Summary
Tara Howley, coach and co-founder of Art of Accomplishment, explores the journey from the “aha moment” of insight to deeply embodied wisdom. She distinguishes insight (a sudden shift in perception) from wisdom (when the insight has integrated so thoroughly that you no longer need to remember it—it’s just how you are).
The conversation covers what facilitates integration—movement, breath, walking, being with the insight without rushing to action—and what sabotages it: fear of losing the insight, beating yourself up for old patterns, defending your knowing, confusing the ecstatic state of the epiphany with the insight itself, or turning the insight into a new identity rather than letting it settle into the body. Tara explains that emotions are the “glue” holding old belief systems in place, and integration requires those emotions to move—anger, grief, and fear all need to be felt for the insight to fully land.
Key Concepts
Key Quotes
“Insight is that aha moment—suddenly seeing something from a new perspective or a different contact with truth or reality.”
“Wisdom is once that insight has integrated into our whole being. We no longer have to remember it. It’s in our muscles, it’s in our body, it’s in our heart, our gut, and our mind.”
“When you get the map, it doesn’t mean you’ve arrived at your location. You actually have to get in the car and take all the turns.”
“The emotions are like the glue that holds pieces of our identity in place—any story around identity or the world in place. And so the glue has to be dissolved.”
“How can you be gentle and compassionate with yourself and love yourself through the whole process—and really enjoy the whole process, even the crunchy bits?”
Transcript
All right everybody, welcome back to the Art of Accomplishment where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease. I’m Brett Kistler and today I’m here with another special guest, Tara Howley. Tara is a coach with the Art of Accomplishment and she’s also a co-founder with Joe Hudson. And she’s going to be leading a group through the master class in this upcoming cohort which starts in like a week or two. Is there anything else you’d like to say about yourself, Tara?
So today I feel like a lover of nature and mountains and skiing. I’m with a couple of girlfriends skiing in Colorado for my birthday. So we’ve been out and it was snowing today. So that’s today—what I want to say about myself is I love the snow and skiing.
So speaking of ideas and insights and wisdom, what I wanted to talk with you about today is the journey from the aha moment of insight to when it becomes a lived embodied reality that is wisdom in our system. So in this work we often have these big insights, we have these epiphanies, and there’s a journey from the moment that you recognize something, the moment that you see it, to your first couple of times testing reality with it, until eventually you’re really living it from a deeply embodied place where it’s just your subconscious—a new reality.
Yeah, I love that journey. I love my own path through that journey. And I love holding space and watching other people dive in and marinate in the journey and all the twists and turns and unknown things that happen in it.
So let’s get started with maybe some definitions. In your view, how would you define insight? Insight is exactly what you just said—that aha moment. It’s that suddenly seeing something from a new perspective or a different contact with truth or reality or a new idea of who you are, or a shift in the perception about your identity or the world or your beliefs that suddenly leads to that “oh whoa”—like, I thought my anger was bad but it’s just me protecting my boundaries. Changing how we see something or feel about something or see ourselves in our place in the world.
Okay so that’s the beginning of this journey—the moment of insight. Now how would you define wisdom? I would define wisdom as once that insight has integrated into our whole being, we no longer have to remember it. We don’t have to do that. It’s in our muscles, it’s in our body, it’s in our heart, our gut, and our mind—our whole being. It’s integrated. And the word I really love for this—it’s coherent. It’s not just an idea we have, but a deep, deep knowing in our whole being.
So what makes it that the insight isn’t enough per se? Like what makes it that we don’t have a flash of recognition and then everything changes immediately? Or does that happen? I don’t know that I’ve ever seen it happen immediately, but I would not put it outside the realm of possibility. What I see happen more than not is people have the insight and then nothing changes. They have this idea like, oh, I just keep hiring direct reports who can’t do it on their own—I have to do everything for them. And they get rid of one direct report, hire another, and it’s the same thing over and over again. Or someone has a toxic boss and they’re like, oh, I’m leaving this toxic work environment, and then they step right into another one. So they’ve had the insight but they haven’t shifted it because they haven’t worked on all the reasons that led to the insight. They haven’t made the journey from aha moment through the lived reality.
Once we have that insight, it’s like when you get the map—it doesn’t mean you’ve arrived at your location. You actually have to get in the car and take all the turns around the hills and test drive it and play with the insights. It’s getting that palpable sense of it down in the body.
I think it doesn’t happen automatically because we have to test it, we have to play with it, we have to try it out, we have to grow with it. And we have to update—like if we had computer systems, we have to update all the computer systems so that they’re all coherent with that insight.
One thing that comes up for me around that is if we were able to get an insight and it changed everything immediately, we’d probably be ping-ponging back and forth between a lot of different insights and it would be really chaotic. Yeah, so there’s got to be some gating mechanism by which an insight as an idea or epiphany gets to make it through different layers into your longer-term, deeper, more subconscious memory.
And I do love the idea of ping-ponging—not the chaotic version, but I think when insight happens and we start to metabolize it, it is a ping-pongy feeling. It moves through our bodies and our organs—our heart, our gut, our intestines even—and our whole being in a ping-pong fashion. I’ve also heard it called titration—you step in, you step back, you kind of bounce on either side of the line to figure out where the line is, in a variety of contexts, in a variety of moods and states, until you really have a picture and a felt sense of how that insight works across your life.
So how do you get from insight to wisdom? What can we do to facilitate that journey? Once we’ve had an insight and we’re like, wow, this could be life-changing if I really integrate it—how do we best facilitate that process?
Favorite things that I love seeing: someone has the insight and then they have this urge to stretch or move their bodies after an insight in a coaching session or in a retreat. And I love it when people actually don’t sit on that urge but when they actually just take that gentle stretch and move the body. That’s the very beginning of letting the insight sequence through the body, how the body wants to move with it in that moment. So I would say that’s the first—and it seems small—but the first way the insight starts to metabolize.
Yeah, I feel like sometimes you’ll see that as a face-cracking yawn or a little bit of shaking in the body. Yep—face, yawn, breath. So the breath is another one I love after insights. If people can slow things down to really have the time and space to just be with the insight and breathe it—slow, gentle, six-count. Letting the belly be soft. On the six-count inhale, exhale on a six-count. Just breathing with it.
And then also I will almost always encourage my clients to go take a walk after a big session. Moving the right side of the body, the left side of the body—right being left brain—helps integrate those aha moments down into the being.
I want to double click on the part where you said “just being with it.” I think that’s a really beautiful and important piece. It’s sort of the opposite of when we have an insight and the common response is: okay, now I’ve seen it, what do I have to do about it? And then we make it a to-do list. Slowing things down right then in the moment and not trying to understand it or solve it or make sure it gets incorporated, but just being with it, gives it the time to actually sink into our being. I do love that slowness.
Other ways to help it integrate: movement—dancing, walking, cuddling, giggling, shaking. And then moving any emotions. Usually the insight has some emotional content behind it—either grief of having thought the opposite, or excitement about it, or anger, fear. There’s usually some emotion that was holding the old belief in place that needs to get moved as well.
And sometimes the fear of stepping into a new open space—oh my gosh, as whatever you are now after this transformation. Yeah. And how I see that fear show up sometimes too is fear of losing it. They can’t feel the excitement necessarily, so then excitement and fear are so closely wired together that it will go to fear—“oh I’m gonna lose this”—as opposed to: how much are you actually afraid and how actually excited are you? Letting the body have that excitement.
And we also have all these different ways that we might try to go back to the place before the insight. But it’ll never quite be the same. We’ll always see a little bit through it. We’ll feel a little bit more of whatever backlog of emotion that previous belief system was holding in place. And the insight, even if we feel like we’ve lost it, will be that much easier to regain the next time.
So what are some of the ways that you’ve seen that we can get in the way of our insight integrating into deeper wisdom? Well, the first one is people will have this insight and then they’ll be like, “oh no, I’m afraid I’m going to lose it, how do I not lose it?” And the holding on to it in and of itself sends a message to the body that it isn’t going to integrate. If someone’s feeling fear that they will forget it, then gratitude for it is often one of the best counters—moving to “oh, I’m so grateful that I saw that” will let go of that grip of fear.
Another way I see people sabotage themselves is by beating themselves up—“oh I saw it, why am I redoing this?” It just becomes a new tool for self-abuse. My whole thing is: how do we create paths of gentleness with ourselves? Through gentleness, how quickly we can really truly grow.
Defending the knowing is another way. When reflected to them, “I already know this, I know this”—but the defense can stop it from coming down and metabolizing and integrating. That relates to where the defense might come from—where we take the insight and integrate it into our identity but not into our body or our lives. We use the insight as another way to cement some sort of identity.
And hold on, I just remembered the other thing I was gonna say on the sabotage front: the insight can come with those delicious high feelings—that ecstasy, that aha feeling. It can come with a state almost like a natural high. And that state naturally leaves, because we can’t hold on to any one state ever. And when it leaves, people mistake the ecstatic state leaving for the actual insight leaving. They conflate the insight with the feeling. And that’s something else they beat themselves up for—“oh I had it and I lost it”—as opposed to: the state is gone but what of the learning is still there? What’s still being metabolized?
Another way that shows up: if we’re attached to the bliss of the epiphany and when the bliss goes away we think the epiphany has gone away, then we’re gonna see the evidence for it having gone away. Because when you have the epiphany, it’s likely you’re going to run into the same thing somewhere else in your life, on a different level, on a deeper level. And when you do, it doesn’t mean that you actually lost the insight—it might just mean that you’re now seeing something on a whole new level. It’s that spiral dynamics, coming around to be integrated in a deeper, more felt-sense way.
So speaking of the felt-sense way—having these insights really settle into the body—I want to come back to the question about what emotions have to do with the journey from insight to wisdom. I deeply believe that insights are seeing through an old story or belief or habit about self or the world, and those stories are all held in place by an emotion. The emotion is like the glue that holds pieces of our identity in place. So the glue has to be dissolved. And in this case, it’s moving the emotions.
Can you give an example? Someone might have a story: “when people get angry, it means I’ve done something wrong or I’m bad.” They can have the insight that people get angry and it doesn’t mean I’ve done anything wrong or bad. They’re starting to unhook identity from other people’s anger. That would be the insight. But then the emotions that have to move: their own anger—“that’s not okay to put that on me, stop telling me I did something wrong.” They might have to move all of their anger about how much of their lives they’ve spent believing they were bad. And often fear needs to move as well—anger’s not safe. And then grief—grief of believing for however many decades that anytime someone was angry, they had done something wrong.
I had a client who talked about when she was in traffic and a car honked, she’d jump and look around to see what she’d done wrong. And it was four cars back, honking at someone else, nothing to do with her. But she had that ingrained belief. So she had to go through the journey moving fear, grief for all the years, and her own anger of “hey, don’t put that on me.”
When you describe going through that grief, it’s as though there are so many micro-insights in that grieving process. In my experience, when I’m going through a big grief process, there can be a flashing of memories that come out of nowhere—I had no idea that was driving my subconscious and filtering my reality. And many of the things don’t even actually show up in consciousness at all—they’re just happening subconsciously.
So the process of emotions moving and the insights are kind of the same thing on some level. The insight is the mental version, but the emotional process is just applying that insight to your deeper store of life memories and seeing what settles out from that process. That’s right. Or what wants to bubble up and move through emotionally and be re-seen. You’re really different at the end of the process.
Sometimes it’s sort of like a house of cards—or Tetris, where if you hit the right thing, everything starts to collapse. Or Angry Birds. You have one insight and if you really let it land in your body, there’s going to be a whole bunch of stuff that used to seem internally consistent that is now ready to collapse too—because if that wasn’t true, then this wasn’t true. Yeah, and the abyss is what can show up.
Tell me more about the abyss. My experience is that when all the stories fall away, what’s left is the place of no story. It’s the knowing of self beyond the story. When we have these insights and the whole house of cards starts to fall—I remember when I had the experience, it felt like every single story was true and not true in a house of cards, and all the emotions behind them, and under it all was just spacious nothingness.
I want to step back and say that the house of cards falling, the abyss—I don’t think that’s the goal. I think that’s a byproduct. If someone’s trying to integrate their aha moments to get to spaciousness, that’s probably going to backfire.
So how do you know when insight has become wisdom? The easiest way is when you don’t have to remember it. When you don’t have to think about it. When it’s just there and natural and you’re not reactive to the same things you used to be reactive to. I also want to say I do believe it’s asymptotic—wisdom is an ever-changing thing. It’s not a hard, fast thing that happens and is done and never will shift again. We’re always evolving and learning and growing and deepening.
There’s an interesting asymmetry: we get the insight and one of the common responses is to be afraid of losing it, but the actual integration will result in the insight just falling away. It’s like training wheels. I look forward to the day where I don’t have to remember that my wants are important, or that I’m not responsible for other people’s feelings. If I’m living in a world where I forget all of that and it’s just second nature, then that’s actually what I’m looking forward to.
That is a great attitude by the way for the whole process. Oh, I can’t wait to get triggered again by someone’s anger so I can see where it hasn’t integrated through my system.
What else would you like to say? I would say marinate in the journey. Anybody having the aha moment—take it and roll with it and steep in it and enjoy it and be gentle with yourself. Everything we do here is about self-compassion and having more compassion for ourselves and others. Once that aha moment happens, how can you be gentle and compassionate with yourself and love yourself through the whole process—and really enjoy the whole process, even the crunchy bits.
Those stories came up to protect us. They served us. We wouldn’t have had them if they weren’t protecting, helping, serving us in some way. They might not serve us anymore, but they for sure did at some point. So appreciating them, being gentle with them, with that part of ourselves. Loving it all. Thank you so much. Thank you everybody for listening.