Jake Eagle
[00:00:00] Jake: What's happening when you access the emotion of awe is that you're entering a state that's more akin to playfulness than pure relaxation. And the reason that's important is because that playful quality makes us pro-social. We're more available to connect with other people. Other people are more interested in connecting with us.
[00:00:22] Aneta: We often hear people wishing us a long, happy, and healthy life, but what if the length isn't what matters most? What if instead, it's the breadth depth, and purpose of each day that matters most? Welcome to the Live the Width of Your Life podcast. My name is Aneta Ardelian Kuzma and join me weekly as I interview guests who made changes in their own lives to live more fully with intention. Gratitude and joy. Be prepared to be inspired by their stories of how they shifted their mindset, took courageous action, and designed the life that they always wanted to live.
Welcome back to The Live The Width of Your Life podcast. My guest this week is Jake Eagle and Jake is one of the authors of the book, the power of AWE. Overcome burnout and anxiety, ease chronic pain, find clarity and purpose, and less than one minute per day. He is a psychotherapist, a mindfulness instructor, and a fellow member trainer, of the International Association of Neuro Linguistic Programming.
And the co-founder of Live Consciousness. After 30 years in private practice, Jake now works part-time as a met a therapist. And he works with people who want to go beyond the bounds of traditional therapy. And together, he and his wife, Hannah, lead life-changing small group retreats at Awe-inspiring locations around the world.
We spent a lot of time talking about how he stumbled across this process called Awe and how it is the future of mindfulness. It was really interesting to talk about the science, what's happening in the body. When we practice Awe, how it works, and then some of his favorite ways to practice it.
He led us through a small Awe moment, a couple of seconds, which was fantastic. And he also shared some of the current and future research that he's excited about. I think that you're going to enjoy this conversation and hopefully, you start to practice the power of awe yourself. Take a listen.
Jake, thank you so much for joining me. I'm so excited to have you here with me today.
[00:02:28] Jake: Yeah, I've been looking forward to this for a while, so it's nice to be here.
[00:02:32] Aneta: I was just sharing with you before we joined today that I read this book this weekend. I was so excited. I finished it probably within a couple of days and I loved it I have so much of it earmarked and I do want to start today's conversation with something that I found in the book.
It was actually in the preface and maybe it's a good place for us to start. You said as lifelong meditators and mindfulness teachers, we confess we were almost embarrassed when we stumbled onto a five to fifteen-second shortcut to transcendence, which I thought was like, wow, mic drop, fantastic, you've got me engaged, tell me more.
So tell me, what is it that you discovered? How did you do it? And why did you write this book?
[00:03:20] Jake: Yeah. So that sentence that you read sort of addressed our embarrassment about the fact that the publishers promoted this book as, one minute a day that can change your life. Historically, I've been very skeptical of things like the claims that people make about things like that.
But my co-author, whose name is Dr. Michael Amster, he's a pain specialist in Santa Cruz, California. He and I didn't intend to write this book. It wasn't something we planned to do. The way it evolved is that I had moved from Santa Fe, New Mexico, to Hawaii. Kind of planning to come here and semi-retire.
I gave up having been in private practice for 30 years as a psychotherapist. And when I got to Hawaii, although my life looked great, I was struggling quite a bit because I had given up my identity. I'd given up all sorts of external validation. And so I was struggling with that. And I ended up developing this idea of asking a question every day, which is am I thrilled to be alive?
Because if you had looked at my life objectively, you would say, this guy should be thrilled to be alive, but I wasn't. And so I asked that question every day and I found it to be extremely profound because when I asked the question, I would see all the reasons why I should be thrilled to be alive. I found it to be so profound that I ended up teaching an online course and my coauthor, Michael joined the course.
He and I've known each other for about 15 years. As part of that course, I asked the participants to meditate 10 minutes a day, and more than half of them said, I can't do that. I don't have 10 minutes a day. So I said, well if you can't do that, how about meditating for a minute a day, just a minute where you take the time to stop, pause, and reflect on hopefully the beauty that you can find surrounding you.
So people said, yeah, okay, we can do that. And whenever I teach courses, I usually do a pre-survey and a post-survey to try and understand where people are at psychologically and their physical well-being. And at the end of this course, when I looked at the results, I realized that people who were doing these were what we called micro-dosing.
On mindfulness just one minute a day. They were getting results that were equal or better to people who were meditating 10 minutes a day, which I found very surprising. And so did Michael, we were both lifelong meditators. We didn't understand why this was so effective. So we each decided to run a pilot project and I did one with people in my private practice and Michael did one with people who were suffering from chronic pain.
We designed a 21-day program. We both ran it. We did a fairly rigorous analysis and we saw the same thing that people who were meditating for very brief amounts of time were getting great results. And we refined it at that point. We refined the practice and we created what is now known as the awe method.
And the on method takes anywhere from, we'll say 10 to 30 seconds. And we asked people to do it three times a day. The results were so good that Michael took them to Dacker Keltner. Dacker is the researcher at UC Berkeley who did most of the original research on the emotion of Awe back in the early 2000s, he also has the Greater Good Science Center and he was so impressed.
He looked at it and he said, I think you guys have created what I would call the future of mindfulness because you've come up with a way for people to be mindful while living busy, hectic, overwhelming lives. So we agreed we would do a large-scale study at Berkeley. And just about that time when we were designing it, the pandemic hit.
And so Michael and I used this as an opportunity to try to do something that would help people, particularly frontline healthcare workers who were under enormous pressure and dealing with burnout and depression. It was a challenging time. Most people remember, but on the front lines, it was even worse than it was for most of us.
So we had approximately 200 frontline healthcare workers and about 300 patients and family members. So it was a large cohort. We did the study over 21 days and the results were remarkable. A decrease in depression, decrease in loneliness, decrease in burnout, decreases in physical symptoms of pain and discomfort, while also seeing increases in well-being and mindfulness.
And because the results were so good we had Publishers coming to us asking us to write a book, which is pretty unusual. And that's how this happened. Then Michael and I took the year 2022. We wrote the book, which came out at the beginning of 2023. It's been out for a year now.
It's being translated into Chinese, Russian, Arabic, German, and something else that I don't remember right now, but it seems to be getting traction. People are very attracted to this idea that you can take just a few seconds several times a day to access what I would now call one of the most powerful positive emotions, which is the emotion of awe.
[00:08:39] Aneta: I love so much of what you shared, and I do want to just go back a little bit. And so, first of all, what does AWE stand for?
[00:08:47] Jake: When you say what AWE stands for the A W E, we've turned it into an acronym. So AWE is the description of a positive emotion that has had very little attention in the past, and we took it and turned it into an acronym.
So the A stands for attention. The idea is that you place your attention on something you value, appreciate, or find to be amazing. And then the W stands for wait, and we ask people to wait, I can explain later what happens when you're waiting, but essentially what happens is that it quiets your mind.
And then the E in the AWE stands for exhale and expand. So at the end of this very short practice, there's a longer-than-normal exhalation, which activates the vagus nerve, and we can talk about that. And that will create this sense of expansion and amplification of whatever sensations are in your body.
So if you start by focusing on something positive, the sensations in your body are going to be enjoyable. And then at the end, when you have this long exhalation, those sensations will be amplified. And so it's a really rewarding practice in that you feel better after you do it 10, 20, 30 seconds, and you get sort of a boost of energy, of resetting of the nervous system is the way I talk about it.
[00:10:09] Aneta: Yeah, I love that. And there's so much importance tied to nervous system regulation because many people are walking around with dysregulation. So that's what ought is and the feelings and what it stands for when you were doing your studies, were these self-reported when you said that there was a decrease in anxiety and burnout and were these self-reported where people said, I sense that I feel better. Or were there any additional markers that you were looking at?
[00:10:38] Jake: These were self-reported. It was a combination of seven different instruments we used to have people fill them out before the study and then after the study, like the depression index and well-being index, and things of that sort.
In addition to that, every day we ask people to fill out a daily log. That information was submitted and we had several grad students who are working on this, and then they would analyze the daily logs that people submitted, which allowed them to do a much more nuanced analysis of the participant’s experience.
[00:11:14] Aneta: That's wonderful. Do you mind walking us through so we can see what it would be like to go through an awe? process, maybe you can guide me through it. I would just love for people to just really experience it too.
[00:11:28] Jake: Yeah, let's do it. The only, I guess caveat I would say is if somebody's listening and driving, probably a better idea to either pull over or do this at another time. Although I will say you can do this while you're driving.
I do it, but the point is if you haven't done it before, that's not the way to start. The reason you can do it is because you can keep your eyes open if you want. So just in preparation, what I want people to do is to just think of something that. You do deeply value, appreciate, or find amazing.
And that could be something in your surroundings. You could be a memory. It could be a sensation that you've had in the past that is very vivid and you're able to recall it. So find something you deeply appreciate, value, or find to be amazing. And we're going to go through a couple of breath cycles.
So place your attention on that, the source of Awe, and allow yourself to inhale and be filled with that source of Awe, whatever that means to you, take that in, allow yourself to be filled with that. And when you reach what for you is the top of your inhalation, you'll just hold for a couple of seconds where you're waiting.
And I want you to exaggerate the attention that you place on the source of awe. Then allow yourself to have a longer-than-normal exhalation, longer than normal. Don't strain, but just a little bit longer than normal.
And that is one cycle of the Awe method. Now there is something called the awe spectrum. It ranges from people having a mild sense of tenderness or sweetness or comfort or relaxation, which is very typical, all the way to what we refer to as an orgasmic experience where there is a release of energy.
In the spine. For me, it's a rising of energy in my spine that goes out of my head and I feel it go down my arms. It doesn't happen all the time. And if your experience is a mild one, it still is valid and it counts. But the more that you do this, the more you open these energetic channels and can begin to experience this release of energy.
We believe what's happening is that all of us have energy in our nervous system that tends to get constricted throughout the day as we feel pressure and tension and potentially conflict with other people, we constrict ourselves when we do the awe practice and we activate the vagus nerve. We're releasing that energy and we're resetting the nervous system and as we do that, we, become more and more sensitive.
as we do that, we have this sensation of energy flowing. As I say, in my case, it's up my spine, but people can experience this in a variety of ways.
[00:14:30] Aneta: And the vagus nerve, of course, maybe some people aren't as familiar, but talk a little bit about the vagus nerve and the signals that it sends to the brain and what we're able to do actually when we are stimulating the vagus nerve.
[00:14:43] Jake: Well, the vagus nerve, Michael refers to it as sort of the master computer in terms of our nervous system, which I think is a good way to talk about it. And it affects so many things. It's affecting our digestion, it's affecting our voice tonality, it's affecting our breathing, and when we have that longer than normal exhalation, we're putting ourselves into what's known as a ventral vagal state, which is different than what happens when we meditate.
If you think about meditation, when you're done meditating, if you're a meditator, you are fairly inward calm and your parasympathetic nervous system is active. And that means you're in the rest and relax, rest and digest, rest and repair state. Very valuable. When you use the AWE method, what happens is that you are in a parasympathetic state, but it has a little bit of sympathetic activation.
What I mean by that, is that this was explained to us by Dr. Steven Porges, who developed polyvagal theory. And Michael and I are in a group with Dr. Porges. And we asked him to look at what we were doing and to comment on it. He said, what's happening when you access the emotion of awe is that you're entering a state that's more akin to playfulness than pure relaxation.
And the reason that's important is because that playful quality makes us pro-social. We're more available to connect with other people. Other people are more interested in connecting with us. So if you were to draw a map of the human physiology, the nervous system, and you were to put the state after meditation as far to the right.
Let's say it's a grid. It would be far to the right, deeply relaxed. The emotion of awe would be far to the right, but it would be slightly elevated because there's a little bit of arousal that happens when we access the emotion of awe. So it's different than what we experience when we meditate. And I would say it's a compliment to it. It's not a replacement, but it's a compliment.
[00:16:54] Aneta: It's so interesting because with the breath and the hold you are bringing some somatic practices here. So it's bringing in some of the benefits that we would experience maybe with breath work. But how would you say this is different from just purely somatic breath work?
[00:17:11] Jake: Well, I think the biggest difference is how brief this is in other words, this is a 15 or 20-second practice where most breath practices are quite a bit longer than that. And the benefit is derived over time where the awe method is almost instant. I mean, we're changing our nervous system for 10 or 15 seconds, depending on circumstances and how familiar people are with breathwork You can do the awe method with your mouth open on the exhalation or your mouth closed, it'll be a slightly different experience. And we don't go into a lot of detail about that other than to suggest to people that they play around with it, but it is a very subtle difference.
[00:17:53] Aneta: Yeah, I love it. And so you talked a little bit about microdosing mindfulness and in your book, I love the way the book is organized.
You talk first about the science. So what's happening in the body, how it works, the future of mindfulness, wherever you are, and then discovering Awe. So tell me a little bit about where you think this part of the future of mindfulness. How do you see this evolving more people are now able to practice the method of awe, because it is short. As you said, you can do it anywhere and most people will have access to be able to do this rather quickly. So how do you see people starting to adopt this as maybe part of their daily routine?
[00:18:38] Jake: I think there's a couple of pieces to this. One is that
when we ask people to meditate, we often encounter a little bit of resistance because people say, I don't have time.
When we ask people to do something that'll take 15 seconds, I've never had anybody say, I don't have 15 seconds. So there's a willingness to do this that allows us to overcome the barrier that is the result of how busy people are. And so what I imagine, and I know it's true in my life, although I live on the big island of Hawaii and my life is fairly low-key, but what I realize is that I can use this in two ways.
I can use it as a practice that I do every day, every morning I do this. Every night before I go to bed, I do this, but to me of equal interest is that I use it proactively. So let's imagine that I'm going to have a conversation with my wife, Hannah, and I anticipate that it may be a tense conversation because it's a topic we don't agree on.
So before I have the conversation, I will use the on method to shift my level of consciousness. And in my case, Hannah knows about this. So what's great is we both do it. We both will take 30 seconds we'll access. the emotion of awe, and then we'll come together and have the conversation. And we're now having the conversation on a different level of consciousness.
It's a different tone. It's a different quality. And we're both much more receptive to that conversation. Another example, as a therapist, when I work with clients and they come in to see me, they'll typically start with whatever the story is that they're most agitated about. And historically, I would allow people to talk about that.
And I would do my best to listen and be present. I don't do that anymore. I'll interrupt people pretty early on and I'll say, I want to hear this story, but before we do that, I want you to access a state of awe using the awe method. And most of my clients know how to do that.
But if they don't, I say, it's very simple, we'll do it together kind of like before we started the show today, you did that with me. You said, let's take a moment together, and let's ground ourselves. It's a very significant way to set the intention before you engage with people. It's a beautiful thing to do. Well, we can use the awe method to do exactly that.
So I'll do that with a client and then we'll come back to the conversation, the story they want to talk about. And it will sound different, their voice will be different, the pacing at which they tell the story will be different, and their perspective will probably shift a little bit. So these are proactive ways that we can use this as a tool to shift our level of consciousness.
And I believe that that's probably one of the key things we need to do at this time in our evolution when people are feeling so stressed and anxious and at times despairing.
[00:21:42] Aneta: I'm so glad that you brought that up. Do you find that there are circumstances where people have a hard time with the very first step, which is being able to bring themselves to focus on something if they find themselves so agitated or so anxious, so depressed, is there a way to help people who are already in a very emotionally dysregulated state to use Awe?
[00:22:07] Jake: Trying to put this in perspective because when I work with people, I have so much confidence that people can find something in any situation, find something that's a source of beauty or tenderness or heart opening. I have so much confidence about that I feel like that carries the day. I do not doubt in any situation.
That I can help someone do that. And it may be encouraging them to think about someone that they love or someone who loves them. It may be as simple as me holding their hand or putting my hand on their shoulder. It may be as simple as gazing into their eyes and connecting in a way that feels meaningful.
So I believe that regardless of what's going on, we're surrounded by beauty, but we don't remember it and we get lost. And what happens is our attention drifts in the direction of things that are disturbing, upsetting, scary. And we don't realize that we always can bring us, I'll give you one exemption or a caveat about this when I say we almost always can bring our attention back to something that we value, appreciate, or find to be amazing.
And the one caveat is we probably can't do that when we're in a life-threatening situation. So if we're being chased by a tiger, true fight or flight, we don't have this capacity of choice, but short of that we do. I've worked with some people who are in very dysregulated states and I'm still able to help them come back and find something simply put something of beauty that they can connect.
[00:23:51] Aneta: And so tell me a little bit about what are some of your favorite ways to practice Awe.
[00:23:58] Jake: So I do this every morning when I get up. Again, I'm in Hawaii, so it's easy to do, but I go outside barefoot and I find the direction of the rising sun and I take a moment to connect with the ground and connect with the sun and I have a moment where I just access Awe.
And it's not about a specific thing. It's all about being alive. It's all about how remarkable it is to be human and all that encompasses all the possibilities that are open to each one of us. So I do that every morning.
I do the same thing every night before I go to bed, I go outside. I look at the stars, usually the North Star, which to me represents something that I can count on in a world full of uncertainty. What can we count on? So I use the North Star metaphorically to say there's something predictable, and reliable. I always know where it is, whether I can see it or not. It doesn't move very much.
And then I think about what in my life can I count on. What do I know to be true for me that I can rely on? So place I usually go is my love for my wife. It's just the most reliable thing in the world for me. So I take again 30 seconds maybe a minute. And I bring myself into a state of Awe. And I think it affects the way I sleep. I think it affects my dreams. It alters my physiology before I go to bed.
[00:25:23] Aneta: Those are beautiful practices. So tell us a little bit, Jake, what happens over time? If someone's listening and they say, you know what, I'm going to start doing this tomorrow three times a day and they love it and they get into the practice what is happening inside and what should they expect to feel different and how will they expect to feel differently?
[00:25:44] Jake: So over time, what we are seeing is that this goes from being a state, a temporary state that we flit into and flit out of and it becomes a trait, which means it becomes part of our character. We carry this with us, and when this becomes a trait, we begin to experience what's known as spontaneous moments of Awe.
So instead of initiating it and thinking, I would like to find a source of awe and have a moment of awe, instead of that happening, I'll be driving in the car and I'll see a scene, whatever it is. And I'll experience Awe arising within me, which I never intended or thought about. It just happens. And this happens more and more as we become more comfortable with our awe practice.
What we're doing is we're building a muscle. We're creating a neural pathway that the more we use it, the thicker it gets, the more neurons travel on that. And the more accessible it is. And I think that if people want to start this practice, the main thing I would encourage them to do is.
Pick things that are easy in the beginning. In other words, instead of waiting until you get in a very stressful situation and saying, I want to access the emotion of awe, do it when you're relaxed, do it when you're having fun, do it when you're feeling good. So start to build the muscle in situations where there's no impediment whatsoever.
And then, over time you can use this. And when I say over time, I mean fairly quickly. You can use this in situations that may feel a little bit more challenging.
And there is something known as a dose-response. And we saw this in our study, what that means is the more you do it, the greater the benefit. So three times a day we recommend is the minimum, but if people are interested in doing this, you can do this once an hour, you can have a timer on your watch and you can set it to the peak of the hour, no matter what's happening, you take a break and you think about what would be a source of awe. What is it in this moment that I can think of that I appreciate, value, or find to be amazing?
[00:27:53] Aneta: I love this idea because when I facilitate sessions for companies, for wellness sessions, I ask them how often they're taking breaks. And the answer typically is I can't. Meetings are going from the top of the hour to running late from one meeting to the other, but being able to leave them with something that they can do easily and quickly and just about anywhere because it doesn't require a lot of time and it probably doesn't require a lot of privacy as you said, you could do with your eyes open if you want it. This is a beautiful practice.
So can you share how are you sharing this method either in the corporate world or maybe even with marginalized communities for people who sometimes are just barely surviving?
[00:28:38] Jake: Yeah. So predominantly I've worked with pretty high-functioning individuals. However, some of those are counselors who are working in marginalized communities. So I don't have a lot of direct experience with that, but I have heard from clients who are in that world that they use this predominantly in two ways.
They use it as a way to connect with people who are not readily available to connect with. So they're using this to co-regulate and experience coherence with those people. And it can happen very quickly. The key is that the person, in this case, the therapist, is experiencing the emotion of awe, which makes it easier for them to connect with other people.
And then the second thing is that they're teaching this to people who have fairly limited emotional resources. And the reason that they're teaching this is because it's such a quick feedback loop. In other words, when people don't have a lot of resources and they're under a lot of pressure and anxiety, it's hard for them to do a practice that takes 20 minutes.
Because their mind interrupts them, their stress interrupts the process. But if you can have that person do something for 15 seconds that shifts their physiology, they're more likely to do it and do it regularly.
[00:29:59] Aneta: I was going to say, have you done any research or have you engaged with younger children? Or adolescence?
[00:30:07] Jake: I haven't. The only thing I know from research that I've looked at is that this is a very typical state for children to be in, physiologically, this state that, again, Dr. Porges refers to as being playful.
It's a very common state when we're young. And part of what happens when we access it is that we're recalling something extremely natural. But to some degree, we've forgotten. We just have lost touch with this incredibly natural ability to be in awe of life, of the world, of events, of people.
[00:30:41] Aneta: Yeah, and I think children are starting to lose a little bit of that just with research that I've seen around anxiety increasing at younger ages. So it would be amazing to see if schools would bring this as something that they teach children or even do it in between sessions as they stretch their body and create a little bit of movement and some of the things that we know are so natural but lacking sometimes.
What other research are you excited about? Any new or future research that you'll be continuing to do on, around Awe?
[00:31:14] Jake: Well, we just finished a study at the University of California in Davis, where we worked with People struggling with COVID.
And the results haven't been published. They're not even complete at this point, but the broad picture was that it was very beneficial. And that was a big deal, I don't know how much you know about people with long COVID, but it's challenging. It can be very debilitating in part because they're so physically exhausted.
And so if you deal with somebody that has long COVID and you say, I want you to meditate for 10 minutes, it's very likely they'll say, I can't do that. But if you ask them to do something that takes 10 or 15 seconds, they absolutely can and will do that because they're almost desperate to do something that will make them feel better.
And the main thing that happened as a result of that study is that the participants had some hope. They reconnected with what it's like to feel well, to feel better. And that stimulated hope. And I suspect you and I share a belief that when someone has hope, all sorts of wonderful things can happen.
[00:32:16] Aneta: Absolutely. That's wonderful. And so do you have any final takeaways that you'd like to leave the audience with today? Besides getting a copy of the book, which I strongly recommend that everyone do.
[00:32:28] Jake: Depending on the timing, I don't know what works for you, but what we haven't talked about are the different levels of consciousness that awe allows you to access. So do we have time to go into that?
[00:32:39] Aneta: Yes, I would love to hear that. Absolutely.
[00:32:42] Jake: So what we've done is we've identified, there are many ways to talk about consciousness, but we've simplified it and we've said there are three basic levels of consciousness that people can access with relative ease.
The first one is safety consciousness, and that's where we live 95 percent of the time. It's when we're being productive and focused, trying to get things done, trying to make ourselves and our loved ones safe in the world. And that's where we are most of the time. It may even be 99 percent of the time.
There's the next level called heart consciousness, and that's when we experience something that's heart-opening and it stimulates compassion and warmth and vulnerability and connection with others. And if people aren't familiar with that or they don't have a practice, I recommend heart math. It's a very simple way to experience heart consciousness and the the benefits psychologically and physiologically are significant and this is very well documented.
If you go beyond heart consciousness, we've labeled the third level spacious consciousness. And when you access spacious consciousness, time changes, time drops away and words drop away. It's a state of being where we no longer have a relationship to words or time. So the best way to describe it is a state of profound presence.
And this is something that all kinds of spiritual traditions have been encouraging us to access for a long time—thousands of years. Most of the contemplative practices like meditation or Qigong or certain forms of yoga help us do this, but they're not all easy. They require some effort.
What we found, and this goes back to the sentence you read at the beginning of our conversation about how awe is a vehicle of transcendence, Awe takes us into spacious consciousness. But it takes us there in 15, 20, 30 seconds instead of something that requires a lot of time and effort. Now, we can't live there.
As far as I know, it's not possible to live in spacious consciousness. But when we go there, it's where we shift our perspective. Everything begins to take on a different meaning. The sense of self diminishes, and the sense of connection with something greater expands, and we open up. When we then come back to connect with people, we're in a different state.
And so I encourage people to access this state of spaciousness before they are going to engage with other people or before they do something they may be anxious about because it shifts your physiology and shifts your attitude and to me, it's a practice that allows us to perform better when we're in safety consciousness. Because we enter it with a different perspective, different attitude, different physiology.
[00:35:46] Aneta: Absolutely. Thank you for sharing that. And if folks wanted to learn more about Awe and the research that you've done or are interested in just reaching out, what is the best way that they can find you or connect with you?
[00:36:02] Jake: Yeah, two things. Michael and I have a website, it's thepowerofawe. com. We talk more about awe there, we have some awe practices that people can do. So that's a great place to start. And then my wife and I have another website for the retreats that we do, and the courses that I've developed, and that's called liveconscious. com. And I've recently developed a course, and at the foundation, it is predicated upon Awe. It starts by helping people get in touch with the miracle of being alive, which is something I think we often forget. But then it goes on and it helps people shape their lives by learning five specific concepts and tools so that we can bring more of that awareness into our lives, the miracle of being alive.
And you could replace that with the word awe, but the focus of the course is not exclusively on us. So that would be another thing that if people are interested they could look at, and then if they have questions and if somebody wants to send an email, if you send it to Info@thepowerofawe.Com. I will respond or Michael will if I'm not available.
[00:37:16] Aneta: We will include all those links in the show notes. And I think that ties in nicely with my final question for you today. Jake, what does it mean to live the width of your life?
[00:37:27] Jake: Yeah, I love that question. It reminds me of a statement from the French writer Colette. She said I've lived a wonderful life. I only wish I realized it at the time.
To live the width of my life is largely for me a matter of going where the energy is. Going where my excitement takes me. Following my passion. And I think that when we do that we do expand the width of our lives. And to me, it's a really important aspect of our evolution.
[00:38:05] Aneta: So beautiful. And I loved reading this book, as I said, again, and also there are practices at the end. So people who get the book can also get some real practice. There's so much data in here. If you want the science, it's in here. If you want the practical aspects of how to do this I encourage everyone to get it.
Thank you for the great work that you are doing, Jake, in the world. It was just such a pleasure to talk to you. And I'm grateful for our time together.
[00:38:31] Jake: Thank you. I appreciate you helping share the work.
[00:38:35] Aneta: Of course. Take care and have a wonderful day.
[00:38:38] Jake: Aloha.
[00:38:40] Aneta: Thank you for listening to today's episode. If today's conversation inspired you to dream again, break out of your comfort zones, or reflect on what it means to you to live more fully, then please follow this podcast because every week you'll hear more stories from people just like you who took imperfect action towards their goals, created more joy and are living the life that they always dreamt of living.