WTF IS ANYTHING?

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What happens to a person after their life breaks open?
Ashlea Sommer has spent the past year listening to strangers describe the moment their life split in two. Three conversations a week, more than a hundred people, twenty-five countries. A death, a diagnosis, a divorce, a job loss, a knowing that wouldn't go away. She calls them thresholds, and nobody paid her to collect them.
She came to this the hard way. Ashlea spent a decade at IDEO and was running a studio of designers in Brooklyn when she nearly died giving birth to her son. Within six months of coming home she'd left the company, moved across the country and bought a house she had never seen. It took another eight years to find language for what had happened to her.
So she has a map now. Thresholds arrive, she says, when the gap between your inside and your outside gets too wide to hold — and then something ruptures to close it. What follows is a window she calls life's built-in psychedelics, when you're briefly willing to choose differently. She also has an equation for why most of us stay put: you won't leap until the pain of the present is bigger than the pain you imagine in the unknown.
We get into her near-death experience, why COVID was a rite of passage nobody helped us finish, the body's veto, and the spiritual thread running through half the stories she's heard. Plus Michelle's "keep going" and Zach's pink flamingo.
Ashlea's writing is on Substack, linked below. The book is coming.

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Alan Scheurman has sat in roughly fifteen hundred ayahuasca ceremonies. He's a teacher, musician, writer and consciousness researcher who has been learning inside Amazonian plant medicine traditions since 2007, including more than a decade with his Shipibo-Konibo maestros in Peru. He runs a school called Multidimensionality out of Joshua Tree and writes the newsletter Mercuria. He's also part of the Disco Expert Network.
This one covers a lot of ground: consciousness development, plant medicine and the psychedelic renaissance, forgiveness, UFOs and UAP disclosure, telepathy, and non-human intelligence.
In this episode:
• The paradox at the center of consciousness development — if consciousness is fundamental, what are we actually developing?
• Why Alan says forgiveness is a door and compassion is the key to it
• How to hold the news cycle without getting stuck in reaction
• His model of the thought frequency continuum: the reactive field, the disruption band and the clarity stream
• "God is ascending" — the idea that stopped Michelle cold
• How a hardcore Marxist atheist writing a book on the Underground Railroad ended up carrying a lineage he wasn't born into
• Why Alan thinks the psychedelic world has integration backwards, and what he means by orientation instead
• The gringo shaman question, answered by someone who gets that DM almost every day
• What happens when a real tradition meets venture capital, patents and the Wild West of the psychedelic renaissance
• The silent black triangular craft that flew over his car outside Joshua Tree, two days before Christmas
• Telepathic contact, hypercognizance, and the beyond-verbal telepaths from The Telepathy Tapes
• The astral schoolroom called the hill, and the day a fifteen-year-old spelled out that Alan is a hybrid
• Why disclosure is happening now, what Alan thinks the national security story is covering for, and where he parts ways with Steven Greer
• As above, so below — why a Hermeticist doesn't assume all these beings are benevolent
You can learn more about Alan and his work at https://bio.site/santiparro

Disco members get a preferred rate with Alan through the Disco Expert Network. Become a member at jointhedisco.com
WTF Is Anything? is a podcast from Disco, a think tank and salon that explores consciousness, reality and the unknown. Join us at jointhedisco.com.

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Gina Marie Boyd is an integrative health practitioner, a spiritual counselor, and a PhD candidate in transpersonal counseling. Her dissertation is called Symptoms as Messages, and the whole idea is that the things we're feeling inside of our bodies are actually trying to tell us something.
Gina's route here was not a straight line. Investment banking in her twenties, then quitting to do improv and stand-up in Hollywood without telling her family. Then MasterChef (*ahem*), a food column, and the presidency of a company, complete with the Gucci loafers and the private jet. Then losing all of it, nearly dying, and walking into an AA meeting in Austin thinking, I am nothing like you people.
This conversation covers health, addiction, Ayurveda, the biohacking boom, why the wellness internet feels leaderless, and what happens when spirituality starts telling people what to believe.
In this episode:
• What transpersonal counseling actually is, and what it does that regular therapy doesn't
• Investment banking to secret stand-up: pretending to drive to work and going to improv class instead
• MasterChef, steak tartare at the audition, and the producers deciding she "cannot be managed"
• Losing everything, and the synchronicity that got her into her first meeting
• Raised atheist, with no higher power to hand anything over to
• So what is health? A 5,000-year-old answer from Ayurveda
• The biohacking question nobody asks: if you're this obsessed with staying here, what are you afraid of losing?
• Adding versus subtracting, and why balance is the least exciting right answer
• Why everyone online is hunting for one system to believe in, and what that costs
• Symptoms as messages, including the client eating spicy food every single night
• Correlation, causation, and why stress and illness are so hard to talk about honestly
• Science versus scientism, by way of Charles Tart
• Thomas Kuhn, paradigms, and why the anomalies piling up right now are being ignored for social reasons rather than scientific ones
• Why Gina won't tell anyone what to believe, and what she makes of spiritual leaders who do
• Did I manifest this? The real danger in "you created your own illness"
• Moving from "what's wrong with me" to "what is this trying to show me"
• One book to start with, one thing she was wrong about, and a symptom she's reading in her own body right now
Chapters
00:00 Welcome
 03:32 What is transpersonal counseling?
 06:43 Banking, then secretly doing stand-up
 07:32 MasterChef, and "she cannot be managed"
 11:29 From food TV to integrative health
 13:05 Losing everything
 14:39 The first meeting in Austin
 15:17 Raised atheist, and what came next
 18:08 So what is health?
 19:41 Biohacking, and what optimizers are afraid of
 21:06 Adding versus subtracting
 26:40 A leaderless moment, and everyone looking for a system
 28:49 Why it isn't one size fits all
 34:02 Successful, sick and using
 38:00 Symptoms as messages
 41:40 Energy, stress and the profit motive
 43:31 Why science and spirituality get treated as enemies
 47:26 Science versus scientism
 49:02 Paradigms, and why anomalies get ignored
 52:07 Telling people what to believe
 55:55 Did I manifest this?
 59:50 From "what's wrong with me" to "what is this showing me"
 1:01:59 A book to start with
 1:04:04 One thing she was wrong about
 1:05:37 What twenty years of addiction gave her
 1:06:51 A symptom she's reading right now
WTF Is Anything? is the podcast from Disco, a curated monthly experience that explores consciousness, reality and the unknown. Join us at jointhedisco.com.

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What happens after we die, and did we choose the life we're living now? In Part 2 of our conversation with hypnotherapist Jennifer Catlin, we go deep into Life Between Lives (LBL) and past life regression, the spiritual hypnosis method developed by Dr. Michael Newton, author of Journey of Souls.

Jennifer shares what she's witnessed guiding clients through their own soul memories. In womb regression, people who felt like life was happening to them discover a very different truth: "I chose this." She walks us through the map of the afterlife that Michael Newton's research revealed, including the life review, spirit guides, soul groups, the Akashic Records and pre-birth life planning, and explains how free will fits in.

She also explains why sessions have become less predictable. More clients now recall past lives on other planets, from water worlds to highly advanced civilizations, and Jennifer believes the veil is thinning as human consciousness evolves.

From there, the conversation gets wonderfully weird. We talk about non-linear time and parallel lives, orbs in a child's bedroom, whether a new soul can enter a person during a spiritual awakening, old souls vs. young souls, and why Earth feels like a school. Jennifer offers her view on why we incarnate at all: Source experiencing itself through us. We also ask what the dinosaurs mean spiritually, talk about the Law of One and animal souls, and share a sign from our cat Frank, who has passed.

We close on what this means for everyday life: how understanding reincarnation and the soul's journey can change your relationship with anxiety, your inner critic and your nervous system.

In this episode:
- What really happens in a Life Between Lives session
- Womb regression and why so many people realize "I chose this"
- The afterlife map: life review, spirit guides, soul groups and life planning
- The Akashic Records and the "library" clients describe
- Past lives on other planets and the thinning veil
- Is it imagination or real memory? A skeptic's question
- Non-linear time, parallel lives and orbs as future selves
- Walk-ins, spiritual awakening and sudden personality changes
- Old souls, young souls and Earth school
- Why we incarnate: Source experiencing itself
- The Law of One, animal souls and signs from pets who have passed
- Using spiritual insight to heal anxiety and self-criticism

Jennifer Catlin is a member of the Disco Expert Network. Disco members get a preferred rate on sessions. Learn more and book at jointhedisco.com.

Missed Part 1? Go back to hear how Jennifer went from school psychologist to hypnotherapist, and the hypnosis session and near-death experience (NDE) that changed her life.

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What happens to the soul between lives? Hypnotherapist Jennifer Catlin guides past life regression and Life Between Lives sessions, the method developed by Dr. Michael Newton, author of Journey of Souls. In Part 1 of our conversation, she shares how a school psychologist with no spiritual vocabulary ended up doing this work.

It started with a feeling in her gut and a stranger she felt she had always known. When she asked a clinical psychologist to evaluate her, she was handed Brian Weiss's Many Lives, Many Masters instead. Then, during a routine hypnotherapy training session, Jennifer left the room. First she found herself as a light being in "human school." Then she was on another planet, with tall beings who spoke in clicks and surrounded her with unconditional love. Two weeks later, heart problems from Lyme disease caused her to lose consciousness while driving. What followed was a near-death experience (NDE) and an out-of-body experience that ended her doubts about life after death.

In this episode:
- Who Michael Newton was and what happens in a Life Between Lives session
- Why hypnosis can reach the same place as near-death experiences, psychedelics and mediumship
- Intuition, spiritual awakening and learning to trust your body
- Past life recognition: meeting someone you feel you already know
- Is a hypnosis experience "just a dream"?
- Comparing a hypnotic regression and an NDE side by side
- Consciousness, multidimensionality, reincarnation and the soul's journey
- The Law of One, "wanderers," and what Michael Newton called hybrids

Jennifer Catlin is a member of the Disco Expert Network. Learn more about her work and book a session at jointhedisco.com.

Part 2 continues the conversation on past lives, what Jennifer's clients experience in Life Between Lives sessions, and how hypnotherapy can heal by revealing our true nature. We also go way off script. Don't miss it.