My Philosophy
My perspective - How I see things - Why I do things the way I do
"When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change."
You’re here because...
you’ve had a lot of success but lately things have been going haywire, like something vital is missing and you feel off.
People sometimes respond to you kind of oddly, differently than they used to, and you can’t figure out why.
You suspect big change is afoot, but you’re paralyzed with indecision, and you keep running the same life-sucking script. It’s like you’re the main character in a mashup of Groundhog Day and the Twilight Zone, and it’s not fun anymore.
Deep down, you’re terrified because you don’t know why this is happening or what to do to get on the other side of this strangeness. You’d do anything to feel like yourself again and get back the confidence and joy and playfulness you used to love about yourself.
On this page I’m going to make the case that your issue is caused by thinking the unknown is an enemy to be conquered, and that it’s possible to embrace uncertainty as your greatest source of joy, connection, and fulfillment.
While navigating the unknown skillfully is deeply challenging, I think it is the most essential skill you could possibly learn.
The most important skill you could possibly learn is
to navigate the unknown with mastery.
If you’re here, you’ve had a lot of success but lately things have gotten out of sync, like something vital is missing and you feel off.
People sometimes respond to you kind of oddly and you can’t figure out why.
You suspect big change is afoot, but you’re paralyzed with indecision, and you keep running the same life-sucking script. It’s like you’re the main character in a mashup of Groundhog Day and the Twilight Zone, and it’s not fun anymore.
Deep down, you’re terrified because you don’t know why this is happening or what to do to get on the other side of this strangeness. You’d do anything to feel like yourself again and get back the confidence and joy and playfulness you used to love about yourself.
On this page I’m going to make the case that your issue is caused by thinking the unknown is an enemy to be conquered, and that it’s possible to embrace uncertainty as your greatest source of joy, connection, and fulfillment.
While navigating the unknown skillfully is deeply challenging, I think it is the most essential skill you could possibly learn.
Why You Struggle
You’re struggling because you think there's an answer to your situation, it's already "out there" somewhere, and you just don't know it yet.
So in addition to the fogginess of not already having the answer, you're also frustrated and maybe even pissed off. And that chews up some of the confidence and creativity you could use to actually make some progress on the matter.
It's not philosophical to you, and whether or not in some corner of the universe, there IS an answer is irrelevant. The fact is, you're in a quandary, and you don't know what to do.
You know the old story (i.e. pre-GPS) about being on the road and having to ask for directions to Destination Point and the old guy at the gas station says, "You can't get there from here."
The reason you're struggling is because you want to be at Destination Point, but you don't know how to get there from here 'cause you've never been on that road before. And of course, the only way you'll ever get there, is from RIGHT HERE.
Learning how to make the trip resourcefully and skillfully is possible, but the first step is in being willing to get fully present in the here and now.
From HERE, all things are possible. Without being present, you'll continue to be hobbled for reasons that don't make sense with the way you think.
Your conscious mind is limited by your finite perspective and what you've learned so far.
Releasing old patterns and creating new ones takes time and consistent attention.
Trying out new strategies under high-stakes circumstances can be costly.
What's driving this?
External unknowns
What’s driving this is that we live in a sea of unknowns and unknowables; our biology is designed to keep us safe and our minds and have been trained to do well by getting things “right.”
So, odds are, you may feel there is a solution to your situation “out there” but you just haven’t “found” it yet. This can lead to feelings of inadequacy or shame just from being overwhelmed by complexity.
And it can lead to over-thinking and procrastination, or on the other hand, to impulsiveness and over-reactivity.
As long as you believe there are right and wrong answers outside of yourself to your predicament, then no amount of diligence, determination, or sincerity will get you to the peace, connection, and clarity you seek.
Internal unknowns
To complicate matters even further, you may have done a lot of personal work on yourself (you may even be a skilled therapist devoted to healing), but the conscious mind is at an enormous disadvantage in relation to the power of the unconscious mind.
Whenever you are under stress and feeling vulnerable at work, home, or elsewhere, the unconscious mind (aka the shadow, the subconscious) can insert itself and get you saying and doing things you probably wouldn’t do if you had a few calm moments to consider your options from all angles.
The signal pathways of your unconscious mind are much larger and faster than the channels for your conscious mind. That’s why you can direct many things consciously, but then sometimes can still say and do things you soon regret.
Dealing with your external reality (the huge world of unknowns and unknowables) along with your internal reality (the ever-present influence of the unconscious mind) is deeply challenging to navigate on your own.
Why is it so hard to DIY this?
Stress / emotional charge
When you’re stressed and emotionally charged, it’s impossible to access the sources of information needed to truly resolve the problem.
Your unconscious mind (your reptilian brain) is designed to keep you alive – not come up with genuine solutions to problems.
It may apply a band-aid to stop the bleeding, or try to make problem go away, but it can’t resolve the problem.
As Einstein said, "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
Trying to fix all this in your own head doesn’t work because...
Your conscious mind is limited by your finite perspective and what you have learned about reality so far.
Your conscious mind doesn’t know what it doesn’t know.
Trying to work everything out in your head (instead of accessing all of who you are, mind/body/heart/soul/spirit) is itself part of the problem.
Your best thinking got you to where you are now.
Releasing old patterns and creating new ones takes time and consistent attention
It’s hard to practice doing things differently, even thinking differently in the normal course of things. It can feel chaotic, nonsensical, embarrassing, shameful,...super unsafe.
Best to have a practice that is low-stakes but that encourages these shadow responses to surface so you can see and reevaluate them clearly.
If the practice is present-focused enough, you can test out new responses in real time.
Ultimately, the nature of the problem is in the unknown (and most likely in the unknowable), and trying to “figure it out” consciously can be a helpful step, but it’s a dead end strategy for changing things in a desired direction.
And...
These dynamics are subtle and complex, and they play out moment by moment.
You've tried...
Chances are, all of what you've done with the intention of healing has been helpful in some way or other, maybe even shifted some things in a positive direction and got you to where you are.
Some of it's been fun and it's all been an adventure.
All good!
But in truth, they didn't fully work either, because...
Some things you've pursued like reading books, listening to podcasts, seminars, and talk therapy address the problem intellectually. They can help you come to terms with why you have some of your patterns you have. But that also ends up adding to the sea of thoughts that add to your internal traffic jam.
Mountaintop experiences
The natural effect of this “headiness” is that it doesn’t include experiences or practices that can help people to connect somatically and actually generate new behaviors that open new paths forward.
Other approaches like various somatic therapies, various applications, treatments, retreats and workshops can be more experiential, body- and energy-centered, which is a big step in the direction of healing. However, the effects of facilitated treatments can be relatively short-lived, and further treatment requires the presence of the healer / facilitator.
A truly transformational program has
these 6 vital ingredients
To genuinely shift the way you’re doing things to a way that would be more in alignment with your nature, strengths, and desires, you need to engage a process that has the following aspects:
1
Mindful presence practice - Any approach to genuine transformational growth must incorporate some practice for nurturing your capacity to be mindfully present in any given moment. This fundamental orientation is basic to any approach to genuine self-knowledge, awareness, and authentic connection. Without these, we can continue to feel lost and unmoored.
2
Experiential change - Transformation necessarily involves some sort of fundamental shift in one’s experience of living as opposed to simply bringing in new ideas, apps, strategies and tactics. While there are millions of different things to do, places to go, and people to see(!), genuine transformation involves embodying a different orientation to ALL external circumstances.
3
Personal creativity - Genuine transformation also involves gaining access to a deeper pool of possibilities from within. Learning to access and express ourselves from that place of truth and inspiration is enlivening, empowering, and life-giving. Our experience shifts, and previously unavailable potentials become possible, then likely, and eventually inevitable. Without incorporating creativity as a fundamental aspect of a personal growth framework, any resulting changes are usually short-lived and can leave you disappointed and discouraged.
4
Harness the power of sound-making - Sound organizes matter. It is also seen by many as having the unique power to create new “things” in the material world (e.g. “and God said…”). Some scientists now see sound as the bridge between spirit (or pure consciousness) and matter. it is a primordial energy we all have immediate access to. Any program that doesn’t incorporate the conscious use of sound is hobbled by its disconnection with this primordial catalyzing and transformational energy.
The involvement of sound connects with you somatically as well as mindfully, creating a direct and powerful impact on your body and emotions. With some sort of sound-centered improvisation practice, you learn to balance your conscious and unconscious minds with higher levels of awareness, compassion, and intentionality.
Such a practice is accessible, experiential, and can be done every day in the convenience of your own home, providing ongoing support for expanding, deepening, and sustaining your personal growth.
5
Sustainable practice for life - For a program to offer genuine, thorough transformation from now on, it’s vital to include a practice that you really want to do! Any practice will be more sustainable if it’s not just some sort of “workout” that feels good afterward, but that you can enjoy in the doing of it. It’s also more sustainable if it offers an ever-expanding world of new possibilities for your growth, enjoyment and fulfillment, whether you’ve got 7 more years ahead of you or 70!
6
Nurtures, refines essential life skills - For a program for be genuinely transformational, it must be more than an enjoyable or needed respite/escape from daily life. It must offer the ability to continually to train and refine awareness, mindfulness, and resourcefulness on an ongoing basis. In this way, the person becomes not only well-rested and rejuvenated, but also more well-resourced, thoughtful, capable, compassionate, and creative in all their daily interactions.
Most personal growth programs include 1 or more of these things, and they can lead to welcome changes. But their impacts can be short-term or superficial if any of these 6 vital elements are missing.
Rather than just a mountaintop experience, you need a practice you can engage in and begin creating new ways of thinking, behaviors, and habits from Day One that can continue to be enjoyable and stimulating, fun, inspiring, and generative for life.
The thing is, if you don’t take care of this...
If you don’t handle this at a deep level, you will continue to seek solutions from a greater and greater number of external sources. This may be interesting and may satiate some more superficial needs (after all, you do value learning in general). But it won’t satisfy the deeper hunger you have for something more genuinely fulfilling.
Approaches without all 6 of those vital ingredients may offer calories for your ravenous mind, but they ultimately won’t provide the nourishment your soul is crying out for.
It will be like looking out and seeing others live the life you know you could be living.
Without the kind of change your soul seeks, you’ll continue to wonder why your efforts to extricate yourself keeping coming up short. This can create a negative feedback loop, leaving you increasingly frustrated and discouraged.
If you don’t handle this at a deep level, you will continue to seek solutions from a greater and greater number of external sources. This may be interesting and may satiate some more superficial needs (after all, you do value learning in general).
But it won’t satisfy the deeper hunger you have for something more genuinely fulfilling.
In simple terms, not taking care of this means you’re spending more of your precious days in an unpleasant emotional state. But unpleasant emotions exist to notify us that something important needs your attention and care. There's no need to add more negative self-judgement for where you are at this point. But brushing it aside from here doesn't help it go away. It just festers.
As time goes on, chances are you’ll experience worsening negative self-talk and it will be progressively harder to make changes. In the long run, one of the very real possibilities is that you may end becoming bitter (with yourself and with life itself) for not having followed this call when it would have been easier to address.
Fortunately, if you do attend to this attentively and with care...
...you will begin to learn an entirely new way to orient yourself to yourself. And through that shift, your experience of everything else will shift. You will have a different kind of relationship with everyone you know, and that shift will be in the direction of more authenticity, more openness, more creativity, more mutual respect.
You’ll expand into a larger realm of possibilities that can be more rewarding, supportive, generative, and fulfilling than you’ve ever thought possible. And you’ll feel more confident, joyful, resilient, flexible, and capable under a wider range of circumstances.
And of course the sooner you address these things with an effective and sustainable transformational approach (whether it’s the approach I offer or another that fits better for you), the more time you’ll have to can enjoy the benefits.
You need to learn how to navigate the unknown skillfully by...
- Acknowledging the value in exploring the less familiar and the non-rational with a practice in creativity
- Engaging in a practice that helps you...
- Seeing and recognizing your thought and behavior patterns
- Realigning yourself quickly and reliably with your creative source energy
- Dropping into direct experience beyond the commentary of the narrative mind
- Attending to somatic sensations and intuitive offerings while playing
- Playing more freely, without concern about negative judgement from others or yourself
- Learning and applying strategies you create for living in the flow with clarity, compassion, and confidence
- Committing to a process for at least 6 months (preferably a year) to set in motion new habits and patterns that will move them in the direction they most want to go.
In a nutshell
On this page I’ve tried to make the case that your issue is caused by thinking the unknown is akin an adversary that's in your way.
The antidote to this is engage a practice where you can learn and master the perspective of embracing uncertainty as your greatest source of joy, connection, and fulfillment.
In other words, living fully and well isn’t about cramming more and more information into your head, but about consciously creating space for the unknown and playing curiously and freely in the midst of it all.
A specially designed modality involving universally accessible and intuitive sound improvisation is an especially potent tool for helping you renegotiate this relationship with the unknown and, through that, with the various problems you facing.
This enables profound shifts in how you experience your days.
What you need, as I see it, isn’t a fish.
And no, it’s not to learn how to fish (or play music), either!
What you need is a way to assess and reconfigure your own unique relationship to the nourishment you need.
In turn, this shifts how you are then able to offer the nourishment you have to share with others.
With high-level tools for assessing and realigning your relationship with the source of your creativity (aka intuition, muse, genie, ...), you’ll have reliable access to inspiration and ideas whenever you need it in any area of your life.
From there, you’ll find yourself navigating tough decisions more confidently and clearly and feeling energized and hopeful about the possibilities for a more fulfilling and enjoyable future.
Does this make sense?
If what you've read on this page makes sense to you, then you may want to look further into whether this work may be a fit for you.
Whether we work together or not, I hope this perspective may offer some clarity for you as you decide what is best for you going forward.
Click below to explore further whether there's a fit for you here.
Still curious?
For more on how sound improv can shift things going forward, this free eBook, “Sound Your Future: 9 Ways Sound Improv Can Help You Find Stability Amidst Chaos, Shift Old Patterns, and Play Your Way Forward” may clarify some of your main questions.
There is an approach to living that most all of us do, or have spent a lot of time doing, that makes everything in life harder.
This short video on “The Essential Skill,” lays out the nature of this problem, and how learning one essential skill can open doors to more joy, freedom, and possibility.
It is the underlying conceptual foundation for this work.
There are several different programs and courses available. They vary based on
the amounts of time involved
different commitment levels
different amounts of live access to Daniel, and
different price points.
For more info on the options currently available to you, go here.
IAmSound.info
Access the fullness that's eluded you through playing your music, your way.
