Brandi Stanley | How to Feel Alive While Living with the Duality of Darkness and Light

Brandi Stanley

Brandi, welcome to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Brandi Stanley

Thank you so much for having me. It's such an honor.

Srini Rao

Yeah, it is my pleasure to have you here. So I found out about you because you wrote in and I remember, you know, as we were just talking about before we hit record, looking at your trailer and thinking, okay, there's something about this that I can't quite explain. That makes me want to talk to you. But then I was just listening to, you know, the early part of one of your episodes with a freestyle rapper. And I thought to myself, if there's somebody who can figure out how to.

Brandi Stanley

I'm going to go to bed.

Brandi Stanley

Hmm.

Srini Rao

connect race relations, philosophy, and freestyle rap into a conversation. That is somebody that I want to talk to. But before we get into all of that, as you know from having heard the show, I'm going to ask you questions that have absolutely nothing to do with your work. What social group were you a part of in high school? And what impact did that end up having on what you've ended up doing with your life and career?

Brandi Stanley

Yeah.

Brandi Stanley

Love it.

Ha.

Brandi Stanley

Yeah, it's funny. I was listening to one of your other episodes recently and heard you ask the same question. I was like, wow, what a fascinating question. I think I would describe myself as not in with the popular crowd, but not totally separate. I could make friends with a lot of people pretty easily. But in terms of my solid group of friends, I'd call us the emo kids. Kind of weird. And maybe folks who saw some of the darker parts of life

struggling with what that looked like and you know struggling to get through high school in a way that felt Joyful and connected but not just not really in with the in crowd but you know a deep love for each other and

Srini Rao

What was your biggest personal struggle in high school?

Brandi Stanley

Oh man, yeah, I mean, I think the honest personal answer is I was having a lot of trouble at home. I think I grew up with an alcoholic parent and or a parent who was struggling with alcoholism and it was tough at home. And like my parents were having a hard time. I was an only child. And so I think school became a place where I sort of learned to put on a lot of masks and just sort of pretend like everything was okay.

and do what I could to sort of remain afloat. And so that was, like I was one of those kids, I'm sure, that showed up in class and was really smart. I think you never would have known something was going on under the surface, but some deeper stuff was going on. And so probably struggling with that. And I think finding people who were able to hang with that, and I think that's been a part of my story for a lot of my life, is who can hang with...

you know, the like dark underside and shadowy side of life and also not have it like completely consume them. And you know, I think the not completely consume me came like later in my maturity, but in high school, I think that was still, you know, who's able to like engage in truth and honesty and not something that feels like we're all just playing show to try to win favor, but like actually being real and honest with each other. So yeah.

Srini Rao

When you're that young and you're having to basically put on, you know, masks at school and put on this game face of everything is okay, I'm smart, life is great, and then, you know, at home you have this sort of polar opposite experience. How in the world do you have those two worlds coexist without losing your fucking mind?

Brandi Stanley

Yeah, I mean, it's pretty difficult. And I think that's even at 40 going on 41, I still, you know, I'm sure this will come up a lot because it's where I'm at right now. But like, I think that's still something that I'm struggling with is that like a learned existence of sort of, you know, it's like your typical sort of people pleasing story. Like there were a lot of not great sort of coping behaviors that I learned from that. And, you know, they did help me survive then.

And it did feel like the only way I could survive. Now it feels like a maladaptation. And so now I think I'm even part of launching the podcast and writing all the things that I write is a lot about me actually finally being willing to tell the ugly things, to grapple with complexity and nuance and paradox, to show that I'm not perfect, that

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Brandi Stanley

there's, you know, and hopefully in sort of displaying that, that it's, uh, it resonates with other people so that it opens them up and liberates them to do that as well. But yeah, I, um, I think it was how I survived and now it feels untenable and, or, you know, I think for the last like five to seven years has been pretty untenable and I've been working my way toward what it means to actually live a life of like full.

I think I'm a person who stands in their integrity pretty well and can't sustain lying. But when it comes to really fully telling the hard, ugly things, it's still a thing I'm practicing. So I think the short answer is it's not survivable. I think when you're younger, those things are how you survive. But eventually, when we become adults, it's not actually survivable. I think we actually have to grapple with that.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Srini Rao

Hmm.

Srini Rao

Yeah, you know, when you talk about coping mechanisms, I think of my own coping mechanisms in some of the most difficult and dark times of my life. And it was always figuring out ways that I could numb whatever I was feeling. Now, whether it's heartbreak, whether it's failure, it was just like, all right, I'm going to go smoke a cigarette or, you know, go drink. And, you know, those are my coping mechanisms. Curious, one, what were yours? But more importantly, like, why is it that we

Brandi Stanley

Yeah.

Brandi Stanley

Yep. Yeah.

Srini Rao

Struggle so much to actually live with this sort of darker side of ourselves and do whatever we can to suppress it Because it seems to me like letting it out is the only key to letting it go

Brandi Stanley

Yeah.

Yeah, and it's funny because I was thinking about, I'm going to skip ahead, so you'll force me here to answer it differently when you ask me at the end of the interview. But part of what I was thinking about in terms of what makes people unmistakable is, I think we have a really deep aversion to death in our culture and I think in people in general, so much so that we're afraid to actually live. And

I think that doesn't just mean like an actual physical death. I think most of life is, or at least a lot of early life, is allowing ourselves to actually die in a lot of ways. That's identity, it's ego, it's letting go of the things that do protect us. I loved your interview with El Luna. She quotes something from Joseph Campbell where she says, or he says that if you think you're falling, dive.

And I thought that was so powerful and profound, because I think any time any of us feel like we're falling, our tendency is to just like scratch and claw with everything that we can to stop the fall. And I think the people I love and respect and I'm drawn to most in the world are people who have actually allowed themselves to dive, or like their tendency when they were feeling the fall was to dive more often than not.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Brandi Stanley

because they were more interested in real healing than they were in sort of distraction and believing that they're OK, but actually continuing to use those distractions. And for me, you partly asked at the beginning in there what my distractions are. And I think I would currently say work, honestly. I think I'm going through a moment right now that looks a lot like I've just been hearing a lot about the heroines journey, interestingly enough, after.

quoting Joseph Campbell and heroines journey. I can't really quote it well, but I was hearing it on a podcast recently and the person being interviewed was sort of recounting all the steps in the heroines journey. And a lot of those early on look like using the hero's journey, like the success, the accolades, the validation and all of those things in a way that,

feel like they're reaffirming your identity. But once you actually find those things and you're starting to get them, that there's something inside of you that tells you, wait, I'm dying, though. This just still isn't working for me. And having to collapse that and go into another dark night of the soul, I guess, and grapple with those things. So yeah, I think work.

And also just like relationships, like asking other people to fill me in ways that I haven't actually truly dealt with in terms of my like probably honestly like a parental wounding, like I think we all have them in various ways. And for me, that's not getting the needs met. When I was a child, no blame on my parents at this point, like just really dealing with that in a mature way, but like really honestly seeing the way that I've operated in the world that actually is when I'm

Srini Rao

them.

Brandi Stanley

fully honest, something where I keep asking other things to fill a hole in me that should have been filled early on, but won't ever until I actually realize that the universe is for me, and I don't have to fill that with other people or work in general.

Srini Rao

Hmm. Yeah. It's funny because I mean, I've definitely turned to work as a coping mechanism, but, um, you, when you were talking about the dark night of the soul, I'm working on outlining this new narrative episode where we're basically putting together a bunch of clips for, you know, sort of your hero's journey to wisdom. And when you said that, I just like the graphic of, of this, you know, hero's journey flashed in my head. I'm like, wait a minute, there's no exit to the journey. It's circular. Like you keep going back through it over and over again.

Brandi Stanley

Hmm.

Brandi Stanley

Hmm.

Yeah, yeah, it's repeated.

Srini Rao

Yeah, it just that literally never occurred to me until this moment that your hero's journey never comes to an end

Brandi Stanley

Yeah, yeah, that's the yeah, I was hearing the interviewer of that podcast also just say like, you know, I also realized that every time I take on a new work project, it's me and my new like hero's journey. And I'm creating a container for the next phase of healing. And I think that's super real.

Srini Rao

Well, let's talk about that capacity to dive when you're falling. Um, you know, like you said, some people grasp, I think some people are just pushed over the cliff and have no choice. Um, like I think I definitely felt that it was just like, I've been fired from every job. So, you know, I'm, I'm being pushed off this cliff, whether I want to be, you know, down it or not. Um, but yeah, then there are those people who, like you said, will grasp. And how do you bridge the gap between your ability to grasp and the ability to dive?

Brandi Stanley

Yeah, yeah.

Brandi Stanley

Ha ha ha!

Brandi Stanley

Yeah, I don't know. I guess my current answer would probably be just from my own experience. I've been doing a lot of somatic work and somatic trauma healing. And I realized basically at some point that I've lived most of my existence in my brain. And I think that's also sort of the masculine hero's journey. We'll think our way to success and think our way to victory or whatever. But we've chopped off the other incredibly intuitive

extremely smart, well-adapted thing that we have in our toolbox, which is our bodies. And it was like, for years I've known that this was a problem and I've worked on it in various ways, but what I've realized is that despite the fact that I know what's real and where I want to be and who I want to be, my body is so caught in a...

sort of trauma pattern that looks like waking up every day and doing routine and just like forcing my way through everything. And I think that's part of why it's so fascinating to me because I think if you're going to ask sort of what my whole jam is in the world, it's talking about the idea of aliveness, you know, sort of through the lens of complexity and nuance and paradox and those things. But I think aliveness is it. And, you know, I think part of the reason for that is because, you know, it feels, yeah, like death when you're just sort of

living someone else's life and you're forcing yourself to wake up every day and do things you think you should do, which is part of why I love that El Luna episodes, you know, the crossroads of should and must. And you know, sometimes we get pushed off and sometimes we have to make the choice. And I think often we don't make that choice until it does become so untenable that it's impossible to live that way any longer. And I think that is also part of the heroines journey story arc. But yeah, I...

I guess I've started practicing what it is to feel safe in my own body because I realized that part of why I'm in that sort of loop where I feel like I'm forcing everything is that my body just doesn't actually feel safe. And so I keep, even if it's existentially or esoterically or, you know, intangibly in some way grasping for other people to help or fill a hole that exists in me.

Brandi Stanley

It's because I just don't feel safe in the world. And I think that is true for a lot of us. And so I think it takes really smart people who can help guide you through what it is to feel safe in your body, for me at least, to break that pattern. And so yeah, I've been doing a lot of somatic trauma healing and breathwork and other things that help calm my nervous system. Because once I do, I think.

you know, I will actually be able to like move forward in a way that is more in my must instead of in my should, if that makes sense.

Srini Rao

No. Yeah, absolutely. That's such an interesting way of putting it. I don't think I've ever heard anybody tell me they don't feel safe in the world. I mean, obviously based on what you've told me about the environment you grew up and it makes sense. How, I mean, how does that play out? Like, how does that manifest then, you know, in your life post high school, like what happened to, to get you to here?

Brandi Stanley

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I honestly think that that's a basis of a lot of our cultural reality right now is people who don't feel safe. We don't like, I think there is a tone of hypervigilance that we think, you know, this is part of what I talk about on my podcast also in terms of holding complexity and nuance is that we have largely created a world of black and whites because it feels safe. Like people are good or people are bad. And we have a hard time holding people who are both good and bad and all.

everything in between. And so, and I think that manifests in a lot of ways also in terms of our identity groups, in terms of the work that we're willing to do, and yeah, how we cut people out of our lives. And so, I mean, I think that has individually been how that has manifested for me also until recently, that I have a tendency to, when I feel like someone is a threat to me, and that does not mean they're like holding a knife at me, you know, it means like,

does this person believe something that I don't believe and does that mean it makes me unsafe because I will fall out with my own identity group? Does it mean, what does it say about me in the world if they believe something that I don't believe or have complex feelings about and I'm still in relationship with them? And so, yeah, I think it's manifested in sort of axing people out of my life until I got.

uh sort of practice enough at holding that complexity. I think it has looked like, like I said, I think a primary one for me is just like um

Srini Rao

Hmm.

Brandi Stanley

is filling my time, even though I'm a person who feels like I operate out of my must, or a lot of my life has been about not doing the standard job, doing stuff only if it feels meaningful to me, et cetera, et cetera. But I do feel like there's been a portion of it for me where I felt like just a leaf in the wind. If someone mentioned something, or if I could find community doing something that these people were doing, I would just fall into that. And then two years later, I'd be like,

wow, what just happened to my life? I don't feel fulfilled. I, you know, am I just going to jump? I have to jump to something else that's the next thing that someone else says is available to me instead of like actually, finally sort of doing something in my own real truth and taking the risk to, you know, this is where the like Julia Cameron's and then Steven Pressfield's and everybody of the world and El Luna even, you know, just sort of speaking to, yeah, starting to see.

For me, actually, I think aliveness became, I talk about this a lot. If you'll allow me just a second to describe, there's a sensation actually with aliveness that is the thing I'm searching for, that is my indicator of my must in the world. And that is basically, I can tell when I do things that I am energetically drained.

I can tell when I do other things that seem like I should be drained, but I'm actually so full of energy by the time I'm done with them that I could like sprint around the city. And that for me became a good indicator of what my must was. And that's actually a sense it's different than joy for me. Joy just feels sort of like a happiness or something, but a liveness felt like a somatic tangible sensation where I was either depleted of energy or I was filled with energy. And so

in terms of how it manifests in a bad way, in terms of, or bad's a judgment word, but you know what I mean? It looks like me doing things without actually seeing if my body is responding in a way that says yes, and just sort of forcing myself to do things that I think I should do. And so, yeah, I'm learning to sort of use aliveness and the energetic response I have in my body to sort of.

Brandi Stanley

be a compass toward the things that I should be doing or I want to be doing, I guess is a better way to phrase that. I think I answered your question somewhere in there. Ha ha ha.

Srini Rao

Yeah, no, you did, you did actually. I mean, naturally, of course, you raised a lot of other questions. I think that, you know, I appreciate one, what you said about sort of, you know, filling this hole. And I came to this realization at one point that we kind of talk about the societal definition of success as, you know, the nine to five job, you know, bullet points and a resume. And

Brandi Stanley

Right.

Srini Rao

I realized at some point that what we thought was our own definition of success is we just traded that one in for, you know, the internet, you know, celebrities version of success where it's like, Oh, be the digital nomad work for hours a week. It's like, that is still not your personal definition of success. That's a definite success definition that was handed to you by somebody, which, you know, I think, you know, it's interesting you bring up like, you know, using all this stuff to fill a void inside of us, right? Because I see what you mean.

Brandi Stanley

Yeah. Right.

Brandi Stanley

Yeah.

Brandi Stanley

Yeah.

Srini Rao

when I was younger, it was parental validation that I was, you know, trying to fill this void from. And I don't think that Danielle will report to me. She's like, I don't think we ever, you know, stop feeling that we want our parents to be proud of what we're doing. I mean, I, I'd be lying if, did to you, if I still told you that I don't still feel this need. Yeah, very much.

Brandi Stanley

Ahem.

Brandi Stanley

Yeah.

Brandi Stanley

Mm.

Brandi Stanley

Yeah. I mean, that's a cultural thing for you too. Like that's just so ingrained in who you are, I'm sure.

Srini Rao

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But then, you know, the idea that it is kind of a paradox, right? You're going into self improvement or, you know, spiritual communities to heal yourself, to help yourself and to get better. And yet, the irony or the paradox, of course, is that you're using that to fill the void. How do you break that cycle? Because like that's one thing I realized at a certain point was like,

Brandi Stanley

Yeah.

Brandi Stanley

Yeah.

Srini Rao

Okay, I think it was when I walked into the Boulder bookstore and I went upstairs, I think you know what section I'm talking about, and I was looking around at the self-improvement section, like, why the fuck do I feel like I've read every book on this shelf? Yeah, like, I don't need anything here anymore, you know?

Brandi Stanley

Yep. Every single one of these.

Yeah. A part of my sort of interesting recent story is that, um, you know, I've, I've dealt with chronic illness in various forms for the last, like, um, at least 10 to 12 years. And so I've been on like a long hunt to sort of see how I can, I can get at the root causes of those illnesses and, or the symptomatic experience of what I feel every day of my life and largely like fatigue, brain fog. Um,

thyroid issues, gut problems, a lot of things that are actually present in common culture right now also, but I have like really felt at a very strong level for over a decade. And very recently, I sort of, you know, this local group of friends that I have here, someone in that group also has experienced chronic illness for a really long time and she stumbled upon something that it felt like it might be a pretty decent root cause to throw some real effort behind.

And so I did a thing which was, I had owned a house in Denver for six years and I decided to sell it in order to what I call save my life, which was sort of for the first time ever really like putting all of my full force behind healing and also like really truly doing this like writing and podcast work, like more of my purpose work for the first time in my life and sort of doing it full time or.

just really taking this year off. I sold the house, I'm renting for a year. And I was like, I'm just going to heal and I'm just going to do work. That's important to me. And it was interesting because as soon as I got that money from the house sale and I had a chance like I'd never had before, I think, I'm sure you resonate with this, but I spent a lot of my career as someone who either gets, I don't know, I think I've been fired once, but it was from like a religious institution or.

Brandi Stanley

college that didn't want me in their marketing department anymore because I was too, um, I was too outspoken. Um, I asked, I asked too many questions, but other than that, um, yeah, I've, I've mostly just chosen to do, like, I've been a freelancer. Like I do work generally that brings me mostly, you know, a lot of joy, but also mostly doing it to keep me financed. And yeah, it was the first time that I really was like.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Brandi Stanley

I'm actually going to do the thing that feels like if I don't do this before I die, I would feel really disappointed with myself and try my own artistic path. And instead of like supporting other people's artistic path, because I basically realized at some point that I had wound up sort of second in line to every company I ever worked for. So I was like the right hand person to the person at the top.

And at some point, like a few years in, every time, I would get to know the company enough that I think I could do it better, which is both arrogant and also just an indicator that I should be doing my own thing. And so this was the first time, though, that I was like, OK, it just takes a lot of bravery to actually be the fall guy, to be the person at the top who is willing to do their artistic thing. So I started when I first got the money, and for this first time ever.

had sort of a flux of cash and decided I was going to basically tackle my health the same way that I think I do work, which was at some point, I realized that I had like eight healing appointments in a week, every week. And I was so exhausted by it. And I realized basically that I was healing the same way that I got sick, that I was just doing and doing and doing, and realized too that at some point, again, it's sort of that model of thinking like,

I was outsourcing my healing to other people. I was like, everyone else can fix me. I'm trying to find all the people who can fix me. And realizing that the root of it was that I was sick. And I probably had my own healing stuff. And so like a lot of other sort of spiritual, philosophical leaning people that I'm friends with, I think we have a tendency to do the self-help. Read every book. Attend every class. Drop $10,000 on coaching. Drop $20,000 on a retreat. Do all these things. But at the end of the day, like a.

on quite honestly, like I'm doing right now, I think is actually the only thing that is the right answer, at least for me, which is to fully stop because I just realized at some point that, um,

Brandi Stanley

Any like until I actually heal some sort of underlying wound that says that I have to constantly be doing in order to survive, whether that's it like you're saying, I do a great job of looking like I'm healing by basically by doing all the things that are a checklist of stuff that you should be doing if you're healing, like therapy and massage and bodywork of all sorts and breath work and whatever it is.

and classes and I don't know, Allen-On meetings or something. I can do all those things, but really, I started realizing not just that I was outsourcing, but yeah, it was taking my autonomy and my own empowerment away. Because it put me into a place of desperation. And I think a lot of people who deal with chronic illness get to this place where they think, oh my god, for me, here's a practical example. I would.

Like food is a good story where one person tells you can eat this, the next person tells you can't, the next person tells you that you should work out in the morning, the next person tells you that you should never work out in the morning, that's bad for your leptin levels. There's just a never-ending string of people that have an opinion about what you should be doing in terms of healing your health. And it's so complex and so difficult to feel like you just don't know what.

the right answer is. And so you keep trying to sort of find person after person who will be the person who heals you. And as it turns out, healing is within side you. And for me, I think I've just gotten to a place where I realized it's almost like I can't work and I can't do any healing other than literally stopping and just shutting everything down. Like today, like as of now, my life looks primarily like.

Srini Rao

them.

Brandi Stanley

waking up in the morning, eating some things, going on a long walk, reading, swimming a bit maybe, and the day is over. And it sounds really lovely, but it's actually quite difficult to be in that much silence and to strip so much away.

Srini Rao

Wow.

Srini Rao

That would drive me fucking crazy.

Brandi Stanley

Yeah, it's pretty difficult. But for me, yeah. Yeah, that's totally fair. And I don't necessarily recommend it for everybody. But for me, it felt like the healing modality. Because, yeah, even I had friends recently, these same friends who shot my podcast trailer, who, like I went on a walk with a couple of them a few weeks ago. And they told me a hard thing, which good friends do, which was.

Srini Rao

As an ADD person, I would lose my mind if I had to spend a day describing what you just did.

Srini Rao

hahahaha

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Brandi Stanley

Like I was asking them basically to talk to me about what they thought my purpose was. And I feel like generally I've sort of found the why behind what I do and a lot of the sort of how I think, you know, in terms of, yeah, I make connections between things a lot and I do it for the purpose of talking about aliveness and, you know, through the lens of.

nuance and complexity and paradox and those things, but I just didn't know how like what I did. Like is it writing? Am I a book author? Am I a speaker? Am I a like should I just go be a pastor? I have like genuinely no idea. So can we talk about this? And at the end of the talk, my friend Kyle was just like, Brainy, I think you've actually probably already found everything that you need to know. But at the end of the day.

you make everything into work. It doesn't matter if it's pleasure for you. You could make the most fun thing into work with zero effort. And so, yeah, it's sort of speaking again to this underlying issue I'm having that I believe that all life is supposed to be struggle, and I have to force my way through things, and I have to earn my way to acceptance, and I have to earn my way to success, and I have to earn my way to everything has to be hard.

And I think that's a thing I learned generationally. That's how my parents operated, and I'm sure that's how their parents operated. And so for me, I literally, even in doing this passion work, the writing and the podcast, I have realized at such a painfully acute place, or in a cute way, that unless I stop, even that has become a task to me. It feels draining to me.

And until I actually start operating in a place that feels filled in and of myself and that other people don't need to fill the wound and that I don't make, I just rip away basically the underlying belief that all life is suffering, which I think is a beautiful part of Buddhism. But for me at the moment is not my growth edge. My growth edge is actually believing that the universe.

Brandi Stanley

wants us to be alive. Like, if, you know, Andreas Weber, who's on my podcast, is part of the impetus of like, or the catalyst for me, of really sort of thinking through this idea of aliveness. And in biology, like his whole thing is like, all life trends toward more life. Like everything actually wants to be more and more alive in nature. And so until I actually like, physically understand that in my body, I have to stop, essentially. And so I've put...

I'm about to partly go on a bit of a hiatus, if not a full break from my podcast. And I've been taking a break from my writing for a while, which is, you know, like you, you know that if you've been doing something you really care about in the world, it's even more difficult to actually put it down. It's pretty scary actually. But yeah, that's, I don't know, it's a long way of saying that was the answer for me.

Srini Rao

Bye!

I mean, my first break from doing this show, the month when I didn't record a single interview was after, you know, 13 years was last month, last in June, just the past month. And I didn't realize that until I went on the vacation and I was like, Oh my God, I literally have not taken a break since we started the show. There's something you said, I think that really struck me.

Brandi Stanley

Yeah, that's a long time friend.

Srini Rao

There are two things, right? You mentioned this idea of energetically, you know, things that drain you energetically or things that fill you up energetically, and then the idea that, you know, good friends will tell you hard things. So this is something that I have thought a lot about over the past couple of months, because, you know, so often what, you know, the things that we turn to, to heal, do is they make us feel good, but they aren't necessarily good for us. And I.

Brandi Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Brandi Stanley

here.

Brandi Stanley

Yeah.

Srini Rao

You know, my mentor, Greg, rode my ass when we worked together. I mean, there were days when he like pushed me to the point of like, you know, me wanting to hit him in the face. Um, and it took me a long time to realize that often what you want to hear feels good, but what you need to hear is actually good for you. And, um, I'm just curious, you know, based on that, cause I think that so often people will take that idea of, Oh, this is energetically draining or this is, you know, filling you up energetically.

them feel good, they will discount the value of. And to your point, like you said, it's only, you know, nobody who doesn't give a shit will tell you the things that you don't necessarily want to hear about are good for you. Your parents will do that. Your close friends will do that.

Brandi Stanley

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, this is an important question. Yeah.

Brandi Stanley

Right.

Srini Rao

And I was just talking to my friend Sam Dogen, and I remember we both started our blogs at the same time, and I brought up an article that he wrote that pissed me off years ago. And I remember this was like, I thought Sam was kind of a dick at that time, is my opinion. And he knew instantly what I was talking about. And I told him, I said, Sam, you know what? I said, I'm not pissed off now because I didn't have the emotional maturity to then to realize the reason that actually pissed me off was because you probably pointed out something that had a grain of truth to it, and I didn't want to hear it.

Brandi Stanley

Yeah, yeah.

Srini Rao

So, I mean, what do you make of that? I mean, how do you, you know, speaking of duality, you have this thing that is quote unquote, energetically fills you up, but I don't necessarily think that means that it makes you feel good.

Brandi Stanley

Yeah.

Brandi Stanley

Yeah.

Brandi Stanley

Yeah, no. Yeah, and I'm still learning how to articulate this well. But actually, my interview with Andreas Weber does a good job of sort of digging into this with him, where we've both sort of realized through different means that it's not just like a hedonistic, do whatever you want, pleasure is the height of all experience. First of all, I think I love what he has to say, which is that.

It's not aliveness at the expense of others' aliveness. So we always are in context of community. So if my aliveness means that community becomes less alive, and I use community very liberally in my own life. So that's literally the land outside my door, under my feet. It's the cat that lives in my house. It's my friendships. It's my dating partners. It's my work. I am in a relationship with my work. If all of those things.

uh, aren't brought more alive by my choices than, and you know, I don't know that it's like a hundred percent of the time, but like the goal is always a liveness of the individual and a liveness for the community. So I think it's at least a good measure to when you're making a decision and, and considering that energetic spike, you know, is this impacting other people in a way that doesn't also bring them more alive? And I think the other.

that I talk about in that interview from my perspective was just, you know, I think we're a culture that for the first time ever has a language of attachment theory and, you know, a lot of therapeutic language that a lot of our other, you know, previous generations didn't have. And knowing attachment theory, you know, I was sort of discussing with Andreas that often I, dating is a sort of better, like the most resonant way I think to speak about this, because it's where I think a lot of our attachment issues are most triggered.

And for me, I was sort of saying, I often find someone, I think, that gives me that sort of energetic spike. And I think this is it. But I realize it's actually, on reflection, it actually weirdly happened somewhere differently in my body. It is a spike, but it feels sort of in my chest, and it feels a bit frenetic. And it is exciting, but I think is actually sort of my trauma wound.

Brandi Stanley

telling me like, this is a person who's gonna trigger you the same way that your parental wounding does. And so I have learned to sort of realize in that way that it's not just, is this making me feel good? It's like, for me actually, the right answer is weirdly or like right under my rib cage. Like I feel sort of in my stomach, like a grounding. It feels like weighted, but in a, in, I don't know how to describe it other than just like a.

a pleasant way, but not in an anxiety. It doesn't live in my head or my chest or my throat or something. It doesn't feel like it's buzzing. It feels like it's just solid. And so, yeah, it's like a.

I don't know. I mean, stimulants maybe. Let's talk about coffee. Maybe that's a good way to put it. So when you drink certain stimulants, you know that you're spiked with energy, but it's a false sense of energy. Like it dips down pretty quickly. It happens, yeah, usually also in a different part of your body that feels pretty sort of frenetic and buzzy. But when you have sustained energy, when you're nourished deeply by something,

And I also use nourishment very liberally across everything, basically. It's the food we eat. It's the work we do. It's the relationships we're in. Are we genuinely nourished? Nourishment means I'm not eating empty calories to feel like, the number of things you have to eat, if they're sort of empty calorically, is a lot. Like the number of things that you have to watch and media in order to feel actually fulfilled is a stupidly endless amount of media. Like the number of relationships you have to maintain in order to feel

actually nourished and sustained is a stupid amount of relationships. When you actually dip into the things that truly nourish you and give you real sustained energy, there's very little you need. There's so little you need. So for me, I think I've started to see it that way. Does this truly nourish me? Is this a real? And again, real is hard to define, but like.

Brandi Stanley

For me, again, it sort of happens in my body. I can tell, like, am I genuinely nourished by this? Or do I feel like I'm just finding one more thing after another, after another, after another to sustain me instead of doing two things and feeling so deeply nourished and connected? Like, I'm able to actually, and that's why I think it's so deeply connected to culturally and individually, like, our energetic feeling of safety. That if I actually feel safe and grounded and.

truly connected in a way that nourishes me. My body and my nervous system are calmed. The right sympathetic things are turned on in my body. Or I always forget which one is parasympathetic and which one is sympathetic. But whichever one is the correct one that is the actual calming and not in fight or flight, that feels so differently than it does when I'm choosing things that.

aren't actually that fulfilling to me, or that sustaining, or that nourishing.

Srini Rao

Wow. That was poetic. I mean, it's funny because I've been, you know, trying to articulate my thoughts on this blog post that I'm writing titled, Why Reading Self-Improvement Books Won't Improve Your Life. And you kind of summed it up. I mean, you gave it to me. I realized what it is. It's empty calories.

Brandi Stanley

Hahaha

Brandi Stanley

Yeah, yeah, that's the deal. That's why I think that's such a powerful way to put it, because I think that's where we are. Part of my podcast, again, sort of the connecting everything to me is like, the way you do one thing is the way you do everything else, basically, that whole phrase. It similarly happens across everything that happens around us and within us. So what's happening with the land is happening inside of me. What's happening in culture and health

Srini Rao

Hmm.

Brandi Stanley

fields is happening inside of me. And vice versa, what's happening to me is happening elsewhere. And so if our soil is being depleted in the world because it's actually becoming dust, essentially, then the food I eat is actually low in nourishment. And then I eat it, and I have to eat so much more of it in order to be actually filled. And it's just a never-ending.

empty calorie thing is a metaphor, I think, that applies to basically everything that we're doing right now. And I think our deepest healing really as a culture and as individuals right now is to look at the things that are actually deeply nourishing us and to choose those.

Srini Rao

Yeah, I mean, it's funny because I when you were talking about this, it's right as you were talking about coffee. I was like, I'm you know, bread. As you said that I was like, well, I just reached for my coffee to take a sip of this. But it got me thinking there was there was a review we got on iTunes and to this day, this was my what I considered the most complimentary iTunes review I've ever received. And it was a person who said there's no feel good fluff on this show. I was like, that to me was like the ultimate compliment. And

Brandi Stanley

Hmm.

Brandi Stanley

Hmm.

Srini Rao

That was my whole sort of idea is like no bullshit personal development. And I, you know, it takes me back to the part of the conversation where we were talking about one person will tell you eat this, another person will say eat that. Um, and this is something I've been harping on lately a lot, uh, because I, when we were doing the interviews for my first book, there's something I said, this phrase I probably said a hundred times in an interview. I said, we could have just as easily called the book, everybody is full of shit because that's what I said. Um, I just said it in a really diplomatic way.

Brandi Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

And it made me think, you know, so my next idea for a book was basically, you know, a book titled, Everybody is full of shit, including me. And this is something I will often say. In fact, I almost always preface it when I sit down with people who, you know, are I'm teaching in a class. I will tell them first off.

Brandi Stanley

Yeah.

Srini Rao

First thing I want you to know is to consider the possibility that everything I'm telling you is bullshit because it might be for you. And that I think is where we, you know, kind of missed the boat in our culture is that we take guidance as we treat guidance as gospel.

Brandi Stanley

Right. Yeah.

Brandi Stanley

Yeah, I also think that the other side of that coin is that a lot of people, a lot of people, are doing. So part of my story between high school and now, I guess, is that I spent basically nearly 20 years in Brandi Stanleyng and marketing. And before, I have this whole story about how I actually shut down online coaching, marketing coaching business in order to finally start the work I wanted to be doing, which is what I'm doing now.

But part of that, running that marketing coaching business, is it like the number of people who come to me to be like, I hate marketing. I hate it. Like why I don't like social media, I don't like any of these things, et cetera, et cetera. And I think it's, there are parts of those. Those are tools. And all tools can be used for good or for bad, basically, or better or worse, or whatever the case may be. And you know.

So it's like not to shit on any of those things in particular or advice in general. But it's that so many people feel like they have to be producing all the time. And again, it's empty calories that we just keep also putting out in the world. And so yeah, I think 95% of it or something, I'm just throwing a random number on there. But a huge majority of it is actually

Srini Rao

Heheheheh

Brandi Stanley

Like we were just saying things because we think we're supposed to say things. I tell you again, as a marketing person, I think you could do one thing every six months. And if you were actually deeply nourished by it, you felt like it was nourishing to other people. You were connected to it in a way that was profound. It was like one of El Luna's musts, where if you had to say it, you couldn't. She has that description in your interview with her, where she talks about the flow through a pipe.

where when she first started actually painting, that it was like someone had spent most of her life with the top of that pipe, with water gushing through it, just constricted. And that's what we learn as children and later as adults, to just constrict that flow more and more, because it's too scary not to. The flow of energy can be overwhelming. But once she did, she just couldn't stop painting. And not being able to stop doing something, because you're so compelled by it,

is an incredibly different energy than, ugh, I have to post three times today to Instagram. And so I'm just gonna make up some bullshit that I think is important, and I'm gonna say that. And I'm not saying that all of it's black or white, of course, as someone who deeply cares about nuance and complexity, but so much of it is that we feel like we have to rather than, if I don't say that, I can't stop from saying the things that I actually care about.

And so, yeah, I think the other part of it is just, we just feel like we have to. We've been told some sort of shit story about how we're supposed to work, how often we're supposed to work, how much we're supposed to produce, what kinds of things we're supposed to produce, what we're supposed to say when we produce those things. And most of it is just because we think we're supposed to. Instead of like, have I actually taken the time to deeply consider what I want to be doing? And beyond that, like, what I can't

stop doing. And that, to me, is the feeling of aliveness. It doesn't mean that I'm walking around all the time just constantly in this energetic feeling of just water flowing through me. But the more you practice it, I think the more that becomes real. And sometimes it's strong, and other times it's not, because nature works in cycles. We don't have to be producing and flowing at all times. That's a whole different sort of tangent of that. But yeah, I think the more that we're actually deeply connected to ourselves and

Brandi Stanley

the stuff that compels us, it's like we can't stop the flow. And that's just so, so different than what most content that we're reading or advice that we're given these days is.

Srini Rao

I think that is a really sort of fitting into what has been a really interesting conversation because I feel like you and I could probably talk for five hours about this.

Brandi Stanley

Oh, I'm sure.

Srini Rao

So I want to finish with my final question, which I know you've heard me ask. What do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable?

Brandi Stanley

Yeah, so I mean like I said earlier, I think a lot of this is the, you know, when you feel like you're fall... the people who are willing to dive when they feel like they're falling, sort of reiterate that quote from Elle. But yeah, I think like you know the people who have been willing to do the scary thing in order to do what matters because failure... Yeah, failure feels different when...

I mean, it's definitely more scary and vulnerable when you do the thing that's scary or vulnerable, you know, when you do the thing that matters to you. But the people who have actually confronted their own darkness, I actually this morning I was reading Robert McFarland, he has a book called Underland. And there's this quote where he says, what these, he'd been talking about sort of all these narratives of people who were like.

digging underground and finding things that were under the earth, basically, and stuff that's in the darkness. And he says, what these narratives all suggest is something seemingly paradoxical, that darkness might be a medium of vision, and that dissent may be a movement toward revelation rather than deprivation. And so I think for me, it's the people who actually understand some level of like, life is actually through...

through an experience of death and the people who are willing to do that, like you said, and the hero's journey, like over and over and over again, and to stand in their own integrity without, like really it's, you know, again, sort of the, a different way to say it from what we've been talking about is that like, you've got nothing to prove when you realize that all of life is a gift. The whole thing, nature operates on gift. You've been given gifts to give, and when you don't give those, you're sort of constricting that flow, and, you know.

Srini Rao

Thanks for watching!

Brandi Stanley

that all things that you need are gifted toward you also. And when you realize that you live in a universe that's built on gift, you don't really have anything to prove. You get to just live a life of aliveness and joy and connection and peace that's very different than if you just keep scrambling and crawling your way to avoid the pain and darkness and shadow side of all the things that make you feel like you have absolutely anything to prove in this world.

Srini Rao

Wow. Okay. Well, um, I think that is such a beautiful way to finish our conversation. Um, probably one of my favorite answers I've ever heard to that question. Um, well, I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your insights and your wisdom with our listeners. Where can people find out more about you, your work and everything that you're up to?

Brandi Stanley

Wow, what an honor.

Brandi Stanley

Yeah, so like I said, I'm putting a large stop to a lot of things I'm doing right now, but I hope that others will still know that when I feel resourced and connected enough to like actually come out of my own darkness in order to give what I'm here to give more of, they will already start following me. So they know that I'll come out when I'm ready. But my website is thisplusthat.com and my podcast is This Plus That.

And it's all, I do a lot of writing and yeah, the podcast is sort of at its core about connecting the seemingly unconnectable and why that's so important. And yeah, so I make weird connections between weird things and talk to other people who have sort of hopped across disciplines or who are holding complexity in their own lives so that we can all sort of practice holding complexity and nuance and paradox in ourselves.

So yeah, and then I guess on, I mean, I'm on social media very lightly currently, but this plus that pod on Instagram and Twitter primarily and YouTube also. I've got a YouTube channel with video.

Srini Rao

Okay, awesome, awesome. Amazing, and for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that.