Life Unleashed: Coming Home To Yourself For Greater Success And Personal Power With Blaise Kennedy

June 16, 2026 Adiel Gorel

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Life Unleashed: Coming Home To Yourself For Greater Success And Personal Power With Blaise Kennedy

Everybody, it is a joy to be here with you again. It is very exciting. I am here withBlaise Kennedy. Blaze, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me.

I have a good feeling about this. We are going to learn some very wonderful things to bolster and enhance our lives from you. Just to get your background, if you can lead us through the path that led you to where you are now.

Overcoming Addiction And Developing Full Consciousness

That could be started at any point. I will start by saying that I was a very enthusiastic young person. I had a lot of challenges early in life, especially having a parent die when I was twelve years old. It was not in my mind to learn about spirituality or healing or trauma, any of these things. It was by necessity. I spent a lot of time struggling as a young person. When I was 24, that came to a head. I got sent to a treatment center for addiction, and my life pivoted very quickly from being very unconscious to realizing I had all this potential and all this intelligence that I could apply. I found my thing to do.

I was very much lost in life, found my thing to do, and have applied myself as thoroughly as I possibly could over the last sixteen years. Over time, I have learned many things and had many experiences that inform what I do. I teach now. I have been teaching for about six years, and I try to cross several different disciplines, which we can speak about. I help people with their awakening journey, their understanding of consciousness, and experiential understanding. I help them deal with practical, emotional, and mental patterns that affect their relationships and their own sense of well-being, and help them explore their curiosity about what is possible.

This sounds like something very timely for us all to hear. I know it is very timely for me to hear because our daily lives today, even though we may have a spiritual bent, even though we may meditate, even though we may do things, even though we may be aware that we are connected to the whole, to the planet and to each other, we still have this thing in our face all the time, not to mention a larger version of that thing called television.

There is a huge force making us unconscious, whether we want to or not, all the time, and it gets more and more. This little thing knows what you like, and it knows how to feed more of it to you, and it is an ever-growing snowball. The wave of unconsciousness only grows. Please tell us where to start? What is the starting point?

If we use the model of my life, again, I struggled with addiction, not to phones, but to substance abuse when I was a child, as I was very susceptible. When we talk about technology and our inability to have executive or maintain executive functioning in the midst of technology or any other stimulus, I see humanity as being quite vulnerable, just as I was when I was younger. A big part of my focus is developing the capacity as a full body, full consciousness, integrated intelligence so that we do not get derailed by things like our drives or technology or candy or anything else that is not really in alignment with the truest version of ourselves.

In everybody, there is this basic challenge, which is, I want to be the best person that I can be. I want to live to my highest potential, but I am not. How do I close that gap? Why am I perpetually engaging in patterns that do not feed me? How do I manage my impulses? Again, the spectrum of how that shows up in our lives is very broad, but we are all susceptible to that. It is through the work that I engage with people that we become less susceptible, more conscious, more resilient, or more embodied, more integrated. All of these words, which we can explore as to what they mean and how we would do that.

The basic human challenge is simple: I want to be my best self, but I’m not. How do I close that gap? Share on X

You talked about having addictions, and typically when people hear that word, they associate it with drinking, with drugs, with substances that you ingest or behaviors such as gambling and things of that nature. I believe every person has the capacity to become addicted to several things. Maybe not gambling. There are so many addictions, but in our daily lives these days, just the stimuli that we are surrounded by are absolutely creating an addictive environment.

Indeed, among Gen Z people, the percentage of young people diagnosed with ADHD is rising incredibly quickly. Let us go there. Let us take a person who is not a drinker. He is not addicted, or she is not addicted to or engaged in destructive behaviors like gambling or endless sexual addictions, and is just a regular person in life. Nevertheless, addicted to a lot of things, addicted to the news, addicted to the political discourse, addicted to always being angry at something that the government is doing or not doing. Where does that person begin?

Just to broaden what you are saying and support it, I think Eckhart Tolle wrote a wonderful book that reached so many people, The Power of Now. He identified addiction to thinking and whether you have substance issues or any of the other things, manifestations that you describe, he found a very broad generalized way to describe this compulsion, which is to say, we tend to believe what we think, we tend to act on what we think and then later often regret it and find that was not totally true or gosh, I spent 45 minutes in the news. Was that actually in my best interest?

Experientially, what you could say is that my way of describing this is that we are in a fragmented state, which means our nervous system is a bunch of competing kingdoms of attention that do not all work together. At any moment, any drive or part of oneself can take over and become dominant. When that happens, the other parts of ourselves stop functioning. They move into the background. A great example of this is hypothetically, you fall in love with somebody, you say, “I love you so much.”

All of a sudden, you are arguing. What happened to that sense of love and commitment I have? All of a sudden, this anger that I am feeling or whatever it is, is dominating my experience. Where is that love? I end up having to go, “Whoops, sorry about that. I made a mistake, and we have to repair it.” What I think is happening physiologically, what I would describe is that our nervous system. Again, we could use a body consciousness nervous system. We could use many words, but it is not functioning as an integrated whole.

It is not working as one unit, which means that when we have charge in one area of our body or mind, it takes our attention, and we are not able to sustain presence and consciousness in all the other areas. In this way, this is the vulnerability that I am describing. Again, whether that is thinking the news or what I experienced as a young person, we are hopeless. We end up going on this ride of whatever it is that is taking over our attention, and we lose connection with all the other parts of ourselves, which we are aiming to live. We are not able to be consistently present in the fullness of ourselves. This is what I would describe experientially.

If I try to address my own addictive tendencies, you gave a great example about your love for somebody, and then you get angry, and everything narrows down to just that. Where is the love? If I connect with my own addictive tendencies, let us say I go to the news and the news, and I know from people in the media that negative news brings more clicks. The news is already negatively biased because it is more exciting. Nobody likes to say, “The Ellen blaze sat down for coffee, and they laughed in the sun.” That is so boring.

If we had a brawl, now that is exciting. There is something in me that when I go to the news, it is entertainment too. In Rome, the leaders used to keep the minds of the masses occupied with gladiator fights in the stadium because it was so entertaining, negative, and bloody. In a way, it is a modern version. I go to the news. The news is controversial in this, but it is alluring, and it is entertaining me, and it is like we almost see a respite from being with ourselves. When Eckhart Tolle wrote the book, The Power of Now, I remember actually I said, “How can I make it into a practice?”

One of the things I tried was, I am in my car driving, and I see the light poles on the freeway. I tried to say, “The universe, all life, everything is between here and the next pole, which is maybe a few seconds.” I try to live my life for those few seconds as if that was the entire universe just between me and the next. I try to use it as a guide, as a system to be here now, but going to the news, or not just the news, going to a TV series on Netflix is anything but being here now. It is like saving me from myself. The last thing I want to do is be with myself. I am afraid of being with myself.

The Definition Of Trauma As Moving Away From Overwhelming Experiences

What we are talking about is that we go through life as a species, thousands of years of life, if we take it from the gladiators until the present moment, even before then. As adults, we go through our lives, and then we find ourselves. We start to recognize that in this present moment, I have all these challenges paying attention, regulating my mood, and being with my thoughts. These are products of the development of our entire life. As a metaphor, if we were to look at a tree that was growing out of the ground, and as it grows up, suddenly, there is a giant event that occurs at the base of the tree that really affects the growth that happens after that.

We would say, in the structure of this organism, there is something that happened in time that has caused it to be this way. As adults, we do not see the cause of this dysregulation, or charge or inability to be with ourselves. We only see the symptoms. There is a very important reason why that is, because the nature of overwhelming experiences is that I go away from them. This is a really broad definition of trauma. When trauma started as a phrase in our culture, it was describing people who had come from war.

We could say these are really obvious, overwhelming experiences. You cannot be with what is happening on the front line. We can understand the ill health, the disturbance that these people have, but this extends broadly both through normal people’s lives and through all of human history in the lives of us as children, as adults, and in our world and those before us. There are so many overwhelming things. There are so many experiences that we cannot stay with, and in the beauty and wisdom of our body consciousness, we learn how to manage that.

We essentially move away from them. That is the essential strategy. We move away from that which we cannot tolerate to digest later. We keep a living remainder in our nervous system of the past. I did not realize this for a long time. It was part of the discovery that made my path so clear to me. For example, my father died. This is a fairly extreme example. After that had happened, I would have told you experientially that I was fine.

I would have told you that I had gotten over that, which was in the past. I was moving on, and I was very shocked to realize that was not anywhere close to being true. What I had actually done was leave myself, and I had left behind this process of grief that was really essential and life-giving and necessary, but I could not feel that. For me, most of us, whether it is having a parent die or just any of the normal things that happen in our developmental process that need a lot of support, children need a lot of support for the growth of their nervous system. I can go into more detail about that.

When there is a leftover in our nervous system, we create fragmentation. Whatever cannot be felt gets isolated within us, stored like a compressed file on a computer to be digested later. Our nervous system that is designed to be integrated and whole becomes less so it becomes less whole. Every time this happens, the integrated me breaks into parts, into fragments. By the time we are adults, we do not feel that directly. We just feel like, “I am trying to pay attention to this present moment, and then I am gone.” It is most often just like it was for me.

It is through symptoms that we start to actually listen to what is happening physiologically in my nervous system, what is happening that is causing this distress. That means that we have to, whatever it is that we do not want to find out about ourselves, we are going to have to run into that. There is an intelligence to not wanting to be with ourselves. If something was previously overwhelming and our physiology is designed to avoid it, we are going to feel that now. That is an intelligent mechanism to try to avoid that which was overwhelming.

The answer lies in the fact that we have more capacity now, both as adults and as a pair of people working together, and in the evolution of our species and consciousness. The ancestors, the people that I come from, really had no chance, in my opinion, of healing from that which they experienced. Dreadfully difficult lives and experiences, or hard work and pushing through, were really the only solution. These younger generations that you describe really have the opportunity to move out of survival, move out of pushing through, and start to think about what is actually going to create the highest sense of well-being.

Is it just working harder or pushing through? They are noticing these distortions in their presence and their nervous system. I would say they are more plagued by them. I do not know that that means that they are more traumatized than their predecessors. I think that they just notice it more. It is this noticing which, for me, is an opportunity for healing and change to occur where that was less possible in previous human history. I will just pause, and you jump in.

This act of noticing creates an opportunity for healing and change that was far less possible in earlier human history. Share on X

Coming from the other direction, there is this classic picture that I can have in my mind of older people, maybe in the South, and they have a house that has a porch. On the porch is a rocking chair. It is completely acceptable and even positive to just be on the porch. Being in the rocking chair, staring into the fields and doing nothing, just being. That used to be a very common practice. It is relaxing. It is okay. You are just being. I also remember a story of a big guru in India, where people came to visit him, and he was in a very humble abode, almost the equivalent of the so-called cave.

It was there, and people came and said, “I have been traveling the world, and you are one of my stops.” He said, “I do not feel the need to go on any trips or visit locations. I am here, and I am fulfilled.” The opposite of sitting on a porch or being in a cave like the guru is having a computer in front of you, with every second bombarded by stimuli, where the stimuli now is very smart. It knows what you like. It almost gives the young people no chance of just being.

I agree with you that modern life is not really set up to support or even invite this. Whether it is the person on the porch or the ancestors who were in the fields, or just living more in nature, go back as far as you want to go. There were so many other supports previously that invited that. I would note that we chose to move away from, or at least a large segment of our population decided to move away from, that. It is a very curious story as to how we decided to move away from that which was nourishing for us.

With that said, your emphasis, I heard you say in another episode that you have children, but what the young people are actually facing is particularly important to me as well. The remedies that are going to support these young people, if they are growing up in a culture and institution that is really not supporting their well-being, are, in essence, really. They are growing up in a culture that supports their entertainment and intellectual stimulation and emotional stimulation, but does not necessarily express their well-being. That is not a great foundation for the future. That is a huge challenge for us.

Going back to what you said about trauma, loss, let us say of a loved one. Let us say there is a family, and the family experienced the loss of a loved one. One person in the family cries a lot and is very distraught and brokenhearted, and spends a lot of time. This is all, absent any therapy, just life goes on. One person cries and really has a hard time with the loss, and processes the loss very hard for them. The other person is what you described. You say, “I am fine,” because they compartmentalize the loss and put it in a vault too difficult to deal with right now. That created this splitting of the person. Is it by mistake that one half of the population, the one that knows how to cry and grieve a little better, lives longer?

Grief And Emotional Processing As Relational Experiences

I would say that, although it is as life-saving as this trauma response is, it takes a tremendous amount of energy. This is not something you notice when you are in it because it is an extraordinary system that numbs you. One of the main things that happens is when people start to return to their body, when they become more present, when they start to feel, what they notice is tightness. They start to notice the activity of contraction that is actually used to hold emotion in place. Holding down your feelings, holding in your feelings, takes work. It is like holding down a spring, and it is a hidden effort.

It is a hidden tax on your energy. This absolutely affects every metabolic system, your organs, and your nervous system as a whole. It absolutely has an impact on health. To note, if you take these two people who have these two different outcomes, one may appear functional. Within the spectrum of people who do not feel there is a huge range of how functional you are and how healthy you are. It is not as simple as saying, if you do not feel this, your life is going to be ruined. It is amazing what people can do and accomplish without feeling.

With that said, the people who are tuning in to this podcast are people who want to go beyond the current state that they are in, whether that is their experience, their sense of connection to life, their physical or emotional health, their understanding of reality, their ability to feel compassion, or getting out of the addiction of their mind or phone. To go beyond where you are, you have to be open to feeling the limits and limitations of the strategies and the way that you currently relate to life. Some people are somehow amazing.

To go beyond where you are, you must be open to feeling the limits of your current strategies and way of relating to life. Share on X

They go through life without ever seeming to challenge those limits. I was very fortunate as I was not one of those people. I was not able to push through. I was very sensitive. Just like you described, the younger generations again. This is increasing. There are people in their twenties who describe themselves as having anxiety disorders. It is one of the largest self-diagnosed or even therapeutically diagnosed things. You think in your generation, the number of people who said, “I have an anxiety disorder.”

For me, having a more sensitive population is a population that is really more open to seeing the limitations of holding. They are actually less able to do that, to live in that way. It is often experienced negatively, like there is something wrong with me, or I am fragile, or why can’t I just toughen up? I hold this negativity, but for me, it is actually a sign that my organism wants to move to a higher level. Finding problems within yourself, finding stored pain or limitations, is how you move beyond it. One of the main things we need to do culturally, I believe, is encourage this.

It needs to be actively supported. Some people are really able to, through great hardship or great faith, believe in themselves that they can take on these feelings and the stored past and all the other things that occur with them, that they can allow themselves to come apart so that they can come together at a higher level of organization. In my experience, this is something that really needs to be culturally supported within families, within our society as a whole. That is why I am here and part of what I do.

The other thing that I want to say is again, you take these two people, one person grieves, another person does not, they can do that by themselves. In my experience, grief is not about sitting by yourself and feeling sad. It is a relational experience. In fact, all of our emotional life is relational in nature. If you were to ask me, the biggest limiting factor to processing feelings is disconnection. Once we are with someone who is able to feel with us, the information about our body and how we feel moves rapidly. This is really the missing ingredient in our culture is the capacity, not just in the individual, but the capacity in our relational environment to hold the feelings that we have. This is something that we are evolving.

The biggest limiting factor in processing feelings is disconnection. Share on X

In Western culture, it is looked upon as very positive to be ambitious and hardworking. If we talk about my friends in Silicon Valley, you create something, you work hard. Sometimes you work twenty hours a day, and it is looked upon as a positive. Let us say somebody has even achieved great financial success. They sold the company. They are now very wealthy, but they are not done. They form another company, and they push very hard, and everybody is applauding this.

The cultural surroundings even make it very acceptable to be super busy all the time. You have a goal to work towards. Any trauma that is inside could stay in the vault, never has to be touched because you are busy, and you are busy, and now you are 80 years old, 90 years old. If your name is Warren Buffett, you are 95 years old, and you are investing and making billions, and there is never any need to go into the vault.

The same thing is within our political sphere, within our leadership class as a whole, it seems to, I would say that that type of survival strategy seems to pair really well with great ambition. That is another huge challenge for us is that our leadership class is very much an expression of who is able to survive the best. That is not the same as who is able to thrive the best. I heard recently of a very famous VC investor, I say his name in your area, who very proudly, on a podcast, said, “Zero self-reflection. Do not waste your time on self-reflection. Just move forward.”

He was so excited to be sharing this message. I thought that is like life, that is how you create tremendously reckless people who are not able to really grow in their ability to empathize, feeling takes up a huge amount of resources. This process that I am describing is very resource-intensive. It takes a lot of time, takes a lot of attention, takes a lot of humility. It is essentially about finding places in yourself in which you need help, which you need care for, the parts of yourself that are under-cared for. You are constantly confronting something that does not feel good or does not work.

It is anti-survival. It is making yourself vulnerable, so it is not flashy. It does not make you feel like you are winning all the time. What really changes that equation is when you get people together. I run groups of people, and the most amazing things happen. If you take a group of people together who have this intention to feel and heal, all this difficult, vulnerable, precious material turns from my weakness into a recognized and celebrated humanity. When you have a group of people that can feel together, and someone will share so profoundly about something that happened to them uniquely for them, it touches people, actually inspires people, and that is because our humanity is actually nourishing to each other.

This is what I think when you talk about the news, which is very much under-emphasized. Is it not we have a lot of experiences that you describe as being charged that leave us activated, but do we have nourishing experiences with other human beings where our humanity actually feeds each other? I sit with people who have tremendous amounts of the whole range of human difficulties, and I have never left feeling like anyone took something from me or that it was a burden to be with them. This is the message. Our humanity is beautiful and nourishing. It is good for us.

It is good for me to feel myself. It is good for me to feel you. This is the glue, the love that actually is part of the expression you described of the unity of the human species. This is why you care for your children and your pets and your plants, because there is this unifying quality, this gravity between us. When people learn to express that directly, not from their shell persona, but like, directly how I feel, what life is like for me, the challenges I have, the beauty of my successes, that desire to be seen in a certain way is not needed because however I am actually is so well received. There is a vulnerable language that we all speak.

Joy, sadness, sorrow, frustration, fear, the whole gamut of human experience is digestible to all of us and nourishing to all of us. When we start to speak that language, it becomes less about what I can do to rise to the top and more about what we can do together. It becomes a much more mutual experience of life, connection, and relationship. If our leadership in our world could move towards that and create systems that emphasize that, that would be wonderful. I do not know that that is going to happen anytime soon or in a nice, comfortable way, but that is what I think is going to have to happen for us to thrive.

I wonder if it is by mistake that the most successful people in the tech world, at least maybe in other worlds, are on the spectrum. Sometimes one of the characteristics, I am not an expert, but it is actually less of an ability to talk about feelings, deal with feelings, and be more logical. Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, said about himself, “I am on the spectrum.” People will tell, and again, I do not know, I am only repeating that Bill Gates, Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin are all on the spectrum in some way or another. In fact, there was a take on Silicon Valley life.

The mega-millionaire, all this. There is a guy who is the CEO of a company. It is so prized to be on the spectrum that he argues with his friends. He said, “No, I am definitely on the spectrum,” because it is like a prize to be on the spectrum. He has this evaluation with a psychologist to show that he is really on the spectrum, which is a goal he wanted. The psychologist calls him and says, “Your tests are back, you are completely normal.” He said, “No, there must be a mistake. Not possible.” Of course, it is a parody, I mean, you know what I mean.

Moving From A Harvesting Model To A Nourishing Model Of Reality

First, I want to say I am fascinated by genius, and it comes in many different ways. Every time I hear Elon talk, his productivity and intelligence are extraordinary, and I am moved by it. I want to say there is real genius and creativity. I am saying that because I am also going to say, I think the way that we create and the way that we express ourselves needs to shift really radically. While recognizing and being touched by the beauty of that, we have a harvesting model of civilization. We harvest, we take. We are talking now about taking from asteroids.

We just think, how can we take more? How can we take more minerals out of the ground? How can we build things out of stuff? We never really think about what we are taking from. It does not really occur to us. We have a harvesting model of reality. This is a very mental way of looking at the world. I see objects, and I think about how to manipulate them. I wonder how I can gain some assets or advantages from them. Again, it is extraordinary. I am so glad we are talking. Yet, what I am describing as a body, emotion-based way of relating does not work like that.

Our body intelligence does not think about how I can take, it thinks about what we can create together. Over and over again, we find, like when you and I are just feeling together, it is not about what we come up with or how we have more. Essentially, this present moment just between us gets richer because you share that you feel sad or because you share that you feel joy, because we feel connected. We have a model that is not about taking from life, but about participating in something that creates wealth for all of us. Again, capitalism is supposed to be like this. That is the idea.

There is a mutuality to it. When we live in our bodies, we live in our hearts. When we are able to relate emotionally, we see this on a totally different level. I am part of an organism, and I am part of the human organism, which is connected to the earth as you described. It becomes about how I can care for us? I stop leaving that sense of care to think and create things. I am much more sensitive to how it is going to affect other people and organisms. I just do not see that again in our leadership class. They just do not seem to be very connected. They do not seem to be pulling that data.

AI has this great idea. If I have all the data in the world, I will be so smart. My experience is that every time I feel people, my data set grows. My field of care and responsibility grows. That is something that has to be cultivated. Without that, I am a loose cannon. I am just one individual thinking up stuff in isolation from my environment. You can see in indigenous traditions that were so opposed to this. They would never think to create things that would harm the natural world. The Westerners come over here and buy Manhattan for a penny.

There is just such a lack of coherence in these two worldviews. One thinks, how can I take, and the other thinks, how can I nourish? This land is me, and I am this land. This is the invitation. We are going to have to broaden our understanding of what intelligence is by realizing all our emotional problems, all the dysfunction, all the addiction we have is actually an opportunity to broaden our intelligence. It does not mean we have to leave our rationality or any of the other beautiful mental faculties we have, but we realize we cannot live without everything else.

We must broaden our understanding of intelligence—recognizing that emotional struggle, dysfunction, and addiction are opportunities to expand it. Share on X

If I have billions of dollars, but I am unsatisfied with life, is that enough? This hypothetical person you described who has taken as much as they can from this world or built as much as they can, if I do not feel good, if I do not feel connected, if I do not have love in my life, does it work? Is it an intelligent strategy? As we go through time, my experience again with these younger people, it is going to get harder and harder to do that. I do not think the young people are going to be as able to do that as their predecessors were, but this is just my experience.

There is a proverb in the ancient Hebrew language that loosely translated says, “Who is rich is who is satisfied with his lot.” It is not a measure of billions or 10,000 or one. You are satisfied with your lot, and you feel good. Really, the bigger meaning is you are not satisfied with how much money you have, you are satisfied with your lot in life, with your connection, with your family, with your friends. It leads me to another thing specifically about men. At least when I was a child, many men were taught that men do not cry.

You tough it out, be a man. All of those processes you talk about, like grieving and handling an event for a young boy who is trying to be tough like his father. Maybe not the young Gen Z men as much. Maybe they have, and you said it, you actually said it. Maybe they have an advantage, being more sensitive and being allowed in that space. The older men were, in many cases, taught to be men, which actually means exactly what you talked about: dump all the garbage inside the cell and do not deal with it.

Challenging The Cultural Blueprint Of Independence And Self-Reliance

Again, I feel great compassion for this. I describe this as survival. This is what you do when you cannot do the more natural thing. I believe grieving, feeling, caring, and connection are all natural parts of our blueprint that require support. It actually requires a whole environment that can care for it. Just like the plants and the trees outside, you would never say to a tree, “It is all up to you. You are going to be the biggest tree in the world, and do not rely on the ecosystem as a whole.” Nature does not work like that. It is an interdependent system.

We would never see, we never look at our flower and think that it either was successful or failed. We would say, “It is part of a system. Either the system was successful, or the system failed.” What you are describing for me as a man, women have their own versions of this. Of course, it is deeply unique for each person, which is what we do in an unhealthy system in a non-supportive, especially an emotionally non-supportive system. It is intelligent. Go out on your own, work hard, and be an independent unit. That is how it has been. I do think that our children have an advantage.

They also have a disadvantage because there is not a lot of infrastructure for them. They have all this pressure to deal with emotion without the mentorship and infrastructure that would precede them. They have a huge inheritance to deal with, a backlog of emotional and experiential content and conditioning without a lot of support from their culture. They have an advantage, and they have tremendous pressure. Yes, I emphasize that this comes out of survival, and the human species is trying to forever try to move to higher and higher levels of well-being.

That is our developmental push. We all want to be happy and happier and more happy. We are going to have to realize, “This way of being has a ceiling.” Being independent, being self-reliant, and working hard actually have a ceiling. The moment I start to realize this in any area of my life is the moment that I am breaking through. If I can get the support from a teacher or system that knows more than I do, then I can thrive and break through that ceiling, break through the way of life I have inherited.

Talking about support, let us say somebody comes to you, let us pick a guy from Silicon Valley, comes to you, fairly successful, very busy, how would you start working with this person?

First thing is, if anybody comes to me, they’re motivated. By the time you’re coming to my door. You have some motivation, and we’re going to need to lean into that. Either you want something positively or you’re suffering negatively. There is something that is driving. People do not show up at my door out of some passive curiosity. Everybody who shows up to see me either is excited about opening into something or is greatly pained by something. We are going to really want to lean into your motivation. Motivation, both in positive and negative forms, is the best thing you have going for you. It is the same force that gets people to create extraordinary corporations. Drive and motivation.

Our sensitivity can also function as a motivation, not just a motivation to push through, but a motivation to be well, a motivation to feel like I am really present for my children, a motivation to feel like I am not alone. All of these things are calls, and our body is craving something. The first thing is to really acknowledge that there is a reason we’re here, that there is something really on the line for us. That sets us up for success. When we recognize that, then people will say, “What do I do? How do I fix this?”

I am going to say it is actually much more helpful. We have to learn to do three things. We have to learn to slow down, we have to learn to feel, and we have to learn how to relax. These are the basic three things we have to learn how to do. Sink into our bodies, slow down, and relax. There is a tendency, “I am anxious. What do I do? How do I solve this problem? How do I get out of it?” The answer is counterintuitive.

The answer is, I am going to actually need to slow down, feel it, and relax. “How does that help me get out of it? I do not want to feel anxious. I do not want to feel sad. I do not want to feel this drive or desire for something. I want to fix my problem.” That is how we fix problems generally in our society. It is actually true that the opposite is happening. Remember, I described the suppression of the past as like holding a spring.

Here is the secret. Our body is trying to be well. Fundamentally, our body is trying to process the past. It is trying to move to a state of higher and higher well-being. The thing that we want is actually in line with what our body is trying to do. It just needs more support. That is all that is missing. The only missing ingredient is the capacity to support whatever our body is trying to process or release.

There is a book called something like The Body Keeps the Score. That is a good one. It is exactly what you are talking about. You are trying to push on the spring all the time. It becomes invisible to you in terms of seeing that you are exerting energy to keep the spring pushed. Your body feels it. You will provide the support.

The Practical Healing Strategy Of Slowing Down, Feeling, And Relaxing

There are two things against. I can talk about what I do specifically there. First, I need to learn how to be with myself. I need to learn how to sink into my body. I need to learn how to regulate emotion, and I do that by feeling and relaxing when charge is active in my nervous system. I want to support it to move. This is a basic principle. The feeling is moving. If you want to let go of your sadness, feel it. What is actually happening when you feel sad? Sadness as an energy in your body is leaving you.

The experience of feeling is the experience of processing or moving the thing that you are trying to get through. Feeling is moving. To support that, we want to feel more, and we want to support feeling more by helping our body feel more effectively, which means to relax. All these feelings, our nervous system develops like a you could think about it like a roadway. LA has a crazy amount of traffic, and all the other major cities do. It has all these roadways.

We want more flow through the roadways, wider roads, and more of them. Our nervous system develops progressively into a more fluid processing machine by feeling and relaxing, waves and waves of emotion and experience move through us, ideally in childhood, that make our nervous system like this really advanced circuitry that allows us to process really effectively. Most people, when they come to me, do not have that built. We have to start to construct that. We have to teach that actually, your feelings are going to help you gain capacity.

It is not just about getting rid of your sadness or your anger or whatever. It is about having that flow through you in a way that makes you a powerful presence unit. Thomas Hübl has this wonderful quote that I love to lean into. “Presence is integrated history.” We could also think that capacity is integrated history, which means every time that I process things, it moves from this stored, compressed file into presence, into capacity in my nervous system. What happens is people come and see me, and they start to experience this. It is all an idea until you start to actually do it.

They go, “I was feeling so sad yesterday, and suddenly I realized, there is more space in my heart, and there is more capacity, and I am more able to be with myself, and I am more able to be with other people.” We remove this idea that my pain and the negativity and what I hold and process in general is about removing things. It is true in one way, it is about releasing things, but it is also about constructing a healthy me. I am the sum total of all my life experiences, which means the more that I feel, the more that my body of presence and my nervous system grow and get healthier and bigger.

Each time it does, it has more capacity. When people start to experience this, they stop being so afraid of their feelings, and they become more and more excited about where they are going. I start to get a sense of where I am going. This is a long answer, but I said there were two parts. The second part, as I describe, is that this is not something that you do by yourself. Feelings are about communication. If you think about it, I have young children. When my child says that they feel, any of my children said they feel angry or scared or sad, this is not so that they can have an isolated experience of sadness or anger or fear.

It is so that they can communicate with me. This is the nature of emotion. It is a communication mechanism. Many of us grow up in homes that are not particularly attuned to our emotional experience, so we become much less expressive. This is an essential part of trauma. The lack of expression or the lack of receptivity to emotion. When adults want to start feeling their feelings, it is not as simple as just sitting down and saying, “I am going to feel really sad.” The thing that turns on our nervous system more than anything, turns on the movement and turns on the aliveness more than anything, is someone who is really here with me, who has the capacity to feel with us.

The health of my body is designed to be received. It is designed to express my experience and to be received. When we turn that on, when we create those conditions, people move out of storing experience into sharing experience because it is more optimal to share. Again, when the environment or the conditions are better than holding on, we will let go. People will come to me all the time and say, “I am holding on to this thing. I do not want to be holding on to this thing.”

What happens is we will sit with them, and we will realize, actually, it is not so much that I am like, this is a problem, it is just something that has not been seen and recognized and treated with respect. As soon as you and I can meet it, we care, and we feel it together. It stops being a problem, and it becomes part of our living body. This is the second thing.

I need to experience being cared for, and I need to learn to care for others. I need to learn how to be with myself, and I need to learn how to be with other people. Once we have those skills down, we can go anywhere, and we can do anything. I mean that literally, once we have that capacity to tune into ourselves and tune into each other, there is nowhere within this reality that we cannot go. That is our navigation system. That is how we travel.

Can you repeat that quote again? Presence?

The Concept Of Presence As Integrated History

“Presence is integrated history.”

I love it.

Eckhart Tolle’s system is extraordinarily simple, as you described. That is why he sold ten million copies, and it is a beautiful system. What people will often say is something similar to what you said, “I want to stay in the present.” Wonderful, absolutely. What Thomas’s addition to this is, just like science, there is addition. People add layers to make a theory or an experience of chemistry or anything else more robust is to say that the present moment is actually filled with everything that has ever happened to you. In nervous system terms, your nervous system is like a tree, like tree rings, it is everything that has ever happened to you. To want to be present is really to be present in everything that has ever happened to you, essentially.

To integrate them. On a practical level, I feel a little bit of regret that my staff has put a meeting for me at the end of the hour, maybe we will go a couple of minutes over, but how do people reach you? How do you work with people? Do you work over Zoom? Do you work remotely? How do people get in touch with you?

I am going to create a unique landing page that will explore all the ways that people can stay connected. You can watch my social media content or listen to other interviews that I have done and learn from a distance. I host free meditations every week that really emphasize the skills that I am describing, and come sit with me on Zoom. I run all kinds of programs for individuals and groups. I do that mostly on the internet, but every year I get together in person with people as well. It is really about finding, getting a taste of it, and finding out if it is really for you. The best way to experience all these things that I am describing is by doing them, by having these experiences for yourself, with just ideas until you feel them. I love having people reach out to me. Again, I will put all those links.

Verbal, do you have a website?

I have a website, BlaiseKennedy.com. I am going to send you a special link on my website that people can click on in the show notes, and that way they can, they will have links to everything that I do that they can connect with me. The thing that I was talking about last is the programs that I teach, where I really emphasize being in our body and connecting. That is the beginning. If you can master those skills or begin to grow in those skills, I really, truly believe anything is possible.

Most of the things that we look to aspire to, either spiritually or developmentally, in my experience, are within reach to ordinary people, to everybody, just by working through and becoming more and more present in their body. Just as a closer, positive note, I know a lot of people your age or older who were in meditation groups, 30 or 40 years ago, where very few people broke through.

We are in a radical period of change for human consciousness, and the number of people who are breaking through is incredible. Basically, every single person that I work with has some degree of breakthrough. I would say this is an extraordinary time to get involved in healing work or body-based spirituality in general. I could not be more bullish.

Blaise, I really wish we had more time to talk. Maybe we will invite you again to get deeper into it, but you can go to BlaiseKennedy.com to see all the possibilities, whether in a group or one-on-one, or follow Blaise on social media. I really want to thank you for taking the time. I certainly got a lot out of this. I hope our viewers did as well, and I am looking forward to seeing you soon.

Thank you so much again. Your questions are so engaging. It was fun to create this with you.

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About Blaise Kennedy

Blaise Kennedy is a teacher and guide working at the intersection of relational practice, somatic awareness, trauma integration, and spiritual inquiry. His work supports people in accessing consciousness not as an abstract idea, but as something lived—through the body, through relationship, and through daily life. Blaise works at the intersection of awakening, healing, and manifestation. His work supports the integration of presence into the body and nervous system, so that insight becomes embodied and shows up in how we relate, navigate life, and live our potential in the world. Further, his work aims to support a gradual return to embodied awareness—helping people develop the capacity to meet themselves, their relationships, and their lives with greater coherence, presence, and depth.