Oliver Mann (Shadow Journaling) Why Self-Awareness Isn't Enough to Heal

SPEAKER_01 0:00

In the author's spotlight, where the stories collide. Twenty authors waiting. Let curiosity guide. All genres invited. From horror district. Unravel the tales at our podcast heartbeat.

SPEAKER_03 0:25

Welcome to the Author Spotlight series. This is where we step behind the pages to meet people who create the stories that we love. We'll talk about their latest book, their writing journey, the story behind the story, and probably a few things that neither of us plan to talk about. Because around here, conversations have a way of taking us somewhere unexpected. Today we're putting Oliver Mann in the spotlight. Oliver, welcome to Travel Time Stories. We're so glad to have you here.

SPEAKER_04 0:58

Thank you very much for inviting. Absolute pleasure.

SPEAKER_03 1:02

So before we dive into your book, I'd love for you to introduce yourself to our audience and tell us a little bit about who you are.

SPEAKER_04 1:10

This is the worst podcast question I always get. Having to just describe who you are in a short sentence when you It's so hard, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. It always becomes in these questions, we always end up defining ourselves on a very superficial level. So like I'm an author, I wrote a book on shadow journaling, I'm a co-founder of a journaling festival in Barcelona. Next year we're gonna do that in New York as well, and also in South Africa. And these are the kind of external things that kind of describe who I am. But I guess the deeper answer to that is that I see myself as an explorer of my own experience of being a human. And that journey of self-exploration is something that I want to bring to as many people as possible. And I think one of the things that gets me very excited about it is this idea that what I want to bring to people is not a route, but a toolkit in order for people to find their own route. And I find having read hundreds of self-help books in the last 30 years, I find that so much of the work that's out there is very much based on a single person's starting point and end point and their journey between them. And then we've got this strange hope that perhaps if I read somebody else's map, I will help it will help me find my own way.

SPEAKER_03 2:32

Right.

SPEAKER_04 2:33

And in the end, it doesn't. There's obviously inspiration, it's beautiful, but I feel like what I want to do is give people a way of thinking that will help them create their own map and their own exploration. So that's the long answer to a simple question.

SPEAKER_03 2:49

I love that answer, actually. Well, we're excited to get to know you and to talk about shadow journaling. You created this book after becoming frustrated with journaling advice that gave you plenty of opportunities for self-reflection, but never quite the depth you were looking for. And you described shadow journaling as being about listening to the unheard you. And I really love that phrase, Oliver. So let's start there. Who is the unheard you and why are so many of us not listening?

SPEAKER_04 3:22

I love your I love your way of framing small questions, but being very, very big at the same time. Yes. Let's just talk about the meaning of life. It was it was an all-inclusive question. Yeah, exactly. I think I think for me, this is kind of reflecting a little bit back on the books that I mentioned, like having read all these personal development and self-help books, that I found I got caught up in self-awareness, and I felt that self-awareness was the goal, and journaling was a tool, and all writing was a tool to develop more and more awareness. And then I think there was a point where I realized I'm extremely self-aware, like extremely like the most self-aware person in the room. But I didn't change. And I felt there was this gap. And then I was thinking, this can't, this can't be it. And I'm a naturally curious person. So I was like, well, if this is what I've been sold as like the goal, how come I don't feel like this is the goal? How come I still feel like I'm quite a distance away from being the person that I would like to be? Especially having done so much work. You kind of go like, I've been digging and digging and digging, and I'm still in the same place, right? It's just so there was this moment when somebody explained to me this idea of Carl Jung talks about psychological alchemy and these different stages of our process of meeting the self and investigating it, and then and then processes around integration, that I realized I'd just been caught up in the first two stages and I'd missed that third step of actually taking what I had been processing and just doing something about it. Connecting that with the work from Nathaniel Brandon is a huge influence on my work. This realization that self-acceptance is what's missing. And when you start tapping into self-acceptance, there's a shift that happens. And it's incredibly profound because self-acceptance gives you an opportunity to change something. Whereas awareness is just knowing that it's there. And a lot of the time, awareness can become a new identity, it can become a series of excuses where you go, well, you know, I behave like that because I'm like this. And then you have the awareness, and then you're going, Well, this is why I am the way I am, and this is what you have to deal with. Instead of going to this process where we say, But this is a bad part of me, or part of me that's not helpful. I don't like using good or bad, even though I do throw them out there. But um, when we realize there are parts of ourselves that are not helpful, and then having to bring them into the fold, and that in many ways is that unheard you, because it's a part of you that's that's there, and it kind of grabs the attention every now and again in uncontrolled negative ways at times. But once we can realize that these parts of ourselves that we're not proud of, that we're not happy with, they do exist. Then we have an opportunity to change them because we cannot change something that we reject.

unknown 6:27

True.

SPEAKER_04 6:27

And rejecting something that's inside us is an incredible drain on energy. We spend so much time pretending that this part isn't there, and we end up exhausted because we're walking around in this inner turmoil, this sense of inner conflict. And that inner conflict is because there's a part of us that's there, and we're trying to pretend that it's not. And that part that we're pretending not to be there is just gonna go like, Hey, hi, I'm here. And then we have to say, no, you're not. Be quiet, be quiet. And the process of self-acceptance is very important to realize that it's not about liking it. You don't have to like something to accept it. And we do this in other things, right? When we're dealing with the world as it is, we accept that things are around us, we don't like them, but we just accept that this is reality. We don't walk around pretending that this stuff that's happening that we don't like isn't there, right? We just accept that it's there, and that's a part where we can start going, okay, well, now how do I work my way around it? But with ourselves, we have a tendency to just keep pushing, keep pushing, keep pushing, and hope that it will never show up. And inevitably it does. But the process for me is this shift where we have, we go from this contradiction of going, like, I don't like this part of my, but it's still here. There are lots of different contradictions we have, but when we can realize that it's there and we can accept, okay, I don't like you, I don't like this part of myself, but it's there. What happens is we turn it into a paradox. And paradoxes are this and that. It's the realization that they both exist, and that gives us a tremendous sense of relief because at that point we can stop fighting it, and at that point we can start changing it.

SPEAKER_03 8:20

Right. I don't think I ever accepted myself until I read your book. And I was like, I've never done that. I mean I've never thought about it. Of course. But it's 100% correct. Once you accept yourself, you can start dealing with the things that you don't like about you.

SPEAKER_04 8:40

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think like you're like you're doing the what everybody else is doing and what I was doing most of my life. Right. This shift for me is something that I can say has happened maybe in the last five years, like on a conscious level. There was a major shift for me about 10, 11 years ago when I was doing a fiction writing course called Shadow Writing, and it opened me up to that exploration of the things that I don't like, things like my dislike of violence. And then I had an opportunity to write out all these violent fantasies that I had through a different character. And it made me experience this relief of suddenly going, well, actually, it's outside of me now, and I can see that this isn't me, but it's in me.

SPEAKER_03 9:31

Right. But I've let it go, I've let it out, it's there now.

SPEAKER_04 9:34

Yeah. And I think this is where like this process of self-acceptance is being able to look at parts of ourselves and instead of saying, I am this, you say, This is a part of me. And that shift is very important because we have a capacity to then go, like instead of going, like, I'm short-tempered, I'm short-tempered because XYZ happened, and this is how I defend myself. But then when you have a possibility to say, okay, so I'm short-tempered because that gives me an opportunity to create a boundary because I can push people away when it's too intense. So it's something that I benefit from. Whereas before I'd go, I'd explode at somebody, and then I'd say, I'm just short-tempered, I'm sorry. Right. But now I go, okay, I'm short-tempered because I just got overwhelmed. There's a process in here, I can accept that there's something going on here and it benefits me. And then instead of going, I am short-tempered, and go, sometimes I have moments of being short-tempered because it helps me in a certain situation. And what happens when you have that realization is that it opens up the door to genuinely communicate honestly about it and say, I'm so sorry, this happened because I got overwhelmed, there was too much happening, and I really am sorry about that. This is not who I am, but this is sometimes what happens. And instead of making an excuse of an opportunity to, instead of defending myself, which is what a lot of us do, when something happens, we have an identity around it, and when we that kind of that part of ourselves we're not proud of shows up, and then we try to defend it and say, like, no, no, no, this is because of this and that, and this is because of my excuse, whatever. But when you have a realization of the starting point of acceptance, allows you to acknowledge it through an apology. Whereas before, an apology would mean that I accept that it's there, which I don't, but now that I've accepted it, I can actually face you and say, Do you know what? I'm genuinely sorry that this part of myself showed up and I'm aware of it, and it opens up for a depth of communication which is transformative. But the the secondary effects of this is that when I realize that there are parts of myself that before were unknown and now are known, and I accept them, it makes it possible for me to understand that there are potentially other blind spots. So when I get into a situation now, I realize, you know what? There's a chance I'm the one who's wrong here. There's a chance that this is my habits, my triggers, my projections that are coming in and flavoring my response. So I'm gonna go in with grace and say, Do you know what? There's a chance here that I'm wrong. And it doesn't mean that I am wrong. I'm willing to explore this because I've explored myself before and I found myself wanting, and I worked on that. And I think this is where it starts becoming beautiful, that we don't necessarily have to fix everything, but it creates an awareness and a humility around how we show up. And I think this is what we are sorely lacking as a human race at the moment, because this goes to the heart of polarization. Because polarization is I am right, you are wrong, and there's a complete lack of humility, complete lack of empathy. Showing up with humility and grace is saying, I firmly believe this, but I understand my previous firm beliefs were sometimes not quite right. So I'm willing to open up this discussion and say, Do you know what? Maybe I'm right, maybe I'm wrong, but at least let's explore this together.

SPEAKER_03 13:32

That actually makes a lot of sense. And I feel like when you're more self-aware, you tend to not have those outbursts as often because you know that that is your tendency, but you also know that how to control if if something triggers you, you know that's your tendency, and so you're able to control that better. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_04 13:55

Yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_03 13:56

You know. Your book, something we constantly hear in the the personal growth world. More self-awareness won't get you unstuck. And that's interesting because we're usually told the opposite. Understand yourself better and you'll change. So I really want to know how can someone be incredibly self-aware and still remain completely stuck?

SPEAKER_04 14:19

I mean, I'll use myself as an example. I was searching and searching and searching for the answers. The the concept around getting more and more self-awareness has an underlying, unspoken premise that life is like a puzzle. And if I find all of the pieces and put them in the right place, I will have solved myself and I will be the Buddha or whatever it is that we have this drive for, right?

SPEAKER_03 14:47

Right.

SPEAKER_04 14:48

But the thing is, we keep looking for puzzles, these pieces for the puzzle, and then we start identifying ourselves with a person who is building a puzzle or creating putting a puzzle together, instead of actually saying, Well, what do I do with all these pieces? How do I actually change myself? And I think this search for more information is fundamentally flawed on a couple of aspects that are just neurological. Like, number one, we as humans are meaning makers. We create meaning from things that we find out about our past and about our present and everything like that. We go like, okay, so my grandmother said this, she said, I'll never be worth anything, and I'll remember that, and that's my meaning, that this is why I've got poor self-esteem. Right? The problem is that adding into another kind of aspect of human nature is confirmation bias. So if I accept that part as true, my grandmother said this, this is why I have low self-esteem, I will keep finding more proof that this is correct. However, my grandmother said a million things to me, including, I love you, you're the most amazing boy ever, right? Right. But I've ignored that because I've got confirmation bias. So now I've got poor self-esteem. I'm gonna find all the proof. My grandmother said this, my teacher said that, whoever else said all these things, and that makes sense. So this is self-awareness. And the problem is we create self-awareness in ways that match another sense of who we think we are, right? And they're not all true because we have like there's a multitude of cells. There's a part of me that's incredibly disappointed with the way my grandfather told me off for doing something. But there's also a part of that experience where um my grandfather taught me amazing things that are still with me and a joy for certain aspects of you know working with wood, right? But those identities haven't kind of taken the same place because I've got confirmation bias that, or I've got poor self-esteem, right? That is one part of who I am. But then there's we forget that in some situations, if we self-identify as you know, poor self-esteem, poor confidence, there are other moments where we show up with exuberance, with passion, with this raw sense of like, I love this and I know this, but because of our confirmation bias of identity, and we keep searching for these parts. And then once I get all these pieces of the puzzle together, I'll be fixed. Right? Whereas for me, the acceptance part is when you go, do you know what? We're all fundamentally flawed in the sense that there is no perfection, but it allows me room to start looking at it and go, okay, now I understand things and I can change things.

SPEAKER_03 17:48

Does that make absolute sense? So let's talk about the word shadow. Because someone hearing shadow work for the first time might assume we're only talking about the darkest or the worst parts of ourselves. But that's not really what you mean. No, not at all.

SPEAKER_04 18:08

It's the Carl Jung quote about the shadow being 90% gold. And you can see that in a couple of ways. One is that once you start approaching your shadow self and you look at these parts, like maybe it's maybe I'm arrogant, maybe I'm a jealous person, maybe all these things, and you start that process of acceptance and you can realize, God, I'm not that, but these are all part of me, which is to me gold on in and of its own, right? Like this capacity to escape from self-kind of deprecating identities that we often do. But the idea for me is that the shadow is what we create when we basically are looking for acceptance. So every moment when we crave somebody else's acceptance, if it's a person or a group or a community, a school, a work situation, what happens is that we we cut parts of ourselves off that don't fit that shape that we have to kind of squeeze through in order to be accepted. And all those pieces that we chuck off and cut off, we basically reject them. We put them in what is our shadow. And that is an ever-developing thing. And I don't think it necessarily ever stops. But I think probably as a child and a teenager, it's as a much more intense experience because the the need for acceptance as a teenager is much, much greater than when you're 40 or 50 or 60. But I think the process still happens, right? People going to a new job will start shaving off parts of themselves in order to make sure that they they fit in. And what's interesting around this is that it depends so much on the family that you're in, right? Like if you are in a family that's conservative and not interested in the arts and it's all about the sciences, and you're a uh a young boy or young girl who's extremely interested in the arts, then that's something that has to be cut off in order to fit into that world. And if you take that into that kind of account and you see how many of these beautiful, joyous, free parts of ourselves that we've had to get rid of in order to become an adult or whatever it might be, there's there's an amazing, there's an amazing room here for tapping into parts of ourselves that we we feel is there, and then going, you know what? Actually, that is a part of me. There is a part of me that just had pure joy with painting or dancing or singing, and I let that go because it was the right thing to do. Self-like the striving for acceptance is the glue of society. So it's a natural process. It's normal that we do it, and it's good that we do it because if we're all walking around like these sharp figures walking around, we don't connect with each other because no, no, no, this is the way I am. There's there's this kind of creates a smooth running of society, but at the same time, having an awareness around what is it that I'm giving up, and then being able to bring it out again. I think this is this is why shadow work is a particularly poignant topic for people who reach their 40s. Because at that point, we've got to a moment where we're like, okay, I've been keeping so many different parts of myself away for so long, and then they come up, and then we're like, okay, hang on. This is there's something going on here. There's a part of myself that's been rejected, and and I miss my creative self. And that gives us that room to bring it out.

SPEAKER_03 21:42

You know, you never think about this that you that we actually hide bits of ourselves to to fit in, but we do, very much so. So this book isn't just asking readers to discover their hidden pieces of themselves. You give A repeatable three-stage process that is fascinating is reveal, reclaim, rewrite. Walk me through those, Oliver.

SPEAKER_04 22:11

So the essence of it for me is that self-awareness is the first step, regardless. And that is the reveal stage when we have to find out what is it that we've got to deal with. And the number one way to do that is through curiosity. Curiosity is essentially about saying, I don't believe everything I'm telling myself. There's more to what's going on. The example I keep using on this is if you're writing in your journal in the morning, like I'm really tired, that first step is going, well, why am I tired? Am I tired because I went to bed at three o'clock in the morning and just didn't sleep enough? Okay. Or am I tired because I'm emotionally drained? Right? And why am I emotionally drained? Am I emotionally drained because I'm in a job that I hate? Am I in a relationship that's not working? Is it because I'm living in a house that I don't feel comfortable anymore? But this process is about revealing what's beyond that going tired. And the next stage is the reclaim part, which requires honesty. And this is something that feels obvious, but it's also extremely hard because being honest in this situation is going, okay, I'm tired because I'm in a job that I don't like. Being honest is going, I'm in this job that I don't like, and I'm choosing every day to turn up. I'm choosing not to quit. I put myself in this job because I applied for it and I said, yes, I took the offer. I'm the one who got myself here. I need to own that process. And then the rewrite stage is about kindness because the kindness comes in. We go like, well, I'm here because of the choices that I made then, with the information that I had then. And now that I've realized all these other parts of myself, I have an opportunity to change how that looks. And then we can start going, okay, well, what does my life look like now that I've had this experience? And the way that this works for me is essentially that life is friction. Every time we brush up against life, there are parts that affect us. There's this amazing quote by, I think it's Ken Wilbur, who says, Anything can either inform you or affect you. And we have this experience in life where, you know, somebody says, you know, they they explain something that's been going on and it's just information. But somebody else might say something and it affects us, and we have an emotional reaction. And that's when for me, that process can start kicking in, that curiosity. What is it about this? Why, why am I getting affected by somebody saying, I don't like your black shirt? What's going on here? You know? And then I can start looking at it. Okay, so I'm judging myself. I wasn't sure about this black shirt or whatever it is, right? Then you're kind of into that process. And with this, you've got just unlimited journaling materials until you reach Buddhist.

SPEAKER_03 25:16

Oh, there you go. I don't think I'll make it to that.

SPEAKER_04 25:19

No, I I always say, like, if somebody's getting close, can they please teach me?

SPEAKER_03 25:23

Right. So, Oliver, I want to come back to you now because shadow journaling started with your own frustration. You went looking for something deeper, and you began studying the work of people, including Carl Jung, Robert Johnson, Debbie Ford, Nathaniel Brandon, Kay Adams, and Gloria Kempton. Eventually you found a thread that helped you and later helped your students. At what point did your personal search become something you realized you could teach to somebody else? That's a good question. Hmm.

SPEAKER_04 25:58

Not sure.

SPEAKER_03 25:59

You know, I I I felt your search through the whole journal.

SPEAKER_00 26:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 26:03

And I just wondered at what point did he realize, oh my gosh, I could actually teach other people, I could help.

SPEAKER_04 26:12

Yeah, yeah. I'm wondering if this is actually a part of the journaling festival that we were doing, because I ended up doing running some workshops in the run-up to that. And it was perhaps the first time I'd run journaling specific workshops. I've been teaching in in different kinds of things throughout my life, but but at that point, I had an opportunity to test out something because I'd been playing around with my own process, obviously. And I when I found that kind of that reveal, reclaim, and rewrite aspect for myself, it became something that I wanted to, I mean, like I just needed guinea pigs, right? To see if it wasn't just right. You know. And one thing that came up a lot in these sessions was people who are experienced in journaling would come up to me afterwards and say, I didn't know journaling could be this. A lot of people just stuck on morning pages and feeling like, okay, they're just doing what I call tick-box journaling. They go into their journal every day and they've done the journaling, and then not feeling like there's anything happening. And then also seeing people who just suddenly had real transitions in their lives, like these transformations where they suddenly could see themselves in a different light. And that's what led me to that kind of exploration. I go, okay, then I started thinking, what other topics can we use here? What other ways can we find in? So for myself, obviously, I'm using my own friction with life as a guidepost, right? Like, how do I, where am I rubbing against the world in a way that doesn't feel comfortable? What can I look at in that? But I also realized that I'm above average curious and I've been doing this for a long time. So it's unfair of me to just say, well, just look at the friction in your life and just keep going from there. So I realized that okay, for for a lot of people, it would be helpful to give them more guidelines than that, which is why I ended up doing these workshops around looking at resistance and looking specifically at the gold in the shadow, like the good things that we have inside and and the inner critic, all these kind of classic things that we will have. And I started teaching that. And and through some very, very profound journaling techniques, people were having breakthroughs, basically. I mean, had one guy in my community who went back to his therapist with some of the work he'd been doing with us, and the therapist was was shocked because he's because he's just suddenly having a completely different view of himself. So even after a long period of therapy, he still hadn't managed to have that sense of personal breakthrough. Right. And I I my personal theory around it is that it's hard for us to communicate to others what we cannot communicate to ourselves. And being able to have that journal as a way to reflect and to realize aspects of ourselves, we have an opportunity to then say, okay, I can see this as here. I can now talk about it. But in a lot of therapy, there's people feel perhaps when things are new, it's hard to say what it is, right? So I think this is why it has the capacity to be a great tool in conjunction with all this.

SPEAKER_03 29:31

So your method is adapted from Jung's idea of psychological alchemy, but you've also turned that into something practical that readers can actually use in a journal, which I loved. Was making these ideas accessible one of your biggest goals with the book?

SPEAKER_04 29:49

The main goal with the book was that people should be able to use it. So, yes, being practical was absolutely vital. Like it was, and it was probably one of the most complicated parts to get my head around. Because when we do any kind of work on ourselves, in whichever way or modality or whatever you want to call it, what happens is we take a concept and we make it linear when as a lived experience it's not. We don't live and going, right, I'm in my identity of this subpersonality, and now this is happening. There are flashes, right? You might get triggered and suddenly you're projecting, and then something else is happening. And these things happen very, very quickly, and you can jump in and out of these identities, right? You might have a beautiful conversation with a partner and everything's fine, and in one second, that shifts and you become defensive, and then there's a different part of you that turns up, and then you're behaving like a petulant child. But when we're working on it in a journal, you can't separate, well, we can't do that process as it happens because it's everybody does it differently. So the issue with the book was going, this is a kind of a big universal concept that I'm seeing. How do I take that and unravel it in a way that is somehow fit for consumption without being in my head? Right? So I was trying to translate how I see the mind and the world and figuring out how I can make this on the one hand readable, as in it doesn't jump too much, and on the other hand, deeply practical, because there are scholars who write much better than me on the theory of the shadow and how all these come up in in adolescence and childhood and all these kind of psychological deep impact things, that I'm not I'm not going to be able to write a book that's that, and I don't want to, because that's the theory. And this goes back to one of the things we were talking about earlier that because I have this firm belief that we, as meaning makers, and as um like without cognitive dissonance and confirmation biases and all these kinds of things, looking for the truth isn't going to work. So in my work, it's not about going, well, I had trauma, so now I'm gonna find out all the reasons why and what happened and everything. Because I know in my own experience that the way I saw my own childhood trauma as a teenager versus being in my 20s and my 30s and my 40s, they're all different. Very. But there's an objective experience that this thing happened, but my interpretation of this event has changed. So if I'm now in my 40s thinking that I'm suddenly miraculously going to be able to look back at that and find the truth, and I will suddenly be sold, is not gonna work. So instead, it's about, and that goes back to the rewrite part. How can I reinterpret what I've learned about myself? How can I find what's helpful and then move forwards with it? Which is why this isn't a book about the theory. It's about how can you take this and actually do something about it?

SPEAKER_03 33:34

I don't want to read the theory books. They're huge, they're hard to read. But this book gave me exactly what I wanted to pull out of the other books. It gave me the tools. And you've included workshops throughout the book rather than just simply explaining the concept. What did you want someone to be able to do after reading this book that they couldn't do before?

SPEAKER_04 33:59

I think the core comes back down to those three steps in the sense, but in the actionable part. So being curious, being honest, and being kind. I think that's that's really it. Because curiosity is a skill. Honesty is a skill, and kindness is a skill. It just needs to be practiced. And I think I guess I guess on a deeper level, I would really want people to be more comfortable with being uncomfortable. Because it's we haven't touched on that so much in the specifics, but the reason why people don't go into self-acceptance and they stay in self-awareness is partly because the next step is just really, really uncomfortable. There's very little comfort in going. Sometimes I behave like an arrogant asshole, and I have to live with that. It's not comfortable to say I'm unhappy because I'm in a job that I hate and I put myself here. That honesty and that willingness to go to that point, it's horrible, but it's also the only way through it, you know. And I get it. So if there's one thing that I would want people to be able to do is to sit with that discomfort, and I struggle with it myself, right? This is an ongoing journey. I'm going through processes where now I'm realizing that, you know, there's a huge part of me that's holding myself back because I'm terrified of disappointing people. Okay. What does that mean? Like, why what how can I look at my own fear of disappointing people? Because I'm worried that if I disappoint someone, they're going to abandon me and it's because of my childhood experiences and all these things. But what can I do that's helpful now? And how can I see that, okay, the only way through this is by closing the notebook and actually taking different action, you know? Like I have to show up differently, and that's uncomfortable. It's unknown. Yeah, but we do it. I mean, this is the the goal, yeah. I mean, like it's uh it's an ongoing practice.

SPEAKER_02 36:12

Yeah, very much so. Forever, I think.

SPEAKER_04 36:17

Yeah, yeah, I think and I think there's there's this uh beautiful um metaphor around this, which I like I can't remember. A friend of mine told me, but I don't know where she got it. Life is like being on a pendulum, and the more you become aware and more you accept yourself, the further you go up the pendulum. And life still swings one extreme to another, but our experience of it goes much, much smoother the further up we go. So life itself doesn't change. But the wild swings that we have, and being at the bottom is probably being a teenager, right? Like that's what it's the most crazy for sure. Being a teenager is like the most traumatic period of life in general, I think.

SPEAKER_02 36:59

But it's it's the hardest, most awkward part of your life, no doubt. Everything takes on profound and deep and permanent meaning. Absolutely, and it's huge, huge, whatever happens.

SPEAKER_03 37:12

All right, Oliver. I am ready to put you under the spotlight. So I'm gonna ask you two things and tell me which one you would choose. I'm very curious here.

SPEAKER_04 37:22

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 37:22

Pen and paper or digital journal?

SPEAKER_04 37:25

Pen and paper.

SPEAKER_03 37:26

Okay, good. Are you a morning or a midnight thought writer?

SPEAKER_04 37:30

Morning.

SPEAKER_03 37:31

Do you write in silence or music?

SPEAKER_04 37:35

Actually, both, but I do like I got one particular jazz album that I put on when I'm journaling sometimes.

SPEAKER_03 37:41

Good for you. I'm a jazz fan as well. So what's one thing you've learned about yourself through journaling that genuinely surprised you?

SPEAKER_04 37:50

I think perhaps my capacity of self-delusion. That's a good one. Like this this realization that I can walk so confidently around thinking I know what I mean, think about something, and then go, oh my God, this is just not true, is it? It's quite is it I tell you what, that's a very humbling experience.

SPEAKER_03 38:09

Yes, it is actually a very humbling experience. So, final question. If your life were a book, what would the title be?

SPEAKER_04 38:20

Impossible. I don't know. Maybe something like Curiosity didn't kill the.

SPEAKER_03 38:25

Oh, there you go. That's a good one for you. I love that. So, Oliver, you've created shadow journaling to give people a toolkit they can continue carrying with them long after they finish the book. So now I'm curious, what's next for you?

SPEAKER_04 38:42

So I recently added a book to that roster, which is like a workbook, which is very practical as well.

SPEAKER_03 38:50

I'm ready.

SPEAKER_04 38:52

And I've got another practical impact book around this as well, like more kind of workshop ideas. So I want to I want to give people more ways to take elements from the book and actually use them. But on a kind of slightly bigger scale, I do want to write another book, like a more proper but work, where I just really want to go deep into the idea of self-acceptance. I think it's I think it's like the I think it that's the life changer. So it's like out of all those three elements from the first book, I would like to go like more deeply into the into the self-acceptance part. And I think you should do that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 39:34

Because this book requires that. Yeah. You need to, yeah. So get started on that today.

SPEAKER_02 39:44

Because I'm ready to read that one too. I'll let you know. I'll put you on my early reader list.

SPEAKER_03 39:51

Awesome. Where can everyone find Shadow Journaling and follow your work, Oliver?

SPEAKER_04 39:57

Shadowjournaling.com. Very easy. And if they go to slash book, I mean I'm sure you put links around here somewhere, but um, there's also um you can get a free chapter of the book as well, so you can get like a taste of this book. Awesome. Yeah. Try before you buy.

SPEAKER_03 40:13

Try before I buy. I always like those. Because then I can kind of read and get interested, and then I'm like, click, I gotta have this. Oliver, thank you so much for joining me and letting me go behind the pages of shadow journaling with you. I think there's something really interesting in the idea that sometimes moving forward isn't about discovering one more thing that's wrong with us and needs to be fixed. You know, maybe it's finally listening to the parts of ourselves we've spent years trying not to hear. And to everyone watching or listening, you can find Shadow Journaling and all of Oliver's information in the episode description and on our website at wwtraveltimestories.com. And remember, every book has a story, but so does the person that wrote it.

SPEAKER_00 41:03

So join us each week in the splendor, in the offer spotlight, we capture the heart with every story shared. A new world takes flight. As we gather tonight.