PRIVATE: LE Member Update. Network Power! Mollie Adler Event & MOODS app offer.
Please welcome Mike Trihy and Tod Perkins (intros below)
THREE HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE NETWORK MAP PROJECT. Thanks so much for going to the effort of filling out your network maps in KayOS. I always knew we'd built something special, but it's nice to have some data to back up the vibes. PLEASE DON'T THINK OF THIS AS SOMETHING THAT NOW NEEDS TO BE CONTINUOUSLY UPDATED, THIS IS AT MOST AN ANNUAL EXERCISE!
- The average member has met 33 others; more than double what you'd see in most professional communities. The median is also close to the average (28.5 vs 33) which means connection density is distributed throughout the community.
- Of all possible connections in a 150-person network (10,878), nearly 25% now exist. For comparison, most professional networks have density under 5%.
- Out of 2,452 total connections in the network, 1,152 connections (47%) are between other members; relationships that don't involve me at all. So the community has taken on wholly independent life outside of me. A whopping 16 other members have reached 60+ connections; relationships with 40%+ of the community! And this only tracks one single meeting when many of you have met each other more than 10+ times.
I'm so proud of this, and I love you all for helping me build Leading Edge.
🚨🚨LE EXCLUSIVE OFFER! Via synchronicities through all of Jason Karp, Devin Martin, Scott Shadian and Dan Lawrence I've been connected to a popular podcaster called Mollie Adler of Back from the Borderline. She's developed the MOODS app that focuses on dream interpretation and tarot readings. I get pitched one of these AI-for-self analysis wrappers at least once a week and never send them to you all because they suck. But I've been using this one for a couple of weeks for daily dream interpretation (I'm going through a big dreamwork stage) and I'm doing occasional tarot readings. And honestly, I've just been shocked at how good it is. She wants feedback and ideally support from communities like ours, so I asked her for a 50% discount. (I said that we should pay something because I believe in paying for good things energetically). If you sign up for the free trial after that, you'll get 50% off with code: LEADINGEDGE...
... NEW PRIVATE ZOOM (Thursday 30th July at 11am ET) In 2 weeks Mollie's going to take us through a private session telling her own remarkable story of breakdown and recovery. Her framing around "emotional alchemy" is more of a spoken map of seven different stages than anything more traditionally self-help. I think it's much more true to the incredibly messy experience that many of us undertake in necessary life transitions, and Mollie is uniquely qualified to talk to us all about it. We will also be discussing what she has been building in the MOODS app and how people in the Leading Edge might be able to interact with it in productive ways. For more background, if you want to prepare in advance, this is her Emotional Alchemy episode as recommended by Fernando Alday. Add to Calendar.
**Tickets are now NEARLY SOLD OUT for the LE Summit in NYC September 17-18 at Midtown Loft and Terrace. Buy your ticket here.
**If you'd like to present at the summit for 30-45 minutes, please let me know!
Upcoming Member-Only Events (REMEMBER THE CALENDAR IS ALWAYS AVAILABLE IN KAYOS)
- Thursday 30th July at 11am ET. NEW PRIVATE ZOOM: Emotional Alchemy and Jung with Mollie Adler. See above. Add to calendar.
- August 19th at 11 AM ET. LE Member Connect. Please attend these if at all possible. It helps keep our community together. If you have never attended one of these before, please make time specifically if you are new to the community. Add to Calendar.
- *LE SUMMIT NYC: Evening of September 17 to full day 18th: BUY YOUR TICKET HERE.*
- Thursday, October 1st at 7 p.m. IRL EVENT: LE Denver Dinner. We are now up to 5 members in Denver and Boulder, hope you can make it!
- Thursday, October 15th at 7pm. IRL EVENT: LE Austin Dinner. As it's now one of our largest cities, I want to come down and see the Austin crew. Add to Calendar.
Community/ WhatsApp Chat Highlights:
Tim Bragassa asked the group what we had been doing to help ourselves receive love. Ian Laming's response was so amazing it deserves full reproduction here.
Hi Tim, I can’t offer any advice, but I can explain what happened with me and what I believe as a result.
I don’t think we give or receive love. I think we get to a “place” where love can flow through us.
I think that place can be “manufactured” – through psychedelics esp in a therapeutic setting, being with certain people, being in nature, cuddling a dog (I love Matt’s example) etc etc – and I think in all these situations we feel totally safe, our guard is totally down, and love can flow freely through us in all directions. But it tends to be temporary.
I also think we can get there “naturally” by going into our bodies and working on our misguided beliefs, our negative narratives, and diving into our pain rather than resisting it (shadow work, IFS parts conversations etc etc). Learning how to ground, and go into the body has been key for me. The more I have done "the work", the more I have come to understand and radically accept all parts of myself and all parts of reality. Isik Tlabar and Daniel Thorson in particular have been my guides on this journey and have literally changed my life. This community serves as a daily reminder of everything I have come to understand. Huge love and gratitude to everyone !
The “added bonus” for me was that when love started to flow through me, I also felt acceptance of everything and everyone, not just myself. I saw (for the first time) that we’re all connected, all intimate, all co-creating together. I think the two things (radical self-acceptance and realizing everything is connected) are intimately drawn to each other. I believe they’re ultimately inseparable, and it doesn’t really matter whether you start with the realization we are all connected and are drawn inexorably towards radical self-acceptance, or you go the other way round like I did.
The “end state” is similar whether you take the manufactured or natural route: you feel totally accepted, totally safe and totally connected, and love flows freely through you. That said, my personal experience is that the “natural route” has given me a duration, a consistency, a familiarity and a depth of “felt sense” such that I find it much easier to get to that “place” and stay there for longer periods of time, than through a "manufactured" route. I've also found that the speed with which I can move from “trigger”/”suffering”/ ”pain” to love flowing freely through me, accelerated dramatically when I arrived naturally. I am not at the point where it’s instant, except perhaps with my wife where I can go from “WTF !#?!” to “OMG, I feel so much love flowing through me right now” in a handful of seconds.
One person explained it well. "It" is always there. Always. "It" is what one person might call the Divine, another Consciousness, the Beloved, Mother Earth, another Intuition, another might call it Love, another might say Source, another Diamond Luminosity etc etc. (FWIW, I consider it an energetic field called Love). Whatever the label, it is always there, but there’s often a self-imposed hedge in front of you, blocking your view. You can catch glimpses of Love from time to time through the hedge. Sometimes you can be a little dormouse and crawl through the thicket hedge and see a bit more (I’d call that psychedelics or nature etc). But if you are lucky enough to be guided to radical self-acceptance naturally , by gifted teachers, then the hedge disappears a lot more, and for longer, and the love energy floods through you more often.
For me, the next phase is to see where this radical self-acceptance and non-duality understanding takes me in terms of my daily life. I know that when intimacy, connection and co-creativity are present, then I’m in my “zone”, and my actions feel aligned with whatever it means to be "living one’s purpose". The outcomes become irrelevant, or at least the desire to “know” what the outcomes will be becomes irrelevant, because I have faith when I’m in the “zone” that everything will be OK because I’m operating from a place of love. I’m taking baby steps each day and seeing where it goes. FWIW, I have ended up doing things that a few years ago would have been inconceivable to me.
There are lots of concepts I had to learn, lots of beliefs I had to unlearn, lots of steps I had to take to “build” the ability to get to that end state of love flowing through me more and more. And there are lots of tools and practices and rituals that I need to use regularly to keep myself open to love flowing freely. I can, and do, slip back a lot. But I find I can get back to love faster and faster these days. I can say with certainty that all these tools, practices, teachers worked for me. And I’d be happy to share any of that with you Tim in the hope that some or all of it might resonate for you too. ❤️
In one of the stranger things to happen since the founding of Leading Edge, Bubba Grimsley (Pensacola) and Jon Mistler (LA) ran into each other walking along the streets of Barcelona.
Fresh from appearing in The Guardian, we had our superstar neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff in the New York Times!
We had yet another Leading Edge member birth a book. Adrian Jones (AJ) tells his own life story that will be very familiar to many of us. If you're moved, please offer it your support by buying and reviewing once you've read it. Powered by Authenticity: What Nearly Dying Twice Taught Me About Really Living Before It's Too Late...
....There are times when it seems the whole group is coalescing around a single theme. For the last few weeks, it has been authenticity. I’ve recently enjoyed Founder Lost and Self Found by Bob Gilbreath, My Disclosure Day by friend of LE Ben Katt where he reveals the reawakening of a dormant consciousness capacity in himself; the surprising ability to speak “light language.”
...And Jeff Williams' The Hour Is Later Than You Think: “The whole point of Earth School is learning how to become the fullest possible expression of a human being.” I also wrote my own piece on how inspirational earth school has been to me.
Our very own CMO Jeff Williams is stepping out into the spotlight he deserves on Ian Laming's Do Radio. He joins LE luminaries on the show like Daniel Thorson, Emily Lane, Eric Markowitz, Ali Khan, William Oliver and Isik Tlabar.
Chief People Officer Dave Ross (Happy Birthday!), appeared on the Your Tru Awakening podcast with the topic "Stop Thinking, Start Creating."
Justin Castelli hosted close to 20 of his teenage son's teammates and friends at his house for a talk about mindset. Here's the recording, which is worth watching.
Diana Stobo and her daughter Samantha were featured on Good Morning America about the wholesome trend of older children moving in with their parents for the right reasons.
Our nervous system expert Jonny Miller has recently introduced me to latch theory. It turns out that Michael Edward Johnson, the man who has developed it, has actually had a conversation with Dr. Michael Levin, another Leading Edge obsession. I think this conversation is interesting because it speaks to a potential biological mechanism for trauma and shadow held in the body.
Will Oliver highlighted an interview by Richard Rudd on the gene keys (popular self-understanding system in LE) that was interesting for its focus on not holding too tightly to any maps, even his own.
New member introductions.
- Mike Trihy, (Denver, Colorado). Good to meet you all and thanks Tom for bringing me in! My day job is managing a fund focused on growth stage private investing - also a father of 3 kids under 6 so things are chaotic! Other interests are all over the place - my journey in recent years has been heavy on dreamwork and jungian thinking following a pretty crazy spiritual experience that took some time to integrate a while back. Alongside that lots of creative work (painting, music production), meditation, shadow work, a bit of somatic work although still very new to this. I’m Denver based so also into stereotypical Colorado stuff (trail running, skiing/snowboarding etc). Plus love music always open to share/receive new stuff (dj sets, tracks, etc). Can already tell from the above snippet of conversation that I will enjoy the topics here , have had my own dark night experience for a bit. I look forward to connecting with more of you in the coming weeks!
- Tod Perkins (NYC). My current interests are around non-traditional approaches to helping people with neuro-diversity, the power of neuroplasticity and exploring the levels of consciousness. I really look forward to meeting any and all of you on here
