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George Thompson, author of The Subtle Art of Losing Yourself, overcame anxiety and confusion by learning how to let go through kung fu, tai chi, and meditation. In this conversation with Corinna Bellizzi, he shares simple yet effective practices anyone can easily try to finally experience self-discovery and self-actualization. He explains how losing oneself can help you understand your purpose on this planet and recreate that unique connection with nature. George also emphasizes the power of silence and collective action in building a much better and way brighter tomorrow.

 

About George Thompson

George Thompson is a filmmaker, Daoist communicator, and Tai Chi instructor who transformed his life through the ancient practices of Kung Fu and Tai Chi in China. Now, with 245k+ YouTube subscribers and a 19-person team, George shares insights on balanced living. His upcoming film, The Subtle Art of Losing Yourself, set in Scotland's wilderness, explores self-discovery and the impact of our narratives on life and the planet. Through humor and vulnerability, George inspires audiences to find inner peace and embrace the interconnectedness of all things.

 

 

Guest LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgethompsonuk/ 

Guest Website: 

https://losingyourself.org/ 

https://www.taoistwellness.online/free-course 

https://www.wayfinder.academy/newsletter 

Guest Social: 

https://www.youtube.com/c/GeorgeThompson1 

https://www.instagram.com/george.thompson._/ 

https://www.facebook.com/georgethompson.uk 

Additional Resources Mentioned:

TRAILER for "The Subtle Art of Losing Yourself"

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow Meditation

 

Show Notes: 

George Thompson - 01:32

Meditation And Mindfulness - 08:54

Cap And Velcro Balls - 14:18

Navigating Conflict - 18:53

Reconnecting With Nature - 23:49

Silence - 28:39

Power Of Small Actions - 34:41

Episode Wrap-up - 37:41

 

The Subtle Art of Losing Yourself With George Thompson

Welcome to another interview episode of Care More Be Better, a CircleB show. Each week, I invite you to care more so we can create a better world together. As part of my commitment to create that better and greener world, I’m planting a tree for each new subscriber to the show and also on my website CircleB.co. When you follow us, subscribe to the show, and also sign up for our newsletter, we’re planting trees. Visit CircleB.co or subscribe on whatever platform you’re picking us up.

In this episode, we’re going to explore self-actualization and transformation as we connect with George Thompson. George is a filmmaker, Taoist communicator, and Tai Chi instructor who transformed his life through the ancient practices of Kung Fu and Tai Chi in China. With almost 250,000 YouTube subscribers and a nineteen-person team, George shares his insights on balanced living.

His upcoming film, The Subtle Art of Losing Yourself, is set in Scotland’s wilderness. It explores self-discovery and the impact of our inner narrative on life and the planet. Through humor and vulnerability, George inspires his audiences to find their inner peace and embrace the interconnectedness of all things. We are after all part of the natural world. With that, I’m bringing him right up.

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George, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Corinna. What a privilege to be with you, honoring and celebrating your organization in this show. I’m excited to be in conversation with you.

George Thompson

I so enjoyed your film. It was a little more than a half hour. It’s about 45 minutes. It helped me to think a little more deeply about how I show up every day. We mentioned in the intro about your vulnerability, your engagement with that environment ability, and your self-discovery. We truly have to be honest with ourselves. I felt that through your film, you essentially invite us to care more about the stories that we’re telling ourselves so that we can shape the narrative that then transforms our lives. I’d love for you to talk about how this film and your content in general because your YouTube channel is very much in the same vein can support us on this continual journey of self-discovery.

You said it beautifully. It captured some of the core ideas. My journey started with anxiety and confusion, not knowing what I was doing with my life. After I finished my education and entered into the unstable world that we’re living in, a new character began to dominate my headspace, personified as the wizard called The Underminer, “George is still single? Not many friends. You’re flawed. Now you’re anxious. Look at everything that you’ve been given. You’re pathetic.”

That was seven years ago. That’s when I started my journey. I didn’t know how to relate to myself. I didn’t know who I was. It was this voice in my head that I believed and it brought me down and gave me pain. It took me into a mental health crisis. I thought I was uniquely messed up for finding life difficult. I beat myself up and I kept this pain hidden because I had shame around it. I then went to China thinking Kung Fu would make me a stronger man, whatever that means.

Long story, I tried to get into a Kung Fu Monastery. I failed. I managed to get taken to a Tai Chi school. With my ignorance, I thought Tai Chi was for older people, “I’m not sure about this,” but I tried it. I fell in love with it and found meditation. That was the philosophy of the mountain. It turns out that these ideas helped me. Given that it helped me, some British living in the 21st century, it told me two things among many.

One is that to hurt is to be human. You have big challenges. The struggle is always part of the human condition. Secondly, if there are ideas that transcend time and culture like meditation and practices discovered all around the world over history, that suggests these are solutions to some of the fundamental challenges of being human. The challenge that we struggle with and the potential that we have to unlock an ability to enjoy life. With that freedom to then show up with an energy of service and contribution. It’s understanding who we are and what we are a part of.

To hurt is to be human. The challenges we face are part of the human condition.

I wasn’t sure that you would mention The Underminer. I wondered if we would save that for the film, but I do find that even taking that perspective of understanding that you have a negative nelly in your brain or an underminer or you are caught in a thought loop that is not based in reality, identifying that and accepting that and then letting it go. If I had understood that to be part of the purpose of meditation twenty years ago. I might have engaged with it differently.

Instead, I came at it similarly to how you thought first about Kung Fu with reference to Tai Chi. With Kung Fu, there’s a purpose behind it. You’re doing something. You’re becoming stronger. You have this perception that it’s somehow superior to the art form that is Tai Chi in some way through your ignorance. Admitting even that ignorance is there is foundational.

It reminds me of my own perspective about yoga. I’ve never enjoyed yoga. I’ve tried to engage with it, but I get caught up in my mind when I’m in a class full of people doing yoga. I have felt the need to have more personalized attention or be doing some of these things on my own to disassociate from myself to the point where I can go inward if that makes sense.

I wondered if this had been similar to your experience in any way or if you could identify a commonality there. I’ve learned over the course of my years being somebody who has also sought out physical movements to help me engage with this exploration of getting out of the negative inner voice. I hear it from other people because it comes up. It’s a self-consciousness. You’re almost worried other people are seeing you do this thing. That then becomes the negative nelly. It’s what I thought about when I watched the film and you’re talking about that perspective of going from Kung Fu to Tai Chi, and then referencing it with my own personal experience.

I appreciate your vulnerability in that as well. It’s connecting us. The more of us that can express like, “I feel self-conscious sometimes doing this.” It’s funny, doing Tai Chi is beautiful when you’re in a park or nature but I live in the city. I went through a journey of like, “Am I going to be the guy who is doing the flowy movement stuff in the park and having people look at me?” As I say, first of all, finding the body practice is so important.

A mantra that I love is the heart and mind follow the feet. Normally, I sort out all of my problems. If anyone has watched Inside Out 2, they know that Anxiety wants the best for the hero, the character, or the young girl, but thinks through all the possibilities of everything that could go wrong at any potential time. At that level, it’s like thinking through, using this beautiful brain that we have, all the possibilities. We were sorting problems out.

The problem is we live in an infinitely complex world and everything is changing. We can’t work it all out. There’s another option which is to come into the body. We’re not just our thoughts. We can train our awareness and where we focus to not be thinking the whole time but instead to come into the body. This is why in meditation, they call it anchors. An anchor in a boat is something you put down to keep you steady as the waves crash over.

We can find ways to rest our awareness. That can be found through yoga practice, Tai Chi practice, walking in nature, surfing, skateboarding, or whatever it is. When you’re awareness is on what you’re doing and it’s in the world as opposed to our heads, then we are training that ability to rest in the here and now.

In that process, there will be whatever we’re bringing because we can only ever start from where we are. A more recent example is going and chatting to Kung Fu people like, “I did Tai Chi,” and then the self-consciousness of, “I can do it as well as they can.” That’s self-consciousness. The paradox is at the heart of the journey to peace both as individuals and collectively. It’s about embracing our whole selves including maybe the bits of ourselves that we wouldn’t want, but that’s the starting point of the healing journey. It’s embracing what’s here, and then moving from that.

 

Meditation And Mindfulness

Another piece that resonated with me as you were speaking is this concept of movement as meditation. When you’re awareness is in your body in this way, especially if you have a busy brain. This is perhaps another moment of vulnerability for me. It’s very hard for me to sit completely still and get a clear mind.

I have found that the most meditative moments where ideas seem to drop out of the sky or where I feel like I’m in a moment of respect and appreciation for everything are when I’m in motion. It could be something as simple as when I was washing my horse or I was off on a run, hiking in the wilderness, or washing the dishes. It’s something as simple as that because motions are involved and everything goes by.

I’ve heard people talk about the practice of Tai Chi and also other martial arts, like when they’re doing their forms, this theme has resonated throughout. I think it was Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who wrote some works. I was recommended his book years ago when I shared with a friend that I was having trouble with even attempting transcendental meditation. It’s something that so many of my friends had had success with, but I felt like an idiot doing it. I found truth in his work and began training for marathons.

It was in my 8-mile runs when I was off in the woods. I didn’t use earbuds or music or anything like that. I would go into nature and allow myself to be in this peaceful time running the woods, listening to the birds, hearing the creeks, and trying to be aware of my surroundings. We do have mountain lions, for example. I found myself in that steady state where the footfalls become automatic and where you’re not paying as much attention.

You’re also becoming more expert at something because you’re running 40 miles a week and more and you get in your body in a way that’s different. You start to understand the efficiency of your footfalls. You exit the pain cycle that is an early runner’s journey. There was beauty in every run like that and it’s the thing I miss about distance running. As a mom of two, who also trashed her feet a bit running so many pavement miles. I no longer have the time or the foot stability for 8-mile runs. I’m finding that in different spaces but the commonality is always the movement.

Mindfulness and motion. I think what you’re speaking to is we can think about meditation as this esoteric religious thing where you’re levitating on top of the lotus, your perfect Yogi position. It’s unattainable for everyday people. My understanding of meditation is the practice of steadying our awareness and embracing the present moment. We can study awareness in many ways, like being with another intelligent conscious being. What a beautiful gift to be running and to be moving and to speak to the fact that we have busy minds.

In my own life, the people that I work with, I shyly put the hands of “I’ve got a busy mind and I can’t meditate.” It’s like, “Join the club. I’ve got a busy mind.” I run a nineteen-person team and I make films. I have a very active mind. I used to judge myself for that. It’s like, “George, you should do a meditation. You should be perfectly empty when you sit down and cross your legs.” That judgment on what was happening in my present moment was a way that I got in my own way and blocked myself.

Meditation is not about being in a specific position and emptying your mind. What the heart beats, the brain thinks. It’s what it does. Instead, it’s that quality of awareness, the presence, and the steadiness that we can find and the embracing that we can find. It’s having a formal practice like maybe we put a timer on and we empty. That emptiness is powerful. There is a time for that. If I can offer one powerful small practice for people, one of my mantras is don’t make a meditation practice so big that you don’t do it.

Meditation is not about being in a specific position. It is about the quality of awareness and embracing steadiness.

The smallest practice that I offer is five breaths. Deep five slow mindful breaths. You can do it first thing in the morning, last thing at night, or throughout the day. If you commit to doing that once a day, your life changes. The people that I talked to had their life changes. That’s formal practice, and then it’s bringing that quality into life. If meditation was just about crossing your leg and that’s it, back to reactivity and blame, it wouldn’t be that useful. It’s about them bringing that quality of steadiness and embracing how we show up in our lives.

Cap And Velcro Balls

In the film, you have a visual for some of this where you’re wearing a cap. It has Velcro balls on that. Talk about this for a moment because I think it’s also illustrative. It’s an exercise.

I’ll try to describe what I’m wearing for the audience. If anyone know that old kids' game where you have the Velcro ball hats and you throw the balls into each other’s heads? It’s called Butthead. Two kids wear the hats and they throw the balls on them. Here we are, human beings in the midst of all this challenge and beauty. We’re born with challenging tendencies. We’re also born with so much beauty. We’re born into a world of trauma that is hurting both the planet and society. We are living in the 21st century trying to navigate all. 

We navigate it using emotions and sensations as guides. If you put your hand on a hot pan, the pain is going to make you take it away. You listen to that signal. Similarly, we have thoughts that pop into our minds. I’ve got my Velcro hat on and a ball in my hand. If we imagine that each one of these balls is a thought like, “My name is George and I grew up in Bristol in England. My love language is vegan brownies. I know all the words to the Tarzan soundtrack by heart, ‘You’ll be in my heart.’ Here I am.” This is the story that I created of myself. 

The funny thing is that if I was born in a different country, I’d have a different name. I’d have a different language and a different story. There’s nothing intrinsically George about me. At all the various times in my life, I felt not good enough. It’s not like not good enough as a physical quality of the universe. No, it’s a feeling that comes from a series of thoughts that pop into my head that I identify with.

To get this then, we’re not our thoughts. Not every thought that we have is true. It leads us to something tragic that we can only laugh at. Think about all of the pain that we’ve created in our own lives then what manifests into the world because of the stories that are only true to the extent that we believe and identify with the thoughts that pop into our heads. That awareness brings some humility and some flexibility.

Thoughts can be useful. It’s part of the human superpower, but to bring a bit of discernment that not every thought I have is true. Through meditation, which is why this fundamental practice has been discovered all around the world, we learn how to have a bit of a less sticky mind. We don’t always have to latch on to every challenging thought that pops into our heads. Instead, they drop off and we can more easily enjoy our lives.

I think that visual is so powerful, especially in a time like now when we live in a moment in time when there’s a lot of negativity going from, let’s say, in politics. We’re in the middle of an election cycle in the States. The far-right and the far left couldn’t hate each other more. It’s a difficult thing to navigate. People have personal friendships that dissolve because of political views. A lot of that comes from taking things personally.

This is something that so many thought leaders talk about disassociating from the judgment of it. The only reason you’re offended is because you took something personally even if it wasn’t meant to be a personal attack. In some cases, it probably is meant to be a personal attack, but you also have responsibility for how you handle that. The visual of a Velcro cap that is super sticky and where people are throwing their intrusive thoughts on you in a way, and even those that you self-impose.

If we can find a way to shed it, that comes from both being vulnerable and also being willing to understand that these are just thoughts and someone else’s thoughts that may be imposed on you. Those thoughts spiral in your brain and then affect how you see your inner self, which then affects how you become. All of these things sound like common sense to me, like we should know this. It seems to be so difficult for us to keep that knowing.

Navigating Conflict

In this review of your film and looking at your content, it feels like you’ve discovered an ability to stay in the knowing. I would love for you to share perhaps a pearl of wisdom and how you do something like that. Even though I think having the visual and allowing yourself to shed is a pearl of wisdom too.

Firstly, we’re not our thoughts and we can let them go. If we’re getting offended, it’s like we’ve created this ego structure like a little statue. We have adorned it with jewels. We want to be celebrated and then somebody says something different to us that we disagree with. That somehow fronts this beautiful sculpture that we’ve created like, “Are you saying that I’m wrong or I am fallible? How dare you,” then we’re off.

Maybe our offense is justified. When we come to our wisdom, we discern that wasn’t appropriate. How does that challenge? How do we want to navigate? How does it land in a beautiful world that we know is possible because human beings are awesome? It also includes conflict. Ideally, no violent conflict, but people disagree. That’s inevitable. It’s a skill.

How do I resource myself? How do I show up in the face of inevitable challenges? That is inevitable. This question of how is so important. I can only speak from my experience of the training that’s helped me to be able to navigate differences with maybe a bit more skill. One of the big things in my life has been non-violent communication or NVC that people may have explored. The books are amazing. They’ve got great training events. It’s a life-changing work. I highly recommend it.

 

There’s one idea that helps me. We’ve already talked about how you can let it go. What’s getting offended? Come to your center. Come to your breath. Allow it to move through you. Don’t let it stay with you. There is that option that comes with training that we’ve talked about. Another thought that comes to me is the idea of needs consciousness. It’s underneath the unskill for racism and the unskill for bigotry.

There is a human being that has needs and in some ways is trying to meet those needs in unskillful destructive ways. Maybe the racism is that we had race riots in the UK. Tragically, I had friends of color who were attacked on the street and hotels of migrants who had come from war zones were burnt down by rioters. It’s terrible. Also, I wanted to go and understand why these people are out on the streets burning stuff and watching videos on it. It’s like these people are facing a cost-of-living crisis. Each winter, they are choosing between heating and eating or feeding their kids.

What they see is more people coming into their country when there’s not enough for them already. There’s a missing link which is the distribution of resources. We start with racism, which is offensive and challenging. If we can look beneath it, I’m not saying that we can still say that’s not okay, but we can build compassion through getting to like, “What are the needs that person is trying to express through that unskillful means?”

If we ask that question, then it’s almost like a little shortcut or trick to compassion. The minute that we connect with the humanity of the other person, in an unskillful way, they are trying to meet needs that should be honored, safety, belonging, community, food, water, and shelter. That compassion naturally grows and extends.

I’m glad you brought up that deep issue because the more that we confront the inequity problem, it becomes an excuse for racism. This is the common problem that we’re going to continue to see as much of the global South is going to continue migrating North. It’s not just about political unrest. It’s about global climate change. There are people in the world in developed nations who deny that changes are even happening.

We live on a globe of finite resources. If everyone lived like we live in the United States or Canada, we would need eight Earths. That’s a big deal. We consider that and we can consider that there’s this thing called climate lag when it comes to how our globe works. We’re going to continue to see worsening weather for the next 30 years even if we were to stop all excessive carbon and methane emissions now.

Reconnecting With Nature

It’s acknowledging that and then trying to think through solutions. Part of the solution starts with the self through acknowledgment that we’ve lost our connection to ourselves in many ways. We’ve lost our connection to nature. We are indoors and on screens, juggling the responsibilities of life in a modern era. Many people don’t have easy access to nature in their daily lives.

I’ve met children who have never met farm animals living in inner cities. How do we reconnect and as you put it, lose yourself so that you can find that deeper connection through your own personal vulnerability again, and become part or at least rediscover that we are part of this harmonious planet? I think that’s the journey of studying sustainability but from more of a spiritual perspective.

The urgency, to speak to self-development, I find it a challenging concept. I’m on YouTube and I’ve been full-time for five years. I’m in the world of ideas to help people transform their lives, but even in meditation, it’s like, “Just meditate and the world will be transformed. Heal yourself. Heal the world.” We live on a planet where there’s a set number of trees. There’s a set number of fields. With the current amount of consumption and with the vast inequities, we’re already causing tipping points and runaway climate breakdown. The urgency is so huge.

A couple of things come to mind before getting to the nature connection aspect. My organization is called Balance is Possible. I think it’s important. There’s a big energetic difference for me between avoiding catastrophe and creating a beautiful, awesome, and harmonious world. To avoid catastrophe, we’re going to put geoengineering pollution into the sky and we’re going to fix this problem without getting to the core of what we want to do with all this human ingenuity.

Is it to keep on exponentially growing and consuming resources? It’s the idea of progress. Where could our future technological utopia take us? We have everything automated. We have Amazon drones delivering our groceries and then we have robot butlers putting them into our fridges. They come and spoon-feed us. We got loads of time to be in Facebook’s Metaverse. Ironically, the things that we love to do is play games where there’s challenge. We struggle and we suffer because that’s what makes life meaningful, and this story is that we are going somewhere with all this automation.

Where are we going? Balance is possible. This is a co-created vision. It’s bigger than all of us. It’s a systemic waking up of humanity and our potential. I do see an important part of that healing is to start within because as Charles Eisenstein says, “The story creates the system and we create the story.” These fundamental paradigm stories about who we are in our relationships seemed to be the foundations of our destructive civilizations or our life-affirming civilizations.

Falling back in love with life is what I see as the core of our healing. There are challenges and there’s so much beauty. We need to get out of the city once a month. Go and be in a forest or be in the wildest nature that you can and be quiet. See what happens, like no expectations. Maybe you’ll put your hand on a tree or listen to the wind and the leaves. What comes up for you as you have that experience? The beautiful thing about that is what you might find and this happens spontaneously.

 

Maybe it’s a bit of a sense of awe and wonder and a bit of a connection with a mystery. It’s like, “Here are all these trees. It’s been alive for hundreds of years.” Birds with unique birdsongs seem to be chatting to each other. Maybe horses are riding through. They can communicate with other humans. We are part of this great unfolding. To fall back in life or fall back in love with life, getting out into the wild and coming back within. Through silence and presence, I reconnect with who I am and the great wonder that I am a part of.

Silence

You mentioned silence. I have many friends who are executives and top jobs at big companies who like to participate in silent retreats. It operates as a digital detox because they’re not on their screens at all for a week often. Also, being in a practice of silence and meditation. Do you integrate that work into your practice?

A silent ten-day meditation retreat. They are part of my practice. The clarity that I have gained from them has been important.

A curious mind here. I have not yet participated in one myself. The closest I’ve been is traveling on my own through Europe with nothing but a backpack and a suitcase that was behind me for weeks at a time. My interactions would be very basic with people along the way because I was on this inward journey myself, but I don’t think I was silent for a day even.

Still an adventure. When we go out, we do come within. When I went to China, I took my Underminer with me. I was escaping Bristol where I was having all this pain. I was like, “I’ll escape.” I got away and then it turned out the Underminer could fly too and took the train.

They are on your shoulder and your brain.

It’s interesting to see what we take with us. I’m passionate about how we can find these moments of silence and stillness in our everyday. We don’t need to go on big voyages and we can develop that steadying of our awareness and embracing the present moment through everyday practice. Also, it is great to sometimes get away because then we get perspective of what I am taking with me. What are the patterns that give me pain?

If I come back to the practice every day, we talk about the five breaths. They’re very powerful. Another powerful idea and I love sharing this one. It’s the movement snack. Instead of having your big yoga class of walking the dogs or being in the garden, it’s all great, but can you have a movement snack, a morsel of movement, or a chi break? Have a chi break when you have a tea break.

Maybe people can check me out on the YouTube channel if they want to find some Qigong with me. You move with the breath and you do five moves of a certain move. It takes a minute. I do a lot of laptop work but every 30 minutes to an hour, I’m getting up and doing a movement snack. It’s an easy way to integrate stillness and silence into every day.

You have exceptional posture. One of the things I do notice and this is something that a good friend of mine who’s also a massage therapist. She’s supported my physical journey for a long time. She put it this way. Your hands are out in front of you all the time when you’re on your computer. The reason we hold so much tension in our back and shoulders has to do with the fact that so much is out in front. Add to that challenge that I have breasts. They also put weight on your front. This means that we’re holding tension and spots even without being aware of it because we’ve grown accustomed to having our arms out in front of us doing this action, which is unnatural throughout the day.

Even making the movement of hanging through a doorway while you go through some of these breaths can also support that and release some of the tension you’re holding and spots that you didn’t even realize. This is something that when I was training to run marathons, my trainer would often say to us, “You can always tell when a runner is struggling because their shoulders come up to their ears.” To get awareness in your body when you’re going through physical labor like running, you go through a series of checkpoints as you’re starting your run and you warm up to prevent injury.

At the same time, you’re also mindfully checking into your body systems like, how are my shoulders feeling? How is my breath feeling? Am I up here? Can I lower myself? Are you noticing this as you go down the mental checklist through your body, hips, feet, or ankles? Are you stiff somewhere? I think that going through that has always helped me to clear the mind of those intrusive thoughts that weren’t helpful anyway because I am checking in with myself. Even if it isn’t the five deep breaths, which are helpful too, get the little underminer out by saying, “How do I feel in my shoulders? How do I feel in my chest? How does my breath feel?” They are helpful things.

Super powerful. Hanging is one of my practices and an important practice to lengthen the spine and rebalance. We are so much like this and even if we’re doing a lot of something, do the opposite to rebalance. The relaxation is coming to the breath. I’ve got a little brain and a head. The nasal cavity is huge. We think we can breathe through our mouth and our nose. The nasal cavity is about the size of a hockey ball behind the nostrils. It’s huge because that’s where we’re supposed to breathe.

When we’re eating and we are peaking, now, I’m breathing in and out through my mouth to make a quicker. Every other single time, we are breathing in and out through the nose. That also includes running and doing our exercises. Can we train ourselves in a relaxed way, watch the tension in the shoulders, or come up with the breath and breathe down into the belly, in and out through the nose? We are resting our nervous system and we can run with less cortisol and less adrenaline, then we can get even more benefits from our exercise.

Power Of Small Actions

I appreciate your content and your perspective. It’s commendable that you’ve sought to put it out there and the world. I have more questions for you but it’s more from the curiosity perspective of filmmaking, which I’ll save for a future time when we get to connect with some other students in my sustainability education program. Thank you so much for spending this time with me. Do you have any closing thoughts you’d like to leave our audience with?

Thank you, Corinna. I want to speak to this movement. There is a movement and I can feel that there are big forces that are against and seem to be winning at the moment, which would be reasonable to say. For me, a definition of hope that keeps me energized and joyful even is that it’s not a state of the world but a state of mind, where we work towards something valuable in itself. Not because it’s likely to happen.

That energy of hope, balance, and peace. What does that beautiful world look like? To keep that possibility in our awareness and to move towards that as opposed to avoiding catastrophe. I want to honor you and your work, and everyone who tunes into this episode because they care. You care and I honor that care. One more quote, “Never underestimate the power of a small group of committed individuals to change the world because it’s the only thing that has ever had.”

Never underestimate the power of a small group of committed individuals to change the world.

That’s my signature on every email I send. It’s not a surprise because I studied anthropology as an undergrad. Mary Leakey is one of my heroes and that’s a quote by her. She was an incredible person in an incredible time of discovery about humanity and our origins. That quote rings true to me forever. To find out more about your film, I’m going to send people to your website which is simply LosingYourself.org. I know that they can get premiere tickets there as well and learn more about the film and your YouTube channel. When is the official release? I know it’s coming in October from what I recall.

The film is called The Subtle Art of Losing Yourself. It’s in the wilderness of Scotland. We see the intelligence of nature out there then we ask, where does our intelligence come from? We go on an adventure through the mountains to find awe-inspiring and understanding who we are and what we are part of. The film will eventually be out on YouTube. We are premiering it in London on October 19th. You can get live-stream tickets. If you go to LosingYourself.org or my YouTube channel, George Thompson, you can find out more about it.

We’ll get a bump in those subscribers to your channel as well. As we shared, you can get premiere tickets on LosingYourself.org. I will be following your journey on YouTube as well. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Corinna.

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Episode Wrap-up

To find out more about George Thompson and his film, The Subtle Art of Losing Yourself, see the links that we provided. You can also simply go to LosingYourself.org and get your premiere tickets now. I encourage you to visit the blog page on CircleB.co for this episode. You’ll see the video version of this. You’ll get to see him wearing that wonderful weird and wacky hat with little balls of Velcro to it and the physical expression of the breathing and some of the movement that helps us all to center ourselves on a daily basis.

With the show, I also provide links to resources and passed episodes that I think will interest you. You can always scroll to the bottom of a blog page at CircleB.co and see those resources. While you once found all of this on Care More Be Better’s dedicated site, it now lives on the show page of CircleB.co. Remember while you visit, please join our newsletter.

Your simple action will result in the planting of a tree through our partnership with Forest Planet and also 1% for the Planet. If you happen to shop and browse around and find something that tickles your fancy, even better. We have a set of eco-friendly and gift-styled items, as well as items that encourage you to get into your garden and grow something that you can eat from your own work. As I prepare to apart, I want to simply thank all of you for being a part of this journey.

You are a part of this show. You’re a part of this community. It’s my firm belief that together, we can do so much more. Just like that quote from Mary Leakey that George shared a few moments ago, “The only thing that has ever changed the world, a small group of people and perhaps not so small as we continue to go forward.” We can find our true selves on this journey. We can discover our deeper connection to nature. We can become who we are truly meant to be and we can make the world a little better along the way. Thank you.

 

Important Links

• CircleB.co
• George Thompson – Instagram
• LosingYourself.org
• George Thompson – YouTube
• Forest Planet
• 1% for the Planet
• https://www.Facebook.com/georgethompson.uk
• https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/georgethompsonuk/
• https://www.TaoistWellness.online/free-course
• https://www.WayFinder.academy/newsletter