Darrell Greenwood: Playing in the Density

Ross Tayler (00:00)

Hello, I'm Ross Tayler, your host and guide for Sacred Sundays, a space to slow down, tune in, and return to what's sacred within and around you. I'm also a life coach for empaths and sensitive souls, walking alongside those who are ready to come home to who they actually are. These conversations are part of fulfilling that purpose, a collective exploration of what it means to live in connection with the sacred. Some weeks you'll hear a sound-based offering to open the space. Other times we'll simply begin in conversation. However it unfolds, this is an invitation into presence, connection, and the beauty of the unseen. If these conversations find you, please subscribe, rate, and share so others can find their way here. Pour a cup of tea, settle in, and let's begin.

Ross Tayler (00:48)

Today on Sacred Sundays, our guest is Darrell Greenwood. Darrell is a passionate advocate for health, wellness, and intentional living. With a strong connection to nature and a hands-on approach to learning, Darrell brings grounded, practical knowledge into everything he does, whether supporting community initiatives, working alongside others in wellness spaces, or contributing to meaningful projects that promote balanced living. Known for his steady presence and genuine nature, Darrell values hard work, authenticity, and building strong connections with those around him, often playing a role behind the scenes, helping bring ideas to life and supporting ventures rooted in health, growth, and community. Darrell is also the author of a multidimensional storybook called Lantern on the Longship. Welcome to Sacred Sundays, Darrell.

Darrell Greenwood (01:38)

Thank you so much, Ross.

Ross Tayler (01:40)

So good to have you, and I appreciate you making the time to have this conversation. I think I met you last July at the Nanaimo Wellness Fair, where I had a table. And I ran into your wife, Katie, whom I've known since at least 1999, which is kind of wild to think about. That was 27 years ago.

Darrell Greenwood (02:09)

Yeah, synchronicities.

Ross Tayler (02:11)

I get the feeling you're no stranger to synchronicities.

Darrell Greenwood (02:15)

No, not at all. In fact, you're in the flow of life when synchronicities are happening on a regular basis.

Ross Tayler (02:24)

So let's start with Lantern on the Longship, because it's a really fascinating, uniquely presented autobiography, right? What would you like to say about it?

Darrell Greenwood (02:38)

Well, ever since I was small, I've always felt like the reality we're presented with is a very small piece of the picture. I wanted to bring some of my experiences to life, ones that show the highly sensitive nature combined with imagination, vision and passion, and really bring these stories to life with the hope of inspiring others. The premise was to reach others who might be having a lot of shadow work appear in their lives. I'm really passionate about the inner healing path. And the vision I keep having is that I can go into the early traumas of my life and not get pulled into them again. I can go deep into them, travel into these shadows, and then come out and tell the story, hopefully sharing wisdom that will profoundly affect others. And then I can transmute the consciousness that reappears when you're writing deeply into the shadow, through the modalities of movement, breathwork and meditation, and continually look to evolve and grow and expand.

Ross Tayler (04:10)

One of the things that really struck me about the stories is your remembrance of the gifts you had as a child, and being able to connect to them, stay connected to them throughout your life, and revive them. What would you say about that?

Darrell Greenwood (04:27)

Yeah, I'd say there was a big part of my life where it was hard to relate to the world. As a kid, and even as a teenager and a young adult, I was attempting to put out the flame of those sensitivities. That leads to lots of learning, and I'm grateful for it. I got into playing sports, and I wanted to toughen myself up and be able to relate to other kids and people in this reality. But there was a big part of me that needed to be alone, and really needed guidance in how to tap into more of the inner gifts. They were there, and no matter what I did, I couldn't get rid of them.

I learned to navigate through life by playing, really just getting out and playing in nature. I write stories about that: playing in the snow, playing with animals, and learning how to harness these gifts, not knowing what they would turn into or how they'd be used in the world. Generally, I was getting to an authentic place of, okay, this is here, and growing into it. That grew in my late 20s and early 30s, and I really dove into the inner healing path at about 36. I'm turning 50 in June, so it's been a solid 14 or 15 years of real, committed healing.

Ross Tayler (06:15)

You've mentioned it a few times, even just now, that you were extremely sensitive. I always wonder about that, because I was definitely very sensitive as a child as well. At what point did you realize it? It's kind of like the idea that the fish doesn't know water until it's out of the water. How did you know there was something different about you, or how did you reconcile that?

Darrell Greenwood (06:47)

Well, it starts when you're really young. You can go into a room and feel the energy of the room without anybody saying anything. It's like having static in the background that you can't get rid of. That was the very first signpost: being in environments that were really overstimulating. As a young kid, I went through my parents' divorce, and I was around a party scene, and as a highly sensitive kid, that was really traumatizing. But the way I see it now, it was such a gift to go through the intensity of an environment like that, because you come out of it with a kind of inner strength and commitment. It put me on a path of wanting to excel in my life.

The shadow of it was that I never really wanted to experience the vulnerability I'd come into contact with, or the pain. I didn't really see it as pain at first, because you grow up thinking, okay, that's the past, it's over, I'm going to move forward, and life moves forward. But that trauma is still in the body. And when you're sensitive, what ends up happening is that it constantly revisits, with the same patterns of learning and intensity, and you don't even really realize where it's coming from or why it's happening, along with the anxiety and the other things we experience as sensitive people. So what a gift it was to learn how to self-regulate, to emotionally regulate myself. Because before that, I would basically exercise, and hang out with friends who were similar. We were kind of protecting each other from having to look at our trauma. And I got into partying, and that just temporarily put a bandaid on the trauma that was underlying it all.

Ross Tayler (09:22)

I really appreciate what you're saying about the patterns, because I grew up in a situation where my parents were both alcoholics, and with that came a lot of noise for my sensitivity. Back then I thought it was normal. I thought everybody's family was like that. I didn't realize it wasn't, quote unquote, normal. It took a lot of strength to navigate those experiences, and it was hard. The ripple effects have shown up through my life in different ways and different layers, in relationships. And as much as it's been a struggle, it's also been the birthplace of my greatest gifts. So it's that interesting duality of the journey we're on.

And you mention in the book that you discovered breathwork as a pathway that was really transformative for you. I wonder what you'd like to say about that.

Darrell Greenwood (10:22)

Yeah, I'd say it was probably one of the most transformational tools that entered my reality. I grew up as a pretty hardcore skier and athlete. I played lots of different sports, and I was always into the gym, so I could relate to breath and regulation through movement of the body. But there was a nervousness. It was very difficult to sit still. When the concept first came up, we were going to go to the place of a woman who's a good friend of ours now, Jessica Bennett, you might know her, and lie on the ground and breathe as a community. And I was like, why would I do that? You breathe all day long, right? Why would we want to do that, and pay for it on top of it?

Anyway, my wife Katie ended up booking us in for a session, and in the first session I had a profound experience. It was just so fascinating how many feelings came to the surface, and how the emotions held in the body showed up. For me, my hands turned into fists and my shoulders got really tight, and I wanted to scream. But part of me was like, okay, don't scream, because you don't want to interrupt. There's an awareness of not wanting to intrude on other people's space, and all these new concepts, when you're in a space like that and you're not really sure what's acceptable and what's not. You want to be authentic, but at the same time, you want to honor other people's space.

Coming out of that experience, I was fully into it. And what was interesting was that, beyond the breathwork, the regulation and the ceremony, it was the next day or two or three afterwards that really fascinated me. I'd wake up the next day, and it was like the old state of being, the identities, the belief systems, were sitting on my chest. I'd feel tired. I'd feel emotional, grouchy, angry. And I was like, where is this coming from? Breathing can't just do that. There's got to be something else happening. So I was waking up quickly to how powerfully, when we regulate ourselves, those old states come up, wanting to stay plugged in, wanting to find a way to climb back into our bodies, because that's what we know. The more I breathe, the more I understand the integration afterwards, being able to get out in nature and move the body, or just lie down and keep working through whatever's coming up to the surface. It's profound how that tool can move the density, the mountains in our consciousness.

Ross Tayler (13:44)

So what you're speaking to is the fact that the body holds on to all these past experiences we've had, and the breath helps to move them and surface them.

Darrell Greenwood (13:55)

Yeah. Even to the point where, when we lie down to breathe, some days it's hard to even get breath into the diaphragm. So we just lie there and feel that shallow breathing and the patterns involved. And then once we draw breath into the diaphragm and really slow our nervous systems down, there's an opportunity to experience the story that is actually trapped in the chest. And there's a real chance, not to overanalyze the past, but just to say, okay, I can see you there now, and I'm going to invite you into my inner space so I can learn whatever lessons still need to be integrated into my life. And if there's nothing, I'm just going to say thank you, and I'm going to let you go.

Ross Tayler (14:45)

It's interesting, because I've experienced breathwork over the years too, mainly when I was in Squamish. I did a few breath circles, and then some one-on-one sessions as well. If I'm honest, I had some resistance to it. And as you're speaking right now, it's making me think about the fact that I was born a month early, and spent the first month of my life in an incubator. I just made a connection: physically, lying on my back for a breath session was a hard thing to do. And I wonder if that's part of it.

Darrell Greenwood (15:21)

I think so. One of the first stories I wrote in Lantern on the Longship was about my birth experience. Both my mom and I were close to death, in and out. It was not an ideal situation. When I couldn't relax, the breakthrough I had was, oh my God, I've never actually processed that. Obviously, as an infant, you can't use the parts of your brain that would remember it, but the body is still holding the trauma. Lying down, it's like, why is my heart beating fast like this? Why do I feel anxious? And once I understood the medicine of it, it was like, okay, this is where I want to be, because this is where there's the greatest chance for transformation as a human, emotionally, spiritually and mentally. To be able to sit and heal all of these different experiences that are basically unconscious traumas, until we really go into the vastness of the pain and just accept it.

Ross Tayler (16:32)

And I really do believe the body is always giving us those signs and signals and trying to move us toward something. And yet, if we're moving through life too quickly, which so many of us do because we have to in order to survive, we don't see it, we don't listen to it, we don't hear it. So it's a great way to slow down. These ways of being can be uncomfortably comfortable, I guess you could say. We can habitually stay in them and not realize what's going on. We just accept them as normal, and they're not our original state.

And I think that's one of the things I noticed when I met you. It's very clear that you are grounded in yourself and connected to joy, and moving through life in a different way. You can feel it in your essence. I can feel that you've done your work. And I see it in your eyes, actually: this light, this brightness.

Darrell Greenwood (17:34)

Thank you. People approach me about that, saying, you're such a grounded man. And I'm very truthful about it: the only reason I can find my centre point of inner peace is that I experienced complete chaos. That's the complete, honest truth. If I hadn't been so far off balance and unregulated, I wouldn't be able to be the centre of the storm. When you're in a more healed aspect of yourself, you can look back at the places in your life where you were ashamed, or really not happy with the events that were going on, and you can say, God, thank you for those experiences, because they make us what we are right now. If it wasn't for being thrown way off balance, we wouldn't have the chance to experience what inner peace truly is, or to be able to inspire or affect others.

Because I think, for most of us, and it's part of being young, when you're unregulated, you do everything you can to hide it, right? Ideally you'd learn how to talk about it and get it out of the body, so you wouldn't have to hold on to it for 40 years or whatever. But you do everything you can to show the world that you're a good person. Which we are. But you don't want to show that side to people, because the sensitive part of me never wanted to burden anybody.

Ross Tayler (19:14)

Well, and that's the original pattern, right? Because nobody was really there to nurture and support you in a conscious way, you're left to process all those emotions and experiences on your own. So you cope however you need to, to turn those things off. I know I did that. I basically had to stuff it all down. It wasn't until my late 30s that I went to a mental health presentation where they were talking about anxiety, and I was like, oh my gosh, that's me. That's what I feel all the time. I had no idea. I could never label it. I just thought that was the way we all felt, even though it was so tremendously uncomfortable. That was how I moved through the world.

Darrell Greenwood (19:57)

Yeah, and what you said earlier is interesting, about how we accept those unconscious patterns as just being how life is, because in a sense, it's all we know. There was a period in my early to mid 30s where a lot of my family and friends were worried about me having addiction issues with substances. I knew I never did. I was in the wrong environments, and I could have been making better choices. But I was on the cusp of either a breakdown or a breakthrough. And what I really learned, and I think this is really valuable information, especially for other men, because again, we hide our traumas, is that we can be addicted to the chemistry firing within our systems, and we don't even realize it. But we defend it.

If we were bullied as kids, or if we have trauma we haven't dealt with, it stacks up to a point where, imagine walking into a room and all the papers just fall out. That's how overwhelmed you can feel, thinking, oh my God, I don't even know where to start or what to do with all of that stuff. And even thinking about it fires this cascade of inner chemistry that comes to life, focused on the lower chakras: the fear, not wanting to fail or let people down. All these continuous themes keep rotating around and around and around, and it leads to frustration, because obviously you're in a loop, and you want to get out of it, and the more you resist, the stronger it gets. Until, I don't know, I felt like eventually I broke. Which was beautiful, because when you break, you rebuild yourself.

Ross Tayler (22:04)

Yeah. One of my medicines over the years has been psilocybin, doing guided journeys with others and individual journeys for myself. I always say it saved me thousands of dollars in therapy. And there are some similar themes to your experiences of breathwork. One of the things that happened for me in these community journeys was that I would become so self-conscious of my impact on the room. Just like you described, because that was how I moved through life: not making noise, not affecting others, and not being in my power. It showed up in all sorts of ways. I remember one journey where I met a guide. I still don't know what it was, or who, or what gender, or anything like that. It was really obscure. But the message was that everything I'd experienced, and continue to experience, was a beautiful problem. In other words, on one hand it's painful and hard to go through, but on the other side, it's a beautiful journey that creates strength and gifts and all these things. And we need both in order to find that middle road. It sounds like you're speaking to those things as well.

Darrell Greenwood (23:29)

Yeah, totally. It's totally true. When we're in trauma or going through a difficult time in our lives, if we flip the story we tell ourselves, often we have the skills and the tools to deal with everything, even though we don't think we do. And it's often the stories we learn in our first seven to 10 years, I want to say, when our subconscious is very pliable and we're absorbing everything like a sponge. Now, in my mid 40s to close to 50, I'm being challenged, going through some of the most challenging things I've experienced in my life, and the story changes, and the treasure of what could potentially come from the challenges rises straight through. We change the story, we change our lives.

Ross Tayler (24:31)

Right. We change the reflection of what we see in the world as well, because everything is a ripple in time of our past experiences wanting to be released. It's layer upon layer, right? We're waxing out the layers we've experienced over time.

Darrell Greenwood (24:47)

And they keep coming back. When I was younger, I used to think that if I did enough work, all the pain and all this strange energy would go away, and I'd be good. I think that's just part of being young. And then it was a real blessing when I started to understand that every day when I wake up, the same energies are still there. I just have a choice about how I want to direct my life force. I can meet the resistance and the imbalances and the different things that show up in my reality, and I don't have to energize them. That understanding alone brings a lot of my creative power back to the present moment. And then I can choose to share that energy with my kids as they grow up, empowering them, and with working with people in gyms, meeting people in breathwork and at markets, and actually being someone who can hold space and be grounded in those environments.

Ross Tayler (25:50)

And that's the opposite side of all the shadow work: your light gets to be expressed again, shining out into the world, into all these things you do. I think that's a really important thing to mention: the relationship you have with your children, and with your partner, and the work you both do together. You're doing so much, creating all your own products, working the land and staying connected to nature. You've been able to create a life that has all of those elements, that is so nurturing to you, and that also nurtures everyone around you.

Darrell Greenwood (26:29)

Yeah, that's really the dream: to just wake up every day with a clean slate. I tell a lot of my clients, look, every time you wake up, it's a completely clear slate. There's no past, there's no future. So if we can begin by just regulating ourselves, whatever that looks like, if we just sit down and close our eyes, it doesn't have to be a ceremony, but it can be our own ceremonial process of honoring our life force and our breath, slowing down, and then entering the day regulated, on this clean slate, instead of running out the door with rocket blasters on our backs.

Ross Tayler (27:08)

Right. I think back to all the years I worked in restaurants. I would literally be burning the candle at both ends, and I would wake up half an hour before I had to be somewhere. I was just running through life, and I'd often wake up dreading the day and what was waiting for me. And I'm so grateful that in this phase of my life, there's never a day I wake up dreading anything. I wake up excited for the day, or peaceful as I enter it. A lot of that is because I prioritize myself first and connect with myself first, and I don't rush out the door anymore. That's the shift we go through when we dial things in.

Darrell Greenwood (27:51)

Yeah. Once we make the unconscious conscious... I love the shadow work. I love being able to go into the darkness and shine light. And I'm so good at seeing the possibilities of what can come from that type of work. I love quantum physics. I understand that when we do this work, it affects the entire universe, the entire planet. It affects our entire lineage, our genetics. We determine how our genes start to express themselves. That's a template for future humanity, for what we could possibly become if we live a parasympathetic, connected life. These things are fascinating to me. So when I wake up, I'm never just thinking about my own journey. I'm looking at the whole collective, at what we could do as a planet, and how much our individual gifts and energies, and the way we show up, have an impact. That's fascinating. That makes me really excited to keep growing and healing.

Ross Tayler (29:08)

And what would you like to say about multidimensionality and quantum physics? It's definitely an important piece of your puzzle. And for me, I've learned so much about Human Design and stepped into the Gene Keys, and the more I get into them, the more I think, wait a second, is this a simulation? What are we actually living here? I feel like you would have something to say about that as well.

Darrell Greenwood (29:37)

I feel that when we can shift our brainwaves, once we understand how to lie on our backs and move into, let's say, delta, when we get good enough that we can fall into the dream state and be conscious there, that's what I believe connects us to [time-and-space?] travel, which allows us to bend the laws of this third-dimensional reality. Because we're presented with, this is how it works. And I believe none of that is true. Once we tap into the intelligence of the body, we can have access to the entire library of the cosmos. Like you were saying, the Gene Keys, the cards of destiny, there are all these different modalities that allow us to tap into the symbols or archetypes of this collective, and to decipher and navigate them and bring more conscious awareness into our day-to-day realities.

And I feel like as kids, we're not taught about the connections we have to our higher self, and the amount of guidance and protection and support available to us. And it's not just one person. It's not just shamans. It's not just people who do the work. This is all of us. I really strongly believe that when we can change our brainwaves and move into coherence, we have a direct channel that connects to every aspect of who and what we are, on every single level, dimensionally, energetically. There are no limits. We just have to believe that it's a possibility. Once we believe in that possibility, we can go deep into our meditative practice, and not only ground ourselves and bring ourselves into complete presence, but also explore the vast energies that we are on so many different levels.

Ross Tayler (32:06)

And a lot of people refer to the veil, which keeps us separate from that reality. Is that by design, or have we been intentionally kept from these gifts, or had them taken away?

Darrell Greenwood (32:23)

I think it's a combination of both. Being able to discover that we're basically sparks of the source, by forgetting everything and then integrating and growing and seeing what we can do in these physical forms, that's pretty awesome. I know a lot of people go into the really dark areas, about us being trapped here or manipulated, almost suppressed. It all comes down to a choice. If we look at it that way, then that's kind of true, right? But we can also look at the opportunities: we could be anywhere in the world, in any situation, and we can still choose to be free. And once we move in that direction, we can break past the senses. Rather than feeling victimized, we can empower ourselves, learn to find joy and happiness, love ourselves and love the people who come into our environments. Then we break the entire web of the matrix.

And it's all a choice. I grew up thinking we're in a matrix and we're trapped, we've been F'd over. I was a real rebel, to the point where I was looking for ways to be part of the team that decimates it. And then you wake up one day and realize that that energy is just feeding the same force you think you're fighting against. Until we find peace and love as more of a collective, we're going to keep animating these energies that are supposedly in charge of suppressing us. But I don't believe that.

Ross Tayler (34:25)

And that's the quantum physics layer, because like attracts like. What we put our attention on is what we attract.

Darrell Greenwood (34:32)

Exactly.

Ross Tayler (34:32)

Yeah. You mentioned the lower chakras, fear, guilt and shame, and we've been experiencing a lot of fear in our culture over the last while. Rising above that and being in our hearts is really the best medicine for it. But it's also hard to create from those lower centres when they're activated and we're in those states of fear. So shifting that takes presence. It takes consciousness to be in those states and rise above them.

Darrell Greenwood (35:10)

Yeah, it takes some time, like you said, and practice, to be able to play in density. And then realizing that playing in the density actually transmutes it. And I feel like more and more of us are starting to completely transform the stories we told ourselves as kids, about how limited we were, or how stuck, or how we are the way we are because of something. I feel like victimhood is really under a lens right now. As the earth goes through this rapid transformation, and there's all this new light coming from the source and the cosmos and the moon, and the sun's doing all kinds of wild things, it's really putting pressure on us to learn how to navigate into more of a state of joy. The other option is, if we stay stuck in the same perceptions, we experience the density in our bodies really quickly nowadays. I feel like we're in a place of real pioneering right now.

Ross Tayler (36:35)

And maybe we don't even realize it in some ways. We just continue to push through. One of the things I love about Vancouver Island is the amount of metaphysical and spiritual community. You can't turn around without meeting someone who is in alignment. It's really great.

Darrell Greenwood (36:54)

Yeah, it's amazing. It's such a magical place.

Ross Tayler (36:57)

Yeah. I spent four years in the Okanagan, and I was literally drying up there. I loved it, it was nice, it was a great experience, but I was drying up. And when I came to the island, I realized why: I was missing that spiritual connection and spiritual community. To be able to find it and connect with it immediately was really great.

Darrell Greenwood (37:22)

Totally. A lot of us were living on the mainland, or in different parts of Canada. A lot of people I meet came around the same time. We moved to the island in 2016, and a lot of people came here then. There were definitely some shifts. A lot of us were even saying that if you're meant to be here, things are going to happen in your life that just catapult you here.

Ross Tayler (37:52)

Yeah, it's true. I literally had a whisper that said, go back to the island. I had been here in 2012 for a year and a half, a bit of a hero's journey with a relationship that was quite challenging, and step one was to eventually get off the island. So to be called back was an interesting experience to go through. So tell me about the importance of your connection to nature.

Darrell Greenwood (38:19)

I feel like nature is probably the most powerful medicine of my whole life. Simply being outside in bare feet, not even doing anything, on a beach, listening to the ocean, there's a simplicity and a connection happening on so many levels that is just nourishing us and bringing us back into balance. And there's no need to know what's happening or why. It's just happening. When I was living in a city, I could really feel myself, like you said, drying out, being ungrounded and not able to find my centre point. And then once I moved to the island, got onto our land, and had a chance to really anchor myself back into wild water and ocean, it was like a butterfly coming out of a cocoon. It was a complete rebirth into what I already knew, because as a kid, all I did was play outside. We didn't have the technology and so on.

I grew up in Prince George, which at the time was more remote, with lots of forest and snow. So I knew that was medicine. And then you grow up and live in a city, wanting to make something of yourself. We were building gyms. We wanted to provide services that could help change the world and help people, and you get caught up in that. And when you come out the other end and you're back in nature, you realize that as kids, we're highly intelligent. You regulate yourself just by being out in the open air.

Ross Tayler (40:18)

Yeah, it's interesting. I think it was around 2011. I was working for Starbucks, and around Christmas time, I walked up to the door and grabbed the handle to go into work, and I recognized, I can't do this anymore. What came next was a leave of absence. A lot of that time was just walking slowly in nature, really reconnecting, because as a boy, I used to do that a lot. I'd walk my dog and walk up creeks and make my own trails. It reconnected me to that part that was so important. It was such a powerful reflection. Nature is such a great teacher.

Darrell Greenwood (41:02)

Something really valuable that came onto my path, and I feel like Dr. Joe Dispenza talks a lot about this, is how our emotions are like magnets. When we're in nature, nature has its way of allowing us to regulate ourselves emotionally, so then we draw more pleasurable experiences to ourselves. Our relationships lighten up. We meet friendlier people. The island is kind of like that, because everybody's out in nature, so we're all regulating ourselves in ways, without thinking we're putting in the work.

Once I understood that, I went from not having an understanding of emotional regulation to really making it a priority in my life. It completely changes your reality. And it doesn't take long. It's daunting at first, sitting with these uncomfortable feelings. But if you can look at the outcome and say, you know what, the outcome of this is going to be a happier life, which will lead to doing work that's more in line with our destiny or our passion, and having friends we can actually be authentic with and really open up to, these are all the outcomes of doing the emotional work. But so many of us don't want to go there, because in the old way of thinking, I don't want to be perceived as weak or emotional. There are all these things about growing up as a guy, where you don't really want to show those parts. I feel like we all have to reorganize what we perceive strength to mean.

Ross Tayler (43:04)

And that actually leads me to a question I wanted to ask. You mention instilling discipline in the book, and I feel like that's an important tag-on to what you just said about men. But discipline has such an interesting connotation. I think we think of it as being disciplined by somebody. And yet, on the other side of that, when we bring discipline into our lives, it can lead to so many positive things. So what would you want to say about discipline in your life?

Darrell Greenwood (43:39)

I would say it's one of the greatest virtues we can build. A good example: let's say we want to get into the medicine of moving our bodies more, with a healthier mind. When we look at that process, we can visualize every cell in our body opening up like a vacuum cleaner, able to absorb nutrients and light and water and come to life. We can reinvent ourselves cellularly. When we discipline ourselves as athletes, we force ourselves to do things because we know we need to be better. That's the old paradigm of discipline. And I feel like there's a lot of medicine in saying, you know what, let's revisit what it means to move the body. What it means to grab a weight or a tool, and when we touch it, it's like a magical lantern, like a genie's lamp: oh my God, I can touch this, and I can close my eyes and visualize myself screaming, singing in ecstasy.

What I'm trying to say is that we can force ourselves to do things, and that leads us to points where we stop wanting to eat healthier or go to the gym or do activities, because we associate them with being painful. But with that little mind play of using the imagination, and looking at it as something new, creating new possibilities, we start doing things and disciplining ourselves, and it becomes fun, something we want to do instead of something we're forcing ourselves to do.

Ross Tayler (45:35)

I relate to that, because after returning to the island, I really stepped into walking a lot. As I was less busy, I would walk three times a day. I just wanted to keep walking. I loved it. And yet there was a time, maybe five years ago, when I couldn't even imagine going for a 10-minute walk, because it felt like too much. I was working full time, I didn't feel like I had the energy, and it felt like work. So I think you're suggesting that a level of discipline, plus bringing some creative energy to it, allows you to get into that flow. Today I had one walk, and I wish I could have had two more, right? I couldn't have imagined myself being like that, but now I just love it. It's such a big, important part of my day.

Darrell Greenwood (46:26)

Yeah, totally. And then there's how you feel afterwards. One of my favorite activities is a sandbag I have. It's quite heavy, and it's daunting to think about, but I love it because it's humbling. Whenever I'm using it, it never feels like I'm doing a very good job. So it's a real chance to meet that part of myself and say, you know what, think of the benefits. This is what's happening to your metabolism, and the ways your muscles are being challenged on so many levels beyond your typical workout. So it's a chance to reparent myself when it's super hard and grueling, and still connect it to an outcome. And at the end, the medicine is that you basically release all those old paradigms and belief systems and everything else, because the sandbag just presses them out of me.

Ross Tayler (47:29)

Right. Which is a metaphor for what life does to us as well, if we're willing and conscious of it.

Darrell Greenwood (47:38)

Totally.

Ross Tayler (47:38)

So Darrell, that feels like a good place to press pause. I always close by asking the same question, and I feel like you've answered it throughout the whole conversation, but let's see what your one thing is. What's one simple way someone could connect with the sacred today?

Darrell Greenwood (48:00)

Sitting down, closing your eyes, maybe going out in nature to do it, bare feet in the grass or in the sand, and taking some long, slow, deep breaths. Not just a certain number, but enough of them that the air goes into the belly and into the heart, and starts to move like the waves of the ocean. You do enough of that, and it's some of the best medicine we have access to. It's the key to life. It's right there in the [toolbox?] of the system we have.

Ross Tayler (48:47)

It's always with us.

Darrell Greenwood (48:48)

Always with us. And it's amazing that we don't even realize how powerful and important it is until it helps us navigate through difficulties in our lives. A real powerful ally.

Ross Tayler (49:03)

I love that. Thank you, Darrell.

Darrell Greenwood (49:04)

Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

Ross Tayler (49:06)

You're welcome. I so appreciated our conversation and all the places we went. I'm sure our listeners are going to love some of the journeys we took. I appreciate you taking the time for the conversation. It's been such a gift.

Darrell Greenwood (49:21)

Thank you, Ross.

Ross Tayler (49:22)

You're very welcome, and we'll connect at some point soon.

Ross Tayler (49:25)

Thank you for joining us on Sacred Sundays. I hope something in today's offering spoke to your spirit, stirred something true, or simply gave you a moment to breathe. If this conversation resonated, please subscribe, rate, or share. It truly helps this work reach the people who are meant to find it. If you'd like to step inside my world a little further, I host a free live practice three mornings a week called Start With You. Just 20 minutes on Zoom to return to your own energy. Everything you need can be found at the link in the show notes. Until next time, may your day be slow and sacred.