What is a Good Life? #84
Engaging The Heart's Wisdom with Wakanyi Hoffman
On the 84th episode of the What is a Good Life? podcast, I am delighted to introduce our guest, Wakanyi Hoffman. Wakanyi is an artist of life who paints the shades of each day as a storyteller, author, keynote speaker specialising in Ubuntu philosophy, scholar of indigenous knowledge, and narrative weaver of wisdom in AI.
Wakanyi is an Indigenous Knowledge Curator for ServiceSpace AI, a Research Fellow at The New Institute in Hamburg, and the author of Sala, Mountain Warrior. She sits on several boards, including the Kenya Education Fund, and her mission is to help co-create a world founded on continuous, naturally occurring, systemic intellectual and emotional progress that is in harmony with all other forms of emerging intelligence.
In this enlivening episode, Wakanyi considers what it would take to reconnect with ancient wisdom while living in a modern world. She shares Ubuntu values of survival, solidarity, respect, compassion, and dignity—dignity for human life and all of life. She explores the hospicing of the systems we presently live in and what has inhibited us from engaging with the wisdom of the heart. We also discuss resisting the urge to interfere with a natural process and the relief and joy of not being in control.
If you are struggling to integrate more wisdom into your life, if you feel you are holding on too tightly to the way things are, even when you realise they are no longer serving you, this episode will give you plenty of space, fresh air, and optimism to consider our next evolutions as people and as a society.
The weekly clip from the podcast (6 mins), my weekly reflection (3 mins), the full podcast (61 mins), and the weekly questions all follow below.
1. Weekly Clip from the Podcast
2. My weekly reflection
One abiding sense that has stayed in my mind since this conversation with Wakanyi is that of growing discomfort inside the cocoon before an inevitable growth or bursting out of it ensues.
For me, the word cocoon has usually just made me think of safety, comfort, or perhaps even protection.
The metaphor of a cocoon, or a series of cocoons in life, is rather satisfying for me.
While a caterpillar’s nervous system is different from ours and therefore doesn’t experience discomfort in the same way we do, when a caterpillar undergoes the pupal stage, it essentially dissolves into a biological soup before re-emerging as a butterfly.
I love the sense of, as a human, repeatedly building new worlds or cocoons in our lives until it is time to dissolve and reform once again—whether that is a belief system we hold, a career, a relationship, a way of life, or how we view and relate to ourselves and to others.
This constant churn of building new worlds, relationships, expressions, projects, and beliefs, then finding comfort or safety within them, followed by discomfort once more as the cocoon now limits our growth or natural evolution, dissolving, and breaking out once again to start the process anew.
For us as humans, dissolving a belief or an identity can be a painful process, depending on how attached we are to it. It can also create a level of ambiguity or uncertainty in our lives that we initially find very challenging.
What puts us in the most resistance to this process is the delusion of certainty we either try to sell to ourselves or others, or are sold to, and the sense of control we believe we can exert over life.
One thing that I have noticed across the 200+ interviews I’ve conducted for this project, before and since the podcast, is that there is continual change, shifting, and recalibration in the lives of so many of the participants.
Whether it was someone who was in between jobs, someone who had sold their company for millions, an artist who had finished a project, people changing careers, embarking upon a path of self-inquiry, developing new curiosities, having children, and so on—the word that came up so frequently was recalibrating.
One thing that really hinders our experience of these naturally evolving phases of growth is our desire to find something final in a constantly shifting world—the desire for finality or certainty.
For example, there is a simple linearity to how we have framed the idea of a singular, fixed point of focus or purpose in our lives, and the limited and restrained expression of what that would be, and a notion that if you have truly discovered it, it will remain constant for the rest of time.
I have interviewed a number of people who have objectively succeeded on a number of fronts in life, and yet life remained a mystery to them. There were often quick to point out that there were stages in life where uncertainty reigned for quite some time. That while some may have had a North Star in life, that that took on many expressions, in the guise of different projects, roles, or modalities.
While even when we set out with clear intentions, we cannot predict with certainty what our experience will be at the end of a process before we have started it. We can often get exactly what we want and it just not feel the way we expected it might.
I feel that the cocoon becomes uncomfortable when we hold onto it longer than its natural duration. What made us comfortable yesterday now makes us uncomfortable today. What we believe may make us comfortable tomorrow may not do so when we actually experience it.
The process of life will always involve these energies, unknowns, frictions, and tensions. I don’t point this out to suggest there is a way to extricate these energies from the process. However, an acknowledgement, observation, and acceptance of them as part of this perpetually unfolding experience can bring much more peace to what can otherwise seem an intimidating process.
While our sharing of present discomforts in the cocoon can often open up possibilities for change and synchronicity in life in ways we could never have predicted nor imagined.
What first comes to mind for you in your life when you read this?
3. Full Episode - Engaging The Heart’s Wisdom with Wakanyi Hoffman - What is a Good Life? #84
Click here for Apple and Amazon
4. This week’s Questions
What systems, beliefs, values, or behaviours are you holding onto that no longer serve you?
Is there an area of your life where the cocoon you are currently in has become so uncomfortable that it requires you to grow or bust out of?
About Me
I am a coach and writer based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 200 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.
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, trust, and connection, or you simply want to get in touch, here’s my email and LinkedIn.