Overcoming the Inner-Critic, Reclaiming Aliveness & Learning Somatic Intuition with River Kenna

I’ve been following River’s substack essays for a few years now and I feel a real kinship with his irreverent and genuinely unique perspectives — as well as his talent for self-experimentation and weaving together esoteric yet incredibly practical concepts which he uses for self-exploration.

In this conversation, you can expect to learn:

💬 How River was able to use somatic-based practices to go from experiencing an incessant inner-critic and suicidal ideation, to almost no inner-dialogue and opening up access to his emotions.

🧠  We explore the dynamic between what he calls Systems Mode that dominates our culture vs. a more Spontaneous Mode of being.

💀 We both riff on how the ideas of Bill Plotkin are essential for these times, and what it means to ‘die well’ in order to become genuine adults and experience a sense of aliveness.


Official Links

👋  Follow River on Twitter/X
📝  Read River's substack essays
👨‍🎓  Check out River'sexcellent course Somatic Resonance

Connect + Follow Jonny:

🐦  Follow on Twitter/X @jonnym1ller
💌  Subscribe to the Curious Humans Newsletter
🫁  Learn more about Nervous System Mastery
🙋‍♂️  Join Five to Thrive — a zero-cost educational email series.
📝  Take the Nervous System Quotient (NSQ) Self-Assessment (totally free)


🫁 Episode Sponsor — Nervous System Mastery

This is my flagship 5-week bootcamp designed to equip you with evidence-backed protocols to cultivate calm and emotional regulation. Our sixth cohort will run in October 2024 ~ and applications are currently open. My sense is that if this conversation resonates with you, then you'd likely be a great fit for our upcoming cohort. This curriculum represents my attempt to distill everything I've learned in recent years about creating the conditions for our nervous system's flourishing.  It's run in an intensive cohort-based way since this is, in my experience, the most efficient way to embody and practice the protocols.

Previous students have shared how partaking improved their sleep and quality of relationships and tapped into deeper states of joy, clarity, and confidence in their lives. We've had over 1000 students have completed this training, and many have said that it has been the most impactful thing they've ever done for their personal growth — so if you're intrigued at all, you can find more details and apply to join this year's cohort over at nsmastery.com


Further Ways to Support the Podcast:

🎙️  I use Riverside to record all of my podcast conversations (it's so much better than zoom for podcasting!)
🎧  I also use Transistor to host this podcast, it's fricking awesome, and I would highly recommend.
😎  RaOptics make the world's best Blue Blockers – I wear these anytime I'm out of the house after dark, and it makes a huge difference!
🤖  I use AI wizardry from Castmagic to help with each episode show-notes + timestamps
📹  Want to create a Hollywood-quality home studio? Get in touch with Kevin Shen here & save $500 with code JONNYSENT500OFF
📝  Test out my favourite journaling app using journal prompts that have made a huge impact in my life.

Creators & Guests

Host

Jonny Miller

Curious Human

RJ

Editor

Rob Johnson

What is Curious Humans with Jonny Miller?

Deep dive conversations that celebrate self-experimentation and ask what it means to cultivate embodied wisdom.

Jonny Miller [00:00:01]:
But it's curiosity as to where we.

River Kenna [00:00:03]:
Are, what we are, that existence, the.

Jonny Miller [00:00:06]:
Physical universe, is basically playful. Welcome to the Curious Humans podcast. I'm your host, Johnny Miller. Hello curious humans. In this episode, I'm speaking with Mister River Kenner. I've been following Rivers subzec essays for a few years now, and I feel a real kinship with his irreverent and genuinely unique perspectives, as well as his talent for self experimentation and weaving together esoteric yet really practical concepts in which he uses for self exploration. In this conversation, we cover how river was able to use somatic based practices to go from experiencing an incessant inner critic and even suicidal ideation to almost no inner dialogue and opening up access to his emotions. We explore the dynamic between what he calls systems mode that really dominates our culture, versus a more spontaneous mode of being.

Jonny Miller [00:01:01]:
We both riff on the ideas of Bill Plotkin and how these are essential for our times, what it means to die well in order to become genuine adults and experience a sense of aliveness. Okay, without further ado, I give you this amazing conversation with Mister River Kenner. This episode is brought to you by the one and only nervous system mastery. This is my flagship five week course designed to equip you with evidence backed protocols to cultivate calm, rewire reactivity, and build emotional regulation in 45 days. Our 6th cohort will be kicking off on October 7, and we're currently accepting new students. My sense is that if the conversations in this podcast resonate with you, then you'd likely be a really good fit for this upcoming training. The nervous system mastery curriculum represents my attempt to distill everything that I've learned in recent years about how to create the conditions for our nervous system flourishing. It's run in an intensive, cohort based way, since, in my experience, this is the most efficient way to not only learn the information, but also to embody the protocols into your everyday life.

Jonny Miller [00:02:14]:
Previous students have shared how partaking not only improve their sleep and quality of relationships, but also tap into deeper states of joy, clarity, and confidence in their lives.

River Kenna [00:02:25]:
I wish I would have found this 20 years ago. Almost like the small moments matter most.

Jonny Miller [00:02:30]:
I actually lean into it now with curiosity. Holy shit, did I just say that? And the more you practice, the better you get.

River Kenna [00:02:38]:
The key for me is emotional fluidity, which I think really buys you more life. Interoception has been so helpful, I didn't even realize all of the tightness internally.

Jonny Miller [00:02:49]:
That I had before. At this point, we've had over a thousand students complete nervous system mastery many have said that it's been the most impactful thing they've ever done for their personal growth. So if you're intrigued at all, you can find out more details and join our next cohort [e-mail]. that's nsmastery.com dot. Welcome to the Curious Humans podcast, River. It is a real pleasure to have you here.

River Kenna [00:03:13]:
Yeah, thanks for inviting me on, man.

Jonny Miller [00:03:15]:
How are you? How are you feeling in your body in this moment? In three words.

River Kenna [00:03:23]:
Overheated, generally calm, slightly scattered. I've had a lot going on today, so I can feel like a bit of high vibration around the head, basically, but just keep breathing. That'll ground back in.

Jonny Miller [00:03:41]:
Yeah, beautiful. Well, I've been really looking forward to this conversation. I feel like I've been a fan of your writing for God knows how long, and there's a bunch of different topics that I want to get into. But the way that I like to start these conversations is by asking if you considered yourself to be exceptionally curious as a child. And if so, can you tell me something that you were curious about?

River Kenna [00:04:08]:
Yeah, for me, it's very, my childhood is kind of one long tale of, like, curiosity killed the cat. Basically. I got very curious about a lot of stuff, and it tended to get me in trouble. The short version is, like, I came up in like, a very, very aggressively evangelical christian family, and all of my schools were like, christian schools. And I asked tons of questions and really tried to, like, understand, like, this is the, you know, this religion, the spirituality, this relationship to God is the most important thing in the universe. Everyone around me says it, so it should be cool if I ask tons of questions about it. It was not really okay to ask tons of questions about it. And, yeah, I kind of had that.

River Kenna [00:05:00]:
I learned to suppress that curiosity for a long time until I was kind of out and free on my own. And then, yeah, I was able to explore Christianity and history and Buddhism and tantra and all the other things to my hearts desire. But, yeah, a lot of my curiosity early on was unwelcome in my environment.

Jonny Miller [00:05:22]:
Yeah. Wow, interesting. So I can. I didn't really relate to that. I went to a school that had a, you know, we had to go to Abbey to church twice a week, and we had this, what I consider to be kind of catholic beliefs, like, shoved down our throat in a fairly aggressive way. What was your response to that? Like, did you, when you left that environment? Because I went kind of like full swing atheist rationalist like that. Was that similar in your experience as well, or what did you. What was your response?

River Kenna [00:05:52]:
Yeah, so I. Yeah, because I figured out when I was in high school, my high school was actually like a prep school for pastors and teachers. And so we had, like, doctrine class and daily chapel and all this other stuff. So for me, it started around then when I would express my teenage rebellion through reading books about evolution and reading about, like, church history from unsanctioned sources. That. Yeah, and reading Joseph Campbell, like, I picked up Joseph Campbell and smuggled the. Actually, I got into Joseph Campbell specifically because my doctrine teacher, like, name checked the series masks of God from him. His, like, four volume series name checked it during doctrine class as the type of demonic thing that we need to, like, stay away from and not give our attention to.

River Kenna [00:06:43]:
And I was just like, alright, I'm into Barnes and noble after school while I'm picking up volume one right away.

Jonny Miller [00:06:49]:
Giving you the reading list to go dive into, essentially.

River Kenna [00:06:52]:
Yeah. And then from there, I was in a secondhand bookstore a couple months later, probably, and I saw Joseph Campbell's name again on the COVID of the portable Young. And that was my first encounter with Carl Jung was, all right, so the demon guy wrote an intro for this other guy. He's probably good, too.

Jonny Miller [00:07:11]:
Books throughout cultures tend to be, like, the most read books specifically because they're banned for some reason. Beautiful. And then the kind of follow up question to that is, were there any particular stories or myths that resonated with you when you were growing up?

River Kenna [00:07:30]:
Two things come to mind. One of them is, I remember this was kind of the secondary one, but I remember printing out a bunch of the greek and roman myths and the gods and what they were gods of and all of that kind of stuff. But that was kind of secondary to my interest in. Yeah, the X Men. X Men were like my personal mythology, and especially anything around any of the stories involving dark Phoenix and the Phoenix force, and like this basically, like, fiery cosmic energy that was in favor of evolution and mutation in certain ways, and often brutally helping out. Its purpose is to burn away everything that doesnt work. And it kind of keeps helping out mutants in different ways throughout the long run of the X Men. And, yeah, I revisited the X Men a couple of years ago, kind of trying to get back to my roots and figure out some childhood stuff.

River Kenna [00:08:33]:
And that was kind of what I noticed was like, okay, I was obsessed with the X Mendez for several years there, and the thing in there that really seemed to resonate was, I wouldn't have had this language for it then, but what it looks like to me now is like, you have a right and responsibility to defend your evolution, essentially, that, like, you are going to change and shift and people are going to want to stop you and freeze that and cut it off, and you have to defend it at all costs. And that seemed to really strike something in me as a kid. Yeah.

Jonny Miller [00:09:08]:
Wow. And the reason I like to ask that question is I feel like there's often this tie between the stories or the specific characters that resonate and then what we're drawn to with our life's work and our kind of vocation. How would you connect the Phoenix narrative or the X Men to the work that you're doing now? I mean, I see some obvious ties, but how would you make that connection?

River Kenna [00:09:33]:
Yeah. So first off, to anyone who, like, knows X men lore and stuff, just to note that, like, the Phoenix is a very complicated character. And I know that there's other elements of it that I'm skipping, but I am pointing towards, like, what hit me as a kid about it and the connection there is. Yeah. Part of it is just I'm kind of a natural junge and Hillman ally where individuation is incredibly important to me. And there's always been something in me that's just like, I am here to become the specific person that I am. Like, I'm not trying to strip away down to no self or efface myself down into what is expected or what I'm supposed to be or whatever it is. The ideal for me, basically, as long as I can remember, is just like, there is something very specific that wants to come through me, and I'm going to keep chasing that specificity.

River Kenna [00:10:31]:
And that ties in over and over again with the X Men stuff in general of just this idea of mutants who are hated by society but continue to give back and protect that society and protect people. And there's kind of a bodhisattva ish lens to it of just like, yeah. It's whether people love you, hate you, whatever it is, you are here to serve the world in whatever way your specific gifts and mutations get you to do that in. Yeah, that's how I'd connect it.

Jonny Miller [00:11:08]:
I love that. And it reminds me of, I had a mentor who said the words to me that really resonated. He was like, you've already won. Be more you, be more Johnny. And that idea of. I think it's only fairly over the last few years that I've started to, mostly after listening to Rob Babe and his kind of soulmaking teachings that this idea of, and this wasn't a direction I thought we were going to go in, but it feels alive right now. This kind of new trajectory, almost like the way that I see it, is the reason that we're here. And the ideas that I kind of received from Buddhism were kind of this idea of like, we have to escape.

Jonny Miller [00:11:55]:
We have to escape reality. There's this kind of up and out mentality. We have to kind of escape the suffering thats here as opposed to this idea of which is more aligned with say, Bill Plotkin, who im sure will talk about of like, no, we have this kind of specific gift or puzzle piece to contribute to the greater unfolding and the greater evolution of all life. And how that, I guess, set of beliefs that cosmology is for me is such a, it's more empowering and motivating and like enlivening. And I guess my question for you is how do you view that for yourself? And when did that develop in your own arc of exploring Jung and Hillman and all these great thinkers?

River Kenna [00:12:42]:
Yeah. So first off, this is a thing that I was thinking about a lot the past couple of weeks. And I did just put out an article a week or two ago called Sers tissue festoon that is basically just my personal theology on this. It's just this long list of this is the case. This is true, this is true. But kind of drawing from that and responding more in the moment from it. Yeah. What's coming up is there's a diagram I saw a couple of years ago that shifted a lot of things for me where it just had one arrow up as the urge to transcendence, this urge to just get up, get out, get away, transcend all of this, and then another arrow down of like urge towards immanence towards what is here, presence, individuation, what is your specific place and specific gift in the world.

River Kenna [00:13:32]:
And basically the way that those two have to bounce, theres a push and a pull. And for me, that shows up in my meditation quite a bit like the whole you can feel kind of the energy moving up your spine and just that like, yeah, keeping the spine moving upward while also grounding yourself to the ground and holding yourself in that tension. For me these days, that very much I can directly feel urge to transcend, pulling me up, pulling me up, urge towards imminence, grounding me, keeping me here. And my journey with that took a, I don't know, I've kind of always just been very imminence focused. The escape thing, I think I got kind of allergic to early on. And I also had a lot of allergy to a lot of buddhist stuff that I would come across until Rob bar Bea, essentially, he helped fix it up for me. Because there's the four noble truths. It's all just like suffering.

River Kenna [00:14:37]:
This is suffering. That is suffering. Everything is suffering. And you can end suffering. And to me, there just felt something, not me, about building a worldview on suffering and on the escape from suffering and on escaping this whole world, this whole everything thats here. And then Rob Derbaya basically reflected to me something that I had kind of experienced and made room for it in buddhist space, which was saying, suffering is important. People suffer a lot and want to end that suffering. And as you practice, as you go down the path, suffering starts to get less interesting.

River Kenna [00:15:16]:
It has less of a hold on you. So that this end goal of reaching suffering zero and transcending entirely no longer becomes as interesting as looking around you and seeing, wow, I am in this world that has endless possibilities that anything can happen here. I can be anything, do anything, and that there's a specific eros or pull that wants to happen through me, that I can be in this world and that there's just so much beauty and fulfillment and joy in doing that rather than in continuing to try to get away from it and transcend it. Yeah, all of that.

Jonny Miller [00:16:02]:
Yeah. So I think kind of speaking to that tension between the imminence down and kind of the transcending up. So one thing that I really did want to talk to you about is this, what you call somatic resonance, which I believe is kind of like your unique phrase. And so maybe as a jumping off point, firstly, I mean, what is somatic resonance for people who are like, what does that mean? What are the kind of directions, direct benefits that someone might get from engaging or even being interested in somatic resonance and what is exploring this way of being, this way of relating kind of opened up for you.

River Kenna [00:16:46]:
Yeah, man, there's a lot down there.

Jonny Miller [00:16:51]:
Yeah.

River Kenna [00:16:51]:
As far as benefits go, I'll just briefly run through my own story where for most of my life, I just had, I think I was in, like, a very top percentile for inner voice, inner critic, this, like, constantly running vocal loop in my head that always needed something to chew on. And that was okay in high school, in college, it mostly just meant that I got really good grades because I would just keep feeding it things to chew on, to constantly think about, which meant that I was always at the top of the class because, yeah, I was compulsively thinking, and I might as well think about the stuff that'll get me good grades. And after college, that stopped working. So it started just chewing on me, essentially. And, yeah, it was very much trying to kill me at a certain point. And I did reach a certain point when I moved to Korea, where I was like, I'm not sure if I survived this year, basically. And that was a big wake up call for me. So I started trying some things out, eventually got around to embodied meditation, just being in the soma and finding different ways into that.

River Kenna [00:18:00]:
And for me, one of the earliest benefits was that the inner voice just softened and quieted and basically went away. It went from 20 some years of constant voice in my head, never stopping. That's the entirety of my experience, to very gentle, soft, and pretty much entirely optional inner monologue. At this point where I can just turn it off if I'm not enjoying or if it's not doing anything useful or not helping me, I'm just like, no, thank you, less in a monologue now. And, yeah, that alone for me, was insanely life changing. And, yeah, but after that, more things started rolling in. A huge amount of access to emotions started coming up where, you know, I crushed a bunch of set myself down going through the super christian evangelical schools where most of my feelings were not welcome or allowed. Crush it down.

River Kenna [00:18:59]:
Just crush it into a diamond. And yes, a much better access to emotions, which has come with the ability to actually let the emotions process instead of them just ruling me forever. It's like, all right, I can cry for 20 minutes. And now that crying has been done and I don't have to hold it for another 20 years, thank God for me also. And this has been true for a lot of people I've worked with, but not everyone. The body was a huge inroad to imaginal work, where after, I don't know, a few months, maybe definitely less than a year of regular somatic meditation, I started just coming across imagistic material in the body and trying to figure out how to work with it. And that combination was huge. Some of the biggest shifts in my life have come from finding an image or an atmosphere or narrative.

River Kenna [00:19:56]:
There's something somewhere in the body where I'm putting attention, and it starts coming up, starts loosening. And then I use jungian active imagination, kind of allow it to complete itself, is how I think of it. You just let it unfold until it does what it needs to do. And then there's just these insane, somatic mental something shifts that have undone some of my biggest blocks. Those ones are hard to talk about because people just don't believe basically. Or it's like, yeah, I had authority issues for almost my entire life. And then working with this one image and allowing it to process through my body within like a week after that, no more of those issues with authority. It was just solved because my psyche decided to solve itself, basically.

River Kenna [00:20:51]:
So that ones a benefit that people tend not to believe until they experience it for themselves. I get a lot of people coming back months later with like, okay, I was wishing that you would be like clearer or more direct when you wrote about this, but now it just happened to me and I realized you were being as direct as you possibly could. Like, that was a good description of this, but yeah, and then there's a bunch of the general same, yeah, the somatic benefits that you get out of anything, just like more calm, more capacity to just hang out and be with whatever is and not get lost in it. There's a huge amount of space around most of my experience at this point where, you know, I've had earlier this year, I started off the year with a ton of really bad medical issues. And even while I was, you know, pacing in the emergency room, there was still just a lot of space and capacity around me. So that I was panicking, I was sad, I was angry, I was all of this, but that wasnt the only thing that was going on. There was more space around it that really helps me just stay sane and pull through it. And having that always available is just huge.

River Kenna [00:22:06]:
Indescribably huge.

Jonny Miller [00:22:08]:
Yeah. Wow. Wow. I mean, I feel like we could spend the next 2 hours just unpacking what you just shared. No, its amazing. I mean, one curiosity that comes to mind immediately is I had a similar experience with the kind of inner, inner monologue. Like when I was at school, like early twenties, I had a pretty intense like inner voice and there wasn't like a kind of definitive point where it shifted. But I noticed that in the last four or five years there's been very, very little.

Jonny Miller [00:22:41]:
And kind of like you. I can kind of like engage that part if there's a problem that I want to solve, but it's not there running in the background. It's almost like something I can choose to open up the computer and run some programs if that's what I desire. And I didn't have any good explanations for why that is the case. I can theorize that maybe there were parts of me that were in my body that were looking to get attention and the only way they could do that was bye. Sharing increasingly loud or vocal thoughts or critiques of my experience. But did you have a sense of what was it about that somatic embodied meditation, which I also want to touch on because I think it's different to how most people practice meditation, but what was it about that that you think had that pretty much life changing effect given where you were in your life?

River Kenna [00:23:37]:
Yeah, I'm very much like a phenomenological dude, more so than a theory dude. So I've got what it feels like happened there as far as what really happened, what the model and the theory is. God knows, man, it worked. So it worked. I'm happy with it. But the model that I usually give to people and actually just went through this with a workshop is it kind of feels like wherever you put awareness in your body, you're almost feeding a gravity well and, like, creating more gravity in that area of the body. And most of us spend all of our time in our head, so any problem, any issue, anything that comes into our life, it just snaps to the head. That's where all the gravity is.

River Kenna [00:24:21]:
That's where we process it. And it just spins and spins and does its thing. Right. So you can interrupt that process by just putting awareness lower in the body, deeper in the body, and after a while, that seems to build up gravity, for lack of a better term. And things are just able to circulate a little more. So maybe something comes into your life, and instead of snapping to your head, into the verbal thought matrix up there, they can slip more towards your heart or your gut or your legs, your feet, wherever. And there's just other places in your body where it's like, okay, I can process this in my heart. Thats where this belongs.

River Kenna [00:25:03]:
Thats where this is. And, yeah, another example from earlier this year. I started. I got a thyroid disease, and it was basically giving me dementia for a month or two there. Like, I was just confused and dumb all the time.

Jonny Miller [00:25:16]:
Yeah, it was bad, terrifying.

River Kenna [00:25:18]:
Oh, it was horrifying. Yeah, because ive relied on my brain for so much of my life, and then it was gone. I just couldnt think, do anything. And in the middle of that, I was first off terrified, angry, disappointed, sad, all this. But then I realized, okay, even if I am like this forever, if this is just what my life is like now, whether thats true or not, at some point in my life, I will likely have mental confusion. My mental faculties will go away if im blessed enough to reach a certain age. So what can I do to make sure that my life is still meaningful and worth living in a positive experience, even in the middle of that. And the answer that came up was very much like directing everything to the heart instead of the head.

River Kenna [00:26:10]:
So I would go through my day and I was still dumb, I was still confused. But if I could just keep remembering that one sub program of just running things through the heart and going, okay, how can I find love and joy and gratitude in this moment for what I do have? And that was huge. And there was that feeling of like, yeah, things can enter the heart first instead of entering the head first. But for most of my life, I dont think that would have been available. Its because ive done years of lowering the awareness into the body, getting all the somatic neural circuits up and firing, and everything fires together and wires together, because I had that. It was a pretty trivial move to just go, okay, everything comes in through the heart first, and then that can still be a good life, even if my head is not online once there. But does that make sense?

Jonny Miller [00:27:12]:
It's really beautiful, really moving, actually. Yeah, my grandparents got pretty bad dementia. And the heartbreak that's there when you're around someone who used to have such sharp, incredibly sharp mental faculties, that just disappears. And the image that I had was almost the attractor basin of awareness dropping down, and that becomes the primary lens through which reality is configured or put together in a way. Yeah. Wow, that's really beautiful. So the other question that I had was, you mentioned that you started using images, or images appeared, and this is maybe kind of moving into imaginal literacy, but for myself, if I, let's say I'm noticing that there's some frustration in my system, I will go through the kind of typical, kind of somatic approach of what does it feel like? Where is it? What does it want to do? How does it want to move? How does it want to express? But there's very little mental or cognitive activity. So I'm wondering, what does a, let's say, somatic imaginal processing reflex or arc look like for you? How would you use this imaginal toolkit? And we can maybe get into what that even is, but what would that look like in a kind of practical example for you? How is it that you're able to use an image that then processes in some way through your physiology?

River Kenna [00:28:48]:
Yeah, hard to know where to start on this one. So, yeah, I think I'll just run through a specific example that was one of these big shifts from a couple of years ago that I'll talk about. But first off, just like a quick kind of theoretical, underlying basis for this is basically just that. Like, this me speaking is just a small part of the wholeness of rivercat, right? Like, this is just the verbal ego, the me and that part of us that kind of sits behind the eyes and hangs out and talks all day. That is a pretty small part of a much vaster psyche, even just on a very literal level of, like, your ego is not pumping your heart or doing the breathing manually most of the time. These are all unconscious processes. The way that you feel about things, the things that you want in this life, the things that it feels worth wanting in this life, you're not choosing those. Those are there prior to this ego self.

River Kenna [00:29:51]:
They're a part of that larger, vaster psyche. So the idea on this image work is essentially that if you can drop into that vaster psyche, it communicates through images. And image here doesn't necessarily even need to be like a visual representation. We just use the term image because it's very common in this area. But these can just be emotional textures, atmospheric feelings of knowing, a vague sense of narrative or memory. All these types of things count as images. And your psyche kind of knows, like, an ecosystem, how to even itself out. The problem is that the ego spends a lot of time not allowing the psyche to even itself out.

River Kenna [00:30:38]:
We try to pin things in place because I'm only good at my job if I do things this exact way or if I'm this type of person. People will only like me if I hold myself into this particular way. And all of that kind of grabs the fabric of the psyche and just pins it down instead of allowing it to move. So a lot of the imaginal process is just dropping that ego, dropping it into communication with this vaster sea of the psyche, and just letting that ecosystem rebalance itself, which we experience as the shifting of image, somatic stuff on and on and on. And, yeah, one quick run of how that worked out for me was I had a dream years ago of basically I just walked to a hilltop. There was a city on one side, an island with a giant bison on the other side. I went towards the city, hung out. Some stuff happened there.

River Kenna [00:31:35]:
Yeah, we can skip the stuff that happened there. I woke up, were done. When I woke up, I got curious, like, okay, I had a choice point there to go one direction or the other. I wonder what was in the other direction. So I dropped back into the drain while awakening, kind of went back into somatic meditation, deepened into the body, brought up this image of me on the hilltop looking towards this island with the bison on it, and just held that image. And this is just classic jungian active imagination. You hold the image and wait for it to come alive, wait for it to start moving on its own to do something that you didnt make it do. Right.

River Kenna [00:32:16]:
And so I followed through a bunch of that, went to the island. Stuff happened, stuff happened. Stuff happened. And I eventually get into this kind of flowy conversation, not words, but much more of just communicating by sense impression with this dream bison that is from my dream there. And the question that I was bringing to it was kind of like, what is my path? This feels like a really big dream, and it feels like you might have insight on this. What is my path in this world? What do I do? Where do I go? And I didn't notice at the time, but my idea of what my path meant was essentially a conveyor belt. I was asking what conveyor belt I could just drop myself onto, and it would take me somewhere better. Right? Yeah, yeah.

River Kenna [00:33:09]:
And wordlessly, with just, like, image and sense impression stuff, the bison kind of replied with that, of just like, hey, so you are in somatic meditation, journeying through a dream image, talking to an imaginary bison in your mind while you lie on the floor and listen to, like, shamanic drumming tracks and stuff. What about this doesn't seem like a path to you? Like, why do you think you need some extra thing? The path is under your feet, not on a conveyor belt. You don't need to go to a Zen monastery somewhere. That's not. That's clearly not your path. This is your path, the thing that you are doing. And, yeah, I woke up from that and, well, woke up, I came out of the meditation and brought myself back up, and, yeah, literally within that issue had haunted me for much of my life. I would not have phrased it that way at the time, but now seeing it, it's like, yeah, which conveyor belt do I put myself on? Whose authority do I submit myself to and just let it take me and turn me into a better type of life to be right? And within days after that, it was just gone.

River Kenna [00:34:24]:
I was like, oh, what Im doing is what I need to do. And theres just been a very rooted confidence and nonchalance around, yeah, Im doing what Im doing ever since then. And, yeah, I really cannot overstate how much that had been a massive issue for me before blocking so much in my life and how after that, it just became a complete non issue. That was not the thing at all. Oh, and just to last, a little coda note here, but during a lot of that, there was a lot of somatic activation stuff going on in that where kind of the same way, like, when your sports team scores and you get excited and without thinking about it, you just jump to your feet and yell. That type of somatic activation where I'm just like, oh, my shoulders need to move and shake, or I need to roll over, twitch, whatever it is. There's a lot of stuff moving through my body at that point. And as it came up, there's kind of a skill of allowing these to move through you.

River Kenna [00:35:24]:
The really big ones, like your sports team, those just move through, and it's fine. There's a lot of much subtler ones that don't take over in the same way, but that you can learn to flow with them, twist with them, do what they want. And, yeah, it seems to be some type of emotional peristalsis. Your body is just moving through emotion and stuff. Stuff that needs to be moved through, right?

Jonny Miller [00:35:48]:
Yeah. Wow. That's a really funny and also kind of profound experience. So what comes up for me in that is I work with a lot of people through the gateway of the nervous system. That's kind of the way that people come to me through and my experience, or, like, let's say the metaphor that I'm working with is our psyche. A kind of magnificent instrument, right? Or maybe like, a series of wind chimes. And this instrument has some kind of self organizing, self harmonizing force which wants to return to resonance or return to being more in tune. Let's say that's maybe the best way to put it.

Jonny Miller [00:36:34]:
But from what you were saying, the ego structures or the fixation or the tension has a way in which it will stagnate or even kind of impede that natural process. So my question for you is less of, like, why do you think that is? But more of, like, on a practical level for people who, let's say, are listening and like, wow, like, I want to meet a great bison on an island and figure out my purpose, or I want to kind of be less in my ego and more kind of trusting my somatic intuition and more kind of in tune with that particular resonance. How do they. How might one get out of the way? Like, what is the. What is the art? What are the moves that can unfixate and that can allow that, you know, kind of natural what you're doing with your shoulders to just kind of happen? Because, you know, I experienced that as well. And whether it's sometimes it's breath work that gets into that. Sometimes it's just, oh, there's an emotion here. And when I'm able to kind of drop into that, it's almost like the body is doing it.

Jonny Miller [00:37:44]:
I'm just witnessing. I'm like, oh, this is cool. My foot wants to do this thing. Interesting. And I'm just kind of tracking it with curiosity. But I know that a large subset, a large chunk of humans frankly, don't really have access to that. So what have you found to be some of the most helpful, efficient, reliable on ramps to accessing that?

River Kenna [00:38:10]:
Yeah, this is basically the entirety of my work. Like, this is the core of everything that I do. The reason I'm so big into somatic stuff is because somatics seem like one of the biggest inroads to that. And yeah, just to back up here, my favorite metaphor recently, well, not necessarily my favorite, but the one that most people tend to understand a little bit is this idea of left hemisphere and right hemisphere of the brain. And thats the most recent one that has kind of gotten popularity. But all through history, people have noted these two basic modes that we drop into, whether we call it left hemisphere, right hemisphere. I tend to refer to it as the systematic mode and the spontaneous mode. Yeah, theres also Federico de Campagna called them technic and magic Keats, the poet.

River Kenna [00:39:04]:
Keats referred to the magic right hemisphere one as negative capability. All over the place, these things are. But what it comes down to is essentially there's the one part of us that really loves control. And I use this word neutrally, but like manipulation, this ability to do what you want with the world, to take it and shape it and tinker with things, make it do what you want, basically. And then there's this other part of us that just can enter the flow, enter the stream and go, wow, this is something big is going on and I am here and present with it and that's cool. And it's not that one of these is good and one of these is bad. They have to work together. The problem is that when you get the left hemisphere, the systematic mode, whatever we call it, when that's the one that's in charge, it wants to block out the other one.

River Kenna [00:39:56]:
It wants to do everything on its own so that it has total control. When the right hemisphere is in charge, when magic spontaneity, negative capability, when that part's in charge, it wants to include the left hemisphere as a part of itself. It wants to work together. So that's why it's super important to do this. And going back to your music metaphor. Yeah. Your whole system is like an instrument. There's a great quote, I'm sure he took it from somewhere, but Ian McGilchrist has a great quote around music of how at a certain point in musical talent and playing music, it feels less like you are playing the music and more like the music is playing you as you play it.

River Kenna [00:40:38]:
Right. And if, you know, if you've like, jammed with some people, you know, like, there's a certain point when the music wants to end, and a lot of times people will kind of like stop at the same time with nothing but like shared gesture, like shared glances, and like, we know that this is the last go. There we go. Or you start up a little rhythm and other people start to fill in the rhythm and everyone kind of can feel where it wants to go. Everything in life is like that. If you can just feel your way into both what wants to happen and how you can develop your skill and capacity to allow that to happen. That's the whole of life as far as I'm concerned. But some of the best moves that I know, so semantically, the best way that I know how to do this is this prompt that I call two ways a body scan feels where a lot of people, when we do body scan meditations, for lack of a better way of going about it, theres basically a spotlight in your head that you shine on different parts of the body.

River Kenna [00:41:42]:
When we ask, feel your thigh, theres a me in the head that kind of looks at the thigh, checks in on the thigh, sees how it feels, etcetera. But that's kind of a. Yeah, that's more the systematic mode control, the centralized in the head managerial position of like checking in on the leg, checking in on the foot, how does the heart feel? And reporting back to the me up here, the other way that body scans feel, and this is one of the more direct portals, I know, to right hemisphere, whatever spontaneous functioning, which is this unfolding type of mode of being, is to instead just allow the awareness that was already in the body to just be aware of itself. So it's not me being aware of my heart, it's my heart being aware of itself. It's not me being aware of my feet, it's the feet being allowed to be aware of themselves. And one way into this is just noticing that, like, your body is not numb right now before you go to check in on your calves, there's already some awareness there. So just let that awareness shine a little louder, be a little brighter, bloom a little more fully, just take up more space. And when you kind of allow that to happen through the whole body, where the whole body can be aware of itself, and it's not so much you trying to do awareness of the body that very naturally begins to lead into spontaneous mode, right hemisphere functioning, all of this stuff.

River Kenna [00:43:20]:
And, yeah, Ian McGilchrist notes that this is actually why I stayed away from McGilchrist forever. And then people just kept asking me when I was talking about somatic resonance, like, oh, so you've read a bunch of McGillchrists, right? Like, you're quoting or paraphrasing him here. I'm like, no, I'm just talking about what happened in semantic meditation. Does he talk about that? So I finally went in and checked in on it, and one of the first things I found there was McGilchrist quotes saying that only the right hemisphere has, like, a whole body schema, that it sees the whole body as a single fabric, that it is, basically. And the left hemisphere views the body more as an assemblage of parts that it rides around in. So we often hear these phrases like this, that im in a body, that im driving around this meat suit, that things like that. That is much more left hemisphere coded. And thats how it feels, the body being its own being and being what it is, very directly speaking for itself, moving for itself.

River Kenna [00:44:22]:
Thats kind of the right hemisphere spontaneous mode type of thing. And that's this. Yeah. Open awareness, allowing things to flow through. And as far as I can tell, once you enter that open, spontaneous space, strange things start happening. You just start noticing more of what's going on. If you keep opening to what is present and you start finding a lot of weird stuff is present. Like dream bison.

River Kenna [00:44:52]:
They want to fix your authority issue.

Jonny Miller [00:44:58]:
Yeah. I'm loving how you're kind of weaving together lots of different things that I've been interested in, but I don't think I'd connected them in the way that you just did. I mean, I love Ian McGilchrist's work, and the matter of things is just an incredible, incredible accomplishment, what he's created. Yeah. And I'm kind of curious about where to go from here, but there's still a sense of like. And I'm kind of imagining myself in a listener's position as well here. What are. Some of the phrase that is popular these days is left hemispheric capture.

Jonny Miller [00:45:38]:
It's like we are, in some ways, infatuated by all of the capacities that the systematic or the left hemispheric way of being operates. And I'm wondering, and there's also another connection here between, I recently had Steve March from Aletheia on the podcast, and he talks about the difference between self improvement versus self unfoldment. And I just made the connection there of, like, the self improvement paradigm is coming from the left hemisphere of thinking that there is a way that we can be better and a way that we can improve, versus the unfolding, which maybe comes from the right hemisphere, which has a natural urge or kind of desire to grow, but it comes through that organic, spontaneous unfolding that couldn't have been predicted from one moment to the next. And I think there's something really, and maybe there's another one here of the poetic versus the technological attunement, where poetic attunement recognizes the kind of inherent beauty and meaning in everything versus the technological, which views everything as a means to some kind of end. And there's no inherent meaning or. Yeah, or like inherent quality. Everything is an abstract noun in some form. It's really, I mean, just like in this moment, it's really interesting of like, all of the different ways of pointing at these two modes.

Jonny Miller [00:47:09]:
Right. I think your spontaneous versus systematic mode is a good way of putting it. But I, it feels like there's my sense, and I imagine you share this, but the challenge, both on a personal and maybe collective societal level, is how do we begin to reorient a little bit more towards that poetic attunement, towards that, again, negative capability. I've always loved that phrase, but I hadn't again, connected the dots between that being a kind of. Right hemispheric way of orienting and being with inherent uncertainty and tension. But that totally makes sense. But yeah, there's not really a question in here besides this. How do we do it, river? How do we do it? Tell me.

River Kenna [00:47:54]:
Yeah, that is kind of my main area of inquiry at the moment. I wrote an essay a couple months ago on the greek concept of Metis, which, yeah, I was reading through Peter Kingsley, and he describes Metis. And it's this basically like intense skillfulness. I'm going to butcher his phrases that he uses this for, but, yeah, basically a skillfulness that is able to both be very focused and direct and focused on what it needs to do and that is aware of everything it wants, that is aware of everything going on without losing anything. And for me, this calls to mind immediately polynesian wayfinding traditions. You look at the ways that they navigated the ocean out there. It was no one thing. They didn't just have a compass or go by stars or whatever.

River Kenna [00:48:49]:
There's these huge lists of the things that they had to constantly be open to noticing but not collapsing down, but also be able to respond to them at a moment's notice. It's this perfect left and right hemisphere balance thing. And I just loved some of the lists of the ways that they would navigate. The shadows on the undersides of clouds, the way that the sun reflects off the ocean and onto the underside of the clouds. And they could see where there were island shadows and orient towards those. The smell of the water and how salty it was. If there was a fresh water outlet into the sea, then it would get less salty and you would know you were close to an island. The direction and variation of birdsong, all this stuff.

River Kenna [00:49:32]:
And it wasnt like they have a checklist internally that theyre going this. Its just, you have to be open to noticing what is present and then immediately calling it in to that more left hemisphere part of you that can throw it in the hopper and process it systematically and know where you are. And, yeah, our culture seems to have really given up on Metis as a pursuit. The only places I can find that are, like, really concerned with developing metis are the arts, which no one takes seriously. Artists and poets are very concerned with this very intuitive, open, and skillful sense. Music. You have to develop a huge amount of technical capability and skill in order to vibe freely with the current of what wants to occur through you. That's the whole skill.

River Kenna [00:50:26]:
And in sports sometimes, too, I think, because they're so embodied. And also this one is less popular to bring up and mention. But it does seem like some amount of threat and inconvenience is pretty necessary for the development of this left and right hemisphere balance thing, which kind of makes sense. A lot of the descriptions of right hemisphere functioning. McGilchrist talks about it, as well as like, youre on the lookout for predators. Thats why you need this whole section of your brain that stays openly aware to everything around you, because if you dont have that, you might get eaten at the watering hole if you dont notice the tiger creeping up. Right.

Jonny Miller [00:51:07]:
Interesting. So I have a thought on that. When youre talking about Metis, the thing that comes to mind for me, the two activities, which are two of my favorite things to do in the world are surfing and rock climbing. And in both cases, with surfing, there's a way in which your kind of attentional faculty is focused on the next point in the wave and what is it going to do. But at the same time, your awareness is incredibly expanded to the entire ocean. There's. What's the next set going to do? What is happening around me? So there is a way in which you're holding that very narrow focus with a very wide aperture of awareness. And it's the same in rock climbing as well, where you are focused on, there's one two finger crimp hold that.

Jonny Miller [00:51:50]:
You're like, I need to get that. And there's a way in which your awareness is also. Yeah, you're kind of expanded to the whole wall and everything else going on.

River Kenna [00:51:59]:
For me, the biggest example was I lived in Hanoi for several years, and, like, driving in Hanoi traffic, same exact thing. It is chaos.

Jonny Miller [00:52:08]:
15 lanes of motorbikes, right?

River Kenna [00:52:11]:
Yes. And like, no one is driving straight. Everyone's weaving in and out of the each other. Like, you get. I get crushed against a bus and just have to, like, go with it and figure out, like, how do I push myself off of this bus in a way that, like, pushes my trajectory around that next car before the other bike gets there. But, yeah, you're focused on what is immediately around you because you'll die if you. If you don't. But also this huge expanded awareness of where are the currents of traffic going? Where do I need to turn? Where am I going? But yeah, that tension, that pull is huge, and it's just not in a lot of places.

Jonny Miller [00:52:47]:
And with regards to the threat thing, I sense I kind of want to bring in some nervous system stuff here around. I think it's likely there's a certain threshold of activation energy, which the more activation energy we have, the more likely we are to kind of constrict and close off and kind of shut it down. And it comes out in keen ways. But if we can stay open, if, like, the pipes, the internal pipes can, like, be loose enough to allow the energy to flow through, then it kind of, kind of self, you know, self organizes. And I experience this in meditation sometimes where, like, if I can stay relaxed enough. And this morning I did like a sauna, cold plunge. And when I dropped and drank some pu erh tea, and when I dropped into meditation, I was like, whoa. There's like a.

Jonny Miller [00:53:32]:
There's like a waterfall, like a torrent of energy. And on the one hand, it is somewhat harder to not collapse and constrict when theres all of that energy and activation. But at the same time, if I can be with that, it creates the experience of intense aliveness, which I guess is maybe another way of speaking to Metis. Or maybe the experiential quality of metis. Is that accurate to say?

River Kenna [00:53:58]:
Yeah, theres a definite and complex relationship between metis and aliveness. That's a whole, the way that I use the words, that's a whole topic on its own.

Jonny Miller [00:54:10]:
Let's go there.

River Kenna [00:54:13]:
There. We're getting a bit more into like how, what's the woo rating that we're allowed to go towards?

Jonny Miller [00:54:19]:
Let's, let's 5.5. We can go.

River Kenna [00:54:28]:
I'll blame some of this on someone else then. Do you know the french theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin?

Jonny Miller [00:54:34]:
I do. He's fantastic. Yeah, the noosphere guy.

River Kenna [00:54:38]:
Yeah, the noosphere. The evolution of consciousness and unfolding all of this stuff. He has an essay and a concept he comes back to again and again that he refers to as the zest for living. And I would just call aliveness or deep aliveness because, yeah, there's kind of a few layers to aliveness. And the first one, the most common one I think is like this thrill, this exhilaration. Like, whoa, I feel alive. Holy crap, man. And yeah, that often comes from this experience of flow and being dropped into, yeah, you're on the wave of creation and you're like, oh wow.

River Kenna [00:55:16]:
It's possible to be aligned with what the situation of reality wants. That is thrilling and that is exhilarating. But one thing Theodore Chardon brings up that is also very key in my experience, is that aliveness is not just an emotional experience, it is connected to emotional experience, but it's something that is deeper. And it is this rock bottom faith in the unfolding of what needs to happen, basically. And the way that he phrases this as, yeah, the development of the noosphere, the evolution of consciousness, all of that stuff, which I think is a very helpful framing, one that I share in some ways and would tweak in others. But definitely for me, this sense that what is unfolding is what needs to unfold is kind of where aliveness is. And like I mentioned, I've had a very, very rough beginning to my year, and there was a lot of crying, a lot of confusion, a lot of anger and disappointment. And inside of all of that, there was still this rock bottom like gratitude that what was happening was happening because there was this feeling that it needed to happen, that something was processing through me that was partly emotional and partly the events around me.

River Kenna [00:56:41]:
But yeah, to me that's kind of how I use the term aliveness, that rock bottom fate, that what is unfolding is what needs to be unfolding and not as a conceptual basis that you kind of convince yourself of, but as the somatic, experiential moment of, yeah, this is what needs to be happening right now. Even if it is unpleasant for me, even if it makes sure that this entire week just sucks, that's what needs to happen.

Jonny Miller [00:57:10]:
Right? Right. Yeah. I mean, I've spoken about this on the podcast a few times, but for me, my kind of portal into aliveness was very much grief. And realizing that the image that I had, yeah, I guess kind of imaginal was from Dante of his icy lakes of hell. And I imagine I was free diving down these icy lakes, and on the very bottom, there was this trap door to heaven was kind of how I experienced it. And in that, there was this, like, that was the moment that any resistance I had in my system, it was just like, let go. It was like, yeah, like, I am willing. Like I.

Jonny Miller [00:57:51]:
Like, I'm willing. That's kind of, that was kind of my mantra. And in that experience, even though the, let's say the kind of inception was, was grief, it was the most potent and visceral and just like MGMA like experience of aliveness that I. That I'd ever had. And it was just this kind of ecstatic, crazy, crazy experience. And I think partly from that, that, for me, was like, whoa. I realized the contrast of that was like, wow. Ive spent most of my life relatively numb, relatively devoid of any aliveness.

Jonny Miller [00:58:26]:
And so I kind of then ended up doing a deep dive into breath work, into emotional work, which seems to be, for me, like the trailhead to that kind of aliveness. And then more recently, something that's really alive for me right now is I did one of the journey jhana retreats and realizing how the four jhanas were kind of like different flavors of aliveness where the first jhana was maybe like you were speaking to in the beginning. There's the thrill, there's the rapture. I just kind of kicked off a giant wave. There's that, like, oh, like, wow, I feel so alive. And then as that almost like, kind of the effervescence kind of like bubbles off or boils off, it kind of settles and settles and settles all the way down. For, to me, what was the fourth genre, which felt like this, like being at the bottom of an ocean, freediving this kind of, like, deep, kind of intense equanimity is almost like intense clarity and refinement. And it was like, that is the same quality of aliveness but without the sympathetic activation.

Jonny Miller [00:59:38]:
It felt like I was going from the peak of my kind of sympathetic intensity to deep, deep, deep parasympathetic, but with the same background quality of embodied safety. And everything is deeply okay. And it was interesting that it was almost like playing a scale, right. It was like there's these high notes, and then they naturally seem to kind of sink down into the lower notes or maybe the lower kind of frequencies. You're smiling. What's coming up for you?

River Kenna [01:00:11]:
Oh, just, I love that we keep coming back to. I keep getting more and more literally convinced that everything is just a song. The whole universe, the whole cosmos is a song. And you keep coming back to music metaphor.

Jonny Miller [01:00:23]:
Totally. Totally. Yeah. I mean, I think it is. I was reading an essay the other day from Ocean Jaro, who talked about the Im probably going to butcher this, but like the harmonic theories behind neuroscience and how our brain, these kind of like different harmonic frequencies that are attempting to reconcile. And it's related to Robin Hart Harris's entropic brain theory, Mike Johnson talking about Newell annealing. And although science hasn't quite pinpointed it, it's like dancing around this idea that there really is a there there when it comes to harmonic metaphors for the brain and nervous system and consciousness. And it's endlessly interesting to think about, for me, at least.

Jonny Miller [01:01:10]:
And it feels true. I mean, for me, it's like there's a sense of like, yeah, that feels right. Even though we haven't been able to kind of point at it from a kind of left hemispheric scientific point of view.

River Kenna [01:01:22]:
Yeah, I think there's a reason these metaphors keep coming back. And everyone talks about the resonance and the vibes and the vibrations being like this and that and the other thing.

Jonny Miller [01:01:32]:
And I mean, that's like a non woo acceptable way of saying kind of what we're speaking. Like his vibe is off or the vibe of that place didn't feel good or et cetera. There's a way that is real in our system. Wow. What's alive in you right now? What's coming up for you?

River Kenna [01:01:55]:
Nothing particularly. I'm kind of just in the open, responsive space with the inner monologue turned off. So there's nothing present except what's present.

Jonny Miller [01:02:07]:
Nice. Nice. Well, the other kind of name that I wanted to evoke in this conversation was Bill Plotkin. Hes been on the podcast before. And listeners who havent heard the episode, I highly recommend checking that out or reading the book that rivers holding up the journey of soul initiation, which is also fantastic. So, yeah, maybe as kind of an entry point, what was it about bills work that really resonated with you? And maybe a part two is what do you see as being? And maybe this kind of ties back to the rest of our conversation. But what is it thats keeping us stuck in what he calls this early stage adolescence and this inability to mature into genuine elderhood.

River Kenna [01:02:57]:
Yeah, so Bill Plotkin is actually similar to my experience with Ian McGilchrist, where people just kept assuming that I was quoting or referencing or paraphrasing him year after year. And so I finally was just like, okay, screw it. I'm gonna go check out this plot. Can do. There should be something good there. And the first one I checked out was his wild mind book because that was just the easiest one to pull up on. I think I already had the audiobook someone had given me or something. So I went out for a walk, started listening to the audiobook, and even within the first few paragraphs I had to pause and be like, okay, I need to get a physical copy.

River Kenna [01:03:40]:
This is going to be like, there's going to be a lot here for me. Yeah, I'm just pulling up that book and its introduction again and looking at it and yeah, there's already a lot of stuff here. I think one of the lines that caught me was something about just like, yeah, the fact that we have no choice but to invite ourselves into the biggest story we are capable of living. And something about that captured so much for me about just like individuation and leaving behind like just how small so many of the cultural narratives and cultural scripts were given are. Even the ones that are, quote unquote like big ambition and go for broke and go big. And all this stuff, when you really get down to what a lot of them are, theyre quite small. Theyre just make more money and they have a better this, that or the other thing. I dont know, its very deflating to look at a lot of them from a certain spontaneous point of view where youre just like, oh, that used to feel so big and alive, and now its just like, yeah, collect more of the good stuff that we have all agreed is the best stuff to have and then die again.

River Kenna [01:04:56]:
And yeah, theres something in that framing of just the biggest story youre capable of living, combined with everything else that he was saying about what clearly meant the big story of your life, the big individuation for you. And yeah, it was that same feeling I got reading Teilhard de Chardin about the evolution of consciousness and following the feeling of aliveness, because that is the feeling of evolving the noosphere, the psychosphere of being the thing that needs to happen. Reading the first couple paragraphs and just realizing, okay, yeah, everyone was right. I'm going to end up being very into this was kind of how I got into it, was I got bullied into it and then was immediately excited to have been bullied into it. And yeah, as far as the, you know, most developmental psychology models kind of agree that most people get stuck fairly early in the process of development of individuation of all of this stuff, usually somewhere around late adolescence, which makes a lot of sense. If you look at our culture, it very often feels like an extremely adolescent culture. We are obsessed with violence and sex and money and more sex again. And then, yeah, it's a 15 year old's culture spread out in glossed over to make it look a bit more adult, a bit more respectable.

River Kenna [01:06:19]:
Yeah, you wear a tie when you chase all of your money and yachts and mistresses and stuff, but still, that's just what you're doing. You're just following the 15 year old urges in you. And yeah, I really liked plotkins model of development, in part because almost every developmental model I've seen from Keegan, spiral dynamics, all this stuff, they lend themselves immediately to all of these, like, hierarchical games of people. You can't understand me because I'm a Keegan five.

Jonny Miller [01:06:53]:
I'm Keogh.

River Kenna [01:06:54]:
Yeah, I am too. This conversation would make more sense to you if you're just a little more.

Jonny Miller [01:06:59]:
Developed, a little more.

River Kenna [01:07:03]:
Yeah. For whatever reason, plotkins just doesn't give that same vibe. And I haven't seen people who are really into plotkin giving that same vibe. And what was fascinating to me, and this question feels like it's referencing an article I wrote a while ago about the hero's journey. Is that the case, or have you not read that article?

Jonny Miller [01:07:23]:
No, I think it was actually a tweet that you sent that was like, I think plotkin might be the answer.

River Kenna [01:07:29]:
Okay. Yep, that's true.

Jonny Miller [01:07:30]:
Here's that one.

River Kenna [01:07:31]:
But, yeah. So the question on the what gets us stuck thing, I wrote an article a while ago called the hero's journey is a jammed door. And what stood out to me while reading through some of plotkins stuff around development was that what he calls this stage, the journey in soul initiation, this stage of moving out of adolescence and into adulthood, into giving the gift to the world that you have to give, it mimics a lot of the stories, like the hero's journey type stories of the young person leaves and undergoes struggle and dies and then comes back with a gift. And what kept itching me was just that we aren't dying is the phrase that kept coming to me over and over again, just, we are not adequately dying. And your old self has to die to move into adulthood. Something about you has to be truly at risk, has to truly be defeated. And I it has to be utterly clear that the way that you have been going about life is inadequate to the next stage of your life. And that is a very real type of death.

River Kenna [01:08:44]:
It feels incredibly threatening. It feels awful. And yeah, it struck me how even in our stories, like, the death of the hero beat has become kind of a joke where the hero goes off the edge of the building and the camera just waits one extra beat until the hand comes up that he's. He held on and he's actually fine, or he goes underwater and the hand comes up and he's. And none of us expect that the hero is under any risk whatsoever. The only time I thought, like, they might, which is an absurd time to think they might do it, but toy story three was like the first example that came to mind of, like, when they're all just holding hands and going down to the incinerator. Part of me in that theater was like, oh my God, they're gonna do it.

Jonny Miller [01:09:29]:
They're gonna die.

River Kenna [01:09:31]:
Holy crap. Yeah. Like, I was crying in the theater, though. It was just like, dudes crying at his shoulder with me. I wasn't crying in a straight game. That's real. But that's the only convincing one I could find where I was, like, oh, there was a real threat of death there. And in our personal journeys as well, it often feels like there's a lot of, we'll kind of mimic or ape death a little bit.

River Kenna [01:09:56]:
A type of inner death of, oh, Im moving on to a next stage, im leaving things behind, and then we go back to our lives and nothing has changed. And part of that is it sounds like Im blaming individuals. A lot of it is about the cultural supports in our contexts. Theres just not the same type of support for a. The old version of you to die, to fall away, to be proven its inadequacies, or for the next version of you to come in and figure out, okay, that was inadequate. What do I do with the world then? How do I move into manhood, to womanhood, to whatever im moving into? We just dont have that support. So it is kind of all on the individuals at this point, which sucks and is basically an impossible situation. But yeah, the phrase that came up around this was like, you can only die as deeply as you live, and you can only live as deeply as you die.

River Kenna [01:10:51]:
And theres something in there that also ties into the aliveness of, like, if you undergo a shallow death of, you know, in this transition where just you let a little part of you drop away, you put aside childish things and go and get a job or whatever, if its a shallow death, then the next stage of your life youre only shallowly moving into adulthood, shallowly moving into aliveness, and sharing your gifts with the world. But if you undergo something that truly just. Yeah. Makes you suffer the inadequacies and shows you you cannot continue life being the way that you were, the person that you were, then, yeah, you are forced to come out the other side as something else and to figure out how to operate in the world.

Jonny Miller [01:11:38]:
Yeah, I think this is a. This is like a really deep point. And I remember in speaking with Bill in this conversation, he shared something around that really moved me. That was the kind of suicidal ideation that many people experience that that is actually in his frame, like, a healthy impulse, that a part of the psyche is ready to die. It doesn't mean physical death. It doesn't mean jumping off a building, but it means no. This is the call to initiation, which is deeply generative if followed and, as you say, kind of held, ideally, by others. And so, yeah, the question for me is, like, well, maybe there's two parts.

Jonny Miller [01:12:22]:
Like, one, let's say someone listening and say they've been through a hard thing, or maybe they've just come back from, like, an ayahuasca plant medicine ceremony. And what are the kind of internal and external markers of a depth of death that will continue to kind of unravel into eventually elderhood versus a shallow, superficial. The kind of hero falls off a building, and then it turns out it was totally fine, and nothing actually really dies, because I completely agree with you. And I think from what I've seen, there's almost a necessary, like, obliteration. Like, that's kind of how I felt during grief. There was a sense of, like, the story of who I. Not only who I am, but, like, the imagined future that I had for my fiance. And I, like, that was just, like, was, like, obliterated.

Jonny Miller [01:13:17]:
And it was like the. I was kind of clinging onto this, like, little life raft or little piece of driftwood in the middle of an ocean, and then that just got destroyed. And in that, there was this kind of, like, deep humility as well. And so those are some of the markers for me. And I'm wondering, and actually, how do you respond to this in your own life? What have been some of the more meaningful deaths? And maybe you're in one right now, right. Maybe with some of the thyroid stuff, with the dementia. Maybe that is a death I'm maybe projecting here, but a death of your relying on your kind of high capacity for using your intellect to kind of navigate through the world. How do you relate to that personally? And what are some kind of markers of, like, this is what is required for this to be a death that has sufficient gravitas to increase aliveness on the other side?

River Kenna [01:14:13]:
Yeah. I mean, what you just described is very much there. The first word that came up for a marker for me was defeat. It's a good sign, oddly enough, if you feel completely defeated. And even the word that you just used, humility, that there's a huge amount of humility coming out of it. We tend to use words like humble and humility because those are the more positive valence. And once we've decided to look at them and see, yes, that was good, we can say it was humbling. There's a lot of humility, but when you're in it, it feels less humility and more humiliating.

River Kenna [01:14:49]:
Like, you are just shoved down to the floor to the bottom of your capacity and, yeah, it feels horrible. That's kind of the big one, is if it feels like a. If you're, like, thinking about it as, like, a symbolic den, like, oh, like, I did this thing, and that really feels like something has ended for me and I'm really ready to move up. That's, you know, something might have happened, even something big might have happened, but it's not a death. That's, like, shooting into this next thing. That's some other marker in your life. Because, yeah, if you've gone through the death thing, you have, you know, spent weeks or months on your floor sobbing and punching things, and your landlord is mad at you and you feel embarrassed to go, like, face your friends after feeling so humiliated and defeated, and you. All of these things, it will be a bad, bad time.

River Kenna [01:15:45]:
Right. And I think, just as a side note, like, the aliveness thing that I mentioned is like, yeah. That it is a faith in what is unfolding is what needs to be unfolding. That's part of why this feels very important to me is because that can be a huge life raft to get through and, like, not let the humiliation just be humiliation to have some faith underneath that. That, like, this is horrible. This is awful. It might stay awful for quite a while and I can have faith that this is what needs to happen, that it won't be like this forever, essentially. And yeah, pretty dead on.

River Kenna [01:16:28]:
This has definitely been a period of some form of death for me. After my few days in the hospital, after getting the endless blood tests, my arms were just so bruised from blood tests and MRI fluid, taking blood in and out of my hands and my arms, it's awful. But after all of that and the dementia and the panic attacks, my heart rate went up to like 170 while I was reading a book and all of this horrible stuff, it felt really, really bad. And I was just defeated and wondering if this is what I was like forever now. And yeah, this has been a big experience of death for me, of some sort of, some parts of me did not make it through the beginning of this year for sure. But to go back to one that I have, this one I dont have a clear view of because I dont know where its going worth mentioning, actually, after the last thing that happened, the partner that id been with for five years, we broke up after all of this disease, dementia, falling apart and then break up. And even while it was happening, for that one, I was like, okay, so that's the last, that was the last one. Like, I don't have anything else left to lose.

River Kenna [01:17:47]:
We're done now. And she's keeping the cats, so I lose my cats too. Damn. Yeah. Literally a couple days later I just, yeah, I just remember the voice in my head of like, that was the last one. All right, cool. It's turnaround time now. And literally a couple of days later, someone invited me to Portugal, where I am now.

River Kenna [01:18:10]:
I'm at an event in Portugal that I was invited to. And then I got invited to something in Vienna, got invited to something in Berlin. Have to go to India for something, France for something. So the whole rest of my year just filled up and there's this very strong feeling of like, okay, I'm in the stream now and I just have to follow what is going to happen and unfold. So, yeah, I really dont have a clear idea of what this particular death means to me yet because its all going to keep unfolding for this year. But I alluded to an earlier one earlier when I said I got to Korea and realized I might not survive this year. I dont think I make it through this one. Theres a much longer story around that one.

River Kenna [01:18:52]:
And it was very much a reckoning with myself of the way that I have been living, the way that ive been conducting myself clearly just doesnt work because my first thought being left alone in my new apartment was, this is probably the place where I kill myself. And that was terrifying and shook me to my core. And, yeah, was also quite defeating and humiliating. I kind of just hid myself away for a while because my usual arrogant self was just like, okay, I have to admit that ive been wrong about the whole way ive been living. And, oh, boy, is that not an easy one for an arrogant 23 year old who thought hed gotten it all figured out and was better than everyone. But, yeah. So that was one of the early ones for me. That was just a massive turning point.

Jonny Miller [01:19:43]:
Yeah. Wow. Theres a quote that Im probably going to butcher, but I think its something along the lines of, from Rilke of being defeated by bigger or increasingly decisively. I forget what it is, but it's this idea that maybe life is. We kind of get defeated by more and more decisively and conclusively, and that something about that process hollows out the conditioning or the parts of us that aren't, that are getting in the way of that true expression, that true individuation. And that maybe that is one of the only. I wonder if it's death and or kind of extreme joy and rapture, which is incredibly rare, but that also, to me, feels like a kind of death, a similar kind of hollowing out of what is no longer necessary, like spare baggage in the psyche.

River Kenna [01:20:43]:
I mean, yeah, the human animal is an aggressively and intensely conservative being. We hold on to everything unless we are forced to let go of it. Right. And yeah, you have to be forced over and over again to lose the next thing.

Jonny Miller [01:21:03]:
I just found the quote. It was, winning does not tempt that man. This is how he grows, by being defeated decisively by greater and greater beings. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I would love to transition into a few rapid fire questions and then let's wrap this guy.

River Kenna [01:21:28]:
All right. What do we got?

Jonny Miller [01:21:30]:
All right, so question number one. What is your favorite beginner practice for coming back into cinematic resonance?

River Kenna [01:21:45]:
One of them that I give out fairly frequently is the gravity fields thing I mentioned earlier of just like theres a huge gravitational attractor in your head, pick literally anywhere else in your body, and just as often as you can, put your awareness there, keep your awareness there. And this doesnt have to be like a sitting formal practice. While youre waiting for the bus, while you are typing, while you are talking to someone, every time you notice that youve drifted your attention away, just put it back. Just put it back. And that one I found is really good for beginners because its so low stakes. It kind of breaks the part of you thats convinced that you have to do something very difficult and official and go onto the mountain and all that stuff. No, no. Just, are you having a conversation? Keep awareness in your gut, and whenever you notice youve lost it, just put it back.

River Kenna [01:22:35]:
And over time, it really does build a lot of capacity that its not a practice you keep up forever, but it does build the capacity to even be able to understand what some further along practices are pointing at. I know me starting out, some of the practices people would throw at me, I did not have the capacity to even feel what they are trying to do. So in the beginning, yeah, anything that lets you feel your body, and especially this, is optional but good. Especially that type of awareness we talked about of like, letting the body be aware of itself rather than behead me. Being aware of the body, literally anything that you can do through most of your day, is grand.

Jonny Miller [01:23:18]:
Brilliant. Second question. This was meant to be a rapid fire question. We'll see. Do you have a sense of your own mythopoetic identity?

River Kenna [01:23:28]:
Nothing that would fit into anything remotely rapid fire. One thing that I could point at is I did a. Do you know Rosa Lewis?

Jonny Miller [01:23:34]:
I don't.

River Kenna [01:23:36]:
Okay, Rosa. She did an exercise while we were in Berlin a couple years ago and just threw out a bunch of archetype cards. And you kind of had to sift through what landed near you and find the archetype that really landed with you. And for me, it was the translator. There was just this image of someone with a bunch of strange, weird glyphs coming in at the back of their head and then coming out of their mouth as something more arranged and formal that resonated very strongly.

Jonny Miller [01:24:04]:
No tracks. No tracks. Why is the left hemisphere like a spider?

River Kenna [01:24:11]:
This is a reference to a tweet that I did a few days ago. What I was referring to there is, I don't know, sometimes when people get really stuck in talking left hemisphere mode and they just go, go, go, and endless concepts and abstractions and more concepts. The imaginal texture of that to me is that there's a silver thread coming out above their head, just forming this perfect crystalline web, and it shines and it glitters and it looks cool and you can just kind of brush it away. It's completely insubstantial.

Jonny Miller [01:24:50]:
What is one experiment that you're running in your life right now?

River Kenna [01:24:55]:
I mean, the travel that I mentioned earlier, I dropped my old apartment. I left everything and selling everything that I have and I'm back on the road just following wherever the stream wants to take me, which I did before in my twenties. And it's interesting how state specific memory is taking me back. I'm remembering a lot more of my twenties now because I'm like, right. I remember being on the road and just going where the universe wants to take me. That's the big experiment at the moment.

Jonny Miller [01:25:28]:
Nice. Re entering spontaneous geographical mode, I love that. And then lastly, what is the deepest aspiration that you hold for your work and for your writing writing in the coming years and decades?

River Kenna [01:25:44]:
The biggest thing for me that feels like very alive at the moment and we'll see how this develops. But it was kind of a project that I'm thinking of as soulmaking scholarship, which is basically, yeah, most of my life I wanted to go into academia and then I started getting into academia and found out that it was nothing that I wanted anymore. A part of, I would say now, because it was so aggressively left hemisphere captured and so just like ossified and stuck and I didnt want to be a part of it. But a project that me and some friends have been putting together is what we might term more like right hemisphere scholarship ive been calling a soulmaking scholarship. And that feels like theres a huge amount of potential if you can get the people who are really brighten can really see the whole picture of something, even if they can't quite pin it down and put words to it. But they will have to put the work in to find ways to do that. If you can mobilize those people, give them structure and give them the ability to do what they want to do. The returns for the world are just infinite and I'd love to find more time, structure, funding, all of the things to do that in increasingly focused ways.

River Kenna [01:26:58]:
Right now it's basically just a couple of group chats where people are working on soul directed masters programs for themselves, essentially.

Jonny Miller [01:27:07]:
I mean, that's the birthplace of all great projects these days. Good old group chat. Beautiful. I love it so much. Well, dude, this has been, it's been such a pleasure. I really, really enjoyed this conversation where if, let's say, listeners are like, okay, I think I understood some of what he was saying, but I really want to learn more. Like what are some of the places on the interwebs that you would point people to? I know you have some great courses out there. Your writing is phenomenal.

Jonny Miller [01:27:34]:
Twitter, what are some of the best places?

River Kenna [01:27:36]:
Yeah, so the central hub would just be my website, burgerkana.com. what I'm putting out, depending on when this episode comes out, there might be a inner wild group community that's going up and that has. Yeah, what I'm putting in there is four mini courses that are all my most direct and condensed for as many people as possible. Versions of rewilding the body and the psyche and all of this stuff. So hopefully that'll be in the next week or so out there. And then. Oh yeah, my substack. My articles are at Innerwilds blog.

River Kenna [01:28:18]:
I explain things. Okay over there. Some folks tend to like it.

Jonny Miller [01:28:25]:
I think they're pretty good. Yeah. I think that the translator archetype is strong.

River Kenna [01:28:30]:
Yeah, that's my shtick.

Jonny Miller [01:28:34]:
Beautiful. Well, all those links will be in the show notes as well. So I'd love to close with a line from Rilke. He says, try to love the questions themselves and live them now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live your way into the answer. In this moment, what is the question that is most alive in your consciousness and what question would you leave our listeners with?

River Kenna [01:29:03]:
The question thats alive for me is mostly just hard to put towards. Actually, words might be something like where to next? And not just in a geographical way, but in a like where is this taking me? Essentially, because I've just been following for years at this point. I've just been following what wants to be done now and next and next. And there's a very real sense that it's heading somewhere very cool. And I'm very curious about what that looks like. And I guess just reflecting that question back to the listener of like, can you sense from your life situation at the moment what wants to be done? Like if your life is a song, can you feel where the next rhythm wants to go? Where the next key change is? Where has it taken you?

Jonny Miller [01:30:00]:
Beautiful. Well, we will wrap and we'll wrap with that. Thank you so much. I hope you enjoyed this conversation. It would mean a lot to me if you could take a few seconds to open up your podcast app and give curious humans a shiny five star rating. This not only helps more people to find it, but it will help me to get more awesome guests in the future. And if you're not already subscribed, then the curious Humans newsletter is where I share monthly morsels of interesting and podcast updates. You can sign up for that at Jony life.

Jonny Miller [01:30:35]:
That's J o N Y Lyth. Thanks for listening.