Trust Without Reservation | Kathryn Cornelius

Kathryn Cornelius has been a performance artist with shows in Berlin, Rome, Naples, Buenos Aires. She's been a consultant at a major international firm and the founder of Whole Human Alchemy, a practice she built on breathwork, internal family systems work, and twenty-five years of moving between art, enterprise, and her own hard-won recovery. She has been through things that are harder to name than any of that — what she calls, without drama, "movie-level shit."

She and I knew each other at Georgetown more than twenty years ago, in the years when high theory got malleable at three in the morning. Then we didn't speak for two decades. We recorded this across two sessions.

We talk about the difference between discipline as punishment and discipline as devotion; a question about faith asked on a porch in New Hampshire at three in the morning; a crime in Spain; and what it looks like to choose to be here.

Also: I stopped hosting somewhere in the second session, and it turned into a different kind of conversation.

Transcript

Kathryn Cornelius & George Laufenberg

The Principal Uncertainty -- Season 1 Finale: "Trust Without Reservation"

Kathryn: Isn't it interesting that you're fighting for your life when you've never valued it?

George: This is The Principal Uncertainty. I'm George Laufenberg. This is the last conversation of the first season, and it's the one I least expected. Kathryn Cornelius is an artist, a coach, and a healer. She built a practice called Whole Human Alchemy out of 25 years of moving between corporate consulting, contemporary art, academia, and her own hard-won recovery. She works with individual clients, coaching and healing for transformation through breath work and internal family systems work. She's exhibited her art internationally in Berlin, Rome, Naples, Buenos Aires, and in galleries across the US. But that isn't really why she's here. Kathryn and I knew each other more than 20 years ago at a master's program at Georgetown in the years when high theory got malleable at three in the morning. And then we didn't speak for two decades. I invited her here to reconnect. What happened instead was the thing this whole season had been circling. Two people who share a lineage, trading true things back and forth at cost. in both directions. We recorded this across two sessions. Somewhere in there, I stopped hosting and got into the conversation. Fair warning, this one runs long and it goes into deep water. Come with some time. Here's where we begin. so appreciate you making time for this. I've been really looking forward to this conversation. one of the great joys of this undertaking for me has been that I'm getting to reconnect with folks lives have been these really compelling journeys, these adventures who I've been out of touch with for a long time. And, Let's start right here right now.

Kathryn: Hey.

George: What does your world look like today?

Kathryn: yeah, well, first of all, it was such a surprise and a joyful one to receive your invitation. So thank you so much because, you obviously left an impression on me, too. And I'm glad to know you again here. What's in my world today? So I have, as always, a couple different irons in the fire. I live in Phoenix, Arizona now unexpectedly, but I love the desert, the sun, the spaciousness. a beautiful way to connect with nature on the regular basis, which, know, surprise, surprise, not as easy to access in DC or New York City where I was for many years before coming out here right before the still working on some art. I'm in a show coming up in Rome in the fall, which is exciting. And I am also an employee owner at a consulting firm, smaller boutique firm. It's a national company, but we have like small offices across the country, And that's great because I've done the solopreneur thing a couple times and it's nice to do that with other people. Kind of reminds me of my early dot com days in so many ways a little bit of your hands and everything and then

George: Yeah. Yeah.

Kathryn: my biggest project and focus right now is actually 2.0 version of a business I started in New York City called Whole Human Alchemy then it was called Whole Human

George: Okay.

Kathryn: Consulting and Alchemy, but this is really focused on the the healing side, the coaching side, leadership development side, not necessarily in what you think of when you think of leadership development, it's more about self leadership through understanding your own journey and being able to work through some of the beliefs and challenges that get in the way of us really expressing what we're here to share. yeah, a lot more in entrepreneurship healing. spirituality, art, all the good stuff.

George: Yeah, eclectic doesn't begin to scratch the surface of the array of things that you bring together in the work that's at least public facing. And I'm so curious about how that works for you. I it seems to me very clear that like the body is the center of things, right? In your in

Kathryn: Mm-hmm.

George: at least it looks that way. mean, it seems to me that this is about embodied practice as a way of knowing. There's like one thread at least that moves through your work.

Kathryn: Mm-hmm.

George: And I would love to hear how that has unfolded for you.

Kathryn: Yeah, yeah, thank you. I would say you're accurate in that the site of the work I offer is all in the body and some of that's just basic logistics because we are in these meat suits, right? it's

George: You

Kathryn: gonna kind of come along with us no matter what. But where the interesting tension started, was in

George: Mm-hmm.

Kathryn: my own healing journey, of course, like so many things. But it was in this sort of fracturing that happened the time that we knew each other and then grad school and all of that and post grad school. Once I started doing consulting for a large international firm, I started to realize how I had been trained at that point for almost, I don't know, seven, eight years in corporate to be disembodied, to just be everything from the neck up is what's prioritized and important or let's say valued. that was great for a while. I could handle that because, I knew that back then I didn't know that it was so easy for me and so easy for so many people because of the dissociation that I had learned in my childhood to be a way to be safe in a challenging home environment. So it was interesting to kind of trace that back and then be like, yeah, of course, why haven't I? Like, of course I've been good at the corporate game because I was already disembodied, so I was this floating head and I was thinking that my worth and value came from what was in my head and not in my whole person. So that kind of planted some seeds for the origin of Whole Human Consulting, which then became Whole Human Alchemy. And that other side of it was the exploration of the body that I was doing through my artwork as a performance artist. and really thinking about how the body is encoded and inscribed by the cultures around us, of course, all the things about gender and viewing and who owns the body. but underneath all of that is sort of this notion of, there was this notion of control and forcing

George: Sir.

Kathryn: and not letting the body have an actual say in what's happening. And let me tell you, you spend enough time under the knife and in recovery. from surgeries and such, you start to realize, okay, maybe I need to listen to the body a little bit more. So that's an ongoing relationship and conversation that's quite different and it's influencing my artwork differently as well.

George: The last time we were in touch, you were very much in this conceptual register. And

Kathryn: Mm-hmm, for sure.

George: that era, the Georgetown era, was such an interesting moment for a lot of us, right? It was this quirky, multidisciplinary, and very pointedly not interdisciplinary master's program that was sort of trying to be all things to all people. And when you first started talking about this embodiment, I remember. I immediately flashed to a conversation I had with one of our most beloved professors, I was complaining about being sick or something and he made this offhand remark about like, body is a tyrant. And I remember in the moment being like, yeah, fuck the body, In hindsight, what a perfect sort of distillation of like, that is just. the heart of the broken way that I have related to my experience of myself moving through the world as a human being, right? Because I completely

Kathryn: Yes, yes, yeah.

George: identified with that statement when he said it. was like zero

Kathryn: Yeah.

George: daylight between that.

Kathryn: I think we get an appreciation for the body as we get older because we notice its changes because doesn't just whisper to us anymore. Sometimes it's very freaking loud. when I discovered design thinking, I would, and really actually when I was starting to get into user experience design, you know, finally we were placing the customer or placing design authority on a person. And we were thinking about how are they going to physically move through a space and how are they going to do XYZ, which kind of relate a little bit to exhibition design. work that I had done before

George: Yeah.

Kathryn: and some of my installation artwork. that was like a through line. And the exciting part was the word empathy, because you can't have empathy without emotions, and you can't have emotions without the body. And so all of a sudden, we're starting to bring, kind of covertly, into workplaces the notion of a whole human, not just someone who going to do some sort of transaction and it's

George: Yeah.

Kathryn: going to be a transactional from their head.

George: I love the idea of smuggling that in. like one of the things, you know, I was excited about thinking you about here you are someone whom I know to really rigorous in your thinking and graceful in your movement across and between things. And I

Kathryn: Thank you.

George: would I would love to, think and reflect and dance a little bit in this question about

Kathryn: Mm.

George: what that looks like for you. I mean, you range from metaphysical healing to cultural theory to user design to really not obviously commensurable frameworks for thinking about what's true and how to make claims about that. What does it feel like to be you as you move between these registers? what extent is it important to sort of alight in a place? What is that like for you?

Kathryn: I feel like as I've grown on my own journey and have healed a lot more things in my own life, it becomes less important to me. The codified systems of production and reproduction in each of these different fields and being adherent to them. And in that way, I'm no longer walking around as a disciplined being.

George: Love it. Love it.

Kathryn: Yeah. And in that way, my field is more open to have whatever kind of exchange needs to happen in that moment. So I walked into the start of what was to be a strategic roadmap session with my client and it was the end of the day. Hate doing workshops at the end of the day, by the way. No one wants to be there. So, know, I just like elephant in the, all right, who wants to be here right now? Let's say some truth, right? Instead of we're gonna discipline ourselves as a group into we're now here for an hour and a half strategy session at 4 p.m. No one wants to be there, right? So let's name the obvious sigh of relief. Okay, energy shifted a bit, but not enough. All right. So now I just start doing this meditation practice like I've done a million times just to ground people in their body and shake things out and get, cause they've been up here this whole

George: Yeah. Yeah.

Kathryn: time. we end up having more spaciousness in their fields because they're not, I've got to make sure that I'm, they're not in their command and control survival sort of mindset. because they've come back into their body and we've all done this weird thing together with this person. Right? So in that way, I'm not, I'm like trying to create a space where we don't have to be so disciplined.

George: I can hear a resonance and tell me if I'm just imputing this, but I think I hear a resonance between the kind of relationship to discipline that you're talking about right now and your movement away from things like, ultra marathon, intense crossfit, the kind of disciplining of the body that comes along with that way of relating to yourself in the world.

Kathryn: Yeah, I mean, I had a time and place where that's where I was exploring that concept of discipline in the body

George: Yeah.

Kathryn: and really control in the body. Then I had all these accidents and stuff, and I just I can't physically do it without breaking, really breaking anymore. So there's there's that acceptance

George: Yeah. Yeah.

Kathryn: and surrender to what is don't love it kind of sucks. I always thought I'd run the Death Valley Ultramarathon. Someday that's 100 miles out in death. I still want to, but

George: Yeah.

Kathryn: you know, just reality. But

George: Yeah.

Kathryn: then turned to like disciplining my mind, which was part of my healing journey too, to recognize that a lot of the thoughts I was having weren't actually mine. And they came from these belief patterns I inherited or things from society or whatever. And so I needed to just apply my mind and say, okay, that's not the truth of who I am because I'm on this constant journey to get to that core center what's true for me versus what everyone else has informed me with.

George: That makes a world of sense. you're also talking about relating to practices and wisdom traditions in a way that I, I would have characterized as disciplined right? I mean, what's the difference between doing yoga at the gym

Kathryn: Yes.

George: versus practicing yoga? If it's not a disciplined relation to the tradition

Kathryn: discipline is one of my greater qualities. But there's a difference between discipline that's punishment and control versus discipline that's devotion and care and love. I tend to my body and my mental health and my emotional health in a disciplined way so that I can show up with greater access to love and devotion with the things I create in the world. With the way I show up and allow myself to be a part of an experience that is happening in relationship, whether that's at an office or in a coaching session or on a podcast. I want to hear about you too. I want to interview you. See what's going on with you. But I this is really great and really timely for me because I'm in a space where I know I'm I need to be working on sharing my story more owning my own wisdom that has come out of some crazy fucking things that have happened to me.

George: Yeah.

Kathryn: I mean. I don't even know if we'll talk about them, like gone through some movie level shit and and it's weird because I'm still the person who's gonna like wake up and you know, go get a coffee cake with my coffee and just do like, you know, I don't

George: Yeah.

Kathryn: know. Like it's a weird thing. Life is so weird and I have missed academia. You know, I was in academia for a brief period of time. and I would have loved to have continued in that path. But to me it was the same thing. My soul has just always been so restless to stay stuck in one place. But I also let society make me feel like shit about that for way too long. Even my gallery who I used to work with. She couldn't figure out what to do with me and my art because I wasn't just making the same kind of paintings every time or my performances were so different every time. Well, yeah, because I'm exploring different things, but at the root of it's the same thing and that is shifting perspectives. why? Because we want that visceral breaking apart of the ideology because it's the ideology that is about the authoritative system of control. and who gets those keys to write history, who gets those keys to determine how we perceive ourselves and others.

George: to whom do we give those keys and how.

Kathryn: and what cost, what's the trade off for us? And

George: Yeah, at what cost.

Kathryn: that's where going back to discipline, it's imperative that we connect to and define our inner authority as such, because the only way out that we're gonna find is through a recognition of our own sovereignty and how our own sovereignty connected to how

George: Yeah.

Kathryn: sovereign everyone else feels. Because as soon as we can acknowledge someone else's sovereignty from our own embodied sovereignty, then let go of the gripping, the grasping, the controlling, the wanting, the pushing, the using, the transactions, the ugh. We come back to a place of peace and we can actually coexist in this way that we are all a part of the same energetic ecosystem.

George: Yeah, I mean, like it's at the absolute end of the day. We have to come home to the body, right? Like it's the it's the only. no way out of that way of navigating through the world. Like I know in my body. By how I feel present in this moment.

Kathryn: Yeah, yeah, it's our compass in so many ways. Our connection to divine, to source, spirit, to our intuitive capacities, which everyone has, just again, like the disembodied head, we've been cut off from them, because better for the business to not be.

George: We didn't want to lose the thread, so we picked it up that Sunday. Kathryn said we needed to stay in the energy. She was right.

Kathryn: And I love that. And I'm a little like, my gosh, I hope I'm as smart as I felt like I was.

George: I got so tired of performing.

Kathryn: This is ridiculous.

George: Well, know, like so much of Georgetown, at least for me and where I was in my life was, I mean, there was a great joy to the experience of, I mean, like the dismissive version would be to say like the experience of feeling really clever. But like developmentally,

Kathryn: Hmm

George: it was much more about like up to that point in my life, everything I had done, I had really built in an excuse to fail or not like live up to potential or something. Georgetown, I mean, I barely finished college.

Kathryn: Interesting.

George: Georgetown was the first time that I actually swung for the fences intellectually and was so rich and heady and exciting and the way that high theory gets malleable at three in the morning with the right combination of temperature, pressure, and caffeine.

Kathryn: Yeah.

George: But it turns out at least for me, that's, I'm not gonna say empty calories, but man, I tried to subsist on that for too many times and for far too long. So

Kathryn: Mmm.

George: all of that to say that I'm far less interested in us impressing each other with how smart we already know we are. And much more

Kathryn: Yeah.

George: interested in reconnecting with you. Cause like, yeah.

Kathryn: Aw, thanks. Yeah. Well, there's so many things you said were so interesting to me because, yeah, well, just as an aside, I like to refer to my Georgetown experience as the most expensive version of getting to know myself and spin degree. And I call it like a spin degree because it works for my technology job, it worked for my academia

George: Mm-hmm.

Kathryn: job, it works as an artist, like. You know, so hey, it's not bad. And actually, like, I feel like it did help with, you know, putting some language and some theory behind the impulses of my youth. Like, there's actually a framework for that.

George: Hehehehehe

Kathryn: But then also, like, inspiring the, just having the awareness that, I too can, you know, build my own models and build my own things from. pulling from lots of different places. So that was really helpful for me. I think the thing I realized in my now late forties is that I never had a mentor in life. And I don't know how the fuck I did what I did. I just sort of like, didn't know any better. I just kind of stumbled along. And I, I,

George: Yeah.

Kathryn: I do think with a DIY culture of both our generation and where I grew up, you know, where we would. put on our own punk shows and raves and I had a zine and all that stuff back in the day. So that was cool. You know, so was like very much just like scrappy, right? And entrepreneurial. So anyway.

George: The mentors thing is so interesting. for me, it took me a very long time to realize a pattern I had reproduced more than once. wherein I got close to somebody who would have been a great mentor

Kathryn: Mm-hmm.

George: and then pushed them away.

Kathryn: Yeah.

George: Most recently, probably. So I've spent some time in the land of education reform. And I

Kathryn: Hmm. Hmm.

George: worked. for, I spent some time with one of the most incredible humans I've ever met was this guy who passed away a few years ago named Greg Farrell. He's the guy who brought Outward Bound to New York. And he did a ton of really cool work. But I remember walking down the street with him one day in the city and he's actually asking me, have you ever had a mentor? And my immediate response was this like, like this totally unconsidered immediate knee jerk. deflection response was like, oh, of course. Yeah, no, of course I have. When like in hindsight, this amazing human being was obviously offering to enter into a different kind of relationship that like, oh my God, I was so hungry for. But I was also

Kathryn: yeah. Yeah.

George: so like wrapped up in the like very slow collapse of an academic trajectory and this particular like fantasy structure that

Kathryn: Okay.

George: had never worked. But.

Kathryn: Where were you? were teaching? Yeah.

George: Like that I kept trying. No, so all right. So like we this is the part where like let's back up because we actually haven't talked in 20 years.

Kathryn: Yeah.

George: So the the thumbnail version, right, is that after Georgetown, I thought I was going to take the, you know, take the high theory lefty, you know, critical social theory stuff and go spend

Kathryn: Yes. Yeah.

George: a couple of years working in politics that I could make this, you know. like Zizek, intelligible and demonstrably useful to folks running like progressive campaigns and such. And I, in the course of procrastinating one afternoon and like failing to get a variety of jobs in DC, I stumbled across a listing for a wilderness-based therapeutic program in Utah while I was like, right,

Kathryn: What?

George: yeah, no, I mean, the more I read about it, I was a couple

Kathryn: Amazing.

George: years sober at that point. We just finished Georgetown. that weekend before, I had re-upped to wilderness rescue certification, like on a lark. And I stumbled across this listing. the more I read, the more it was all wilderness and philosophy. And the more I read, I was like, my god, is this real? This is a thing people do? And I wrote to the field director and was like, hey, I don't know if you're actually hiring right now and whatever, but let's have a conversation. And that led to hours

Kathryn: Yeah.

George: of conversation over a couple of days. And they wound up flying me out there for an interview, which was basically this week-long Buddhist retreat at 10,000 feet, culminating in a sweat lodge. It the first time I'd ever been in a lodge. And

Kathryn: Amazing.

George: I ran back to DC. It was like, no, no, no. have to, like, I have a plan. I got to spend a week, like, I can't say yes to this job offer. I got to sit with this for, you know, I spent a week intensely meditating, trying to get an answer to this question.

Kathryn: Yeah.

George: And you know, like linear time being what it is, like eventually the deadline hit and I was like, no, I don't actually have a, you know, a clear, you know, high contrast answer like I was fantasizing about. But what I have, if I'm slowing down, softening and paying attention is an awareness of this sort of series of soft clicks, you know, this like gentle guidance in

Kathryn: Yes.

George: the direction of this. And so I was like, all right, fuck it, going to Utah and moved out to Utah and spent a. year working as a wilderness guide in this program that was mostly like young adults, 18 to 25. And it was a combination of like, you know,

Kathryn: Wow.

George: garden variety, chemical dependency, psych stuff, and 12 step stuff, and

Kathryn: Yes, yes. Yes.

George: Native American spirituality in a way that like

Kathryn: Mmm. Mm-hmm.

George: in hindsight, I had a lot of questions about, and where there were a lot of problems with the kind of appropriation going

Kathryn: Sure.

George: on. Like, but that was the beginning of the conversation, not the end of it. Right.

Kathryn: Hmm.

George: And I mean, actually, eventually that's what my PhD wound up being about.

Kathryn: About what?

George: Flash forward 10 years, my doctoral dissertation is on the spiritual lives of mental health professionals.

Kathryn: No, I love that.

George: It was not dull. was a very interesting. I mean,

Kathryn: I would read that.

George: that would you would make like the fifth person. It's funny. I've actually I'm just now within the last eight months, like finally working on the book that that wanted to be. But like

Kathryn: Mm-hmm.

George: all of the stuff that really felt important and mattered in my two years of field work all over the place, none of the stuff that really felt important made it into the dissertation. because it was sort of in the wrong frame and there just wasn't, some of that I just wasn't willing to put under a microscope. But.

Kathryn: Did you feel like pressure to produce a... thesis in a certain way. And like it was almost too

George: Yeah, I mean there's...

Kathryn: much spirituality or something for academia because I feel like I hit up against that in the art world for sure.

George: That was... In the art world? that's super interesting. I would not have... Okay.

Kathryn: times were different. Times were different back then. I had a subtext of emotional content and spirituality that some of the curators wrote about, but it was very like seen as just kind of cutesy. It was not the way it is now where like you can go into any gallery and a museum and see artwork that's been produced in last 10 years with like crystals in it and other sort of stuff. Yeah. No, that was not.

George: Huh.

Kathryn: That was not there. And I always thought that was so ridiculous. I'm like, but the pre-Raphaelites and and the sublime like that just happened, you know, technically speaking from,

George: Yeah.

Kathryn: you know, a history perspective. So I'm like, why is this like taboo? And it was so anyway, so did you encounter that?

George: That's so interesting. No, no, Oh my God, yeah. I'm one

Kathryn: Yeah.

George: of my favorite advisors. So two things on that. One is that one of my favorite advisors, one of the most brilliant people I've ever been near, like right before I went out into field work, pulled me aside and verbatim was like, don't go all Castaneda on us. Carlos Castaneda, who

Kathryn: Okay, yeah.

George: was an anthropologist, who's sort of like the...

Kathryn: Yeah.

George: black sheep of the, you know, he's a cautionary tale in like straight academic

Kathryn: Mm.

George: anthropology. I mean, for some

Kathryn: Mm-hmm.

George: good reasons, right? He like just made up a lot of shit and was not, you know, interested in letting actual empirical reality get in the way with in the way of a good story. But,

Kathryn: Hmm.

George: but like, you know, honestly, I think the answer to your question is yes. And right. So part of it is absolutely there was not good space for this. You know, the more time I spent with like senior scholars of religious experience across a number of fields, the more consistently we'd run up against the like, you you'd be in it, you know, you'd read people's books where they very carefully, you know, police the boundaries of what they're willing to make claims about. And, you know, then you'd be in like a seminar with somebody whose books you'd read and You know, and like somebody would just keep pushing and pushing like they're like, but is it did it really happen? Like, is it real question? Which, you know, I think is

Kathryn: Mm-hmm.

George: personally, I think is sort of the least interesting question you can ask in an academic context about like religious or spiritual experience. even like the people who I there were two answers from the people who I genuinely deeply respected and admired who were doing the kind of work I was interested in within academia. And one of them was I mean, this guy literally said, my membership in the academy depends upon me answering no. Like verbatim quote, a lecture hall. And the other, from someone who I respect even

Kathryn: Yeah.

George: more, when she realized where the work was taking her, put it in a box and said, this is my career trajectory and I'm not willing to put people's, thing that is so central to people, like under the microscope. And she like shifted to working on like documentary stuff. And I mean, the sensibilities there, but I both came in with and internalized the, know, in the sort of like Foucaultian sense, right? Like the, what now we're talking about is like, you know, presumptive, obeisance, uh, you know, the like policing myself out of this.

Kathryn: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yes,

George: And it like it was this like just shitty

Kathryn: yes.

George: feedback loop. I was in for years trying to write the fucking dissertation. It was a very long and winding road. mean, you know, it's.

Kathryn: wow

George: So I spent a year in Utah. I put PhD applications on hold because I could not begin to speak to what I was doing in Utah and I knew I wasn't just like screwing around in the desert. Like that that has given shape to everything I've done since like there are days I don't miss it, but not many and certainly not whole weeks they go by. cause the work in its most basic sense was about bearing witness. It was about, you know,

Kathryn: Yeah, amazing.

George: building this container where it was safe for people to have new experiences of themselves and then bearing witness.

Kathryn: Yes. Yes.

George: and it's, it's the most in that vocational like the full sense of a calling, like it's the most profound experience I've ever had, right? Work wise.

Kathryn: Mm-hmm.

George: And like personally, it's inextricable from this sort of like radical break between like when I was in the field, I was like, I was in this like, in the world in a way that like, my God, if I could stay there forever, I would just, that would have been amazing. And then I would come out of the field and like my life was a hot mess. Socially, relationally, all of the, you know, life stuff. move back East, spend a couple of years working in politics and policy, mostly at the state level. Jersey, actually, working

Kathryn: in DC? Jersey. OK.

George: on a statewide campaign. came into, I was the governor's speech writer for a while and then worked in an agency thinking I was sort of getting back on track with the political, you know, the high theory stuff

Kathryn: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

George: and, and like that obviously wasn't working. So The single biggest value from Georgetown was effectively repaving my undergraduate transcript, which would never have gotten me into doctoral programs.

Kathryn: Mm.

George: So I was applying to PhD programs in Yeah, And short story long, I started a PhD program the next fall, spent the first year and a half. right back in that sort of Georgetown mode of impressing myself

Kathryn: Yeah.

George: by being clever and sounding really good talking about, know, I mean, had some fancy shit going on. spent those back in Argentina working with this novelist and this Locanian psychoanalyst and social movement stuff and like all sorts of really cool, sexy. It sounded good.

Kathryn: Wow, that sounds cool. Yeah.

George: It sounds good. It sounded really good. But I didn't give a shit. got my, I was so not in it.

Kathryn: Where were you doing the

George: And

Kathryn: PhD?

George: at Princeton.

Kathryn: Okay.

George: I had So I had, hit this point in the fall of the second year where I was like, can't pretend I can't, I had to go to my advisor. was like, I don't know how to work on anything I believe in or care about. Like I'm afraid that if I look too closely at it, I'm going to mess up this stuff that is really important and beautiful for people. But I've never been anywhere near anything that is as important as the shared experience of sacred space. And I cannot spend more time not working on that. Like if I'm going to stay in this. like, what do I do? And they were great. were

Kathryn: Hmm.

George: generally, they were like really supportive. And this sort of magical thing happened over the course of them, like two, within the two weeks from when I came out of the closet about that, I, what I, what I said was like, all right, so I think I'm going to, I'm going to blow up my summer plans and I'm going to do, I'll do two different versions of preliminary field work. I'll spend half of the summer in Peru where I know there's a You know, a huge robust mystical tourism industry. And I will spend half the summer on a Lakota reservation because I know from my Utah experience that somebody's talking to Whitey about what about

Kathryn: Mm hmm. Yeah.

George: ceremony and practice. And

Kathryn: Yeah.

George: these like these points of exchange and the kinds of relationships that are made possible like that sounds like a potentially. You know, not trying to slice open religious experience, but like. A thing that you can use the tools of social science to do something interesting with, like what kinds of ways of

Kathryn: Yes.

George: being in the world together are made possible by, you know, these practices or these, you know, these shared participation in these practices. like within two weeks of saying like Peru and South Dakota, it turned out that my intermediate Spanish teacher was instead of being like random grad student number nine was like a major Peruvian poet who'd fled Fujimori. and who introduced me to all these people. yeah,

Kathryn: Amazing.

George: like a week later, I'm in the counseling center at the recommendation of a buddy of mine who was a postdoc. So you should talk to this guy, he's weird like you. And I'm talking to him and he looks like this sort of like, know, very like hippie to be Bob Ross character. And he's got the like, in the garden variety, new age, like the Kawhi poster and Black Elk Speaks and all of that. But as I look around his office, he's also got some really like fairly obscure Lakota. ceremonial implements in his office that are like not the things that you find at the crystal shop in town. And like I finished telling him like, I'm thinking I'm gonna spend half the summer here, half there. And he's like, well, you know, I actually, I was a Sundancer for eight years and I can

Kathryn: Mm-hmm.

George: introduce you to some people. I mean, it was literally within like two weeks of this. So short story long, central questions of like the dissertation level work and this sort of also structures what I'm doing now in terms of coaching consulting stuff really about how people sense of their capacity to change their world moves, how far beyond what they grew up in or were encultured in they're willing to reach in search of like making meaningful lives and shared experiences

Kathryn: Yeah. Yeah.

George: where and how they like police the boundaries.

Kathryn: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

George: and like. The sort of why anthropology on this was that I think of anthropological field work as a kind of engaged ambivalence, right? Like, which is sort of like, it dovetailed nicely with my, my like lived experience of always sort of having one foot in and one foot out anyway.

Kathryn: Mm-hmm.

George: And, you know, in a way that seemed like, well, I can't seem to figure out whether I should be doing healing work or studying it. So like, let me just, I'll try this both and neither nor betwixt in between thing. which made sense at the time, but also kind of kept me stuck in certain ways, I think. the

Kathryn: Because of the observation and needing to have a degree of neutrality.

George: Yeah, mean, nobody in anthropology has taken the neutrality, the neutral observer thing seriously for quite a while. but it's but but but and that's part of why. Yeah.

Kathryn: Okay, right. I remember that Clifford Geertz, yeah, I remember, yeah.

George: Yeah, yeah, there's this sort of like, I mean, part of the attraction of the discipline is that it had been in a 40 year long petite mal seizure about, on what basis are we making claims about what's true in the world and what's privilege, right? The privilege of perspective and

Kathryn: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, yeah. Right.

George: position and how like purely relational and positional

Kathryn: Who gets...

George: it is.

Kathryn: And who gets to make the meaning out of that and say what it is. Yeah.

George: Yeah, So, I spent a few years after PhD work trying to convince myself I actually wanted to be an academic and that had never been true. I just liked the idea of it. And the part that I really liked

Kathryn: Yeah.

George: was working with like first gen low income kids and that led into some time in education reform. then my now ex and I moved out here to Montana where I live in 29.

Kathryn: Ew.

George: She got a job offer out here and it was a reasonable time for a pivot and then like the stay at home dad thing turned into multiple years of that, which is longer than I expected and like wonderful, but also hard. spent a couple years running a nonprofit here, like a preexisting nonprofit. I didn't start it. And I've been, you know, since the fall of this year. trying to figure out what's next, making space for it. So that's

Kathryn: Alright.

George: like the super quick and dirty, having taken 25 minutes of our time here. you know, I just, I was, heard

Kathryn: Yeah, yeah. No, good.

George: our earlier, our first round conversation, at least the first half of it had this sort of, am I interviewing you vibe to it? Which, which is great. Like there's a lot of wonderful stuff to talk about, but also

Kathryn: yeah. Yeah, no, that's cool.

George: That's not, that's not all this is. Right? Like the reconnect matters.

Kathryn: Gotcha, okay, yeah. A fascinating journey you've been on and there's some weaving of similar exploration just in different ways, I think, between us. I think what remains to be like central in my way of working in the world is the idea of the frame and creating like contained space and then what can happen within that space, whether it be something, you know, where there's some kind of relational exchange, some sort of rituals, some sort of transcendent kind of experience. I think. It obviously has been a part of my performance artwork, but it's even in, you know, how I would create a workshop for a corporation and certainly in the healing work too.

George: does it look like in your practice now? how did the distinctions work? mean, like just looking at your website, right? You've got like so many different things going on and you're drawing on so many different frames.

Kathryn: I know.

George: And like, sort of behind the question, I was wondering about like moments where you either find intersections or breakthroughs between frames or, you know, places where you find yourself like flattening a narrative or like

Kathryn: Yeah, yeah.

George: How do you hold the tension?

Kathryn: So I've always been interested in using like the assumed frame for the context and dynamic or stated purpose,

George: Mm-hmm.

Kathryn: but then twisting it a bit so that it slightly destabilizes the expectations that people are bringing into what they think they know about it, which then opens up that field for something else, for some other kind of possibility. So that example I gave before about you know, starting to lead a roadmap workshop, but then having people get into their bodies and do this little bit of a meditation one of those ways where I'm sort of crossing streams. And in so many ways, the work that I was doing the big international consulting firm I was at before, That work, doing customer experience strategy work employee experience strategy work and the guys have other things. You know, it really requires empathy and there really wasn't a big vocabulary for that and still really isn't in corporate America.

George: Mm-hmm.

Kathryn: There is a little bit more, you know, because of the pandemic. I think a lot of what I was trying to do with that company, the philosophies underneath it, the frameworks, they could land a lot more easily now than back in 2017 when I was trying to do them. it was hard for me in some ways because I've been so disciplined by the very system that I want to change. and internalize that. And so it is, you kind of have to test the waters and see how much can I take, you know, this square and push at the edges to start to make it more of a circle. So there isn't one defined edge. and then becomes a spiral. Back in grad school, I had this blog, I don't know if you knew that, before blogs were a thing and all that, called Circles and Lines, because I just sort of intuitively had this sense about what I now understand is more of a masculine directive energy, like a line, linear thinking, that modernist thinking, versus the circle. which is more feminine, which more generative and fertile and the spiral, which is in so many of these wisdom traditions, I think we both have studied. And that spiral is, you can call it like the path of continuously ever evolving human consciousness. We use the notion of a spiral and healing journey. You probably know some of this from recovery where it's like you go into one layer and then the thing that you think you got Through oh shit comes back around again. Oh except this time you're like, aha. I see you I know what you're doing here and you

George: Yeah. Yeah.

Kathryn: know, you can evolve a little bit quicker through that That's kind of that that healing journey as a spiral

George: Hmm. Kathryn, how do you keep language around masculine and feminine as archetypes for these aspects of human experience, how do you keep those from collapsing into Essentialists claims about the people and the nature of people, but like... How do you hold that open rather than let it collapse?

Kathryn: I think about it more from what I've learned with Eastern medicine. And that's just that we have, and also, know, Vedic perspectives too, we also, we all have masculine and feminine energy. We have those dimensions and qualities within us. So to me, it's, it's kind of like, it's a, approach would, I would just call it, it would be queering essentialism in that context.

George: I like that. was struck by the word word disciplining coming up again. I'm wondering moments where you find yourself the edge of something and like the feeling of either being disciplined or disciplining yourself, right? Like whether we see that as coming from within an internalized thing or from outside, like the places where becomes a kind of embodied experience, right? I mean, you've done a lot of really interesting shit in really different contexts, right? mean, like you've started multiple companies and you've been working with high altitude corporate folks at like, the same time as you're doing this? mean, is this at the same time as like really

Kathryn: my art.

George: exploring the art?

Kathryn: Yeah. And also as I'm starting to study and train in these different wisdom traditions and lineages, which is leading into healing work. Yeah, doing it all at the same time.

George: What are the transits you think of a moment where you were aware of yourself in transit between frames?

Kathryn: Sure, mean, like I used to use all my paid time off back when I had paid time off. Like it's a little different in my arrangement now, you know, all my vacation time was to go somewhere and film something, I took time off to do my intensive yoga teacher training, wish you'd ever meet her. Didn't work, you know, during that time. yeah. I mean, I also had, I don't want to say time off, because it wasn't really time off, but I've had so many back to back kind of accidents and surgeries. So I would have some time coalescing from yet another accident surgery to do some deeper healing spiritual work on myself, some more study. and a lot of my free time would be spent going to lectures, going to... trainings, workshops, all of that. And I think that that was because it gave me the foundation. But at a certain point, you sort of have to recognize like, oh, you can also find an addiction or an escapism of real life in the healing work or in studying of life, but never

George: Sure.

Kathryn: the living of the life, right?

George: No, what do you mean? I have no experience with that.

Kathryn: I had no idea. Like, well, yeah, and you were even referring to this before, Would I go study it as an anthropologist, as healing worker, actually do the healing work And sometimes, though, like, I definitely have had a couple teachers in two different traditions say, you know, in order to really learn the thing. and embody it, you need to be teaching it. So I've definitely created opportunities through, you know, whether through like the coaching or wellness side of my previous company or, just fulfilling my like stated teaching hours for my, you know, certification in meditation and, and yoga, I would create these containers to, to teach and offer, which I still do. sometimes another way you know the transition is just the habitus, right, Because, you can't necessarily get yourself all decked out in crystals or whatever, like, you know, and go to like present to like the CEO of a major manufacturing company. So sometimes that like. would be a tell.

George: Say more about the tell.

Kathryn: Well, I've never actually really fit in, I think, anywhere I've been. And I don't want to. my current client, I've had multiple clients there, say, there say like, are you an artist? Because you dress this certain way or whatever, so the habitus, know, just. And also, I can use the jargon. I mean, it's part of being. chameleon and also one foot in one foot out like you talked about and that's just a small way that you can be a little bit of disruptor without it being too too major like to completely throw off.

George: I mean, I asked these questions not out of abstract interest. I the luxury of anthropology, I think is that like, when one has big questions, you get to go. spend a lot of time with other people living their way through these questions. mean, like that as a deep

Kathryn: Mmm.

George: sort of sensibility, right? Like, it

Kathryn: Mm-hmm.

George: may even be that my, like, I'm so limited in how I'm constructing these questions. Let me go find folks who

Kathryn: Mm-hmm.

George: are finding other ways of thinking about these kinds of questions, right? like, when the embodied experience is, where it feels like something's at stake. And ambivalence in the full sense, not of like, meh, I can go either way, but in the full sense of being, ambi meaning both, Valiant, of the strongest forces in the universe, being pulled in two opposing directions, at least two. Where the embodied experience Is it like I have all of these things I can draw from in this moment? Is it I am this and now I'm being asked to be that? Can you think of a concrete moment maybe as a way in? felt? this kind of tension.

Kathryn: Well, I think I had living inside that tension for a long time, back in New York. It almost is like, can frame it as like when I really started my spiritual journey or my healing journey. When those things happen, it becomes harder for people to stay in the identity that they've constructed up to that point. So certain things are just not gonna work. And in some ways, I feel like some of these accidents I had have maybe, and other traumas I've been through have maybe been the times where the universe was like, we gotta pull you out of this for a minute, because like, this is just not working. yeah, I mean, definitely. tensions in Maybe something else I need to say is that. Attention I've had is just how self-directed am in my life and I think given the context in which I I grew up and The imperatives I've had for my like own basic survival like I've always had it pay my way I've never had anyone taking care of something for me. I've always had this kind of goes back to like you know, having had a mentor I just never knew that was a thing and I've always had to be hyper independent because that's just survival strategies, right, that you learn.

George: Sure.

Kathryn: And so I was kind of going almost even from job to job just in the same way that I was dating people back in the day where it's like, you like me? Okay, I like you too. Let's say in a relationship. this, you know, someone says I should apply for this job. Okay, I'm going to apply for a job. Okay, I get the job. And then here I am sort of thing, you know, and I can't say that. A lot of that was I had inside me enough of a core sense of self to be able to say, hmm, do I really like this or not? It'd be more like, let me get into it. Let me try to do what I think I want to do or what, you know, like perform within what I'm meant to be performing in. then, and then that would, yeah, that would get at some degree of tension. And I try to. navigate through that. full on believe and understand all sorts of relationships, whether they're workplace or intimate or friendships, community, whatever. Those are all sites where we can work through our childhood issues and traumas.

George: Sure.

Kathryn: And so I know I was doing that in a lot of my workplace settings before. And so it's more like when I decided to leave the big six figure job and start my own thing, do that full time really just rely on. degree of faith. That was when I took the first leap really to being kind of fully self-directed. But even then I was looking to too many models outside of me. was over relying on a coach that I was paying to help me. Yeah, so I think it's like an ongoing journey and this is why you teach what you need to learn, right?

George: Yeah

Kathryn: why I think I was given this model by the universe or whatever, just like I've definitely been given artworks to make by the universe, I understand that now. But this model, A Whole Human Alchemy and the retreat that I just kind of channeled in back in 2018, Design A Whole Human Life, it is about becoming aware of your circumstances, conscious of them, deciding what, in an embodied way, felt sense, like is this working, is this not working? know, enter some of those design thinking tools we talked about before, and then how would I want to craft my life? What is the experience I want to have? So I had to go from very much like the outside directing me, or what I perceived

George: Yeah.

Kathryn: as the outside, and the version of the outside. know, parents, society, da da. I had to take all of that and eventually like go, no. And like, who am I? What do I really want to do? What really makes me feel alive? Really returning to what is my truth and. How can I live in more sovereignty? And that's at the core of my work. And that's going to continue to be at the core of my work till I die and probably in the next lifetime. Because I think that that is the journey that we're all on in so many ways is undoing, unlearning, unraveling all of these things that have told us who we are and who we need to be. And so those are the tensions that I'm most interested in. they do

George: Mm.

Kathryn: come into, you going back to your question, hopefully this makes sense as an answer or response. But it's more about my mindset around some of these spaces.

George: Mm-hmm.

Kathryn: So whereas before I was kind of more like, this is happening to me and this, you know, kind like more of a victim with this versus now it's like, no, I'm consciously like, I don't have to be at my job. So if I don't want to be there, I can go. But

George: you

Kathryn: actually, If I look at this and this is where one of the components of my Koshi model comes into play. If I look at what that job is providing me right now. it's actually feeding these other areas of my life in ways

George: Hmm.

Kathryn: that that conscious awareness and choice then an empowered choice. So here we are back to connecting to inner authority and your own sense of where you want to be and be more self-directed. That's where that comes into play because then I'm like, okay, I can make that work for where I am now. I know eventually I will evolve out of this expression of my life because that's just what, you know, I know I'm here to do. I am constantly like, whether I like it or not, having these phoenix rising from the ashes moments or periods in my life. And so I know I will. we'll go through another evolution where that balance won't work anymore. Except this time, I will be aware of it and I will be directing it a little bit more than I think like the nudge or shove I've gotten from the universe has like, precipitated a lot of change in my life.

George: Faith is such an interesting word, not just to think with, but to sort of dwell in. How has, within what you just said, one of the arcs that just moved through your response to that last question I mean, you narrated it as a sort of move towards increasing self-direction, right? And you talked about early on the experience of you, when you use the word faith, it was with regard to, I think, leaving your six figure job and starting the, I

Kathryn: Yeah.

George: don't know if that was the first of your consulting projects, but whichever one that was.

Kathryn: Yeah.

George: How has the texture of the experience of faith changed

Kathryn: not do well with the Catholic faith I was raised Because from a young age, I was there's so much hypocritical stuff going on in here.

George: Sure.

Kathryn: Like, oh, we love everyone except for gays. Woo hoo hoo hoo. Like, what? That never made sense to me when I was really young. And so I just did not. And I would see people performing religion, including in my family system, performing religion and doing like the peace be with you handshake thing and then be out in the parking lot and being kind of assholes to each other. So that just never landed for me. So that was an unfortunate experience of faith or in that kind of way that I think so many people go through. So faith didn't really land in my field as a word I would even say to like. Maybe the last. Like now I feel like it's more of a word that has, I'm just curious about it and I have some connection to it. I'm trying it on in this way that... is to develop my own relationship with it. Similarly, when I was doing the yoga teacher training and our teacher would have us end classes that we were teaching saying something like, Be receptive to the grace of God within you. And I couldn't say the G word, I couldn't say God, because it just didn't, it stuck in my throat. And I think, again, like I think there's so many people like that. because of the way that these things have been brought to us. So it's really in non-denominational contexts that I've learned to come a little bit closer to that word and that language, almost purely, all right. as a poet, as a would have been linguist, as someone who cares deeply about song lyrics more so than the music sometimes. The words we use matter and they can kind of cast spells. And so I got curious about what is faith really mean to me? How can I have a relationship with this, right? If something is so abhorrent to me and so foreign to me. I can either keep that outside of me and not have a relationship with it or I can get curious about it and bring it in. So I've been choosing to do more of that. Huh, I have such a visceral reaction, right? You were talking before about having such a visceral reaction to something where it was like, that was me in faith. And when I had this accident that led me out to being in the desert, I ironically ended up in a nursing home in Harlem recovering for quite some time post-surgery and post-surgery that went wrong. And it was, there was Catholic stuff everywhere and there was mass and there was all of this. And so was like, well, isn't this funny? This happens and I'm clearly being guided to do something different with how I'm living, cause I'm not really

George: Hmm.

Kathryn: living. my life. So yeah, that was sort of where it's it's sat. I started to approach the word a little bit more. And now instead of thinking about the things I do is that maybe would be seen as a little crazy or foolish like fool's leap. I think of like more of a more leaning towards the leap of faith rather than like a fool's leap. Although I do love the energy of a fool because it is joyful.

George: Yeah. Yeah.

Kathryn: in so many ways. Yeah, so I'm just, I'm getting to know it.

George: Hmm. Yeah, that's funny. there's one sort of like archetype that I find personally aspirational, it's holy fool. I wonder about... Less about the question of like a capital F faith, right? Like religion necessarily or something like that. know, when you said what you said, I immediately was thinking about a conversation I had with somebody on a porch during a retreat in New Hampshire in 2002, three o'clock in the morning when I was banging my head against, like I just could not, the very idea of faith seemed absurd to me. And the gift that this, person gave to me in that conversation was to not indulge my desire to argue, but to say like, what if faith weren't belief without proof, which of course is exactly how I was thinking about it. if faith weren't belief without proof, but rather trust without reservation?

Kathryn: I like that, yeah.

George: Well, yeah, and it had, I mean, what it did was to shift the question out of the register of something over which I felt that I had no control. I couldn't just choose to believe something and like talk about language.

Kathryn: No.

George: spent a lot of time thinking about the word belief, the word experience and academic context. But shifting it to a question of trust, is almost, which, you know, at the time and still is often almost impossible. but not entirely impossible and something that I can act on as a matter of will. Right. Like I can choose to trust. It's terrifying and very difficult at times, but like, not impossible. It's just really hard. Um, so I mean, that's where my head went, but I was thinking, I'm, I'm wondering about your experience of yourself in the act placing small F small F faith. in something, whether it's outside of you or in you as you launch something.

Kathryn: By the way, think trust can maybe be like a gateway drug to faith in some ways. and I do think like underneath there's a recognition of surrender and powerlessness. And I think until you have experiences in life where you actually feel and see the limits of your own power, supposed power, you can't really easily approach these. These things that are bigger that are more like in the line of like what the word awe really means.

George: Yeah. Yes. It's very hard to be committed to, you know, to not like policing the boundary between like abstract conceptual and like embodied experience, but also still like being pulled towards those things. Right. So the question was precisely not a conceptual one. It was precisely a about the kind of embodied texture of your experience of

Kathryn: feeling, feeling safe.

George: of placing like as an active agentic. You you like the word sovereign, we'll go with sovereign as

Kathryn: huh.

George: a sovereign act, right? Placing faith in whether it's self or the person or structure, whatever.

Kathryn: Okay, okay, yeah, so Well, like I said, I'm still I'm definitely still a student of this for sure. And maybe early stages. It's almost like in retrospect where I have to be like, well, I was missing this thing or I needed this thing and then somehow it came to me. I wonder what it would have been like to reverse engineer that and have faith that this thing was going to happen and that would have taken me out of anxiety maybe about this thing that hasn't shown up yet. If I had faith that if it's needed for me, it will happen. Okay, I'll put it this way. I did those those activity of like stripping away the ideology from religion that I was first grew up in. I've had a visceral like invitation to be in faith through even like living through what I could have definitely died when I got hit by this car on my bike and I didn't have a helmet and was like thrown back. I could have split my head open. I could have completely died. Right. Like so that could be seen as like like faith was behind me. But oddly, like I'm getting kind of teary as I'm talking about it. I just don't know. I don't know. I think I'm working on it. I think part of what I'm doing now and this next. level of my work in the world as someone who's trying to accept and have faith in myself and the gifts I have been given, the wisdom I have gained, like I think I need to keep working towards cultivating that and opening up to that. and having faith within myself, about myself, to do the kinds of things that I'm looking to do in the world right now. rather than it be something outside of me, like, you know, bearded sky god daddy

George: Kathryn, can you think of a moment, like where you were aware of yourself choosing to have faith in yourself.

Kathryn: So I have had in my lifetime. You know, I've worked through. various mental health challenges that I understand now come from, know, the environment I grew up in, the impact of that on my physiology even. And I was, was the victim of this crime when I was living in Spain not too long ago. And when I came back to states and things were still happening, it was a very, very hard, very alone. period of time and I think I had to really again choose to live to live through that experience and continue to be on this planet. And fortunately I was connected with some resources that helped me do some deep, deep like work to understand why I've always had this feeling like I don't even deserve to live. is, you know, but, and then I met someone who also felt that. I was like, good, I'm not the only person, you know, like. But there are, you know, we all have different things that we kind of come in with and different experiences that are obviously out of our control as babies and small children and all of that. And so this thing that's called like a shame existence bind, think having worked through that as well as doing some neurofeedback, which helped change the way that my brain had been structured from a very young age to be in this like. place all the healing work that happened as a course of this horrible thing that I mean movie level could not have ever thought that this would be a thing that anyone I would know go through let alone myself but to come out of that and to choose life and really Like, well, fuck, you know, I didn't die when I got hit by that car. I didn't get murdered when, sorry, like when I had been raped. I didn't also get murdered as a part of this crime that I was evicted. I'm like, something must be keeping me around here for some reason. So why don't I just choose to have faith in my very existence and let that be enough? and let myself be more surrendered to what is experienced in the day to day and let that be enough. And what if I were to I don't know where it is. I can't locate it in a space per se. But what if I connect with that energy that held me? for like the two hours I was in a bathroom in an airport in an island in Spain to try to keep myself safe so I could get on a plane and not get taken. Like, what if I go back to those moments? of sheer terror and sit in that energy that was holding me through that and let that be the basis by which I trust, I have belief, and I have some faith in even just existing. So that's why I think it's kind of not easy for me to talk about it. It's not,

George: Yeah.

Kathryn: yeah, it's never gonna be like the live, laugh, love embroidered pillow version of faith for me.

George: I don't know that there's a more profound prayer than let that be enough. that I know of.

Kathryn: Yeah.

George: Yeah.

Kathryn: For sure, yeah. Yeah, so these moments where we are invited to go beyond what we even think is possible and come out of the other side. If you can't turn around look back and be like, well, fuck. If that's not some kind of like justification for some sort of something, call it faith or as a. woman I used to work with used to say when people couldn't get their arms around a certain word or we get hung up with a bunch of C-suites like debating over something. Who cares what you call it? Call it a banana. I don't care. The point is we've got a banana. Call it faith. I don't care. It's a thing.

George: Yeah.

Kathryn: It's here. You know, and I don't think we should

George: Yeah.

Kathryn: ever think we actually know it all the way. God, how could we?

George: Yeah.

Kathryn: And they, they, they got in that way. Good!

George: Yeah. Yeah, it's like.

Kathryn: Cause if we figure that out,

George: You

Kathryn: what else are we gonna do here? I don't know.

George: So much of it for me at least is precisely about possibility.

Kathryn: Yeah.

George: You know, I think back, I am not a stranger to some serious mental health challenges myself. you know, certainly the worst depression I've ever been through, you know, if I'd had any idea how bad it was gonna get, I would have gone inpatient in a heartbeat. And

Kathryn: Yeah, yeah, understood.

George: the volume of labor involved in trying to hold open the possibility that this totalizing experience, right? Being down all the time is hard and it sucks, the moments that were really scary were the ones where no matter what I did, you know, no matter how many post-it notes I put up or how many friends I had had like on like, hey, call me, you know, every other day

Kathryn: Mm-hmm.

George: to check in, kind of, you know, I'll schedule the people involved in the care and feeding, right? No matter what I did, there were a small number of moments where like, I could not remember ever having felt different. than the like all consuming dark. And I couldn't imagine ever feeling different. And like that,

Kathryn: Yeah. Yeah.

George: like the weight of that, the prospect of not being able to keep that at bay indefinitely. Like. That was the fear, like that was the scariest I think that it ever got.

Kathryn: Yeah. Yeah. Do you feel connected to your intuition? or some sort of inner voice that can guide you at times.

George: More than I have in the last 15 years. I came out of that hole, but I didn't come all the way out of it until really quite recently. That episode of

Kathryn: Yeah.

George: depression had a decade plus long tail. you know, for me, it's been a combination

Kathryn: Yeah. Yeah.

George: of some really, like I first encountered like holotropic breath work myself a few years ago and like, holy mother of God, did that open some things up.

Kathryn: Yeah.

George: You know, just enough kind of room for possibilities. Slacking the rope, room to like, room to start to be curious again about my own experience of

Kathryn: Bye bye.

George: myself and about other people and to be able to listen to that voice that you're talking about.

Kathryn: Yeah.

George: You know, the...

Kathryn: I asked you because like, think it's, I think of those few, well, not even few, but I've definitely had some mystical experiences where in meditation, I'll just learn things about myself, about my parents, about whatever, like kind of get these downloads and then we'll hear very clearly certain messages and the one when I was in it with that stuff from that crime. remember I just was like, I need, I'm gonna go really out of my mind if I don't do something. So I went back to doing a regular Kundalini practice. And I remember sitting in that meditation one day and I heard so clearly in my channel that voice loudly. Isn't it interesting that you're fighting for your life when you've never valued it? And that to me was like, mic drop. Okay, I'm gonna get with the program. I mean, yeah. So when we have those darker times or just in general, I think when we move through the world with more faith, we are more open to listening to that voice instead of what the ego wants or what the mind is like, what the conditioning says, you know?

George: Interesting is an interesting, fascinating word there, right? Isn't it interesting?

Kathryn: Yeah.

George: What does that conjure for you in terms of the position from which the observation is being made? what I'm wondering about is like when you said it that way, my first thought was like, that's that's a that's like cultivating curiosity about this. You know, this tension.

Kathryn: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

George: But I don't want to presume that.

Kathryn: Yeah, I don't know. haven't thought about it. just if it just what it did is it just. reorientated me, I think, out of what I was experiencing in that moment to let some that like it was letting the light in the crack. It was lighting. It was letting in the possibility.

George: Yeah.

Kathryn: Maybe that it is possible that you actually do care about yourself and love yourself enough that you want to be here. Look, you just fought your ass off to get out of where you were. and you're still fighting. maybe actually you do care. Maybe you are actually supposed to be here. Maybe, know, you would have died if you were supposed to had a life that ended earlier. it's a little bit of, I think it just cracked, cracked open that time for me.

George: no, God, no, no, no, no, no, don't want

Kathryn: sorry to lay such a heavy heavy thing down.

George: to come out of it. You know, when I

Kathryn: Yes.

George: think about the what was shaken so profoundly for me in know, in like the darkest episode of acute depression. I came out of that with a, like a bedrock level inability to trust the reality of my own experience.

Kathryn: Hmm. That's not necessarily

George: Right? Because I had been.

Kathryn: a bad thing, right?

George: Say more. Say more.

Kathryn: well, that's like the, in my mind, it's pointing at the, you know, we often have an unreliable narrator telling us how terrible things are, or, you know, you're this kind of way and that kind of way, and it's really just like the ego or some other wounded part that, you know, inner critic. critical inner parent, all that kind of language around things. So kind of where I went with that.

George: Yeah. Yeah. So there's the, there's the not being able to like it being a very good idea to not trust the narrative, right? That I'm in, but I'm watching myself impose on my experience. I

Kathryn: Mm.

George: want to make a distinction and I'm not certain it holds up, but I want to make a distinction between that and like the actual real time experience of self by, which I mean like, so in those moments of extramus, when I was certain. in the way I've been certain about very few things in life, like embodied visceral certainty, certain that I hadn't always felt like that hopelessness, that abject despair, and would always feel that way. And demonstrably

Kathryn: Mmm.

George: totally wrong, right? Like, that's

Kathryn: Mm-hmm.

George: obviously not true. It wasn't true. I don't know if I was in that for 20 minutes or 10 hours. I honestly couldn't tell you. the faculty, like certainty as a faculty. right as a kind of capacity. I came out of that experience with like, all right, I, and that, that seems like a net positive, right? like certain certainty in my life has mostly been about like, I like the feeling of certainty that's about, you know, the fantasy of solid ground underfoot, you know, but the great sort of existential struggle on the back end of that, you know, through the, through the long tail of the that depression as experience, also out the other side of it is about, for me at least, is about what is the relationship between my sense of my own experience and my sense of myself. Put another way and I want to like I want to try to do two things at once with you because you're like one of very few people who I know like Like we could try to do this I want to try to do to bring some conceptual conversation in without losing the keel that's under this conversation right now. mean, to me, I feel very grounded and present with you in this conversation in a way that I don't wanna like pull out of to have an abstract seminar room conversation. Because I think there are real things at stake. At least there have been for me for people that I care about. So you talked at one point earlier about, you know, being, think the language you use was being like secure in your sense of self. but if I'm wrong, correct me. Like, you know, I heard echoes of the word like authenticity, right? Which is a word that gets used like all the time. Right. And has,

Kathryn: Yeah.

George: has a really, has a really complicated history, right?

Kathryn: authenticity, it's so hot right now. Like, like that Zoolander.

George: Right? It's like five, one hour. And we're having a

Kathryn: Hansel's so hot right now.

George: Hahaha But not just right now, right? I mean, it's

Kathryn: Yes.

George: really coming out like you can trace it. There's a great book from the early 70s by know, Lionel Trilling, literary theory guy called Sincerity and Authenticity. And it's a book about sort of tracing

Kathryn: Mm-mm. Mm-mm.

George: the last like half millennium of, know, for quite a few hundred years, sincerity was like the default, like the sort of defining value and understood as,

Kathryn: Mmm.

George: you know, the Congruence between how you present yourself and how other people experience you where like are you a sincere person? And sometime in the late 19th century and we can map this onto all sorts of other shit that's going on like ink like you know Marx Freud all sorts of stuff Sometime

Kathryn: Yeah.

George: in the 19th century, but like holy crap blowing up in the counterculture in the late 60s Like authenticity sort

Kathryn: Hmm.

George: of fully takes over as the kind of key term

Kathryn: Mmm.

George: core value Right. And that's about congruence with some inner sense of self as opposed to the kind of fundamentally social orientation of sincerity. And like, I, as a person, I have like an intense ambivalence

Kathryn: Mmm. Mmm. Mmm.

George: around this, around this, right? Like, because in some ways authenticity seems transparently and self-evidently to be like a good thing. Like, I feel that. Like that's an embodied experience

Kathryn: Mm-hmm.

George: that I have, right? Like, are we, am I present to you in this conversation in a way that is authentic, right? Or am I, as opposed to like managing some version of my self presentation in a way that like, I'm really trying not to do right now. And in the next breath, but I want it, I want there to be a way to hold these things at the same time. And this is what I was kind of trying to get at at the outset here of this question. I want to be able to hold that. Truth, like small t truth. at the same time as an awareness of like how complicated, like this is, it's not a value neutral term, right? It's not, it's like patently not the case that like, well, authenticity is just good, full stop, right? It has a history, it has a politics, it has all of these things that like, I don't want that to be everything, but like, it's also not nothing. How does that work for you? I mean, you're someone who thinks a lot about the forces involved in the world that we live in, whether in the kind of spiritual language that you're, the metaphysical and spiritual language that you're bringing to bear in this part of the conversation, or, know, pick your register, right? The high social theory, or the best version of management. understanding how management and working in organizations towards some collective goal. Like lot of different registers, right? But like authenticity is one of these notions that so easily gets treated as a self-evident, transparent, we know what it means, a good, right? It's the anchor point.

Kathryn: Mm-hmm.

George: But like, but it's not, right? Like nothing actually is.

Kathryn: Nothing is actually authentic.

George: the anchor, no, nothing is a totally stable anchor point, right? Like how do

Kathryn: Yes. Well.

George: you think about your relationship to authenticity? What I really want to ask is how you experience your relationship. I don't mean to ask you a strictly

Kathryn: Yeah.

George: conceptual question.

Kathryn: You know, I think there's a was this period of time in my journey where, you know, you learn about ego and you want to let go of the ego and have these ego death experiences because then you'll be your pure, true, authentic self. Right. But then you learn from psychology while you do want some of your ego because you need that to function. So it's like tensions between those things. And then I think about Jung and his work and the idea of like masks that we wear. And that's like where I think I got very interested in this idea of authenticity and the masks to the point that, I made some performance art around these themes, but. I think just getting to know yourself undoing those layers of learned beliefs and patterns and then making, I'm just going to say the word righteous choices, like right alignment choices for you to be in right relationship with yourself. If you're in right relationship with yourself, then I think you're expressing in an authentic way.

George: The thread I want to pull on is that just been talking about like having really complex experiences of self,

Kathryn: Mm-hmm.

George: right? Like that's like a moving target would be an absurdly simplistic gloss, right? Like that is not a stable

Kathryn: Yeah.

George: thing in the universe. How has your experience, and again, my hope is for us to not just the conceptual level, how has your experience of orienting towards... self. How do you see that move? What does it feel a moment where your experience of yourself as a navigational aid changes? Have you ever watched that happen in real time?

Kathryn: I don't know, guess just the way that I am living now is... you know, tuning into myself and my energy meditating in the morning, kind of set that tone and then to make decisions and choices are right alignment for me and also acknowledge other individual or I'm going into I mean, I think like I can feel in my body when I'm not being true to myself in that moment. So it is a little bit of like a felt sense. like I really struggle to tell even a white lie. You know, like most people, like some people can just like spout them off. No problem. Right. But it hurts,

George: does it hurt?

Kathryn: in my core, down in my solar plexus, down into my sacral And I do think sometimes I can feel and sense when someone else isn't being true. So I know like true, truth, authentic, not trying to make them interchangeable, but in some ways they are, I think.

George: We could call them all banana, right? That's why the question,

Kathryn: Exactly.

George: that's why, mean, this for me, I keep coming back to the question of like, how it moves around in practice, like what it does in the world.

Kathryn: Just the more you're in who you really are and you've stripped away. I keep going back to it like the other stuff that's like told you who you're supposed to be the beliefs and all that and more you've stripped that away and are just. moving through the world. with yourself, you're in your own resonance, you're in your own frequency, and that frequency, you could think of it as like, you you're being your own note on the piano, and if you're not tuned correctly to who you are, you're gonna like sound off, you know? I have to come, I'm trying to land it somewhere in the body,

George: Yeah.

Kathryn: but for me it's a feeling state and it's a tone. It's a frequency, it's an energy. And when we're not in our authentic self, think like we can hit against that so much that it ends up making us sick.

George: It's the title case, Who You Really Are.

Kathryn: Yeah, the truth of who you really

George: better.

Kathryn: are.

George: And in your, is your sense at this point in your life that that's a stable thing? That there's a fixed object somewhere in there?

Kathryn: I know this might sound very weird, but I'm an artist. So I made this watercolor randomly when I was on my watercolor journey. was like, I can't keep making this conceptual artwork where I'm not using my hands. So I made this artwork at the center was this deep blue and then this pink around it and then this yellow. And it was very intuitive. And I was like, woof, that's me. That's me. And so, yeah, that's stable. Cause that somehow is my true note, my true frequency, my true self. But then how that gets expressed. is going to be different based off of where I am. Corporate office, art space, like gallery, healing studio, my healing studio at home. that's going to get expressed differently. But those expressions, as long as I'm checking in myself that they are in alignment with what I'm meant to be doing right now. And it's a moment by moment thing because this is dynamic yet stable. That's how I know I'm like. in my authentic self and my authentic truth and my authentic power. And eventually some of those things will fall away, right? Like I'm not as invested in my energy towards having as big of an art career as I was before where I'm like actively connecting with galleries or trying to be in shows or things like that. My energy is focused in other creative pursuits at this moment. So that's what I mean like. it can kind of shift and change but like that core sense of self, whether it be those three colors and that's like what it is or not, like I don't know, I mean that's, it's just a knowing. And I think that I do have that pretty landed at this point. But I'm curious to see where else it'll go. I'm curious to see just more of like how I will express what it is that I'm meant to express. in the world as time goes on.

George: What's the relationship between curiosity and faith in your experience?

Kathryn: Well, I don't know that I've thought about those two ideas together, I guess that's sort of it. Like maybe if I have faith in myself, I'm landed in some sense of not solid self, but it's a knowing that I can come back to. And then that curiosity maybe is how I think about, I'm curious, like, what am I going to be guided to create today? Or how am I going to be guided to create today? Or... That can be a degree of curiosity. I'm really intending to put into material form the experiences I've had in my life and the wisdom I've gained from it in order to be of service to others through words that eventually get published in a book. I'm curious what that's actually gonna end up being, but I have a sense that that kind of expression might happen. So there's a sort of faith I have that if I'm really called to do something like that, which I think I am, I'm gonna have faith that it's gonna happen and land with the right people. But I'm curious what it's going to look like. What shape it'll take.

George: When you say that, you thinking of the, have a memoir in progress, right?

Kathryn: off and on, yeah. But I don't know if memoir is the right word for it right now.

George: Okay.

Kathryn: don't know. Yeah.

George: What would you call it today?

Kathryn: It's writing. It's a writing project. It's a trying to like translate out what's inside.

George: When you imagine reader, is it different from the way that you imagine an audience when you're making installation or a performance piece?

Kathryn: I don't imagine an audience. I do and I don't. I'm having a relationship with creativity when I'm creating something. okay, so let's say like a live performance art piece. It's I'm creating it for... the work itself to be expressed. And then I guess having some faith that it's gonna do what it does and what it's meant to so long as I'm being faithful to what is coming through me. These are big questions that I haven't thought about in good ways. I feel like I didn't answer your question though.

George: I think you did. meant it less in terms of how are you imagining packaging something for, kind of person who's going to consume X and more in terms of what version of, don't like audience, maybe like I'm not attached to the word. want to get away from a production consumption frame. wondering about the version of a fellow traveler or participant or whatever that. shows up in or haunts or whatever the relation is that that that figure might have in your experience of creation in your other kinds of art. And the version of that. figure in writing.

Kathryn: So you wanna know about. like the audience I'm writing to.

George: you just said you don't like you're not thinking about the audience. You're thinking about your fidelity to the work. Right. And

Kathryn: Yeah, that's been my main motive creating. know like, I mean, they would talk about this with business all the time, like, who's my persona? My ideal client kind of thing. And yeah, picturing an audience to receive the book. I haven't really wrapped it around there, but I do think that there is a part of this work. that is gonna be speaking directly to people's inner children. Because they're the ones that really need to be healed and held and seen and heard. And the adult wrapper around it is then gonna also have some, they'll get some candy too through it.

George: I knew you were going to Candy there, the adult kid, the rapper around the thing.

Kathryn: Yeah.

George: I, this could, this could go on for a very long time from where I'm sitting. have like a thousand other questions I would love to think through with you, but we've been at it for a while.

Kathryn: answering the questions because I do get my head still too. That's why we need these

George: Yeah.

Kathryn: body practices. And also, a place evolving transition. I've been on the other side of that very bad PTSD. I from that experience I was talking about before, but... I am this stage of like post-traumatic growth and like self-reformation. And so some of responses are a little unformed because I haven't, you know, it's almost like you're trying to name the parts of the goo inside the chrysalis and

George: Yeah.

Kathryn: they're not quite formed yet. Or Alternatively, I just don't know that some of the stuff that I'm working through right now really can have like lot of words behind it.

George: for what it's worth, Kathryn, I'm like, I'm way less interested in the like clean, neat narrative of like how these pieces fit together and way, I love that formulation you gave because like that's the fucking thing, right? Like I'm way like that, the naming of that is like trying to name the parts of the goo and the chrysalis, right? As the caterpillar fully. like digest itself and then reconstitutes as this other thing. I and can see why the appeal of alchemy language, the full sort of like transmutative quality.

Kathryn: Yeah.

George: appreciate your patience with my questions because like they do tend towards heady questions and that's not where I want to wind up. that's not the only place I want to wind up. I'm. I'm way more interested in like the texture of the experience of trying to name the goo or trying to try and failing to name the goo than I am in like, you know, what's a, what's a, you know, scalable schema that, naming the parts of goo. Do you know what I mean?

Kathryn: Yeah, yeah. behind the title of your podcast?

George: on the surface, it's a play on the uncertainty principle, right? The idea from physics, from quantum physics, that you can know either the position or velocity of a particle, but not both at the same time, and the act of looking changes

Kathryn: Hmm.

George: it, heart of it is about like how the act of looking changes things. and the sort of tacit injunction there to be really intentional in the act of looking because it's going to change things. And think it was right before my 40th birthday. I get this. You can see this.

Kathryn: that's pretty. Well.

George: Yeah, so it's a,

Kathryn: That's nice. huh.

George: It's what's called a sea anchor. Like boats close to shore, you will drop anchor in sand and the weight of the chain holds them in position, right? But out in open water where there's no hope or fantasy of solid ground, use what, like the contemporary versions are more like parachutes in the water, right? The idea is they create drag and they orient the bow of the boat towards the waves. Right, so it's a kind of dynamic stability thing. mean, I like the visual of this one a lot better, because it's like a 19th century technical drawing, but the principle is the same, is that it acts as this thing that does not indulge the fantasy of or grasping for or solid ground. But as a matter of practice, makes it possible to orient towards big waves, towards what's coming. me it was a kind of hopeful gesture, as I was just kind of beginning to understand just how

Kathryn: No.

George: long the tail of the, existential dark in my life was gonna be like, this isn't going anywhere. I mean, it's a lot less, know, like today's not a day where I have to figure out whether I'm gonna live or die, but like, man, like.

Kathryn: Yeah.

George: this, there's still like a blanket here and like it's been years. And so maybe this is just like the new normal and like maybe there's a way out, but maybe not. And what do we do with that? Like how do we orient and how do I orient in the world? know, mean, if I were naming. principle, what the primary uncertainty is. everyone. I who thinks seriously about this sort of thing would come up with a slightly different formulation, but they're they're adjacent. they're like panels on a very complex polygon. Like really what's on the inside is, is, you know, is like. connected but like is it like what am I doing with my life? it like how do

Kathryn: Mm-hmm.

George: I know what's real? Is it like how do I learn to love myself? Is it all I mean there's a million different ways of like the primary uncertainty for a given person at a given moment is. One of my most favorite anthropologists ever was guy named Greg Bateson who this book called Steps to an Ecology of Mind had this one sort of Socratic

Kathryn: I love you.

George: dialogue section. character A was asking character B, you know, like, an anthropologist, how do you know if a ritual is a sacrament or a metaphor? Right? And

Kathryn: Thank you.

George: the response was like, can't ask me that. You have to ask whether a particular dance is sacrament or metaphor for a particular dancer on a particular day. That there is no general, there is no schematic abstract answer to the question. one that matters or is real. So I don't know that answers your question. But that's some of the soup.

Kathryn: What was my question?

George: What's

Kathryn: this is the most academic conversation I've had in God knows like years and years, you know,

George: Hahaha!

Kathryn: which I appreciate so much because I miss that part of myself. I miss that part of my brain and have been cut off from in so many ways like what have been my passions. So I am in this like kind of new ish. identity formation that is about how can I be of service to others and at the same time also just kind of honor what I've been through and have it be of use for some greater good. Because I think sometimes we want to do that stuff not just to be nice people, but it's a way to be like, okay, there was meaning to what I went through and survived, you know, and here's the gold I can unearth from the shit or like, you know, can alchemize from the pain. And yeah, so I'm very much like in these early phases of that journey. Which is why it's like, okay, I know I'm not writing necessarily a memoir anymore, but what am I writing? I don't know. I'm also on Substack, like I just, and I don't know what I'm doing too, because it's like I've got so many irons in the fire. And one thing I will say,

George: Yeah.

Kathryn: being in my late forties and in this era of my life, I don't have the same energy or even interest in doing all of those things. Not to mention, I think, You can do a lot of things all at once. A little bit easier when you haven't healed so much, right? Like, because for me, doing all the things all the time was very much trauma response because I wasn't actually ever being in my life. I was doing in

George: Yeah.

Kathryn: my life. And so now I'm far more interested in the being. the being in the goo kind of thing and letting that be okay and actually letting that be where the juice is because

George: Yeah.

Kathryn: frankly it is in so many ways and having more of a lived felt experience that isn't a bunch of arrows or a bunch of lines, a bunch of masculine energy going and directing and is more like, well, what is it like to have a Sunday where I'm not scheduled or doing something? or putting this pressure on myself to like figure out this next thing with my business or yada yada. so yeah, I'm in flux with all that and add to it. I don't know where you are with your family dynamics, but my dad's going through cancer and my mom doesn't have a whole lot of time left and I've gone to please thanks with my healing

George: Thanks.

Kathryn: where. I'm all of the things are coming up right now. All of the deep grief. and reckoning with that is a lot. So I have a low

George: Yeah.

Kathryn: bar for me these days. I try to anyway, comparatively speaking, it's a lot lower, which if you ask any other person, they're like, fuck you do a lot. No, I don't.

George: The bar is the Death Valley Ultra. Like, yeah, mean, if that's where the bar is, then yeah.

Kathryn: Exactly. I'm glad you remember that. man. So are you still sober? I remember that being one of the most interesting things about you. know that, because I didn't know anything about that when we first met. Yeah.

George: Yeah. yeah. So it, it is an interesting question to me at least. I, so I have not been like actively involved in recovery for probably 15, 12 or 15 years or something. but I also

Kathryn: Yeah.

George: haven't, I don't drink.

Kathryn: Mm.

George: and you know, I, I'm still sort of, I was going to say coming to terms with, but I don't Like I don't like the rigidity of that. I'm, I'm still like very much trying to hold open, like this. I absolutely think recovery saved my life. both in terms of the like instrumental ways in which alcohol and drugs were go going very badly for me for a while. and in terms of giving me a structure in which to make sense

Kathryn: Yeah.

George: of my experience, in a way that. like at a certain point, I think really stopped serving me and I tried to stay in it too long. you know, mean, I look, I meant

Kathryn: Yeah, yeah. We grow out of that stuff, you know, right? Like you can, I mean, I know some people are like, oh, they have to be in recovery and go to a meeting every day for the rest of their lives. And that's, that's good for those folks. But you know, I mean, I think we move in and out. Yeah.

George: What I miss about it, and this is the thing that I haven't begun to figure out yet. Well, maybe that's not true. I think I figured it out. I'm just not willing to do this work I'm not willing to do or haven't been. I don't think the rigidity serves me or has served me for a long time. What was actually transformative about that? as a space is like, so I would get up, you know, I I couldn't begin to tell you how many times I stood at a podium and told my story. And the the religious practice was starting with a moment of usually really banal, but abject honesty. Like my back hurts right

Kathryn: Mm-hmm.

George: now or. Or like, you know, my foot's on, or like, you know, whatever it

Kathryn: Yeah.

George: was that was like, always starting with like one true, like in the Hemingway, you know, start with one true sentence, sense,

Kathryn: Mmm.

George: like always starting with one true thing and then having

Kathryn: Mm-hmm.

George: an experience. Like what was, what I think is so tremendously powerful and why I like sometimes like, sometimes I think hard about going back to 12 step land because I miss the shared experience. of vulnerability in a way that like

Kathryn: Mm hmm.

George: is very hard to find in the workaday world and which I have demonstrably not been willing to like conjure on a regular basis. Like

Kathryn: Hmm.

George: I certainly have tried and failed, you know, with some, with individuals, like, you know, there's a braver person than me who like, you know, let the freak flag fly like higher and earlier. there's a version of me that's doing, that's like hosting retreats and doing more like men's work and things that like.

Kathryn: I was gonna say, what about like a men's circle or something?

George: Yeah, yeah, it's part like, yes and I'm like,

Kathryn: Yeah.

George: I'm moving like part of the part of like the work right now or like over the last few years has been about having compassion for myself for the pace at which this is unfolding, which is like not, I'm

Kathryn: Yes, I understand that.

George: not thrilled with that pace. I'm not proud of it. It doesn't look like I think such things should look or the story I want to tell about it. But But I am moving towards that. And I've missed, ugh, I've missed like men's circles and that kind of shared vulnerability. You know, I know whether it's, like, you know, will I ever decide that I, you know, dabbling with alcohol is a thing for me? Like, maybe, but it needs to sort of not feel. Like I don't want there to still be a lingering question of, because it was such a slippery slope. mean, anything that could give me like adequate distraction, anything that could be a really compelling source of, know, like fill the room with light and sound and like get me out of me was such, such a compelling slippery slope kind of thing.

Kathryn: Yeah. Do you feel like that part of you is still alive, like from those younger years that needed to get out of your life through that kind of escape?

George: I mean, I'm capable of like, watching many hours of a really good TV show at once or playing a video game or doing

Kathryn: Sure.

George: anything. I'm still capable of orienting like that in a way that makes me think, yeah, yeah, 100%. That's, yeah, that's the, that's the, yeah.

Kathryn: Like workaholism too. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I relate to that too. Yeah.

George: And the weeks when I don't have my kiddos, yeah, they're like 12 or 14 hour days typically. Because it's interesting what you said earlier. Like I definitely, you know, from the time I graduated college until my like early thirties was really like trying to solve the vocation in the full like calling sense, tried to solve the vocation problem by process of elimination. And not where I didn't have to, I mean, I had to pay for the Georgetown loans, but You know, like my parents paid for college and I had like no real obligations to anybody except the occasional like, you know, family needs help with X family needs something like why sort of stuff. But I like I moved very lightly in that sense. And then, you know, my My oldest, I have two kids, two daughters, 12 and eight, and the mother of my children and I were dating and she got pregnant. And that was very, like I would have, I would, really, expected to be like, shit, this is not my plan sort of about it. But in fact, my experience of it was, like a small number of other things that I could point to that are like these sort of key moments that I would narrate. To the extent that I was able to pay real attention to what was going on in my body, like my actual reaction was excitement

Kathryn: Mm-hmm.

George: and a touch of relief at the prospect of not being the center of my own universe.

Kathryn: I hear that, that is such a thing for men. Yeah, that it's like gives us grounding and takes you outside of yourself. Yeah, it's interesting.

George: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it turns out, you know, unsurprisingly that my capacity for self-absorption is still bottomless. But like, I have

Kathryn: Okay.

George: to make lunches for school tomorrow. You know, like there are things that just in a very concrete, chop wood, carry water sort of way that interfere with, my,

Kathryn: Yes. Yeah.

George: you know, boundless capacity for, for that stuff. So, but I'm right now very

Kathryn: Hmm. Interesting.

George: much in the like, well, I was in this job. I took a job running a nonprofit based here that I knew before I took it wasn't a good fit. And it was, was a pretty uniformly negative experience overall. mean, good people, great mission, but all of my worst stuff was coming up in that context. And, and also like the wheels came off of my world. was, you know, the It was the end of my relationship with the mother of my children who was having an affair and all of this stuff that just like, you was a hot mess for a while. And that job unhappened pretty abruptly in the fall of this year in a way that I'm like, I haven't missed it for a single moment. know, and

Kathryn: Yeah.

George: I'm and you know, I've been trying to build, I've been working on this, like trying to figure out what this thing is. Let it, let it breathe a bit. for the last six months or so. I have a little bit of, I'm burning through savings right now. I have a little bit of runway left. don't know. I may have to take a work a day job. I have a mortgage, I have kids. These are real in a way that they didn't used to be.

Kathryn: Yeah.

George: So. I relate to that as well.

Kathryn: Yeah, these times are in. What I did want to just say, like I I know a lot more about recovery now because of I did a little bit of Alanon in New York at the suggestion of my my Buddhist meditation teacher. And then but in that post Spain therapy recovery, it was like outpatient that I did. they introduced me to ACA and that was really, really great. yeah, being in rooms of people that you're not the only person who's gone through that crazy shit in their own way has been really helpful. And I dated an alcoholic for like eight years after Georgetown. So that it took a while to leave that relationship. Yeah, so.

George: Yeah.

Kathryn: interesting stuff but yeah good models I haven't really been going to meetings as much lately just have so many other modalities and stuff I think we go in and out of them so yeah.

George: There's that discipline question resurfaces, right? Like what version of discipline

Kathryn: A little bit, yeah.

George: is?

Kathryn: Yeah. Yeah, I think the main thing for that is just I like to check whether or not I'm doing something because there's have to energy or obligation energy underneath it. Or because I want to. That's another way that I'm like living more authentically. now

George: Kathryn Cornelius' work is at KathrynCornelius.com. Her practice is called Whole Human Alchemy. You can find my work at the Principal Uncertainty dot com. That's the end of this first season. Thank you for being in the room.