Unleashing your inner child just may be the most radical thing you can do in our current culture.

Join host, Reese Brown as she sits down with comedian, creator, and political commentator Dave Neal to discuss his path as a gritty creator, passionate father and husband, and spiritual meaning maker. Neal discusses everything, from inner child work to politics to the deeply human need to live authentically. We start with the moment Dave almost quit everything. Living in Hollywood, getting by with his then girlfriend (now wife), when we lost his job due to the pandemic. A seeming rock bottom allowed Dave to rediscover his spark that changed the trajectory of, not just his career, but his life.

What happens when the “good girl” grows up, becomes a mother, and realizes the performance is killing her and hurting her family?

In today’s episode of Making Meaning, Reese Brown sits down with Diane Sorensen, former teacher, mother, coach, and host of Chaos to Connection, to unravel the mother wound, the good girl archetype, and the generational patterns that silently shape our lives. Diane shares the story of how her daughter’s mental health crisis became the unexpected catalyst for her own awakening.

If we are trying to create a new world, essentially create new spaces and systems that are open and liberating and empowering,

We have to be actively creating those in the image that we want them to exist in now, while also tearing down the structures that prevent that from happening. We can't just tear down these systems and structures and then get to work building this other thing. We also can't just build this other thing and hope that along the way these bad structures will dissolve.

But we need to be doing both.

Because they ignored it, I ignored it. I tried to pretend like it never happened. Well, we ran into that person again. I saw him and it triggered just everything, the thoughts and the memories and all the things. And we had been at church and I don't even remember what the message was about, but I started sobbing right after he said the title of the message: “It’s not your fault.”

So I might not be able to see it right now, but I can trust because I do know I trust Spirit that this is happening for me and in some capacity, this is trying to get me where I want to go faster.

Our economic system and the way that it's evolved to push ever more out of us. And we often talk about economic rules as if they fall into the same category as ecological rules and laws. And I think we get confused about it. And when we talk about our relationship to place and what is and is not possible, we're often looking at it within the confines of our current economic system.

But we made that up. We made that system up. It doesn't have rules the way physics does or gravity does or ecology does. It's just completely made up. And I can't say that enough because like we just made it up. It's completely fictional. And I think that when we talk about sort of that spiritual bypassing that you're mentioning, what we're really talking about is breaching sort of the rules of ecology and of human relationship.

Breath is one of the most complex instruments that we have. And if you imagine that you buy a tool or a software program or anything that requires instructions in order to be able to use it and you don't read those instructions and all of a sudden you need to use it, it's as if it's not a tool at all. It has no value because you've got to sit down and read the instructions. You might have, you know, be under pressure, I only have five minutes, but you can't read the instruction manual in five minutes, so you're left there kind of like prodding at things and hoping. And I think the same thing is with breath.

Maybe I'm a little crazy, but also what's the alternative? It's almost like you have nothing else to believe in but that, right? Am I just going to be incredibly pessimistic about everything and just hate my life and hate everything and just, I'm on this earth for one time, in my opinion, only one time, and I wanna make a difference. And maybe what I'm doing isn't gonna make a difference, but I'd rather live my life trying to make a difference than just throw in the towel. There's a lot of criticism out there, but I don't see a lot of solutions. And I'm trying to work on the solution, not just criticize.

We’ve gotten it backwards. You have to engage with your being and out of engaging with that spiritual part of yourself, you determine your belief system. And so I want to lower the barrier that people have towards engaging and understanding this piece of themselves because they think they have to know before they've even sat with it. We are living with some spiritual crisis in our society.

As a Black person who comes from a middle to low class family, realizing how much rest we need.

We need a rest. my gosh, we need a rest. Noticing my parents, for example, as they age and still have to work so hard to make ends meet, and me encouraging them to accept that, yeah, it's okay if you're resting now. Don't feel like you're betraying yourself because you're resting. You need to rest and I want you to process that and realize how much you are doing a service for yourself by resting.

I'm a very spiritual person and I still have my feet firmly planted on this earth. I come from a cultural background, so there's always that mixture of the magic and the practicality. This is earth school and we choose the lessons that we want to learn and we choose to be incarnated into a life.

The details of the knowing aren’t as important as the knowing itself, that there is a template that is interconnected with a a greater beingness, a greater livingness, a greater aliveness that means we can never go astray. We may make a less optimal turn right or left, but ultimately that knowing this is gonna keep us on track. And so it's a deep trust in ourselves and who we are.

I work very intuitive intuitively a lot to be able to feel where you are and what it feels like inside of you. For me to decide if I'm gonna love you or if I'm gonna get in your face and say, I will friggin be scarier than anything is scaring you right now.

And you go like, “Okay!” and you do it. And then I ask, what does that feel like? And every time practically it's like freedom.

Well, what are the deeper questions? What is, why are we here? Is it to commune with others solely or is that a means to another end of a greater purpose? What is this spirituality? What, know, so that makes it hard. And I think through the hobbies allows, you know, an exploration and a searching and testing of yourself.

Probably our favorite story that we keep telling over and over has to do with an acorn. And the need for an acorn to crack open to grow a deep taproot by spending the winter time in the dark, in the soil, in the cold, and to grow that deep taproot and then be able to spread the roots out from there in order to really move into becoming the essence of who they are always meant to be, which is a great oaks.

And it doesn't take a lot of drawing parallels to our own hidden wholeness, to use a phrase that Thomas Merton, mystic and priest would have used, did use, our own hidden wholeness, this essence of who we are invited to be, that is growing in the darkness.

Practice being present for your birthday when people are showing up with good cheer for you. And that's why I think when we let the barista know it's my birthday today and she smiles or he smiles and says, happy birthday, that's just one person and it lasts 10 seconds and you can keep moving on. There's not a lot of pressure there, right? It's just a moment. It's not like it's a birthday party filled with 20 of your friends and it's lasting for four hours and there's a lot of energy you're dealing with, right? There can be fragments of joy.

The work that I do with myself, with my clients is trying to find out what is that balance of uncovering, recovering, discovering your true self and for yourself and how can you also belong.

And what I find is that the more you can do that, it seems counterintuitive, but, you know, because I think that's as we grow up, right? As we grow up and get older, that's that whole process of individuation is the more I can be myself, the more I actually belong. And not just to myself, but the more I feel like I belong within my society, my family, my whatever.

Donald Winnicott, who's one of the great British psychoanalysts said, true mental health can be exhibited by one's willingness to share their experience with another and to take in the experience of another. And that is authentic connection with another.

And that is how we want to be spending our 86,400 seconds a day, you know, like doing the real stuff, at least we can't do it all the time. Of course we're going to associate. I'm going to play my wordle in the morning. I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm to say happy birthday to people on Facebook, but that's literally, I pretty much use Facebook only for happy birthdays and posting my stuff and sometimes hitting a like on a thing or two, but it's under five minutes a day. I've really decided to go on a diet. I don't want to get lost there.

Because I know they want me there. And I don't necessarily want to be used by them. I will use them. But one of my dictates also is create more, consume less.

This is all a play within us. Let's say you want the love of your life, somebody who makes your heart beat, and there's a lot of people who say, you shouldn't want that. You shouldn't want a specific person, or you shouldn't want a specific job. I believe you're allowed to choose what you want. Like, this is your reality, essentially.

It's not just to fool yourself into saying that, I'm in a relationship with so and so. Because your brain is gonna fight against that, right? But it's this idea that, I'm not asking you to believe that you're in a relationship with so and so. I'm not asking you to believe that you have this job. What I'm asking you to believe is can you believe that your belief in this is enough?

It was a complete mindset shift for me on just how I viewed football, the game, coaching, life, mentorship as a whole. It really just opened my eyes up and I've been able to take and carry a lot of that on from coaching and from playing, know, into the business world.