How To Create Your Own Life Experience with Barnet Bain

Award-winning filmmaker, educator and creativity coach Barnet Bain believes that you can consciously create your own life experience – including how people experience you. Barnet shares his strategies for how to do this, including the willingness to be brand new in the very next moment. He also discusses the role of humility as a great foundation for a successful pivot. Of course, it’s harder to let go of the things that worked for you than the things that didn’t work for you. Yet the humility to allow something entirely new in enables you to pivot. Learn how you can both discover something new and allow yourself to be discovered BY something new.

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How To Create Your Own Life Experience with Barnet Bain

I’m going to introduce you to a dear friend of mine, somebody I absolutely love and adore. He’s a new friend. I’ve only known him for a couple of years. You are going to get the essence of this guy quick. Before we do that, I want to speak into what’s present for me, which, in this moment, is gratitude. I feel so lucky to be breathing right now, to have the blood flowing in my body. I thank God for that and in this moment, I am appreciative of your time wherever you are, whatever you’re up to. It’s a beautiful medium and I recommend that. I highly recommend each of us have this opportunity to be a producer of content and a voice in the world and a voice for reason. Our world is in need of that. What we say here or what we may say is a voice of reason.

The Book of Doing and Being: Rediscovering Creativity in Life, Love, and Work

I will introduce the amazing Barnet Bain. Barnet is an award-winning filmmaker, educator and creativity coach. He is the author of the book, The Book of Doing and Being: Rediscovering Creativity in Life, Love and Work, published by Simon & Schuster. His other book is, The Third Story: Awakening the Love that Transforms. Barnet consults and trains business leaders and private clients who are committed to high performance. Through his talks and workshops, Barnet guides people of all ages and walks of life to expand their vision of what is possible and develop their gifts and talents with passion.

Barnet is a core faculty member at Columbia University’s Spirituality Mind Body Institute, the first Ivy League Masters concentration in Spirituality and Psychology. He also has, among his film credits, a beautiful film called Milton’s Secret. He was director and screenwriter on that film starring Donald Sutherland. As well as the Oscar winner, What Dreams May Come. He was the producer on that, starring Robin Williams. One of the things that I also love is that he’s the official partner with Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Foundation and Big Brothers Big Sisters of America. They enjoy participation of millions of community, corporate and educational leaders annually, including President Obama, who are using Barnet’s creativity content in their curriculum for community schools and corporations. What you’ve done in your life has been amazing. The beautiful part is that there’s always the next chapter, this next pivot for us. What’s not written in the bio that you’d love for people to know about you, Barnet, as a person or in your professional world?

I’d love to both know people and to be known by people. It’s about connecting, spending time, and feeling the energy of somebody that I’m with. Being willing to be known in that way by others. You could call that humility. I used the word humility in ways that might be unfamiliar to most of the readers. I like to think of myself as being willing to have it all be brand new in the very next moment. Even though I do have a lot of accomplishments, a lot of achievements, and I have certain ideas about life. I want to develop a capacity to let it all be different in the very next instant. I call that particular trait humility. Above all else, I value that. I’d like people to know me for that. I’d like them to experience me in that way. I don’t know how often that happens, but I’m putting it out there. Maybe we’ll get some feedback down the road.

We’re thinking about how we create our experience of being, how often we do that. I have a practice in the morning that’s intended for that one purpose, just to be the conscious creator of my own life experience and how people experience us as beyond our control. To set that intention that we want would want people to experience us in a certain way and use the word humility as part of that is beautiful. Humility gets nearly enough credit in so many instances. It is such a great foundation to build on, when we realized how little we know.

It’s a great foundation to pivot on. It’s key to be able to have a willingness to pivot. It requires a surrender to what you think you know. A willingness to allow what maybe I did know, what maybe I knew and what maybe worked for me. It’s harder to let go of the things that worked for you than the things that didn’t work for you. It’s been harder for me to let go of the things that I thought were working for me. I do have the humility to allow something entirely new to take me and then I’m enable to pivot. I both discovered something new and allow myself to be discovered by something new. That’s what a pivot is.

While we’re talking about willingness to have it all be new. It’s almost a cliché that all crows are black, all swans are white. Even though I may never have seen anything except a black crow, I could have the humility to see a white one. Even though everything I know about myself and about life and all of my strategies to get along in the world, even though I have a fair amount of comfort with them in the very next second, something could supersede it, something can change it. To me, that’s humility. It’s holding onto my world view lightly and allowing it to be reinvented in the next moment. There are a number of different kinds of pivots, people get slammed up against the wall or they bought them out or they top out when they hit the bumpers. For whatever reasons or circumstances from the outside in, compel us to make a life change. There are certain circumstances from the inside out, that’s a whole different ballgame. From the inside out, to allow everything I know about life, or some things or one thing, I know about life in the very next second to be obsolete and replaced by something new. That kind of humility sets the stage for a very different order of pivoting.

Create Your Own Life Experience: Humility is holding onto my world view lightly and allowing it to be reinvented in the next moment.

It sets a stage for a very different life. I remember Osho said, “Life exists in the unknown.” In essence, everything exists in the unknown. That’s divine. That would be considered a life in the next moment. What could happen in the next moment, could I see a white crow or any other thing that would be outside of the range of possibilities that are programmed into us based on our experience. Our ego and our arrogance. Our humility takes it a distinct possibility, if not probability, that things will change radically whether we see it or not in the next moment. In more than what Osho said, I thought it was so incredible changed my life. I remember reading and thinking about it was that, “Everything in the past is dead.” How often are we spending our time protecting the past, thinking about the past, reliving all that? There’s no energy, there’s no power in it. The present moment is so powerful because of its possibility.

What’s in the unknown, which scares the daylights out of people because pivot is a euphemism for change, how it is that we change. One of the great constants in the universe is that everything is changing, it’s a constant. I’ve been terrified of change, I’ve been so addicted to control or addicted to certainty and I’ve seen a lot of people that play in that space too. Status quo leads to stagnation, stagnation is death. I follow those breadcrumbs from Osho that what is in the unknown is alive. There’s life in that and what is in the known. What you said about humility being a way to temper the “what we know” part well, what we know is a dead thing.

What we know is very different from having a set of competencies, from having a capacity to respond in the moment, from having been matured enough and developed enough so that we have character, we have principles, and we have humility. All of which empowers us to be responsive in the moment, in the present to whatever comes up. I shuttled back and forth from acknowledging how competent I am to deal with whatever comes up, to wanting to control when it comes up. It’s very different. The knowing that I have the confidence to respond to whatever comes up in the moment, that’s flow. It’s not losing faith in myself. Retreating into old patterns and old behaviors that seek to control, to play small, to push out. There’s no humility in that whatsoever. To push out possibilities that things may come up that are new to me, that are unfamiliar to me, that clash with my ego, my egoic needs, my desire to feel on top of things, in control of things. Or that I’ve got it buttoned down or that I have certain kinds of measures of safety or control or status. All of these kinds of conditionings that we pick up from the culture that we cling to, that we hang onto, we play inside and we color inside the lines of that. Those are all mechanisms for control. There’s not a lot of humility around crutches to hang onto.

Every piece of our culture operates in a particular story and that story trains us to live into it. Share on X

I always get these images of these railings that you have on the side, like safety railings and you’d hang on, you just play inside of that. I try to keep it as a game, I try not to make it too serious. Sometimes I am more successful at that than others, but the game, for me, is to be aware enough of how I’m responding to life. Am I seeking to control life, make it small enough for me to delude myself into thinking I am controlling it when all I’m controlling is I’m narrowing down my participation with it. Making it so small that it appears to be familiar and I get to play out the same themes over and over again or am I flowing? Sometimes when I let go and I’m flowing, there is a moment of exhilaration. I can be terrified because it’s very unfamiliar to let go and what can come up for me is a sense of dread. In a sense that I’ve been identified for so many years with what I think I know that when life just started to take me along.

We’ve done a great job of convincing other people.

When we get swept along in the present, it can feel all of my strategies for controlling. For playing for a role, for presenting myself to look good for others, for feeling safe, for all of those strategies when there’s no place for them to be applied, it can feel like a death. It’s also a liberation, but it can feel like a death. There are lots of elements to this growth development.

It’s a death and a birth at the same time.

It’s a paradox.

Letting go is so important. Socrates said, “All learning is remembering.” We’re just remembering. That’s powerful that this moment of it being a death and a birth at the same time, we’ve got to be letting go all the time. The whole of life is a process of letting go all the time.

We have both been trained by our family or our family origins, our communities, and our education. Every piece of our culture operates in a particular story, and that story trains us to live into it. Inside this story, there is this notion that you can aggregate knowledge. With a whole bunch of knowledge, you can think life or most circumstances in life. To a certain degree, that appears to work. If you live life on those terms, it appears to work until it doesn’t. Inside a very limited bandwidth, it appears to work. I just get the right job, if I just have the right marriage. If I just have the right circumstance, then it appears to work. I have yet to see.

There’s a logic to it. If their thinking is his logic from college, I was a lawyer for eighteen years, I’m familiar with that brand of establishing premises to have arguments that are sound. It’s sound thinking and yet somehow, it doesn’t tell the whole story.

It tells a logic story that it works. What is fundamental to the way our culture operates is head tripping, head office, head story, everything, even in the language. We approached life as through analysis. We analyze everything. Is this good or is this bad? Is this up? Is that down? We are giving it all to the supervisor. Everything that happens above the eyes is the supervisor. She’s constantly assessing, determining, judging, and rearranging parts. There’s nothing new under the sun, it’s rearranging the furniture. The bigger action, the bigger domain of activity is not in the head. It’s a feeling. It’s not an analytic experience. It’s not an experience that severs us out of the hole and analyze it. It’s a feeling or experience that unites us with the whole, marries us to it. I’m not suggesting that we abandon logic and reason and never turn back. We are talking about a wisdom here, which in this context can be understood, can be defined maybe as being able to move beyond logic and reason without losing sight.

Create Your Own Life Experience: Wisdom is about being able to move beyond logic and reason without losing sight.

We don’t become entirely reliant on it because the big action is in the feeling space, it’s not in the slicing, dicing, analyzing, and supervising space. It’s not in making everything a legal argument or making everything a lot of money obstruction, a zero-sum gain, an accounting proposition, a ledger sheet. “He did this to me, so I can do this to her.” It’s not in approaching life only through the head. This is a big thing for me to chew on and a big thing for me to swallow. This is an exploration that I am deeply involved in because like you, I’m a heady guy. I’m making such an effort to put the clutch in on my thinking. Most of my thinking is unnecessary, the ruminating, the future eyes, the constant analysis. More and more, it goes like a flywheel. I don’t pay too much attention. More and more, the focus of my attention is on what am I feeling here? What am I feeling? Most of the time, I realized most of what I’m feeling are old feelings and not about now.

Most of the time, over and over throughout the day, every day, my interruptions to my flow and my well-being are flowing along in the present. Something comes up that is remotely similar from my past. It triggers me out of the flow, out of the present, and I’m thinking, usually without awareness, that I’m having an old thought, an old feeling or something that is similar. It’s triggered by something that appears familiar in the moment that is triggering old defenses, old ideas, and old beliefs. It takes me right out of the flow and right into my control thing. Over and over again, I have to remind myself, “This is an old feeling and not about now or this is an old thought and has nothing to do with what is going on now.” I am connecting all the stuff that I’m holding in my body or holding in my memory. So much energy through my day goes there so much. It’s quite an adventure to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

It almost feels a lot of that energy, that time that we’re spending is soothing our eight-year-old emotional self that hasn’t gotten past eight years old. We’ve not dealt with a lot of the things early on in our lives that imprinted us at a point where we didn’t have a choice about it.

We could have not dealt with them then. Things happened to you, they happened to me, they happened to everyone. Many of them we’re not even consciously aware of. Certain kinds of hurts, certain injuries, certain abandonments of love, certain inundations, too much or not enough. I’m not even talking about the more obvious violence. Certain things happened to us. They happened to us very young and they happen to us in utero. Things that happen to our moms were when we’re in utero. Our mother’s biochemistry and the child in the womb, that’s one Martini, shaken, same biochemistry. Whatever’s going on her is being imprinted into my development, into my body. Not into my thought process because it’s not until the early months of life that we even had a thought process. These emotions, thoughts and feelings that happen from our mothers and after birth, in our formative months, they go straight into the body. They don’t go into a memory bank because we don’t have a cognition in that way. It goes right into the body. You’re going along through the day and something comes up and all of a sudden, you have an adrenaline charge or a fear or an anxiety or some kind of response.

Most of what we’re feeling are old feelings and not about now. Share on X

It’s a feeling since four years old when your parents were arguing about something. You were six and you determined this means something. There’s a meaning to this, but you don’t have a precognition about it. It’s not a thought, it’s a feeling. It means something from that moment forward. You don’t know what it means, but it informs your life in so many ways. These are the things you’re talking about that come back in different situations.

We look at it and we can see in our lives certain patterns because these thoughts, these feelings, they have followed us all through life. If you look to a thing that whenever you feel there are certain patterns of behavior, think back to when you feel like too much is happening or something takes you by surprise. There’s a feeling that you can recall that is familiar. That goes back as long as you can remember this feeling and then we put thoughts to it, in that feeling. It usually has something on the order of, “I’m not enough. I’m not good enough. I’m not lovable. I’m bad. I did something wrong. I’m not safe. It’s a scary place. Something is going to happen to me. I’m not enough to respond to life.” You have your own version of it. It will be in that tone and that feeling, it’s a body feeling. For me, sometimes it gets tighter. Sometimes it’s a burning heat.

It’s always an old feeling and not about now. When we can recognize something in my present life, I’m in the present, something comes up. It triggers that takes me out of the present. If I know this feeling is old and not about it, I can respond to the young part and return to the now. I don’t have to get triggered. I realized this is a four-year-old you’re talking about or a six-year-old. You don’t even have to know what it is. You just know it’s not about now. I tell myself when that happens, even if I don’t know precisely what age or what was the injury, “I love you little guy, I want you, I see you, I hear you, I’ll take care of you. It’s not what you do, but who you are that I love.” Even when I say, “It’s not about what you do in the world, it’s who you are that I love. You don’t have to be afraid anymore. I’ll take care of you. You can trust me. You can trust your inner voice. Take a breath. My love will make you well. I know that you’re responding to feelings of injury of hurt. Maybe there was no mom to take care of you in a way you wanted or no dad.” Another person cannot fulfill all your needs. In the end, these fundamental injuries and wounds that take us out of the present, they can only be met by us.

This is called self-care and you could use a number of terms I suppose to describe it. There’s a great need for this for people. Men in particular, have a more difficult time in the feeling space. Identifying what you feel and being safe with your own feelings because otherwise what tends to happen, people they sedate those feelings. Lots of ways to sedate them, whether it’s spending, or it’s drinking, or it’s smoking. To sedate or control the things that are uncomfortable and to experience what you’re talking about now is not necessarily avoiding the feeling. We’re having reactions to it, which is more often the case, we react. This is about being in the moment or in the presence of that feeling. Having a strategy to, not so much heal it, I don’t think there’s anything that’s broken or anything we’re that we’ve got to fix. Take it in, it’s a part of yourself that’s a disowned part. You’re coming home. You come home to that fuller expression of who you are and then it’s authentic. It doesn’t have to be pretty, it doesn’t have to be perfect, it doesn’t have to be meet anybody else’s standards or meet society’s standards but it’s you.

We’re not broken, nothing needs to be fixed. We create beliefs. We create thoughts. We create a structure of energy that are held in our beliefs, thoughts, and choices. Not including decisions, feelings, and emotions. They become islands. They become isolates of energy. I think of the water going down the drain in my bath. It was a whole bath of water there but ran down the drain, there’s this little galaxy that has a self-organized pattern of behavior or a pattern of energy movement. We do that with our thoughts and our feelings. We take an infinite energy sea and we organize it in such a way that by holding it in place, we impose a certain kind of a gravity that keeps those planets, have those beliefs revolving around the core. It keeps it going.

When we have these injuries, these feelings, and you may be eight, maybe six, maybe two months, parents are doing something. A child always makes it about them, however you make it, “I’m bad, I’m not good enough.” The same situation for another child is, “Who will take care of me? Are they going to divorce? Are they going to hit me? Am I going to be injured? Am I going to be abandoned?” However you take that, that becomes an energy that begins to repeat itself and it starts to seek affirmation as the child matures.

The child starts to look through that lens and is constantly looking to affirm that “am I safe?” It becomes an organized energy structure. As we become more aware, we get older, we become more mature, become more sophisticated, these feelings and thoughts come up and instead of being identified with them, we learn how to relate to them. Put them out so I can relate to them, bring them home, and take the gravity out of it so that it doesn’t have to go around in that cycle. It can disperse. You bring home that energy pattern, which could be 50 years old. It could be when you’re six, you bring it home to the present, you disperse the energy. We have a tendency to be dubious about emotions. We have certain beliefs about emotions, less comfortable with them. We were trained in my era, it was all about being strong, silent, and never speaking. Just suck it all up and be stoic about everything.

Create Your Own Life Experience: We have a tendency to be dubious about emotions. We have certain beliefs about emotions and we’re less comfortable with them.

That doesn’t afford any possibility or any room for ever unwinding those tightly old injuries. Every time they come up, it means that I’m automatically going to have to abandon that part of myself just when I most need my own support. I could feel it, I could develop a capacity to feel. It took me years to develop a capacity to even feel. My wife would say, “What are you feeling?” I’d say, “I’m not feeling anything. I don’t even know what you’re talking about. I don’t even know what a feeling is.” I know what thoughts or feelings are, I know what anxiety is. What is a feeling?” It’s a challenge for guys.

You talked about humility at the beginning. Emotions feel humbling, it is Humility. We so vulnerable in our emotions. Arrogance is the opposite of humility, that’s much more of the head. There’s much more arrogance that resides in the head, you could call it ego or whatever it is that we want to label it. It’s interesting because I would have said, maybe a few iterations of myself earlier, however long ago that was, I would probably describe it as, “It’s a journey. It’s this journey from the head to the heart,” that sounds fine. There’s no accident we have both a very well-oiled machine between our ears. It’s what separates us from every other being known to us. We also have this incredible organ that is our heart and this thing inside of us that we feel through. It seems more of a recalibration. It’s more of creating harmony so that maybe that recalibration of the dial to get the tuning right. Even when we drove, we wouldn’t keep the station forever. Twenty miles later, you’d have to dial to retune it.

We have the head, now it says slicing, dicing, supervising, labeling and strategizing. There’s no feeling in it. Thoughts about feelings, “It’s weak, it’s strong, I don’t know how to feel, I feel anxiety instead.” There are all kinds of distinctions that go on here. We have a heart, different kinds of attunement but we also have the body. I know when I talk about the head and the heart in the way that I create those distinctions, I’m beginning to realize I’m still in my head. I am now doing a head version of the heart. I’m beginning to get a sense that the heart and the body, the head, the heart, and the body, it’s all one thing. If I can a shuttle my consciousness. I’ll say to people, “Where are you? Put your hand on where you’re operating from,” and they usually put their hand on their head and then they put their hand on their heart. They never go for the whole body.

When we’re triggered, you’re going along and you’re suddenly something happens, somebody says something at work, a boss, a colleague. Suddenly, I feel I didn’t do it good enough or I feel bad or I feel defensive. In comes that feeling that we talked about, that feeling that has haunted me for as far back as I can remember. I’m not feeling it in my heart, maybe I am, but not always. For me it is a feeling in my body, my body starts to tighten. I feel like this little life is scooped out of me. Maybe I feel brittle or maybe I feel I have no aliveness and my whole body feels like 100 pounds. It’s not just a heart feel, it’s a body feel. I’m beginning to have a sentence that even in the way that I have talked about are related to my heart, it’s still through the head. When I take a breath, then I realized my head is the one that’s trying to explain everything to myself. If I’m trying to explain it myself, I’m in my head and my heart is not separate from my body. The heart is a place of connection. My body is a place of wholeness. It’s the body.

I work in a world that has lots of consultants around and they laughingly refer to consultants as head on a stick. Have you met anybody that works for these big organizations? They’re pretty heady people, but not too in touch with what’s going on in their bodies. Business people talk about, “I had a gut instinct.” Jazz musicians talk about the groove, that’s not a head trip. You don’t find the groove in your head. Athletes don’t find the zone in their head. You will never analyze as much as we try, as much as people go and take the lessons. You and I are surfers. You will never ride a wave from the head. You cannot process data by the head at the speed at which leg comes through. But you can through the body because the nonlinear intelligence. There is the head that analyzes things and thinks about things and then there is a body/heart, one unit that includes the head. The head does not include the body or the heart. The body is the totality of things and it is not slicing and dicing. It is in the world and knows itself to be part of the world.

Create Your Own Life Experience: The head does not include the body or the heart. The heart or the body includes the head.

I have to briefly share a great story I heard. I was talking to a buddy of mine who wrote a beautiful book. I read the galley. He talks about Carl Jung comes to the America and he goes to New Mexico. He visits a Pueblo Indian chief, and the chief says to him, “I hear that you think that you approach the world thinking through your head.” He began to laugh and the people around them started to laugh. Jung says “Why are you laughing yet? Doesn’t everyone?” The chief says, “No, I don’t even know how you get through it, but it makes it makes sense. It explains a lot about your culture. We think with our stomachs.” That was the first part of the story. The conversation changed Jung’s work dramatically.

The second part of the story is that they go traveled to the coast. There is a young man from the Pueblo who goes out into the Pacific, he has never seen the ocean before. He stands at the edge of the Pacific for a great length of time and then he comes back to where they were all staying, Jung was staying. Somebody says to him, “What was your experience of the ocean?” He says, “There are great canyons under the water just like we have in New Mexico and there’s a fort down there, just like we have in New Mexico. There are animals, it is full of animals, great and small. Some of them are so large and so fierce and so ferocious, but don’t worry because they cannot come out of the city. They have to live there, so you don’t have to worry.” Jung said “How do you know this? You stood by the ocean.”

He said, “Because it speaks to me, we’re one with it, you shuttle up to here, label things, and try and put things together in a linear way. We already know we’re one with it. The same way that when we are ill, the plants speak to us and tell us what would serve us. We don’t need to go by process of elimination and try this one and try this one.” Jung said, “That’s so interesting because I’ve often wondered how did you find your Pharmacopoeia? Did you try this one and said it didn’t work? You adjusted the dosage and then it didn’t to work. You changed the plan.” He said, “No, we’re attached to everywhere. We’re connected to everything. Everything is speaking to us.” This is the way we operate in our dream world. Every night we turned to that relationship. We’re not trying to think out, strategize life in our dreams. This is to the point of the core of what we’re speaking of here. Can we begin to develop a relationship with the present through our heads? The answer to that is no. The head is not in the present. The head is designed to say, “The light is red.” We give that over to our own volition. That means I should stop or I’m going to blow through it. Our relationship the present is an embodied experience and emotional experience also through the heart.

The heart is a place of connection. The body is a place of wholeness. Share on X

It’s an expanded definition of consciousness because this is a program mostly about pivots that are not in doing things, although lots of pivots result in doing things and experiences that change based on. It’s more of a pivot in consciousness and that takes in a lot more than the headspace. It’s an embodiment. It’s the heart, it’s the body, it’s a feeling, it’s intuition and it’s pre-verbal. It’s things we cannot put into words in essence, but things that we can intuit if we’re in our bodies, fully embodied in a moment. I don’t know of anything yet that takes me to that place better than a breath.

I’m inviting the readers to take a breath and tune in to what you experience of his warmth. I’m not referring to his temperature, I’m referring to a quality of his energy. You know how sometimes you look at people and you go, “That person’s cold.” We know they’re cold. Sometimes you look at somebody else, and we have a sense of this someone, who at a soul level, is inviting and make space to others. You can get a sense of the warmth of that person. This is not happening from your head. You can also have a sense of someone’s charisma. Charisma, I want to define as the voice of someone’s expanded self.

What is the quality as you tune into charisma? I have an experience of it in the body. It is a little exciting and I sensed that there are great gifts from someone’s soul that are coming through him to me, and that is appealing. I have a sense of warmth. I have a sense of charisma. These are not the five common senses, we’re onto seven already. The five common senses that reside through calibrations of the head. We’re now into two that reside in calibrations of body. Attunement’s not going to read Adam’s charisma through your head, and there are many more of these uncommon senses. I suspect that there are infinite experiences related to our feeling states, relative to the small basket of possibilities, relative to our diagnostic capacity. We’ve pretty much maxed them out.

Barnet, I’ve enjoyed this conversation. I would love with the few moments we’ve got remaining to ask you about rituals. Is there one particular ritual or practice that you have on a daily basis that helps you to be more in tune as we’ve been talking about in nature?

I live in most glorious nature. In the morning, my first thing is I look outside either at the ocean or the mountains and I lead in the beauty of it. I’m very specific about my experience of the beauty. It’s a felt state, it’s not an analysis. I experience beauty as being simultaneously serene, peaceful, and exciting. I make a ritual of this, a practice of this. I start taking in the morning, it’s easy to do that with nature, to see the excitement and the peace in everything in nature. I begin with that and I do my best to remember to return to that as many times during the day. Throughout my day, confine the beauty in things but not as a head trip, but attuning to the simultaneous experience of excitement in peace same moment. In order to develop this embodied awareness of things, I want to meet reality incarnated, not in my head. I want to meet the world in my body.

Barnet, thank you so much. I hope you’ve gotten giving yourself some moments during our conversation just to be. Barnet, I know you teach several times a year, some amazing courses on the difference, the distinction between doing and being. As we close out this particular episode, I want to say how grateful I am, grateful to Barnet for being with us, grateful to everybody that’s been reading. We’d love it if you would of course leave a review. The reviews are really important for us. The feedback is great on iTunes. If you’ve not yet subscribed, you can go ahead and do that. You can join our community of Pivoters by going to PivotFb.com, which will take you to the front door of the start, My PIVOT Community on Facebook.

As we bring this episode to a close, I want to remind us all how important it is that we are grateful in this moment and for this breath alone. With this breath, I’m going to set an intention, a prayer, a wish, a hope and everything else I can muster into it, that tomorrow, each and every one of you, Barnet, myself included, and everybody else will wake up. We had the blessing to be able to wake up today. My hope is that we’ll wake up tomorrow, that our bodies and our minds will wake up. Our consciousness will rise a little more than today.

This is profound and it is such a blessing in that moment because as we realize we’re waking, and we’re taking that first conscious breath of the new day. Realize in that moment there are people who are taking their last breath at that very moment. There’s new life being born, babies that are taking their very first breath in that moment. That is so holy, it’s spiritual, it’s sacred. We don’t need a whole lot more to be grateful for in that moment than that. We wake up and we’re in gratitude. If you’re willing to lay in your bed or when your feet hit the floor to declare out loud these words, “I love my life.”

Important Links:

• Barnet Bain
• The Book of Doing and Being: Rediscovering Creativity in Life, Love and Work
• The Third Story: Awakening the Love that Transforms
• Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Foundation
• Big Brothers Big Sisters of America
• The Conscious Pivot Radio on iTunes
• PivotFb.com

About Barnet Bain