When we have a challenge or problem in our lives it can seem obvious to focus on that problem in order to solve it. But what if finding the solutions to problems – like an overeating habit – didn’t involve this kind of approach at all?




Ian Watson’s work as an educator is to provide education and training that doesn’t just inform, but which empowers, heals and transforms. For it is only through your own insightful realisation that deep and lasting positive change occurs.



He works mainly with groups, and sometimes with individuals. His intention is always the same – to remind you of what you already know to be true deep inside, but may have temporarily forgotten. To help you reconnect with the source of your own wisdom, wellbeing and innate self-healing capacity. To come home to your true Self.




You can find Ian Watson at TheInsightSpace.com.



You can listen above, on your favorite podcast app, or watch on YouTube. Notes, links, resources and a full transcript are below. 



Show Notes




Observing in patients that healing seemed to come from somewhere mysterious



How feeling better can become an ongoing pursuit when we don’t understand the source of peace



How we don’t need to work on our issues



How insight is the only catalyst for change



How we live in a thought created experience



Why working on our issues is counterproductive



How our symptoms are never a nuisance or something to get rid of




Transcript of Interview with Ian Watson



Alexandra: Ian Watson, welcome to Unbroken.



Ian: Very nice to be here. Thanks for inviting me.



Alexandra: Oh, my pleasure. So why don’t you give us a little background?



Tell us a bit about yourself and how you came to came across the Three Principles.



Ian: I really have followed my own interests, which took me initially into alternative healing. As a teenager, I started with Bach flower remedies. And that led me into herbs and homeopathy. Homeopathy became my career for at least 15 years, I was a practitioner.



Also, I became interested in the training side. So I started running a homeopathy training school, wrote some books became reasonably well known, I suppose, in that field, and assumed that would be my life’s work really. I love homeopathy still do.



To my surprise, working with a lot of clients over time, I started to see that sometimes people come with a physical health problem. But it turns out to be the entry ticket. And there’s other things going on which once you get to know the person, as you will know, they start to reveal more about what their internal struggles are the other things going on with that in their life. I started to feel that there were other ways that I’d like to help people but I didn’t know what they were. I sometimes felt that the purely homeopathic approach that I knew, wasn’t addressing everything that could be addressed.



And just in general terms, to say what I mean by that, sometimes I would work with people it felt like we were both pushing a rock up a hill, and not getting very far. Like they were working really hard. They were doing all the right things, I was doing my best to find the remedies that will help them. And my inner sense was nothing much is really changing on a deep level. We were moving things around.



Contrasting that I would see some people who literally first interview or very in a relatively short period of working together, something would seem to shift for them quite quickly. And they’d be on their way. They might still come to me for occasional support, but it’s very different experience. I got curious about that. You know what, there’s something invisible here. I don’t know what it is, that seems to be like the secret sauce that determines what people’s experiences.



I saw exactly the same thing when I was running homeopathy school for about 10 years.



People would go through the training, we were on a three year program, some people would come out, they’d already be practitioners, they’d already have a plant base, it all seemed to just grow and flow naturally. There’d be other people who’ve done exactly the same training would tell me this is really hard. It’s really complicated. I don’t know enough. Maybe there’s not enough sick people where I live, I don’t know. They’d come up with all kinds of reasons why didn’t seem to be working out.



Again, I was scratching my head thinking it can’t be why they think it is there’s something else. So that became my pursuit for about the next nine or 10 years.



The other thing that I noticed, and I obviously this was also looking at my own experience, as well as the people I was working with, when we’re struggling, essentially, were struggling with how we feeling on the inside. In very simple terms, that’s what it comes down to. We notice that we’re feeling a particular way that’s not comfortable. We know that we could be feeling different, which is interesting. Everybody knows when they when they don’t feel right. Everybody knows they could feel better. And then we do whatever occurs to us, whatever makes sense to us to try to make that happen. And sometimes with success, but often not often, it just becomes an ongoing pursuit for people as it did for me, trying one thing trying another.



But I knew that it was something around that, that there was something important about helping people to reconnect to how they really knew that they could feel on the inside. And that became my pursuit for about another nine years or so. I re-trained in a number of things. I trained with Brandon Bays in Journey process work. I started to learn Jungian psychology, I was looking at dream analysis, I was doing belief change work. The essence of it, I call it emotional release work, because I saw that that was a big part of what people were struggling with.



I had my own hybrid way of working with people. The homeopathy side just gradually fell away. And I became more focused on that. And then in beginning of 2011, someone who I knew who I hadn’t been in touch with for a while said that his work had been transformed by this understanding called Three Principles.



I was like, what’s that? If that’s any good, I would have heard about it by now.



But I haven’t, and it was something that was still under the radar of most people. I think at that time, it wasn’t widely known at all. There were very few resources and materials available. I went and listened to a talk. Something spoke to me and I knew that that was the missing piece.



So I immersed myself in that. I found myself on a training with two wonderful trainers. And that’s been the foundation of my work ever since. And what it did really It helped me to make sense of everything else that I’d done. That had been helpful. And it also helped me to understand that puzzle; why do some people shift very quickly and have a profound and lasting change? Why do other people to continue to struggle no matter what they do, no matter what you do, all of that suddenly made sense, it became really clear, so I knew I was onto it.



Alexandra: What led you as a teenager to look into homeopathy?



Ian: That was very strange. There was no one in my family that was doing anything like that. So it was my secret hobby. I spent a lot of time in nature, I did grow up in a small town on the edge of a wild area where as young kids, we just used to spend a lot of time in nature. Certainly I did. So I felt very easy the natural world.



I think at some point, I just discovered or heard or read that these trees and plants that were everywhere, were also medicines. I was just fascinated by that idea. It was something just catches you. That was just like an eye opener to me that and I wanted to know what they were and what they could do basically. So wherever I go out in the woods that was getting to know, not just the trees and the plants and the funghi, and so on, but what kind of herbal uses they had.



And then I learned that some of them were Bach flower remedies, which was really amazing. And then I stumbled into homeopathy after I bought a book, which this was when I was about 15 or 16. I found this book, which was an A to Zed of alternative therapies. So it began with acupuncture. I don’t know what was at the end, but somewhere in the middle was homeopathy. I read this book cover to cover I was completely fascinated by and when I reached the homeopathy section, that was it. I was done. I was like, Oh, this is what I’ve got to do.



It just spoke to me in such a deep way. I started finding whatever materials I could find, because there was no internet in those days. So I was literally going down the library. I was finding secondhand books in antique book shops. Most of them were antiques. Books from 100 years ago, or stuff like those, but they were just amazing.



I had that feeling that I’d found my thing. It just felt so familiar to me. I felt like I already knew this material somehow. And then some years later, I discovered you could actually train in this damn thing. I mean, I had no idea. But by a series of amazing synchronicities, I bumped into someone who was wearing a college of homeopathy sweatshirt, I was like, there’s a college? You’ve probably no idea. So where is it? It’s in London. And okay, I’m moving to London. I grew up in the north of England. But that was it. There was no question in my mind that I was going to do anything else. So



Alexandra: That clarity is always so interesting to me that at such a young age, we can have that kind of experience. It speaks to something.



Ian: I know, it’s not like that for everyone. But I think often people do have hints or clues. But we’re not always encouraged to pay attention to them or to listen to them. And certainly not to turn them into a career that they will have a particular leaning towards. Something and then the parents or careers advice personal. Yeah, well, that’s nice, but you’ll never make a living out of it. And I’m sure my parents had those kinds of thoughts. But I think where I got lucky was not stumbling upon my interest. I think it was giving myself the freedom to follow it.



Alexandra: And then what year was it that you connected with the three principals?



Ian: That was beginning of 2011.



Alexandra: Okay, yeah. Wow. Interesting. Relatively recently.



Ian:I trained in homeopathy in 1985.



Alexandra: Oh, wow. Okay.



Ian: It’s been quite a long journey, the whole thing.



Alexandra: One of the things that you mentioned on your website is that there’s no reason to work on our issues. Can you talk about that a little bit? And what you see in that?



Ian: Yeah, and that’s a bit of a head twist, isn’t it? For most of us, we’ve at least looked into some kinds of self-help or psychology, because it’s all about working on your issues. And most of the things that I had learned post homeopathy, which were in in that realm, it was all about different ways and tools and techniques and processes for doing just that, working on your issues.



But what I really enjoy and what I came to see for myself was what I already explained to you: I was seeing as a homeopath you could read some people, you could work really hard, and they were working really hard and they still the fundamental shift is still not happening. While with someone else you did almost nothing, we just have a preliminary chat, and the person who got oh my god, I don’t know what you just said. But thank you very much. I’m good to go.



I’m scratching my head thinking what’s going on here. So one of the things that I heard at Sydney Banks was the originator of the three principles, understanding who lived in Canada, as you probably know, but he actually grew up in Scotland, early part of his life, still had a Scottish accent. Although he lived all his adult life in West Coast, Canada, I started to listen to some of the recordings that he made before he died, he died in 2009. And read his published books. And one of the things the first thing that jumped out at me from what he was saying was:




“The only thing that will really make a difference in a person’s life like a true deep lasting change is when they have their own insight.”




So it has nothing to do with what I say or anybody else says. It’s not to do with what they read or what they practice. Insight, he said, is a shift in the level of consciousness, shifting the level of understanding. When that happens, your world changes. Until that happens, nothing changes. Really.



When I heard that, I was like, Oh, my God, that’s it, that and I suddenly I look back at all these thousands of clients that I’d worked with and I could see that that was true in every single case. So that was the first thing that puts paid to the idea that it’s all about working on your issue. You can work on issues till the cows come home. But if you don’t have an insight shift won’t happen. You won’t feel that fundamentally different.



And vice versa, you could actually do no work on your issues. If someone creates a space for you, or you just get fortunate as Sydney Banks did, it just happened for him spontaneously. He just had a spontaneous realization, which completely transformed his life in a way that was visible to other people. They’re like, what the hell’s happened to Syd? It was amazing that people were absolutely gobsmacked by what happened.



He said that’s why he came to that conclusion. He said, It can’t be anything that I training, because I didn’t train anything. It can’t be any practices I was doing because I wasn’t doing any good. It can’t be any teacher, because I wasn’t studying with a teacher. The only thing he could account for it was this internal insight shift that he had experienced. So that was the first piece that was very helpful to me to understand.



Then, through the Principles understanding what I’ve come to appreciate is that we’re living in a thought created experience.



What that really means is that our experience is being created on the inside 100%, even though it looks like a lot of it’s coming at us from the outside. Most people if you ask them, do you get upset or you feel stressed? Yes. What do you think is causing that? Oh, my husband, my wife, my kids, my work, the commute to work, my finances.



If you’re a homeopath, my patients will all point the fingers typically to something or combination of factors. And so we know when this isn’t going well or isn’t going the way I think it should, it causes me to feel stressed in some way overwhelmed or frustrated or whatever. It looks like there’s a direct cause and effect relationship between circumstances and other people. And how are we feeling? What Syd Banks realized that’s just an illusion, it’s not actually true. In fact, it can’t be true.



Because if you put six people in the same situation, are they going to feel the same way? No, there has to be a hidden factor. And even the same person on different occasions in the same environment will not feel the same way? Why not?



What’s the hidden variable? Thought.



So that’s what’s really creating what the person’s felt experiences. It’s just that it’s invisible. It’s happening behind the scenes. So we attribute our feeling state to things that are visible, and it’s so very understandable that we will do that. The reason I’m explaining this this way to one is in order to answer your question properly why does it why is it not helpful to work on issues?



Once Syd Banks realized we were living in a thought created experience. And essentially, whatever we give our thoughts attention to increases in our experience, we get to experience more of it, whatever we think more most about, that’s what dominates our experience. So what happens supposing I have a little problem in my life, and if I just leave it alone, chances are it’ll go away, if it’s no big deal.



But if I start thinking about it, day and night, and then I enroll a therapist to help me think about it, and they start delving into my past and try to discover all the reasons why it’s happening. And then I join a support club or group. So I’m now in a community where we all talk and think about it all the time, guess what happens? It becomes bigger, in my experience, which is innocent, it’s not deliberate. Obviously, it’s just a misunderstanding of how the mind works. But that’s the main reason why it’s not helpful. It’s actually counterproductive.



What we end up with is a is a bigger seeming problem than what we started out with and is endless, we can just keep adding more and more story to it. It never goes away. And that, to me, that is exactly what happened in my own experience. And I saw that happen over and over again with clients. Once I understood that didn’t make sense to me to do that kind of work anymore. All those wonderful techniques that I spent 1000s of pounds learning. Yeah, I fell away pretty quickly once I realized that.



Alexandra: If someone comes to you with an issue that they want to work on, what do you recommend doing instead?



Ian: There isn’t anything I recommend them doing. So the first thing to say about this, the Three Principles is an understanding. It’s not a doing. It’s not another technique. It’s not another process. But a lot of people come in and ask exactly that question. You have tried all these other things I hear you’re doing so what do I do? What do you think I should do?



It’s natural that people would start at that point. But your sense is we’re starting from a false premise, the false premise being that there’s something I need to do to solve this problem, I’ve got this problem, how do I solve it?



A better starting place would be, how can I change my relationship to what looks like a problem so that it’s no longer a problem?



That’s really what we’re up to in this work. Because actually truly that’s how problems get solved. I don’t know if you know, you probably have heard the famous quote that’s attributed to Einstein, we cannot solve the problem at the same level of consciousness that created it. I heard that I didn’t know 30 odd years ago. And I was like, Whoa, that’s true. And I thought I knew what he meant.



I assumed that what he meant by that was, if I’ve got a problem, and I try and solve it with the same kind of thinking that created it, I’m just gonna get lost, I’m gonna get bogged down, I’m probably not going to find the answer. But if I can have a shift in my consciousness, so I got like an elevated perspective, then I can find solutions, which are not visible to me at that lower level of understanding. So that’s how I understood it. I thought, yeah, that makes sense.



Fast forward. 20 years or so I came into the three principles, understanding what I realized, from my own experience, that that’s not actually what happens, that’s not actually how problems get solved. What happens is, I’m at this level of, I’ve got a problem. And I’m going around in circles, I’m not getting anywhere. If I look away from the problem, rather than focusing on it, right, and we all know, this, we all know this is this is actually what works, right?



You lose your keys, where’s my keys, where’s my keys, they could be in front of your nose, you’ll never see them. If you just go and do something else, and forget about peace for a while, that certain moment, it’ll come to you. That’s usually what happens when you find yourself putting your hand in a jacket pocket or there.



So we’ve all had experiences like that many, many, many times, what actually happens is, when you have a shift in consciousness, at this new level of consciousness, the problem doesn’t exist. It’s not that you find the solution. They only existed at this level. You actually move to a new level where it’s a non problem. So there’s nothing to be done.



Alexandra: That’s such a good explanation. I totally had the same experience with that Einstein quote, like the initial understanding of it, yeah, that you would just go up on a level and see it differently. But what you’ve described is so true. Makes sense, right? I love that.



You do mention on your website that you combine your Three Principles work with homeopathy. So tell us how you circled back around.



Ian: I don’t want to give the impression that I combined the two as a practitioner, because that’s not true. I don’t practice as a homeopathic practitioner anymore. If people want that I refer them to colleagues who are still doing that work. So my work as a practitioner moved on out of that field. But my homeopathic understanding stays with me.



Now, as you will know, once you start to look at look at health and disease through the lens of homeopathy, there’s something about that to me is fundamentally true. Homeopathy has principles behind it, which is why it’s been around 200 plus years is never going away. No matter what anybody throws at it. Or everybody tries to dismiss it as just placebo. It won’t go away. Why? Because it’s based on something that’s fundamentally true principle of nature behind. So we don’t need to worry about that.



I’ve never been concerned about homeopathy being shut down. Or that nonsense. It’s never been a worry of mine at all because I understood that the principle of homeopathy is a principle of nature, which is why it pops up all over the place. Hippocrates talked about it. Paracelsus talked about it, when a principle is a principle is true, people will get glimpses of it throughout time and space all over the place.



And then it just took for Hanuman to actually have a deeper insight into it and assemble a system of healing around it. But he didn’t invent the principle of cure by homeopathy, he just uncovered it, and created a healing system around it. That’s the way I think about it.



Sydney Banks did the same thing. But not within the homeopathic field. You could say, within the psychological and spiritual field, what Syd Banks did was really brought a unity to the field of psychology and spirituality that we didn’t have before. And what he uncovered was that there’s actually principles behind how that works, too. Which is so cool.



So for me, there’s wonderful parallels between the two. And, for example, one of Sydney Banks’s three principles is what he calls universal mind. Where he basically talks about how our experience gets created. He said, the first ingredient you need is universal mind intelligence, which is, he says, it’s the intelligence of all things, and it’s in all things. So it’s that which is doing the creating, but everything is also infused with that intelligence.



What does that sound like to homeopathy? Vital force, right? It’s just using a different language, talking about the same thing. So in homeopathy, we talk about this invisible dynamic playing the vital force. And that’s what actually does the healing. And all we’re doing with remedies is to catalyze that. And then the healing happens, because it the intelligence is built into the system all healing is self healing.



The remedies don’t do it, people don’t do it. It’s a self regulating system, physiologically speaking. Well, guess what? So is the mind. That’s the bit that Syd Banks uncovered.



The human mind is also self-regulating.



Why? Because it has the same down intelligence behind it, how could it not? It’s so funny to me that even homeopaths will often think that that exists in the body but they won’t necessarily think it exists to the same extent with the human mind. That we have the idea that maybe there’s some exceptions, some mental health problems, needs some different kinds of intervention, or something like that.



What Syd Banks came to see was that everyone actually has mental health on the inside. And he said as much. He said, every human being is sitting in the middle of mental health, they just don’t know it. They’re innocently using the gift of the mind against themselves to create suffering. That’s essentially what the three principles reveals.



So I just started to see parallels like this all over the place. And then, of course, we had the COVID, situation, lock downs, and all of that I was unable to do the work that I’ve normally been doing, which is working with groups, trainings, programs, and so on. So I’d stay home for a while. And it occurred to me it was interesting, because I saw that some of the people that I knew in the three principles world who were doing amazing work in the mental health field and so on. They were getting freaked out about COVID, because they don’t have the holistic understanding that I had as a homeopath. I thought, well, that’s interesting. I wasn’t getting freaked out.



And then we’ve got homeopathy, what are you guys worried about? But of course, they didn’t know about that medically speaking, they were still quite calm thinking in conventional terms. And then I looked at the other side of the coin, I started to speak with homeopathic colleagues who were doing amazing work, of course, during COVID, time and after. And what I realized was that, oh, they don’t have the principal’s understanding, it will be so helpful. If they knew this piece, it would take all the stress out of the equation of their work all the overwhelm all the burnout.



I mean, honestly, you can deal with that so quickly, once you have the three principles understanding, and it gives you something you can share with your clients, which will enhance the self healing work that you’re already doing for them.



Because I came to see that, I would say that one of the main obstacles to cure in 21st century is what I would call chronic mental stress. And we know physiologically, now, if someone’s living in a state of chronic mental stress, doesn’t matter what they do, they can eat the right foods, they can take the supplements, they can even take remedies, they can do yoga every morning, if that chronic mental stress continues, it actually inhibits all the self healing mechanisms of the body. So it’s not a little thing. It’s a really crucial factor.



And not only that, it makes the homeopathic picture very complicated. Because you’ve got the original symptom picture, and then you’ve got a whole fog of what the person thinks is causing it and all the reasons why they think they are the way they are. And this is when all of that’s in the way that makes for a complicated case.



This is why homeopaths often go to places like India or Africa and they take cases that wow, homeopathy is easy here. It seems a lot easier. Why? Because people have not got as much on their mind, they’re not adding so much story to it, because we live in much more psychologize kind of atmosphere in the West. That’s really not helping us that’s working against us, not just as practitioners, but as individuals. So there’s so many ways in which I see these things dovetailing and helping each other out and working well together.



Alexandra: During COVID, you began to share the principles with homeopaths.



Ian: Yes, when I could get the chance. One of the reasons that happened was I did a couple of homeopathy programs, which I hadn’t taught for years. But I thought I’ll just do it for fun. So if anyone’s interested, I got hundreds of people. So that was first I did a couple of online programs, which were actually homeopathy programs, but and some of the people from the three principles world got interested in that. So I thought, well, that’s great. That worked.



Then it started going the other way around, I started getting invited again, because people saw I was doing something homeopathic, which I hadn’t done for years, I got invited to go and speak at some of the homeopathy colleges and give talks and so on. So the kind of cross fertilization started to happen, which I was really happy with. And it continues.



Alexandra: That’s great to hear. One of the other things I wanted to ask you about was burnout, which you mentioned and stress, and this mental activity that’s going on. Overwhelm is another word we often use.



On your website, you have a blog post that talks about how these things are signals. About how we are imposing our agenda on life.



Ian: Again, that’s one of the gifts of the principles understanding just like when have you learned homeopathy, Alexandra? Is that part of your background? No, I was making the false assumption, I just realized that you would understand the homeopathic references I was making. And I saw actually, I don’t think that’s true. So sorry about that.



In homeopathy, when people go through a journey, like I did, learning something like homeopathy in a deep way, and it could be acupuncture, or it could be one of many holistic things, it doesn’t just give you a new tool to treat illness, what it gives you is a new way of thinking about health and disease. It changes your perspective. So you actually have a different homeopaths have a different relationship to symptoms than the average Joe.



We don’t see symptoms in anything like the same way. We see as the language of the vital force, of the intelligence that’s at work behind the scenes. It’s like the symbol language of that intelligence, showing us what’s going on and what’s needed in order to help and support that healing process. So it’s like a signal system to homeopathy it’s really valuable information.



Because most people see symptoms as a nuisance to be gotten rid of. They think that that is the disease. I’ve got a headache, give me a pill, make it go away. And end of story. So just as that happens for if you’re training in something like homeopathy, when you learn the principles, what that does, it changes your relationship to feelings, to emotions, particularly what we would call the negative ones or stressful ones, feelings or anything that a person would call stress, anxiety or depression overwhelm, something of that kind.



How does it do that what you start to learn is that, again, the body mind is just giving feedback. When we have a feeling that’s a feeling of constriction or tightness or discomfort, which is why we would call it stressful. What is it signaling? Well, if you understand that thought creates feeling, not circumstances, then what it’s signaling is that feeling is giving you feedback about the state of mind, essentially, it’s not giving you a detail thought by thought breakdown of because thoughts moving really quick, but it’s giving you a flavor, these giving you the flavor of it.



If you’re in an anxious state of mind, you’re going to feel anxious in your body.



If you’ve got thoughts about this should be happening and it isn’t, you’re going to feel frustrated in your body. And it’s a watertight system. For all of us. You can’t think one kind of thoughts and feel something different. So once you know that, what we would normally think of as negative emotions or stressful feelings, now they become really useful indicators. Because they’re making visible the thinking patterns that would otherwise be invisible to so it’s bringing it’s like the warning.



It’s like the dashboard warning. It’s alerting you to something that’s good to know. And that doesn’t mean that there’s anything that you have to do about that. This is a piece that people find challenging. It’s like okay, I know. I know it’s my thinking and I know it’s the wrong kind of thinking. How do I get rid of it and change it?



It’s actually enough to understand that it’s thought. Once you see that, it’s thought and you understand something about the nature of thought. What’s the nature of thought? It’s temporary. And it’s pure energy. It’s not made of anything solid. It’s just energy taking form momentarily, creating an experience, which then cascades through our physiology. And then it moves back into the formless from where it came. It’s followed by another thought.



It’s like a continuous stream that we’re living in. So once you understand that, the only thing that we need to do is to notice when we if we’re feeling something that’s not pleasant. Okay. So I must be in some kind of a state of mind. Without realizing it, I’m creating this feeling of worry, and anxiety. Oh, well, that’s good to know that. So I may as well ignore that thinking.



That’s actually all we need to do is just pay no attention to it. Because it’s a self-correcting system, it’s self-regulating, if we don’t give it any attention, it just leaves us. And then fresh thought comes in. And we feel different.



That’s how if you look at young children and babies, that’s how they process emotion. Something comes to them, they feel it. It’s very intense, but it’s momentary. And they get over themselves very quickly. And we think that’s amazing. What are they doing to recover so quickly? Well, they give us the wrong question is actually what are they not doing?



What they’re not doing is adding a story to what they’re experiencing.



So it’s because we’ve learned to do that as we’ve gotten a bit older. So we’re actually interfering with the self regulating process that we were born with. We feel something it’s momentarily unpleasant. It’s just about to leave us and we go, Wait a minute, I’m not done with you. Come back here, I need to analyze you and fix you. I need to find out where you come from, and how long you’ve been, and how long are you going to bother me fall under.



All of that extra attention just amplifies it in our experience. And then we have the experience of being stuck in a certain feeling stuck. But again, that’s self created. And it’s instantly done.



Alexandra: I love that explanation. That was great. Thank you so much. So just before we hit record, we talked about how you were just at the Viva event in Spain. So as we’re wrapping up here, I wondered if as you’ve been involved in this understanding for a few years now.



Do you continue to have insights to see things in a fresh way?



Ian: It’s the gift that keeps on giving, which is just amazing. Once you have an orientation, and you know what direction is helpful to look in? It just keeps opening up more and more. And that to me is one of the amazing things about it.



My colleagues who are people that I trained with, they’ve been in this field for two years, some of them and they still say the same thing. They’re like beginners in that sense that they still having insights, it’s still getting deeper and but also simpler, the deeper he gets, the simpler he gets. Yeah, that’s quite interesting.



As people move further along that journey, what they report pretty much universally is that they realize there’s even less to do than they thought. So it’s more like an unlearning, though, it’s like a shedding and unlearning, rather than an acquisition type learning. And that’s an important thing for people to realize, If anyone looks into it. And if you start coming at it with your intellect, trying to learn it, like you might learn another a book oriented subject, you’ll miss it, because you really learn it that way. It’s learned through insight, through your own realization.



It’s not memory based. Because once you have a shift in understanding through insight, you don’t have to remember it, you’ve already had the shift. I would call it embodied learning. When you really embody what you know, you don’t have to go through life thinking about it, or remembering it or looking it up. Because you’re living out of your understanding now.



And actually, we’re always living out of our understanding. It just makes that conscious and visible a bit more than it was before. But I would say that the main thing for me that I suppose I’ve paid most attention to, and it’s partly reflecting my own background interest is an aspect of the principles that we call innate well being. So this is one of the things that Sydney Banks uncovered is that everyone’s actually Okay, on the inside. No one’s broken. Psychologically speaking, no one is broken.



Now a lot of people have the experience that they’re broken, or they have the belief that they’re broken, but that’s been created in thought. And then it gets reinforced by health professionals usually, and whatever they read, and they look up on Google and so on, and then they put a label on it, it starts to appear as if it’s more real than it than it did before. Have more solid, more tangible, but actually, it’s still being created in thought.



Underneath all of that person’s still 100% okay. Everybody has innate well being. So that’s a piece of the understanding that to me just keeps opening up, I keep seeing it deeper and deeper. And it’s so profound, and it’s so powerful. No matter what modality you’re working from, if you’re working with other people in helping role, if you if you sit with the person that you’re helping with the certainty with absolute certainty that they’re okay, on the inside.



They might not know that, but if you know that on their behalf, so to speak, they acts as a kind of tuning fork, they start to pick it up from you, they start to remember, because it’s true. You’re reflecting back to them a deeper truth than what they currently believe about themselves. And at a certain point, it hits somebody, oh, my God. And they once they realize it for themselves, they’re good to go.



Alexandra: It’s so remarkable how that happens. And I love your tuning fork analogy. That’s awesome.



Ian: It looks like a resonance, like a resonance phenomenon.



Alexandra: As we’re winding up here today, is there anything we haven’t touched on that you’d like to share?



Ian: I think the only the other piece that I would perhaps just mentioned, because again, to me, it’s a significant piece of the understanding is really think what we’re doing as we come to understand ourselves better, is learning to listen in to our own wisdom, more and more.



This is, again, something that Sydney Banks talked about a lot was he had a lovely definition of wisdom, which really struck me when I heard it. For him wisdom was he said, That’s the intelligence of life, the universal mind intelligence. He said, Whenever it comes through us, and it’s not contaminated by our personal thinking, by what we’ve picked up habits of thought, and so on, if it’s not contaminated, he says, it comes through as wisdom, we experience it as wisdom.



Now, it might come out of your mouth as wisdom, I said, often, you just know what to do. You find yourself doing the right thing, and you don’t really think about it too much. And it’s funny how we often do that in emergency situations, people often do things that would never have occurred to them in daily life. And they get asked afterwards how did you not to do that, though I didn’t have time to think.



That reveals the truth of what Sydney Banks is pointed to is that when our minds not cluttered, we can actually live in a much more wisdom led way more instinctual, which is how animals live. And it’s how we’re designed because we still we are physiologically speaking animals, as well.



We have all of this instinct and energetic knowing within us, most of which is under utilized now, because we’ve been taught to rely on the intellect for everything. So over time, what this what I see this understanding does, it helps to correct that imbalance. So we start to let go of the need to use the intellect to overuse the intellect. And then we could fall back on this other system that we’ve got, which is actually way better.



And it and it doesn’t take effort. I was doing a retreat recently, I call it the path of ease. That’s what starts to unfold. If you if you just learned to listen into your own wisdom, your life will be relatively straightforward. There’ll be twists and turns and lots of things that you can’t predict, but your experience of it will be relatively stress free. And that’s available to anyone.



Alexandra: Oh, beautifully sad. I love that. Thank you so much.



Where can we find out more about you and your work?



Ian: I have a website, which is called The Insight Space as written as if it’s one word. So it’s TheInsightSpace.com. There’s quite a good body of resources there, most of which are freely available. And also there’ll be pages for any events and so on that come up. But there’s plenty of recordings and things that I’ve already made that people can enjoy. So yeah, that’s the main place people can also find me on Facebook from time to time.



Alexandra: I will put links to the to your website in the show notes at unbrokenpodcast.com Thank you so much in this has been lovely, lovely to connect with you.



Ian: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.







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