Exploring Flow Consciousness: With Justin Faerman

“Do we live in a world where reality is happening to us or because of us?” is the fundamental question to understanding our potential. Featured on this podcast is Justin Faerman, the co-founder of the Flow Consciousness Institute. In this podcast Justin and Jiro engage in a free-flow dialogue on some of the finer subtleties and emerging insights on flow. Justin offers an insight into his deep self-awareness practice and shares with us his views on the mechanics of consciousness and flow, as the pair discuss the “stand-off” between those who believe consciousness exists localised in the brain, versus those who believe consciousness exists as separate to individual neural activity.

Transcript

Welcome to the FlowState Performance Podcast.

This is your host,

Giro Taylor.

I'm the founder of FlowState,

Which is an organization that helps leaders and companies exist in states of flow.

We nourish an ecosystem of organizations that are optimizing for the emergence of purpose and potential.

All the good stuff.

If you want to connect with me,

If you are looking for potentially some help to develop yourself,

Develop your self-belief,

Develop your self-awareness and become a leader in flow,

Then you can shoot me an email at giro at flowstate.

Co.

If you run a company and you want to explore how your company can shift out of fear,

Control,

Mindsets and shift into trust,

Purpose and expression,

Which is the new paradigm of business,

If you want to turn your business into a hive of human expression and flow,

Then definitely shoot me an email,

Giro at flowstate.

Co.

Today on the podcast,

I'm very honored to have the co-founder of the Flow Consciousness Institute,

Mr.

Justin Fairman.

Justin is a brother of mine.

We have been in dialogue over the last couple of years.

We met up in person when I was in California a few months ago and we had an instant connection.

Obviously,

We're both exploring flow and flow consciousness in our own ways.

I support his work,

Him and Jackie.

Netchel is the other co-founder of the Flow Consciousness Institute.

These are brothers and sisters of mine.

I trust them implicitly.

I support them every way that I can.

They're doing wonderful things in the world.

Their level of integrity is impeccable.

Their level of insight,

Wisdom and dedication is impeccable.

It was an honor to have him on the show to explore some of his emergencies.

He's really amazing at blending in the science,

The emerging science,

The emerging science from the fields of quantum physics,

From neurobiology to help us understand what's happening when we're in flow,

When we're experiencing this state of consciousness that they call flow consciousness and I call flow consciousness.

Justin is also in the media space.

He's running an organization that is dedicated to sharing higher consciousness media.

He's just a beautiful human being walking the talk,

Living his path and really,

Really connected to his practice of self-mastery and self-awareness.

I really just honor him for that dedication to that.

You're going to enjoy this show if you are exploring flow and you want to know more about it or if you're a flow geek and you've been exploring flow for a while,

Then you're really going to love this conversation.

This is a flow conversation between two people who are just a little bit interested in flow.

Enjoy the show.

Welcome to the Flow State Performance Podcast.

I'm here with my good friend and flow brother,

Justin Famin.

How are you,

Justin?

I'm beautiful,

Brother.

How are you doing?

I'm doing so well.

Happy to see your face.

And today,

For those listening,

You're in for a treat.

We're going to be diving into some.

We have no idea what we're going to talk about,

But it's going to be awesome.

Justin is the co-founder of the Flow Consciousness Institute.

In fact,

I'm going to let you describe what you're doing,

Man.

That's definitely the best way.

If you could be so kind as to help the viewer understand,

I guess,

Some of the labels you wear and some of the work that you do.

Yeah,

Totally.

Totally.

So,

I mean,

Starting where you left off as a co-founder of Flow Consciousness Institute.

So,

I like to think of what we've done as having developed a new operating system for human consciousness that allows people to live in a more limitless reality where they can experience ongoing flow,

Effortlessness,

Exponential growth and success,

And really just thrive on every level of their being.

And so,

We're pioneers in what we call flow consciousness,

Which is on the same spectrum,

But on the other end of flow states.

Instead of it being temporary,

It's more of like an ongoing experience of flow,

Similar in a loose way to kind of Zen philosophy or Taoist Wu-Wei philosophy.

So,

That's one thing.

We run trainings.

We do research.

We do all kinds of things all over the world.

We do a lot of speaking and teaching and traveling.

And that's one thing.

I also am the founder of a conscious media platform called Conscious Lifestyle Magazine,

Actually the co-founder of that as well.

And that's working to basically change the narrative and empower people through really high quality,

Deeply transformational media that helps them to grow and expand as they read it and consume it.

So those are the two things.

I think that's really in service on a high level of a string in a new era of peace,

Prosperity and higher consciousness on the planet.

And really doing that at a large scale by kind of working on these high leverage things like consciousness and the narrative and systems at a global scale.

So all those things kind of come together.

And of course,

We're all infinite,

So we can't be contained in anything.

But that's what I'm doing with my time here in this life so far.

Beautifully described.

Thank you for sharing.

So how did you come to be doing this work,

Justin?

Just give us a little bit of an understanding of,

I'm really interested in childhood narratives and how the kind of threads that connect childhood to present day.

Can you share something around that?

Yeah,

Totally.

Well,

It all started back when I was five.

But seriously,

It all did start back when I was five.

That's not as far back as I can remember.

And I remember two things.

First,

When I was really young,

I was actually thinking about the kind of things that we're talking about now and that we're doing with our lives,

Which is really cool to kind of be present to being so open and still in touch with some deeper aspects of my soul when I was a little child.

And I was having these really deep insights about the nature of reality.

And I was thinking about the nature of right and wrong and why even at that age,

Looking at the world around me,

I could see that,

Why are people killing each other?

Why are people destroying the environment?

This is obviously what's sustaining us.

Why are people doing this?

And I remember just being so confused and constantly thinking about all these big picture existential things.

And as cool as that was,

It actually had.

.

.

Like everything has a positive and a negative.

The negative side of that was that it made me feel really disconnected from the reality that I was in because I felt super out of sync with it because I clearly had different opinions than how most people were living.

And I also,

Whenever I would express what I was thinking,

People couldn't fully understand what I was saying and they just weren't in that space.

They didn't understand what I was talking about fully.

So it made me.

.

.

It actually gave me wounding around fear of self-expression and not feeling like I could say what was on my mind or if I could express myself how I truly was because that wasn't being met with love.

It was being met with,

What the hell are you talking about?

Or that's interesting,

But I don't agree or whatever.

And so that caused me to shut down for a good portion of my life from about ages six or seven till about 20.

I was in the process of losing myself and trying to fit in society's boxes and all these different things and ended up getting addicted to drugs and eating crap and treating my body really poorly and I was super depressed and just all these things that result from using yourself and not self-expressing.

And then I finally had some moments where I kind of snapped out of that haze and woke up around when I was 20 and got into meditation,

Got into eating organically,

Got into expanding consciousness,

Yoga and personal development.

And that sent me on this trajectory where I eventually got to the point when I was about 26,

Where I started to have experiences that I would now call really powerful flow experiences.

And I started to have mentors come into my life that were carrying pieces of this body of work,

Although they didn't call it flow and they were teaching it in a very different way.

But that kind of opened up that perceptual filter for me that it was possible to live in this expanded kind of way that you could live effortlessly and things could be created by very different mechanisms than society teaches you and that could be done in a much more,

What we would say,

Effortless and flowy way.

And so that was kind of my overall story journey into flow and where I met up with it.

So it was really a journey of losing myself,

Finding myself and then becoming so passionate about the journey of personal development and self-growth that I couldn't help but hit a flow trajectory.

Because I think that this is where most people are headed in terms of their stage development.

Eventually you get to a place where you can sync up and be aware of and allow in a reality of flow and let that be how you go about your life.

Beautiful,

Man.

Thank you for sharing that.

One thing that popped up when you were talking was around the struggles that you had faced.

And I think a lot of people can relate to the struggles of the feeling of childhood trauma and wounds and it made me wonder around the role of pain and challenge or how we sort of contextualize pain and challenge in this path of living in flow,

Which you talked about using words like effortlessness.

So in what way does living in flow encapsulate a life in which there's no doubt that pain and challenge and struggle are just rich and potent forms of learning?

Yeah,

Totally.

That's a great question.

I think that so basically like our grounding and our philosophy around this is that you need struggle and suffering or pain and suffering to grow until you don't.

They're great teachers until you can shift into a reality where you don't need to learn through pain anymore.

So in the collective structure that we're in as a society,

That's still a way that most people are choosing to learn.

And that's a way,

The way that our society is structured engenders struggle and suffering for many people.

And so that's how many people end up learning,

But you can get to a point where you don't need to struggle and suffer as a way to learn.

And you do that by shifting your perception into a level of reality where you can properly contextualize and see the deeper wisdom,

The deeper meaning in these experiences.

And also too,

On the note of childhood wounding,

Let go of limiting beliefs,

Emotional patterns in the trauma that are creating that feedback loop in your reality,

Which is really in our experience and our opinion,

Why struggle and suffering is showing up is to really show you these places that you're still limiting yourself.

Beautiful.

So let's talk a little bit about this concept of letting go.

I know that you've done some education around emotional freedom technique.

Is that correct?

Or what are some of the tools you teach people to let go of things like childhood patterning and trauma?

Totally.

So we've kind of developed a few different techniques in house that pick on some different modalities like EMDR and different somatic therapies that kind of access deeper layers of our nervous system and our mind and our body and our energy bodies and so on and so forth.

So there's a little bit of overlap with the EFT,

But it's also different in its own way.

And what we've found is that there's four different levels that a pattern needs to be cleared up,

That in most personal development methodologies,

Even in most psychotherapeutic or healing modalities,

People tend to work on one,

Maybe two levels.

There's actually four levels that we need to work on,

Which is mental,

Emotional,

Energetic and physical.

A wound or a pattern will actually get embedded on all of these different layers of the unit of self.

And so if you just are working on something on a mental layer,

Which is typically how people work with limiting beliefs,

You're not addressing it on these other layers and then therefore it doesn't fully release because there is other components.

And so the techniques that we use are really designed to hit every single one of those layers.

So for example,

There's a lot of great techniques out there that work on one layer,

But if you hybridize them all together,

Then you're able to kind of have a more potent thing that allows people to access deeper layers more easily.

Awesome,

Man.

Cool.

Thank you for sharing that.

Now let's get into a little bit more about your work and what's been coming through for you lately,

Because I know that you and I are on kindred spirits in many ways and on a similar path and it's a path of emergence really.

And it constantly strikes me how we keep showing up,

We keep doing our own self-awareness practices and we kind of,

There's a trust,

There's a surrender.

We don't really know what's going to open up for us.

So what's been coming through for you lately?

What are some of the new emergencies that you've been breathing life into?

Yeah,

Totally.

I mean,

Similar to you where it's basically like the flow work is being called into bigger and bigger spheres.

The way that it's birthed through us and the way that we teach it is really an individual practice,

But we also live in a collective reality and we live in a community.

And so people are curious and wanting to know how it applies in those contexts.

So we've been doing a lot of research,

A lot of real world testing,

A lot of just deep intuitive listening and study into how does it want to emerge on the collective scale and how does it fit into,

For example,

A project that's designed to transform every aspect of society?

What's the through line in government and politics and health and social systems and the environmental sphere?

How does flow fit into that?

Where is its place?

Is it foundational to everything?

Is there more nuanced applications in each one of these fields or what?

So we've been really exploring how to integrate it into every layer of society and not have it just be only for people who are able to have the time,

Energy,

Bandwidth,

Finances,

Whatever to just kind of do an intensive personal development thing.

Like how do we take it out and teach it in the poorest,

Most challenging environments and stuff like that.

Interesting.

So a couple of things that have been coming up for me,

You talk about flow in a similar way that I do in terms of understanding that there's this individual level and then there's this organizational or collective tribal kind of cultural level.

And then you've spoken a couple of times about the systems that we're all a part of.

What is your vision?

Just like the direction or the vision is the only word I guess that best describes it.

What's your vision for the future when you think about all of those levels together?

Totally.

I mean,

I guess you can take two different perspectives on this.

There's the perspective that everybody's getting exactly what they need in every moment.

And so the trajectory where we're at and what we're doing now is exactly where we need to be.

And then there's also the trajectory of like,

Well,

If you could wave a magic wand and create anything you want,

What would you create?

I think that's really the level of vision.

It's like,

What are we holding for the planet?

What are we holding for ourselves or whatever?

And on that level,

I really see it's such a big thing to really sit down and in the conversations I have,

People really sit down and really describe their vision.

It could take like 30 or 40 minutes for something as big as the planet.

But I think a cool way to simplify it is something along the lines of where every single UN sustainable development goal is hit and achieved and locked in place.

We have ongoing lasting world peace.

That's a tricky one to define too,

Because peace has a lot of different levels to it.

But ongoing world peace,

We've switched over to completely clean renewable energy.

We're getting to the point where free energy,

Completely free,

Unlimited energy is the thing.

And we're all able to collectively live in a state of flow consciousness.

So society is reorienting itself around purpose.

Deep inner healing work is being done on a large scale.

We're transcending the need for war and suffering and violence.

And we're able to kind of reorient and reengineer society in a way that is supportive for all life.

So we're not just talking about animal,

Human,

Mineral,

Whatever,

Every aspect of this reality that we experience is supported and nourished and given space to self express fully.

Beautiful,

Brother.

Thank you for articulating that.

That's definitely a vision that I want to be a part of.

That sounds beautiful.

Yeah.

And organic restaurants everywhere.

Nice.

And like clean surf and offshore whenever I show up.

I'm like,

I'm going to be in the frame,

You know,

Sharks,

But they're doing their thing.

Sharks who are just well nourished and well fed that aren't interested in both of us.

Cool,

Man.

So what do you tune in as the biggest obstacles to us collectively manifesting this vision that sits within all of our hearts,

The more beautiful world our hearts know as possible?

What is it that stands in the way?

Yeah.

Well,

That's a really good question,

But having a lot of conversations around this.

I mean,

My personal belief is that it's always a consciousness level issue.

Like every,

Every issue is a consciousness level issue.

I've heard some friends and mentors of mine say that agency is really important,

That most people feel disempowered and they have locked there.

They're in a state where they believe that reality is hopeless or their situation is hopeless and so they lose their agency.

But I still think that that's even an extension of consciousness,

Like not having agency,

But you can drill that down into beliefs and emotional patterns and so on.

So I really think that the problems stem from our own internal problems,

Our own feelings of separateness,

Our own feelings of being unworthy,

Our own belief that the situation's hopeless,

Whatever the oppressive collective mainstream media narrative is at the moment.

All of these things are kind of locking us into this reality.

And so I feel like we need new storytellers in a lot of ways.

People that can really put out a new narrative and that's not just one person,

But it's like a blending of all these different disciplines of philosophy,

Of science,

Of research showing that we live in the most prosperous time,

All the technologies we have.

We just kind of need,

Built on that foundational level of consciousness,

We need a group of people to kind of come together and be the early adopters and anchor in this new reality and then let it diffuse out how it will.

I love how you honed in on the power of storytelling there.

This is something that's been coming up a lot for me from really disparate ends.

So on one end,

There's sort of like the indigenous worldviews of the land that I'm sitting in now in Australia,

Where these humans would go out and sing the world into existence through stories.

And there was actually no written language on this continent.

So everything was stories,

Everything was passed down stories and mythologized.

And I've really been tuning into the power of myths and the power of stories and therefore the power of storytellers,

The importance of storytellers.

And on the other end of the spectrum,

I've been studying complexity science and learning about complex adaptive systems and about to understand such systems,

Which is what we're all a part of.

Human body is a complex adaptive system,

Society is a complex adaptive system.

The truest,

Most high fidelity data that can be gleaned from a complex adaptive system is in the anecdotes and the stories that are being told firsthand by people.

It's in those things that not only can you reveal the consciousness of the organism,

But you can change the consciousness of the organism.

So if you reverse engineer that,

You've basically got change the stories,

Change the consciousness.

And what's powerful about that is realizing the mechanisms that dominate storytelling in our culture,

Like CNN,

Fox News,

And even YouTube and things like social media,

Things like that.

And I remember one of the powerful shifts in consciousness I went through when I just decided that I would no longer submit my consciousness to the flow of information that was coming through mainstream media.

Yeah,

Yeah,

Totally.

And I'm sure you've gone through a similar thing as well.

But for me,

I went through a stage in my 20s where I was kind of addicted to the news.

I was working in the corporate world and my father would always read a big newspaper from cover to cover.

And I started picking up the same pattern.

It's just like this very extreme form of brainwashing.

What do you think when you tune into the stories that are being told in our culture,

What do you see as,

I guess,

Like the potential for us to be part of creating a shift there?

What can I do?

What can you do?

What can the person listening do to be part of creating new stories and telling them?

Totally.

Well,

I mean,

There's a lot of different layers of that.

Right.

You can go from super granular,

Like how do you do this?

So let's start there and work backwards,

I guess.

I think that,

I mean,

First of all,

I think that,

I mean,

First of all,

I think that,

Reviews

Just happened on this talk and loved it...enlightening material for today's world

Such an amazing talk! I'm SO grateful I have found this podcast, such wonderful info and people. Thank you!!!

Thank you for this conversation.

Wow! Those guys give me hope for the world, I’m gonna listen to this every time I feel hopeless, which isn’t very often and I wish there was a way I could send this interview to friends and family because it’s what I’ve been saying forever and I’m 63 years old but just to hear that there are younger people out there who are doing this work totally warms my heart