It was author Roy Bennett who said, “No one has ever achieved greatness without dreams.” And the American disability activist Helen Keller said, “Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.”
This is the continuation of part one with my guest Jamie Wheal. It was such an in-depth discussion based on his new book, Recapture, The Rapture, Rethinking God, Sex and Death in a World that’s Lost its Mind, that we broke it up into two parts.
This is part two with Jamie, so if you haven’t heard part one yet, make sure to visit here, and listen to that as well, because it will blow your mind!
In this episode, we discuss why it’s important to heal your past, the different types of brain states and how to access them, and the different practices to help achieve peak states, and why we don’t have a full understanding of our human experience.
Let’s recap who Jamie is:
Who Is Jamie Wheal?
Jamie Wheal is the Executive Director of The Flow Genome Project and a leading expert in the neurophysiology of human performance. His work combines a background in expeditionary education, wilderness medicine, and surf rescue, with over a decade of advising high-growth companies on strategy, execution, and leadership. Jamie’s coaching ranges from Fortune 500 companies like Cisco, Google, and Nike to the U.S. Naval War College, and Red Bull. Since founding the organization in 2011, it has gone on to become a leading voice of evidence-based peak performance, counting award-winning academics, legendary professional athletes, special operations commanders, and Fortune 500 business leaders among the hundreds of thousands of people in its global community.
You’ll find Jamie speaking on the intersection of science and human potential to diverse, high-performance communities like Young Presidents Organization, Summit Series, TED, and MaiTai Global. At the Flow Genome Project, he leads a team of the world’s top scientists, athletes, and artists dedicated to mapping the genome of the peak-performance state known as Flow. He lives on the Colorado River with his wife Julie, their two kids Lucas and Emma, and a righteous Golden Retriever named Cassie.
Let’s jump right in to continue hearing what Jamie had to share!
Learning From Animals to Process Trauma
Humans are different from animals, in that we walk around holding onto stress, either anchored in the past or constantly thinking about aches and pains in our present. The animal’s trick when they get stressed is to discharge all of it immediately. Even without experiencing major stress, there are a multitude of ways we accumulate trauma or micro PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder).
Well, we don’t have to accumulate it, and we can process all of this, just as animals do.
“Can I reboot my nervous system to establish a global systemic reset? And can I do that by pulsing energy through my nervous system — such that it discharges me and just like a laptop that’s fritzing, [perform a] cold reboot and power backup to homeostasis? I’m going to face every challenge, opportunity, and get knocked off — but I can come back to the center via tools that I have access to that don’t cost an arm and a leg. [The question is] can I come from my best more often? And can I metabolize my grief as fast as I’m taking it in?” – Jamie Wheal
Instead of holding onto trauma for months and years and suffering with it — experience it, have your heart open, allow yourself to feel, and then move on.
While a global systemic reboot is about finding the pieces that can work for you, Jamie and his team at The Flow Genome Project are concentrated on understanding why things like tapping, breathwork, physical therapy, psychotherapy, psychedelics, and the multitude of therapies out there work — and creating a system that enables us to hack our system to create these optimal states on demand.
We don’t all process the same information in the same way. In fact, there are three different categories that you might experience by reading this. Jamie calls them “acculturated triggered responses,” and he has some fantastic insights for us to understand them.
Three Ways People Respond to Information
We all fall into one of three categories: A hedonist, a purist, or a conformist.
- A Hedonist is a person who is all in — they say ‘tell me more!’ These people want the cheat codes. The challenge with the hedonist is what Jung said: “Be aware of unearned wisdom.” Hedonists are up to their ears in it, so their challenges are addiction and infidelity because they want ALL of it. They want to go for everything and taste it all. Finding breaks is their problem — they burn too hot.
- A Purist is a person who proclaims ‘their body’s my temple.’ They don’t need those ‘cheat codes’ because they’re shortcuts. They have spiritual materialism or pride in their self-identity. They meditate, do yoga — while proclaiming not to do those ‘other things.’ They might have become self-satisfied and stopped searching because they’ve created a fixed mindset around all the ways they do their things.
- A Conformist is a person that wouldn’t know what to think. ‘What does everybody else think?’ This is specifically true asking ‘what do medical, religious, and legal authorities tell me?’ Conformists think nothing of having their kid on Ritalin, nothing of putting their spouse on Klonopin or Prozac — and knocking back two or three drinks every night to take the edge off or maybe even smoking cigarettes, cause that’s all socially sanctioned or normative. Yet they would rather get divorced versus seeking MDMA couples therapy, which could have created some form of healing, all because they don’t want to lose control.
It’s not to say that one is preferred over the other, in fact, there are important lessons to be learned from all three categories.
“Each of those folks has a core value. The hedonist says, ‘I value the fullest range of human experience — it’s sucking the marrow out of life.’ The purist says, ‘I value the sanctity of mind and body.’ The conformist says, ‘I value evidence and the advice of experts.’ If you pull them all together and stand up as hedonic engineers where you’re asking ‘Can we do all three of those things? Can we seek the full range of human experience with evidence and the advice and oversight of experts and value and appreciate the sanctity of mind and body?’” – Jamie Wheal
We all have this potential at our disposal as we navigate these chaotic times. Now — how do we integrate that into our lives?
