Episode 155 transcript: Why Your Hardest Season Could Be Your Greatest Transformation with Jakob Gricar

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[00:00:00] Jakob: The Majority of us know that right now, so many autoimmune diseases are psychosomatic, which means that they start in the mind. So just by me eliminating the stress and shame cycle about it, it has already started healing itself.

So it was mainly the realization that the more I stressed myself out about it. And about how I looked and about how I felt and about not having friends and not having self-esteem, the more I released all of that and ended up releasing all of that, the body followed.

[00:00:31] 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 breath 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 have 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 Live the Width of Your Life. My guest this week is Jakob Gricar, and he's a trauma-informed transformational coach who blends a decade of mastery and somatic work, internal family systems, ontological coaching, NLP, and CBT, and other modalities to catalyze profound interchange. He works with high-impact entrepreneurs to help people step into their purpose, and he guides all of his clients to regulate their nervous system, dismantle limiting identities, and remember the truth beneath the noise. His journey started when he was 13. He was recovering from a chronic illness, and then it started a lifelong devotion to his spiritual practice. The spark carried him from homelessness to near-death initiations and yogic studies in India. Deep plant medicine studies in the Amazon. And the creation of retreat centers in Guatemala and Mexico. And today he works with world-renowned coaches. He mentors other business leaders, and he leads Vortex retreats and runs a multi-six-figure online program. His story is fascinating. I couldn't get enough. It was just really, really impactful to be reminded of how sometimes. The hardest things that happen to us when we're in them, we don't recognize that, that is the catalyst for our life's work. I hope you enjoy the conversation today as much as I did having it take a listen. 

Jakob, thank you so much for joining me today. I am so excited for our conversation.

[00:02:39] Jakob: Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited.

[00:02:41] Aneta: Yeah, it's so amazing to be able to connect to people from all over the world. And I think that's one of the best, most interesting things about the internet and Instagram specifically is just connecting. I'm in Cleveland, Ohio. You are in Europe right now. Although I know that you have lived a very interesting life. This has taken you to many different places. So excited that you are here.

[00:03:06] Jakob: I'm so excited to be here.

[00:03:08] Aneta: So, Jakob, I wanted to just start and talk a little bit about your journey because sometimes we have things that happen in life that we can look back on and see. That is the catalyst that becomes. The entry point into our entire life. And I think for you, you had something as a young man that happened to you specifically. Do you mind just sharing a little bit more about that?

[00:03:33] Jakob: Absolutely. Yeah. When I was about 10 years old, I developed a chronic skin condition, and there was a pretty severe eczema all over my body, specifically on my neck and my face. And as a result of that, I developed pretty bad insomnia. I developed really bad social anxiety. I started isolating myself and escaping into my. Own inner world and like the world of fantasy books. And then when I was about 13 years old, after spending more time with doctors than I did in school or at home, I found a book on my grandmother's shelf. I was so hungry to just read more. I was just constantly fueling my mind and just escaped into this like different lands and mystery, and fantasy.

And I found this one book that was talking about medicinal plants, and I got interested, and I read through the entire book just for the sake of curiosity. And at the end, one of the chapters was talking about self-healing, specifically in that case, through self-hypnosis. I got interested, so I went into a library.

In Slovenia, we don't have a lot of things translated, or we have not had that was 15 plus years. And started just devouring everything I could find on self-hypnosis and meditation, and ended up recording my hypnosis tapes. And I used them first to put myself to sleep because of my insomnia, but then I realized, wow, it's helping me to ground and be with everything that is.

So I started reading books on Zen Buddhism and meditation, and I started meditating, and about three, four months later, my skin disease went away, and that just opened up my eyes to everything possible through the power of the mind. And I got pretty upset at the school system and doctors, and everyone else.

I became quite a bit of an angry teenager at the time, and I ended up skipping school, and instead of like other kids would skip school and smoke weed or drink alcohol, I would skip school and study personal development and listen to seminars, and meditate. Go into nature and sit under a tree.

I listened to my hypnosis tape and started downloading different like meditations and hypnosis, seminars, and things like that, and spent the next five years building myself up in this way. And I left Slovenia when I was 18, I had a vision, and this idea was built on all this personal development that I'm just going to travel the world, and it's all going to go super beautifully and super perfectly and so effortlessly.

And of course, as you can imagine, it didn't. So when I was 19, I went through a period of homelessness, and when I was 20, I started picking up these odd hospitality jobs and construction jobs. And when I was 21 moved between Australia and India. Halfway between volunteering and different like projects, and ended up studying yoga in depth.

And this was like my entrance into spirituality, and that led to all these different experiences from living with the indigenous people in the Amazon, through building retreat centers, and into the space where I'm at right now.

[00:06:46] Aneta: It reads like a book. It's so fascinating. And I'm curious, so when you found this book, your grandmother's book, was she still alive?

[00:06:53] Jakob: Yeah, she's still alive right now.

[00:06:56] Aneta: And so when you found the book, did you ask her about it? Say, hey, what is this about? Or why were you reading it, or what was her own experience with it?

[00:07:06] Jakob: No, my grandma lives in the countryside here in Slovenia, which is where I was born and raised. So her bookshelves were always full of many different books. And mainly there were three types. They were either really old Slovenian literature; that being said, she does not speak another language.

So they're like really old Slovenian literature, which I always found incredibly boring. Or they are like war and history books because as, part of my lineage. There was a lot of war and like the Second World War, and the participation from my great-grandparents as well. And then the third part, the third category that the books were in, was just like the alternative healing.

So she has her garden, and she was always interested in all these different medicinal plants and used to brew her liquor from medicinal plants, and has a garden where she would be collecting peas and vegetables and stuff like that. So it wasn't very unusual. So I just picked a book that I could find that would pique my curiosity, that wasn't either history or literature. And it ended up being one of the most profound things that put me on a very specific path in life.

[00:08:14] Aneta: I love that so much, and I love that you found it at your grandmother's house and not just like in the [00:08:20] library. It just seems much more meaningful when you decide to record your meditation, and I could almost imagine myself as this young 13-year-old struggling with the things you struggled with and then reading this book and saying, I don't know if this is going to work, but I have to try it and recording it.

And then that the faith that it takes to continue to listen to it over and over again. And you said in three months you healed yourself. Was that the right timeframe?

[00:08:46] Jakob: Yeah, it might have been a bit longer, but it was less than half a year.

[00:08:51] Aneta: What did it start to feel like when you started to notice that things were changing? Did you itch less? Were you starting to sleep better? What was that path? And then did the doctors and your parents say What are you doing? What's working?

[00:09:05] Jakob: So an interesting thing is, nobody said anything about it. First of all, my mom continuously fired doctors because she was more into alternative medicine. And I don't know what was going on in Slovenia at the time, but they were trying to inject me with different things and put all these different creams, and it was just bizarre.

And my mom already knew, like, this isn't working. This isn't proper. This is not how we heal. But then my relationship with my parents was also really messed up because of how misunderstood and alone I felt inside of my struggles, and like more stress that was there, the more conflict there was.

And then at some point, I ended up pushing them away quite a lot. So, as this process started, I was at the point where I would barely talk to anyone and just ended up having my own experience. My relationship with my parents hadn't healed up until about five years ago. And yeah, in terms of how it looked inside of myself is I first used it to fall asleep.

I would listen to this tape just to be able to relax because it was so intense being inside my body. That I used it to calm down, to calm myself down, to be in the present moment. The second thing was that, through the meditations that I was doing, I was learning how to enjoy the moment.

So what I learned through that was not to love myself despite having a skin disease, but to love myself because of it. Love that as well. And that was the process of the meditation, which was, how much can I be present in this moment, present with the itching, present with the pain present, with the discomfort, and stop labeling it as such and just allow it to be there and learn to fall in love with that experience as well, because that is a full range of being human, 

[00:10:53] Aneta: Absolutely.

[00:10:55] Jakob: The more I did that, the less stressed I was less under stress, and as we all know right now, the majority of us know that right now, so many autoimmune diseases are psychosomatic, which means that they start in the mind. So just by me eliminating the stress and shame cycle about it, it has already started healing itself.

So it was mainly the realization that the more I stressed myself out about it. And about how I looked and about how I felt and about not having friends and not having self-esteem, the more I released all of that and ended up releasing all of that, the body followed.

[00:11:33] Aneta: Yeah. I can't imagine what it felt like to be a young person and feel so isolated through that experience. As you started doing the work on yourself internally, and of course, then the skin took that external representation of the work you were doing inside. What shifted? Did anything change at school or in your relationships, maybe outside of just with your parents?

[00:11:57] Jakob: Yeah. I switched from zero to a hundred. I became somewhat of a popular kid. I ended up pushing myself deeper into martial arts. I was training in martial arts at the time. I ended up going to international competitions and becoming pretty good at it. My confidence started growing quite a lot.

It would still be looking for a lot of external validation through other people and where I was and who I hung out with, and how much I achieved, and all of that. So that all went very positively upward. Whereas my school went downward quite a lot because I would no longer just be in the studies.

I ended up being very resentful of the system because I saw how much we don't know. So that was the moment when I was about 14, 15 years old. I decided that as soon as I finish high school, I'm leaving and I'm putting myself out of the system. I'm getting out as far as I possibly can. And haven't reentered the system in this kind of path up until very recently.

[00:13:00] Aneta: It's interesting, and I imagine that as you were doing this work and you're reading more and more books, and I love that you talked about skipping school because your curiosity and insatiable desire to learn more and to grow were so strong. It must be so difficult to try to reconnect then to other people who are 14, 15, 16 years old. Was there anyone that you could talk to about the things that you were learning? No. Yeah.

[00:13:24] Jakob: Not. I still see a lot of people from back then, and I still would not be able to talk to them about that.

[00:13:31] Aneta: Yeah. It's so fascinating. So you made this decision to leave because parents’ strained relationship. The school, the system, wasn't for you. It was something you felt like you'd outgrown. So, where did you g,o and how were you able to be so convicted that you were going to figure it out?

Because I don't know what kind of a plan you had at 16, but I'm curious to share a little bit more about your thought process, and like maybe what you were hoping for, and instead what happened?

[00:14:02] Jakob: Yeah. First of all, I also want to express my gratitude because a lot of recent interviews, podcasts, and appearances that I've done have been so much about the work I do right now. And not a lot of people have dug into my story to that depth. So I appreciate that. 

[00:14:19] Aneta: I'm a coach after all. Jakob, I want to get down to really what's going on here. I think it helps set the stage, and we'll get to all the other stuff too, but there's always, like in the hero's journey, it always begins somewhere, and then you go on the journey. So I think it's important to know where things began with you.

[00:14:37] Jakob: Yeah, so I left Slovenia when I was, I think, around 18 to maybe towards 19. I just finished high school. And I was a pretty adrenaline-seeking teenager, so I wanted to move this energy and this drive and this grasping in one way or the other. So I started skydiving. I started driving motorbikes, and I started driving like crazy, and I met somebody, got into a relationship, met some friends at the time, and then drove pretty recklessly once and totaled my parents' car and had an intense car accident. And instead of them being there for me and saying, Hey, we were so worried, are you okay? They actually responded with a lot of anger, and this was like the straw that broke the camel’s back for me within my relationship with them, and I just cut ties with them.

I got insurance money for damaging the car. I got my savings, and I put them both together. I gave them all of that money, and I left and I moved to Barcelona with a few of my best friends with the idea to start a business and start our entrepreneurship journey without speaking any Spanish.

So we moved to Barcelona. And a few weeks later, we ran out of everything that we had. We put all our money on one pile, realized that we're not going to make it in Spain, so we moved to Budapest, Hungary, and completely ran out of everything. Two of the friends went away, and then two of us stayed, and we just ended up hustling, and we would volunteer.

We would sell different things to get some commissions. I remember a lot of these moments were the lowest points of my life. I remember one time we put all the money that we had, which was probably the equivalent of about $80. We put it on a table and we played poker with it, and we made about $30 out of it.

And that was our food for the week or two weeks or something like that. And at some point, there was just a realization of the low point that [00:16:40] I was in, especially because I fueled my mind with so much personal development for so long. And I was like, I can't be here, I can't stay here. So what I did was I took all the money that we've made.

My best friend at the time just said Hey, I'm happy here. Like, you can take all of it if you want and just buy yourself a ticket. And I booked a one-way ticket. Got out of Hungary, ended up hitchhiking from Slovenia to the south of France, and ended up homeless in the south of France, and slept in the streets.

Didn't know what I was going to eat, and just lived day to day. And there was this voice inside of me that kept on saying like, Keep going. You've got all the tools, you've got all the resources, you just keep going. And I just kept going, and because of that voice inside of me, I never turned into the homeless person who would be bagging in the streets. I was more of a homeless person who was extremely charming and social and ended up meeting all these different cool people. And I remember one time I would sleep in the streets, and the next day I would meet some people on the beach and end up connecting with them.

And they would ask me, Where am I staying? And I would tell them like, I don't know. They would say Do you want to sleep in one of our spare bedrooms? And I would sleep in this multimillion-dollar mansion in the south of France and just had all these weird experiences, and it was this voice and this drive and this desire to just keep going and see what happens that drove me for actually the next few years.

[00:18:08] Aneta: Wow. Did you have any sort of spiritual relationship with God or a higher power, or where do you think that voice was from?

[00:18:16] Jakob: Not up until that point, that's actually where it developed. So a part of what I was studying in person when I was reading the books and listening to seminars was Jnana Yoga, the Yoga of Knowledge or Advaita Vedanta. So developed, somewhat of a relationship with, let's say, the divine, but I never really called it God up until those moments.

And I remember being homeless in the south of France. There was a day when it was raining, and I was sleeping outside. I was seeing myself in the depths of my depression. It was like in the depths of my darkness. And then there was suddenly this understanding of the divine orchestration that had to happen for me to be in that exact moment.

With the awareness that the moment was profoundly beautiful. It was a warm, rainy night in the summer in southern France, and I realized that the depression was in my mind, and it had nothing to do with what was. So it was like the split and the separation of wow, these are the facts, and these are the story, and the mind is completely separate from the experience.

And as soon as that landed, it was like the understanding of wow, there is God, and there is divine orchestration inside of this. If I just ask myself a different question, I'm going to get a different answer.

So that was the moment where everything clicked for me and everything shifted for me. It was a really big spiritual awakening. I clearly remember that night as well.

[00:19:40] Aneta: Amazing. As I was listening to your story, what came to mind was a curiosity about whether you went back to what you learned on the tapes. So whether you went back and you said, okay, I was 13. I learned something different.

My current reality isn't necessarily where the end of the story is; I can shift, I can change. So did you have that moment where you went back and said, Wait a second, I know I can do things differently. This isn't the end of my story.

[00:20:10] Jakob: Absolutely. And as I expanded the question. I asked a different question. And the question was like, what am I learning from this? How can I enjoy this? What am I growing into? And as I asked myself this, it was almost like everything started flooding back in. And I realized how resourceful I was.

I realized I consumed. So much personal development more than most people will within their entire life in those five years. Imagine an unemployed teenager. I was working night shifts in a warehouse sometimes. But just like most of the day, it was just consuming personal development.

There was barely any socialization or, like, actually studying for school. It was just like, How much can I learn? 

So all of that started flooding back in, and I like, I've got the tools to shift my state. I've got the tools to shift my mind. I've got the tools to create motivation. And then the rest was just like, Where are the opportunities?

And something beautiful happens when you reorient your focus. It's the opportunities just become so clear. And it was like, okay, this person is offering this that, and I remember in the South of France, where somebody offered me a volunteering position in the mountains where I would work construction.

And as soon as I arrived at that place, the chef who was there quit. And the owner of the place was just freaking out, and she was like, What do I do? There's nobody that I can hire. We're so far up in the mountain, like nobody's going to like just come here tomorrow, when I need them. And I was just in the space where I was like, I'll do it.

I got it. And she was like, Do you know how to cook? And I was like, I'm the fastest learner you've ever met. And she was like, Let me train you on French cuisine.

[00:21:56] Aneta: Of course, you're like French cuisine, and that's something like more basic, and did you feel scared when you said that, but recognize it as like a divine opportunity.

[00:22:08] Jakob: I didn't, I don't remember feeling scared when I said that. I remember being in the place where I was. I had pushed through so many barriers to be where I was that the capacity to be with all of life's experiences was large and still is large. So it didn't faze me like the things that I said yes to.

And actually, I had this sensible desire to say yes to even bigger things, and this is what my life is reflecting right now, too. 

[00:22:39] Aneta: So good. So, how long did you stay as a chef, and then when did you make your way to the Amazon, India, and all these other places, too, because you're still fairly young, so it's been quite an adventure.

[00:22:52] Jakob: Yeah. I didn't stay that long as a chef. I think it was in about a month or two months, they made me a manager of the place. They said they haven't taken a vacation in years because they haven't trusted anybody to manage the place. They made me a manager without speaking any French. And then they paid me, actually, and that was one of the first times that I got paid, and I got paid pretty well for my standards at the time.

And I used that money to move to the UK, spend some time in Edinburgh, in Scotland, in Leeds, in northern England, and then in London. Made my way towards London. Started working as a cocktail bartender. Went into working in different specialty cafes, moved to Australia, and while I was in Australia, I also traveled to Bali, to New Zealand to India.

Then, in India, was actually where I fell in love with the culture, with the people, with the traditions. Ended up staying at some point for a couple of months while I was having this calling to deepen my spiritual practice. And even though I had touched on all of these spirituality and personal development, it was more like it's deeper.

Like, we can go deeper, we can go so much deeper. And that's when it clicked for me, and I became a yoga teacher in India, and I asked myself, if instead of again, it's all about the quality of our questions. So I didn't ask myself, like, how do I make myself a wealthy yoga teacher?

Or how do I make money teaching yoga? I asked myself, what can life offer me through this new skill that I have right now? So what I did was book the tickets to Latin America. I started trading, teaching yoga in different retreat centers. For accommodation, for food, and then eventually also for plant medicine journeys.

And I sat in a dozen ceremonies with indigenous plant medicine keepers, specifically starting in Peru with Shipibo Conibo and Mestizo tribes. And then also making my way through Ecuador and Brazil, and Colombia, sitting with all these different elders in different traditions, and just had all of these beautiful [00:25:00] experiences that just really ripped me open in so many different ways.

[00:25:05] Aneta: It is so interesting. One of the things I think the gifts of travel, too, is just meeting people. From different places and learning more about their culture, and especially if you don't know the language, you get to observe and use some of your other senses to immerse yourself. What have been some of the universal truths that you discovered about people and humanity as you've traveled in these different locations?

[00:25:30] Jakob: The most universal ones would be that almost everyone has a silent struggle, and some cultures talk about it and they work it out in the community. Like for example, in indigenous traditions, they don't see trauma as a problem of the individual. Trauma is a problem of the community, and healing also happens in the community. In Western cultures, we tend to keep that to ourselves. So what I've observed as universally as possible. I would say that we all enjoy each other, and we all enjoy people, and we all enjoy being in community and celebration. We all tend to have very similar needs. The need for belonging, for safety, for security, for some sort of adventure or variety, right?

Those kinds of things. And also, some cultures talk about it, and some don't. Some have healing practices, and some don't. But generally, everyone has an unsaid and unspoken story. And the more we become attuned to that, the more beautiful and interesting life becomes. And the more we are vulnerable about our personal experiences, the more we realize that they're all very universal.

The deepest struggles that we think are the most unique to us are the ones that are the most universal.

[00:26:51] Aneta: That's so true. Did you find a deep sense of belonging in some places more than others?

[00:26:58] Jakob: I did, I never felt at home as I did in the Amazon with the song, with the music, with the people, with the warmth that's there, with the culture, with the tradition, with the beliefs. I enjoyed India too much. It's been a core, key part of my journey, and then also most recently, just the community that I've built around myself in the last year or so has been the most powerful catalyst also of the successes that I've had.

[00:27:26] Aneta: Who did you remember that you were in those communities that maybe you didn't find in Slovenia and Europe initially?

[00:27:35] Jakob: I felt that Europe and Slovenia. We're not big enough for how much my mind got expanded through those practices and traditions. There's a lot of depth in the spirituality that isn't limited to a certain belief system, which is what I see most of Western spirituality to be. It's very religion-based, and it's very closed, and it has this moral duality that it creates, which is, I'm right and you are wrong. I'm right because I believe in this, and you're wrong because you don't, or you either do this or you do that. And if you do this, you're good. And if you do that, you're bad and there's heaven and hell, and this kind of like dualities, whereas who I was and what was present in those spaces was, there was no duality.

And this is also like the teachings of, let's say, Advaita Vedanta, the non-dual traditions, or there's no separation between you and me. There's no separation between me and God. There's no separation between you and God. So it's just realizing that level of like awareness does create a deeper sense of belonging and way less judgment than shame.

[00:28:52] Aneta: Yeah, it's so interesting. Sometimes we have to go away and separate ourselves from the systems and the beliefs and family, even sometimes, to follow where we're being guided. And so one of the places you were guided was towards plant medicine, and I know you have experience in the facilitation of some of those ceremonies.

Did you study with the shamanic tribes and learn more about it? I'm curious about your experience with the plant medicine journeys and maybe some of the positive things you've seen, and then maybe even some of the challenges that you've seen with that experience.

[00:29:28] Jakob: I'll start with the positives. There's nothing that can interrupt the pattern as much as something that takes you out of your mind. Alan Watt has a good. A series of seminars called Out of Your Mind, which I enjoyed, and in that, he says that the only way to attain enlightenment or self-realization is to get out of your mind.

To get out of your way. To get out of the repeating, recurring thought loops that we keep living in. And it said that most of the thoughts that we have are just repeated thoughts, the same as the ones we had yesterday. And our environment is such a big catalyst for that as well. I'm going to say nothing is as potent to get us out of there as plant medicine is. And my journey with that was very interesting because I was put into the space of facilitation very early on was one of my probably like within the first 10 ceremonies of ayahuasca that I sat in, I was asked to facilitate, not facilitate as somebody serving the medicine. I would never do that just because of the deep reverence and honor of how indigenous people are trained inside of this.

But I was asked to support, to be there, to take care of the people, to make sure that nobody gets hurt. And within that process, I wasn't a sober observer. I was also being given the medicine. And what started happening is that the medicine worked through me and worked me instead of me working in the space of medicine.

So I would realize that the more I take myself out of the way, the more the medicine allows me to see who needs help, where, how to help them, and how to help them with what? So it was more the medicine that became a teacher and not so much any person. But then I also, as a part of that process, of course, started asking a lot of questions.

And whenever I asked the questions, I always got the answers too. That's something that I've learned on the way is asking and it should be given, right?

So I ended up asking a lot of questions and learning quite a lot from some really wise people, and over time developed a very deep understanding of how to work in those spaces.

And ended up staying in the space of facilitation, leading some of my retreats. Started bridging the indigenous wisdom with more of the Western approach to psychology and psychotherapy. Supported in building a few retreat centers. And using all of these tools that I've learned also for myself, and then later on with my clients, in like my practice of somatics and the coaching that I do right now in like high performance.

And then, yeah, the shadow part of plant medicine that I would say is people tend to put something above God and themselves, and it becomes the way of reaching for more. So, I have a problem in my life. I need more planned medicine.

The same as it happens with personal development, it can become an escape and an addiction.

So if you realize that within yourself, like now I'm coming into a space where I'm feeling down and depressed and not so good, let me just consume more books and join another course and pay for another coach, and it becomes like a grasping, consuming addiction. Even though plant medicine can be quite an unpleasant experience, when you're coming with a challenged mindset into it, it can still be very addictive because it gives you this ability to see the world through different views, and therefore it can become something you outsource your power to. And it's not the devotion towards something that is everything. It's the devotion to an external object or a plant or a substance that then becomes Oh, this is my God, this is [00:33:20] my teacher. 

So that's just in terms of like plant medicine in general. But then there were also a lot of different stories in the Amazon of like how that got abused and how it became more of a moneymaking, capitalistic machine than actually a force for good.

[00:33:34] Aneta: Yeah, I wondered what the perception is of the indigenous tribes who have had this has been part of their culture, their history, their spiritual journey for so long. What is their take on the Westerners coming in, and especially the repeat folks who have to come in multiple times a year, as you said, for their next big breakthrough?

[00:33:54] Jakob: It's interesting because it depends. Some traditions are much more focused on this, like surgery; let's just go into it and focus on a specific issue, like the Shipibo-Conibo Tribe, for example. Some tribes are focused on just like song and music, and it's more like a communal event.

For example, like Huni Kuin, Yawanawá Kaxinawá. And then some tribes are a little bit deeper in acre towards the border with Peru, which again comes back to these like really intense, strict traditions. But I would say I have seen levels of judgment there very present in some cases.

And then in some cases it's also just a very unconditional kind of loving parental view on. We on Westerners, for example, even the Kogi tribe from Seattle, Nevada, the Santa Marta in Colombia, they call us their little brothers because we are so unaware of the actual truth of the world. 

[00:34:55] Aneta: That's so interesting. So I'm curious about what you're working on now, because I know you have gone through your journey and you are now a guide, of course, and you're helping and serving and using your life as an opportunity to work with others. Tell me about how you are currently serving in the world.

[00:35:13] Jakob: So right now I have a couple of different things going on. My main project is called Metamorphosis Collective, and that's a group program, which is a 12 week long container transformational container for women specifically, where we focus on the depth of transformation in the way that no other program does where we bridge ontological coaching with somatics and me and my business partner work alongside one of the pioneers in somatics.

She's 83 years old, one of the elders in this field. And what we did is we brought together a series of tools and processes into a container that's five calls a week for 12 weeks, really in depth and rigorous, where we hold very clear, ruthless standards and accountability so nobody can join the call one second late.

We have very strict boundaries. There are requirements of attendance requirements every week. There are requirements of completing certain exercises every single week, and that's how we hold women accountable, that they commit to doing it. And if they don't meet the requirements, we simply remove them from the program.

So I've never seen anything like that in the online space. What I've seen is majority of the coaches are very happy to take the money, and then they don't care what happens after. So we've created a very different system, and it's also the game that we like playing because we love to coach, and we like being there, and we love people knowing that we have their back unconditionally.

And that means five, six days a week. So that's one of the offerings. We're launching the next round, likely towards the end of October. And then I also have a private podcast where I share the insights of what I've learned through my travels, my journey, working with hundreds of clients. Building this business, which is a multi-six-figure business right now.

And I just share raw, unfiltered voice messages two to three times a week. Just posting them in a private space. And then I also work one-on-one with people. And that is a little bit more of a high-touch point, high-accountability process. Currently, I seem to be attracted to seeing a lot of high-level entrepreneurs who are seeing that if they don't sort out their inner world, their outer world suffers as well.

And it's the recognition that the traumatic imprints and like this core root of dysfunction, unless it's being processed, it's influencing everything from our health to our relationships to how we make money.

[00:37:47] Aneta: Amazing. What are some of the big transformations that you're seeing with clients?

[00:37:53] Jakob: I would say the biggest ones are people just start feeling free and stop looping in shame. Our programs and my coaching are also focused on unraveling addiction, and not addiction in just a traditional sense of heroin or weed or ketamine or alcohol or whatever.

But addiction, more so, is looking at any repeating behavior that we do consistently despite adverse consequences, which can also be binge eating, or like watching Netflix or procrastinating. You should be starting your business. You should be doing all these things. You should be acting differently with your partner, and yet you still catch yourself in these loops that just don't go away.

So I would say those loops go away. Those processes go away. So it opens up a lot of freedom to be who we want to be once we deal with the core root of dysfunction.

[00:38:51] Aneta: Interesting. And why women? Do you work with men as well, or have any containers for men?

[00:38:57] Jakob: I work with men one-on-one. I have a few male clients. Initially, when we started our program for both men and women, there were a few reasons why we got pulled towards working with women only. One of the things was that it was much easier to take them deeper, quicker. It seemed to me, especially coming through the lens of like somatic work and like emotional intelligence, that with men, sometimes it felt like pulling teeth.

And it took me weeks to take them into the spaces where I take women within the first session. That was one thing. And then we also noticed that women just share more, they get more excited about it. And as we decided to fully own the fact that we only work with women, the container just got so much safer, and that got so much deeper.

And then there's another part which I think is important to mention too, which is majority of the women said that they heal their masculine wounds within this container. They saw what it means to be in the presence of an immovable boundary without somebody enabling their behaviors, and like being caught in enabling more of the same stories, while still being a loving space.

Because I think society we learn that the only time the boundaries are enforced is when somebody's punishing us. So it was a really deep healing of seeing, wow, healthy masculine is the one that contains, that holds the container, that holds it tight, also. These are the boundaries of the containers.

These are the requirements, this is the context, this is why we do what we do, and just giving all the information, all the context, all the things that are needed, and then there's freedom inside of that container. That's where the surrender, the depth of the work, can happen.

[00:40:41] Aneta: Yeah, it's so beautiful. And I will say as a woman too, just being in the presence and the company of healthy masculine energy feels so nourishing to the nervous system, and it does create that freedom and safety that you were talking about. So, congratulations on all your success with the program and for the work that you're doing in the world.

Jakob, I want to ask you a final question, even though we can continue talking for hours, what does it mean to you to live the width of your life?

[00:41:12] Jakob: The width of my life. I would say letting the ordinary moments stretch wide, so giving myself a full range of the human experience. Meaning that I stay curious and hungry for a new experience. I stay present with them. I stay in connection. I play, and at the same time, I allow myself to go into the depths of grief and the depths of pain and the depths of my being, and as I allow myself the depth in the grief, the anger, and the pain, while also experiencing play and adventure and possibility and intimacy. I think that creates such a big range, and within that range, our life becomes much wider and much more full.

[00:42:03] Aneta: Yeah. I love that response. Jakob, thank you so much. It has just been such a gift getting to know you, and I'm just so grateful. We have lots of experiences that happen in life, and when someone like you can take that as a young child and see the journey that it's brought you to, to a point now where you are helping others heal on their journeys, it's beautiful. It's what we're here to do as humans.

[00:42:29] Jakob: Yeah. Thank you so much for saying that, and thank you so much for all of your questions. Yeah, this was beautifully guided, and I'm so grateful for you.

[00:42:37] Aneta: Yes. Hopefully, we'll get to talk again soon.

[00:42:41] Jakob: Yeah.

[00:42:41] 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. 

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