Thought Leader

A must-listen for anyone interested in how the stories we tell shape the lives we lead and the societies we create. Whether you're looking to better understand your own place in the world or seeking ways to impact the broader societal narrative, this discussion will provide valuable insights and practical tools for navigating the complex interplay between myth and reality. This episode is a recording of a talk I delivered at The Walled Garden Philosophical Society in August 2024, in which I explore:The Influence of Historical Myths on Modern Identity: How do ancient stories and cultural narratives continue to shape our beliefs and behaviours? We uncover the threads connecting past mythologies to current societal norms and personal identities.Authenticity in the Age of Social Media: In a world dominated by digital personas, how can we reclaim our true selves? We discuss the challenges of maintaining authenticity when online platforms encourage conformity.Awakening to Personal Agency: What does it mean to 'awaken' in a culture steeped in preconceived narratives? We contemplate the process of recognizing and asserting our individual sovereignty within the emergent tapestry of societal roles and myths.Navigating Cultural and Psychological Landscapes: How can we help ourselves and others navigate complex cultural narratives? This conversation provides insights for those guiding others through the labyrinth of societal expectations and self-discovery.Support the showSign up to my Substack: eyeswideopenlife.substack.comemail info@eyeswideopenlife.com

"If yoga, breathwork and meditation are the way to establish the internet connection and improve the clarity of that connection, BEYOND THE MAT is the way to upgrade the operating system, upgrade the browser, download new updates and create a new map by which to explore the boundless internet of human potential."This Episode outlines a game-changing and proven approach to holistic self-mastery tailored for those navigating the pressures of urban life, corporate demands and general overwhelm. We discuss the necessity for us to embrace practices and modalities that take us "beyond the mat", to empower us in our efforts of wellness and personal growth, complementary to, not replacing, essential technologies such as Yoga, Breathwork or Meditation, but using those as starting points for journeys of self-awareness and self-knowledge that are informed by psychology and neuroscience but remain approachable and digestible enough for us to become the debuggers of our own complex operations systems. "Beyond the Mat" is a project that leverages the foundational benefits of Yoga, Breathwork, and Meditation to address the deeper complexities of our personal narratives. It enhances self-understanding and upgrades our internal dialogue, giving all yoga practitioners a new dimension in wellness practices. SUBSTACK ARTICLE:https://eyeswideopenlife.substack.com/p/beyond-the-matENQUIRIES:rocco@eyeswideopenlife.orgSOUL SPEAKING EXAMPLE:Close Your Eyeshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DP1ps4rI62UJUST BE LIKE THIS TODAY EXAMPLES:Forgiveness: https://eyeswideopenlife.substack.com/p/forgivenessDaring to Dream: https://eyeswideopenlife.substack.com/p/daring-to-dreamSupport the showSign up to my Substack: eyeswideopenlife.substack.comemail info@eyeswideopenlife.com

This is a recording of a teaching session on the online platform created by Eyes Wide Open Life called myMojoDojoLife.com. It is a session that would be very relevant and meaningful to everyone right now.The main theme of the session was the troubling invitation to consider how our entire lives have been described in the language of the Left Brain, of sterile facts and details, that are actually too small to accurately describe or define our fuller and deeper experience, and by refusing to hold the other side of that conversation, the one about our Hero Journey, our personal Mythos, the language of Imagination, we actually cauterise and abandon our vitality and essence along the long road.The dedicated practice I mentioned at the back end of that recording can be found here: REFRAMING YOUR STORY (YouTube)Support the showSign up to my Substack: eyeswideopenlife.substack.comemail info@eyeswideopenlife.com

"You are the crowning emergence of your own process."This is a recording from Just Be Like This Today!This is part of a series of daily invitations to grant yourself permission to drop all your other nagging ‘Musts’ and ‘Shoulds’ about self-improvement, personal development and living a virtuous life. Just enjoy this one cup of Living Wisdom, just choose this one thing and sit with it today.Shame is the mind virus of our society, accidentally arrived at, as a result of tribal survival mentality designed to optimise for social cooperation. If you inspect closely any modern virtue, any fear you have, beneath all the masks, you will encounter the parasite of shame.Self-acceptance is not about being worthy by some universal standard; it is about becoming your own worthy leader precisely because no one else is coming. We are all imperfect. And all any of us can do is commit to the code that says “As soon as I know better, I do better.” You start from where you are with what you have.Support the showSign up to my Substack: eyeswideopenlife.substack.comemail info@eyeswideopenlife.com

A thousand times the waves will come and a thousand times you must say: Not Today!This is a recording from Just Be Like This Today!This is a daily invitation to grant yourself permission to drop all your other nagging ‘Musts’ and ‘Shoulds’ about self-improvement, personal development and living a virtuous life. Just enjoy this one cup of Living Wisdom, just choose this one thing and sit with it today.The real trick is to invest the lion’s share of your energy and attention, not for what seeks to unmake you—the silence from the gallery, the old stories of inadequacy—but rather on how resilient you are in holding together and mending, and the blessing of your life for making you so. You are either riding the waves, being tossed by the waves or you are perhaps making the waves. Either way, there will be waves.Every wave you ride becomes a wave you make!This episode includes a reading of my masterpiece of encouragement called Not Today!Support the showSign up to my Substack: eyeswideopenlife.substack.comemail info@eyeswideopenlife.com

Opening the cage, and taking flight...This is a recording from Just Be Like This Today!This is a daily invitation to grant yourself permission to drop all your other nagging ‘Musts’ and ‘Shoulds’ about self-improvement, personal development and living a virtuous life. Just enjoy this one cup of Living Wisdom, just choose this one thing and sit with it today.You get the dream you live, if you aren’t daring to dream your own dream, you are living someone else’s. Maybe that’s why some of it feels like a bad dream?Overwhelm, Burnout, Depression and Anxiety are some of the Body’s ways of waking up the Heart, out of the bad dream, and getting the attention of Attention into the dawning Reality of what is Unfolding and what is Possible.This is a 13-minute exploration of the essentiality and practice of Dreaming.Support the showSign up to my Substack: eyeswideopenlife.substack.comemail info@eyeswideopenlife.com

The Power of an Examined Life.This is a recording from Just Be Like This Today!This is a daily invitation to grant yourself permission to drop all your other nagging ‘Musts’ and ‘Shoulds’ about self-improvement, personal development and living a virtuous life. Just enjoy this one cup of Living Wisdom, just choose this one thing and sit with it today.It helps to think of your life in packets. There was the packet you spent in the womb. There was the packet of your infancy, then the toddler packet, and so on. In a way, this last cycle you have been through was a packet. And if you are open to the idea of renewal, it means you will be getting ready to pick yourself up and face a new cycle, a new packet. To live an examined life then, implies that you have to look back, and examine the packets of your life. How far back, is up to you. Your heart will tell you what magnitude of death and rebirth you are facing right now.If you want to move forward you have to plan forward. If you want what you have never had, you must do what you have never done. You need to look back to see forward more clearly.Support the showSign up to my Substack: eyeswideopenlife.substack.comemail info@eyeswideopenlife.com

On Being okay with Not Knowing...This is a recording from Just Be Like This Today!This is a daily invitation to grant yourself permission to drop all your other nagging ‘Musts’ and ‘Shoulds’ about self-improvement, personal development and living a virtuous life. Just enjoy this one cup of Living Wisdom, just choose this one thing and sit with it today.Trying to figure life out is like rummaging in a sack trying to pull a mystery object out, that you are looking for, without knowing what it is. Having a phone in your pocket means you never get to sit with a question and let it nag at you. You have become used to having instant answers on tap. You have normalised the abnormal.The recording is a short guided reflection on the necessity and power of Sitting with Questions, even ones that do not have ready answers. —there is a way that you can shape the hand of your grasping mind as if it knows what it is trying to grab and draw out. Sometimes the way you are holding a question is exactly what will make the answer evade your grasp. This is what the Zen Koan means: Not Knowing is Most Intimate. A Koan is in fact a tool used in the Zen tradition that poses a riddle or question, that is not meant to be solved. The work, if it can be called that, is done in the interstitial space of uncertainty.Support the showSign up to my Substack: eyeswideopenlife.substack.comemail info@eyeswideopenlife.com

Forgiveness is both the province of the well and the door to wellness. You will notice those who struggle to forgive, struggle also to be well.This a recording from Just Be Like This Today!This is a daily invitation to grant yourself permission to drop all your other nagging ‘Musts’ and ‘Shoulds’ about self-improvement, personal development and living a virtuous life. Just enjoy this one cup of Living Wisdom, just choose this one thing and sit with it today.Forgiveness is always so much less about someone else than it is about you. And yet paradoxically, only when you hold the same wish for the other person to also be made again both whole and free, do you find a way for yourself to be both whole and free.If the wound is great, we will have to let it go many times.The recording is a short guided reflection on the necessity and power of Forgiveness. Support the showSign up to my Substack: eyeswideopenlife.substack.comemail info@eyeswideopenlife.com

In this episode I discuss Actualization, unpacking what I mean by this, and the Power of Permission, which we need to give ourselves, to pursue our intents, to take mastery of our life and our choices, to enter courageously into a conversation with the Universe and with the reality of our lives, where it becomes okay to 'fail', so that we can learn, grow and develop.Indirectly I also discuss in some detail what the entire project of the Eyes Wide Open Life podcast is about, what my motivations and intentions are, and what my main thesis in all of my work is, which is found throughout the @rocco.jarman humanitarian art project on Instagram and the Courses and Coaching I deliver via Eyes Wide Open Life. I also cover:feedback loopsself-measurement and reflectionradical honesty and vulnerabilitypeerlessnessthe false attraction and pursuit of wisdom vs the more authentic project of actualization and discovery of selfIf you take nothing else away from this episode, this is the part i hope truly lands:I believe, and in many ways, Iam living proof, that the pursuit and attainment and the successful negotiation of all the obstacles that stand in the way of self-mastery and self-liberation, is at bottom, psychological.  That is, our pursuit or failure to achieve connection, is as a result of the ideas we carry, ideas we have been infected with through conditioning, the ideas we have failed to challenge and correct in ourselves.  Ideas about love, acceptance, forgiveness, worthiness, power, belonging, divinity, and consciousness, are the ideas we need to get straight, and redundant impediments like shame, guilt and the confusion between Fear and Danger, between Pain and Injury, between Discomfort an unbearability, that discernment, is KEY.Support the showSign up to my Substack: eyeswideopenlife.substack.comemail info@eyeswideopenlife.com

Looking with genuine care at the source and nature of conflict in Palestine."It is entirely possible for two sides in a conflict to both be guilty of separate and irreconcilable transgressions that do not justify either nor balance each other out."This episode is an invitation to pause, reflect, and resist the urge to form quick opinions. With the understanding that conflict cannot be resolved through one side being right, we aim for a transcendent perspective through which everything can be held and reconciled. Our focus is not just on the conflict between Israel and Palestine, but on conflicts that manifest in various forms—be it emotional, political, or otherwise.Most of all, it is part of a mandate we each need to consider and own to be open to this necessary form of generosity and courage, in a word Leadership, whereby can live up to the claim that we care more about a path to peace, than we do about retribution and vindication.Support the showSign up to my Substack: eyeswideopenlife.substack.comemail info@eyeswideopenlife.com

In this episode, my guest Rowan shares his insights on an much needed culture shift and prevailing leadership paradigm in business. His views and wisdom are visionary, pragmatic and quite overdue and we take a thoughtful and immersive dive into the nature and culture of corporate business, covering both strident critique as well as what better might look like. Rowan is a specialized consultant for CEOs. With formal education from Berkeley University and Harvard Business School, Rowan has honed a unique set of methodologies aimed specifically at enhancing CEO and Leadership performance in Business. Aside from his extensive experience and impressive professional resumé, Rowan holds an unflaggingly positive perspective on the potential of business, viewing it as an evolving masterpiece. Rowan's LinkedIn NewletterLockStep GlobalSupport the showSign up to my Substack: eyeswideopenlife.substack.comemail info@eyeswideopenlife.com

In Conversation with Daniele Bolelli. Danielle is the host of the incredible History on Fire Podcast. We get together from time to time and discuss the state of the world, our moment in history through the lenses of our individual and shared philosophies.Daniele is wonderful conversationalist with a discerning eye on both our complicated human history and our troubling present moment.We discussthe uniqueness of our shared moment in history,the general state of apathy that we find in company and conversation,dogmatic ideology,ideological capture,identity politics,our default psychological models of adapting to social challenge, andthe disturbing trend of mass appeal of content and opinion on streaming services and the internet in general. Daniele's links: https://linktr.ee/danielebolelliSupport the showSign up to my Substack: eyeswideopenlife.substack.comemail info@eyeswideopenlife.com

In conversation with Agatha Nowicki, Hollywood actor, writer and soulful human caught at the very edge of the war for the human soul, playing out in the current battle of the writers' strike, sparked by the motions of the streaming platforms and the power brokers in Hollywood and Silicon Valley as they move to further disenfranchise artists and creatives in their ongoing quest for 'more'.We discuss the strike, Agatha's own calling to vulnerability and expression through art and what the toll the unfolding madness is having not just on her own life, but on humanity.We share our shared and private experiences from our recent walking tour in Ireland where we met as well as the rude return to 'normal' as we both struggled to integrate that powerful and transformative experience.We also discuss the Murmuration project.To Follow Agatha's work:Instagram: @agaloves, @asilentkind Substack: A Silent Kind of Light IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2063520/Credit for the photography goes to Bodi Hallett, pictured at the end of that pier reaching out into Lough Inagh, is Agatha, contemplating the vastness.Support the showSign up to my Substack: eyeswideopenlife.substack.comemail info@eyeswideopenlife.com

The episode brings to light the hidden struggle faced by creatives, thought-leaders -anyone who is looking to share their gifts with the world, who are increasingly outpaced by the algorithmic machinery and soul-dead formula of online engagement and marketing. With my wonderful guest, Karna, we reflect on the startling reality of the tech industry's escalating race to maximize engagement at the expense of soul, in the arms race of human attention we encounter in online marketing today.My guest is a talented and powerfully aligned human being who is challenging and re-engineering everything we think about marketing, how to approach it, how to execute and how to operate from a place of unwavering integrity and alignment where real creativity can blossom, where sincere connection can flourish, where it is fun, and where everyone wins, without compromise to their soul.Karna is the champion and midwife of engagement ecosystems based on sincere connection.  This long form conversation and what Karna has to share, is well overdue in the world right now.Please follow Karna: karnalivnau.comKarna's substack: karnalivnau.substack.comKarna's Instagram: instagram.com/_alignmentmarketing_Support the showSign up to my Substack: eyeswideopenlife.substack.comemail info@eyeswideopenlife.com

As a society, we faced and struggled with the reality of mental illness long before it dawned on us, the crucial necessity for practicing Mental Health. In the same way, we have been living with the reality of spiritual illness long before it dawned on us as a species, the crucial and long overdue necessity to prioritise and practice Spiritual Health.The project of mental health is necessary, but comparatively small. The invitation via Spiritual Wellness is so much deeper and vaster. We are so much deeper and vaster than we imagine. We are so incredibly empowered right now. We are standing on the threshold of Tomorrow.This podcast episode is about the advocacy for the necessity and relevance of Spiritual Health and wellness, and how it is at the heart of all our Crisis of Meaning.The message is: Take care of your spiritual health and your mental health will take care of itself. Recconnect with your sense of 'Soul' and your sense of meaning, of vitality and belonging will be found.Support the showSign up to my Substack: eyeswideopenlife.substack.comemail info@eyeswideopenlife.com

"Who do you think you are?" is a complex question that reveals multiple dimensions of our self-perception, societal expectation, and the interplay of power dynamics. It questions our self-identity and the perception of others, highlighting the gap that often exists between the two. It underscores our tendencies to perceive the world, including others and ourselves, through subjective lenses. This statement is reminiscent of Anais Nin’s perspective that our understanding of the world is a reflection of our own selves.Echoing Socrates' sentiments on the worth of an unexamined life, this question prompts us to self-reflect and introspect on who we believe we are. It prompts us to question the source of our power and the need for external validation.Implicit in this inquiry is the accusation of arrogance, which can stem either from one's inability to accept their mistakes or from others' reluctance to accept one's correctness. Hence, having the courage to voice your truth, ensuring your self-awareness, welcoming challenges, and discerning the value of others' opinions, are vital steps in authentically answering this query.In asking "Who do you think you are?", we are invited to confront and reconsider our own self-conceptions through honest self-exploration.Support the showSign up to my Substack: eyeswideopenlife.substack.comemail info@eyeswideopenlife.com

50th Episode.The term "soul" is often misunderstood due to its broad and varied interpretations across different cultures, religions, philosophies, and even individual beliefs. It's a concept that's both deeply personal and universally applicable, making it prone to a multitude of definitions and meanings.The 'soul' is an innate, essential aspect of our existence, which has been overlooked in the face of societal and technological progression. This spiritual neglect has resulted in a sense of disconnection, isolation, and depletion within individuals and society. The 'soul' is the reservoir of spiritual health and the source of deeper meaning, symbolic understanding, and a sense of real connection to the broader universe.However, the world we live in is predominantly dictated by the more egoic (and egotistic) perspective and the logical thinking of the left brain, overshadowing and disconnecting us from our 'souls', causing a deep crisis of meaning and spiritual illness. The potential for healing and reconnection lies in reawakening our 'souls' and restoring balance in our lives. The unfolding of our 'soul' is a continual process, parallel to the constant unfolding of our lives.Support the showSign up to my Substack: eyeswideopenlife.substack.comemail info@eyeswideopenlife.com

In this episode we explore the deep and troubling implication of Breaking Promises, something that we believe defines everything noble about us, but also something we learn through life's seasons, is an inevitability. Promises have seasons which we cannot sustain without cost to ourselves and to the people held in the chains of those promises.This episode continues the Ending Cycles arc of the last 4 episodes.Our promises hold us, and the other person, to a place and a season, which we cannot contain without chaining us, and them, to a static smallness.  Our Promises are absolute and binding and cannot endure in a relative and changing world, and we break ourselves and limit ourselves in trying to keep them.We look at the skilful way to release ourselves and other people from promises, with grace and the better way to define our commitments to our loved ones, to ourselves and the world; Making Agreements, and letting there be Terms.Support the showSign up to my Substack: eyeswideopenlife.substack.comemail info@eyeswideopenlife.com

In our ongoing arc of shorter episodes processing necessary endings to make way for new beginnings, we look at the reality that some people are not open to growth or the level of self-honesty we need for connection and security. Sometimes reconciliation fails when the other person is not ready to have that level of conversation or that level of self-ownership.There is still a way to process this with grace and compassion, as much for yourself as it is for them. We cannot please our way to happiness, and we cannot hold space for the weakness in others forever without incurring a cost to our own projects of growth.  Sometimes we have to choose ourselves.This episode explores the way to find closure in that unfolding circumstance and how to Let Go and Walk Away. Anything that does not bring us alive, is too small for us. Goodbye, I cannot love you, because you never were a friend to me.Goodbye, I cannot keep you, because you were unsafe to yourself.Goodbye, I cannot care for you, because I cannot love you the way that you expect me to love. I can only love the way that is true in my heart, and for all the light I can wish into these eyes, I cannot see how you are true in yours. Goodbye,I cannot hold for you,Because you are weak in the placeswhere I choose to be defenceless.Goodbye,I cannot trust you, because you are so reliable, to be the same as this, on any day,when the wind stops blowing your way.So reliable, to raise the flags of victimhood when we should be taking turns, adjusting the sails, adjusting our course,and toiling at the oars. Goodbye.I cannot love you, because.Because you don’t care for my ’because’, and yours has taken up all the room in our shared harbour.Support the showSign up to my Substack: eyeswideopenlife.substack.comemail info@eyeswideopenlife.com