at this point is to bring together all the best intelligence of our species,
the technology, what the Christians know, what Islam knows, what the atheists know, what the scientists know, what the artists know, to bring together what the healers know, what the doctors know, to bring it all together.
And if we can do that, we will have a much bigger picture and a much deeper and up-to-date intelligence that's also likely to lead to more of what we're looking for, which is contentment, you know, to be content, human beings.
I get emails all the time and I relate to all of them from people at the moment who are stressed beyond belief.
Some of them have had much worse experiences in this last year than I can ever imagine.
You know, they've lost people close to them and they've had to keep themselves going, along with having to come to terms with losses like that.
There are people who've been through the most, well, the saddest experiences.
My heart goes out to each and every one of them.
So, you know, my experience in this, well, I've just been isolated from the rest of the world for nearly a year.
I've lost nearly a year of my life, but that's a lot of people's story.
But people who contact me, and that's one of the reasons for actually doing this now with you.
Just to take a little bit of time out, because some of the stuff you talked about is all about slowing down and stopping and having a think, which we don't normally allow ourselves to do.
But let's just put ourselves into the position of one of these people who contacts me, who's massively stressed.
Now, if we were doing this on the radio, and I like to use the same disciplines for this online show that we use for radio, but the regulations would say, if I'm talking to you, that I have to say that if you feel stressed, if you feel any physical ailments of any kind, your first port of call is your general practitioner, your medical doctor in America, your GP is the first place you should go to.
And then if you want to contact somebody like Jakob, then by all means do that.
So assuming they feel so bad that they've gone to the GP first and got proper professional advice from that person, which is the way that you should do it, then they contact you maybe.
What would you tell them?
How do you think that you could help them?
Well, one of the things we started to do when the first lockdown happened was we just started to run sessions online, open and free, to support people with the practice that we've developed, which is called movement medicine.
Movement medicine doesn't require any beliefs.
It doesn't require buying any special kit or feathers or beads or anything like that.
It's simply about being able to be in your body and to let your body be moved by rhythm and to learn how to breathe and move and to learn how to pay attention and to simply to let go a little bit, to let those muscles, those bones to move.
We are designed to move.
We're designed to be physical beings and we're not designed to spend most of our time sitting still in front of a flat screen.
We have binocular vision.
We need to see a wider view.
So very simply, we created a whole bunch of free resources exactly to support people who are having a very hard time.
And indeed, we've been very lucky to be able to do that.
Good music, good movement.
Let yourself give voice to what's inside you.
Even shout, even shake a little bit.
There's a very, one of our practices is called shaking medicine, where we are starting with a, like you might see if you light a fire with a gentle little spark, but then after a while, really, once the body is warmed up and making sure that you take care of your body and you're aware of any physical limitations you have,
that you allow the body to shake out as if, you know, as if you were, as if a storm was passing through you.
And you know what it's like when you're just before a storm and there's all that heaviness in the air, but then it starts the storm.
And after the storm, there's that sense of quiet and peace.
And that's what we've been doing is taking people through these short journeys and like, you know, 40 minutes in the morning or whatever.
And as I said, we made a lot of these resources freely available exactly for that purpose to support people.
So it's all non-invasive, as you would call it.
It doesn't involve any substances.
You don't have to commit yourself to any wacky beliefs.
No, not at all.
It's got nothing to do with belief.
You bring whatever, you know, if you're a Christian or an atheist or anything else, bring it along.
It's not, we're not concerned with your beliefs.
We're concerned with your being.
And the only thing that you, what a person needs, really, is the willingness to give it a go.
Like, yeah, this might see, I understand.
You know, the first time I did this, I was in my early 20s with a woman called Gabrielle Roth in a dojo in the east end of London with 30 people in a room.
And, you know, I went in there.
I hated dancing.
I felt horribly self-conscious.
Everyone was in there dancing.
If you've ever seen me dance, I mean, it embarrasses me and everybody around me.
It's probably 10 minutes with you, mate.
I was the same.
And I discovered that all I needed to do was shift my attention from that.
It wasn't dancing that I didn't like.
It was self-consciousness.
It was that I didn't feel comfortable in my body.
I thought that I ought to be different than I was.
And there are very easy ways to quickly shift your attention to the place where actually it doesn't matter what you look like.
It doesn't matter if you think your moves are good moves or not good moves.
What matters is that you allow the health of your physical being and there is health in us.
You know, life has a, you know, if I cut myself, the health in my body will repair that cut.
There is a movement towards health that's natural to us.
And all we need to do is let ourselves move and we will connect to that healing power.
And it's not very mystical.
It's, you know, a bit more oxygen, a bit more movement, a bit more awareness, a bit more space for emotion, for your emotional intelligence and the willingness to let go.
And on the other side of that is just, even if it's just a moment where you can just go, oh, I can just let go of everything for a minute and let myself, you know, fall into the arms of the ground underneath me and let gravity hold me and let everything go.
It's such a simple thing, isn't it?
And yet sometimes when you're freaking out, the last thing you think about is kind of stopping, stopping and doing something else.
You focus on the freaking out.
I mean, look, I'm not giving people guidance on how to heal themselves here.
Please don't think that.
But, you know, on those occasions lately when I've been close to freaking out one way or another, and I have, and I'm not ashamed to admit it, you know, I'm a pretty balanced person, fairly calm about life these days because I've seen so damn much and done so much that, you know, nothing really, nothing much upsets me anymore because of all the stuff that I've seen.
But on those occasions, it's just useful to stop.
If you stop for a moment and focus on something else, it might help.
Now, that's not to say to people who feel that they've got an ailment that they shouldn't go to the doctor.
They absolutely should.
But it's one thing to have in your toolkit, maybe.
Well, it's a lot to do with our nervous system.
And, you know, as we learn, you know, through neuroscience and through all kinds of modern psychotherapies and understanding of how the mind works, we're beginning to understand that our nervous systems, if they are activated, they can become very quickly overwhelmed.
And when they're overwhelmed, then we're in a freeze, fight or flight.
And in that state, we do not make good decisions.
We don't make good decisions.
Even our ability to hear lessons, the muscles in our ears contract so that we don't hear so well.
So if we're in that kind of a state where we're overwhelmed and our nervous systems have been overactivated, we need ways in which we can find the way back to calmness.
But sitting down on a cushion and meditating, if your mind is busy, it's very difficult.
You sit down, you try to breathe, but your mind won't stop.
And then your body's uncomfortable.
And that's what's so wonderful about movement medicine.
It starts where you are.
You know, like, okay, you're feeling lots of energy in the body.
Let's move then.
Let's move that energy.
And then by saying yes to that, we allow the nervous system to calm down.
Even when you say that, I feel calmer.
But look, how do you tell all those angry people that?
You know, how do you tell the world is full of angry people now who are angry because their point of view is not numero una all the time?
Or they feel that people should be listening more to what they have to say and the people that they've been reading about online have to say.
How do you reach the angry people?
Well, the same way.
I mean, you know, again, anger is only a problem if it's not given its natural role.
You know, we feel angry when we feel our boundaries have not been respected and we carry around a lot of that from the past.
But in terms of, you know, that expression that's going on in the world, which is based on I'm right and you're wrong and I'm fed up of not having myself listened to and I'm just going to act out.
It's very, very difficult.
And unfortunately, a lot of that is down to the ills of social media, that we are, you know, the way that algorithms work in social media, we tend to only hear the points of view that we already agree with.
The points of view that are different to ours get ridiculed.
So we're becoming more and more polarized.
And, you know, it's very difficult these days.
We don't have a...
there's very little ground that we can all agree on.
You know, like there's very little, there's Like gravity.
Okay, gravity exists.
We're standing up.
We can stand on this earth because of gravity.
Let's start with what we, finding some kind of common ground.
But we are in trouble.
And, you know, the expressions that we've seen in America and, you know, we see it in America because, and that's very big news.
That kind of expression has been going on all around the world for a very long time.
It's more scary for us when it starts to happen closer to home.
Well, before I start getting emails from people on any one side, we're talking about anger on all sides here because there is no doubt about it.
There is pent-up fury in America, in every country, on all sides of every argument.
Everything has become politicized these days, and people argue about things that are not political.
So the level of anger and tension, let's use the word tension, the level of pent-up tension, it seems to me, seems to have racked up enormously, especially within this last year, but over these last few years.
And it seems to be, I don't know, it seems to be the cola bottle that you keep shaking up that never actually blows its top.
But there it is already to blow its top.
And at some point, it might, unless we do something.
Well, you know, I think we have to start with a comeback to education.
We have to start with our children and we have to start with teaching our children how to listen.
You know, my wife, who's a rather brilliant woman, though, of course, I'm her number one fan.
At the beginning of lockdown, her guidance that she listens to said, your job right now is to make a course about listening, reminding or teaching people what she calls embodied listening.
And embodied listening is a way of being able to deal with your nervous system enough that you can listen to a different point of view, acknowledge that you're being activated, you don't like it or you feel emotion, but not immediately react.
And so, and in order to do that, we need like culturally acceptable forms of release.
You know, there are many, many people around the world, again, Indigenous people, who when they feel that level of tension has reached a point where the calmness and the joy has left life, they go into ritual and they call that grief ritual.
And they shake and they shout and they cry until they're empty again and their level of joy comes back.
And we need to find ways that are creative.
Otherwise, you know, we are in trouble.
And our lack of capacity to be able to even be interested in a different point of view than what we consider to be the truth is dangerous to all of us.
And so we need to find these simple ways and they do exist.
They are not so hard to find.
You know, embodied listening is one.
There's all kinds of ways of working with the nervous system.
And, you know, there are lots of schools where kids now are learning meditation or embodied meditation techniques.
And this is what we need.
We need to start with our kids and with our education to teach them how to, when you've got two very different points of view, rather than one against one equaling zero, how can one plus one make something bigger and better that you didn't know before?
So for sure, all the people who are expressing that rage are doing so because they haven't felt listened to and they felt marginalized.
And, you know, any kind of politics that says my truth is the truth and every other truth has no merit.
If any kind of politics or point of view that has that as its guiding principle is only going to create war.
In the end, the outcome of that is war.
And look where it's taken us in history and look at how many people had to die in World War II.
Exactly.
Because of anger, pent-up anger.
I don't look.
I don't want to get too philosophical because I don't know anything about anything.
And I have tried in the past to meditate.
I've been asked to.
I'm not very good at it because I've got a short little, as Paul Simon once sang, I've got a short little span of attention.
But I hear what you're saying, I thought it was important that we should have this conversation.
Now we've only got a couple of minutes left, Jakob.
And I know that your publisher, Hay House, would want me to give you the chance to just sum up what your book, the latest book, Shaman, Invoking Power, Presence, and Purpose at the Core of Who You Are, what it's all about.
So if you want to use the remaining two minutes or so just to give me a thumbnail sketch, and then you're happy, the publisher's happy, and I'm happy.
How about that?
Thank you so much.
It's very sweet.
Very lovely.
So, I wrote this book because I understand, I believe, that every single human being can benefit by contacting this archetypal human force that we call the inner shaman.
And the inner shaman is that part of you that is connected to the power of nature, that's connected to your ancestors, that's connected to your capacity to connect your imagination with the physical world.
And so I wrote this book to break down in a step-by-step process how anybody can gain access to the guidance, the inner guidance that that archetype can bring.
And so it's a step-by-step journey that invites anybody who's willing to discover that place that's inside all of us, that is our own, it's our human nature.
And through our human nature, we're connected to the power of nature itself.
And through that, we're connected to a greater power or something, that mystery of life that I talked about earlier on.
And, you know, in a time like this, when we're all crying out for some kind of wisdom or guidance, to be able to access that within your own being is of massive value because it helps us to be who we are.
It helps us to discover more who we are and to not believe so strongly in the limitations that we were taught are ours for life.
We are much more potent and we have so much brilliance and beauty and creativity within us.
And that inner shaman has access to that.
And it's what we need now, not just individually, but in our relationships, in our families, in our societies and in our relationship with the biosphere, with the earth itself.
And when you walk down the street, as I do where I live, regularly or through the park, and eight times out of ten, within any walk that I take, I'll smell strong cannabis coming back from somewhere.
People are seeking refuge in those kinds of things because there's something wrong in their lives.
And, you know, that's absolutely not the way, in my humble and honest opinion.
I'm holding here something that I keep on my console here and have over all of these months, something that I bought years and years ago when the movie E.T. was out.
It's a little model E.T. The reason I have that in front of me whenever I'm on air these days or doing anything is because E.T. was always looking for home.
And I think in this day and age, we all are.
So Jakov, thank you.
This is a conversation unlike most of the others that I do, but I've been grateful for it because I just think, you know, the core thing of all of this is to take a little bit of time out and just have a little look at yourself.
You can afford to do that, especially if you're in lockdown, you might have a little more time than you had.
And I find, you know, let me just say that, you know, I'm not allowed to and I'm not endorsing what we've been talking about before.
I get angry emails telling me that I'm endorsing it all.
I'm not.
We've had a conversation.
It's not an endorsement, but it's a conversation.
You take out of it what you like.
But I found it very interesting and on a personal level, very useful.
So thank you, Yakov.
Well, thank you very much for keeping it very down to earth and very real and very related to real people in their very real lives, because that's the point in the end.
Yaakov, Darling Khan, and I promised him that I would give a little plug to his website, which is 21.
That's the numbers 21gratitudes.com.
21gratitudes.com.
And as I said in that conversation, I'm not here to endorse any of that.
I'm just laying it out there for you.
And I hope that you maybe got something from it.
But that's, as they say, a matter for yourself.
More great guests in the pipeline here on The Unexplained Online.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do and wherever you are, please stay safe.
Please stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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