Media

Transcript

Opening clip:

Once you complete the Guided Shifting journey and move through the awakening progression, peace becomes less like an emotion and more like... it's almost as though everything is made of peace. Anger, frustration, resistance, fear — all of it happens against this backdrop of peace. It's hard to describe, but in lived experience, it's as though that pervasive peace — which doesn't feel blissful, just kind of ordinary — creates additional capacity and permission for the body to feel and express more of what it had been repressing for most of its life. Peace becomes a foundation upon which other emotions can be felt, and upon which empathy can occur with others.

If you had told me a year ago that it only takes 30 minutes to enter into the awakening progression and feel the initial effects, I would have said no way. But it turns out it's true. And so I don't know what's possible. What drives me is to just keep discovering how this can all be better.

I have this radical mission of getting people through their awakening and healing journeys very, very quickly. Maybe one day it could be done in a single day — maybe objectively 80% complete in terms of the deconditioning for some people, 95% for others. At the very least, I want it to be good enough that people don't need to become lifelong seekers or lifelong inner workers, because there's just so much great life to live outside of focusing on inner work.

Maybe this can be faster, easier, deeper — maybe it can't. Maybe it does require lifelong commitment for some. But maybe not. And so I want to find out. I want to test what appears to work really well, test it rigorously, see if it can clear the bar of western science, see if it can be knocked down — all in the pursuit of making it better. We have no idea what's possible.

And the moment I believe, "Oh, this can't get better — this is probably as good as it gets" — I'm almost always wrong. So I fall back on: maybe.

It's always been about the dance between inspiration and just quickly manifesting something real into the world — efficiently, without fear. Bridging the gap between "this feels right" and getting it out there to see if it lives or dies. The gap between me having a new idea for how to better serve people through Guided Shifting and them actually experiencing it is often as short as an hour or two. It doesn't need to be perfect. It doesn't need to be right. It just gets out there. We see if it lives or dies. If the world wants it, it lives. If the world wants more from it, it grows. If the world rejects it, it dies. And that's hard. And then we create again.

Everything you experience through the website operates beneath the level of teaching. I don't teach anything. I guide you through an experience where what Gary described around peace becomes your embodied reality — something you live from. You can forget it and it's still there. These are no longer teachings to remember or recite. It's not conceptual. It's just: let's see what your body has in store when it goes through this process.

Host (Stefan): Welcome to Seekers and Finders, the podcast where we explore the infinite pathways to truth, creativity, and connection.

[After some warm opening banter and a brief riff on the band Journey...]

Stefan: You have a nice smile on your face. You're sitting in peace, aren't you?

Jason: I don't know the way out anymore.

Gary: Hold on — that's a good jumping-off point for our talk. How do you stay in peace — what the Jeffrey Martin community calls fundamental well-being? I feel like Jason does. I'm not moved by the stock market plunging, even though all my money is in there. How do you stay in this seat of fundamental well-being in spite of everything going on in the world right now? If you can't keep your seat of peace in the midst of whatever's happening, then maybe you haven't awakened to your true nature. Jason, how about you introduce yourself and tell us about your process of bringing people into an awakened — or shifted — state of consciousness.

Jason: That's a good jumping-off point. I hold this work with a lot of care. It's really important that people are met where they are and know that what they're experiencing is essentially normal.

Over the last decade or so, I spent many years operating under the belief that in order to be the best citizen possible, I needed to be extraordinarily up-to-date with the news — everything that was happening. There was a lot of suffering in that. A real sense of obligation, a sense of duty to constantly be reading headlines. It wasn't a good time. Eventually I went cold turkey, took a long break from the news because it was so dysregulating.

One of the things I'm most grateful for now, as a result of what I offer through guidedshifting.com, is that I can fully re-engage with the news and feel deeply okay. And that's wonderful. It's also paradoxically a little lonely — I don't know many people in my life who can be that connected to what's happening while feeling this level of okayness in the body and nervous system.

I've always been drawn to meaningful action in the world. For me, this work creates more capacity to see clearly what's happening — to not be afraid of opinions I disagree with, to confront information that doesn't fit my existing story. There's a kind of courageous citizenship that's been unlocked here that I've really enjoyed leaning into, and I haven't found its limit yet. Like you, Gary, a lot of my money is in the market, and I can see what's happening and just... not get thrown into fight-or-flight every time I see a headline. I wish more people could experience that. We need an informed citizenry, but we also need one that feels okay in their bodies — not constantly catapulted into activated states, because that perpetuates a lot of suffering.

Gary: I'd add: an awakened citizenry. Informed and awakened — that's where the rubber meets the road. You're watching the stock portfolio evaporate and you're still connected to your essential nature, to what we'd call fundamental well-being. Whatever label works for you.

Jason: And I want to be careful here — no one's body is operating incorrectly. There's a way that a lot of people hear what we're saying and receive it through the lens of shame: I'm not having the right response. Something's wrong with me. That's just not true. There's no wrong way for a mind and body to respond to things. Your system responds the way it's wired and conditioned.

It just so happens that this level of embodied awakening offers another way. And it doesn't require decades of seeking anymore. It's much more accessible now.

I have some friends who've always been extraordinarily passionate about social justice, and there's a real fight to be had right now. If that's what moves you, if that's how your system is designed and you like how you're designed — go for it. We need a diversity of designs in the world. It would be pretty boring if we were all cookie-cutter awakened citizens. If you like the way you're designed, great. If it works for you, great. But we should be able to choose.

Stefan: That's a good point. Humanity is made up of billions of singularities, each with a different makeup — different personalities, different chemistry, different nervous systems. So my question to you is: have you come across people who simply didn't respond to your process? Where you realized it wasn't going to work for them and they needed to find a different path?

Jason: Of course. If you try a session or two on guidedshifting.com and it's not clicking, there's additional support available, and I'm rolling out new things that will help if the initial version isn't working. But if after giving it a genuine try it's still not working for you — don't keep going. Only continue if it's actually working. And given how affordable it is, there's really no pressure.

With the current version of the offering, about 75% of people have the predicted response — experiencing the neurophysiological changes that Dr. Jeffrey Martin originally articulated in his awakening map, and that members of the Perfectly Okay nonprofit community, like Dr. Luciano Melo and Rostislav, have further mapped out along the progression.

I just this week rolled out a new offering to members in prototype form that lets you experiment with ten different variations of the method to find the one that works best for your system. You can then use your preferred variation within the guided process. I believe this is the pathway to getting that 75% up toward 95% or higher.

And even among those for whom it does work, there's still a lot of variation — in how significant the shifts feel, how noticeable the changes are, and how spiritual or mystical the experience is. The hypothesis — which actually came from a conversation I had with Rostislav last year — is that it likely comes down to the baseline vagal tone in the nervous system before your first shift. This is measured by heart rate variability.

If you have low heart rate variability going in, the potency and the mystical quality of the shifts tend to be greater — the relative delta is significantly higher. Someone like me, whose average HRV was around 95 milliseconds as measured by my Apple Watch before my first session, had a fairly subtle experience for much of the progression. The first couple were significant, but then it got pretty quiet. So some people's systems appear to simply be more wired for the mystical and spiritual qualities of this experience — and those qualities arise spontaneously, without any prior spiritual orientation.

Last year, before I built the website and was guiding people one-on-one, most of them had no concept of awakening. They weren't spiritual, they weren't meditators. It worked extraordinarily well for them. And experiences of non-duality, or the softening of the hard lines between past, future, and present — these mystical things would just spontaneously arise for them. Their systems were wired for it. Mine, it turned out, mostly wasn't. That's what I've observed.

Gary: What I've realized, being at what feels like the end of my own journey — I'm from the generation born in the late 40s, who had our formative experiences in the 60s — is that spirituality has changed dramatically. Back then, there was Ram Dass, there was the whole wave of Eastern mysticism. Now there's a new generation for whom spirituality isn't necessarily the frame anymore. Achieving conscious evolution — getting immersed in a higher force — isn't as resonant for them. Their experience relates more to life on earth, to being. And it seems like your process, and Rostislav's, and Jeffrey Martin's work, fits that new sensibility.

Do you feel that we're still trying to reach the same place, just without the spiritual language?

Jason: I just don't think these approaches are in competition. If anything, they're complementary.

Gary: I agree — I'm not saying one replaces the other. Maybe it's like different forms of yoga: bhakti yoga, jnana yoga, karma yoga — different paths to the same eventual end. You're adding another route.

Stefan: I'd summarize it this way. What Gary's describing I'd call the old model of spirituality: you enter a path, you follow teachers and gurus, you practice over lifetimes, and maybe someday you'll be graced with shaktipat from the master and attain enlightenment. That's the old model.

The new model — which is what Jeffrey Martin, Rostislav, Jason, and others are pointing toward — is: you can awaken right here, right now. Maybe in 30 minutes, maybe 30 days, but not 30 years and not 30 incarnations. What you're looking for is already here. You just need to recognize it, open to it, find a portal into it.

Jason: It might still take 30 years for some people. And I'd add something to what Stefan is saying: from a design thinking perspective, I believe there's no such thing as user error. If it's taking someone 30 years or 30 lifetimes, that suggests they may not be being served well enough by whatever methods, offerings, or communities they've been seeking through.

That said — there's nothing wrong with wanting to join a mystical community. Nothing wrong with having a beautiful relationship with a guru or a daily practice you do for decades. If you love it, if it works for you, great. End of story. But yes, there are other options now. People deserve to know their options. And those options are getting better all the time.

Stefan: The people who need more time with this kind of approach — what does that look like?

Jason: The people who need more time are typically those carrying a significant amount of trauma in the body — where being aware of bodily sensations at all is simply too much. That's a perfectly legitimate outcome of life experience. If you had core defining moments where you were attacked or traumatized or just overwhelmed, the body and mind get rewired to protect against feeling. The method at guidedshifting.com does require some connection to the body, some ability to feel. And for some users, the moment we start to move in that direction, the mind gets hyperactive, the heart rate spikes — the body panics, because it learned at some point: if I feel, it's too much, maybe I'll die.

Bessel van der Kolk talks about this in The Body Keeps the Score — sometimes the first step is just getting a weekly massage or doing some gentle yoga. Just beginning to ease into the felt sense of the body, instead of staying stuck in a mildly dissociative cognitive space. Guided Shifting isn't currently optimized for those people. Over time I'd love to offer bridges into this work for them. But for everyone else — the success rate is high and getting higher.

Gary: You've been talking about peace. But I'm wondering how empathy fits in. Peace is a feeling inside the body. And empathy — the heart center, the sense of being one with others — seems like a very important part of what becomes possible once you're in that state of peace.

Jason: I have a lot to say here. I'm not sure peace is actually an emotion, at least in the way I used to experience emotions. Before going through this work, peace felt like something I had to sustain — it was a little fragile. Now it's more like a substrate.

What I can say is that I've never had more access to emotion than I do now — clean, prompt, full expression. I spent my whole life unable to really cry, unable to access anger. Now it can just flow beautifully, skillfully. It's the greatest thing.

In my experience, a big part of what empathy really means is to be in this grounded, rest-and-digest state — deeply connected to someone who's having their experience — and to be able to fully allow them to have it. Not dampening it, not saying "oh, you're fine, don't think that way." But being able to go there with them. To use your nervous system for co-regulation.

My nervous system is no longer being catapulted into reactivity and imposing its own agenda. A concrete example: I've been with my partner for about 15 years. Whenever she would get upset and need time to herself, I used to experience that as rejection — my nervous system would get totally thrown off because of some early attachment wounding. But since that's been healed and deconditioned, I can just let her fully have her experience without making it messier with my own reactivity. It's the most freeing thing for both of us.

And to Gary's final point around peace — once you move through the full awakening progression, it's as though everything is made of peace. Anger, frustration, fear — these all happen against this backdrop of peace. That pervasive peace, which isn't blissful, just ordinary, creates additional capacity and permission for the body to feel and express more of what it had repressed for most of its life. Peace becomes a foundation upon which other emotions can finally arise.

Gary: I'd put it this way: it's like all the emotions that have been moving like this constantly — up, down, up, down — finally begin to settle. They flatten out slightly. Every now and then they'll rise and give you a touch. But there's a settling that creates what you feel as peace.

And the empathy I've come to — it took me a lifetime to get here, and it's really only happened in the last two or three years — is this: if I witness something that shows someone's natural greatness, it brings me to tears immediately. That's not exactly an emotional state — it's more like a state of bliss arising from unconditional love. A felt sense of being one with everything. That's the empathy I'm describing — beyond the solar plexus, beyond the reactive personal self.

Jason: And as a coach, that's exactly what I get paid to do — to bask in the awe of other people's greatness, and to feel completely moved by it. Yes — now I can be moved to tears by it. Yes.

Jason: For people who've gone through the offerings on the website, what I see quite often is that those who've been emotionally repressed their whole lives find, even after one or two or three sessions, a spontaneous upswell of emotion — tears, anger, whatever's been held back. The body suddenly feels safe enough to stop repressing it. That's deeply healthy. Long-term emotional repression leads to chronic cortisol in the body and can lead to physical illness. So it's wonderful when the body feels safe enough to let things move through.

That said, the formal Guided Shifting process — moving through the awakening progression — isn't alone sufficient to allow for complete, spontaneous expression of whatever the body wants to feel. For that deeper work, there's another stream of sessions on the website called Sound Bubbling. These sessions leverage the enhanced safety that the Guided Shifting sessions have already created, to allow the body to fully express whatever it's been holding — at a level comparable to what psilocybin, MDMA, and other psychedelics appear to do, except here your body has persistent access to these mechanisms, not just a temporary window.

As a side note, the Sound Bubbling sessions are actually the highest rated sessions on the website. People often find them even more impactful than the awakening-focused sessions, because there's this extraordinary sense of freedom and aliveness that occurs when the body gets to fully release huge emotions and experience some deconditioning around them. If you can feel anything, you can do anything.

The way I think about the overall structure: the Guided Shifting awakening sessions are the base of the pyramid — the foundation. The emotion and healing work builds on top of that. And together, what you're working toward is being able to feel anything, cleanly and freely, in the presence of whatever life brings.

Gary: Feeling is a very important part of your process.

Jason: Absolutely. And the inverse — the inability to feel safe feeling certain things — is the root of pretty much all suffering. It's the body working against itself, accumulating cortisol, contracting against its own experience. That contraction can persist for weeks, months, years, even decades. And it takes a real toll.

Gary: Do you still feel pangs of pain or difficulty? Can you say "it's all gone"?

Jason: No — I definitely still feel pangs. The deconditioning process is ongoing and it's genuinely hard to know where you are in it. Am I 30% complete? 70%? 100%? Life has a habit of surprising you. It'll say: look, feel that — there's something still here. So yes, I still have what I'd call healing opportunities.

Gary: Is there ever really a completeness? Is the realization perhaps that this continues throughout life — and that's fine?

Jason: If you'd told me a year ago that it only takes 30 minutes to enter the awakening progression and feel the initial effects, I would have said no way. But it turns out it's true. And so I genuinely don't know what's possible. My mission is to just keep discovering how this can all be better — getting people through their awakening and healing journeys much more quickly than was previously thought possible.

Maybe one day it could be done in a single day. Maybe the deconditioning is 80% complete for some people, 95% for others. At the very least, I want it to be good enough that people don't need to become lifelong seekers or lifelong inner workers — because there's just so much great life to live outside of inner work. Maybe this can be faster, easier, deeper. Maybe it can't. Maybe it does require lifelong commitment for some. But maybe not. And I want to find out.

I want to test what appears to work well, rigorously, against the standards of western science. See if it can be knocked down. All in the pursuit of making it better.

Every time I think, "this can't be better — this is probably as good as it gets" — I'm almost always wrong. So I fall back on: maybe.

Gary: And that's wonderful — you're approaching it almost like a scientific discipline, an ongoing experiment, not an endpoint. Not the final word. And I'm sure you communicate that to your users.

Jason: They regularly get emails from me saying, "Hey, I think I came up with something better. Try it out if you want." Then I get feedback, and we improve the whole experience for everyone. It's so fun. I'm incredibly grateful for the user base I have right now — everyone's eager to try new things, share feedback and ideas. This should be available to the world. There's no reason it needs to be limited to a select few.

Gary: Here's one of the big takeaways from today. We're really talking about two models of spirituality. In the old model, we weren't students or users — we were disciples. Many of us in the 60s and 70s were disciples. We embarked on not just a lifelong journey but potentially many lifetimes of practice before attaining the goal, whatever that might be — enlightenment, liberation, whatever you want to call it.

What we're saying today — what Jeffrey Martin is saying, what Rostislav is saying, what Jason is saying — is that this is not necessarily the case for everybody. And if it's your situation that you need 30 years of practice, there's nothing wrong with that. Whatever's going on for you is valid for you.

Jason: I'd add: from a design thinking perspective, there's this principle — there's no such thing as user error. If it's taking someone 30 years or 30 lifetimes, from my perspective that means they may not be being served well enough by whatever they're seeking. But — there's nothing wrong with wanting to join a mystical or spiritual community. Nothing wrong with having a beautiful relationship with a guru or a set of daily practices you love. If you enjoy it, that's complete. End of story. What matters is that people deserve to know their options. And hopefully those options are getting better and better.

Stefan: That's my whole point. You are not condemned to a 30-year program. You're not confined to seeker jail. There are other options. More and more people — whether they're hardcore spiritual seekers or just average people looking for a better life — are finding their way to approaches like Jeffrey Martin's, like Rostislav's, like Jason's. And what's beautiful now is that all these different modalities are showing up. You can find the method that works for you.

Jason: And this is also one of the reasons I've been very intentional about not creating an insular community around Guided Shifting. I don't want people getting their social and connection needs met purely within the organism of the offering. I want people to lean into communities across all parts of their lives. The sense of congregation — of being with others — can be vast and abundant, transcending any particular beliefs or spiritual framework. As I go further through my own deconditioning and healing process, more and more I see strangers as brothers and sisters. My congregation grows every day. And that's a glorious thing.

Gary: If you can bring individuality into community, the community is better off — rather than conforming to whatever a leader at the top wants to impose. And I think the only way you can truly transcend that is to become one with the whole — to find yourself a part of everything. That's that unconditional love. You become part of everything, but you're not following someone else's belief system. You've found what you needed to find for yourself.

Jason: And conditional belonging — if that's all you've got access to right now, take it. Belonging is healthy. As social creatures, we need belonging. But if you're lucky enough to have your body and mind shift to a place where you can feel unconditional belonging — where you don't need to perform or conform to belong — that is something extraordinary.

Most of the planet is operating on transactional belonging. And if that's where you are, that can serve a real purpose. But being able to graduate from transactional to unconditional — that's worth aspiring to.

Stefan: I'm a digital artist who creates through allowing the work to unfold without premeditation. I never start a project thinking about what I'm going to do. I just sit down — like a meditation — let things flow in and start the work. And that's allowed me to surrender, to exist without forcing outcomes. I sense something similar in how you're building Guided Shifting.

Jason: Very much so. I think of guidedshifting.com in exactly the way you're describing a piece of art — it's being guided by whatever feels like the right next step. And often the right next step feels like rest. Doing nothing for a week or two weeks. Looking away. Seeing what else is happening.

This is the first major creative endeavor I've taken on as an entrepreneur that isn't building toward a predefined endpoint. And that's remarkable. It's so much more alive and dynamic. With all the other companies I started in the past, especially those that required outside funding, you had to paint a very specific vision of how the company was going to be big and how it was going to make money. There's nothing wrong with that discipline — it's good homework if you're taking on other people's money. But this work is cleaner. It's more like a work of art. This intuitive unfolding, guided by bursts of intuition that feel beyond thoughts — they just feel right, or they feel wrong. And it's so much more freeing.

I get to be proud of it at every stage. Not "I can't be proud of it because it hasn't reached the predefined goal." Just unconditional appreciation for the progression of this thing as it moves through the world and grows and shrinks and finds its shape. Like what it must feel like to be a parent.

Stefan: Musicians say the most important part of a song is the space between the notes. That's where it all happens. The silence is what makes the song.

Jason: And for so many of us who carry a lot of trauma, our bodies and minds are wired to avoid that space between notes. It's too much. Too scary. The body thinks it will die if it really eases off its defenses and relaxes into that silence — literally or metaphorically.

And I think that spaciousness is a crucial part of creating anything that's going to live harmoniously in the world. You can impose a creative vision through brute force and have temporary life. But the kinds of creative expressions I'm drawn to are more like living beings that need to coexist in harmony with their environment. Sometimes that means resting in complete silence. Sometimes it means a lot of action and movement. Organisms move through both cycles, and so does good creative work.

Stefan: In a couple of sentences, how would you describe your own creative outpouring?

Jason: It's always been about the dance between inspiration and just quickly manifesting something real into the world — efficiently, without fear. Bridging the gap between "this feels right" and getting it out there to see if it lives or dies. The gap between having a new idea for how to better serve people through Guided Shifting and them actually having their hands on it, experiencing it, is often as short as an hour or two or three. It doesn't need to be perfect. It doesn't need to be right. It just gets out there. We see if it lives or dies. If the world wants it, it lives. If the world wants more from it, it grows. If the world rejects it, it dies. And that's hard. And then we create again.

Gary: One of the key things that came out of today — and this struck me early on — is this: peace is not an emotion, though it can take on emotional quality. Peace is more foundational. It's the basis. Peace is the ocean, and emotions, thoughts, movements of the body — those are the waves. Because they're part of the ocean, they're not a problem.

As Jason said earlier: thoughts are not a problem. There's nothing wrong with emotions. Nothing wrong with anger. Nothing wrong with any of it. Because these are the waves. But peace is the foundation — the underlying ocean. And once you get to see that all there is is the ocean, then this wave and that wave don't pose a threat. They come and go. But the foundational peace — that's what doesn't come and go.

To me, that was the key insight from today. And I hope people will explore Jason's work — it's guidedshifting.com. It's not a fixed, written-in-stone process. It's ongoing, continuously developing. Everyone who engages with it becomes part of that ongoing journey.

Jason: I'll just underscore that final point by saying: everything you experience through the website operates beneath the level of teaching. I don't teach anything. I guide you through an experience where what Gary just described around peace becomes your embodied reality — something you live from. You can forget it and it's still there. No longer teachings to remember or recite. Not conceptual. Just: let's see what your body has in store when it goes through this process.

Stefan: Thank you so much, Jason. Your joy has come through this entire conversation, and I'm sure it will reach everyone who watches. You've got something real here.

Jason: Thank you both. This was truly lovely.

Learn more and begin your journey at guidedshifting.com.