"I think intuition is really just calming your left brain down so that you can take in more information. What does that imply? It implies that the world around you is much more complex than you know. Much more, there's much more information to glean from the world out there than we allow.”

Stella Eisenstein is a healer and health practitioner who has touched many lives, drawing on formal training in acupuncture, physiology and bodywork alongside a highly developed embodied intuition.

Like many of my guests, Stella is a recovering overachiever. She has travelled from a largely rational and materialist understanding of the world towards something more open-ended: a worldview in which intuition matters, not everything important is necessarily measurable, and change sometimes happens in ways that don't fit easily into the models most of us are trained in.

What I find particularly interesting about Stella is that she hasn't simply replaced one set of certainties with another. Her journey has been driven by a persistent attention to results and to what she calls the “data points” that didn't fit her existing worldview — combined with a willingness not to decide too quickly what they mean.

Stella is also married to the writer Charles Eisenstein, whose work similarly explores the territory between conventional rationality and less easily measurable ideas about interconnectedness and meaning.

It is perhaps no accident that Stella herself embodies the crossover between these two different paradigms, almost in her very being.

I feel personally that Stella's insights into physical healing and recovery - as insightful and helpful as they are in themselves - also point towards much bigger questions about how we use our time and our lives, and how we might think about the forward movement of our world at this time.

There is a lot of treasure in this one. A couple of fave moments:

“When you are engaging the tools of the left brain exclusively, in other words, getting, doing, fixing, action, and you're simply not recognizing that you are part of a system that has a whole another mode. That other mode doesn't go away just because you pretend it isn't there.”

“We're going to always be a little bit in the not-knowing. That's very right brain. That's a very right brain way of just continuing to take in information, continuing to take in information, and not ever really falling into a sense of I know what this is. Because we don't.”

LINKS & FURTHER READING

Stella Eisenstein
https://www.resonantattention.com/

About Stella
https://www.resonantattention.com/about-us

Iain McGilchrist — work on the divided brain and different modes of attention
https://channelmcgilchrist.com/

“Attention Is Not a Resource But a Way of Being Alive to the World” — on instrumental vs exploratory attention
https://channelmcgilchrist.com/attention-is-not-a-resource-but-a-way-of-being-alive-to-the-world/

Charles Eisenstein
https://charleseisenstein.org/

Integrative Manual Therapy — Sharon Giammatteo
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/59446/integrative-manual-therapy-for-the-autonomic-nervous-system-and-related-disorder-by-sharon-giammatteo-thomas-giammatteo/

Ariane de Bonvoisin has lived many lives.

An international swimmer in her teens, she graduated from university at 19, worked in consulting firm BCG, went to Stanford Business School, entered venture capital, and by her late twenties had become a managing director at Time Warner’s $500 million digital media fund.

And then it all fell apart.

In this conversation, Ariane and I explore what happens when the external story of success no longer fits with deeper truths of who a person really is — and what that might mean not only for individuals, but for leadership, work and society as a whole.

Ariane is best known for her work on change, but our conversation goes into fresh territory: the body as a source of truth, the impossibility of living two separate lives and identities, and the moment when success becomes impossible if it's not 100% aligned.

We talk about her childhood across seven countries and three continents, the family instability that gave her drive, and the “chronic self-sufficiency” that helped her achieve but also eventually had to be unwound.

One of the most powerful moments comes when Ariane describes finding herself in a New York clinic, covered in eczema and on two medical drips, realising that she was “allergic” to her own life.

From there, we explore change not as a productivity strategy or self-improvement exercise, but as an identity shift you are never completely in control of — the moment when the life you live can no longer carry the person you are becoming.

We discuss:

• How many achievers have two bios: the external CV and the real, hidden one
• Why the body often knows the truth before the mind does
• Optimism and the danger of bypassing grief
• Privilege, control and access to transformation
• Feelings, spirit and intuition in leadership
• The fear of disappointing others
• Children, technology and the future of human aliveness
• Why the emotional body matters as much as the physical body
• The “S word” — and why spirituality is still so hard to talk about in serious adult life

Ariane’s current work focuses explicitly on bringing together the worlds of success and spirituality. Her podcast, The Spirit Collective, speaks with people known for public achievement about the spiritual path behind their lives.

This is a conversation about work, change, embodiment, intuition and the deeper life asking to be lived beneath whatever it is you are presenting.

Ariane de Bonvoisin — https://www.arianedebonvoisin.com
The Spirit Collective — https://spiritcollective.com
Spirit Mama — https://spiritmamabook.com

I know very little about philosophy but I like it when a random dad in a kids playground starts talking about Wittgenstein and the reality-shaping assumptions of language.

Rich Watkins definitely passes the bar of being an over-achiever. He entered the world of business at 16, became the youngest innovation consultant at pioneering agency What If, travelled the world advising organisations, and eventually built his own practice around helping people work together better.

But more excitingly (for me), Rich has DIY-assembled a coherent philosophical outlook on life and work that, by comparison, makes my thinking feel fuzzy and unexamined.

In this conversation we explore what happened when the scaffolding of Rich's over-achieving began to fall away — and how he gradually moved from orientating himself around what the world rewards towards a more embodied sense of what he actually cares about.

Drawing on thinkers including Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Virginia Satir and Donna Haraway, Rich describes ideas not as maps telling us where to go, but as lenses or compasses that help us see our situations differently.

We talk about why so many of our models of leadership and teamwork are already out of date; why human beings live inside language rather than simply using it; and why the ability to notice our own defensiveness, assumptions and inherited ways of seeing may matter more than finding the “right” model.

Topics include:

• Moving from external validation towards embodiment and desire
• Wittgenstein, language games and the “city” of language
• Ideas as lenses rather than maps
• Why old models of teams and leadership stop fitting reality
• Virginia Satir, defensiveness and how we relate
• Intensity, hyperfocus and learning to make space for softness
• Donna Haraway and “staying with the trouble”
• Optimism, uncertainty and doing the next right thing
• Dialogue as a practice for seeing more clearly

Explore further:

• Rich Watkins — website
• Rich on Wittgenstein and language
• Ludwig Wittgenstein — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Martin Heidegger — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Virginia Satir Global Network
• Donna Haraway — Staying with the Trouble
• David Bohm — On Dialogue