portal to the unknown

0:00Let's say you were constantly being rewarded for being a good boy because you were quiet. But why did you have to be quiet? This is just an example. Because your parents had shitty jobs that stressed them out that they didn't do anything about. And so then they took it out on the kids. And when they came home from work, they just wanted silence and peace because they had a dysregulated nervous system. So there's so much in us that's been shamed, that's been rewarded and punished, not because of any real metric of morality and what's good and bad, but rather just because of someone's distortion or the way that somebody's life ended up. There's no real sense behind it. And so you grow up and that shadow self is begging for you to integrate it, because your life is going to be better as a result.

0:55Now this is to me the primary thing that Jung saw: that in order to admit and really accept and understand the evil in oneself, one had to be able to do it without being an enemy to it. As he put it, you had to accept your own dark side. There's a nice German word, Hintergedanke, which means a thought in the very far, far back of your mind. He only had a Hintergedanke in the back of his mind, which showed in the twinkle in his eye. It showed that he knew and recognized what I've sometimes called the element of

1:42irreducible rascality in himself. Now this made Jung a very integrated character. In other words, he understood that an integrated person is not a person who simply eliminated the sense of guilt or the sense of anxiety from his life. He's a person who feels all these things but has no recrimination against himself for feeling them. You are now experiencing the Nectar of Time. Nev, thank you so much for being here on Nectar of Time. This is going to be a really exciting hour that we have

2:30together, because you're a very exciting person. And in fact, right now you are in Belgrade, aren't you? You're at the end of a journey that you started about a year ago, and you're about to embark on a new journey. So there's so many exciting things, and you have a lot of interesting, intriguing things to say. So, Nev, thanks for being on the show. Oh, thank you so much. I'm so excited to be here, and yes, I am at the end of a very exciting journey. So I do feel like I have a lot to share with your audience today. I want to start today with a couple passages from the book Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse. Steppenwolf is one of my favorite books. I mean, people who listen to this show, followers of the podcast, they

3:19know I like Hermann Hesse, just like they know I like Murakami. And what do you know? I got some quotes for you. But when Nev and I were planning this episode, we decided to anchor this around the theme of portal, or portals, to the unknown. A lot of what Nev does is related to shadow work, related to uncovering hidden treasures inside of you, uncovering hidden artifacts that may or may not be pretty as some treasure, but still might be quite valuable to look into and integrate and understand. It's like finding an old letter that was written by a family member and you're like, "I didn't know this affair happened."

4:06But I guess doing that in your own mind. Nev, before I go through these passages, do you have anything that you'd like to preface the episode today with? I don't think so. I think, yeah— Just dive into it. Yeah, let's go. So in Steppenwolf, there's this really cool device that's used. It's a magic theater. And the magic theater is this place where you're going to do all that shadow work, where you're going to uncover all these secrets. So there's a couple passages. This is the first one, where sort of Steppenwolf—I think that's his name in the actual novel. I forget if he has another actual name. He probably does, or he's just the protagonist—but

4:55he's walking down a street late at night and he sees this sign, this neon lit-up sign, and it says, "Tonight at the Magic Theater, for madmen only, price of admittance, your mind, not for everybody." So this is already quite ominous. This is already a similar—what would you say—a similar pitch that you might give to someone that's about to embark on the journey of the soul, a journey into the darkness of their mind. Because the price might be your mind if you don't fully integrate it. And so further, the quote continues like this,

5:44where it says, "This little theater of mine has as many doors into as many boxes as you please, 10 or 100,000, and behind each door, exactly what you seek awaits you. It is a pretty cabinet of pictures, my dear friend, but it would be quite useless to go through it as you are. You would be checked and blinded by it at every turn by what you are pleased to call your personality. You have no doubt guessed long since that conquest of time and the escape from reality, or however else it may be that you choose to describe your longing, means simply the wish to be relieved of your so-called personality. That is the prison where you lie." Yeah, that is really such a good

6:35passage. I can't think of a better start to this episode. And I think that passage actually is almost like the summary of the work that I've been doing, not just with my clients, but on myself, for probably, give or take, the last 16, 17 years. I think that we really as humans, we've really been trained into externalizing our awareness, which means having this heavy focus on that which is around us and the physical world and, you know, what people say and societal structures and rules, and almost taking things at face value. But one thing that I know as someone who's practiced a lot of shadow

7:22work and really taken the time and the liberty to dig into the deepest corners of my mind is that nothing in this life should be taken at face value. And for me, this stands out most when it comes to human behavior. And one of the reasons why I love shadow work so much is because oftentimes we carry out a set of behaviors and we have a conscious idea of why we're behaving that way. But when you actually get into the nitty-gritty of shadow work and you find out the real reason why you're behaving that way, what is the root cause, the source, what you're actually trying to achieve, which is

8:11always, and typically 100% of the time in humans who haven't done the work on themselves, different than what they say they're trying to achieve, you start to find out how we are all manipulative and sneaky and self-serving, and there's so many things that we do to avoid being punished, and it's just this existential kink. But what's so relieving about shadow work, and this is where I diverge from that passage, is when you find out your existential kink and everyone's existential kink, it's no longer dark. It becomes fun. You can play with it because now you see yourself and you're not owned by that shadow any longer. And so I think that

9:00we all have to know what our existential kink is. And I think the only way is through digging into the deepest corners of the mind and asking those questions that nobody wants to ask. But once you ask them and you find out the answers, it becomes like a playground. So this is a really cool concept, and it's quite profound, because I think there's a lot of, you know, even ancient texts that describe play as sort of the ultimate answer, which is very difficult to reconcile in a very serious world. Now, say more about this existential kink, because it's quite an interesting concept. I haven't actually heard it described in those terms before. I actually had another question lined up, but this is interesting. I'll get back

9:47to that other one. So with the existential kink, how do you isolate? How do you know this is the thing? And talk a little bit more about transitioning from the darkness to the playful. Okay. Yeah. So, you know, what isn't obvious at a surface level for most humans who haven't done the deep dives is that we are actually oftentimes, and I would say all of the time, the root cause of our own suffering. And I would take it a step even further to say that we actually get off on our own suffering. And this is where the existential kink

10:36piece comes in. It's like we make that suffering something that is so horrible, so terrible, something that we don't enjoy. But whenever I look under the surface with my clients, and I can give you some examples, we always end up finding out that that person actually created that suffering because they stand to receive something from it. And as much as they say, "This is this thing that I don't want. It's so terrible. It's so outside of me. It's something that I'm desperately trying to get away from," it's actually not the truth. They're creating it. They want it for some reason. And I look at it through the lens of existential kink. It's a bit of a play on words. There's also a woman named

11:24Caroline Myss that wrote an entire book on this, where she also speaks to the existential kink from the perspective of, you know, you're a human. You don't just want to be here for the lightness and the love and the light and the fun. You actually get off on the darkness, the dirt, the grungy stuff, the darkest corners, because it gives you diversity. It gives you something to play in. It gives you this duality, this human playground. Let me know how that's landing, if there's anything— I'm getting Dracula images. I went to the theater to see Nosferatu, the new Dracula movie. And I mean, it's full of people, right?

12:12It's a scary thing. It's not a movie about pleasant things. People are possessed. You know, someone's going on this pilgrimage up to this hill to sign his life away—not intentionally, but that's what ends up happening due to madness. But there's something about that that's very appealing. There is no redemption without that trough, without that suffering, without going through the process. I think, you know, even take someone like Jesus, for example. The return of Jesus is the salvation, is the deliverance from this world that they're in. I mean, there can be no deliverance. There can be no redemption without the world that we're in, without the terror, without

13:00the suffering, without the, you know, the malice. So that to me does lend—it does make a lot of sense. But I guess when I think of things, I think of things on maybe a more macro level instead of a micro level. It's difficult for me to isolate that specifically in my mind. I will say facetiously that I'm a masochist, because I like to go do endurance sports, right? I'm doing it sort of, you know, because you're on kilometer whatever and you feel something invigorating about the discomfort that you're in. And also, not just in physical endeavors, but also in literature, I enjoy reading about suffering. I enjoy

13:48reading about darkness. There's something about it. So what is the intrigue there? Is it something that I'm not currently aware of in myself? Is it a lack of self-awareness, that I have this curtain around it? Yeah. So the entire premise—and, you know, Carl Jung, one of the fathers of psychology and shadow work, really spoke a lot about, you know, the shadow self. It is this suppressed part of ourselves, and it was oftentimes, you know, shaped by fear, by shame, by societal rejection. And so, you know, we have these quote-unquote unconscious parts, things about ourselves that are denied, that are shamed, that are buried so deep down. And

14:36the reason that we start to, you know, really attract these perhaps dark experiences, or call things into our lives that, you know, are perhaps uncomfortable or undesirable, is because we actually are receiving a mirror of that repressed self, that denied self, that shadow self that actually desperately wants to be integrated so that man and his psyche, or her psyche, can come into wholeness. And I think the best way that I can describe this to you, because sometimes it can be really hard to imagine how this all plays out, is by using an example. So something that I've seen a lot in—let's take relational patterns as an example. Oftentimes I hear a lot from women that they

15:25continuously call in emotionally avoidant partners into their lives. And so this is a form of darkness and suffering for them, right? It makes them feel lonely. It makes them feel rejected. It makes them feel denied, suppressed in their relationships, unable to experience that full spectrum of love that is desirable. However, when we dig beneath the surface of this woman who says that she is so available and she deeply desires this, we actually find out that she is completely avoidant herself, and she's been lying to herself the entire time, claiming that she is open for love. But underneath the surface, we oftentimes find a bunch of unresolved trauma and

16:15experiences that caused her to shut down her heart. So she's not available. And this partner that she's calling in, that she is essentially projecting on and blaming for her experience, is just a deep mirror of her own emotional avoidance, which she cannot see about herself. How much of this can be manufactured by you, in the sense you can take someone who is not ready for this but you can get them ready, and how much of it needs to be their own willingness to do this? Like, can you strap someone down and integrate their shadow for them? No, it needs to be a 1,000% their own willingness, because the thing is, these mechanisms of

17:04suppression and denial are very powerful, and they're oftentimes very much handled by our unconscious mind. It's not even something that is done consciously. You don't sit there and say, "I'm going to suppress this and forget about it." It's something that just happens. And so if someone shows up to the table and they're not ready and it's being done against their own will, their mind just isn't going to open up. And there are so many different mechanisms that you can hide your own from your own self, right? So the human being needs to be willing, and most importantly, they need to feel safe. Right. Yeah, I mean, this is a topic that comes up quite often,

17:52obviously, you know, facing yourself. I find, you know, I can always look at myself as an example of someone who's, you know, on a journey and looking to integrate and whatever. But I do think that there's layers to finding things out about yourself, because to some degree I would consider myself a self-aware person, but the key word there is "to some degree," right? I don't actually know how self-aware I am, because the definition of the blind spot is that you can't see it. Right. And so I feel pretty comfortable, but I know there's still things here and there that bother me, there's still things that create anger, that

18:40create rage, that create discomfort, that create triggers. And how do you know when you've hit, you know, the critical point in that journey? Because you know as well as I do, in the self-help world, in the self-development world, whatever you want to call it, everyone thinks they're self-aware after you've read a couple books, right? But most customers, most clients, most people that are looking for help are also those same people in that world. So it seems to be a little bit of a recursive snake-eating-its-own-tail situation. How do you ascertain, even for yourself, let's say, where you are, given that you're doing all this work? I'm curious to know your thoughts on that.

19:28Yeah. So when it comes to the integration of your shadow, one of the greatest markers of that is your capacity to hold triggers: how reactive or neutral you are in the face of being triggered in a relationship. You know, what your behavior is when you're triggered. That's often to me a measure of how strong and unintegrated the shadow is. Or in the opposite way, when you're just able to hold more neutrality, it really speaks to a higher level of awareness, because oftentimes when the shadow is unintegrated, human beings are much more reactive and they're much more likely to project. And

20:16when the shadow is integrated, when that person has seen this part of themselves, they no longer need to project onto other humans, because there is that deeper understanding. For example, using that relationship example, you wouldn't need to react to the emotionally unavailable partner anymore. You would make a simple yes or no choice: "Okay, this isn't for me." But when you still have an unintegrated shadow, because you haven't seen that part of yourself, that person, it's like a hair-trigger, or it's like an itch you just cannot stop scratching, because you need to see that within you, right? And so I can speak to also my journey over the years. You know, I started off very turbulent in my relationships,

21:05very reactive, you know, at the drop of a dime, someone's comments. And this wasn't just in romantic relationships, but in friendships as well. And as I continue to do this work, it's like I'm just in a place of neutrality. And these relational conflicts, and, you know, conflicts that come up inevitably throughout our lives, it comes down to a simple yes or no choice: is this aligned with my values? I no longer need to react. And so that's a really, really good marker. Yeah. Interesting. You no longer need to react. Yeah. And that's sort of the problem, is that that is so comfortable, that these are like safe havens for us, right? When we get triggered, in a way—it's like, I find that for myself

21:54and some, it's like the righteous indignation, right? You really feel like your anger is valuable. You feel like your trigger is valuable, and you don't want to let them go. They're like infinity stones of trauma or something that you're holding in your gauntlet. Yeah, I mean, that part is really scary. So essentially you become that person that is that equanimity, if you will, right? Where despite bad things happening, despite good things happening, you remain stable. This is all about creating a stability in yourself, being able to weather the storms of life, and

22:43ultimately, I guess, listening to your intuition. Because the fear that I have, the biggest fear that I have, is distortion of intuition. Like, if I feel my intuition is somehow distorted—and it could be distorted in a myriad number of ways, right?—then I feel I will betray my fate. I will betray my destiny in my short time here on this planet, right? And that's the scariest part. I mean, if you're a Hindu, then you can say, "Well, you know what? When you die, you're going to hit the reset button. You'll try again." And that's the samsara, right? That's that loop that brings you back over and over again until you figure it out. But, you know, the Jewish side of me doesn't really like that. The Hindu side is like, "That's

23:32all right. You're going to be okay." But the Judeo-Christian side is sort of judgmental about not figuring that out in your time here. So to some degree there's that pressure. Yeah, I mean, how do you feel about this idea of the distortion of intuition? And is the shadow work the ultimate way to gain clarity with your intuition? Is that really the purpose? Oh, 100%. Yeah. What I found is that, you know, again, it comes back to the more unintegrated shadows you have. Because if you think about it, those unintegrated shadows, they live beneath the surface, and there is a lot of charge. And if we think about that charge in terms of energy, it's like the

24:20top wants to pop off. There's always something looking to rise, because the shadow self wants to be integrated. We're actually meant to live as this whole being and not have these caged-off parts. And what's even more interesting is that oftentimes a shadow self is really a direct consequence of the level of shame that exists in our society, and all the things that are made good or bad, right or wrong, that sometimes aren't even that. You know, think about the school system. Think about all the things you were punished for as a kid. Your unconscious mind starts to integrate that punishment and make it life or death. So let's say you were—I'm going off on a bit of a tangent

25:06here, but let's say you were constantly being rewarded for being a good boy because you were quiet. But why did you have to be quiet? This is just an example. Because your parents had shitty jobs that stressed them out that they didn't do anything about. And so then they took it out on the kids, and when they came home from work, they just wanted silence and peace because they had a dysregulated nervous system. So there's so much in us that's been shamed, that's been rewarded and punished, not because of any real metric of morality and what's good and bad, but rather just because of someone's distortion or the way that somebody's life ended up. There's no real sense behind it. And so you grow up and that shadow self is begging for you to integrate it, because your life is

25:53going to be better as a result. And so I want to bring this back to the intuition piece. It's like the shadow self is really sneaky, but it's not actually sneaky. It just wants integration. And so when you have a strong shadow self, it's really, really easy to receive these intuitive hits, but it's actually just your shadow speaking. And I had that a lot in the beginning of my journey, because I'm extremely intuitive and I needed to learn how to hone my intuition. And I will say it's a hard-knock life. The only way to really purify that intuition is to sometimes make the mistake of listening to something that you were convinced is

26:40your intuition, and end up so tied up, realizing it's your shadow self only after the fact. I'm not even joking. I have had so many situations like that. They weren't always pretty. It wasn't always fun to go through, but it was a form of purification. Right. Well, you're indulging in what you deem to be at the time your intuition, and then after the fact, if it's not—I mean, that's the learning, right? You kind of have to take action to get the learning. You can't learn all of these things in the classroom, right? You could be taught it all day long: "This is intuition, this is shadow, this is intuition, this is shadow." But you got to go take the exam

27:26at some point, and the exam is in real life, with real decisions that you're making. I mean, do you have clients that are religious? The problem I see with shadow work is its ability to mesh with religious moral structures. Those, ultimately, those are prisons, right? And let's say you believe in whatever—you could be Muslim, you could be Jewish, you could be Christian. There's so many things that create shame, that create guilt, that make you feel like you're not doing the right thing, or you should be doing this, you should be doing that. To me, that cannot exist in the mind that is fully integrated with

28:15the shadow, right? Because you're creating these structures that cannot be touched. But if you're creating structures that cannot be touched, that's where the shadow is going to hide, right? And it knows you're not going to be able to go in. So it's like, "We're just going to live here rent-free." Do you have clients like that, that you've had to deal with? I have had some clients who perhaps in childhood grew up in families that were very strict and religious. You know, even—I mean, I'm my own client, and I grew up in almost a strict Balkan family with the Serbian Orthodox religion, which was, you know, also imbuing us with a lot of shame. And what I can say is that those clients now mostly self-identify as spiritual. So they let go

29:03of the religion, or they actually don't have—I don't think I have anyone who adheres strictly to a religion. Because you're right. Personally, I think that at the essence and at the core of almost all the world religions, and especially some of the books and the ancient scripts and texts, there's so much beauty, and it really speaks to love and light and the highest frequency and beautiful virtues. But I just think that we've gone so deep into man's mind distorting religion and wielding religion as a tool for control, for manipulation, for power, that there's just a lot in every religion now that you can

29:53no longer fully rely on and trust, if that makes sense, because there's been so much distortion that's been introduced. Right. It's an unreliable—I don't want to say unreliable narrator, but it's an unreliable structure. As it used to be, you could just throw yourself into it completely. We know too much now. That's the danger. We know too much. And I do feel the same way. Again, for those that know me in the show, I'm by no means anti-religion, but I'm definitely like, you know, just like you're integrating the shadow, you got to integrate religion in the right way, too. And, you know, no one alive here on this planet currently has spoken to any deity with verifiable evidence. So I think everything is up for interpretation and in the open.

30:40And if you're reasonable about it, you could probably handle it. But if you're kind of like—I'm a bit of an absolutist in some senses, when it comes to, well, in particular when it comes to divinely ordained rules and laws and whatnot. But that's a different tangent. That's a different tangent altogether. I want to sort of switch to your actual work, where I see you on Instagram—and you can go on Nev's Instagram and see her run these processes with her clients. There's a lot of physical touch. There's a lot of physical components to it. It's very visceral.

31:29Can you explain what you're doing with these clients? It looks to the uninitiated like you're doing some sort of an exorcism on them. Yeah. So, I mean, my work has really integrated a lot of the nervous system regulation work, and I think that it is really foundational to work on our nervous system in our body, because our nervous system is really the foundation of our stress response, of whether we are living high-functioning but extremely disconnected. And so I use a lot of somatic tools, and I think what you've seen is a lot of breathwork. And when I'm facilitating breathwork, I oftentimes touch women and give them that support, obviously with their

32:16permission. But the reason why I incorporated so much body work along with the shadow work and everything I do is because one thing that I found is a lot of humans in today's modern world are essentially living in a state that I call functional freeze. So they're extremely high-functioning. They're able to perform at work or perform as an entrepreneur or carry out all of their daily tasks, but they're living in a state of being completely disconnected from their body. So they have a lot of issues with sleep. They feel tired, exhausted, they're stressed out all the time. And, you know, whilst these symptoms go on, they just continue living their modern

33:03lives. But it's a deep state of unsafety. And what I found is, before we can go into these deeper modalities that actually require a lot of energetic presence and capacity from us, right? Because it's not always easy to look yourself in the mirror and face your own wounds and patterns and traumas, and, you know, it's very confronting. So what I found is that I don't want my women, or my clients, living in functional freeze, because when they go into that deep inner work from their functional freeze, it pushes them over the edge in terms of their stress response, and instead of that work feeling healing, suddenly it feels

33:52overwhelming. And that is one of the issues I've identified in the world of healing and personal development. Sometimes there's such a deep focus on the mind without actually looking into the body and what that client's stress response is, what their stress levels are, how safe they feel, how they're sleeping. And then this personal development world goes so deep into the mind and the concepts and the theories, and this person starts to just feel incredibly overwhelmed. And I've seen that it doesn't matter what you learn. If you're in a state of overwhelm, there's nothing you can do with what you've learned. You're just going to freeze, and it's going to turn into

34:39shame and blaming yourself for not being able to make a change, right? Right. But it's not your fault. You know, the burden that we all have these days just from trying to sustain modern life is enormous, and people need the space. And so that's why I do a lot of breathwork and grounding and body work, because it really calms the body, and it really just works very much on adrenaline and cortisol and that stress response in them. Right. So you're sort of seducing them in a sense—obviously not in a sexual sense, but in a body sense—to release the mind. You're like—

35:28oh, it's almost like a physical incantation or something. That's what it looks like to me. It looks very cool. You guys should check it out, and maybe try it. I don't know if you have any takeaways. Do you have practices that people can do themselves at home, or do they need to do it with someone, like with a partner? Yeah, I mean— Meaning you, or someone like you? I mean, I haven't really put out anything like a resource for someone to try on their own. And if I'm being honest, it's because I go to the depths with the clients that I work with. And the work that we do thus far, at least, has been very much work that needs to be supervised by a trained facilitator, because— Yeah.

36:14A lot can come up for them. And that's not to say anything negative will come up. Oftentimes when my clients do some body work or breathwork with me once, they'll ask for some tools, and I'll give it to them, because we already know that they had a good response to it, right? But definitely, you don't want to be suddenly trying things on your own and then feeling unsafe and retraumatized by these experiences or techniques. Yeah. No, that makes sense. Yeah, you want to, you know, proceed with caution, and just like hiking or something, do it with a friend, or someone you trust. I have one qualm about all of this just in general, and the

37:01qualm is this. Many times in these—and I'm part of this program right now. It's a little bit of a cult. I'm going to do an episode on it another time. But there's this whole idea of getting away from the mind and being in the body. My problem with that is I don't think that's a balanced approach. I think the mind has superpowers, the body has superpowers. Why do you have to choose between the two superpowers? To me it sounds like it should be, you know, a pilot and co-pilot, and they can switch as needed, as opposed to the body is better than the mind. Some people will say—and someone mentioned in this program, they mentioned

37:49that the mind is not the real reality. The real reality is in the present moment, in your body. Well, that sounds nice, but from, you know, a practical perspective, if someone's doing surgery on me, I don't want them to be in the body. I mean, I want them to be in my body, but I want them to be in his mind or her mind, right? So how do you reconcile that? Because I feel there's a little bit too much emphasis sometimes in these circles with "be in the body, be in the body." I mean, if Einstein was in his body, he would not have created, you know, general relativity. You know, Newton wouldn't have created calculus, right? So how do you see these roles,

38:36and how should they play out in our lives? Yeah, well, I'd love to shed some clarity on why most practitioners—and why there's so much of that right now. And I think the reason that suddenly there's been this big emphasis put on "be in your body, be in your body, be in your body"—and this really speaks to our ability as humans, our inability as humans, to hold duality. Because historically, and you see this in modern psychology and, you know, everything that's been in the realm of psychology and healing, I would say up until probably the last 20, 30 years, it's been all focused on the mind. And then we ended up finding out how there are so many benefits to incorporating

39:26the body and getting humans out of that conscious thinking mind, and that it's just a really good tool to get into the body, because the mind is really where so many of the patterns and the distortions and everything is stored, right? And so instead of kind of marrying the two and just saying the mind and the body, they're now just saying, "Get in the body, get in the body, get in the body," and going to— An overcorrection. Yeah, it's an overcorrection. They're going to the other end of the pole, the extreme, right? So for me personally, I believe in both. I believe that there is a time for both, which is exactly why I work with my clients on their mind and I do

40:15the body-based stuff, but it's never been exclusively one or the other. Because you're right, you do need the mind, but you just want to make sure that that mind is not being run by unconscious programming. And so when a human first sets out on this journey, it might actually benefit them to spend a little bit of time focusing more on their body, but eventually they have to integrate both. Yeah. Yeah, it's a difficult process. It's not easy. You know, I think people will say someone is cerebral as not an insult but as a criticism, like, "You're too cerebral, you're too in your mind, you

41:03need to be in your body." Yeah, there's certainly a happy medium, and I certainly need an overcorrection, that's for sure, because I'm very, very, you know, analysis paralysis. Overthinking is another criticism of people that are too in their mind, right? "You're thinking too much." Okay, well, thinking is actually probably a good thing, but overthinking is also not a good thing. Simplicity is the marker of intelligent people, right? Not complexity. Taking complex ideas and making them simple is that marker. So I wonder, you know, in that sense, it's like, okay, if you're taking something complex and making it more complex, that's probably an indicator that you're not really there yet. But anyways,

41:52that's also a little bit of a tangent. I think you put it very, very well. I want to go back to the anchor of this podcast, which is portals to the unknown. You embarked last year. You know, we met in Squamish in British Columbia, one of the hiking capitals of North America, and climbing capitals of North America—Squamish, British Columbia, in the Pacific Northwest, for those unaware. But we met there at a kind of day retreat. It was a cool little thing that went on. And a few weeks after that, you sort of got up and left and went to Eastern Europe, went to the Balkans, and went to your ancestral homeland on your own. You know, you weren't going on a

42:40friend trip. You weren't going on a family trip. You were already in British Columbia on your own, and you were like, "I need to up the ante even more and go, you know, even further into the depths." For a lot of people, that's a scary thing to do, right? And you saw that portal. That portal appeared to you—maybe you can describe, you know, when that portal appeared to you exactly—but you decided to jump in. And I think in all of our lives, from time to time, we see a portal. Some of us jump through that portal; some of us wait for the next one, because it's a scary proposition to go into the unknown. How do you go into the unknown? And if you see a portal, should you go through it? We discussed words such as fear, death, risk,

43:32responses to fear, honesty with yourself. These are all things that came up when we originally discussed this idea. What do you have to say about all that right now? The first thing that I have to say is, if you see a portal, you should absolutely walk through it. That is my life philosophy. And I do know that that differentiates me from perhaps the modern human, because so many of us have become risk-averse, and I would say even overly risk-averse. And the last couple of years, I have been walking my life on pure impulse. It's like, if I receive that intuitive knowing—which, now that my intuition has been purified after many years of making

44:20some really bad mistakes, I really do trust that intuition. And I think for me, the portal to the unknown opens the moment that we realize that we can no longer survive in the known. And, you know, shortly after meeting you, I just had this deep knowing and this deep self-realization that I could no longer live in Canada. And I didn't know what was even the push behind that, to be honest. I had quite few logical reasons for that. But it was a full-body knowing, and being less cerebral and more in my body, I've always had to respect my body's signals. And so I just trusted the

45:10impulse, and truthfully, I had no idea why I was even heading to the Balkans. I had no expectations. I essentially packed up and I left on an impulse. And what proceeded to unravel for me was probably one of the deepest treks into understanding of my lineage and my ancestors. So my parents, my mom and my dad, they came as immigrants in '96 to Toronto, and I was born in '95. So I was 9 months old when I came. And, you know, whilst I grew up in that Canadian society with Balkan parents, I didn't understand my roots. I got

45:58shipped off to the Balkans a couple of times throughout my life for, like, 2 months, but I had no idea. And I had no idea that something was missing. My whole life, something has been missing. And I can't even tell you that I've ever been aware that something was missing for me. It wasn't until I got here and I embarked on this journey of really understanding my ancestors, really understanding the culture here, really understanding the thoughts, ideas, and beliefs that have shaped people's values, that I feel like I integrated a part of myself. Because suddenly things from my childhood—the way that my father behaved, the way that my parents raised us, which very much differed from, you know, what I was hearing in school from the other kids—things just

46:46started to add up for me and started to make sense. And really getting to know my ancestors gave me the opportunity to understand my own patterns that I was carrying from my lineage. And I think that's really important for us, right? There's a lot of us who come, especially to Canada, as immigrants, and we lose that deeper connection to the people that came before us and how they lived. And what I really found in the Balkans was that there's a lot of trauma. Yeah. It's not pretty. This land has been through war and oppression and slavery and so much oppression of the feminine. There's a lot of sexual shame in this society. Women are meant to take on these very traditional roles. And tying back to everything I also

47:34learned about women, I started to understand why I had a lot of internalized shame that I couldn't even pinpoint where that shame came from. Shame about being a woman, about being beautiful, about being a sensual being like that. There was never a feeling of being allowed to express that, right? And I grew up in Canada, you know, the modern world. You'd be curious as to why that is. But my lineage and everything that comes from here is so far to the opposite end of that, right? I want to tie this back to the unknown. So I really stepped into the portal because I knew that I could no longer survive in my known reality. And if you know anything about Eastern Europe, you know that it is so far in

48:23the opposite direction of Western society. I got catapulted into what felt like a different planet. And it was really, really challenging, and I was afraid, but it led to probably 11 months of the greatest self and personal development that I've ever been through. Wow. And so I think that for those humans who want to change, they just have a deep desire to shift. That fear is always trumped by curiosity, if that makes sense. Interesting. It's almost childlike. Children will go and they'll be curious about things, and they'll go into dangerous

49:10situations not realizing it. So you almost want to use curiosity, is what you're saying, as the propulsion for going through the portal. Yes. And if you think about it, as a child you were so curious. You wanted to play. You wanted to get to know things, right? And if you're anything like me—I mean, my parents, my mother, she had just a very intense fear response. And it was like, "No, no, no, no, no. That's dangerous. That's dangerous. That's dangerous." And I think the older we get, the less we're rewarded for that curiosity. People start telling us that it's dangerous. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we start buying insurance. Yeah. That's really cool. I mean,

50:01there's so much to say about that topic, but I think you put it so beautifully, and it's really inspiring to know that you were able to do that, that that is an available pathway for all of us in our lives if we feel stuck. To learn that, hey, you can just take the step through, be curious, remove the fear. Again, we say that as if it's easy to do. It might take time. It might take you two, three, four years, five years to build up the courage to do that. But you can't build up the courage without first implanting that seed of thought in your mind and letting it germinate. And then eventually you realize, "That's a portal,

50:49and I'm going to go through it." And we're only here once—well, as far as we know. But let's do it. Let's try it out. Let's see what's going to happen on the other side. That's, I think, what makes life invigorating. You know, you talk about your ancestral homeland. I'm just curious, do you think it's important? Do you think it was just important for you personally to go there, or do you think it's important for everyone to go to their ancestral homeland? Is that just a you thing, or is there objectively something in—whether it's grass or sand or rock or water, or whichever part of the world you're from—to go and touch that with your bare feet and really be there in that place of your ancestors?

51:37Yeah, I think it was particularly important for me because, like I said, I am a shadow worker. I'm a healer. I'm a guide. And so for me it was specifically important, because shadow work also involves a lot of those intergenerational patterns, right? And so I think I needed to come here to embody an even deeper layer of wisdom. Is it important for everyone? I wouldn't say so. I mean, I think it's really important if you truly want to get to know yourself at the root, but if that's something that you're not interested in, then it's probably not a high priority for you. I want to tie in the last part of—

52:26because when you get into shadow work, it's very difficult to have a conversation around shadow work without bringing up the topic of sex and sexual energy. And, you know, when you say nervous system, nervous system is related to stress. Stress can be related to sex. All of these things are so interconnected, but it does come up as a very significant frontier when you're embarking on this shadow journey. And there's a reason why a lot of these groups and cults and whatever end up being connected to that, and end up having a significant component where it's, you know, sexual in orientation. The other biggest repression that we have is the sexual repression, right? A lot of the shame, a

53:13lot of the guilt that we discussed today is—yeah, it's one thing, I don't know, if you're Jewish or Muslim, to eat pork, and then it's another thing to have sex before marriage. They're two different classes of guilt and shame, right? So in your work that you do, how does that come up? And how do you handle that? I know you reference it in your content from time to time, but how do you deal with that? 'Cause it's obviously a major factor for a lot of people, and I think it's probably one of the primary reasons that deter people from probably doing this, because that's a heavy one to look into the eyes of. Yeah. So sex doesn't actually come up as

54:02directly as you might think in my containers and spaces. And, you know, I don't want to make this about gender, but I predominantly work with women. And I think that for women, sex, when it comes to performance, the actual physical act itself, it's not something that we put as much emphasis on. It's not something that actually matters to us that much. I think more so, when we think about sex, we think about intimacy and the relational part of it, you know, the actual love, the feeling of being accepted, wanted, desired. And also for the feminine specifically, it's the feeling that she can actually be beautiful and sensual and expressed in who she really is, right? And I think

54:50that a lot of women, when it comes to sex, for them it's really just the suppression of her being sensual, right? Of her dancing, of her moving a certain way, of her walking down the street in a crop top. Right. It's an expression. It's an expression thing, right? So when it comes to the actual physical act of intimacy, that's not something that I focus on as much with women. And I do think that there's a gender difference here, but what women have historically dealt with is a lot of sexual abuse and a lot of sexual trauma. And it's interesting, because what I have normalized through my work is really speaking about it. It's like looking the beast in the eye and

55:37giving it a name and a face. And that is so liberating. Mhm. I think that sex is something that we need to talk about, that needs to be brought out into the open, right? And again, this comes with this whole idea that what is repressed and suppressed is the most harmful for us. That which we bring out into the light, and that we actually look at with our two eyes and we consciously acknowledge, is so much less of a big deal, is so much less heavy. And so when I think about this work around sex, it's not heavy at all. And one thing that I love about my clients is they make such big breakthroughs, because just the act of speaking about it and bringing it out loud—whatever shame she might be holding, whatever judgment she

56:24still has toward herself or her body or her not being good enough—once it gets brought into the light, it just dissolves. Yeah. Wow. Once it gets brought into the light, it just dissolves. Like, back to the vampires. Yeah, that's really cool. Oh man, there's so much beautiful imagery, and I feel like we could continue this conversation for hours, and we can take it in so many different directions. It's just a very interesting topic, integrating darkness. I mean, I love that. I can drink that. It's like a chalice that I just want to keep sipping from. Let's say, if there was one, you know, one particular thing that you wanted to leave us with today, to sort of wrap your

57:14whole point together for this podcast, to make one last point, to summarize something, or if you have a quote or whatever wisdom you want to drop that people can take with them as a token from this podcast, what would that be? What really emphasizes your views on all of this? Yeah, I think I would just say that looking at your darkness is the source of your greatest power. Looking into those voids, into the unknown, into those patterns, whatever it is, it will give you so much power. It will push you to evolve as a human being. It will make you a better person. And it will make you more courageous, more self-assured, right? It's

58:03the source of your greatest power. I love it. Well, I want to end with a quote that I think is quite instructive here on how you might feel at the next stage of the journey, after you're starting your integration, where you can look into the eyes of your shadow and you can give a wink to each other. In the sense that I don't think the shadow ever goes away, but I think it becomes an ally. And there's this quote in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. It's not a particularly profound quote. It's actually quite a simple quote, but I think it is telling.

58:50And it goes like this. It says—oh, and by the way, I should preface this: Murakami uses this device of a well, where his protagonists frequently end up somehow in a well, whether it's a well in their backyard or it's a hidden well somewhere. But they end up in this well, and the well becomes like a portal into the unknown, a portal into the shadow side. And at first, when they enter this well, it could be quite daunting and quite scary. But when they frequent it more and more, it sort of becomes a friend, becomes an ally, and when something is changed in them, it definitely changes. So it goes like this: "Everything was unchanged: the darkness of

59:37the well, the thick walls of the well, the faint light from the house above, and the quiet. And at the same time, everything had changed." And so what that tells me is you can recognize the shadow. You can recognize the darkness, but the thing that changes is your relation to it. Maybe you're not scared of it anymore. Maybe, as you said, you're more curious about it. Yeah. Yeah. I think that directly ties back into what I said, that the darkness is the source of your greatest power, because once you confront it and you actually take a look directly into it, it no longer holds power over you. You actually now wield it rather

1:00:27than it wielding you. Wow. Well, Nev, it was a pleasure having you on Nectar of Time. I feel like there will be more episodes together in the future. We only really scratched the surface in the last hour or so. Thank you so much for being here, and I wish you all the best, and please continue helping people on this journey. We look forward to following you. Where can people actually follow you and find your stuff online? Yeah, I think Instagram's probably my main platform, and so I can leave my link, but it's just "I am Nevena G." Sweet. Well, ladies and gentlemen, we'll see you on the next episode of Nectar of Time.

1:01:14Thank you, everyone. Bye.