Welcome to Episode 18 of The Art of Humanity, where we explore creativity + consciousness to allow you and your business to evolve. In Episode 18, Jessica Ann talks with a former criminal defense lawyer, psychotherapist, and author Jeff Brown.
Jeff became a lawyer in Toronto in 1993, after apprenticing with famous Canadian Criminal Lawyer Eddie Greenspan. After hearing an inner voice calling him away from law, Jeff began an adventure in self-excavation and expansion that lasted 15 years, culminating in the clarified call to write Soulshaping. He spent over six years at it, then refused a significant contractual offer to publish it, preferring instead to self-publish on his own terms.
SOULSHAPING represents a model of Grounded spirituality that speaks to individuals from all walks of life. The very personal and heartfelt way that Jeff takes the reader through his journey calls out to the reader’s own quest for true-path. It is evocative, original and highly relational, and not to be mistaken for self-help books that preach at the reader with familiar aphorisms.
In this interview, Jessica Ann and Jeff Brown discuss:
- His background as a lawyer and what led him to where he’s at in the world today: “I had this masochistic need to find my authentic face in this lifetime.”
- The challenge that comes with accessing his soft voice that wanted to share his “Truth aches.”
- How to come to grips with our emotions during the process of shifting towards your most authentic selves.
- The importance of connecting our spirituality with our humanness.
- How we can clear our emotional material to do our work in the world and access our portal to divinity.
- What happens when we make the clearing of our emotional material – and why most “survivalists” don’t know why they’re here.
- Why he left the possibility of fame in trial law to be on his current path – and why the calling itself (the calling to write) is his portal to divinity – a way to access a unified field and it becomes a buffer against the madness of the world.
- The importance of getting in touch with our centers to make powerful shifts.
- Why the “New Cage” movement: A term to describe the more ungrounded, dangerous and simplistic elements of the New Age movement, including but not limited to wishful thinking mantras, spiritual bypass and premature forgiveness practices, superficial healing techniques, and the perpetual denial of common sense realities with fantastical perspectives (‘Everything is an illusion,’ ‘There are no victims,’ ‘Anger is a sub-standard emotion,’ ‘All judgments are bad,’ ‘You chose your every experience and circumstance,’ ‘Your personal identifications are inherently false,’ ‘Just ask the universe for what you want…,’ ‘Everything you see and feel is a reflection of you,’ ‘There is no one to blame,’ ‘The ego is the enemy,’ etc. These perspectives have their place in certain circumstances, but taken too far, become a prison of their own making, locking people in with their unresolved pain, obstructed from doing the real work by their addictive flights of fancy. The key to escaping new cage prison is developing a willingness to do the real work to ground, embody and heal in authentic terms. On a relational level, New Cage connections are often woundmates, priding themselves in their seeming spirituality, but actually falling apart at the seams- boundaryless, ungrounded and controlled by all the unresolved emotional material that the crystals didn’t quite heal. In their determined efforts to float above the fray, they actually just perpetuate their own wound-bodies and miss the opportunity to do the real work to become conscious together.”
- The importance of having tools at our disposal to clear our emotional material such as: body-centered therapy, bioenergetics, and holotropic breathwork, Osho’s dynamic meditation, are necessary ways to discharge your life from the culture so you can become clear the emotional material.
- Why the media needs to inform us without trying to screw us up emotionally. At some point people need to revolt and say: “Listen, Mr. News People, we’re not going to watch this anymore. we’re not interested anymore. you need to start portraying reality in a more balanced way and not use negativity to try to hook in our anxiety…you need to inform us without trying to screw us up emotionally.” Once they do that…the news doesn’t have to leave but they’ll have to modify the way they do it…but I do have to wonder what has to happen where people just walk away and say I’m tired of hooking people into the darkness. there are so many more beautiful things happening on this planet…why can’t we just present it?”
- Jeff’s next body of work, his publishing company Enrealment Press and how you can download his courses at different stages of your path.
You can learn more about Jeff at his website: soulshaping.com or buy his book An Uncommon Bond on Amazon.