Saying Yes to Life
My most recent dark night and the birth of Soulful Impact
Welcome to Soulful Impact, a newsletter and podcast exploring a new definition of impact.
Hey everyone,
It’s been a while since I shared a reflective essay post, as I’ve been focusing on my podcast (which I hope you’ve been enjoying!) and evolving my business, formerly known as Starlight Leadership, into Soulful Impact.
It feels good to open up a blank white page to write again. I expect these essays will be less frequent now that I’m putting more creative energy into the podcast, but they also feel like a particular form of expression that I value — an opportunity to slow down and be a bit more thoughtful with what I share. So I do look forward to continuing to post essays like this from time to time.
Today’s post shares more about the personal journey I’ve been on this year, the process I’ve been going through as Soulful Impact was born, and some key things I’ve been learning from all of that.
This post is also a chance for me to share my excitement, joy and passion for the 5 Steps of Soulful Impact, a framework that initially emerged through a 5-part newsletter series earlier this year and has since become the backbone of all forms of my work guiding and coaching others (as well as my own personal practice). As a quick refresher, the 5 steps are:
The deeper I get with this framework, the more I share it, the more I apply it in my own life and see others try it on in theirs, the more I love it.
If you’ve experienced traditional success and realized how hollow it feels…
If you crave a deeper sense of fulfillment, ease and joy in your life…
If you feel passionately about making the world a better place in a genuinely revolutionary and lasting way…
Then I really want you to experience the power of this practice.
Saying Yes to Life
My most recent dark night and the birth of Soulful Impact
Trigger warning: this post discusses suicidal ideation. If that topic is sensitive for you, please proceed with care.
I collapsed, weeping, into my brother’s arms.
It was early March, 2024. I had just made it — barely — down to Boulder for an advanced training intensive with my psychedelic guide mentors at The Center for Medicinal Mindfulness. My brother and his wife were welcoming me into their home for the week. When I arrived, they had just sat down to dinner with a group of friends.
“How are you, Brooksie?” my brother asked.
“I’m sick… and depressed.”
As the words left my mouth, I was overcome with tears. My brother is 6’3”, and as much as the younger me resented having a “little” brother who was bigger than I was growing up, in that moment I couldn’t have been more grateful to melt into his large embrace. A shred of embarrassment flittered through my awareness as I realized all his friends were watching, but it didn’t last. I didn’t have the energy to care how I appeared, let alone to bottle up my truth.
It had been a rough few months. I’d been no stranger to dark nights of the soul, but this was feeling next-level.
The prior fall, after completing the 2nd cohort of my flagship vision quest program, I was riding high. For the second year in a row, the experience and the results of that program had surpassed my wildest dreams. It felt so good that I never wanted it to stop. And that’s where I first got caught by my shadow.
After the program ended, I slipped into the subtle addictive pattern of identifying with and wanting to control my emotional experience. Some feelings were coming up that felt uncomfortable, that I didn’t want to be with, and that I thought meant some scary things about me and who I am. At first, I unconsciously tried to avoid those feelings by diving head-first into rigorously planning for the next cohort, but I quickly noticed that I was exhausting myself (ye old workaholism-leading-to-burnout pattern is pretty familiar to me by now).
So, I got myself some help.
I hired an awesome new coach to support me in working with this shadow material, to uproot these deeply seated fear-based motivations and help me settle into a more trusting and expansive flow with my business.
It worked great at first. My work with that coach helped me build a lot of new awareness and acceptance of what was going on, specifically helping me notice how my patten was being driven by those feelings I didn’t want to feel.
I was avoiding the grief and heartbreak I felt for the ending of such a beautiful program. As much as I intellectually knew the importance of honoring that grief, in the moment I just didn’t want to do it.
At the same time, I was avoiding fully feeling my joy — as counterintuitive as it sounds, I unconsciously wouldn’t let myself fully celebrate the victory I had had because I feared that would mean that it wouldn’t happen again.
That turned out to be the deeper emotion driving at least this layer of the pattern: an irrational but penetrating fear that I would never be able to achieve such a beautiful outcome again.
The narrative attached to this fear was a manifestation of my familiar core wound: the belief that I was fundamentally flawed, not worthy, and needed to constantly earn my right to live and enjoy life. “If I relentlessly produce tangible outcomes that other people see as worthy and valuable,” the inner narrative went, “then I will eventually become worthy and valuable myself.”
I had peeled back a few layers, but I wasn’t done.
While I was seeing myself more clearly and opening up some of these stuck emotional layers, it turned out there was an even deeper layer of healing that wanted to happen. But I was going to need an extra nudge to really meet it.
That’s when I got sick. In early January in Costa Rica, I unknowingly drank some bad water that led to contracting Giardia and E. coli.
It was brutal. The Giardia went undetected for over 6 weeks, and the E. coli was resistant to two rounds of antibiotics. By mid-February, not only did I still have those two original bugs in my system, but I’d also developed a nasty secondary infection called C. diff, indicative of a serious gut imbalance that is infamously hard to get rid of. That led to a third round of the strongest antibiotic yet (one of only two drugs in the world that work against C. diff). As a friend put it at the time, I had carpet bombed my gut.
I felt helpless and obliterated.
Being sick was like putting a megaphone to all those deep fear and shame voices inside of me. It was during this time that the depression really set in.
My fears about my inherent unworthiness and the compulsion to prove my worth through productivity were amplified by the experience of being sick and incapacitated.
To those scared and wounded parts of myself, being sick validated my basic fear of being fundamentally flawed. “There will always be something!” they would tell me. “No matter how hard you try, you’ll never escape this darkness and death inside of you… it’s at the core of who you are.”
The combination of the sickness and the depression did literally feel like darkness and death. It was like I was being haunted by a black cloud, a ghoulish presence. The blackness would creep up into the edges of my experience at seemingly random times, its wispy dark fingers clawing at my peripheral vision or turning my guts inside out. My body would somatically implode, caving in and collapsing.
And that’s when I would instinctively resist. I’d fight the darkness back with all my might. Which makes so much sense, right? If my description of this experience gives you chills, then maybe you get it. It was horrible. Of course I wasn’t willing to accept it.
But that’s also how I was giving it power.
In retrospect, I can identify this darkness as a part of myself that had been around for as long as I could remember. For most of my life, it had been relegated to the shadow — because I hadn’t yet developed the capacity to fully face, feel and experience it — but it was there.
This wasn’t just the part of me that feared I was inherently flawed and unworthy — it was the part of me that actually enjoyed and fed on that belief. In the words of Ekhart Tolle, it was my “pain-body” — a parasite of the mind that required me to be addicted to negative feelings and thought loops and used the energy of those experiences to keep itself alive.
But its strategy only worked when I was resisting it. By resisting it, I mean believing its stories, fighting to prove it wrong, and finding unconscious ways to avoid feeling and experiencing the intensity of it. Ironically, this resistance created far more suffering than I ever would have felt by just accepting it, allowing it, and letting it flow through me in the form of energy and emotion. But that’s how unconscious ego patterns (and the pain-body) work.
For most of my life, one key way I had resisted experiencing the depth of my pain-body was by being a workaholic. Terrified by the sheer intensity of negative feelings and nasty thought-loops that the pain-body would trigger in me, I would relegate it to the shadow and convince myself that if I won enough external success and adoration, it would finally relent. This may have distracted me from the pain-body temporarily, but what I was actually doing was just generating more fear and scarcity — more negative energy in the form of thought and emotion — for it to feed and persist on.
Another, more subtle and pernicious unconscious strategy for resisting the existence of my pain-body was self-loathing. As crazy as it may sound, on a certain level my ego preferred the experience of ruthlessly beating up on myself to actually fully feeling the intensity of my pain-body. I unconsciously preferred to fight against the pain-body at all costs, doing whatever it took not to fully let it in — even when that meant directing serious hate toward myself as a form of distraction and self-armoring. Perhaps, on some level, it at least gave my ego the illusion of control.
Once again, the actual result of this strategy was self-defeating, as it was just a way that I was feeding more negative energy to the pain-body parasite. When taken to an extreme, you can see how this is one way that the parasite can end up killing its host.
I found myself thinking about taking my own life.
Not in an intentional or directed way — I never formulated a plan or felt any actual motivation toward taking any action of self-harm — but suicidal thoughts were occurring in my mind at a pretty alarming rate.
That’s how loud and intense the pain-body experience (or more precisely, my resistance to it) had become. It was so intense, so scary, that some parts of my mind thought it would be better to die than to keep experiencing this.
Even though I knew deep in my bones that I didn’t actually want to commit suicide, my initial reaction to having those thoughts was to further amp up my resistance. I got even more scared. I moved farther away from the possibility of surrendering to the fullness of what the present moment was asking me to experience, and instead doubled down on contraction and attempts to control.
Even though I now see that this resistance was just prolonging and deepening my suffering, I can also totally appreciate the wisdom behind it. On some level, I believed that if I fully submitted to the pain-body — if I fully surrendered and let this ghoulish darkness fully come into my body and my experience — that I would never come back. I feared I would take my own life, or perhaps even worse, turn into a monster and severely hurt or even kill someone else that I loved.
I felt like a soldier in the trenches, stuck in a hell that never ends. I activated my network of support, reaching out to loved ones, mentors and friends and being honest about what I was experiencing. It helped, to a certain extent. I was often able to release some of the emotional energy of the pain-body on my own or with some support, but it would ultimately turn out to have been more like a pressure-release valve than a full clearing. Before long, I would be back in the trenches again, this time even more discouraged, dejected, helpless and obliterated.
At long last, I got the support that I needed.
The momentum of this whole experience finally turned around during that week in early March, when I made it down to Boulder for that training.
On a physical level, I was a few weeks into a new natural supplement protocol provided by an amazing GI specialist doctor who I’d been referred to by a friend. I was beyond relieved to have found someone who actually took the time to offer a holistic treatment to what I was experiencing, providing me with a regimen of supplements that would help keep the bad bugs out of my gut while also supporting the growth of the good ones, and avoiding any further antibiotics.
On a psychospiritual level, it was in the container of that training — with the support of my sacred plant medicine allies and the guidance of my clinically-trained mentors and guides — that I finally found the willingness to fully face, feel and release the depth of that darkness that had been haunting me.
The first night of that training was a “resourcing” cannabis journey. Knowing I was primed for a big experience, I had spoken with the team beforehand. I intentionally placed myself next to Daniel McQueen, the center’s founder and lead trainer, for the journey itself.
Sure enough, not long after the journey began, the darkness appeared. Instinctively, I watched my mind and body try to shut it down — just like I’d been doing for months (if not my entire life). But I knew that it wasn’t going to work, not in this space. Resistance is a recipe for suffering in any part of life, but that is especially true in the amplified experience of a psychedelic journey.
Earlier that same day, I had written (and underlined) the following note in my journal during our training discussion:
“The key factor is your ability to accept your experience, whatever it is. No aspect of the experience is irrelevant.
It’s about welcoming and saying YES.”
I knew what I had to do. Mustering all of my courage and strength, I raised my hand. Daniel came over to me.
“I’m going into a really dark place,” I stammered. “I’m so scared.”
“OK,” he responded, cool as a cucumber. “Let’s do it. I’ve got you.”
Grabbing my hand, he sat down next to me. The presence of his voice, his super calm nervous system, and his big teddy-bear-like body immediately helped me begin to relax.
And then the energy began to release. Bright flashes of moving color and light filled my visual field as a huge wave of sensation flowed through my entire body. An overwhelming flow of energy, light, feeling and sensation seemed to originate in my gut and then rocketed out of my arms, head and legs. I writhed uncontrollably, moaned, and screamed. It was the closest I’d ever experienced to an exorcism.
Daniel helped me let it flow. Intuitively and gently, he moved the arm he was holding into different positions, and placed his free hand on different parts of my body. I could feel the energy flowing more and more, as deeper layers of my nervous system let go and released.
I felt exquisitely supported and held. The combination of the medicine, the ceremonial container, and Daniel’s direct, in-person support allowed my system to finally drop into a state of surrender and trust.
It was super intense. But afterwards, almost immediately, I felt a thousand pounds lighter. The rest of that journey was like a sparkly waterfall of new insights, clarity and appreciation flowing in relating to various different aspects of my life.
I was back.
There was still some more healing to do — the remainder of that week in Boulder included two more very challenging and intense journeys for me — but the momentum had shifted. Over the following 1-2 months, I slowly but surely worked my way back into full mental, physical, emotional and spiritual health.
Saying Yes to Life
Out of all the insights I scribbled in my journal in the second half of that pivotal journey experience, there is one that stands out:
“I choose to say YES to LIFE.”
What made this particular insight so powerful was not simply its defiance of suicidal ideation. Yes, it is a declarative statement of my desire to live — but more than that, it’s actually a deliberate embrace of the full spectrum of my entire life experience. It’s an open-hearted welcoming of ALL of it — including and perhaps especially the darkness. The pain-body. The haunting ghoulish cloud that makes me question whether I can trust myself, or whether I even want to stay alive.
When I lovingly welcome the presence of it all, I find my way home to wholeness and peace.
When I wrote that note, I was feeling directly connected to the sacredness of all of life — not just the pleasant stuff. Having put down a massive psychospiritual weight and found a sense of safety in my body again, I was able to deeply feel and remember the truth that everything — darkness included — originates from Source.
Saying yes to life doesn’t mean being boundary-less or submissive. It doesn’t mean letting go of your agency or your “no” — in fact, quite the opposite. It means claiming your no and your boundary from an open-hearted, loving, and trusting place. It means saying no to resistance in your inner experience, saying no to the parasite of the pain-body. It means stepping into an empowered creator mindset and choosing to trust that life is happening for you, not to you. It means sensing into the sacredness of everything you are experiencing and saying yes to letting life be your teacher and your guide.
Saying yes to life means letting go of the exhausting and endless fight with reality or different parts of yourself. It means welcoming the fullness of your present moment experience, no matter how intense — and from that empowered and loving place, choosing how you want to respond. It means taking your stand, finding your way, and giving your gift by showing up with the embodied presence, perspective and creativity that only you can.
It’s alchemy — turning lead into gold. Turning pain into purpose, freedom, aliveness, and joy.
The Birth of Soulful Impact
The 5 Steps of Soulful Impact emerged through the depths of this dark night. I wrote and shared those five posts between Feb 16 - Mar 15, 2024. At the time, writing them was simultaneously a way for me to bring some positive energy into my days — like a light at the end of the tunnel — and also an opportunity for me to really test and put into practice the ideas that I was articulating.
In the end, this whole experience became a deep validation for me of my belief in the power of those 5 steps and the principles that underlie them.
Without the foundation of an empowered creator mindset — including the ability to question my thoughts, seek out good support, and open to the possibility that all this was happening for me — I might never have made it through that experience.
What finally turned the tides was my ability to find the willingness to turn toward what I was running from and embrace the inner darkness.
Crossing that energetic threshold helped me wake up to my wholeness on an entirely new level. I’ve felt more safety in my body, more groundedness in my being, more trust, joy and love for life in these past 6 months than I ever have before in my life.
From that grounded, grateful and embodied place, I unlocked an entirely new level of giving my gift. What began as a simple 5-step framework has now evolved into the ecosystem of Soulful Impact, including a podcast and a cohesive suite of both new and legacy offerings. I’ve been more present, attuned, loving and in service to my family, friends, and community. All of that together feels like my fullest embodiment of my soul’s vision to date.
And of course, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to repeat! The past 6 months have included no shortage of further opportunities to keep on doing my work 😉. Thanks to this experience of my recent dark night and my deepening commitment to practicing these 5 steps, I’ve been showing up for that work with an open and loving heart.
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Your story hits those notes of harmony within me, Brooks, and congrats on making it through (this part of!) the journey with such an awesome map for others to follow. Big medicine. Blessings!
What a story—thanks for being so raw, Brooks. That continuing, awkward relationship with acceptance is so transformative. This part had all my hairs standing on end:
> “I’m going into a really dark place,” I stammered. “I’m so scared.”
> “OK,” he responded, cool as a cucumber. “Let’s do it. I’ve got you.”