Lorne Brown:
By listening to the Conscious Fertility Podcast, you agree to not use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition in either yourself or others. Consult your own physician or healthcare provider for any medical issues that you may be having. This entire disclaimer also applies to any guest or contributors to the podcast. Welcome to Conscious Fertility, the show that listens to all of your fertility questions so that you can move from fear and suffering to peace of mind and joy. My name is Lauren Brown. I’m a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and a clinical hypnotherapist. I’m on a mission to explore all the paths to peak fertility and joyful living. It’s time to learn how to be and receive so that you can create life on purpose.
This week on the Conscious Fertility Podcast, I have Dr. Marcus Anthony and I I had the pleasure of meeting Marcus at a conference online around consciousness, which piqued my interest, your talk on the digital future and consciousness, artificial intelligence. And we got talking and I think he has a lot to offer with respect to our Conscious Fertility podcast. So here we go. And I’m gonna just give a brief introduction. So, Dr. Marcus Anthony. He is a prolific writer and published speaker. You’ll see by all the publication he’s done, he has over 10 popular and academic books. He’s also contributed to 50 academic journal papers and book chapters. Much of his writings in teaching is as a futurist, and it’s been about creating deep futures and the idea of integrative intelligence, which I’m hoping he’ll discuss what that actually means. Integrated intelligence during our talk today, and much of his research has been inspired by his own personal experience in exploring consciousness, which is including mindfulness and meditation, inner child work, and integrated in intelligence itself. And his most recent mis mission has been establishing the Power and Presence project, and he’s written a book on the same name. And so the book is called Power and Presence, and explores the reclamation of the authentic self via the practice and body presence in digital wisdom. Marcus, welcome to our, our podcast.
Marcus Anthony:
Well, thanks very much for inviting me Lorne. I’m looking forward to talking to you and discussing things.
Lorne Brown:
So for our listeners and, and for yourself, Marcus, when I started this podcast, it was to explore how can we use our mind, our subconscious, this idea of consciousness to impact our physical health and wellbeing. And so we go from like conscious fertility to conscious conception, to conscious pregnancy to conscious parenting, where these children are gonna be raised by men and women who are conscious or awake, and they’ll get their attachment needs met. And this hopefully will lead to a world of conscious adults when they grow up where they feel that connection and don’t have this desire or need to do, you know, get addicted to drugs, join gangs, commit suicide, or go to war with each other. You know, this idea of belonging. Mm-Hmm. . And for our listeners, that’s my agenda. Our listeners are looking for any edge, any way that they can increase their fertility.
And there’s a lot of talk about mind body connection, this psycho neural immunology idea of how your thoughts and feelings impact your nervous system, your endocrine system, your immune system and ornal system. And you’ve been doing a lot of research and writing and dabbling into the conscious work. Some of your books besides the new one, power and Presence, I think you have a book called Discover Your Soul template, 14 Steps for Awakening Integrated Intelligence. That’s right, yeah. You have a title I saw A More Attractive Law of Attraction, deepening the Art of unconditional Love and Entangled Minds, the idea that will change everything. So as I said, welcome to the podcast, and I thought it would be great for you to start with, what do you mean by integrated intelligence?
Marcus Anthony:
Integrated intelligence essentially means that human consciousness is embedded within layers of intelligence or understanding, which transcend the local mind. So it basically is the realm of the, the intuitive. And there’s a knowledge base that we can tap into through that, and that makes us smarter in a practical way. It can potentially make us smarter in a practical way. Over and above what we traditionally think of intelligence in traditional models of intelligence. We basically think of, of the mind as being a discreet unit. And we basically go about our lives as separate units separate from each other, as separate from the environment. We know that this is not true now in, in terms of the way the mind functions purely at a biological level. So there’s two levels to this at least. The first one is the, the idea of the synchronization of mine.
Because as we move through the world and with each other, basically our brains synchronize with each other. So mirror neurons basically connect us to each other and to the environment into each other. So when we’re with each other, we, we are affecting each other consciously, quite often, unconsciously. But that’s definitely a part of integrated intelligence as I see it. This is mainstream science now. And you can read quite a bit about brain synchronization if you just go to any good book science. But I believe it transcends that as well, that literature in that that area doesn’t normally incorporate the areas that are more associated with the esoteric or the spiritual because the model in the traditional realms is, is limited. It’s paradigmatically, delimited by the idea that consciousness is a product of the brain. So basically we are connected to other people, to other places, other times and other spiritual realms through the mind.
Ma mainly the, the doorway to these experiences is mostly through non-ordinary states of consciousness. And that doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to take drugs or to, you know, meditate on the hill for 20 years. It may just mean that you mean need to incorporate some mental processes into your life that are not normally thought of as being part of a normal waking consciousness work through dreams, for example, or meditative states. So this actually deepens the range of cognitive processes or of knowing that we can employ in our lives. And through exploring that, you can see at a practical level that we are all connected. So this opens a whole realm of intelligence. Intelligence is how you solve problems, basically. Can you solve a problem? Well, if you can solve it with, with your phone, for example, your iPhone and Google, that’s great. There’s a form of enhanced intelligence.
But if you have your own connection to intuition or to communities of people, these are all different ways of enhancing our intelligence. So the non-local mind is another very significant way of enhancing intelligence, cuz it connects us to realms of understanding that are difficult to access through our traditional means, even, even through, say, the internet. And that would include ideas like meaning and purpose, also our, our soul issues, our understanding of why we’re here and our relationship with the world and each other, our relationship within inner child, perhaps our relationship with our, the things that we want and need, including, say, having children or wanting to be fertile, wanting, wanting to create things. So the realm of integrated intelligence is very important in those, those areas of conscious relationship with self and with the world and with each other.
Lorne Brown:
And when you say this integrated self, you talked about this intuition, this knowing. So would this be something that people would, could use on their healing journeys? Because I often see some of the women looking for signs what they should do next. You know, should I do an ivf mm-hmm. or not? Should I take this or that? Is this there an idea that there’s a part of you that is all knowing that knows what your next steps are?
Marcus Anthony:
Well, I guess in theory it could be seen as all knowing. But I think there’s as a more practical and, and the limited aspect of that is we are imperfect human beings. So we can think of ourselves as in relationship to knowledge and intuition as it unfolds before us. I think you mentioned something about you looking for signs. Well, that would be part of what I would call synchronicity. And synchronicity can also be seen as part of integrated intelligence that somehow the, the world that we live in and the universe is connected to us in, in meaningful ways. I think that’s, that’s okay. I’ve certainly had some very meaningful coincidences myself. The only problem in that area is that if you give your power away, waiting for signs or, or synchronicities to tell you they can be useful. But I wouldn’t use them as the primary way of trying to understand what decisions to make.
But they can be extremely, extremely powerful. I’ve had many powerful intuitions in my book Aca Soul template, for example, about okay, it’s going back a while now. Must be about 30 years, I guess. I was start just starting my healing work and doing a lot of shadow work, which was quite difficult to do. And what I was starting to realize is that I had significant issues towards relating to women as a result of a fairly dysfunctional relationship with my, with my mother. So I had this anger, this almost a kind of a rapacious anger towards my mother. So that if you think of the idea of of rape for example, which is a very dark thing, but there may be psychological drivers behind the idea. I mean, the idea of Jack the Ripper, for example. Not that I know too much about the history of Jack the Ripper, but I think the, he had a fairly problematic, like they had a fairly problematic relationship with his mother.
I’m not talking about literal rape here, although that may be a part of it for some people. But this particular experience that I had, I woke up one morning, I’d had a dream just before I woke up. And in this dream I’d had this experience that the jack, jack, the ripper was lurking, lurking around. And that I was trying to deal with this free dark energy. And I came across literally as, as Jack the Ripper, as I was conscious of this idea that there was some destructive archetype there. So anyway I was a bit disturbed by this, but I jumped in my car to go to work. I was working at an international school at that time. And my car pulled up the behind another car and there was a sticker on the back of the car and it said Jack’s back. And it was actually an advertisement, I think for Jack Daniel’s whiskey, but I thought, wow, that’s interesting.
I really felt there was some meaning in that. And then I went to went to work in my school. In my first class I was teaching a year eight class, an advanced class. And what I did when I got into the room was no, I’d asked the students to write the first sentence of a story for homework. And what I did was I looked around the room and I just felt let my energy fall onto the student that I, I felt intuitively could share their first line. And there was one boy who stood up, I can’t remember his name. And I said, what you opening line is he must have misunderstood me because he sta he started reading the whole story. He’d written the whole story and I just decided to let him go for it. And it was a story about the police were on the hunt for this killer and rapist.
And, and it was a short story. And in the end of the story, the, the police shot the rapist and he, and he died. And as he folded the ground, this dark shadow emerged from him. And, and ending line to this student’s story was, and it was the spirit of Jack the Ripper. Oh, leaving the body of the student. And I said, well that’s interesting. Thank, thank you for that. Of course, I couldn’t really share with the student how meaningful that was to me at a personal level, that story is suggested that there’s something within fields of consciousness that connect us, that can help us to heal and to a deepen in understanding, including of the shadow. And obviously something like that is kind quite dark, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be something in the shadow. It could just be something to do with our connection to other people or relationships in general. Kinda work that we wanna do could be something to do with fertility or our own children or our own inner child.
Lorne Brown:
And when you talk about this, this shadow, so cuz so many of the experts that we’ve had have talked about, they call it trauma, like people have this trauma Yeah. That’s trapped in the body mm-hmm. . And you’re talking about the shadow work. Is, is this related to that? Is there a similarity there? Or is this different names for the same? Same thing.
Marcus Anthony:
Okay. Well, I see the shadow is basically the norm. Normally the repressed or very difficult or dark parts of ourselves that we find hard to acknowledge and to, to allow to move through us with, with consciousness, it can be trauma is a big, is a big part of the shadow. In fact, it’s probably the foundation normally related to a biographical issues that we’ve had in our, in our childhood could even be things that happened in our adulthood as well. So what happens is when we’re children, we do experience trauma. The inner child, if you like, can be traumatized and parts of our cycle that our energy can break off and become dis literally disconnected from us. They may even locate themselves in other people, like other childhood friends in our parents. So there can be a kind of an entanglement process.
I sometimes call it a possession, although that meaning may have something a bit more terrible than I wanna think of. I mean, it’s not like you’re going to, your head’s gonna start spinning around, like in the movie The Exorcist system, you’re gonna vomit frogs and and things. But it just means we’re entangled and parts of ourselves may be connected to other people. In fact, it’s true for all of us. That’s been true for, for me, some of those entanglements are not so problematic. You might just have, it might be part of you that’s still connected to a childhood girlfriend, for example, when you’re a teenager because you both meet each other’s needs. Or that could be something quite difficult. The, there might be a real soul issue for you to look at with an entanglement you have with caregiver from your younger days, especially your parents, grandparents also, depending on who you were growing up with. So part of the shadow is these entanglements, often it’s to do with shame as well. Shame is a very significant part. And this becomes quite Freudian, but it’s sexual shame, shame to do with the, with the body. And toilet shaming as well can have a significant effect on the way that we relate to the body and each other. Our sense of dis disgust in ourselves and in others. These things are all part of the shadow. So I guess the thing is, how, how does that play out practically for
Lorne Brown:
Us? Yeah, the practical side of it, cuz I’ve heard over and over again, it’s not so much this situation, the event, but it’s how you internalize it. And this gets trapped in the body and couples and the men and the women that I’ve seen, you know, shame comes up a lot. Some talk about past abortions. Themes come up, you know, they may have an issue with a parent or an in-law or they may have an issue with their spouse. And when you distill it down, the themes that come up on the subconscious programs are, you know, I’m not enough. I’m not pretty enough, I’m not lovable enough, I’m a failure. And then fertility seems to be like a wake up call. It’s just another thing to trigger one of those as you’re calling it shadow. And I’m curious, just with the work that you’ve been doing and the writing you’ve been doing, how do people come to heal this, to integrate this? So this, I call it stuck energy, this vibration mm-hmm. That’s trapped in the body starts to move again. So you have flow and receptivity and you get that creativity and, and it shows up on a physical level as well as as vitality and health and wellness.
Marcus Anthony:
Well, for me, the process that I’ve used and I was taught by my teachers and I I’ve developed it further over the years, is, is to be in conscious relationship with the energy or the, or the issue that, that, that emerges for you. So it’s not about getting rid of the issue because you can’t really get rid of it if you want, if you try to get rid of it, then you are in a, a negative relationship with the energy structure. So for example, if you are, you are frustrated or feeling inadequate because let, let’s say you’re a woman and you can’t have children or you’re not, there’s some maybe a physical issue that you’re experiencing. There may be a sense of inadequacy or not feeling. You are, you are a complete woman or of service to society or your husband. And so there may be some issues around that.
And one thing that you can do is to develop a practice of a conscious awareness whereby you become present with the feeling of that and how it moves through the body. This can be difficult work though. So it can be useful to have a teacher to teach you these things. It does take, it took me quite a few years to really work with this process myself. And I had, I had some, a lot of help with teachers, but the essence of it is, is actually quite simple. Let’s say you are feeling oppression or, or feeling down or, or empty because of an issue you have with not being able to have the, have the child that you want. But what you can do is you can sit somewhere or even move, move if you want to and, and give that a voice. What, what is it really saying and how is it feeling?
And you can move around and just, just act it out. And in a sense, to channel it by just connecting it and giving it a voice. Connecting exercises or noticing exercises are quite, quite useful. So where can I feel this in my body? And if you feel, let’s say in the solar plexus, what, what does that want to say? And you, then you can just relax and give it a voice. It might be saying, you know, I, I feel empty and I’m, I’m worthless, you know, I’m, I’m no service to this society. And typically this kind of energy structure, I I was looking at this before the podcast as well with, with the general consciousness structure of, of some of your audience, especially the females, and know not only females are interested in, in this, I know men are, men are as well, but
Lorne Brown:
You’re correct. More, more women than men, are interested. It just seems to be what we see in our practice. So you are speaking to the majority of women, but thankfully there are men that are listening to this as well.
Marcus Anthony:
Mm-Hmm. So the, so the sense that that might be that I feel empty, I’m worthless, I’m not lovable. There’s something, there’s something wrong with me, you know, well, you know, what have I done wrong? So there may be a self-rejection, a self annihilation there in a sense. And at its deepest level that may express itself as a kind of desire to not do not exist or to self, to self annihilate or to disappear or to escape. And of course that is self-defeating. It’s not unusual when we move in into the shadow, the really the bottom of it. There’s a desire to, to not exist. You could call it suicide if you like. Even though you may not be consciously suicidal, there may be a part of yourself that just can’t bear existence. I guess this is part of Fre Freud’s death wish as well, .
So this is slightly, slightly dark, but you can, you can have the, a relationship with this which is, is lighter than what you may think. So once you become comfortable with that, and it may, may take a little bit of time to be present with it, then you can start talking with it. It can be helpful, like to have a toy, for example, like a teddy bear or a doll, and then the hold the toy. And this is, this is a practice which many people have used for years. John, John Bradshaw used it years ago. And you can allow that little boy, little girl to talk back to you because normally the sense of inadequacy or being unlovable will mirror your relationship with your parents or your childhood. The sense that I’m not lovable and I’m not, I’m not worthy. So allowing it a voice over time, if you just allow yourself to be present with that on a regular basis, it will begin to integrate or, or connect those parts of yourself and help you to relax, relax more into your life and to be more present.
Because actually it’s, it’s while you can be present with people and and life, if you’re not present with what’s within yourself, the same time, you cannot actually be deeply present because your le your part of yourself is, is rejecting yourself. So there needs to be at the deepest level on inner journey that you need to take if you are gonna do a, a journey of presence. But this may take time and we have to respect the, you know, the universe and what, what we can deal with at any given time. Because you have to be very patient and loving and very gentle with yourself. If you put the energy of self rejection or pushing, you know, I’ve gotta get this done. You know, especially if you’re a kind of a person who might be a more a type personality or someone who’s been successful in their life through pushing and competing.
If you put that energy into inner child work, it’s self-defeating. So you have to learn in a, in a ironic sense to embody the feminine or the receptive as you’re doing this kind of work and, and relax with it over time. You can, you can learn to learn to relax with these things. And the fear of what lies in with us begins to dissipate. And, and that’s when true healing really begins to happen. But we never really are fully in control of healing. It may take a process of time that we, we can’t really know. All that we can really do is release to it.
Lorne Brown:
As you said, that kindness, you’re to yourself. So you’re, you’re taking a relationship with yourself and this is that integration to become whole and complete is to take a relationship with all parts of yourself.
Marcus Anthony:
Yeah, that, that’s right. I mean, in my journey I was extremely self-critical. And of course that voice is just mirroring what my parents also said to me when I was, when I was younger. That’s a voice. Of course, that still comes back. It was a very, very conscious thing. I remember when I was eight, 18 years old, I went to the, my school formal which I dunno what you would call it, prom, Canada prom prom, I guess. Yeah. And I had, I had zero self-esteem basically. And I’d never had a girlfriend at that stage. And it was impossible for me. My, my my sense of self-worth was, was so low. And anyway, it just so happened that a girl that I, I liked had broken up with her, with her boyfriend, but she was still in trauma, if you like, from that. And, and it still happened that someone that worked at my father’s bakery knew that girl.
He basically arranged a date with me and this girl that I liked who’d just broken up with a girlfriend. So of course she wasn’t ready to get in a relationship. But anyway, so she completely rejected me when I turned up at the prom, you know, and she just wasn’t interested in me at all. And I remember going back, back home afterwards, it was about 12 o’clock and I stood at, in the garage in the darkness, and I put my hand up against the wall. This, this horrible feeling was going through me. I just came to this realiz realization that, that nobody would ever love me. No one, no one would ever love me. And no, I was unlovable. And when I, when I felt that it was kind of, it was kind of a strange thing, that resignation I think was the first step of awareness e even though I really had no, no idea what to do with it at that age. And I went upstairs and I went to bed and I woke up in the morning and I, and I somehow felt lighter. It would take many years of healing work to really start to integrate that, but almost complete sense of self-rejection underpin my own journey. And in a way, all of us have to deal with that at some level. You know, some, some people are, are more into that at sole issue than others.
Lorne Brown:
Marcus, like what you experienced there when you had this thought that you’re not lovable, that rather than fight it. So what you resist persists that you surrendered, you surrendered into that feeling excepting yourself for the person who thinks nobody’s gonna love you. And that brought you into presence, which brought in that flow and allowing where you felt better the next day. I, I asked this question because in the conscious work that I do for myself and share with my patients, a big part of is noticing, like you said, becoming aware. Mm-Hmm. . Yeah. And being willing to be uncomfortable. Meaning rather than trying to feel good or trying to get better at feeling. So that means if it’s an uncomfortable feeling, just notice it. Just take up a relationship with it. Notice it. It doesn’t mean we prefer it, that we want it, that we’re resigned to it.
It just means this is how I feel now. And the process of just noticing and allowing it, it’s been my experience that you get into this state of some state of presence. There’s a bit of awareness that’s with you now. You’re not totally in it at the effect of this thought or feeling because there’s a something witnessing it. Cuz you’re now observing it, allowing it, noticing it, being willing to be uncomfortable. And in that process it often just transforms. And I’ll, I’ll borrow from Eckhart Toley that he says, when you’re fully in the present moment, there’s no suffering. And it seems like uncomfortable feelings can help bring you into presence. And so I’m curious, when you were saying your story and you had a sense of peace, it was one of the things Ecker also said. He says, when you’re fully present, you can either remove yourself from a situation consciously or you can consciously change or improve the situation.
And if you can’t remove yourself or change the situation, then you can continue to surrender to accepting what is, because you can be at peace in an unhappy situation, meaning that you still don’t like the situation, but it’s no longer a trigger. You’re not fighting with it. It’s not causing this friction stagnation. And there’s a sense of flow. And so I guess that’s my, my question for you a long question, but do you think it’s because you were no longer rejecting or fighting it, but there was this a little bit of surrender to this is what I think and feel right now.
Marcus Anthony:
I think it was just a little bit of that there. Although at that, that age, I couldn’t really complete it or embody it. Of course there is a little bit of a danger as well if if you just say, oh, I’m worthless. You could spiral into destructive energy as well.
Lorne Brown:
Yeah. And I’m not suggesting that that part, and I want to be clear for our listeners, it’s not believing when you, everything that happens is neutral and then we give it meaning right through our subconscious programming, the lenses. So the languaging, I’ll be around the, it’s accepting myself for the person who thinks I’m not lovable or accepting myself for the person who feels unlovable, that’s different than I, I am unlovable. Like that spiral. It’s like, yeah, right now I feel unlovable. That’s my truth. That’s my reality. I feel unlovable. It’s not an admission that I am unlovable. I just wanted, it’s a fine line there. But I do find when you’re just like, I feel not enough, like I accept myself for the person who feels not enough. I have found in that process, when I just get present with it, that a sense of peace does happen. And I call it my approach nac, notice, accept, choose again. Mm-Hmm. Yeah. When you’re in the accepting part of it and you sense that, as Eckhart calls it, there’s peace in an unhappy situation. The paradoxical part of it is once you fully can surrender to what is, then you can choose again. Then you can start creating differently. Cuz you’re in that state of presence where opportunity, infinite opportunity exists.
Marcus Anthony:
So it’s about developing the, the witness. So you, you’re present with it, but there’s a part of you observing this other part that is, that feels unlovable. Yeah, well what, whatever it is, whatever issues is coming up that might be feeling worthless because I can’t, I’ve not been successful in being able to get pregnant, for example. So yeah. So it’s a, just allow allowing it a space to express itself now without believing in the story that comes up. Because there’ll be a story and, and beliefs that are associated with that story that, that emerge. But you shouldn’t for a moment believe in the story. Right? If you want to, you can just observe it or you can talk to that part of yourself doing inner child work, I feel worthless. Nobody loves me. It’s no use trying. Then you can take the role of the adult and say I understand you feel that way, that’s understandable, but I just want you to know I, i love you and, and you’re not worthless. And you can develop a little dialogue there and you can practice this because you know, there’s a certain level of authenticity that you can bring to the inner child. But sometimes you can realize that the inner child is not quite ready to, to listen to it. So you have to respect also its resistance. Mm-Hmm. , oh, I can see you’re not quite ready to, to love yourself, but I, I still choose to love you anyway.
Lorne Brown:
And it’s amazing cuz what you’re saying sounds so simple. I love the inner child work and you, I was introduced to it through the work of John Bradshaw, who you mentioned earlier. He’s one of the first Yeah. Books I read on inner child work. I like it for a couple of reasons. It’s my favorite modality. And again, in my nac I bring it into the accepting what it is. And also in the choose again, like reparenting that inner child. And the way I make sense of it for myself is, you know, you have all ages within you right? At all times. And in the inner child work the subconscious idea of it, I would suggest is that your subconscious can’t tell the difference between this inner and outer experience. That’s why we can go to a movie and watch it. And even though we’re aware those are actors and actresses on the screen mm-hmm.
We can still laugh and cry. And so when you do inner child work, it’s like burning a new song on a cd. So for those of us that grew up with CDs, some of the people listening may not, don’t, may not know what we’re talking about. But you could be playing the CD for the last 40 years. It says, I’m not lovable, I’m not enough. Right. That could be the song that you’ve been playing and if you took a CD and you burned a new song saying I am lovable, I’m safe, I’m supported. No, even if you’ve had the old song for 40 years, I’m not lovable. I’m not enough. The next time you put put the CD in, if you’ve burned a new song on it, it will play the new song. That’s what happens. And for me, inner child work is like that.
When you go in and start to reparent the inner child, the way you gave that example, it starts to burn a new story on it. And then you as the adult start to live as if you got that childhood. It is such a powerful modality to help reparent that in inner child. The other reason I love it so much working with reproductive health is I think of law of attraction. I’m sure you’re gonna have something to say about this cuz you’ve written a book on this, but of like, at attracts like to simplify it as much as I can here. Mm-Hmm. If you’re wanting a child and you’re waiting to have that child to love something unconditionally, well like attracts, like, if you can start reparenting yourself and create that vibration, that energy in you of loving your little child unconditionally, to me you’re creating that attraction already.
Inviting that child in because you don’t have to wait for the physical child to be born. You can start to create that vibration inside you. I remember my favorite story with a woman I worked with who did a lot of inner child work cuz of her, her past, her history. And when she became pregnant well into her pregnancy, she said, I feel like I’m carrying twins. And I go, why? And she goes, I’m constantly talking to my baby that I’m carrying and I’m constantly talking to my infant. She was always working with her, her one-year-old and her fetus . And so yes, she continued to talk to both her and her child. And sh when she talked to her and her child, she realized her baby was benefiting from hearing that Yeah. Discussion as well. Mm-Hmm. Do you wanna elaborate on that? Cuz I, I I haven’t heard what your style of inner child work or what your relationship is to inner child work except for that you mentioned John Bradshaw.
Marcus Anthony:
There’s quite a few things you you mentioned there, but I like what you said about relating to a, a literal child as your inner child. So if you bring consciousness to that, then it’s a healing process. And the reverse of course is that when we don’t bring consciousness to it, we then instill all that stuff onto our own children, which is inevitable to some degree. So it’s the same with also with pets. If you’ve got pets, you can also transfer your own issues on, onto, onto pets as well. So there can be a healing process in, in having children. There’s no doubt about that. And it’s not necessarily the case if you don’t bring consciousness to it at some level. Not everyone’s doing consciousness work. So that may happen without you really trying. It may just be, you know, the lots of people that have gone through the world have been wonderful parents without ever having really done any, any deep work.
You know, just may be that the consciousness that, you know, the gift that mo that moves through them if you like. So it’s not necess necessarily about having to do work like this, but I think it helps that if you can, if you can use the kind of modalities that we’re talking about. So the kind of inner child work I, I learned through healing group that I I I was with most of it 25 years ago in New Zealand. We basically had in this group, normally about 10 or 20 people. And we, we basically learned to parent each other’s inner child. So we learned a clairvoyant process, if you like, telepathic process where we could channel each other’s inner child and we could act it out in psychodrama. So you could act out the dynamics of, of someone’s drama while they observed it.
So basically if I was acting out someone else, an actor in someone’s biographical past, it could even be an ancestral past, I would just go into that, whatever came through me, I would act it out, including any of the messages or the stories that came out. And then after that, after the drama, if you like, we call the drama or the story has, has been revealed, then we would go into the emotional aspect of it. What part of me is keeping the story alive. So in, in seeing the drama acted out, it brings it into deeper awareness and it may trigger parts of ourselves that seek release through the feelings or the intuitions or the emotional body. And life itself is like that in a way. It does it, life will attract to you situations that allow, give you the opportunity to see what the drama is, what the soul story is, and it will tend to keep repeating itself at some level until such time as you bring consciousness to it. This is my understanding that it moves through different lifetimes.
Lorne Brown:
My conscious teacher has shared that on and others on on many occasions, that it’s that idea things aren’t happening to you, they’re happening for you and that you’re constantly having these events to help you integrate or wake up in life. Is that what you’re sharing? Kind of like these things are, you’re, you’re co-creating them, basically. You’re a co-creator. So if you’re loving your life, congratulations, you’re a co-creator. If you’re not loving your life, congratulations. You’re a co-creator of those events.
Marcus Anthony:
Yeah, that’s, that’s how I see it and how I experience it. And I’ve, I’ve seen it many times. So I’ll tell you a story. When I w when I was I guess this is the reason why I had this little dream during the time that I began this process of healing in, in New Zealand, cuz many of my mis my issues were to do with women, especially three women in my biographical life. And my mother my maternal grandmother, and I guess she’d call her a half aunt, who was a half sister of my, my mother. So just at this time, just by coincidence, of course I just moved to New Zealand just though happened that the, the head teacher who was a woman of the department, I worked in international school, I would describe her as basically a, a having psycho psychopathic tendencies, .
She was not a very nice person. So basically she completely rejected me from the moment that I turned up, you know, to work in her English department. She wouldn’t even talk to me, actually, quite literally. I would walk into the staff room and she would ignore me cuz she didn’t, she didn’t want me to be hired. Apparently she didn’t like the decision. I was hired by the principal from Australia and I came over, she didn’t like me. So this, this was quite difficult for me. And of course this brought up issues of rejection and, and anger. It was a perfect opportunity for me to learn about my own anger towards women, especially powerful women that might be abusing me, which is what she was trying to do. So I had to learn how to do the inner work, but also to relate to her in the real world as somebody, you know, that was trying to get the better of me.
You know, that was trying to get into my head. It was literally trying to get me fired, for example. I was hearing that in staff meetings. Like we, as I walk out, maybe I had a playground, Judy, and then she would start mocking me in front of the other teachers. A student told me that she was mocking me in front of her own class. Extremely unprofessional stuff. So what I did was, while I was doing the inner work, I started to approach her and say, I’ve heard this thing, these things is this true? I heard that you were, you were mocking me in front of your class. No, no, no, it’s not true. And what happened in the end was, because I did that, I did that assertively, but I wasn’t, I didn’t yell at her or I didn’t try to attack her.
Lorne Brown:
Speaking your truth, right? So with people could say kindness or good intention. So you weren’t like speaking your mind, you weren’t defending fighting, but you were being authentic. Speaking your truth.
Marcus Anthony:
Yeah. But it was, it was good for me cuz I was very shy and not very assertive. So it gave me a, a good chance to, to stand up for myself. And eventually she just, just backed off and she actually turned on another staff member that, that then she started to pick on. Cuz this is what bullies do, right? They, they seek up people who are weak and they don’t like it when you stand up to them. But, you know, in a way that was a wonderful gift for me, which is why I’m not a complete advocate of safe spaces. Safe spaces are good, but it’s also okay sometimes to have spaces that are, well at least you can, you can utilize spaces where things are not safe for your advantage. I’m not recommending that you get into toxic relationships and workplaces and so on, but
Lorne Brown:
Advantages like they’re talking like spiritual growth or personal growth
Marcus Anthony:
Yes.
Lorne Brown:
With the work and the inner child work. So you’re sharing how in New Zealand you guys would get together and and do this creative way, like this role playing almost. And again, I I find that a powerful modality. Can you talk a bit about, you know, you talk about authentic self in some of your writings you talk about law of attraction. You’ve just mentioned a little bit about inner child. I’m wondering if you can tie this into those that are looking to have personal growth, spiritual growth, and maybe use this to, the idea here is to use the mind to impress upon the physical, right? If we’re not in flow, Chinese medicine says this really wonderfully and I’ll paraphrase it, but you know, the number one cause of disease is are emotions outta balance. And so it’s our thoughts and our feelings that are not dealt with that get trapped in the body and lead to other health issues.
And so in Chinese medicine, your emotions can really impact your physical. Now we have the science of psycho neural immunology and I think they’ve added an E to it, psycho neuro endo immunology. So your thoughts and feelings impact your hormonal system, your nervous system your endocrine system and your immune system. So the science is showing that getting your your emotional life in order can impact your physical. So circle back just your work. You talk about, you know, the sole template, you have a law of attraction. You’ve used the word authentic self. Just curious for our listeners, what is consciousness and how can consciousness be something that can be an important part of their journey? And I say consciousness, consciousness work.
Marcus Anthony:
So when it comes to things like of attraction for example, just something you’re kind of just, you’re suggesting or talking about there, what I call the authentic self. We have certain desires, things that we want, we want to do and things that we want experience. And that may include having, having children so we can bring a conscious awareness to, to that desire and then develop a good the right relationship with a, a loving relationship with it. It can be any desire as well. Some desires though, are born of, of neediness. For example, if you want a child, and it’s really because you don’t really have a, a conscious relationship with your own child. You want the the child to love you back. You, you’re looking for the unconditional love that you that you never got. If you’re not aware of that would, that would be an unconscious desire to create something or manifest something in your life.
So if you’re using the law of attraction, for example, and normally people would use some visualization process or affirmation process to create something which you’re not fully conscious of. It may reinforce the, the problem that underpins what, what you’re having. So just having a child, for example may not fulfill you in the way that you think because you may just transfer all those, all that unconsciousness onto the child. So my thing is to, to look at your relationship with desire and what you want and to get a sense of whether it’s part of your authentic self or not. You can do the use this in the same way that you use any kind of relationship with your body. You can just get a sense of whatever it is that you desire and then put your feelings into it and relax with it. Allow that to speak to you and you can get us an intuitive sense of what’s really underpinning it.
If you just relax with it, it may, it may come forth in words. I’m, I’m pretty good at using words. So if if I do that, you know, I’ll, I’ll get a sense of of what I really want out of something and there may be something behind it which is not healthy. So when it comes to the law of attraction, even if you get what you want, it’s still about developing the right relationship with that thing, a healthy relationship with it. Because if you get the Lamborghini for example, if you’re using that as a, as a means to elevate your sense of self or self-worth, then it’s not going to give you the thing that your spirit or your authentic self, it’s really desiring
Lorne Brown:
It. It’s interesting how you’re putting that, but it’s in the law of attraction or in manifestation, why do you want the thing you want, right? What is it fulfilling? And and so getting really clear on that and I think what you were alluding to about this desire of having a baby, cuz in my work anyhow, we never tell you to stop wanting something cuz you never cho chose to want it . You know, it’s just something you realize. I want that. And, but it sounds like you’re talking about there is a fine line between having desire, a healthy relationship of wanting something and having this desperation or feeling lack emptiness, anxiety because you don’t have it and they’re not quite the same. Because some people say, I really want this. You can sense the anxiety and the stress that they can’t have it if they’re doing a practice of visualization, of having the baby, it actually elicits the lack of not having the baby, the lack of the ba of not having the baby and some negative emotions. So I think you probably have something to say on that because there’s the desire which can be healthy. You have a desire, you wanna have a baby that’s healthy, that’s your, that’s your desire. But it can go to the extreme where it feels desperate neediness and it brings up anxiety. That’s not what you’re talking about when you’re talking about trying to track something.
Marcus Anthony:
Well, what I do is I just get a get a sense of whether it’s really something that, that serves me or serves my spirit. There’s, there’s many, many different things that you can do with a lifetime. Many things that you can create or or to to, to have if you like. And one of the main things is that whatever it is that you’re seeking, that you go about it in, in a way that you, you can ask yourself, how can I do this in a way that brings joyfulness or or lightness of spirit. So it’s holding lightly to what you’re moving towards and also releasing the outcome because you, you may not get what you want. You know, there’s a lot of things that we, we seek that we may not get.
Lorne Brown:
That’s that idea of not being attached to form an outcome. Is that
Marcus Anthony:
What you That’s right. Yeah. And then we then we get filled with a sense of abundance anyway because there are so many things in life that we have that are worth so much that we, we may not value simply because they don’t have a price tag. That’s one of
Lorne Brown:
The, but it takes a practice, right? Cuz I just know from my experience with the women and men, I, I see this idea of not attached to formal income. They want it, it is such a desire, they’ll try to pretend they don’t want it, but they’re just lying to themselves cuz they’re told, oh, that’s gonna make me get the baby if I pretend I don’t want it. So there is a practice, a skill of taking up a relationship and understand you have a desire and being open to what, what’s that baby gonna bring to you? Why do you want the baby? And then being open to other ways of that manifesting in your life, not just through that baby.
Marcus Anthony:
Yeah, that could, that could be, I mean there may be other options who, who knows perhaps there is a physical problem which cannot be surmounted. I can’t talk for what other people’s personal circumstances are and you may not get that thing that you want. But then there may Yeah, you’re right. There may be something else. It could even be adoption, you know, or maybe you can have that experience by working with children. You know, there, there may be other possibilities,
Lorne Brown:
But you’re focusing on the feeling now. So this is a clarification. So this is not a statement, it’s a question for you Marcus, is that you come wanting a baby, you want to grow your family. And in my process I would want to understand why I want this baby. Like why, what’s gonna be different? How am Im going to feel? Right? What’s gonna happen? Mm-Hmm and then I’m, what I’m asking you is, are you suggesting then great, now you know what the feeling is, how it’s gonna change you on a emotional level, spiritual level, start to focus on eliciting those feelings versus focusing on having to have the baby focusing on ways to cultivate the feeling of like, some people may feel I’ll have more purpose in life. I’ll feel whole, I wanna love something unconditionally and I want to, you said something earlier you didn’t comment on, there’s many reasons you can have it want to have a child.
And my teacher and I and I subscribe to this, the only wrong reason to have a child is for it to love you. That’s backwards and that’s not good for the child. That is backwards. You will love your child unconditionally, but that doesn’t mean the child’s gonna love you unconditionally. And so I just wanted to point that out there cuz that’s the only you can have any reason why you wanna have a child, but if you’re looking for a child to fill that lack of love, you want something to love you unconditionally, probably not a good way to manifest that. Back to my point. It sounds like, are you asking ’em to cultivate that feeling then of what that child represents for you and then focus on that, that way you’re not so focused on the form of it’s gonna be a
Marcus Anthony:
Baby. Well that actually wasn’t what I was suggesting, but I think it’s, it’s a great idea because most of the things we won’t to involve a feeling or a sense of that outcome. So I think by focusing on the feeling in, in the law of attraction, normally what you do is you focus on it as if, as if it’s happening now and you’re experiencing it now. And my understanding of consciousness in the world is that, that it will manifest in, in some way, but it may not necessarily be the way that you expect. Can
Lorne Brown:
You talk a little bit more about the law of attraction? Just you’re starting on kind of how you do it. Do you have a process for law of attraction? Cuz some, some of the women I see are looking at manifesting a baby. So law of attraction, applying that. I’m curious, what is your process for law of attraction? Are, are understood? You, you’re talking about imagine as if you already have what you want, as if it’s happening now, but do you have other tips? Your top three or top four ways methods for manifestation?
Marcus Anthony:
It’s about conscious relationship with this desire as I, as I mentioned with was if you look at say the that old cd, the the Secret, right? Do you know what I’m talking about? The book The Secret?
Lorne Brown:
Yeah, I know the book. The Secret. Yeah.
Marcus Anthony:
Okay. There’s, there’s nothing in there about consciousness conscious relationship with what you want. It’s like, okay, I’m gonna get a man, I’m gonna get a car. So it’s quite materialistic. My suggestion is you can use all those processes, but just do them consciously and go about them joyfully. And if you don’t get what you want, well that’s part of life because we don’t always get what what we want. Then we can, you know, we, if we have some experience of, of loss or anger or resentment that, that arises from that, then it’s just about bringing relationship to that as
Lorne Brown:
Well. And that, that’s the consciousness idea. When you say bring consciousness to it as whatever happens, just be present with it, right? Because everybody thinks we’re always trying to just feel good and be happy, but consciousness is about being present. So if you’re feeling sad, you’re presence with your sadness. If you’re feeling happy, you’re not attached to either one. Neither gets more priority. There’s a part of us that yes, I will share. I prefer the joy , the abundance, all the good stuff. I, I’m not neutral, but when I have the unpleasant feelings in my past, I would want to avoid them and be distracted from them. Some people have do serious distractions, drugs, alcohol, right? I, I would be more of a workaholic kind of guy. Some people eat now I’m like, oh, that’s uncomfortable. I notice it and then I get into the process of just being with it, taking up a relationship with it. And I have these tools. So now rather than resisting it, I just observe it and it’s been my experience when I sit with it, it just kinda dwindles away to a sense of peace.
Marcus Anthony:
Yeah, that’s right. I think the other thing is that try as hard as we, like we are not fully in control of, of our lives and there are so many different structures that are both physical, systemic, social, also parts of our consciousness feels that we are not in immediate control of. And some, some of them may even be astrological, you know, the, the movements of planets and stars around each other. The movement of the earth around the sun can trigger different consciousness structures to, to emerge out of individuals and, and the collective. And we’re all being impacted by these things all the time. You know, when I wake up in the morning, I may have had a series of dreams or something, which suggests that there’s something i, I need to look at and it’s not that I wanna look at it, I didn’t plan to look at it, but it’s, it’s happening.
So when that happens, you have to, in a sense surrender whatever your ego was planning to do and allow, allow a space to work with that structure because that’s what life is asking you to do in that moment. And some of those structures when it comes to the psyche may be ancestral. We’re all connected with soul groups and there may be something moving through those wanting to be expressed through you or by you or you’re being impacted by it. The economy might be tanking. Covid, COVID turns up. There’s lot, lots of things that, that we’re not in control of. So, but
Lorne Brown:
Vice versa. Marcus, you talked about the, we all don’t have time really to go into, but you talked about ancestral influences on us. Cuz in the subconscious work and there is actual science, like research showing that trauma that’s happened in your, in your ancestral history can get carried forward into your life. Now even though, you know, there’s people that are Holocaust victims that they studied where, you know, the newer generation that didn’t go into the Holocaust have that trauma in their cells. They’ve done the cherry blossom study on mice where they were able to shock the mice and then the pups, the grand pups that never got to talk to the, the grandmother that never were, were never shocked when they smelled the cherry blossom, they would go into the fight or flight response. So it showed that they could pass that down. One thing I think is interesting that we had a discussion off camera, and I’ve heard this before, is that when you heal, when you heal yourself, your ancestors benefit as well. And I think you talked about that from the entangled minds perspective.
Marcus Anthony:
Yeah, I think that’s, well, my experience is, is that that is true. So when, when you deal with your, with your inner child or your trauma, the entanglements that you have with other people will start to dissipate. For example, when I began to work on some of the issues that I had to do with mass masculinity, for example, because I had an uncle that was, well, he had some very strong issues to do with sexuality and I, I saw this through the work that I did, but he projected them on, onto, onto me. So there was a, an arrangement between me and him, which I never knew about when I was a child, actually, where he would psyche would literally, you know, attack me and, and push me down and, and shame me. So I was processing a lot of the shame of his childhood.
And he wouldn’t, if I’d approached him about this, he wouldn’t have even known about it himself. So when I, when I started to work on that and get in touch with those parts of myself self, including the anger, my own shame, my own lack of belief that I’m, I’m masculine or that I, that being a man is a good thing, then I disentangled myself from him. So that really then heals me. But it also in a sense, gets him to work on him, on his stuff in theory, at least because I’m not judging him as well. I have to stand up to him at a, at a, at a consciousness level. But because he is then receiving a part of that feedback from me, like, you can’t do this anymore. No, you’re, I’m not playing that game. There’s something within his psyche also I believe that is healing or coming to an understanding potentially because I’m disentangling myself from him. And also we need to look about your, talk about your descendants. Whatever you don’t heal gets basically passed on to to your own descendants. So you are work, you are working with the ancestors and the descendants at the same time, I believe.
Lorne Brown:
And you talked about the descendants. So people are looking to grow their family. I heard it this way, and I really like this analogy or this metaphor that you come into the, if you don’t pay your debt, if you don’t pay your debt, then your children have to carry your debt. And so by doing the conscious work, you’re paying your emotional debt, therefore they’re released of that. And so, to me, my conscious work, a lot of that was I wanted to clean up my subconscious limiting beliefs and programs so my children don’t have to do that cuz I didn’t enjoy them . And so I didn’t want them to have that. And going back to the beginning of our discussion, the idea this podcast is conscious fertility, conscious conception, conscious pregnancy conscious parenting. This is that idea of giving this new generation that clean slate. So if we do our work, then we are present, we can attach to our children. So we’re consciously parenting. And then that’s a way of paying off the debt. And then your children have a better chance to flourish as adults.
Marcus Anthony:
Yeah, I agree. So we all have an opportunity to have descendants in that sense, in an energetic sense, even if we don’t physically have children. Because how you go about relating to other people, the children that you meet on the street to other people, and they’re in a trial, you are, you are leading seeds for future generations, whether, whether you know it or not. So that’s a very joyful thing. That’s, that’s a gift that you, you can have to be a creator, a conscious creator in the world. Even if it isn’t passed on through your genetics, it will be passed on through spirit if you like.
Lorne Brown:
So we wanted to continue this discussion with you. They wanna read your books, learn more about you, Marcus, how can people find you? Do you have an Instagram? Do you have a website? What’s the best way for people to find you? And we can share this in the show notes below as well.
Marcus Anthony:
Yeah, I need to work on my online presence again. But the best place to find more information from me is from my personal website, which is mind futurist.com because I’m also practicing in, in the futures field. But much of my futures work is about consciousness and the, what I call deep futures. You can buy for find books under Marcus t Anthony on Amazon. Also the book, our Power and Presence isn’t out yet. I’m still working on it, trying to get through all my university work. I’m hoping to have power and presence out within the next three or four months.
Lorne Brown:
Perfect. The power of presence. And that’s gonna talk
Marcus Anthony:
About, basically it’s about conscious relationship with self in the digital society. So the big part of it is about bright relationship to technology. So in a way it’s like, it’s still the spiritual journey, the self-awareness journey. But in the modern age, in the modern context, all many of us are spending a lot of time in online environments and communicating through social media. And it’s very easy for us to have our authentic selves and our authentic lives and our authentic needs subsumed or taken over by somebody else. So in a way you become algorithmically possessed. Basically the, the very short part of it is that social media and tech giants have worked out how to tap into that so that we click, click, click, but those clicks may not be taken to places which represent our authentic selves and we can end up being a creator for somebody else and doing their work so that you monetize their systems or their political or economic agenda. So that’s what the book is about. So it’s, anyway, it’s like the spiritual journey in the 21st century.
Lorne Brown:
Interesting. Well, Dr. Marcus Anthony, I want to thank you for taking the time to be on the podcast. Thank you for all the writing you’re doing as well, and I wishing you all the best as
Marcus Anthony:
Well. Thank you very much Lorne for inviting me on. I’ve really enjoyed speaking to you.
Speaker 3:
If you’re looking for support to grow your family, contact ACU Balance Wellness Center at ACU Balance, they help you reach your peak fertility potential through their integrative approach, using low-level laser therapy, fertility, acupuncture, and naturopathic medicine. Download the ACU Balance Fertility Diet and Dr. Brown’s video for mastering manifestation and clearing subconscious blocks. Go to acu balance.ca, that’s a c balance.ca.
Lorne Brown:
Thank you so much for tuning into an another episode of Conscious Fertility, this show that helps you receive life on purpose. Please take a moment to subscribe to the show and join the community of women and men on their path to peak fertility and choosing to live consciously on purpose. I would love to continue this conversation with you, so please direct message me on Instagram at Lorne Brown official. That’s Instagram, Lorne Brown official, or you can visit my website, lornebrown.com and acu balance.ca. Until the next episode, stay curious and for a few moments, bring your awareness to your heart center and breathe.