Al McBride 0:03
Welcome to the dealing with Goliath podcast. The mission of dealing with Goliath is to sharpen the psychological edge in business leaders with skin in the game, who want to be more effective under pressure, uncover hidden value, and increase profitability with expert guests across the business spectrum.

Al McBride 0:20
We deliver gems of wisdom delving into their methods, their thinking and approach to business life and problem solving. This is the grand a cup of insight, long form podcast interview where we take a little bit more time to delve a bit deeper into our guests experience stories and get those prices nuggets.

Al McBride 0:39
I’m your host Al McBride. My guest today is Andrew Wayfinder Hryniewicz. For those who don’t know, Andrew, Andrew is an architect, psychotherapist and shamanic practitioner, who’s an expert in the psychology of resilience, trauma, recovery, and peak performance.

Al McBride 1:03
Since 2011, Andrew has helped over 175 executives and professionals, from scientists to artists, creatives and writers use his deep mind methods to become wiser, more creative, fulfilled, and happy in their professional and personal lives. Andrew, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us today.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 1:28
Well, thanks for having me. I really enjoy the work you do and was really pleased to be invited.

Al McBride 1:33
It’s great, it’s great to have you on the show, because we’ve had a number of conversations in a group that we both attend. And you’re always great at giving a very interesting angles of insight to people, you’re very generous with your insights. So hope, I hope you’d be generous with the listeners today.

Al McBride 1:51
So let’s start off let’s start off with talk to us about that change. You went from being an architect to being a therapist, and then into shamanism. How did that come about? Was that a very gradual change? Or was this sort of you knew you needed to take a different path one day had to talk us through that?

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 2:14
I’m sure we’ve all had the the experience, usually in a relationship, sometimes in a job where you get that, oh, this isn’t gonna work out? moment?

Al McBride 2:27
Sure.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 2:28
Well, throughout my life, there’s been this sort of like inner voice that will, you know, eventually says this, isn’t it? Keep looking?

Al McBride 2:38
Okay, yeah.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 2:40
So it’s, it’s largely been this kind of inner, this inner urges inner voice saying, close, but but no cigar. So I mean, I, yeah, I mean, I went into architecture originally. But you know, as I finished university, I was really torn between, do I want to go off and become an architect and make beautiful places and make the world more beautiful, and I was very interested in ecological things?

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 3:07
Or do I want to go off and do become a psychiatrist, and, and work with, you know, people’s mental and emotional suffering. And so I spent some time going off into architecture, not quite sure. went and studied social work for about a year and a half worked in a therapeutic prison. And at some point, realized a lot of people in the profession were drawn to it, because they were very wounded.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 3:42
and I recognize that in myself that I was very wounded. And I thought this is not, this is not the place from which you try to help people. So I find myself coming back into architecture, and going off and doing that for about 20 years. Okay. But then that was 15 20 years ish. It was it dries because I spent quite a bit of time in school before that. But then as I was approaching 40, my mother got very ill she got cancer.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 4:11
And, you know, took her about seven years to die, but in particular, the last year or two, and when she died, that the wheels came off my life, you know, that stuff that I had been kind of pushing into the side sort of saying, No, no, no tiptoeing past just couldn’t couldn’t be pushed off anymore. And I got really depressed I mean, to the point where I couldn’t think straight you know, I couldn’t choose a cell phone plan. My mind was really that affected by the grief and and that that triggered a lot of stuff that had to be faced. So there was about three years there were therapy was like a part time job.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 4:52
You know, therapy, yoga, meditation, hypnosis, various other forms of, you know, spirits. healing and stuff. And on the back of that I, I kind of rethought what I was doing with my life and kind of came full circle back to the psychology thing and started retraining as a psychotherapist. So that’s what sort of brought me back. And then in the middle of all that there were, there were other experiences, I had sort of three, three experiences of the veil dropping, and sort of seeing, seeing a bigger dimension of reality.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 5:34
And the first was actually the year after I left university, I had a grant to travel and study for a year in and it was a self directed project and I was traveling around Greece, reading Greek myths in a kayak sort of trying to recreate a an ancient experience of being you know, on the water and dealing with the forces and the elements and reading the myths. And, and I had an experience in in an olive grove one night where the veil dropped and I how to describe it.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 6:16
I’m lying up looking up the Milky Way. And I’ve never really seen the Milky Way. So I mean, I’m just I’m just seeing this, this amazing river of light across the heavens. And in like an instant, I’m not looking up, I’m looking down. I’m like, I’m like this little insect stuck to the side of the planet looking down into the universe. And I realized that if if the planet let go, I would fall forever. And then then an instant later, I’m I’m like, I have like a God’s eye view. I mean, somehow, my my awareness is way, way, way away. And I’m just aware that I’m this little tiny speck of consciousness on this pebble with a smear of life on it, whizzing through this measurably large space. And then I have this slot, I’m alone and I’m going to die.

Al McBride 7:16
Doesn’t sound terribly upbeat?

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 7:18
No, no, it was terrifying. I mean, it was completely terrifying. And that sort of kicked off about 20 years of meditation, Tai Chi yoga, anything I could, lots of reading lots of study, you know, mystical work science, trying to fill that experience of I’m alone and going to die. And then 20 years later, I had a very different experience. When I was doing all the therapy stuff around my, my mother’s death, I was working with a spiritual healer one day.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 7:50
And again, I’m in a room and all of a sudden the veil drops. And I see the room is full of angels. I mean, you know, angels the size of my thumb, to angels as tall as the room itself, every size in between. and I I’m not from a religious background, this was not the kind of iconography or imagery that would that would come to me, I just, I just suddenly became aware that what I thought of this empty space was just full of an extraordinary density and variety of presences.

Al McBride 8:29
It’s quite something,

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 8:30
because I know completely mad. Um,

Al McBride 8:34
well, it’s something a little different. All right. And this was sort of one of the things I wanted to talk to you about what you get remarkable results for your clients, who have often tried various modalities of coaching or even therapy before. And this is one of the things even just when you were talking there, a lot of people will listen to it sounding like oh, it sounds like you know, did you have any herbal substances beforehand, but oddly enough, that takes me into the next question, which you know, the last few years has been an awful lot of research into psychedelics in therapy.

Al McBride 9:10
I mean, not least from john hopkins university has a whole department on it now and they’re leading the way and it has profoundly impressive results, everything from PTSD to addiction to you know, therapy, resistant depression and whatnot. And from what I’ve heard and read about it, it’s all of them seem to do is turn off what neurologists called the default mode network, which is essentially the inner voice and often for people in distress, the inner critic.

Al McBride 9:42
A lot of people report similar experiences of saying things like, Oh, I finally was able to hear what I feel my truer self and this this critic was sort of separated or or turned completely off for for a while and you can hear nearly or true Your voice and your truer self, which isn’t, isn’t in any way judgy and is full of much more acceptance and general love and positivity and good things and, and people.

Al McBride 10:11
They describe these experiences on the same level as when their child was born that level of profound, you know, perspective shift and it lasts as well you know, you come back to them a years years later and that they’ve stayed moved in that perspective. And I just would love you to talk about that for a minute in the sense of is that also where the shaman ism brings you maybe from a different direction, but is it also the in effect shutting down that noisy self critic and all that busy mind and being able to see sort of a truer self? Is it a similar?

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 10:59
They’re definitely related and overlapping? I think in order to answer that, from the way I understand it. A lot of people want to know what is shamanism? Some people have heard the word but what is it? It’s shaman is really quite simple. It’s it’s the original form of culture. That if you go back far enough, in your ancestry, you’ll come to a time and a place.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 11:23
When you’re, you know, your ancestors lived in a world that was shamanic. In a world that was full of spirit, where it was understood not as a thought thing, but as an experience. That everything that was was alive. The trees were alive, the rocks were alive, the water was alive, the mountains was alive. The Earth was alive, you were alive, animals were alive. Everything had spirit. And that you can sort of connect with and work with that. And you know, that’s what fairy tales are about. Moses talking to a burning bush is a shamanic experience.

Al McBride 12:05
I mean, the original art the cave paintings. Yeah, shamanic experiences they don’t do them at the front of the cave and tend to be right the way backwards pitch dark. Yeah.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 12:15
Yeah. So so so it, you know, originally culture, you know, we had this, this and if you go back, you know, the great, the great mother, the great goddess cultures all seem to be coming out of this and the cave art for this sort of stuff goes back 30, 40 50,000 years, that seems to be the way we started. And then out of that is shamanism is a set of techniques, a set of methods for altering your consciousness so that you can communicate with these other dimensions of reality.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 12:50
This is where ayahuasca and the other plant medicines and things come in that shamanism today is sort of divided into wet shamanism, using plants using the plant medicines, which is, in a sense, a minority phenomenon, because the plants you know, they don’t exist everywhere in the world. They exist in quite a bit quite quite an abundance in the jungle.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 13:19
But you get up into Siberia and Lapland and the tundra and the Eskimo places and other parts of Africa, although Africa has the Boga which is also very, very powerful. And that’s getting probably a little bit too complicated. But so it’s it’s a set of methods for altering consciousness and sometimes you do it with a chemical. Sometimes you do it with a ritual with a practice.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 13:38
The most common tool is a drum or rattle, or something like didgeridoo, these all create a rhythmic, monotonous hum, that in trains the brain. Now another way of looking at it is that I did a lot of my training with Michael Horner, as an American anthropologist to kind of revived shamanism. He was studying shamanic cultures in the in the late 50s, early 60s. And he’s perhaps the first white man to do Ayahuasca. Right?

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 14:11
Because he was studying an Ayahuasca tribe and the shaman said, if you want to understand it, you have to do it. That makes sense. So, so that’s that so so that said, Ayahuasca plant medicine uses that’s the wet end of shamanism versus the dry end. One way of understanding what it’s what you’re doing there is because I often get clients who asked me, you know, what’s your opinion on Ayahuasca and I said, it’s extremely powerful tool, very valid tradition.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 14:44
In terms of actually using Ayahuasca, there’s three issues, the the quality of the plant material, that that the substance is brewed from the skill of the brewer. Whether they are Know what they’re doing or not? Right. And the dosage. You know, so variables and so there’s so there’s a lot of variables there. Then the other issue is one way of thinking about our consciousness is that your consciousness is a little bit like that big warehouse at the end of the Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Al McBride 15:23
Right? Yes.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 15:25
Yeah, you know, it’s big and it’s full of stuff, right. And we normally walk around our consciousness with a very small flashlight.

Al McBride 15:35
Right?

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 15:36
Oh, and we move around with what we can see in the flashlight. And I Alaska LSD and things like that is a little bit like going in and turning all the lights on at once. And some people are prepared for that experience, and some people are not.

Al McBride 15:55
Okay.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 15:56
So with with sort of the, with the ship, and again, I was the last training I was at with Michael, somebody asked him, you know, what’s your opinion of Iosco since, you know, he was like the original guy. And he’s actually written, you know, a very scholarly book on the subject. And his comment was very interesting.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 16:15
He said, Why don’t you learn the universe before you blow it up. And so my experience has been, you know, working with clients, working with students with groups and stuff, teaching people how to journey how to alter their consciousness will and go into these other dimensions, go into these altered states, you you work with spirit helpers. So that’s basically like, you get to meet the manager of the warehouse. And he takes you around with a much bigger torch, and he knows where everything is.

Al McBride 16:50
That makes some sense that just just to, to interject for one second on that where you were talking about the different, you’re alluding to the different brain levels, and was something I mentioned earlier that, you know, you work with people, one of the things that you help with is improving or gaining peak performance. And this reminds me of, you know, Steven Kotler, the flow Genome Project, where they’ve amassed a huge amount of research in the last number of years, but He always talks about, you know, beta level, for those who don’t know, beta is where we’re just chatting, and you’re thinking very much with your rational mind, regular daytime stuff.

Al McBride 17:31
Alpha is when you’re dropping deeper. It’s sort of like meditation or meditation level. And then they said, theta, theta is usually associated, as you said, with coming in and out of sleep. But it’s very, it’s very deep. But when you’re in a flow state, when, which is extremely, which is basically high performance is the is the flow stage is when you’re super focused, and you lose sense that time and you’re bringing all of your resources to bear on whatever it is you’re doing.

Al McBride 18:05
You’re on that deep, alpha enough. And as he says, You’re touching into theta. So when, when you’re talking about these, these changes in state, is that what you’re doing? Again, we’re using slightly different language, shamanic practices, but it’s a similar similar principle of, of dropping into deep, alpha alpha brainwaves. Is that would that be accurate? or?

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 18:29
Yeah, well, you’re not dropping into alpha that I’m aware of what I’m aware of is that the, you know, the major tool in you know, say that, you know, dry shamanism is this very dull, monotonous drumming that goes on in the back ground. And that’s actually a theta rhythm. It’s three to six cycles a second. And what the shamans discovered, you know, after, you know, with 1000s, if not 10s of 1000s of years of, you know, field research, is just when you have that steady, monotonous drumming going in the background.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 19:08
It just, it allows interesting things to start happening in the brain. And I think what we’ve what we’ve seen is that, that is a theta rhythm. And as I as you said, as you said, We don’t normally we pass through theta as we’re going in and out of sleep. And that steady drumming allows the drain the brain to anchor in that theta state. And then once the drumming is going, once you’re anchored in that state, this this sort of internal ability to have visions to visit other dimensions or what you experiences other dimensions, right?

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 19:44
is is is is is there and it’s in, it’s in that altered state in that dimension where you you get access to information to answers to capacities That are latent in all of us. And so, so the there’s a number of different ways of saying how this happens. I mean, because one part of the work that I do is essentially getting getting the static and the distortion out of the nervous system. So you can have, in a sense, in an electronic sense, a clear flow of signal.

Al McBride 20:30
Right.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 20:32
So that that’s, that’s the more healing side of the work is that. And I think and this is this is where we get into trauma. I, I don’t think I think it’s only now we’re starting to understand how prevalent trauma is in our culture,

Al McBride 20:49
selectively.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 20:50
And how it’s, it’s, it’s at the root of addiction problems. It’s at the root of depression, in some instances, not all

Al McBride 20:58
it’s, as you said, You was that fantastic book. The body keeps the score. Yeah. And the American

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 21:08
Gabor Ma Tei.

Al McBride 21:09
And incredible how he was saying working in high security prisons like violent offenders, it is statistically impossible nearly to find someone who isn’t wasn’t didn’t have severe childhood trauma. So they again, it’s one of these key events, not that everyone who has trauma is going to end up in prison. But when you don’t have other things in your life going in certain directions or otherwise helpful environmental factors. Yeah, you can very easily go into these disastrous cycles.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 21:41
Well, and that’s and that’s, you know, that’s the aces study. Are you familiar with that? no adverse childhood experiences,

Al McBride 21:47
okay.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 21:49
It’s done in the I think there was a late 80s in Kaiser Permanente, a big HMO in California, and they were looking at 18,000 of the HMO members. And so, you know, given the way America structured, if you’re in an HMO, it basically means you’re, you know, you’re middle class or better you’re employed, you’re probably well educated. So these are not people coming from, quote, bad backgrounds.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 22:16
Okay. And what they screening for was 1010 different things. Physical neglect, physical abuse, emotional neglect, emotional abuse, sexual abuse, alcoholism, mental illness, disruption in the home, and and i think incarceration. And, and they were stunned to discover that something like 70 plus percent of these people from good backgrounds had at least one of these traumatic things in their childhood, but I think close to 40% of them had four or more.

Al McBride 22:57
Wow.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 22:58
And when you get to the level of, you know, four or more the the prevalence of things like who it is. Yeah, so, this is a little thing that I created a little handout on this. So it’s addiction in the home drugs and alcohol, mental illness and own depression, psychosis, and so on. Physical emotional neglect, absent parents divorce, abandonment, or illness, physical, emotional or sexual abuse, witnessing domestic violence, parent in jail, led to a seven to 30 times more prevalence of things like heart disease, cancer, diabetes, suicide, alcoholism, strokes, and early death.

Al McBride 23:43
The body keeps the score. Yeah, very things manifest. Right.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 23:47
So I think we’re starting to really understand that that trauma is much more prevalent in in our culture in people’s childhoods, which create a lot of difficulty in the getting zapped by the sun, which leads to a lot of difficulty. I think, what’s the best way of describing it? trauma is not so much what happened. It’s the emotional scar tissue that’s formed around the event that constricts and limits Yes, the person’s ability to function to be flexible.

Al McBride 24:34
That’s fascinating, because it’s just this is just to compound the point and putting things together here. There was a study done on children in the new in New York, particularly children, Manhattan, after 911 and why some of them had PTSD and other traumatic experience symptoms afterwards, and others didn’t and what was the difference? And what became very clear, very good Quickly was how the parents actored not to blame the parents is just how they happen to act.

Al McBride 25:06
Generally, when the parents gave some sense of agency to the child that they were involved in, like, oh, run, and you know, grab your bag and grab your teddy and grab whatever, when they’re able to be more involved in the process of making themselves safe. And the parent was, okay, we’re gonna do this, we’re gonna do this. And it seemed like there was some sort of a plan or some sort of a less panic, that there was a slightly more sense of control, and maybe Okay, stressful as it was.

Al McBride 25:35
They didn’t, they didn’t develop symptoms of trauma, or PTSD, these kind of things. But when there was a sense of panic, and a sense of out of control, and no agency, no sense of control over anything, they tended to develop trauma. So it’s very much what you were saying. It’s not just the event. It’s how that’s encoded in the story or the explanation of the event.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 25:58
Yeah, yeah. No, and I think you know, that, you know, the Buddhists sort of talk famously about, you know, with our mind, we create the world, you know, and this is where all the mindset people get off is like, you know, change your thoughts change your reality. That’s very true. And it’s limited in the sense that, yes, with our mind, we change, we create the world. But first, the world created our mind.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 26:25
Exactly, you know, that what you experienced from birth, through the age of sort of self reflection and awareness is going to sculpt and shape your nervous system, your reactions and your beliefs. It doesn’t mean they’re fixed. Certainly, but it but it means they’ve been shaped in a particular way. I think that’s, that’s what a lot of of, you know, therapy is about, is trying to understand the shaping and to redo it, you know, in some cases, it’s, it’s, it’sre parenting.

Al McBride 26:58
re parenting is a big thing these days. Absolutely. But it’s also echoing, as you say that the Buddhist statement very much echoes, you know, the western history in stoicism, that route of cognitive behavioral therapy and mindfulness are often these days taught as sort of the other side of a similar coin. With that idea of you know, it’s not the event, it’s our thoughts on the event, or it’s our mind on the event, we want to expand that.

Al McBride 27:26
I’ve often felt that way, man, I even lectured in cognitive behavioral coaching, the coaching offshoot of CBT. And even though I used that much to, to do that, now, it’s one of the my go to tool in the toolbox, if you will, working with coaching clients, you often do get it and often it’s very effective. But equally, there’s a minority of times of significant art where it just doesn’t quite take hold. And I’ve discussed this with a number of other coaches, many who are far more experienced than I am. And we all suffer centuries, maybe we need to train as therapists to help people go that bit deeper.

Al McBride 28:04
But this is what’s interesting. Is that your because when you were talking before, about you, talking about how you had a personal crisis, you mentioned in 2008, and you had to revisit a lot of these things and how you had the distinct feeling that therapy wasn’t the right tool for the job. I’m using my language here. Yeah. And you needed something else, something deeper, and like we were talking about this complete. I use the word spiritual change, but state change. Can we talk a bit more a deeper dive into that we’re going that direction anyway. But I just wanted to mention that that how do you know which tool is right for the job, so to speak? Or do you have?

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 28:55
Well, I mean, at this point, the way I work is I’m using all the tools gotcha. That and you know, a very simple way of sort of describing kind of what I do is, is you know, a client comes to me and some part of their life is is not working. And it’s either something like they’ve reached a certain level and they know they and they’re aware I want to go higher, and yet I don’t I don’t quite know what to do.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 29:27
You know, so so one strategy that people who, you know, that they’re actually quite successful. But in Marshall Goldsmith term, what got them there is not gonna is not going to move the needle. Gotcha. So it’s like, you know, or it’s like that scene in Jaws, you know, we’re gonna need a bigger boat, and they’ve realized I’m, I need to be a bigger me,

Al McBride 29:50
rice.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 29:52
So that’s, that’s one end of the spectrum is like, Yeah, I just I need to be a bigger me. And then there’s the other end of the scale. Is is, you know, some some kind of I had a meditation teacher who used to ask me how loud does it have to get, you know, and they’ve had they’ve had, you know, the universe’s hit them with a two by four of some sort, pay attention dummy, there’s something going on. So whatever it is, you know.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 30:21
So, um, what they’ve become aware of is that that something’s not working, either they can’t reach that next level, or they’re at a level and they feel they’re blocked, they’re stuck, they’re frozen, they’re afraid, whatever it is. And the way I sort of describe it as that there’s, there’s something going on in your nervous system in your neurology that is blocking your ability to move to think to create whatever. So the first part of the process is to remove whatever it is, is blocking. Right. And that’s, and that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s sort of a psycho spiritual process. It’s not purely psychological. Okay. And it’s not purely spiritual.

Al McBride 31:10
And it’s going back to this idea that, you know, our, our psyches are built our whole problem biology is built, not particularly to thrive as such, but to survive. And sometimes they’re not mutually exclusive.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 31:25
Yeah. Well, I, I think the way I describe this, this actually comes into the therapy model, I was trained in the human Givens model, which basically posits that we are here because our ancestors survived.

Al McBride 31:42
Absolutely.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 31:44
And so what that means is for 10s, of 1000s of years, and hundreds, if not 1000s, actually, probably millions of gender relations, you know, one ancestor made it to the next, you know, first is Amoeba, you know, and then as little critters, and then as apes, and then, but what that means is that when we’re born, we come in, ready to thrive. You know, we come in with a set of emotional, social, physical, spiritual needs, wired into our nervous system, we come in with all sorts of genetic potential, we, we come in with capacities for meeting our needs, memory, the ability to form bonds, curiosity, imagination, logical brain, metaphoric brain, you know, we have all these abilities.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 32:36
And ideally, we’re also born into a culture and a family, that gives us everything else we need to activate that potential. Okay, and I think this is where a lot of people are having difficulty is that either they’re born into a family that’s stressed, dysfunctional, or otherwise not working very well. Or they’re born into a culture that’s also crazy making, you know, because our culture is crazy making.

Al McBride 33:11
Did you mean, to me in modern Western culture, do you mean?

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 33:16
Well, I think, I think modern, I think modern Western culture is kind of an extreme example, in certain ways. But I also think that, you know, most indigenous cultures look at, at all modern cultures, and they see us as crazy. Because, you know, the heart of sort of the indigenous experience is that we are all connected, we are all one we, you know, everything. There’s no such thing as, you know, the Garden of Eden being thrown out of, you know, that that whole story that’s at the basis of Christianity, and Judaism and Islam.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 34:06
And, and before that showed up and Babylon and stuff, that’s, that’s a relatively new idea in sort of human thought it’s only four or 5000 years old. Right? And, and it’s, it’s a very alienated one. And, and they they do not experience the world as being threatening or dangerous, or they experience the world as being something where we’re all connected. And we, so I mean, that’s, that’s, that’s quite a different thing. But in terms of just the day to day strains of

Al McBride 34:35
which is to say it isn’t it isn’t because when you have an acceptance that you weren’t thrown out of Paradise, and that there’s the promise of getting back into it if you play your cards, right, and what you think, you know, it is how it is out there. Yeah, things are dangerous, but they’re also fantastic are plentiful at times. It sets up one psyche of expectations and a very different way.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 35:01
Yeah, no, I think in some sense, it’s an incredibly fundamental question. But it’s also a very big one for the podcast.

Al McBride 35:08
And it’s just interesting, because you mentioned it when you were into in architecture, you were very in the ecological side. And it kind of taps back into that, that. That I mean, that shamanistic approach from

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 35:22
No, I mean, the thread between all these apparently disparate things, is how do we live in harmony and balance with ourselves, with each other, with our environment with the planet? Exactly.

Al McBride 35:38
So just just going back, because we did go off in a very fun tangent there for a minute, just looping back? What because you were talking about how you were working with your clients. And, you know, a lot of your clients are, you know, if you look there, if you ever see their LinkedIn profile are quite impressive people. Yes, as you said that they have these severe blockers, they have these have something stopping them or making their lives far less enjoyable or full of contentment, as it might be? So talk us through how you work with them. How are you? And a lot of them, as I said, have tried coaching or therapy or other modalities that have worked a little bit but not solve whatever it issue is, they’re they’re suffering with? So what is different about you? How do you what process do you move them through?

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 36:30
Well, one of the ways I describe the model I use is, is to sort of say, you know, imagine, your life is like a mill pond, okay.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 36:41
And everything that’s ever happened to you is a stone being thrown into that pond. So every event, you know, creates a splash, and a ripple. And some of the stones are very small, and some of the stones are very big. And over time, this pattern of splashes and impacts and ripples, creates the surface of the pond creates how turbulent or smooth your current experiences. And so depending on what modality you’re using, they have different stances to what to do. So I think your classic kind of coaching approach as well, you know, forget about the past. Don’t worry about it, it’s over. Let’s just set a direction, set a goal and start swimming. Okay. And maybe we need to work on your technique.

Al McBride 37:35
to swim faster.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 37:37
Yeah. And a short term therapy approach. Similarly, would say, let’s, let’s focus on goals, let’s focus on outcomes. And maybe we need to work on your fear of water. Right, at least your fear of water. A long term therapy approach might say, well, we actually we need to study the pattern of the ripples and map back and figure out where the splashes were, and where the big ones were, and where the small ones were. And, and the I think the assumption there is that once you get a picture of what happened, somehow it magically fixes itself.

Al McBride 38:16
But once you know,

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 38:18
once you have this trauma, or there’s less you have insight, and I think that’s that’s, you know, because I spent quite a few years doing that. And I think that’s where, you know, there’s a bit of a question mark, what happens there? And and this is a very broad generalization. A more meditative approach would say, well, you need to sink below the surface of the water, get away from the turbulence go into the depths. And then you’ll be fine. Or the more fluffy end of the, the, sort of the wounds and of the, the Enlightenment, new age is you rise above it,

Al McBride 39:03
right?

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 39:04
But But both of those run the danger of, you’re just you’re just disassociating you’re there, there are different ways of numbing out there there perhaps less destructive than then you know, shooting up, right? But you’re still you’re still kind of using the technique to deny the experience or doll it you’re not you’re not resolving it. Gotcha. Now, there’s definitely a strand of meditation that is all about sinking down into the essence of your being and into who you really are and dissolving everything.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 39:48
But, and then the shamanic is really more you ask something bigger and wiser than your normal self for help and it goes to the biggest splash the biggest stone and in ways that are hard to describe. But once you’ve experienced them, it’s like holy shit, you actually remove the stone, remove it from time and space, you remove its impact, so that that turbulence is no longer radiating out in your pond. And the way I work with people is we, you know, we kind of work with all of those things. I mean, we do sit down and figure out, what are your goals?

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 40:37
Where are you headed for what’s getting in the way, we do work with meditative techniques for calming the mind, we do a little bit of history taking and figuring out the patterns. But the heart of it is using that touching in with something bigger, something wiser, your unconscious mind your higher self and beyond to find where that big stone is, and remove it and remove its impact. And I think that’s where you can you can reach those methods with talk therapy, it just, it just takes a lot longer.

Al McBride 41:17
And you know that one of the big things with talk therapy is that rapport and trust between therapist and client, yeah, can be a good fit, you know, so, as you said, it can take months or years to do that. So, I mean, to continue that analogy, you know, when you remove one or two of those particularly big stones that often solve the problem for your clients, and then they’re free to to grow or evolve or expand. And this is where we’re talking about high performance that these people are performing a pretty high level anyway. But as you said, to really harness their abilities and their insight, and yeah, and get tremendous results at the next level, they need those things to be removed. Does that usually free them? Or is there a further steps or further?

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 42:05
It depends on the situation. bizarrely enough, a lot of my clients are executive women, which is very strange, because, you know, in this lifetime, I have been neither of those things. Right. But, but many of them come to me because of sort of glass ceiling bullying, power abuse situations in the workplace.

Al McBride 42:32
Okay, so there’s often an abusive element, even if it’s mild, just about on the side of legal.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 42:40
Well, just, bullies are no different than sexual predators. They have they they know who they can do this with.

Al McBride 42:50
Right.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 42:53
There were there was a horrible story that I learned from actually Gabor Ma Tei. My my I did his training and compassionate inquiry. And there was a, an OB GYN who was, you know, brought up for molesting his women patients. And had been for years and, and he had, and there were, like, huge numbers of his patients said, I had no idea he was always a perfect gentleman with me very respectful, very this. And but there were other ones and basically, you know, like, like any kind of a predator, he knew people who were vulnerable, do that. And just in the same way that child molesters, they have a sort of a radar for children who were from families that are not paying attention to them.

Al McBride 43:47
Wow, that’s disturbing, as I’ve heard this before, with psychopaths, that psychopaths have been shown videos just to people walking through shopping malls, and they have to choose sort of Who do you naturally target as a victim of for whatever horrible thing they want to do. And they invariably scary consistency of picking the ones who had been, as you said, abuse victims rather than the ones who hadn’t. Yeah, so I still haven’t worked out exactly what they spotted. And they couldn’t, they couldn’t often

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 44:19
catch what it was. It’s not conscious. No, it’s just, you know, it’s a predator. It’s a predator prey relationship. So there’s a there’s a certain knowledge of and this is what I would this is what I realized is that the reason a lot of these women were coming to me was because of their trauma history. Okay. And because of the fact that I have a trauma history, and I’ve done a lot of work on it, right, of course.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 44:43
And so, so it said, so, you know, step one is to release, you know, that the memories, the experiences, the beliefs, that are sort of attracting or mag you know, magnetizing is Quite the word, but you know, when your energy

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 45:02
changes, you’re no longer a target for the bullies. So in one sense, they just find that the bullies kind of disappear. Yeah. So that, that that can be one level of problem solving. But then the other one, the more high performance when that gets back to Nicola, you know, one of my favorite clients who came to see me because things were going really well. You know, you know, PhD from Cambridge, 15 years climb through, up through the ranks, had gotten her lectureship had her research team, billions and billions, millions in grant money to solve important problems.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 45:50
So she was great, you know, feeling wonderful, but a little overwhelmed by all the opportunities, all the choices, and so this was a sense of, you know, I, I need to be a bigger me, right. But at the same time, she was also having kind of a spiritual crisis, that there was a part of her that was waking up to, well, you know, I like a more mystical side of her. And she didn’t know what to do with this mystical side, because the physicists was terrified that if the mystic, got outed, she’d lose all credibility.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 46:27
You know, in this rational scientific world, and, and the mystic is saying, we have to quit physics and become a yoga teacher. He was literally being torn apart by these two, these two demands. And so we worked together for about six months and and integrated the two so she was, was, you know, very happily being mystical, using the shamanic techniques for going into other dimensions of reality.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 46:58
And, and, and when she’s when she’s on these meditative states, she’s, she’s having these experiences, where she’s talking with the spirit of Einstein and Tesla, about her research. And she’s meeting with, quote, The Spirit of the materials. Her lab is researching, and she’s coming back with insights, little diagrams and thoughts.

Al McBride 47:22
It’s always interesting, because is it we’re talking about going theta level brain, which is associated often as we go in and out of sleep. And it’s often when we’re very creative. When we you know, we wake up as we’re dozing off, where the brain is working very interesting ways. But, you know, the subconscious, you know, for those who aren’t aware, the subconscious tends to work in metaphor. So, so I just love these metaphors. Well, I want to talk with Tesla, you know, if you have particular respect for Tesla, he’d be a great one to to get advice from, from that part of your psyche to tell you that you might be listening to otherwise Yeah, very cool. Well,

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 48:00
I think, you know, there is this image of, you know, the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious mind, I forget his name, it’s one of the one of the, you know, popularizers, he draws this picture of sort of says, you know, it’s like the elephant and the elephant driver. But your conscious mind is the little guy sitting on top of this big elephant. And the elephant has all sorts of desires and memories and history and experiences. And the driver is doing his best to steer the elephant.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 48:31
I think I think that’s, that’s an accurate picture, but it doesn’t go far enough. I think our unconscious is not an elephant. It’s a blue whale. And it’s in the ocean, where it’s connected and communicating with all the other blue whales, that that’s Jung’s collective unconscious. So that our unconscious is even bigger than we think it is. And it’s even more connected.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 49:02
Than then we’ve, you know, perhaps previously thought, because, I mean, I’ve had experiences of seeing and getting information about stuff that, that this did, I shouldn’t know. And my client similarly, that, you know, they’ll, you know, you know, Nichola getting these insights into the worker lab is doing corporate clients will get insights into, you know, a big spreadsheet model, it’s not working a division that’s having difficulties, a project that’s not working.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 49:36
And to the point where, you know, using these insights, they you know, they turn dead in the water things into successes. And, and if you go into the Oh, forget it. I think it’s the Dogan, one of the sort of Shamanic peoples in Africa, many of them Talk about who actually the Bushmen also speak about, you know, they don’t learn anything here, they learn everything by going to classrooms in the sky. You know, that they, you know that that all the knowledge is held somewhere up there. And that’s where you go get it.

Al McBride 50:22
How long does this process usually take when you’re working with clients from beating stock, and they come to see you for whatever reasons, as you said that there’s something that they want resolved to feeling that they have a resolution of sorts, or a certain level of freedom, or answers or whatever that might be. And then as he said, so often, I mean, I’ve read your testimony is extremely impressive that there’s there are extraordinary results happening and Is it is it a similar track for most people are some people take a lot longer, some people a lot shorter? How does that work?

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 50:58
Well, certainly the way that work has evolved now is that I, I now typically take people into what I call my destiny awakening. So there’s even the destiny awakening, which is roughly a three to six month process, right? Um, one to one, where, you know, we kind of figure out what the thing is that they want, you know, what’s the thing that’s going to make the biggest change? Is it something around your business?

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 51:33
Is it something around your health, is it something around your relationships, and then we, you know, that becomes the focus of the work we’re doing. And then there’s six to 12 weeks of meeting, where we’re just exploring the dimensions of the problem, I’m giving you little micro tasks and exercises, to both agitate the situation, and also start to make it better. Because I’m trying to understand what’s really causing it, where the problems are, you know, so this is a mixture of me and sort of other it’s something else, figuring out where those stones are, where those big stones are.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 52:22
And then we have the karmic alignment day, which is a day, sometimes a day and a half, very intense process. Where that’s where we clear the neurology, we clear the belief statements, and we, we kind of, that’s where the stones get taken out. And then there’s, you know, there’s a follow on process of six to 12 weeks of integrating the shifts the changes. And, and if we haven’t quite cleared everything from your neurology will continue to clear it in that period. That’s one trajectory.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 53:00
There’s another one that has more to do with that, that’s more on the end of people who just want to kind of clear stuff and move on. Right? What Nicola did was she actually did more of the becoming her own shaman stepping into her destiny work. So that’s it’s a similar process, assume similar length three to six months. But it’s, it’s a certain amount of clearing, but a lot of it is also learning to develop this skill, this capacity to alter your awareness, it will change your consciousness, draw on these other dimensions of reality, other dimensions of your own awareness, and then use them effectively in your life.

Al McBride 53:51
So so often, I find with a lot of people in one way or another, wash, I and what a lot of people I know and similar profession, help them do is essentially get out of their own way. And while it sounds like you’re doing and started a whole other, a whole other deeper level, and as I said, being able to do it more so as well. But if people wanted to start looking down that direction, what would you recommend?

Al McBride 54:23
So for example, I mean, I, as you know, a huge, huge fan of, of Joe dispenza, who’s deep meditation, and it taps into some of these abilities to gain that sort of insight if you’re into meditation, and it was a ton of research and how beneficial that is. This is this, for me was a whole other level again, and hugely beneficial, but I just wonder what would you recommend something that they can do to start one, maybe solve the problem, but start looking in the right direction?

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 54:55
Well, I would, I mean, I would definitely concur that hey, Kind of meditative practice any kind of regular thing, where you sort of sit and be with yourself and allow kind of your true nature to arise is a good thing. You know, and that’s and that’s part of, you know, that’s one part of that that preparatory phase in the work that I do is, is giving people, you know, specific breathing practices, putting aside, you know, and we start really small, you know, initially, it’s like, a minute of breathing practices in the morning, when you wake up in a minute before you go to bed.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 55:41
You know, and then the second week, it’s two minutes, you know, because it’s, it’s grooving it in, it’s important, it’s not, it’s not, you know, if you try to say someone, okay, you know, starting tomorrow, I want you to do 20 minutes of meditation in the morning and 20 minutes at night, that’s not going to last No. But as you start to have this experience of what it’s like, to, to breathe, and calm your nervous system down, you know, because in many cases, people have spent 20 3040 years being scared. You know, and running.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 56:14
And then there are, there are a couple of there’s some very simple techniques, I mean, one of them is, is the hah breath, where you just you breathe in through your nose. And then you just make haaaaaah sound. And just do that, I mean, that, that, that starts to that helps to make a connection between your conscious and unconscious mind.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 56:45
It’s it strengthens the connection. Another one that’s actually being taught in a lot of business schools, is what I call be like a dog. But you know, it’s, I call it cats and dogs be like a dog gets gets gets too many Snickers, cats and dogs, just yawn, yawn and stretch. And even if you have to fake it just

Al McBride 57:06
it’s infectious.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 57:08
But it’s not only infectious. But brain scans show that that just yawning a few times, seems to push like a reset button in your nervous system. Yeah, and it’s it’s, it’s why you see cats and dogs yawning and stretching all day long.

Al McBride 57:25
Yeah, they do a lot.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 57:28
And especially if you do like a very, very slow neck roll. One of the reasons it’s important to do it very, very slowly, is it allows your brain to notice where the stiffness in the tightness is, hmm. And once it’s noticed it, it can say calm that down. But if you do it too fast, you don’t notice it. So again, that’s why, you know, cats and dogs do this very languorous, stretching, stretching, you know, they’re not stretching athletically. They’re, they’re stretching sort of consciously.

Al McBride 58:06
Very cool. Very cool.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 58:08
So I’d say, you know, those are two things that I often teach people, I mean, I always teach people to do is to, you know, just develop the breathing practice, and, and the, you know, yawn stretch thing. Just, you know, it takes less than a minute, 30 seconds, do it, you know, a couple of times now, and again, the research shows that, if you do this two or three times an hour all day long, in in certain respects, in terms of relaxation, it’s equivalent to a meditation practice, well, it will not give you the kind of the awareness benefits. In the sense of, you know, the Buddhists or, or the people who use meditation for those purposes, it’s not going to do that. But in terms of the physiological, calming the nervous system down benefits, it will.

Al McBride 59:02
Excellent. Excellent. So if people want to learn more about you, Andrew, where’s the best place for them to check you out?

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 59:11
Well, I’d say just go to my website, Andrew wayfinder.com. There is a there is, well, there’s going to be a quantum healing, energy meditation up there, that it’s about 12 minutes long, and it’s a visualization that just energizes the physical body, the emotional body, the mental body and the spiritual body, and kind of lines, line lines them all up.

Al McBride 59:36
I’ll check that out.

Andrew Hyde Hryniewicz 59:38
And then once a month, I do kind of a demonstration, where I go into how my model works and, and who’s it for and what what the process does. So you know, if, when you when you get the, the meditation, you’ll be on the mailing list for that.

Al McBride 59:57
Excellent. And I can announce my To that details that will be beneath the podcasts and the video. So excellent stuff. Well, thank you so much under. It’s been a fascinating conversation. Thank you. Well, remarkable insights there. Thank you for being on the show. Okay. Cheers. Cheers. Talk to you again soon. Bye bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai