Why Are We Even Here?

At 2am on a Wednesday, the question shows up — why are we even here. Most of us don't ask it out loud. Our nervous systems flinch away from it. The culture offers us two bad doors — religious certainty or materialist dismissal — and neither quite fits.

This is a kitchen-table sacred talk about the third door. It moves from polyvagal theory (why the question feels dangerous in the body), through 2025 peer-reviewed research on consciousness as a fundamental field, into the epigenetics of inherited trauma and the University of Virginia's decades of documented consciousness research. Then into family constellations — the ancestors in your cells — and finally into the body's quiet knowing that meaning is not a concept to solve but a felt state to return to.

Contains a brief somatic coming-home you can do anywhere. No clean answers — a better question.

Transcript

So welcome everyone and thank you thank you for listening and thank you for being here I want to ask you something and I want you to know upfront that I don't have a clean answer for it so if you've come here looking for someone to hand you a neat little spiritual bowtie on life I'm going to disappoint you in about 30 minutes or possibly sooner the question is this why are we even here? Not why am I in this job maybe that too not why am I in this relationship though maybe also that not even why am I the way I am although we'll get to that one a bit later I mean the bigger one the one most of us don't say out loud because it sounds either too terrifying or too teenage depending on what time of the day you're asking it why are we here? Any of us at all I was going to call this talk the meaning of life but that felt like a lot of promise in a podcast description also I'm a man in my 30s with a podcast and I try to have some self-awareness about what that already looks like so instead I'm going to do what I usually do which is ask a question that sounds simple and then take some time to make it more complicated in what I hope is in a useful way now wherever you are right now driving, Walking, Lying down, Standing in a kitchen, Waiting for the kettle you don't need to change anything you don't need to sit a certain way you don't need to close your eyes you can just listen to this and see if anything resonates now here's the thing that I have noticed working with people one-to-one whether it's in a therapy room or in a constellation workshop or in a session online with somebody in another country the question is almost always underneath the question someone comes in and says my relationship is falling apart someone comes in and says I can't stop people pleasing someone comes in and says I have panic attacks I don't know why everything in my life is fine on paper and if we sit with it long enough I mean really sit not just do the surface level let's fix this thing underneath almost every presenting issue there is a quieter question and it usually sounds something like this what is all this actually for? Or is this it? Or I am doing everything I'm supposed to be doing and I still feel like something is missing and I don't know what that something is or the one that breaks my heart a little bit every time I hear it I am not sure I actually want to be here now I want to say something about the last one before we go any further because I think it gets misunderstood and it gets pathologized and it gets panic responded in ways that actually make it worse there's a difference between not wanting to be here and not being sure what you want to be here if you're in the first category pause this and ring someone but the second one I'm not sure I want to be here that's actually a much more common experience than people admit but sometimes it's more like an existential jet lag like you turned up to a life you didn't apply for and nobody asked if you wanted the job and the modern self-help response to that is usually something like go find your passion discover your true purpose quit your job travel what's your why if I'm being honest makes me want to lie on the floor because those questions assume that the answer is somewhere inside you and you just haven't looked hard enough and if you are still struggling it must be because you haven't done enough journaling you haven't done enough vision boarding you haven't done enough breath work or meditation which and I say this as someone who has a meditation library on insight timer is just another way of making it your fault so the question why are we here is bigger than what is my purpose it's older than self-help it's older than therapy and it's older than most frameworks we're using to try and answer it and I think and this is the part I want to spend the next bit exploring I think most of us have been taught quietly that asking this question is a problem that if you're asking it something has gone wrong I want to suggest the opposite the fact that you are asking this is one of the most human and honest things you're capable of now let me tell you something about nervous systems because I can't help it it's what I do your nervous system has a very specific job its main job is not to make you happy first thing to get out of the way it's not your nervous system's job to make you happy its main job is to keep you alive and those two are not the same thing if they were evolution would have gone a lot differently to keep you alive your nervous system does something which Stephen who developed polyvagal theory calls neuroception so neuroception is the constant unconscious scanning your body does of your environment and of other people and of your own internal state to work out one question am I safe right now? And in his most recent writing Stephen is still publishing there's a 2024 and 2025 update of the polyvagal theory in literature he's been clear about this safety in the nervous system sense is not nothing bad is happening safety means this is familiar this is predictable this is known now think about that for a second that the nervous system prefers familiar to safe predictable to good and known to true which means big existential questions like why are we here are from the nervous system point of view actually quite threatening because they open up the unknown they destabilize the familiar and they crack open the frame you've been living inside and your nervous system goes no whatever this is I'm not doing it we are going to think about what to have for dinner instead this is why the moment you try to sit with this big question you suddenly remember an email you haven't answered or you get hungry or you feel tired or you start scrolling so that is not a character flaw that is a trauma-adapted nervous system doing its job very well on top of that physiological layer there is a cultural layer now we live in a culture let's be kind not particularly comfortable with not knowing the whole machinery of modern life is a setup to give you the answers quickly cleanly and with a product that ties to it always why do I feel anxious there you go take this why does my relationship keep failing read this book why do I feel empty have you tried yoga have you tried ice baths have you tried holotropic breathwork mushrooms there is this new app and look I am not anti any of that some of those things are useful but there is a difference between tools that help you live with the question and tools that are sold to you as replacements for the question most of what's on offer right now is the second kind because the honest truth is that the question why are we here doesn't have a product attached to it you can't monetize the full weight of that question without diluting it and so what tends to happen is we all quietly agree not to ask it we perform contentment we just get one life I live my life I'll do this great so we perform contentment we post the highlighted reel and we tell ourselves we are too busy to think about it and then at 2 15 a. M in the middle of a Wednesday for no reason we can point to we lie there and it comes up anyways historically when the big question finally breaks through most of us have been offered two doors door one is religion capital R religion with a specific answer with a specific book and often a specific man in the sky with specific opinions about your body and apply this to any religion door two is hard materialism there is no why the universe is random atoms banging into each other meaning is a story you tell yourself when you die the lights go off get back to your spreadsheet you're lazy you're odd and for a lot of us and I include myself there neither door fits the first one has been too often weaponized too often used to control too often mixed up with the stuff that hurt people that we love the second one feels like it's missing something obvious even if we can't name what it is now I am not religious per se but I was raised around Hindu philosophy and then I also moved to Ireland so I have exposure to being in an Irish Catholic country which is a combination that let's just say gives you complicated feelings about both the doors what I've come to think after years of sitting with people in therapy rooms and years of sitting in my own stuff is that neither door is the right door there is a third door and the third door is the one almost nobody talks about because it doesn't give you a clean answer it gives you a better question though and that's what I want to walk towards slowly in the next section so I'm going to do a slightly nerdy bit now but stay with me I promise I'll bring it back in November 2025 last year literally a few months ago as I record this a paper was published in a peer-reviewed physics journal called AIP advances and the journal is published by the American Institute of Physics it's not some fringe outlet the paper was actually a cover paper of that issue meaning the editors thought that it was the most significant contribution in the whole journal for that month and the author is her name is Maria and she's a professor of materials science and nanotechnology in Sweden so her day job is studying matter at extremely small scales we're talking molecules here that kind of thing and she is not a mystic she does not have a YouTube channel but the paper she wrote proposes something very staggering in my opinion it proposes that consciousness is not produced by the brain consciousness in her model is a fundamental field like gravity like electromagnetism that underlies everything and time matter and space emerge from it not the other way around now I want to be really careful here because this is the point where spiritual podcasts usually get too excited and start making claims that research doesn't support so let me be clear about what the paper does and doesn't say it doesn't prove consciousness is fundamental it's a theoretical framework it just proposes a model and it offers some testable predictions that the future research can try to validate or falsify what it does do and this is the bit I find very moving is it takes a question that for centuries has been considered unscientific unserious the domain of mystics and hippies and men in ashrams and people like us and puts it back on the physics table peer-reviewed cover paper and that matters because for a long time if you asked is consciousness bigger than my brain the mainstream scientific answer was that's not even a real question and now there is a serious physicist at a serious university saying actually it might be the most real question we have now layer in something else because I don't want to rest this on one paper even if it's a good one over the past 15 years and accelerating massively in the last five the field of epigenetics has been telling us that's something extraordinary about what we inherit there is a growing body of research showing that trauma doesn't just affect the person who experiences it it changes the expression of genes that get passed on which means when you sit down in a therapy room at 34 trying to work out why you're wired the way you're wired the answer is not just in your childhood your childhood is already partly shaped by your mother's childhood which was shaped by her mother's which was shaped by what happened in 1912, 1940, 1847 to people you never met whose names you might never know let's take a breath now I know that's a lot so let me say what I actually think this means rather than what some coroners of the internet are doing with it it doesn't mean you're doomed it doesn't mean that the past determines everything epigenetics is simply about gene expression meaning that patterns can shift they can change they are responsive to the environment to the relationship to nervous system regulation to everything that we do in the healing room so what does what it does mean is this you are not starting from scratch you never were you are one moment in a very long conversation and some of the questions you're wrestling with in your body right now they were not written by you they were handed to you the fact that they feel like yours is just that's where the epigenetics comes in now there is also the consciousness research layer and then there's the work which happened at the University of Virginia this is a research unit that has been running for over 60 years and it was founded by Dr. Ian Stevenson now they've collected documents for over 2, 500 cases of young children typically between the ages of two and five who report detailed specific verifiable moments of lives that do not belong to them the memories check out memories that includes name, People, Places, Events, Circumstances of death and they were actually able to trace it back to real people who actually existed and died often before the child was born about 70% of those cases were violent traumatic deaths 30% involved birthmarks or birth deficits that correspond to the wounds on the previous body and this is data this is data maybe they don't want you to see or know they're documented files and you can go on and read them now I am not telling you to believe in past lives I'm not I think the people who certainly believe in past lives and the people who certainly don't are making the same mistake just in different directions the honest answer is we don't know and we live in a culture that finds we don't know unbearable so we rush to find certainty in either direction what I am saying is that the question of what consciousness actually is where it comes from and whether it is confined to this one eight year stretch between a birth and a death is no longer a question only spiritual people are allowed to ask it's a live question in physics it's a live question in psychiatry it's a live question in epigenetics and the honest scientific answer after all the work that has been done we don't know but the possibilities are more open than materialist philosophy told us for most of the 20th century so when you ask why we are here and you feel like a kind of vertigo come up I want you to know something the vertigo is not irrational you're asking a question that has serious scientists serious philosophers serious therapists like me have not figured out yet you are in excellent company you're not failing at life by not having the answer you're just being awake so now I'm going to move from the head into the body because I can sit here for hours and talk about quantum physics and peer-reviewed papers because I love doing that but at a certain point someone's nervous system goes that's lovely but what do I do with all this at 3am and I can't sleep so I understand fair enough let's go there now here is something I've noticed and it took me years of work to really trust it the body knows things the mind doesn't have language for and I don't mean that in a woo-woo way I mean that quite literally that your body processes information through pathways that never touch conscious awareness the vagus nerve alone sends about 80% of its information upwards from the body to the brain not downwards so that means your body what your body is doing it's doing without consulting you most of it and most of what it knows it knows before your thinking mind gets a chance to weigh in so when you ask the question why am I here? And you go looking for the answer in your thoughts you are looking in the least informed part of your system the thinking mind is like the PR department it writes the press releases after the decisions have been made somewhere else so in somatic work there's a particular shift we watch for and it doesn't have a catchy name unfortunately but if you've ever sat with someone who's been in a tightly wound protective high vigilance state and you've watched them settle really settle maybe for the first time in years you know what I'm describing the shoulders drop the jaw clenches the breath moves lower in the body into the belly instead of the chest something in the face comes back online that hasn't been there for a long time so in polyvagal language we'd say they've moved into ventral vagal in ordinary language we just say they've come home and here's the thing that took me a long time to understand when people are in that state genuinely regulated genuinely present genuinely in their bodies they don't tend to ask why am I here not because the question has been answered the question hasn't been answered they've just stopped needing the answer in order to be here they've stopped needing the answer in order to be present and that's not a bypass let me be clear about that because I can already hear objection that's not spiritual bypass it's not just relax and the question will go away the question doesn't go away but it stops being an emergency and there is a big difference here I don't know why I'm here and I'm panicking and I don't know why I'm here and that's okay both are the same sentence until the comma and everything changes after that I used to think meaning was a concept something you worked out in your head like a crossword find the right idea plug it in and done I don't think that anymore I think meaning is a felt state it lives in your body and it has a very specific texture which is hard to describe but you felt it you felt in a particular conversation with a particular person when something went quiet and true between you you felt it holding a baby you felt it in a piece of music that caught you off guard you felt it after a funeral when the wake had gone too long and someone said the exact wrong thing at the exact wrong moment and the whole room started laughing and crying at the same time meaning is not the answer meaning is a moment where the question and the not knowing and the being here all fit together without friction and it's always embodied always nobody has ever had a meaningful moment only in their head which is why in my experience the fastest route to why am I here is not to think harder but it's to come back to the body not as a performance not as a technique but as a return and I want to do something with you now just a small thing you don't have to stop what you're doing just let this land wherever it lands no need to close your eyes obviously please don't close your eyes or do wherever you are now wherever just for a second notice that you have a body this might sound silly but a huge amount of modern life is spent in our heads looking at screens thinking about the next thing scrolling most of us forget we have a body until it breaks down or demands something so just for a moment notice your feet do you have feet? Can I feel, Sense, Experience the feeling in my right foot left foot both notice your hands whatever they are doing resting on your legs wrapped around a mug resting on your chest on a steering wheel whatever they are doing now now hands feet and notice that you're breathing now now the breathing was happening even before you started listening to me you didn't have to tell yourself to do that just notice it right now somebody is listening to this and that somebody has a body somebody is listening to my words and that somebody has a body and that body right now in this exact moment is alive which is if you stop and think about it the most extraordinary thing that has ever happened you don't have to know why you're here to notice that you're here and noticing that you're here really noticing it is at least in my experience the beginning of an answer it's something it's not the whole answer but it's something now I want to pull in something I haven't said yet because no talk I give would be honest without it when we ask why we are here we are asking a question we means just me the individual with my name and my birthday and my particular life and I think that's one of the places the question gets stuck because the we is bigger than that I facilitate something called family constellations now it's a form of work developed by Bert Hellinger who was a German psychotherapist and he spent some time with some ancient tribes Zulu communities in South Africa then he came back and he integrated what he learned with his training this method is very hard to describe if you haven't seen it it looks strange from the outside people stand in a room and represent members of someone else's family a grandfather they never met a sibling who was miscarried the great aunt who was erased from the family tree and things move things emerge stories that were never told start to surface never ever ever through the mind or through the body so I'm not going to try to explain the mechanism to you here but I'll tell you this in 15 years of doing this work I have watched repeatedly people come in with a question about their life why am I so anxious why can't I commit why do I keep sabotaging myself and the answer is almost never fully their own the answer is usually something like this my grandmother lost three children and her grief was never spoken about and I've been carrying it or my father was the scapegoat of the family and I'm the one who's been trying to prove he wasn't a bad man or there was a miscarriage before I was born that nobody acknowledged and I've been living as I shouldn't be here so if you're new to this kind of work that can sound like a stretch I understand I was skeptical for a long time too but it lines up it lines up what neuroscience is telling us about implicit memory it lines up with what trauma therapy has been saying for 30 years which is the body keeps the score and the score it's keeping doesn't only belong to you which means the question of why am I here starts to look very different now because I isn't a clean unit as I thought I is a node in a very long network I includes people who stood behind my parents when my parents didn't know they were standing in a line and people who stood behind them and all the way back so when I sit across from a client who's carrying an ancestral weight they didn't know they were carrying and we find the weight we name it and we let it be placed down something happens that feels to me almost religious now not in the institutional sense in the older sense to bind back together to reconnect what was separated so a lot of the work that I do or I think I do is reconnection work you to your body you to your grief you to your people you to the long story you are a momentum and in that work why are we here starts to feel less like a riddle and more like a belonging you are here because somebody many somebodies chose life even in circumstances where life was very hard to choose you are here because a chain of decisions and accidents and losses and love that stretches back through time and right now it's you listening to this and that's not nothing I want to say one more thing on this because I know someone listening is going to hear this and spiral into so I am here to heal things for my ancestors and then go turn it into a new form of spiritual pressure please don't do that that's another trap the pressure to be the one who fixes everything who heals the family line who breaks the cycle and also earns six figures and also drinks celery juice that's just trauma and fancy spiritual packaging you don't have to redeem your lineage you can just be in it you can be one of the links you can do the bit that's yours to do and let the rest be held by people you never meet and forces you don't have to name that's enough that's honestly enough now I want to bring in something that I hold very carefully because it's one of those ideas that can either be useful or that can become a spiritual hand grenade material depending on how it's handled so in some spiritual traditions now there is an idea called pre-birth planning and the idea is roughly this before we come into a body something of us let's call it a soul call it consciousness call it whatever make some kind of agreement about what this lifetime will be for the challenges we'll face the people we'll meet the lessons we came for and then we come in then we forget the veil of forgetting it's called sometimes and there are many many other phrases that I can use to describe this phenomena now there is a book written by Robert Schwartz called your soul's plan that is very popularized in this framework there are a lot of books like it right now and I want to be really honest with you I don't know if this is literally true I really don't I have had enough strange experiences in constellation rooms and in my own life to not dismiss it and I've also met spiritual bypass personalities wielding the phrase it's all part of the contract it's all part of the contract to be deeply suspicious of how it can be so misused so if a man at a retreat tells you that you chose your trauma before you were born run that's not wisdom that's blame dressed up in incense so here's what I notice whether or not you buy the literal metaphysics the framework of maybe some things were chosen some were inherited some were read random and I don't have to sort out which is which that framework does something helpful to the nervous system it holds the question of why am I here in a way that's bigger than what did I do to deserve this or why is my life like this these two questions what did I do to deserve this and why is my life like this they keep your nervous system small and self-blaming they are fight-or-flight questions dressed up as philosophy whereas maybe some of this was for something and maybe I don't have to know what that's a ventral vagal question it holds space instead of demanding the answer now because the topic of this talk is so deep we can't complete this without talking about karma so I also want to touch on karma whatever that means for you because it gets dragged into these conversations a lot and in my opinion it's been badly misinterpreted in western spiritual culture the word karma in its original context simply means action that's it action but action and its consequences so it's not cosmic punishment it's not you must have been bad in a past life and it's definitely not oh look that's karma coming back at him or her that's a distortion of that got attached somewhere in the transition translation now in fact there's research there's a 2024 study in the asian journal of social psychology that's worth looking up that's showing that a retributive concept of karma that what goes around comes around version actually correlates with victim blaming so people who hold a strong belief in retributive karma are more likely to blame people for what has happened to them which if you think about it makes complete sense it's a cognitive shortcut for why the world isn't fair so instead of saying the world isn't fair i don't know why we say actually it's secretly fair and that person must have deserved what they got so that's not spiritual wisdom that's moral outsourcing so the buddha himself apparently explicitly rejected the view that all suffering comes from past karma it's there in all the text i've read all of them but somehow western spirituality turned it into a moral accounting system and here we are so when i say maybe some of this is for something i am really really not saying you chose your trauma or your suffering is is your fault i am saying something much softer i am saying life contains more than we can measure more than we can explain and holding it loosely tends to hurt less than trying to explain it at all there is a phrase in mystical traditions the cloud of unknowing the cloud of unknowing it points to the idea that the deepest knowing is not the knowing of certainty it's the knowing of sustained contact with mystery you don't solve it you live it and slowly something in you makes peace with not having an answer without giving up the question finally that's the third door that's the one i mentioned earlier so it's not religious certainty it's not materialist dismissal but a disciplined grown-up embodied willingness to live inside the question and to let the question live inside you without demanding it to close because here is what i've come to believe and as i said in the beginning i could be wrong i reserve the right to update but here it is the question why we are here is not a problem to solve it's a companion it's going to walk with you your whole life and learning to walk with it not fleeting it not panicking about it not grabbing the first answer that looks shiny is maybe one of the most important spiritual therapeutic and human skills you can develop the question keeps you honest the question keeps you humble and the question held well keeps you soft also so we are coming towards the end and i want to gather a few things up and then let you go if you're still here if you've been listening to this for the last 41 minutes and 39 seconds or so you were hoping i'd land the plane with a clean answer so i'm sorry i warned you at the start but here is what i can leave you with not as an answer but as a set of things i actually believe after a lot of years of sitting with the questions with myself and with other people the first one the fact that you ask why am i here is not a sign of failure it is a sign of depth second your nervous system will try to convince you that the question is dangerous and will root you towards easier questions and quicker answers that's also not weakness that's biology third modern science not influencers not spiritual influencers not that person who tells you they have the answers or somebody that's selling you something but modern science serious science is currently more open to the possibility of consciousness being fundamental meaning being non-local and lineage being something we carry in ourselves fourth the body knows something that the mind can't fully articulate so when you come back into your body when you notice your feet when you notice your breath the people that love you the specific texture of this tuesday afternoon you don't answer the question but you stop needing it to be answered in order to be here and that's homecoming fifth you are not alone in the question you are one moment in a very long line of people who have asked it your ancestors are in your cells the people who made it possible for you to be here their unfinished business rises in you sometimes so does their love the last you don't have to redeem anything you don't have to be the one who fixes families heals the lineage becomes the best version of you and post about it you are allowed to just be in it be a person be here now tired confused loved if i had the answer to the question directly why are we here i wouldn't not because i don't care but because any answer i gave you would be too small the closest i could get and i've been working on this for a while is something like this we are here to be here to let consciousness move through a body for a little while to love and be loved as much as the nervous system will allow and a little beyond what it will allow to tend to what was handed to us without being crushed by it to leave the room a bit kinder than we found it and to hold the question gently without needing it to close that's all i've got that's my third door answer such as it is go find your own it'll be different to mine it should be so wherever you are right now i want you to know that you don't have to have this figured out by the end of this recording you don't have to have this figured out by the end of the year you don't have to have it figured out by the end of your life figuring it out was never the point the point was just to be here for a little while with a body with other people with a question too big to answer and too real to ignore you're doing it you are right now doing it by being here so thank you for spending this time with me if this talk moved something in you if it settled something or stirred something or just gave you a bit of company on a late night question share it with someone who might need it and you probably know who so once again whatever wherever hair is tonight i just want you to be here with a body with a breath with a question that's more than enough take care of yourself thank you very much for listening and namaste

Reviews

This talk resonated with me so much. I have asked the question from time to time in my teens and 20's of 'Why am I here?' but in recent decades I have never felt that I needed an answer.....I just am and that's okay. I also have understood that I am my lineage, I have enough traits and medical issues in line with my parents and grandparents so I have always understood that my body/cells is made up of all my ancestral lineage, I am a product of all of them that stand behind me. I understand generational trauma, pre birth trauma and childhood trauma and that I carry it all and that is also okay and I acknowledge it. I also understand that we reincarnate over and over, our soul/consciousness is having an experience here on earth in a human body so we are also a product of our past lives. What I find difficult to understand is how those two seperate things body/lineage & soul/past lives come together to produce who I am. Is my soul seperate from my body and they are two distinctively different parts of me that co-exist or are we enmeshed and become one and that is me. That is the part I have trouble understanding. I'd like to think I am just a soul having an experience in an earthly body but then I think...hang on a minute, what about my ancestors and everything they have through, surely that's me also.
Thank you for this talk though, like I said above, it really resonated with me and I don't feel the need to search for meaning or the whys anymore. My journey is more about integrating all parts of me (shadow work) and healing (re-parenting the child & healing trauma), forgiveness of others (no more blame as everyone is doing their best at the time and place they are in) and resetting my nervous system (stopping the automatic reactions). I'm on my way there but I have a long way to go still especially the automatic responses (triggers).

I still have some worries though (or just thoughts) about what happens after death. Are we trapped, memory wiped and automatically sent back randomly or do we plan our next life with our soul tribe or do we get to escape earth and go somewhere else? To be quite frank about it, I'm a little bit done with earth, I don't really want to come back here again especially with the world going the way it is going. Kindness, compassion and empathy doesn't appear to be winning, big egos seem to be winning but that's a whole other subject LOL.