The Power of Letting Go with John Purkiss

Have you ever stood at life's crossroads feeling weighed down by the past?

In this episode with John Purkiss, author of “The Power of Letting Go: How to drop everything that's holding you back,” we talked about the paradoxical power of surrender in achieving success and fulfillment.

You are invited to ponder the profound shifts that can occur when you trust in something greater than yourself and let go of the need to control every aspect of your life.

The conversation underscores the importance of surrendering to the greater intelligence that connects and governs all things, and the struggle many face with letting go of control.

The episode is a transformative blueprint for personal and professional renewal.

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00:00 Power of Letting Go and Surrender

10:47 How C-Suite Executives use the power of letting go to their advantage

19:44 Examining trauma and emotional healing

36:11 Ego, self-confidence, and achievements

42:36 How to tap into a greater intelligence

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Transcript

Arjun: 0:00

John, I read your book called the Power of Letting Go how to Drop Everything that's Holding you Back, and it emphasizes letting go of the ego and surrendering to a higher intelligence. Can you share a personal experience or maybe a turning point in your life where letting go led to a significant change?

John: 0:23

Yes, there's one mentioned in the book in chapter four, just to give you the context. So I was brought up as a Christian, so I went to church and Sunday school for 10 years, but I was in a group in Leicester, which is now, I think, britain's most South Asian city. So I was aware there was this other thing beyond Christianity, like the Hindu, buddhist, whatever traditions and so I left Christianity at the age of 15, but what I took with me was the idea that there was something more intelligent than my brain which was running everything. So much later on I got. So I wasn't an atheist, right. So much later on I.

John: 1:09

So I worked really hard and, you know, got lots of certificates and prizes and highly paid jobs and all that, and then eventually got completely stuck by running my own business in Paris. And then Paris went on strike, so my business stopped and I was this is going to sound like an American self-help book. I was ill and broke and my girlfriend had left me and I couldn't pay the rent, all that stuff that you get in. You know the low air that you get in great self-help stories.

Arjun: 1:37

Yeah yeah, completely against the wall kind of feeling.

John: 1:40

Like that kind of the or the floor, whichever, yeah, yeah and anyway. And so the turning point was I. So I studied economics. I have a kind of social science background. I thought, well, this is really interesting because, on the one hand, I've done all the things that you're supposed to do as a good middle-class boy. You know, you study hard and work hard and do everything correctly, and so all the inputs were correct and the output was, you know, zero out of 10. Right, so I thought to myself, I'm clearly missing something. It's a bit like, you know, you haven't switched your computer on one of those things and something fundamental is missing. And so the turning point was I.

John: 2:18

This was a year before the power of now was published, so I had no idea what mindfulness was or anything like that. But I was reading this novel called a rich man's secret, and in this novel this man meets somebody who tells him to return to now, and he keeps returning to now. And every time and I started copying the character in the novel, so every time my thoughts started irritating me or making me feel depressed, I just brought my attention back to my breath or my senses, and I had no idea what I was doing. I just noticed that it felt better.

Arjun: 2:56

Yeah, absolutely.

John: 2:59

And so and so, first of all, I learned to be present in a very unorthodox way. The second thing was I decided to let go because nothing was working in my life. So I thought, okay, let's, let's just stop doing anything. And I couldn't, you couldn't work anyway, so I just used to go for long runs in in the woods and and I didn't do any work, and and I. The other third thing that I did was I asked to be guided to the and and within a few days later, an advert advert appeared in the newspaper.

John: 3:34

It back in the UK, so you know, in another country, for the perfect job. And, long story short, I got the job and my financial goals were fulfilled immediately. And it was my first experience of when you stop trying so hard and you actually tune into this greater intelligence and everything just works. And something which I didn't mention in the book is that there were. I later I didn't go to the detail, but I later discovered a memo from the chairman of the company that I joined and he said for the first time we're going to recruit somebody through an advert, and there are five. The ideal candidate will have the following five attributes. I met all of them. It was a bullseye.

Arjun: 4:21

Do you know what they were?

John: 4:23

I can tell you what they are. I mean might annoy some people, but I mean, do you want me to tell you? Sure, go for it, I can tell you what they were. I mean, these days you probably couldn't place this kind of advert, but I thought they were and they just show. The reason for telling you is not to show off, it's to tell you how specific this advert was right, and for me it was. What it showed me is that the cosmos can be very specific and deadly accurate Once you choose right.

John: 4:49

So from memory, the criteria were and these were all ideally, they were all nice to have. So one was probably mid 30s, I was 35, probably went to Oxford and Cambridge. Probably has an MBA. Yes, I ideally worked in banking or management consulting, both Ideally speaks another European languages, in my case French, German, Spanish. So if you think you know what are the odds of all of those things being lined up, All those permutations were lined up perfectly within days of my letting go and asking to be guided, Right, right, and I've had experiences like this since then. That was the first one. It's like you know. The combination lock suddenly went, click, Exactly when I let go.

Arjun: 5:36

Yeah, no, that's a great story and I mean that's. Those odds are similar to the odds of us being born. What is it? One in 40 trillion, something like that. So I mean there are. I can understand your feeling of wow, something greater is actually in control, can.

John: 5:54

I can, I just give you another one, Just other people might be able to relate to. Oh, keep going. Yeah, you know, just another, because that one might be. The reason I don't use that much is it sounds a bit, it's a bit remote. But here's another one. Right, Like during the pandemic you know, we have in Britain, we have these coat, we have these Brompton folding bicycles, right, I don't know if you've ever seen one, but they're amazing, they fold and you can put them anywhere. Right, Nice, and I wanted a folding bicycle and because of the pandemic, they were all out of stock. Right, you couldn't get one.

John: 6:25

And I decided my fantasy was orange, three gears, M handlebars. So this is one of over a hundred permutations. Everything's out of stock. And I learned this technique, which is in the book, is I learned to complete. I realized I had this pattern of life doesn't give me what I want, which went back to when I failed my color blindness test at the age of six. And so when I completed, when I actually relived the pain of being six and failing this color blindness test again, something went. That that pattern of life doesn't give me what I want got removed and it's really spooky. I went and looked on a retailer's website. They only had one Brompton available and it was orange. Three gears, M handlebars.

John: 7:14

That's amazing and I thought and I hadn't written it down anywhere. I thought what the hell's going on and I thought this is some kind of scam. The next day was to us. I ordered it, thinking it's a scam, and it arrived. It's like what.

Arjun: 7:28

Yeah, exactly, it's hard to make that up.

Arjun: 7:30

I mean, you are definitely in tune with the universe or some higher powers, yeah, and your story is powerful because you mentioned you were 35. At the time, you felt like you were doing all the right things in terms of achievements and outcomes, but something still kind of felt misaligned, maybe in your psyche, and so this is something that we've talked about in the past on this podcast in terms of just that might be the exact point of what people call the midlife crisis, where you have all these things going for you, but you feel misaligned and there's something that's kind of off in your psyche. And so this point in life where you realize that you need to figure out who is your inner authority, where are your choices coming from, where are your thoughts coming from, who's really guiding your life, and so when you're telling that story, I'm kind of thinking about like, wow, there is an element of overlap there. And then also, at the same time you mentioned you let go and things started to unfold and life started to unfold itself and that's similar to here in America.

Arjun: 8:42

You try to hit a home run playing baseball. If you grip the bat too tight, chances are you're going to be popping up or striking out. But if you kind of just loosen the grip on the bat and go through the motion and go through the process, you're much more inclined to hit a home run. So letting go in that sense as well and also just in this story that you just mentioned, but also throughout while I was reading your book I kept kind of being reminded of, there's a video that's been circulating on the internet and it's like a monk, so like shall in wisdom, and this monk is speaking and he says in order for something new to come, something old must go, empty the cup and start from the beginning. It's not easy to do. You must spill the old tea and pour a new one. I just feel like that is all interconnected to not only the story you shared but your book as well.

John: 9:38

Yes, yeah, I agree with that. I mean one of the I attend, so my guru. We call him Swamiji. He has wealth manifestation teachers, so I attend these classes every day and one of the exercises we did was to empty and tidy your apartment as much as possible and it really helped. Like anything you're not using either put it out of sight or give it away and clean everything and in terms of manifesting, it really helps.

Arjun: 10:08

Just the physical. That is interesting and that you said that's a wealth manifestation idea.

John: 10:14

Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's his job. He's a wealth, a wealth acharya. So, swamiji, his middle name is Nithyananda. One thing that's quite refreshing about him is he he actually says to people you know, if you're not wealthy, there's a problem with your consciousness. Oh, interesting, he's not about sitting in caves. It's like you know you should naturally be. You think he said the wealth should be like the dust rising from your feet. It should just be happening.

Arjun: 10:39

You know interesting, interesting and yeah that there's something to be said about that. But actually let's get into a little bit. You know you mentioned the word wealth, but thinking about your role as an investor, your role also as a partner in terms of you know someone who recruits senior C-suite executives, senior board members, I'm curious you know, when you're interacting with these types of founders or co-founders, or you know board members or CEOs? I mean, how have you seen them use the power of letting go to their advantage?

John: 11:16

Well, it goes in stages. So I would say, and you know, in Western culture is evolving. I always think of California as being kind of in the lead, because a lot, of, a lot of great spiritual teachers from the East have started in California. Right, I mean, that's how it's worked. But I would say, sitting in London and I'll say I've talked to people all over, but I think there are quite a lot of people in business now who understand mindfulness or yoga on some level. So they have some understanding of being present and some of them just regard it as relaxing. You know they go swimming and they notice that they feel better when they go swimming because their mind stops chattering quite as much, right? So there's that level, which is already good. You know your blood pressure starts to come down. You know it's good for you. A lot of people notice that when I learned mindfulness, apparently by accident, my intuition suddenly became stronger. You know that enabled me actually to work in executive search, because suddenly the mental chatter died down and my intuition started working, which I would define as immediate insight without reason. You start to read people because your mind is less noisy. So that's one level. So I think, in terms of the people I work with. Some of them are learning to be present.

John: 12:40

A much smaller number in business, a pretty small number have got to the second stage in the book, which is identifying your pain patterns and removing them. So in the book you know we talk about. The first one is letting go of thoughts you know. So once you're present you can, you can see your own prejudices and biases and things and start to drop those. But the second one is letting go of the pain that's running your life. So there are people, for example in business, who are aware of the pain that's running their life right, but a pretty small number have begun to remove it actively. I mean, I would imagine you've come across these people, you know. There are business people who are incredibly driven by something that happened in their early childhood and they know it. They just haven't addressed it right. So they have three divorces and cancer, but they build a massive company.

Arjun: 13:31

Yeah.

John: 13:32

Yeah, so they know. The pattern is there In most cases. They just haven't addressed it.

Arjun: 13:39

So you know, and unfortunately, business history is littered with those people you know, unfortunately, yeah, so going from enjoying each moment to letting go of thoughts that are keeping you stuck, to letting go of the pain that probably feels chronic but is unaddressed, to completely surrendering, I mean you probably see that kind of transformation in some folks. Are those, all this, also the same kind of qualities or things people should be thinking about If they want to be more marketable themselves?

John: 14:13

Well, well, definitely, in fact, I would say you won't need to worry about marketing yourself anymore, true, true, I mean, because people will start coming to you, one of the things I find very entertaining. Okay, who do you think? Because I, long, a long time ago, a colleague and I wrote a book about personal branding who do you think has the biggest personal brand in history?

Arjun: 14:40

Oh, that's a tough question. I mean off the top of my head. For some reason, the first name that popped in my head was Michael Jordan.

John: 14:47

Okay.

Arjun: 14:48

I don't know why.

John: 14:49

Well, I would say in human history, I would say it's probably Jesus.

John: 14:54

But it could be, but recent history could be Michael Jordan, yeah, okay, okay. What I'm saying is that if you take people like Jesus and Buddha and a lot of these people didn't didn't write anything, right, they didn't promote themselves on social media. It was their way of living though, yeah, and they attracted vast numbers of people and changed the world, right. So I what I'm saying is that as you develop spiritually, a lot of this stuff just happens naturally. People start coming to you, you know. But, yeah, I mean back to business people.

John: 15:27

It's interesting what you say about surrender, because I'm just thinking out loud there are some people who have, because what I mean by surrender is when you let go completely and you just allow things to happen through your body, and there are clearly some people who've done that very successfully while still having some pain. So if you take Steve Jobs, who I never met, so he learned Zen meditation, right, and I remember reading about him he said he could see further than most people, like, he had this tremendous vision, but he still had tremendous pain in his life and he died of cancer. But you could say that he did surrender to the point of, you know, channeling extraordinary new products, right, you know, and there are musicians, if you think outside business. There are musicians who've had very painful lives, but they've channeled beautiful music, or writers who've channeled amazing literature whilst having truckloads of pain.

Arjun: 16:30

Exactly, it's like the pain drives them and even in like if you look at a standup comedian, for example, a lot of them are funny, but they're kind of like talking about issues or things that happened in their childhood that are painful.

John: 16:44

Oh yeah, yeah. Well, my last podcast was one such person. Yeah, oh interesting, so it gives them material. But still, yeah, we started doing the completion technique on air. Oh, really yeah, because that's where they're coming from right.

Arjun: 16:58

Yeah, exactly. So, actually to that point, I was kind of trying to think about that. I'm like, look, you know, one of the concepts here is to let go of pain, but you're going to have the group of people that say that pain is necessary for life. It's what drives you. So, like you know, there's always going to be this balancing act of like. How do you respond to the person who's going to say, well, I need the pain in my life. Well, how do you respond to the person who questions you know some of the basics that we're talking about, whether it's the basics of mindfulness or whether it's the basics of the Vedic practices and these old traditions. I mean, how do you respond to people who are questioning these?

John: 17:34

I would just say well, what I've done is I just try it and see what happens. I mean most things, I just try them. Some things I get a result straight away. Some things I don't. And if I get a result and sometimes it's a dramatic result then I may be interested intellectually in understanding it. I think sometimes I feel a bit frustrated. I have some intellectual friends, particularly from Cambridge places like that, who try to understand everything intellectually before they have an experience. I would much rather just have an experience, and if there's something there then I'm interested.

John: 18:10

So if we take your example right, so let's take the completion technique which is in chapter three, right? So some people, they well, plenty of people. They cling onto their pain, they live with their pain for decades, you know about their childhood or whatever it was. And everybody who's not enlightened has got these pain patterns right. We all have, right, even people who were born into, you know, even people whose parents were billionaires. Well, in fact, those people have very particular pain patterns, right? So all these people, everyone has pain patterns and I think at some point most people just get fed up with it and just say, okay, I've had enough of that. How about if I try letting go of some of it, and frequently what happens is you just need enough pain to make you want to drop it. True, yeah, you might nurse your patterns for a few years, but at some point you think, god, I'm sick of this.

John: 19:01

Yeah, exactly, and if it makes you ill or it makes you broke, or you're on your third marriage, or you just think hold it. Maybe you know, I know somebody's been married five times. At some point you say hold it. The common denominator here is me.

Arjun: 19:14

Right yeah, and somehow you have to frame it in a way of like okay, the pain of remaining the state the same is actually greater than the pain of change.

John: 19:26

Yeah.

Arjun: 19:27

So yeah, I mean, can we walk through some of those exercises, whether it's eliminating pain or even the step before that, which is getting rid of thoughts that keep us stuck? I mean, I think if we have exercises for each stage, that would be phenomenal.

John: 19:41

Yeah. So let's assume, as you said, let's assume, that anyone listening to this knows how to be present, right, like you're thinking mindfulness or yoga or something, and you have some idea about how to be present, right, and then the first thing that happens is you start observing your thoughts, right? So you, instead of being your thoughts, you kind of observe them, right. So and that's a very simple thing you, just one thing you can do is just write them down. Just look, I do it quite often. I wake up with my head full of it's like emptying the trash, right. You wake up in the morning the head full of rubbish and you start I just write down all these negative thoughts and you just look at them, right? So, some of them, you can say, well, I don't know, can you think of a negative thought? Just pick one. I mean, there are so many that people have oh, here's one which I put in the book is the feeling that you should do something. So lots of people have all these things. I should be doing this, I should be doing that. That word should oh, yeah, you can write down you know all the shoulds and then think, well, okay, well, where did those come from and do they make any sense?

John: 20:47

You know, actually here's an example that came to me this morning. Someone was saying to me in business you shouldn't be doing business with people who have appalling human rights records. And I was thinking today, why shouldn't you? You know, because obviously they've done bad things. That's their karma. They're going to have to face that. But does that mean you should never, you should have nothing to do with them? Maybe you should have something to do with them, maybe you should help them. You know why? Where did that should come from? And I realized I'd never questioned it before. It's just like it's an assumption, at least in the West. You know it's widespread assumption If someone has an appalling human rights record, you should have nothing to do with them.

Arjun: 21:30

Right, as opposed to maybe being a little bit more open-minded, maybe like first trying to seek to understand them, yeah, and then move forward before completely flat out rejecting them, yeah.

John: 21:42

I once saw a video in which Swamiji it's somewhere online he said if Hitler came in front of him, he basically wouldn't be triggered by Hitler, as most people would right, yeah, you know, if you believe in karma, you know Hitler's got some work to do. Yeah, yeah, but anyway. So that's a should.

Arjun: 22:03

That's an extreme should, but there are plenty of other ones, like where you are in your career, where you, in terms of how much money you could be making, in terms of you know, even just thinking about it like from a parenting perspective, there are people that will tell you how you should be doing something.

John: 22:18

Yeah.

Arjun: 22:19

So there's all these types of thoughts that people put into your own head that end up kind of keeping you back or keeping you stuck.

John: 22:26

There's so many, there's so many. And another one that came was like in our family. One of my brothers said let's stop giving Christmas presents, right, let's just stop. I like that Right. Whereas there's this whole convention of giving Christmas presents and there are economists who've which people don't, many of which people don't want, right? So they're economists who've calculated how much money is time and money is wasted on Christmas presents. But it's a social convention, right? There are so many things.

Arjun: 22:56

Yeah, Absolutely. But in thinking about that, I mean, I could imagine people are going to face drawbacks and challenges when they try to go through these stages and try to, like you know, for example, even writing things down. I mean, I'd be curious, you know, obviously writing something down will help you distinguish between what's real versus. In other words, you know what your true self is versus what the story is that you're telling about yourself. But I feel like there's certain times where aligning with certain narratives is actually going to be beneficial more than it is a hindrance.

John: 23:33

Well, narrative, the way Swamiji describes it. He describes them as cognitions or thought currents or whatever you want to call it. So one of the main ones which he says to people straight away is I'm not here to convince you that I am God, I'm here to convince you that you are God. And his whole message is you are Paramashiva, you are supreme consciousness, right. So as a narrative, that's pretty powerful, right so you and I are both divine. You know we're from the same source, we're both Paramashiva, so.

John: 24:06

But then you know, other people have narratives like I'm inadequate, or I'm a loser, or I'm unacceptable, or and if you start writing these down, I mean the way he describes it is most people are run by five or six sort currents. And I've done a lot of work on this. I got down to in fact I'm doing a new book where I've written it all down. But you know I've got. You know I'm unacceptable, I'm a failure. Life doesn't give me what I want. Life's unfair, it's impossible. So imagine you've got like that's like five or six lines of code in your computer which are running your life. You might want to consider changing those.

Arjun: 24:45

Yeah. So I mean expand on that a little bit. What are you going to write about in your book related to those five or six currents which I feel like are very relatable to a lot of people? Yeah, and kind of makes us a little bit in a weird way like interconnected with the way that a lot of us think.

John: 25:01

Yeah, yeah, well it's. I mean it's the power of letting go talks about it. The basic technique is in there, the completion techniques. So what it's saying is that, well, most babies are blissful, right, at some point before the age of seven, something traumatic happens and you come to conclusions about yourself and the world, and Swamiji calls it your root pattern. So I got all the way down to the age of about one. So most people's patterns fall into place between two and seven, right, because when you're two you've got vocabulary, so you can come to conclusions. Before two, you don't have vocabulary, but you can still have feelings, right? So let's say, in my case, what I did and you can do this using chapter three of Power of Letting Go is I realized that when I was five years old, I went to school speaking like this.

John: 26:02

As you may know, this accent is the accent that the BBC sells to foreigners, right? This is like export English from Britain, right, it's hilarious. I went to school in Leicester, where they have a local accent, right, which is different. And so I turn up, my parents, we move from the south to Leicester, and I turn up at school thinking I'm going to make loads of friends. This is all in the book and they laugh at me because of my accent, right? So I conclude that I'm unacceptable. And it also feels unfair, right? And then what happens is you do, and completion the instruction is incredibly simple. It's relive to relieve. So you can look at yourself in a mirror, you can close your eyes and relive it. You relive intensely, over and over again, this experience. Right, I'm five years old, the sun is shining, I arrive at school, I start speaking, all these children laugh at me. I feel unacceptable, this is unfair, etc. And then that cognition I'm unacceptable then runs my life for the next few decades, right? So then I discover, you know, most of my friends are not British, they're outsiders like me. You know, when, at the time I was 18, like, how come my friends are all Asian, jewish, ukrainian, polish, nothing except English. How does that happen, you know. And then, so what happens is you relive that intensely.

John: 27:37

And then what happens is earlier incidents open up. So one that came up, or other incidents come up, so an earlier one was. Well, one that came up was, you know, failing my color blindness test. And there the cognition is I'm a failure. So I discovered I was partially red-green colorblind, which meant I couldn't fly aeroplanes, I couldn't be in the army, and all this. So then the cognition is life doesn't give me what I want. I'm a failure. And this is. I'm six, right, so right.

John: 28:08

And then I work my way back to the age of two or three. My mum puts me in a chair to have my hair cut. This isn't what I want. I start shouting and screaming this man's trying to cut my hair. Eventually he cut himself. So the whole thing came to an end but that's like, and then, but that's still. I had vocabulary, right. But then eventually I got back.

John: 28:30

Swamiji calls it boiling the land. Is there something that happened, even pre-vocabulary? And so my brother, I was seven when my youngest brother arrived and I remember him crying and my dad said we just let him cry because you'll make him, make me, make him stronger, right, we don't. That's what people did then, right, and it suddenly dawned on me that must be what happened to me, because I realized I had this underlying thought current of there's something wrong and many people have this, this feeling that something is wrong. And I realized that goes back to when I probably was one year old and had no vocabulary. So what I started doing and I've done this relatively recently is intensely relive. I'm in my cot or crib, as you call it, and I'm reliving intensely. I'm crying and nobody comes. It just feels like something's wrong. And if you look in the world around us, there are so many people doing crazy things because their underlying cognition is something is wrong, right, something is wrong, so I have to go out and fix it, like like invade a neighboring country, for example.

Arjun: 29:46

Yeah, yeah, that's very interesting and I feel like, if you think about it, everyone, when they boil it down, he's gonna be that 10 month old who's in their crib or caught crying. And if it's extended for a couple of minutes, I mean that that means you feel helpless, you feel like something's wrong, you feel like there's no help around you, yeah, and then you have to somehow, over the course of your entire life, you're now starting to express that kind of emotion, and whether that pain is expressed in a healthy way or somehow expressed in a suppressed way kind of kind of determines how you live your life. And so, as you talk about releasing some of this stored pain and reliving it and really looking at yourself in the mirror, how can someone turn that into a healthy emotional expression, as opposed to a suppressed emotion and projecting it on other people?

John: 30:47

It's a great question. I mean, unfortunately, I see it in business. So what will often happen is like someone has this trauma in early childhood. It can be lots of things. It can be what I've just described. It can be, you know, there are people who've narrowly escaped being killed in their early childhood. You know they had to leave the country. They, you know the father was a drug dealer. Something happened, right, there was a road accident, whatever it is.

John: 31:16

And then what happens and this is the story of many entrepreneurs, right, massive trauma early on, and then their life looks like a life of fantastic achievement, right, because they have this deep feeling that something's wrong. They look, they work like crazy to build some business, so it all looks great on the outside, but on the inside there's all this suffering which they've suppressed right, and at some point that starts to destroy their health, their relationships, their business. Right, like they don't trust people or they don't. They basically hit a wall right, and the way to deal with it is simply to do the completion technique. If you intensely relive that pain and you work your way back, swamiji calls it the root pattern.

John: 32:04

The root pattern is how you see yourself in the world, right, if you intensely relive it, at some point it goes. So in my case, I was intensely reliving being one year old and suddenly it stopped and it was a bit like someone turning the radio off. So this thought pattern of something is wrong suddenly stopped and I suddenly have this cognition that life keeps giving me what I need and has always given me what I need. So suddenly your software changes right, yeah, exactly. And then and then. Of course, this affects everything, and what I would say to business people, for example, is you can carry on building your business, but you won't have the stress, the high blood pressure, the excess weight, the divorces and all the stuff you had before, because it will all start settling down.

Arjun: 32:57

Yeah, it's as if, if you go through these exercises and really take a look at yourself and really really let go and surrender, then all of a sudden, that's how you become more harmonious with yourself and the people around you, and then that might be exactly how you can wrap your head around this concept of interconnectedness with other people. Yeah, you'll see it, it'll be obvious. Yeah.

Arjun: 33:24

Yeah, so it's just this concept of letting go is what leads to more harmony in your life, which leads to the idea that we're interconnected as people, we're interconnected with our environment. But it really starts, obviously, as with 99.9% of things, it all starts with you and actually you putting in the work and you doing going through the effort, and a lot of times you're not going to be able to do that. You're putting in the work and you doing, going through the effort, and a lot of this conversation, I feel like, is around, yeah, letting go of pain, but in that process, you're letting go of your own judgments on yourself, your own labels on yourself, and that that's a huge part of this as well, because that's going to improve. Obviously, that's going to improve your life, that's going to improve relationships professionally and personally. But what's interesting about that is like, yeah, you want to remove judgments and remove labels, but there's going to be scenarios where making judgments or using labels is actually effective for decision making or communication.

John: 34:27

You need them to some degree. Yeah, I think, maybe what it is. I mean, maybe what it. By the way, I'm not, I'm not politically correct, so I'm going to just tell you something that I read. So I read in the newspaper this is this is statistical, right, I was reading in the UK Albanians are 10 times more likely to go to jail than the rest of the population, right? So in the UK, right, so you've got a label which is Albanian, right, which is someone who has an Albanian passport, and you have a statistic people who go to jail. Right, so that's something that exists in the outside world.

John: 35:07

Now I suppose the way I would look at it is say, well, ok, that's like a probability, that's a label, but I suppose the way to handle it is not to apply that to your daily life in the sense of saying, ok, I know that probability is out there, but if the next person I meet is Albanian, I'm going to keep a completely open mind. You know what I mean. It's like you go down a dark alley at night. You know you're more likely to get attacked in a dark alley than in a brightly lit street, but you know that. But you can still be present and keep an open mind, walking down a dark alley, like like kind of. Why I suggest is don't don't let the statistics or the labels color your life too much.

Arjun: 35:53

Yeah.

John: 35:54

Because they are, I mean, you know, the real numbers, right?

Arjun: 35:57

Yeah, but then you know you have to let go of the labels and the judgments, because then that's how you let go of these five to seven different you know thought patterns that a lot of us have. Yeah, yeah, I kind of want to go back a few beats and come back to this conversation around. You know, like goals and achievements, I've been thinking about this. You know, how do you reconcile the idea of letting go with the need for ambition and achievement that some of us have? And, like you know, you think about setting goals and pursuing goals. A lot of people think that's essential for personal and professional development and even success. So I'm I kind of just want to go back a few beats and get a little bit more insight from you in terms of how you think about ego, self confidence and achievement.

John: 36:47

Big topic. Okay. So I would say let's take the Eastern definition of ego, not the Western one, okay. So the Western definition of ego is highly reliant on Sigmund Freud. So, you know, in the Freudian idea you have super ego, ego, id, and so in the West, ego is often regarded as useful. The ego kind of mediates between the super ego, which is kind of morality, and the id, and id wants to get into fights and have sex with lots of people. It's kind of primeval drive, and the ego is in the middle, trying to make you behave sensibly, right. So I've heard people say you know, our chief executive needs a bit more ego, or she has her ego under control, right, as though it's something useful. So that's the Western view, right, but the Eastern view is very different.

John: 37:35

The Eastern way Swamiji explains it is he says your ego is made up of incompletions, so all these pain patterns, your ego is constructed from these pain patterns. And the most beautiful analogy which I've read, which is in one of his books, is he says take a bamboo flute. Right, if you have a bamboo flute which is empty, the divine plays beautiful music through this flute, right. But if the flute is blocked with ego, with dirt, then the bamboo is only good for carrying dead bodies Interesting, right. So the aim of the exercise, from the point of view of the Vedic tradition or the Eastern traditions, is to remove the ego, and then the beautiful music starts flowing through the bamboo flute, right?

John: 38:22

So that's what we're doing, and I would say desires are absolutely fine. If you get rid of your ego, they're going to be realized far more easily. I mean one thing I noticed well, actually anyone listening to this will have noticed this there will be some areas of your life where your desires are realized very, very easily. If you think about, if you take health, wealth, relationships, maybe career, whatever, most people find it easy in one of those areas at least, and they get completely stuck in at least one area. I mean just about everybody I've met who's not enlightened is stuck in at least one area. Does that ring a bell?

Arjun: 39:06

Yeah, absolutely and most of the times at least. I'll just speak for myself. Myself, it feels like the stuckness is career oriented.

John: 39:19

Okay.

Arjun: 39:20

Yeah, like you know, you think about spending eight, nine, 10 years at one particular company and you kind of maybe like reach a ceiling or there's like a story that's. You know, you have like an identity there. You have like a, as you call it, like a hallway brand.

John: 39:37

I was like yeah, All right.

Arjun: 39:39

And so it's like, once you get to a point where it's hard to get other people to change their perception of you, you get stuck. And then what makes it even more of a reason to feel like you're stuck is if you decide to stay there and decide to say, okay, the compensation is great or the work life balance is great, so I'm going to just stay here, but you're actually kind of like really holding yourself from potential exponential growth. If you make that change, which is, of course, going to be hard at first, and this would happen to me. I mean, I spent almost a decade at one particular company. I ended up going on my honeymoon and we went to parts of the world where I noticed that people were super happy just selling trinkets on the street. I noticed that people, you know, when they were interacting with each other, it was with smiles as opposed to judgment. And on the flight home I started thinking to myself I'm like there's more to this than whatever I'm doing. And so, yeah, I decided to make a really tough decision, which was to move on from that place without really having a plan.

Arjun: 40:51

And you know the next thing? You know, actually, this was right during, right when COVID was about to hit so early 2020, I made this decision without, obviously having any knowledge that the world was going to change. And so, yeah, I mean I'm just telling you a personal story of I was in a spot, felt stuck. I noticed that there's more to this. I made a decision to leave and now I feel like I'm in a place where I'm learning every single day.

Arjun: 41:15

I'm, you know, challenged in ways that maybe it wasn't challenged in the past and I'm growing in ways, especially something like this you know starting a podcast and building it and you know, starting something from scratch. So my point is that that's a lot of words, but my point is that you know you might find yourself in a situation that feels very comfortable, but when you've removed yourself and you reach this point of, like, breaking through your comfort zone, you actually are going to really find out a lot about yourself. You find out about how powerful you are. You find out about, you know what you can manifest and you really start to live a much more like fulfilling existence and start flourishing that way.

John: 42:01

Yes, well, life has. I mean, I've experienced that. That job I told you about I got when I was 35, I got to partner relatively easily and then a year later there was this massive downturn and half of us got fired. So life has a way of pushing you out of your comfort zone.

Arjun: 42:17

It sure does. Yeah, especially if you think you know what you're going to do and you have this plan.

John: 42:23

Most often very soon.

John: 42:25

That plan is, you know I thought I was going to be there for 25 years and suddenly I was out. But one thing I would just want to mention, because we have limited time, is so we talked about letting go of thoughts and letting go of pain. This surrender thing is super important. Yeah, a lot of people understand that everything's connected, but what the Vedic tradition is basically saying is that there's an intelligence which is running, is in everything and is running everything. And I think what a lot of people, particularly in the West, struggle with is they worry that if they let go, their life will fall apart, and it sounds like you've experienced it is. When you let go, the opposite happens. When you let go completely, everything falls into place.

Arjun: 43:13

As you say, life unfolds.

John: 43:16

It does, and most people don't trust that, and I kind of got forced into it, it's like. But what I do now is I actively. So what I do is I, I? This may sound odd, but I find I have a choice, right? I can either try to handle everything intellectually, with my mind or my ego, and try and solve one problem after another all day long, which is very tiring, and that's what many people are doing.

John: 43:41

By the way, if you try to do that, running a large organization, you'll probably be ill, because the scale of the, the complexity of the problems you're trying to solve, will grow and grow and grow as you add more people and resources, right, right, so that's one way. Is you're using your mind or your ego 16 hours a day? Right? That's one route. The other route, which I'm adopting, is to say Paramashiva, supreme Consciousness, please manifest through this body. I just let go completely, and then I just know what to do and I don't worry about. I don't worry about how it's going to happen. I deliberately drop all thoughts about how, and then the magic happens.

Arjun: 44:24

Very interesting.

John: 44:26

And the magic is like well, you know, someone reads the book and says, hey, do a podcast, or someone I don't know. I bump into someone in the street who says I've got this company and we need a chief executive. I mean, the most bizarre things happen.

Arjun: 44:38

Yeah, I mean, even think about your own experience. You wrote this book in, or at least you released it in 2020. And you know, if you look on Amazon, it says, you know over 1400 reviews and you know it's very well received and it could have been just perfect timing in terms of 2020 and the pandemic and all that. But I think there's something to be said about the conversation that we're having and how real it is for a lot of people, the way that, you know, we're kind of stuck in these thought patterns. We're stuck with our identities, we're stuck with this like persona that we've built and you know it is difficult to let go because, I mean, there is this thought that if you let go specifically of your identity and the sense of security that you've built, the sense of continuity that you've built, that you're actually going to lose yourself.

John: 45:29

Yeah so.

Arjun: 45:31

I mean, let's be very real about this. I mean, I painted a picture of my personal story. I may have made it seem like it was easy, but that transition from a very secure, comfortable job and situation to, okay, now, what am I going to do? Because it was difficult and it still is. At times, you know, I think about like, oh, I could have just stayed there and things would have been fine. But I just want to be very real about this, that we may be talking about it in a very simple terms, but there are some drawbacks, there are some challenges. People are going to have to fight through it, but at the end of the day, you know that you are creating your own life. You are living something that is aligned with your inner authority. You feel like you're a little bit more in control of your thoughts, and so, even if you're letting go, you're letting life unfold itself and you're living your own journey.

John: 46:26

Yeah, that's I mean. By the way, the point you made is very good. The Power of Letting Go was published in the US the day all the book shops closed due to COVID, wow, and the whole thing, like everything went down the pan. I thought, oh, was that the book launch? And it looked as though the whole thing was going to flop. And then one thing that happened was like 40% of sales are audible. So people, more and more people you started listening to audiobooks. And then another thing that happened recently is it's going to be published in Hindi, which I regard as a great irony, given that the wisdom comes from India.

John: 47:11

Yeah, and, but I think this is to me the really important point, which I hope will help, will will help people is that the pain comes from my ego, right, so once you let go properly and, for example, the way I do it, I say, like, please, manifest through this body, is I'm dropping, I'm dropping the identity which is causing the pain. It's the ego that causes the pain, right? Once I become the empty bamboo and allow everything to. For example, I was doing yoga on Swamiji's ashram nearly eight years ago and the yoga teacher said become a pure channel, and I suddenly got it right. All I have to do is be a channel and all this stuff will just flow through me If I get my ego out of the way. And what happens now is books, relationships, businesses, podcasts. They just flow through me. I mean I don't listen. I hope you won't be offended. I don't listen to the podcast. People, people. People said that was a great podcast. I said I say, oh, what happened?

Arjun: 48:09

I don't remember yeah.

Arjun: 48:12

Yeah, I thought you enjoyed it, exactly, exactly Glad you found something useful. As we wrap up here, I want to say one of my favorite parts of your book was when you talk about those like early waking moments where it feels like you don't even have a thought in your head. Like that split second is what consciousness is. Yeah. So I just want to say that, reading that now, when I wake up, those first few seconds where I literally have like zero thoughts in my head before they all start racing in, I love it, I really capture it, I try to really sit in it for, even if it's just two seconds, like knowing that, okay, I just woke up and there literally was no thoughts in my head. That is the consciousness, that is where we are, that is who we are, that is what we are, that is where everything is coming from Exactly Before all the software started booting up.

Arjun: 49:13

And it boots up immediately. I mean relatively immediately, but it boots up. But before it boots up, there is that split second where you wake up without a thought and that is the pureness. Exactly yeah, exactly yeah. That was one of the biggest shifts in perspective for me while reading your book. So I know we're wrapping up here. Is there anything else in terms of what you would want to maybe other people to know about you, what I would encourage people to do is well.

John: 49:42

My website is johnperkiscom. If you want to know more about completion, on YouTube there are videos. There's very good videos about the completion technique, because I know some people learn by reading, some people learn by watching. But if you type nithyananda, n-i-t-h-y-a-n-a-n-d-a and completion into YouTube, there are some great videos explaining that technique, which boils down to relive, to relieve, and I think for a lot of people, that's the most important thing to learn next, because then you start destroying your ego and you start manifesting what you want much more easily.

Arjun: 50:17

That's great. I'm going to look into that myself after this as well. John, I want to say thank you for your contribution. First of all, thank you for spending some time with me today. Thank you for sharing your insights. I know that this book is something that I feel like you can always go back to, and you don't have to start from the beginning, but just read a portion of it and it could just be impactful for your life in that moment. And one of the other things I want to do is pick up your other book, which is how to Be Headhunted, because I do feel like there's this element of like. I know that when you let go, you no longer need to market yourself. I'm still in the process of letting go, so I'm still in the process of probably needing to market myself.

John: 51:03

Okay, well, that book's old. I mean the principles are the same and it's only available on the secondary market. I mean the price vary between one penny and £250. So I recommend one penny. There you go.

Arjun: 51:15

There you go. Well, yeah, john, I appreciate your time and yeah, let's stay in touch. Yeah, thank you very much, enjoy it, thank you.