What is a Good Life? #79
Seeking Truth & Reality with Jen Cohen
On the 79th episode of the What is a Good Life? podcast, I am delighted to introduce our guest, Jen Cohen. Jen is a Co-Founder and Director of Seven Stones Leadership, a leadership journeys company, and the Director of Coaching Education for Mobius Executive Leadership, a global boutique consulting firm serving Fortune 500 companies. She is the co-author, with Gina LaRoche, of The 7 Laws of Enough, and the author of the chapter “From Surviving to Thriving” in the book Being Human at Work, edited by Richard Strozzi Heckler.
Her coaching and training are distinguished by her studies in several communication technologies, along with quantum physics, ontology, neuroscience, psychology, trauma—both individual and collective—somatics, and systems thinking. Jen is a Master Certified Somatic Coach with the Strozzi Institute and holds a master’s degree in Applied Psychology with an emphasis on systems theory.
In this captivating conversation, Jen shares with us her lifelong questioning of what is truth and what is reality. She speaks of her journey from experiencing trauma in her childhood, to continually seeking a sense of truth, and the emergence of her path and experiences with bodywork and healing. We explore the process of transmutation and extracting wisdom from our experiences, the sense of something bigger being at play that is moving us, the process of how purpose synchronistically arises, and living a life that ultimately brings her closer and closer into contact with reality.
Whatever you may be going through in life, this conversation will provide you with considerable inspiration as to what can become of our lives if we do not look away from reality but walk towards it. While Jen shares her considerable wisdom and insights from her own examined life of inquiry, giving us all much to contemplate.
The weekly clip from the podcast (4 mins), my weekly reflection (3 mins), the full podcast (59 mins), and the weekly questions all follow below.
1. Weekly Clip from the Podcast
2. My weekly reflection
In the interview, I loved Jen’s perspective on what the process of transmuting an experience or trauma into wisdom might entail. She suggests that wisdom is what remains when something is fully processed, understood, held, accompanied, and related to. If the experience, or "it," receives witnessing, relationship, interest, mirroring, insight, and cognitive understanding (something she says we overemphasise as a society), then the alchemy of that process is the gift we were meant to receive by going through it.
This isn’t about seeing trauma as a gift in some new-age or overly positive sense or then being glad it happened. It’s about genuinely walking the hard road of the experience. The phrase “genuinely walking the hard road of the experience” feels substantial and weighty to me, as I’m sure it does to anyone who has walked that road in some aspect of their life or is presently trying to.
We live in a world looking to “hack” life rather than live and experience it. We seek top-five lists distilling someone else’s wisdom, seemingly in an attempt to avoid the process itself. As if we are merely a computer system in need of the right file to correct our behaviour. We are blindly willing to make gods out of the words and thoughts we consume, hoping there is a way to go through life without walking the hard road, but that simply doesn’t align with any reality I know.
I remember my first trip to India, where I found myself in Lakshman Jhula, just outside of Rishikesh, a place where many Western spiritual seekers congregate. I kept encountering people who assumed I must be there to see Mooji, a spiritual teacher I hadn’t heard of, who was hosting large daily gatherings or satsangs for a month in Rishikesh. Curiosity got the better of me after a few weeks of hearing about Mooji, so I attended one of these gatherings, where attendees could ask him questions about his teachings or experiences in their own lives.
My cynicism was already heightened when I arrived and saw people with smiles plastered on their faces, offering each other performative greetings and gestures that didn’t look or feel natural.
As I listened to the first few questions, it seemed people were more interested in proving to Mooji that they had read all his work and that they “got” it or understood it—students seeking gold stars from the teacher. Their experiences sounded hollow, as if they were trying to cultivate a sense of wisdom that didn’t resonate with their being or feel embodied at all. In fairness to Mooji, or maybe it was just my projection, he seemed to be growing impatient with these performances.
The next person who stepped up to the mic nonchalantly referred to their “knowing” that “time is just a concept.” At this point, Mooji interjected, saying that it’s all well and good to say time is just a concept while on a trip from California to India for a month, sitting in a satsang each day. But if your rent is due next week and you don’t have the money in your account, saying it then would carry more weight.
From that point on, the questions and experiences shared seemed more real and messy. The veneer of projecting wisdom and the smiling façade I resisted was pierced. I witnessed other attendees audibly experiencing challenging emotions in response to the questions and shares of others or to Mooji’s responses.
Personally, I don’t care so much for what people say they understand about life from others’ work or from published studies pointing to the “average experience” of participants. I care more about whether the words they express align with how they live their life. Do their words and theories stand up in the white heat of their life and the choices they make? Can they illustrate through their own experience or sacrifices that they are connected to these words?
Otherwise, I have met many people who can talk up a storm and dazzle with their intellect but seem to have little grounded or embodied experience of what they refer to. Their words feel empty to me. To me, it feels like a distinction between intellect and wisdom. I am not saying there is no value to intellect, but for me, its importance is a distant one to the weight and experience of walking the hard road itself.
Without that, people make life an intellectual puzzle to solve—often an obvious and easy puzzle to solve. They pretend they know the answers, that they are in far more control than they are, simply because they have not delved into the depth of life experience and been humbled by its complexity, paradox, and beauty.
3. Full Episode - Seeking Truth & Reality with Jen Cohen - What is a Good Life? #79
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4. This week’s Questions
Is there an area of your life that you suspect you are turning away from truth and reality?
Can you recall an experience in your life that has been transmuted into your own personal wisdom?
About Me
I am an artist based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I left behind a 15-year career in Capital Markets after I became extremely curious around answering some of the bigger questions in life. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed around 200 people, to provide people with the space to reflect on their own lives and to create content that would spark people’s own inquiry into this question. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience, beyond the facades we typically project.
If you would like to work with me to explore your own lines of self-inquiry, experiences I create to stimulate more meaningful group conversations and connection, or you simply want to get in touch, here’s my email and LinkedIn.