The message of emotions: “Live Your Life”

Seeing Mindvalley’s CEO, Vishen Lakhiani, become overwhelmed with emotion during a live session last week touched my heart. I have experienced similar feelings while sharing something I care about deeply. Seeing Vishen reveal his emotions made me feel our common humanity, caring about other humans, sharing the same cause.

I come from the corporate world, where lack of empathy often seems to be a benefit as Kevin Dutton explains in his fascinating bookWisdom of Psychopaths.Let it be clear, it can be an important and valuable quality at times to focus less on emotion and more on the task at hand. But even in the corporate world, real emotions can open doors to greater connection and collaboration that may never have otherwise occurred.

Something that triggers my emotion is the current disconnect in the world: the “anti-social” media and polarized politics. Even artificial intelligence algorithms are used today to create chat bots to interact with real humans to find out what triggers fear and division between people to feed political campaigns. This is polarizing and alienating people.

I have family in Europe and in China. What drives me is to create more connection and understanding between people, from east and west, regardless of skin color, nation, religion, or ideology.

Two years ago saw I saw the below image in a dream and felt very attracted to it. I learned that it was a painting by Japanese painter Katsushika Hokusai, using a Dutch painting technique to represent the story of a poem by Li Bai, a famous Chinese poet: “When the storm is very strong and the waves get very high reaching the sky, the ocean is a tough place to be, but if you can get onto those waves, you are able to touch the sky”.

For me, the painting in one way symbolized the challenge the polarized world was facing, but in another way symbolized how, if we unite across borders, we would be able to do amazing things. And, it inspired me to write an article about how China and Europe could find each other to collaborate on climate change and environment.

When peers reviewed the article to be published in EUROBIZ, the business magazine of the European Chamber of Commerce, they suggested that I focus on the business aspect, “not to talk about paintings or human emotions in a business magazine”. But I did it anyway and used it to visualize how collaboration between China and Europe would create a wave of more sustainable business, effecting change far more impactfully than doing it separately could ever achieve. You can read the article here. It brought me new friends on both sides, in Europe and China, wanting the same, and I have been supporting their collaborative efforts from behind the scenes.

Last year I started coaching people, following my gut feeling that something good would come out of it. By the end of the year I started wondering whether I was doing the right thing, as I was investing an increasing amount of my time into it without the cash flow needed to keep things going. Guess what happened: the image appeared again, this time hanging on the wall behind a person I was coaching. I smiled and took it as a sign to continue.

This synchronicity gave me confidence that I had something of value to offer. In January this year I presented a session at an International Convention of Excellence. During the session, I summarized what I have learned over the past 17 years in China, combining insights from western science and eastern knowledge, about how we have the capability to “hack our brain to gain superpowers” by essentially tapping into our inner wisdom, or intuition.

I felt inspired by the loads of positive feedback and the requests for coaching and collaboration that followed. One friend, however, contacted me afterwards and said my “story was inspiring and valuable” but that I risk “losing credibility for some people in the corporate world” if I don’t provide enough scientific evidence to support the eastern approach or power of intuition. I felt puzzled: the key message in my presentation was exactly that sometimes it is better to quieten the analytical, critical mind that demands scientific evidence and just try it — personally experience the process and outcome for yourself.

I was concerned about what I should do, as most of my income still came from my corporate career. Well, every now and then I wake up in the middle of the night from a dream and I reflect on what my subconscious has to tell me by writing it down. The message I received in a dream not long after the discussion with my friend was to look back at a recording I saw earlier about how the brain can be trained. I dug into my files, found the recording and noticed that it referred to “William Braud”, so I went online to see if I could find him.

Guess what I found…

The same painting, again…

My emotion and excitement rose. I explored further, found a report from the US Central Intelligence Agency’s Reading Room called “Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process”, published on June 9, 1983 but released in 2003. It was written by Wayne M. McDonnell to his commanding officer in the US Army Intelligence and Security Command. McDonnell was tasked with offering an assessment of the Gateway Experience, to “construct a scientifically valid and reasonably lucid model of how consciousness functions under the influence of the brain hemisphere synchronization”. This proved to be a difficult project for him. He dives into transcendental meditation, hypnosis, quantum physics, both eastern and western religions, and more.

One sentence in the document in particular struck me: “…sudden, holistic perception in which the individual suddenly finds that he simply knows the answer in all of its ramifications and completely in context, sometimes without even being able to put his newly found perception into words, at least initially.”

My memory suddenly flashed the beauty I had seen in a lucid dream almost 30 years ago while studying genetics at university. I dreamed that ‘our memory and soul could not be in our brain but must be out there’.

The dream impressed me deeply, so I started reading everything I could find from Carl Gustav Jung, a Swiss psychoanalyst, about dream analysis, to understand how to interpret my dream. At that time, I found an answer in Jung’s concept of the Collective Unconscious, which was inspired by the Chinese Book of Change. Jung wrote: “The ancient Chinese mind contemplates the cosmos in a way comparable to that of the modern physicist, who cannot deny that his model of the world is a decidedly psychophysical structure”.

I now understand the Book of Change, how reality works, how we can take the red pill…

Ultimately in this journey, guided by my emotions, I was able to access my intuition, which helped illuminate a more meaningful path and revealed insights into my higher self — who I am beneath the analytical mind, ego, and belief system I was conditioned into.

This journey started with moving from my corporate career to strategic consulting on promoting cooperation between China and Europe to make global business more sustainable, which next led me to following my passion as a business coach, and fast forward to now, where I share my revelations on how people can access parts of their brain through ‘neuro hacking’ to find the guidance they need within to fuel their ambitions.

I hope it can inspire you to also listen to your emotions, to follow your intuition, to “live your life”.

Don’t waste it.

johnny

PS: upon request, I added a link where you can download the

Authenticity Test.