For a long time I was committed to a rational materialist worldview and dismissed anything that sounded too woo out of hand. Then I kept running into things that did feel kind of woo, but they worked and changed my life in meaningful ways. Trish Blain’s article “Life is Woo” deals with exactly that tension, so I invited her on to talk about how striving for material success and wanting spiritual growth might not be in conflict at all.
My guest is Trish Blain. She wrote “Life is Woo”, created the four forces framework and has been a social mission entrepreneur for many years. You can find her work at Alive Edges.
In this episode
- Why so many people add a disclaimer before mentioning spiritual experiences, and how religious and new age language makes them hard to talk about.
- The trouble with “ascension” spirituality that treats emotions, sexuality and being human as things to rise above, and how it fed my own sexual shame.
- Holding individuality and oneness at the same time, instead of aiming for the bliss of no self on a park bench.
- Trish’s four forces, connection, expression, purpose and growth: core desires that also turn out to be skills and states of consciousness.
- Connection as a skill of attention: what you pay attention to shapes what you experience, including why people “fall out of love”.
- Why a solid sense of self makes letting go less scary, and how people pleasing and putting up walls are both strategies.
- How “authenticity” can turn into emotional dumping, and why Trish finds the idea of a faceted self more useful.
- Gratitude without spiritual bypassing: conscious ranting, flipping what you don’t want into what you do, and treating the desire gap as a prompt.