welcome back to Inside personal growth. This is Greg Voisen. I am the host of inside personal growth, and have been for 17 years and over 1200 podcasts, and joining us from Del Mar, and I gotta let my listeners know court, but it's actually Cortney McDermott, and this is the book. Give yourself permission. I actually have been able to meet with her twice, because we live pretty close to one another. That doesn't always happen. Court. How are you today? Same

I'm well, I'm so well, how are you and thank you for having me here. I'm excited to talk. Yeah,

well, you're fired up, I can tell so I love that, and I love the fact that we're going to get into something that will really help our listeners in in their life journey. And I think giving themselves permission to be confident, be happy and be you is truly it. But before we start in to that, I'm going to let them know just a little bit about you, because I've learned so much about you over our time sitting together having coffee and having lunch the other day, and I was so kind of enamored with your background, I think that my listeners will be as well. So let me tell you a bit about her. She's a best selling author, a TEDx speaker and a mind body expert with a Master's of Science from the London School of Economics. Her work in the field of self development and business strategy has been featured in women's health success, the Huffington Post, Fox News and many other mainstream business and lifestyle media. Cortney's career highlights include her time as an executive at Vanity Fair Corporation. She was also vice president of sustainable partners Inc, and then running her own business with clients and audiences at Universal Music Group, Google, Nike and Virgin Unite. She speaks four languages and lives between Italy and the US, recently transplanted to Del Mar, California. You can connect with Cortney, and it's not c o u r, it's C O R, T, n, e, y, MC, pyramid, M, C, D, E, R, M, o, t, t.com, there. You can learn more about her books. You can learn about her speaking, what she does. You will also put links to her LinkedIn page and anywhere that you need to find her on social media. So court, can I call you court Sure?

Absolutely okay,

because we've had such a great opportunity to spend at least a couple of hours together, which I always say is kind of unusual. Give yourself permission is really kind of a powerful title, because so many of us don't give ourselves permission, and we fall into what society wants us to become or do or be and and we don't actually live this life of happiness and fulfillment. We live a life that was like expected of us by our parents or our boss or whoever it might be, what was the moment or experience in your life that inspired you, one to write this book, and two, for you to find your own self and give yourself permission, because you didn't always give yourself permission either. No,

yeah. And I feel like I'm constantly having to move that marker in terms of the permission granted to myself of, oh, wow, maybe I can do this. And that experiment process, that experimenting process has been, has been really exciting for me too, and I the book came as a kind of a download, actually. And I think in part, because of the experiences that I had had working with so many high perform, quote, unquote, high performers, and then also in my own life, of noticing that lots of times where we weren't showing up for something, or where we didn't believe that we could it was because we weren't giving ourselves this permission, because, precisely to your point, we were afraid of how others would respond to it, how we were thinking we kind of had to stay within the confines of what we had either created for ourselves or what had been created for us. So when the inspiration came for this book, it was like, give yourself permission. And these are the these are the different areas to sort of give yourself permission in. And I noticed how funny it was that here I was working with people at the absolute top of their game, but all of us were still struggling with this, with this piece. And so that's where, that's where the inspiration came from. And like I said, I'm still very much always challenging my own self in this regard of well, why aren't you giving yourself permission? And it's funny the title of that book, because so many of my friends now they say core, just give yourself permission, right? Give yourself permission to do this thing. So yeah, that's where it came from.

I had a prior book which was, change starts within you. And I think really, look, there's a correlation between the two. Change does start within all of us. And you know your journey has taken you from being in these roles at executive at Vanity Fair, to being an author to now being a transformational coach. And so if you were to tell our listeners like, hey, oh boy, I jumped off. And I know it was afraid to leave Vanity Fair, because I might have had my own fears. And then I jumped into this, and I became an author. And boy, I was afraid because I didn't know if I was going to sell books or I was going to get speaking engagements or be on TEDx, what, how did you approach giving yourself permission, and how did you get the I'm just going to say it courage to say, Hey, I give myself permission to do this or and then there's a second part to that, is the whole spiritual element that you bring to the table, which is so incredibly valuable. And I think once people see the value of connecting with their higher self. They realize that they are being guided by a force which is beyond them. They just need to tap in. So how did you that's a long round about way to get into the question. But the question is, hey, you were there once. A lot of these listeners are there now, what advice are you going to give the listeners that's like, hey, I want to I want to hear what she has to say. Yeah,

well, I think it was Warren Buffett who said, Don't test the depths of the water with both feet. In other words, don't just dive in and hope for the best. And there have definitely been times where I've jumped and hope for the net, but I don't actually counsel that. Usually what I say is just just piecemeal, dip your toes in and start playing with this. So I remember when I was an executive at Vanity Fair Corporation, I I wanted to do some training. My boss kind of wouldn't let me do it. And I thought there was this option to submit a research proposal, and if they liked it, they would accept it and let you go to this conference pretty much free of charge. And so I thought, Well, why not give it a shot? And so I did this in my spare time, in my evenings, on the weekends, where I could carve out a little bit of time to follow that impulse, that creative nudge that was nudging me of wanting to write. And when so I did this, I went to the conference. I thought my paper was total crap, and then it ended up winning the best paper award. So I was really shocked by that, and it sort of catapulted my comp, my career, into this other area of the business, which was around corporate responsibility, and then that sort of took on a life of its own. So it was having to your point, the courage to do something, but I also did it sort of piecemeal. So it wasn't, it wasn't okay. Now I'm going to quit my job and go right. It was, let me see what little pieces are calling out to me. And as to your point that you made in there, there's this force that's working through us. And a lot of people might say, well, I don't know what you're talking about. Well, if, if, if that comes up for anyone, it's the same force that's conducting the trillions of biochemical reactions occurring in your body every second, right? No one would negate that. That force is working for us. It's beating our hearts, it's doing all these other things that we don't consciously have to be aware of. That force will start to take on everything else once you give it the space to do it and stop clogging up the system. So that's what a lot of what I talk about.

Well, it's kind of like taking a journey through the jungle and clearing out the pathway, you know, with the machete. And as you said, it's one step at a time, but in essence, you still have to clear the way the shrubs to be able to get, you know, to where you're going. And you know, an accolade for you is Nelson Mandela's was it? Was it his daughter who made this it's his grandson. Grandson says all you have to do is look into cortney's eyes and you know she's figured something out. Her gift is helping the rest of us figure it out, too. And I would say that's true. There is something about your eyes, and when you look into your eyes court, there's a deepness, there's a richness, there's a something there, and, and, and I think for my listeners, whether they get it verbally or they're watching this on video, I think that they'll they'll sense that it's like you gotta have another sense. So one of the things I wanted to say was you emphasize in this book that we are already where we need to be, okay, alright, but that isn't a belief that a lot of people are carrying around because they're always striving for something else. They're always striving for the next. So how can people shift their mindset from striving to arriving? As you say,

I love that I've heard, striving to thriving, but I love this, what you just said, striving to arriving. Wow, yeah. Well, here's the thing, all of these potentials that we talk about, they exist in the field, and you can look at that scientifically. I mean, we can look at this from an epigenetic standpoint, of you're either signaling, signaling some genes, or you're not, and activating and signaling, learning how to do that. You can look at it from a quantum physics perspective of a particle is a wave at the same time, it's a wave up into the point of observation, ie attention, at which point is translated into into a particle, into the physical form. And so it's this idea, right, that these potentials are there, and it's only in the moment that we alight the attention with our attention, that that probability outcome can start to make itself present, or make itself, make itself even visible, right? And so since I had started to see this in my own life and with my own experience and working with so many clients, and also after giving talks and speeches all over the world, seeing how people were starting to essentially alight these potentials, or these probability outcomes that before they didn't seem to have access to, I really started to play around with the science, because I wanted to understand, well, if this is happening and if I'm seeing it, how do we start doing that? And so the striving piece, the striving to arriving. I love that is, that's the piece that's actually kind of holding you back. And it's a funny thing, because in the world, or, you know, in society, I should say, we talk about, you know, make it happen. And we sort of glorify this idea that you have to keep striving and hustling. And by the way, hustle is such a funny word. It's kind of to means to cheat, right? If you look it up as a dictionary definition, it'll talk about kind of this cheating thing. And you are sort of cheating yourself, because what's happening as you're striving is you're activating a lot of stress hormones. You're activating a lot of chemical responses in the brain and the body that are hindering your progress, whereas when you relax into the potential, what's happening is you're shifting brain wave frequencies, so you're starting to get into frequencies that are more conducive with a lighting that probability outcome, and you're starting to just open up to possibility. And so what I really wanted people to see through my work, because I had experienced it firsthand, was like, Oh, my God, you could just wake up. You know, people talk about it being a journey, but actually, it doesn't have to be this great journey. You could just wake up like you wake up from a bad dream. And so that's where, that's where that was coming from,

yeah. Well, you know, you you blend science and spirituality in this book, and I think it's bridging the gap for most people, because a lot of people are skeptical. I know when we had lunch, she said, Look, if you just can't sit for five minutes with yourself, right, or 10 minutes, or 15 or 20, you're always then looking to the next, the next, the next, to trigger some other thing that you have to do, but actually giving yourself permission to relax and enjoy who you are and love yourself for who you are is, it's a big deal. I mean, one of the things is forgiveness and self forgiveness, right? Like forgiving the fact that, well, I didn't become what my parents thought I was going to become, or my boss wanted me to be, or whatever, but I did become who I am, and I'm okay with who I am, right? So how do you bridge this gap between the two spirituality and and science? For people who are listening right now that might have a bit of skepticism about the two, because you've just talked about energy waves, and you talked about quantum physics, and you talked about a few things that I'm not saying, all the listeners are going to be like, Hey, I get what she's talking about. But there's going to be some that are still going to say, Nah, it's all done through hard work. And next,

yeah, well, here's the thing about relaxing, right? And we get fresh. I remember, I remember years ago, people saying, just relax. And I would say, I am relaxed, right? And I totally wasn't relaxed. You know, my nervous system was on overdrive and all the things. And if we look around and we can kind of sense this in ourselves and in others, lots of times when you're basically vibrating. I mean, I'm talking about hertz per second, right? So I'm talking about brain wave I'm not talking about these. It's, there's nothing air airy fairy about it. It's really like a lot of people are running around and rushing around in beta, right? Which is this frequency that the best way I ever heard it described is, imagine you have a four gear race car, and you're driving it in first gear all day, right? So you're pedal the metal. I'm gonna get where I have to go no matter what? Yeah, you'll probably get there. It's very linear. It's, you know, action breeds result, breeds, action breeds result. Yeah, okay, you'll probably get there. But there's a lot more wear and tear on the engine than if you start moving into some of these other frequencies. Now, beta has low range beta, high range beta. If you're in low range beta, you're already starting to open up to these new possibilities that I'm talking about. But when you're in high range beta, you are just a recipe for, you know, a lot of cortisol and and and all sorts in adrenaline that's just on, just over production of these chemicals, right? Of these neuro chemicals, so, so again, lots of times people say, well, it's they want the science part. And I thought that was really important, because I work with a lot of really smart folks. You can't just say, stand in front of the mirror and say, I'm good enough, I'm smart enough. And dog on it, people like me, you know, you've really got to get in there, and with the science that matches what a lot of those spiritual traditions knew all along. I mean, if you look at the Eastern traditions and a lot of what came out of India, for example, and other traditions, what we're seeing is they, they knew these things intuitively, instinctively. They understood how this these operating systems work. They talked about it in terms of chakras or energy wheels in the body. And what's happening over the last, I would say, especially the last 50, 6070, years, is that science has been catching up, and especially more and more recently, where we're looking at these brain body scans, and we're seeing, Oh, my goodness, these chemical messengers that we're sending down from the brain that are a response of these electrical impulses that we call thoughts, which most people are not actually actively directing. So you've got 50 to 70,000 thoughts of these, or impulses, of these electrical impulses every day, and there's literally sending these chemical messengers, lots of them, when you're holding on to them, they're sending them down into the different organs or energy centers of your body. So we can see this on brain body scans. We see them actually getting lodged in there, and then it's clogging up those systems. And people wonder, Oh, you know what? My guts hurting, or I've got this, I've got irregular activity in my heart. You know all these kinds of things that are happening, but again, this is where we're catching up. This is where we're realizing that's not by chance, it's not by chance that it's been stored there, and there are very specific things that you can start to do to free up that energy so that you can be more in tune with this force that we've been talking about. And so it is important to bridge that gap, but it's important only in terms of getting you to a place where you start to open to these things. You don't even need to know that much about this to just say, Oh, what if I just start to open and turn toward a new potential.

And well said, and with that being said, you know, people will always say, Mind, Body Spirit. Right, Mind, Body Spirit and but you you talk about the beliefs, which is really the mind. We're talking about, conscious, subconscious, super conscious. How can listeners begin to reprogram the beliefs that literally are manifesting themselves into the energy which then is manifesting itself into the DIS ease. I say dis ease meaning I'm in a hurry, or it then manifests itself into a side ache or a belly ache or a headache, or whatever it might be. And I think these are common things, and I think it's probably common knowledge to the people in kind of alternative medicine practices, but maybe not a lot of people who still might be listening to the show where it isn't. So how would you tell them right now, if they were looking at beliefs to reprogram so they could create a more fulfilling and rewarding life.

So let's go back to the thought impulses. Let's go back to this again. They're electrical impulses. We don't know the origin of them, which I find really fascinating, because neuroscientists have have figured out a lot of stuff, but what they haven't figured out is, where do these thought impulses, where do these electrical impulses originate? So we can't parts, point to a part of the brain, for example, the the prefrontal cortex, and say, Oh, that that thought impulse that you're having, of my mother in law's this, it's, it's coming from that particular part of the brain. We don't know. But what we do know is that the average person is having somewhere between 50 to 70,000 of those a day. And we do know that for most people, those are recycled thoughts. They're the same thoughts, or roughly the same thoughts every day. So the formless, this electrical impulse is informing the form. That's a really important concept to just wrap our heads around the formless, which, in this case, I'm talking specifically about the electrical impulse. There are other formless activities happening, but these electrical impulses that we call thoughts and we latch on to either because we like them or we don't Okay, they are informing the form now that that piece is really crucial for what I'll say a little bit later, but holding on to that piece first, I want to say, Please, please, please, if you're listening and you're thinking about this, do not start at the level of the thought, can

I say something real quick? Yeah, I think one way for people to maybe relate to it is the invisible actually becomes visible. So the form list informs the form. If the form is the visible the invisible or is like, well, we don't know where those thoughts are coming from, but the reality is, think people can relate to that concept of invisible becoming visible, because you a great example of that would be, well, you're having a day, you know the stress is mounting. The stress continues to mount, the thoughts of negativity around that occur, and then you blow up, right? You just like, explode at somebody, or you do something that you're not supposed to do. So if the form lists, informs the form. How do I change the form to make sure that it's positive?

Well, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna come right back there. First I want to say, let's take a concrete example. Let's say a carpenter wants to create a chair. Okay? The carpenter has to think about the chair, has to plan the chair, has to design the chair. Has to put all of her energy into making the into making this, this thought, this idea, come into the physical form, right? So this is a great way of just saying, let's, let's look at something really, really tangible, right? If the carpenter mid, mid chair making decides that she wants to make a couch, uh oh, you know, now we've got to deconstruct everything. We got to make something else, right? It's really we're all doing this, but there are subtle ways and less subtle ways. So let's talk for a minute. I want to go back to the point of, please don't focus at the level of the thoughts. Because imagine you're, you know, you're bombarded. You've got these 50 to 70,000 thoughts. If you're trying to reprogram the belief with, you know, like I said, I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and dog on it, people like me, it's probably going to fall short. Because what we need is, we really need something else that's going to allow us to start working at that level. You know, a lot of people say, I think, but for most of us, that's the equivalent of saying, I beat my heart, because that process of those 50 to 70,000 thoughts, they're happening almost as automations. They're at they're automatic. And so trying to change that wave without understanding some other things first, is going to be really hard. I would urge people to consider stepping away from positive and negative, because it's really not about it's like Shakespeare saying nothing, neither good nor bad, but thinking makes it so it's like that's just an electrical impulse. So if we can distance ourself a little bit from the thought by recognizing it's an electrical impulse, and at that point, we do something really important. And this is where most people kind of miss the boat, or most of us miss the boat is we've got to find ways of unblocking that stored energy, that accumulated energy, of having so much repetitive, repetitive, repetition. I can't think of the word, but, you know, repetitive. I can't think of that. But when we've repeated thoughts, sometimes my sometimes my brain, also with other languages, it gets stuck on one word. It's like, wait a second, then I'll find it in another language. Anyway, that repetition, right? So there's a lot of that. It's cumulative. You can imagine it like a calcification of a thought, which is also happening in the form it's a calcification around an idea. So again, don't, let's not start at that level, because it's extremely arduous. The process of learning to think is a very, very arduous undertaking. Most people will never go through that. Let's start at the physical level, because this is stuck energy. So one of the things that I'll constantly tell people is shake it out. You know, I was listening. I went to the south of France a few I don't know how many years ago, five years ago, 678, years ago. I can't remember. And I did this retreat, and this woman there who had founded a movement called Koya, she talked about shaking, and she said she was having a shake one of our hands really vigorously while she told us this story of a gazelle being chased through the wetlands by a tiger. And she says the gazelle gets away. However, the gazelle does not go to therapy for the next 10 years. About this time that this tiger was chasing her, what the gazelle does is she shakes through every part of her body, releasing the tension, releasing the fear, and goes back to being a gazelle. Now we were taught when we were growing up, sit still, don't move, don't do that, right? I'm asking everyone listening, if they're ready for this invitation, to ignore that completely and start shaking. And I'm talking about literal shaking out of the body what's been stuck and accumulating there, so that you can start to deconstruct some of the constant thought patterns, which I talk a lot about in this second book, precisely how to do that in really simple terms, so that people can start that undertaking. It's a beautiful, beautiful thing, once the mind moves from master to servant and starts to serve the shaking

is the physical element that actually gives you the assertion or power over the other thought. So in other words, it dissipates, it goes away. So to me, your story, that story you just told about the lion and the gazelle, is a perfect example of that. So I got a question for you. You know, there's energy around everything we're talking about energy right now. There's an energy of love, there's an energy of money, but one of your chapters is, make a lot of money, okay? And you know, there's this whole energy about being wealthy or being rich, many people struggle with the concept of wealth and self worth. Okay? What's the biggest misconception in your mind about people that have about money and or abundance in their life? Because they either choose to not accept it, or they connotate money with evil, or whatever it might be. But I'd love for you to enlighten us about this concept of make a lot of money.

I love this one. I just gave a full interview on this for learn from people who lived it, which is another podcast that I absolutely love. This, Matthew blades interviewed me on the frequency of money. And we got so much powerful feedback about this, I had financial advisors actually reaching out to me and saying, Oh, my God, you just summarized in one podcast episode, everything that I've never been able to teach my clients about wealth accumulation, and I think one of the most important, since you're asking for kind of what's the main thing, I would say understanding that money is the word currency. For example, it comes from Cortney, it comes from flow. So again, the minute you start getting into those ideas of money, is this or money is that you're sort of blocking off the flow. Imagine like you had a hose, right? And you start to just clamp down on it a little bit with some habitual thought patterns around it, rather than being open to flow. In Your Life. We hear this word flow a lot, so it becomes a little bit distracting. It might bring us to other places. But the idea is, simply, there is this abundance of of wealth. And I don't mean that in terms just of financial wealth. The wealthiest people I know, they're like backpackers. I mean, there's some of the people that are closest to me, and they're you, you wouldn't know half the time if they're homeless or wealthy like and they're Uber, Uber wealthy. And because there's less it's, it becomes more about just where is life taking me. And the greatest wealth principle, I think, one of the greatest wealth principles to understand, is that it's, it is all in you. There is a there is. It's almost like you had the ruby slippers all along, right? The fact that you can really feel your way into this abundance of everything that lives within you and all around you. One of the exercises I used to do years ago was or lead people through, was like, just look outside. Go outside. I'm looking outside this beautiful window right now, and there's just this plethora of life and all it's, all its manifestations, everything it's doing. And it's just so exciting to say, Whoa. Look at, look at how life does it right and then relaxing again into this. It's in me I can access this feeling right now of feeling secure, a feeling that I've got everything that I need, you know, and starting to just gently allow yourself to experiencing, experience that inwardly as then the outward starts to come and meet it. Because again, you're electric and you're magnetic. Okay, you're sending out signals all the time. And again, we can call these thought impulses, but they're also sensations and that that then breed a very specific signal that you're sending. And then, of course, you're drawing back in that probability match. It's, it is it is science, it's, it's actually not. There's nothing about it that's woo, woo. It's just the way you're designed. And so the more you start to feel inwardly what you are in that beautiful expectation of outwardly, you'll start to open up more and more to that

well, you bring up the the value of flow. And I think there's many and I don't want people to misunderstand, because there's a psychological flow where you timeless, spaceless, but there is an element associated with that same thing, with the flow of abundance in your life. That's the time when you're the most creative, as you just said. That's the time when you are accepting of new thought coming into you, and you're open and receptive to that. And I think that is really the optimal time to make shifts in your life, changes in your life, to be accepting of things. I just was talking to a man, Bob Rosen, who wrote, wrote a book called detach. And I think the reality here is, in the eastern philosophy, you know, we can get really attached here. And I think I've said this before, but I'll say it again. There's never a hearse that has a U haul behind it, right? And, and I think many people are attached to all these physical things in their life that they create. It's like I got a house, I got the car, I got this, I got that. And I think where you find the greatest level of happiness, as you were saying with your backpackers, is you wouldn't know if these people had anything at all other than their backpack and the clothes on their back, but they're as happy as can be because they haven't attached all this, pardon me, shit that happens. So look, this comes down to living life by design. We use, I used to teach a class on purpose, and we used to say, is your life on purpose or is it up by accident? And I think that comes down as, how can someone start creating a life that aligns with true desires, instead of, as I said at the beginning of this show, societal expectations, or expectations from wherever? So, in your humble opinion, having taken this path, in this journey, which is where you're speaking from. What would you advise somebody who's listening right now about finding that inner peace and finding a life that is fully my permission?

Yeah, wow, there's a lot packed in there. I would want to, I would love to pull out two pieces of it. The first is desire. I'd love to for us to chat a bit about that, and then in response to the whole question. And the second piece is, is peace? You know, that eternal peace that we hear about, and I love the word desire. It's funny, in Buddha's teachings, you know, he talked about desire being the trap. You know that that all life is suffering, and all suffering is related to desire, or because of desire, and desire is the trap, right? And so freeing yourself of desire. And I remember, years ago in Anthony de mello's work, I had read this, what he he said, You know, I he was talking about the the teachings of the Buddha, and he said, really, it's about your attachment to the desire. And after reading that, I realized the power of what he was saying. Because desire, in and of itself, as I, as I like to think about it, is an evolutionary impulse, okay, it's coursing through you. It's a desire to be more. It's a desire to experience more that is life, that is budding, that is that is firecracking throughout your whole system. It's the most sensation. It's just it's just sensational. It's wonderful experience, right? So desire is how we're designed. We're designed to have those evolutionary impulses that are calling us to be and express more of this formless power that we've been alluding to throughout the interview. So desire, in and of itself, I think great. I think that actually, that translation of the Buddha's teachings might have been a little bit off in that sense, because there'd

be no procreation of the species if there wasn't desire

as well, as well. So it's this idea, right? That it's the attachment to the desire and the way, the way that one could think about this is in this, the beautiful way. And this was I, again, I'm paraphrasing from Anthony de Mello teachings, but this idea that without this thing, I can't be happy, okay, without the relationship going this way, without the promotion, without my, you know, I don't know my clothes looking a certain way, or my car being a certain kind of car, whatever, then I can't be happy. Okay, that, or, as Shakespeare would put it, therein lies the crux. Okay, so the the human, the trap is without this, I can't be or I'm not. Okay, if it doesn't go this way, and that's where we get ourselves into a big bundle of messiness. Okay, so it's not the desire, per se, it's one also to the other point that you made in that question, because it, like I said, was really packed. But this other point was, you'll feel the difference between the evolutionary impulse that's coursing through you and the excitement of that versus something that's been societally imposed. You'll actually feel it in your body. And the more you listen, the more that cue will become extremely clear to you of this is what you know. This is the thing that I'm really after so so again, embracing, acknowledging, loving the evolutionary impulse, the peace, the eternal peace that we hear about, comes from saying, I'm also perfectly okay if it goes any other way. And by the way, to go back to the question of money, that's true. Wealth is like, I'm okay no matter what. And I don't mean okay as in, the F word, as in, fine, okay. I mean okay as in, I'm spectacular, regardless of how this goes. And it's, it's saying, I do feel this evolutionary impulse. I'm I'm nurturing it, I'm loving it, and I love everything that's happening. It's getting to that place. And it might seem that's that might seem really far off. I know for me in my life, that felt super far off. For so long, I was very driven to get to the next thing. But what I kept realizing over and over, luckily, it was like, you can't you keep smacking your head up against the wall, you'll eventually realize this isn't working. You know, if you notice how quick that turnaround of like, Oh, this isn't as satisfying or as gratifying as I thought. Next, Next, Next. And you eventually, you might decide to get off the the hamster wheel.

I like the fact that you say that. And I think there's a, there's an, there's an old Indian story that the punch line is good things, bad things. Who knows, right? So in other words, oh, you just said about finances. Well, if it didn't go right, well, who knows? The reality is we don't know why that occurred, and we need to let go, and we need to know that we are fully abundant no matter what happens. You know that we can attract into our lives? You know they say people who've lost millions made millions, lost millions made millions, is because they know how to attract that back into their life, right? It hasn't ever been anything. And you also said not bundling up flow, allowing flow to occur. And I think that is because people do like to damn things, thinking, Okay, I claim it. It's mine. That's what I have, right? And so this comes down to this. You know, sometimes having a vocation versus having a living comes down to our people playing and having fun. And you encourage people to have fun and play more. And I think that also encourages people to be more creative. Use their creativity. You be open to that. Why is play and your estimation important part of actually accessing the spirit within?

Yeah, I dedicated a whole chapter to play in this second book. Because what I realized from my experiences, I had started to have these really phenomenal experiences. I didn't know, actually, if I was going to share them in my writings, because they almost felt, I felt a bit vulnerable to talk about how this happened, also, because I didn't know how it was possible that I was having these experiences. I didn't have them in any traditional ways in which people seek them out. I was having experiences of so called, or what you would call Satori, and one of them actually lasted for two days, and I was trying to deconstruct, like, what happened there, because I wasn't, I wasn't on anything, but I was, I was complete bliss. I was sat chit ananda. I was I was I was without. I was desireless. I felt, gosh, it was just the most. And I do share the writings that came through me during that experience. I share that because what I wanted to do, as I said, was deconstruct How the heck did this happen, right? And as far as I could tell, it was this really seeking. I was seeking that, that knowing. I was seeking that connection with this four source energy that's coursing through us. I was actively searching for it through my research, through my practices. And then the funniest thing happened, I sort of just let go of my attachment to finding it, and then I got really goofy. It was so I just got goofy. I just got funny. I remember I was with a one at the onset of one of these experiences. I was with a friend, and I was just so playful and goofy. I was like, who cares? I just kind of gave up in the best way, and bam, the minute I gave it up, I got it and I gave it up in a really playful way. So I was thinking, okay, and then I saw this happening. I realized that was a pattern in my life, that lots of times I was, quote, unquote, striving for something, and it was the moment that I relaxed around it, and I got goofy, that that thing just just shot out, just shot up, and so, so that's as far as I could tell, was this play, which you know, when you again look at the Eastern traditions, this idea of Leela or divine clay, like everything's Playing around us, right? So why are we getting so stiff? And if we could, if we could loosen some of that stiffness through, you know, some of what I was talking about before, and there are many other ways to do it. I talk about in that in the book, but it's if we can start to loosen some of that stuck, stagnant energy, and we can invite in some playfulness, then lots. I mean, actually, your whole world could shift.

I would say that that is the best advice you gave people on this podcast, is to loosen up. Now a lot of people would say, to let go, but you were striving so much to find it. Then when you let go and became playful, it found you. And I often say people you know say, Well, I have a gratitude journal. And I say, I think gratitude finds you. You don't find gratitude. So the question then becomes, is like the way you're looking at this story about seeking, pushing, striving, right, and the minute you played, it found you, and you had this satoria experience, right? In other words, it was like, Okay, this is wonderful. This is what I was seeking, so hard to find, and I allowed it to happen, and it found me, right. I always sometimes ask, I think, when people are striving for that, that psychologically, what is it that are you either running from or toward, or what are you chasing or what's chasing you? Okay, so with that being said, going back a ways to your younger self having gone through this amazing journey that you have as a soul on this and your spiritual transformation, what advice would have you would you have given your younger self before you started this journey, and what advice would You give the listeners today to be thinking about, hey, how am I going to take this journey and be more accepting and less attached to the outcome?

The one piece of advice I would give is trust. Trust trust everything. Trust everything that's occurring within you and outside of you. It's funny, you talked about everything. You talked about running away from things and running toward things. And one of the thing, one of the ways I like to think of that, is everything you're running away from and everything you're racing toward is inside of you. And so when you start to discover you have, you have the treasure, the kingdom of heaven is within you really again, you can relax more and more into that trust. But a younger version of myself might have railed against that a little bit. I don't know that a younger version of myself could have accepted that advice at all. But I do know that that's where the that's where the treasure trove is, is saying, Oh, just like I'm trusting in that four source energy to beat my heart, just as I'm trusting in it, to send the electrical impulses down to my legs, to have me take one step and then another. I'm going to consciously and actively direct the trust process around everything else and see what happens. You also mentioned this other piece that I think is also extremely good advice, which is the gratitude piece. Sir John Templeton, who was arguably the greatest investor of all time, when he was asked the secret of wealth, he said he responded in one word, and it was gratitude, and it's really acknowledging like, Whoa, there's a butterfly that just flew outside my window. Whoa, I get to talk to you today. This is absolutely marvelous. Whoa, I can take a walk, or I can lay down, or I can talk to friends, or I can go jump on a trampoline, or whatever that is. There's, there are trillions of things when you start seeking and seek and you shall find, right, there are literally, I don't, I don't even know how, how great that that factor is, of just, of just saying thank you. Thank you like thank you that I can listen to this. Thank you that I can invite in some of this information. Thank you that I'm ready for something new. Thank you for that new potential that already exists within me, because I can feel it and I can imagine it. And that's the creative principle that Einstein was talking about. He's like, what did we do? We got what did we do? We got this all wrong. We created a society that revered the rational mind, which is so limited. Let it go. Be grateful for what you can imagine, what you can image in and just say, Wow, thank you. I love that.

Yeah, actually, in my book, hacking the gap, a journey from intuition to innovation beyond I use that Einstein quote. I can't quite remember it exactly, but you paraphrased it relatively close, but I want our listeners to give yourself permission. Be confident, be happy. Be you. It's Cortney MC Dermott. She is the author of this book, also the author of another book called change. Starts within you. You can look her up at her website. We will give you coordinates all of you to that. Here is the book court. It's been an honor having you on this podcast, taking this little bit of time to speak about the many experiences that you've had that hopefully can impart the wisdom to other people to say, if you take one thing from this, and if it was just the last thing she said around trust, just trust in yourself. That's the biggest permission, I think, that you could give yourself is trust yourself, right? Don't go toward doubt, don't go toward fear, don't go toward uncertainty. And certainly don't let the outside world tell you whether or not you can play or not, play when you want to play, be who you want to be. I know at times it, it's like, well, they're judging me, you know, well, don't worry about who's judging you. The reality is, have fun with it. So any last words you'd like to give Jess,

thank you so much. And also letting everyone know to check out your book, hacking the gap, which I read, and I thought was absolutely phenomenal. I read it on a plane ride and on a recent trip, and it was really, really great. So thank you for having me on. Thank you so much to everyone who listened. It really says a lot about you and what you're ready for, and I'm excited to connect wherever that takes place.

Namaste to you. Cortney, thank you. Have a good rest of your afternoon and blessings to you. You too.